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Hello, hello! Welcome to September's Secret Podcast mini-series.
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We are talking about moving through a job change you did not want.
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And this topic comes up very regularly when I am working one-on-one with coaching clients.
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And it's also been something that when I have been at networking get-togethers or that kind of thing, because I really used to avoid and used to be worried about networking events.
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I'm believe it or not, I'm kind of a little bit shy one-on-one in person, but I really love women's networking and I really have met so many fascinating people.
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And one of the things that I have been asked multiple times is do you coach people when they're in midlife and they're dealing with a job change and they didn't want to be in this position?
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And the answer is yes.
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And so what I want to do for you in this mini-series is give you, I believe it's going to be five, it might be six, little podcast episodes for you as a subscriber.
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Thank you for being a part of this.
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So that you hopefully have a little bit smoother path moving through this.
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I can't give you an answer exactly.
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I can't tell you exactly how things are going to work out, but I can be by your side, and you can come back and listen to any of these episodes in any of this series and any of the series to come each month if you need a little bit of extra support.
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So that's what I hope to be here and do for you in bite-sized pieces.
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Okay, so part one today, right now.
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In my head, I'm calling this when the worst happens.
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Now, the reality is, of course, we're talking about not necessarily the worst.
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The worst we're dealing with life and health, but it feels really the worst in the moment, doesn't it?
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When we're dealing with a company closure, a bankruptcy, a layoff, a firing, uh any of those things.
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Maybe even retirement if you didn't feel ready, but I'm more talking to you if this really wasn't your choice, and suddenly you are needing to figure out what to do for income, what to do with the rest of your life for income.
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So I just want to give you permission that it's okay to be upset.
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And maybe that's obvious, but I think sometimes we we kind of lean too far into putting on a brave face.
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We lean too far into okay, I'm pulling myself up by the bootstraps, and I'm gonna go figure this out.
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We're gonna get to that.
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Don't worry, it's coming in this mini-series.
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First, I just want to give you permission that it is okay to be upset.
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And most likely, you are feeling kind of blamey.
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You are comparing yourself to some ideal that doesn't exist, to other people that you worked with, to other people that you know.
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We compare indiscriminately against anyone, and you're blaming somebody who made this decision.
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You're maybe blaming yourself and telling yourself that if you weren't such an insert negative adjective, then this wouldn't have happened.
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And the comparison feels like why me?
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Why me?
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I worked hard, I built this business, I had a big dream, I made smart decisions, you could be an entrepreneur, you could be someone who's lost your job.
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So I'm kind of going to give both examples.
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Why me?
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Why not them?
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Why are they okay and I'm not okay?
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It's not fair.
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That's a comparison trap.
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But I just want to give you permission not to be mad at yourself for this.
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When something bad happens, we need to process these feelings.
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And that comparison, why me, it's not fair, is coming from being angry, feeling slighted, being jealous of other people.
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It's normal.
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So the the key is to recognize if those stories are going in your head.
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Is there a thought running around in your head all the time?
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What about him?
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What about her?
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Why me?
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If there is, that's okay.
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We just want to notice.
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We don't want to judge ourselves, we just want to notice.
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And I want you to ask yourself, just kind of take a deep breath, pause, catch the stories.
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I want you to ask yourself if that comparison game and the jealousy and the blame is helping.
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There's some chance it is, and it's kind of fueling your fire.
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If that's the case, okay.
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But in most cases, it's kind of it's almost as if you are you're you're standing on quicksand, and is quicksand even really a thing, by the way.
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I feel like quicksand was something I feared when I was a kid, but I've never once in my life had to deal with quicksand.
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But anyway, let's say you're standing on quicksand, and as I understand it, the more you move, the deeper you sink, and the harder it is to get out.
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So if most of the time, if we're doing the why me, what about them, it's not fair, and that's running in our heads all day, it's like standing in quicksand and and wiggling around and digging around and trying to get out, and you are going deeper.
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So we want to recognize it, and we want to tell ourselves it's okay to be upset, and it's okay to feel like this shouldn't have happened, and it's okay to be mad, and it's okay to feel like it wasn't fair, and what we don't want to do is then point to other people because we don't know the full story of what's going on with them, we don't know what's going to happen with them, we don't know anything about them besides what they choose to show us.
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So, how do we process this?
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All this anger, maybe it's sadness, maybe it's anxiety, maybe it's worry.
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I'm kind of thinking through those emotion words because I want you to practice putting a name on what you're feeling.
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If I asked you right now, how do you feel about being in this position?
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Most of the time when I ask that to a coaching client, the answer sounds like, I feel like I can't believe that this happened.
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Well, the problem with that statement is that that's not a feeling.
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So you think that you can't believe it happened, and that's valid.
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But it's really important that we start to learn how to identify what is the feeling that those thoughts are creating.
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And I say this all the time on the podcast episodes, but if you don't have my story cycle resource, it's you need it.
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Go to CherylpFisher.com slash story cycle.
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It's free.
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It has a wheel of emotion words in there, and so and it's going to walk through the process I'm going to talk to you about right now.
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And so that will help you.
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You can have a glance at that, and that will help you.
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Because we want to see if we can get a little bit more specific than mad or sad.
