Ep 200: Your Favorite You - 200 Episodes In

I named this podcast Your Favorite You because I believe your favorite version of yourself already exists within you. She's not someone you have to build from scratch—she's someone you uncover one choice at a time.

For this milestone episode, I’m talking about what your favorite you actually looks like in the quiet of an ordinary life. Because after 200 episodes, here’s what I know: Being your favorite you is almost never a grand gesture. It’s not the mountaintop. It happens in small moments, on random weekdays, and sometimes without you even realizing it. It's the yes turned into a no, the bad day at work you didn’t take home with you, and speaking up when you wouldn't have before.

Today, we’re exploring the tiny, sustainable, completely unglamorous, but absolutely life-changing shifts I've watched women make over and over again. Whether this is the first episode you’re listening to or the 200th, I want to say thank you, my favorite listeners. Thank you for being brave, and for doing the quiet work that nobody claps for. You are the reason Your Favorite You exists, and I’m so glad you’re here.

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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.

Hello again, my favorite listeners.

I am still Melissa Parsons, your favorite general life coach for brilliant women, and of course, your favorite podcast host. And today is episode 200. 200. I need to let that be for just a second because when I started this podcast, I genuinely did not know if I'd make it to episode 10. 

And yet here we are. So before anything else, thank you. Whether this is your first episode or your 200th, you are the reason that this Your Favorite You podcast exists. Now, for a milestone like this, I could have done a big retrospective, the greatest hits, the grand sweeping, look how far we've come episode.

And I thought about it, but that's not the episode I wanted to make. After 200 of these and years of doing this work with so many brilliant women, here's what I know. Being your favorite you is almost never the grand gesture.

It is not the mountaintop. It's not the dramatic before and after that you could post about. It doesn't, unfortunately, come with a certificate or a finish line or a parade. Being your favorite you happens in the quiet of your life.

It's a random weekday. It's the thing you wanted to say, but you didn't say. It's the yes you turned into a no, the bad day you didn't carry into the kitchen with you after work. It is so small and so quiet that most of the time nobody even notices that it's happening.

So today for episode 200, I want to talk about that. Not the headlines, but the quiet stuff. The tiny, sustainable, frankly, completely unglamorous, but absolutely life-changing shifts that I've watched women make over and over and over again.

The ones that they almost glaze over because they're too busy looking for the big dramatic transformation to notice that they're already living in the real one. I'm going to walk you through what your favorite you actually looks like in the quiet of an ordinary life.

If you are my client or you have been my client in the past, I still think of you when I write these, of course, just so you know. Or if you've been listening and you've been thinking that you would love to be my client, I want you to listen in for yourself here because I promise you're in here somewhere.

Okay, let's start with the most radical thing a woman can do, which is to say and mean the word no. I've watched so many of you come to coaching absolutely fried, saying yes to everything, yes at work, yes at home, yes to the committee, yes to the favor, yes to the thing you did not want to do, yes and yes and yes until your own body starts sending up flares.

It might be headaches, it might be a clenched jaw, your stomach might be in knots, you might not be sleeping. I've had women genuinely convinced something was medically wrong with them, me included, when what was actually wrong was that they have not said no to a single thing in years.

And here's what I want you to hear about the no. We build it up into this enormous, terrifying confrontation. We run the catastrophe in our heads. They'll be furious. They'll be disappointed. They'll think I'm selfish.

It'll all fall apart. And then you finally say the small, quiet no, and nothing falls apart. Nobody is really disappointed. There's no penalty. The catastrophe you rehearsed simply doesn't arrive. One of the truest things I've ever heard a client say about her first real no was, nothing blew up.

Nothing was lit on fire. I uttered the word no and nothing blew up. Nothing was lit on fire. And here's the part I really want you to take with you, especially if you're sitting there thinking, I could never just start saying no.

You don't have to do it all at once. This isn't a cliff jump. Your favorite you does not dramatically leap from one cliff to another. She builds herself a little set of monkey bars and crosses over one rung at a time.

The first snow can be tiny. You can say no to the one thing that's the easiest thing to decline. And then on the other side of it, you'll notice that the world is still standing. So you reach for the next rung, a slightly bigger no, still standing.

And rung by rung, no by quiet no, you get yourself all the way across to a life that actually has room in it for you. That's the work. It's not a TED Talk, though as you know, I love a good TED Talk.

