00:00 

Hey there. This is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 76, "Finding My Wings." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:21 

Well, hello and welcome to the podcast today. I'm so happy to have you here. I've had a really amazing week. I had an opportunity last week to be coached by a coach friend of mine and I have to tell you this coaching thing is everything it's cracked up to be. It was the most incredible experience, so insightful as she helped me to see things that I was not seeing, and helping me to connect with things that I needed to connect with. It was just such an amazing experience. If you have not taken the opportunity yet to sign up for a free mini session with me, get on my website tanyahale.com, go to the "contact me" page and from there you can send me an email and I will set something up with you for a free mini session. 

01:13 

It's just amazing what this is about. I had one with someone today and she was just like "wow, this is so powerful." I'm like "I know, right?" This coaching thing is so cool. And it's different than counseling. It's not the same thing. So if you've been to counseling, this is different. This is really forward-focused in helping you to learn to take responsibility for everything going on in your life and really at such an intense level that it really is life-changing. Painful and difficult, but freaking amazing. So get in touch with me so that we can schedule a free mini session. I would love to work with you and show you how coaching can make such a big difference in your life. 

02:04 

Okay, moving on. Today we are on episode number 76 and I'm titling this one, "Finding My Wings." Okay, because really, life is an amazing journey, don't you think? And at our age, I don't know any woman who has said, "yep, I'm exactly where I thought I would be at this time. It's all worked out exactly according to plan," okay? I know when I was younger, I had this idea of how things would be in my 50s. I'd be married with grown children who adored me and they loved to come over and visit and share with me their deepest dreams and their desires. And I would help them figure out life while sitting around the kitchen table. They would always seek my counsel because our bond was so strong, right? They would always want to come home for the holidays and whenever they could, they would spend time with me, helping me with projects around the house. And I mean it might even have a married child or two at this stage and their spouses would adore me as well and they would love to spend time with me. I would be like a second mother to them. 

03:12 

Okay, they will have just stepped into our family like they were always there. And if they have children, they'll think that I'm the best grandma ever. And at this stage I imagine that I would be married to the love of my life and this man would adore me and he'd be an equal partner in the physical, in the emotional labor, of our home. We would have spent our lives living the gospel, having family home evening every week, and scriptures and prayer every day with our family. We would clean the house together and do the dishes together and do yard work together. We would trust and confide in one another and patiently and lovingly resolve concerns the way that we learn to when we were missionaries in the MTC, right? And financially, we would be in such a great place at this stage in our lives. Our retirement fund would be fully stocked by now and we would even be looking forward to an early retirement with lots of traveling and taking our children on trips all over the world. Our house would be paid off. We would drive nice cars that we paid cash for. 

04:14 

And even better than all that, by this age I would have learned how to be kind and thoughtful all of the time. I would never have a slip of the tongue anymore because by my 50s, I should have learned to control my thoughts and only say things that build other people, never wreck them. And I Imagine that by this age I would have developed such a Christlike love for others that every action, every thought, every feeling, is founded in the example of my Savior. People are strengthened just by being around me. I just live this almost amazing life with no conflict constant prayers and scripture study and connection with God and the patience of Job. 

05:00 

Okay, now I hope you didn't forget that we're talking about what I thought my life would be like in in my 50s when I would be dreaming about it in my late teens and my early 20s. Because I don't know about y'all, but I had this fantasy that by this point in my life I would have it all figured out and just not really have too many other struggles. But then reality hits, right? Because we're meant to have struggles in life, where it's not supposed to be struggle-free. Okay, and life happens and all kinds of things start happening that we never thought about, things that weren't supposed to happen because we had this plan, right? But they were things we didn't have any control over and in the process I know that I felt that I lost myself and that someone else came in and took my place and started behaving in ways that completely shocked me. 

05:54 

I feel like when I was much younger, I had a very clear vision of who I was and what I could do to make the world a better place. I could feel this woman with amazing potential inside of me and all it was going to take at that point was a few years of finishing college, getting married, starting a family, and then it would all come together. Actually that's kind of when it all started to fall apart, right? But here's the truth of what I experienced, and I don't think it's far off from what so many of the other women I chat with have experienced and probably you as well. We got started on this journey called life and we got so caught up in the doldrums of life. We got so busy with little kids and a career and household responsibilities and difficult marriages and unfulfilled dreams and we forgot about that woman inside of us who was yearning to get out. 

06:51 

You know that woman deep inside of you who you felt as a teenager and she let you know you had something amazing to do in life? Little by little I know that I started shushing her because she was making me uncomfortable. I knew she had great things to do but I didn't have the time nor the energy to listen to her and to learn how to set her free. But she is the real me. But I couldn't listen to her because I just felt sometimes like it was too much. It was one more thing to add to my plate that was already heaped full. Heaped full of things that I loved but heaped full nonetheless, right? So I put her in a box. I asked her to sit quiet for a few years until things slowed down and I continued on my way. And you know the way. The way that was not the way I had originally planned. My unplanned way included a really difficult marriage that never seemed fixable. It included pretending when we were around other people that we were good, that things were fine, that we were happy. It included harsh words and hard feelings and cold actions. 