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And the reason for identifying those feelings is that then we can think, okay, what is going through my head that is creating that feeling?
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And so I've given you this example about comparison.
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If you're feeling jealous or angry, it might be that it was the this isn't fair, and what about them that was in your head, and that might be what you identified.
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If you're feeling mad, maybe you kind of I like to think of it as like walking through your head and just kind of looking around.
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Remember the cartoon movie Inside Out?
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You're just kind of checking around in there, and you notice that you are saying something to yourself all the time about how your boss was a complete jerk, and that's why this happened.
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Just to give you an example.
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Or that customer wrecked my business because they didn't pay.
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There's something in there that's creating the emotion.
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And so as we start to recognize that, we don't want to get stuck in it.
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If you're analytical like I am, sometimes when I was first learning how to do this, I would just get stuck in figuring out what's the thought, what's the feeling, what's the thought, what's the feeling.
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Dig deeper, what's the thought?
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Why am I having that thought?
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Why am I having that thought?
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I don't want you to go down that path.
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We know why you're having those thoughts.
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You're upset about something that is changing and you didn't want it to change.
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So we don't have to dig further into that.
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What we want to do is process it.
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And so let's talk about how to do that.
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How do I process the anger, the worry, the anxiety, the jealousy, the fear?
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If you are someone who doesn't dislike the idea of journaling, that's a double negative.
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I am aware of that.
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If you're willing to journal, I would like for you to have temporarily, this is not a lifelong practice that I would recommend, but temporarily, I would like for you to have a venting journal.
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And this could be a Google Doc or a notes app on your uh notes on your phone or something like that.
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It doesn't have to be a handwritten journal, whatever floats your boat.
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Okay, you can type it, you can voice uh what do you call it?
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Whatever it is you call it, excuse the midlife brain, when you talk to your phone and then it types it out, you can do that.
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Dictate.
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I want you to be able to vent to that paper or that document, spew it out.
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Because we're not gonna go back and read this, we're not gonna sit in it, but we gotta get it out.
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It's not you being a bad person for thinking those things, it's not that I'm gonna tell you shouldn't about anything.
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What I want you to do is let it out.
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And just writing down, I'm mad about this, and my boss is a jerk, and that customer wouldn't pay, and blah blah blah blah blah.
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That doesn't mean that thought is immediately going to be erased from your brain, right?
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This is not magic.
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It does mean you're taking away a little bit of the power.
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And maybe the next morning you get up and you're my boss is a jerk and that customer didn't pay, and you're writing the same thing.
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Okay, you're still taking away a little bit of the power.
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So give yourself five minutes.
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And if you have a smartwatch, I absolutely literally mean put the timer for five minutes.
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Give yourself five minutes, maybe first thing in the morning, maybe at night, one time during the day, and just meh.
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Maybe pick a time when you happen to be in a particularly angry mood and vent it.
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The timer goes off, we stop venting, now we breathe.
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So you've vented for five minutes, and you are riled up, right?
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Riled up, riled up, feeling all the things.
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That's good.
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So I'm gonna tell you how to use breath work and tapping to calm your body back down, and I'm gonna say there are gonna be days when this doesn't feel good, this idea of venting, because we don't like, as human beings, we don't like to feel and experience these uncomfortable emotions.
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I don't want to use the word negative, uncomfortable emotions.
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I don't want to be mad, I don't want to be sad, I don't want to be jealous, but I I feel it anyway, you feel it anyway.
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So we avoid it, we shove it down, just like I said at the beginning.
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We bootstraps on, this is all gonna be good, no problem.
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The thing with emotions is that if we can process them, they go away eventually.
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Not like a snap of a finger magic, but eventually.
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They lose their power.
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We feel them a little less, we feel them a little less, we feel them a little less.
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It's like processing grief.
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Everybody's aware that there's stages of grief as you process your feelings.
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That's true of any emotion.
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So if I vent, I allow myself to I'm upset.
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Each time that happens, it's gonna be a little less powerful because of the fact we recognized it and we let it out.
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Now, really important each time we do that to now calm our nervous system back down so that we can actually okay, think, move forward, think, figure it out, move forward.
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Okay.
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So, what I'm gonna give you in today's episode is the idea of breath work to calm you.
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And we're not gonna get super complex.
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If you know a breath work practitioner, then absolutely work with them if you would like to do that.
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There's so many different ways breath work is healthy for you.
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I simply want you to take slow, deep breaths.
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So you're gonna go in through the nose on a count of four, which is not easy to do, and then out through the mouth on a count of four.
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Even better, try in a count of four, hold it a count of four, out a count of four.
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Do that a few times.
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Even better, put your hand on your heart while you do it.
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The physical touch of your hand on your heart is mimicking the benefits of a hug, basically, and it's changing the state of your nervous system.
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I just feel calmer having done that a couple of times.
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Do that at least five times, as long as you want, beyond that.
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Calm your body back down because I don't want to leave you in this riled up vent venting state.
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Calm your body back down.
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And it doesn't have to be more complicated than that.
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Alright, now, next episode in the mini-series, we're gonna talk about honoring these feelings further and some of the other things you can do after we're getting through some of this venting cycle.
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And we're starting to think alright, what the heck am I gonna do next?
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I'll see you then.