Mine has still yet to be released as of this recording, mid-June, but I digress. It's one small no on a random Thursday that nobody claps for, and it changes everything. Here's the next quiet one, and it's sneaky because so many of us are so good at it that we don't even know we're doing it.

Pretending. I'm talking about the automatic, I'm fine, when someone asks how you are. And before the thought even forms, out it comes. I'm fine, I'm good, I'm great, busy, bit good. When you are, in fact, not fine.

We do it on autopilot and it feels like nothing, like good manners, like keeping the peace. But here's what I've come to believe. The automatic I'm fine is one of the most quietly corrosive things in a woman's whole vocabulary.

Because every time you say it when it isn't true, you take the real you and you tuck her a little further out of sight. You disconnect from your own truth and you isolate yourself, even from the people who love you most, maybe especially from the people who love you most, even from your best friends, because they're not responding to you.

They're responding to the fine you handed them. And isolation like this is exactly where shame likes to live. Stopping the pretending is rarely dramatic. I mean, it can be. It totally can be, but usually it's not some big confessional moment.

It's not some big life-shattering event. Usually it's just answering one question honestly. It's letting one person see the real thing for once. It's saying, actually, today's kind of hard. It's telling the whole truth about who you are, including the messy both and of it.

Here's the thing I like to teach all the time, and I believe with my whole heart. Part of you can feel like shit, and another part of you can feel absolutely amazing at the same time. Those aren't a contradiction.

That's just you being a whole human being out loud instead of performing like you're fine. And sometimes the thing that finally lets us drop the act is watching someone else go first, watching another woman be unbothered and unashamed about the parts of her life that the rest of us would scramble to hide.

That's part of why I do this podcast the way I do, why I tell you about my own missteps and my own messy moments, my own fucked upness, because somebody out there needs the permission slip. Somebody needs to see that you can be imperfect and still be close to your people, still be respected, still be deeply okay.

It's also why I love and honor and respect the women who choose to do group coaching so much. Someone always goes first in group, doing the thing that they once thought was not even possible for them.

And they show the rest of the group that pretending never lands us where we want to be. And telling the truth about who you are and what you think and what you feel is what can set you free. So here's your quiet invitation.

Notice where you're pretending. Maybe it's simply saying I'm fine this week. Find one person you can tell the truth to. You don't have to stop pretending with the whole world all at once. You don't have to take out an ad or write an article in the New York Times.

Just stop pretending with one person. That's the monkey bar. This next one is for all of my fixers, my helpers, my, oh, just let me handle that woman. I see you because I am you, and I will probably be recovering from this one for the rest of my life.

So many of us, and especially those of us who were raised to be good and helpful and kind, and double especially those of us who then chose helping professions, we have quietly confused love with fixing.

Somewhere along the way, we decided that if we're not solving it, we're not loving them well. So let's say our kid has a bad day. We leap right up to repair it. Our partner is upset. We rush to manage it.

Someone else that we love is struggling and we cannot sit still because their discomfort feels like our emergency. And your favorite youth starts to see and believe the quietest, most counterintuitive thing.

Most of the time, you don't have to fix it. So picture a small version of this. Maybe your kiddo is upset about something genuinely small, a rough day, a disappointment, a thing that just didn't go their way.

The old you would have been grabbing your keys, problem-solving, smoothing it over, making it disappear. Your favorite you just sits down next to the person and says, yeah, buddy, this really sucks and does nothing else.

No fixing, no fluffing, just being there while the person you love is experiencing a feeling. Typically, nobody's watching that moment. Nobody's clapping. It's the quietest possible revolution. And it completely rearranges what that child learns about being a human in the world.

That feelings are not only survivable, they also do not require a rescue, that you can be sad and still be okay. A tool I love for this, and I'm going to give it to you, is when someone you love comes to you with a problem, before you launch into solutions, just ask, do you want my help solving this or do you just need to vent?

Most of the time, like hardly ever, do they actually want you to fix it? They just want to be heard, seen, validated, understood. And you get to just hold the space. Like many things in life, this is simple, but it may not be easy in the moment, especially if you are a fixer or a recovering fixer.

And of course, this extends way past our kids. It's in our marriages, our friendships, our partnerships, the quiet release of needing to be right. I'm still fucking working on it. The willingness to let another adult have their own inner world, their own truth, even when it makes no sense to you.

What if that's just what they think and that's okay? You don't have to fix them. You do not have to win. You're, quote-unquote, letting them be a whole separate person. And here's the part that I find genuinely magic.

The thing I've watched happen again and again. You do not set out to change anyone else. You just go first, quietly in your own life. And as my coach Maggie told me over and over, it only takes one person in a system or a relationship to change for the whole system or a relationship to start to move.

So you stop fixing, you stop managing, you stop performing, and slowly the people around you start to shift too without you having to say a single word about it. Okay, now let's talk about the thing kind of underpinning it all, because the saying no and the dropping the pretending and the not fixing, none of it sticks if you can't be with your own feelings.

And learning to feel your feelings is maybe the quietest work there is because it happens entirely on the inside where nobody can see it. So much of who we are was built in our childhood. A lot of us learned very young that certain feelings weren't safe or weren't welcome.

So we got really good at burying them. And that little kiddo who learned to swallow her feelings, she's still in there. Your favorite you would not and does not abandon her. Your favorite you gets quiet enough to reach back and say, you're allowed to feel this now.

Let me be here with you while you do. And I want to be clear because this is where I think the wellness industry might be getting it a little bit backward. Feeling your feelings is not a glass of wine in the evening.

It's not a spa day or a fresh blowout. I am not against any of those things. You do you, but that's not the work. That's distraction from the work. The actual work, the work that changes your life, is the unglamorous, non-Instagram-worthy, deeply quiet practice of sitting with what you feel instead of sprinting away from it.

Letting the feeling move through you instead of bottling it up or carrying it around like a stone in your throat or a kaleidoscope of butterflies in your chest. I had to look up what a group of butterflies was called and it's called a kaleidoscope, which I think is so cool.

A huge part of this is simply learning to pause. So many of us live in a very high reactivity state. So something happens and we're off and reacting before we even take a breath. Your favorite you builds in a pause.

She feels the wave of emotion. She has compassion for herself while she feels it. And then she pauses just long enough to let her own wise voice get a word in. Because here's the secret, that wise inner voice, your capital S self in IFS, is always there.

Most of us are just never quiet enough to hear it over all the noise. So you just have to get quiet enough to hear it and let that voice, that part of you know that you're willing to listen. So this week, because life is going to life, something is going to knock you sideways, something's going to knock me sideways, and I'm going to do this too.

Pause, take a breath, or two or three or ten, however many you need, and ask what the wisest, kindest version of you would say if you got quiet enough to listen. Okay, we're getting to the heart of the whole episode for me, so please stay with me.

The hardest thing about this kind of change, the no saying, the truth telling, the not fixing, the feeling, is that it's so quiet, you can genuinely fail to notice it's happening. Like I said, there's no certificate or finish line, no moment where the music dramatically swells.

And so a lot of women do this deep, real work and they walk away convinced that not much has changed. Here's where the change actually lives, not in the big breakthrough moment on a coaching call, although sometimes that happens and it's so fun.

But it's usually in a random middle of the week day. It's the offhand thing where you say something about yourself that's kinder, calmer, more sure, and then you catch yourself and think, huh, where did that come from?

I didn't even try to do that. The people closest to you may notice it before you do. You may have a partner who says, what's gotten into you lately? Did you have coaching today? Not because anything dramatic happened, but because the way you talked about yourself has quietly and fundamentally changed.

And I want to say something right now to anyone in the thick of it at this moment, anyone doing the work and feeling like nothing's moving and maybe feeling like you're still a bit in the muck. This work might be working the whole time.

I've watched women finish a season of hard inner work absolutely certain it didn't take, and then reach back out a year later to tell me that the deepest stuff had been quietly rearranging her whole inner landscape the entire time.

They just couldn't see it yet because the most important changes often don't announce themselves. They're seeds that you've planted. You don't get to watch them grow. And then one completely ordinary day, you look up and everything is different.

And there's a seedling and a flower. And it's like, oh my God, this is what I've been working toward. This is why I am relentless about celebrating the small stuff. Some of my very favorite coaching calls are the ones where a woman comes in and has three wins and we just spend the whole hour on these three little wins.

Because naming the quiet victories out loud is how you finally start to see them. Your favorite you, I hate to tell you, is not waiting for you on some distant mountaintop. She's already here in your kitchen or in your office on a Thursday.

You just don't know where to look for her. On a recent coaching call with my amazing group, one of my clients said, I think I'm starting to notice the shift. I just feel more like me before I became a professional and a mom and a wife and, and, and—all the roles that she had taken on.

I want you to sit with that for a little bit. Sometimes the work is just coming back to who you were before you took on all the roles and rules and responsibilities. Okay, I want to land this plane on the both-and because it's the thing that still inspires me to look for it.

And it's the thing I most want for all of you. You can love yourself exactly as you are and still want to change both at the same time. Those two are not in competition and holding them both at the same time is one of the biggest things we do in this work.

In fact, the love has to come first because, and I will say this until the day I die, you cannot hate your way to a better life. You cannot hate yourself to your favorite you. If we could, every single one of us would already be exactly who we think we're supposed to be.

Because Lord knows we've all tried the hating route. We've tried the criticism and the punishment and the relentless inner drill sergeant. It does not work. It has never worked. The only thing that has ever actually worked is the radical, quiet act of being on your own side first.

And here's a beautiful part of that. From that place, from actually liking the person you are, the growth that can come is not the white knuckle it, punish yourself, crash and burn by February type of thing.

It's the kind that lasts. It's sustainable precisely because it's built on love instead of being built on loathing. You make a change not to finally become acceptable, but because you already are acceptable and amazing even, you become curious about what else is possible.

And from that place, you get to be a gorgeous work in progress without it meaning anything is wrong with you. You get to do the do-over. You get to say to your kid, to your partner, to yourself, I got that wrong.

Can I try again? Can we have another chance to figure this out together? That's not weakness. That is your favorite you modeling for everyone watching that you're allowed to be imperfect and whole and lovable all at the very same time.

There's so much freedom in this. You're allowed to take the leap and you're allowed to climb back down. You're allowed to start the thing and you're allowed to decide it's not for you. There is no path you can get on where you've ruined it.

You can always, always change your mind and do something different. And the entire time, you can still be your favorite you. So 200 episodes, folks. What does your favorite you actually look like in the end?

She looks like a woman saying one quiet no. A woman answering, how are you honestly for once? A mom sitting beside her kid instead of fixing the bad day. A woman pausing one breath longer so she can hear her own wise voice.

A woman who catches herself on a random Thursday talking about herself with kindness and is a little surprised by it. A woman who finally, finally stops trying to hate herself into someone better and who gets curious about who she already was.

None of that will ever make the news. It will make this podcast, but none of it is the grand sweeping posh transformations. It's all happening in the quiet of your one ordinary, yet completely extraordinary life.

And that's exactly where it counts. I named this podcast, Your Favorite You, because I believe she already exists. She's not someone you have to build from scratch. She's someone you uncover one choice at a time.

And if you heard yourself anywhere in this episode today, and I would bet my whole life that you did, then you already know she's in there. You've probably already met her on some random Thursday when you weren't even looking for her.

Thank you for 200 episodes. Thank you for being here, for being brave, for doing the quiet work that nobody claps for. You are beautiful exactly as you are, and you can love yourself exactly as you are and still want to make changes.

Holding both of these at the same time is the whole thing. That's your favorite you. All right, my loves, go be quiet, ordinarily, magnificently her this week. I'll see you next time.

Hey - It’s still me. Since you are listening to this podcast, you very likely have followed all the rules and ticked off all the boxes but you still feel like something's missing! If you're ready to learn the skills and gain the tools you need to tiptoe into putting yourself first and treating yourself as you would your own best friend, I'm here to support you. As a general life coach for women, I provide a safe space, compassionate guidance, and practical tools to help you navigate life's challenges as you start to get to know and embrace your authentic self.

When we work together, you begin to develop a deeper understanding of your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. You learn effective communication strategies, boundary-setting techniques, and self-care practices that will help you cultivate a more loving and supportive relationship with yourself and others.

While, of course, I can't guarantee specific outcomes, as everyone's journey is brilliantly unique, what I can promise is my unwavering commitment to providing you with the skills, tools, support, and guidance you need to create lasting changes in your life. With humor and a ton of compassion, I'll be available to mentor you as you do the work to become a favorite version of yourself.

You're ready to invest in yourself and embark on this journey, so head over to melissaparsonscoaching.com, go to the work with me page, and book a consultation call. We can chat about all the support I can provide you with as we work together.

I am welcoming one-on-one coaching clients at this time, and, of course, I am also going to be offering the next round of group coaching soon. 

Thanks for tuning in. Go be amazing!