08:08 

And through this, it seemed that the real me just got buried deeper and deeper underneath a bunch of crap that I don't even know where it came from. I found myself not acting anything like I felt my true self should be acting. I became manipulative and self-righteous. I was unkind and even hurtful. And none of this was in my true nature. I was hurting and didn't know how to fix it. I didn't have the tools to understand what was really going on and to figure out how to work through my situation in a healthy way. So I continued to beat my problems with a hammer because that was the only tool I had. It didn't matter what tool was needed. All I had was a hammer, and I was not gentle, but it was all that I knew. And the more I hammered away, the farther and farther I felt from the real me that was hiding inside of me somewhere. 

09:07 

But even through it all, I could still feel her down inside of me trying to speak, wanting to be heard, hoping to be seen. I could just always feel her in there, but my thought processes and my behaviors were stopping me from seeking her out. For me, the change started to come when I started to acknowledge what I was going through, when I stopped pretending that everything was okay in my marriage, and I started to look for some answers to some really, really tough questions. This is about the time that I also stopped listening to fiction books in my car and started listening to self-help talks and books and conference talks, things like that. I started looking for information rather than escape. And this is when I started to hear her voice again, and it started off so slowly at first. An amazing piece of knowledge in one book and another piece in a talk I was listening to, and little by little, I started seeing pieces come together to show me a picture that started to make sense. 

10:18 

Okay, now I know that everybody's journey looks completely different, so I'm just going to tell you mine, but hopefully you will see similarities in the sense that you will recognize the patterns and processes. Though pieces had been coming together for me for quite a while, I was still struggling to really understand what I needed to do. And the reason I was still struggling was because I was so hung up on the thought that divorce was not an option. But one day as I was listening to an Powered by  LDS psychologist named John Lund speak in my car, it was a CD that I checked out from the library, he said something about how God may have known that my relationship wouldn't be a celestial one, but that through the process of my marriage, both me and my husband would learn the things we needed to learn to become what we needed to become. 

11:09 

Now though I'm sure this does not apply to everyone, because of the immediate and powerful, overwhelming, really, spiritual confirmation that I received, I knew that it applied to me. This one thought that maybe divorce was an option because God may have known it would happen caused me to look at my whole situation differently. And for the first time in about 15 years, I heard the voice of my greatest potential, the real me buried deep inside, crying out to me. And I started to listen. I felt that over the next few years, I've received so much personal guidance in knowing how to work through my situation. 

11:55 

Now, did I do everything right? Absolutely not. I continued to manipulate at times and to say unkind things and revert to passive aggressive behaviors. But here's what started to happen: I intentionally sought to understand and learn about what was going on and what I needed to do. I fasted, and I prayed, and I read and listened to a lot of books. And through this process, I started to see what needed to be fixed. I started to see the thoughts and the behaviors that were holding me back. I will never forget my first listen to Brene Brown's CD called "The Power of Vulnerability." It was about a year after my divorce, and it created a complete shift in how I saw the world and relationships and my responsibility within those relationships. I checked it out from the library and listened to it three times before I couldn't renew it anymore. The concept of vulnerability spoke to my soul, and I could hear myself inside begging me to understand and apply these concepts. 

13:02 

And I started to. I really started to seek to be more vulnerable in relationships. It's something that I'm still working on, but four years ago, the word "vulnerability" was not even on my radar. And over the next two years, I read everything Brene Brown several times as she started to teach me about shame and guilt and about how to rise after a difficult challenge and about how to do things that were scary. And I understood the "why" behind these things, which gave me courage to listen to myself more closely, that voice inside that was saying, "hey, hey, I've got something here," right? And over the several years since my divorce, I've exposed myself to learning about emotions and thoughts and habits and behaviors. I've really tried to view myself from a clear lens and become aware of what things are holding me back. 

13:56 

And this is an amazing thing that I've learned. God wants me to find me. And he has, step by step, led me down a path of self-discovery that has been so amazing and life-changing. He hasn't given me too much at a time, but just enough to push me into discomfort so I have to look at things more clearly. And then I hit a point where all of the things I learned from Brene Brown had prepared me for some other concepts that I needed to learn. And this was when I encountered Byron Cady and Brooke Castillo from the Life Coach School. These two women started teaching me about my thoughts and how my thoughts create every feeling and action that I have or that I engage in. 

14:45 

And in this last year, this is where my biggest shift has occurred. I've begun to realize that only in taking full, 100% responsibility for everything in my life, can I really discover myself again and let her free to create what she was sent here to create. When I talk about taking full responsibility for everything, that is exactly what I mean. There are circumstances that I can't control, but beyond a circumstance, every other thought and feeling and action and result I experience in my life is completely within my control. As I have learned to stop blaming other people for things happening in my life, I have become more and more empowered. And this empowerment is starting to free the me that has been held hostage my whole life. 

15:42 

The reason I feel she's been buried so deep for so long is because I was not being true to myself. I backed down from things I felt strongly about because it was easier than a fight. I wanted so badly to be peaceful on the outside that I didn't set healthy boundaries and thereby created a place with no fighting, but so much inner turmoil that I couldn't feel peace. I harbored resentment and anger and I didn't leave any space in my heart for love and compassion. And I don't feel that our spirits are meant to live with so much turmoil. I was so busy nursing my wounds and trying to make it through each day in a difficult marriage and trying to take care of four children and a house and a yard and all the things that those entail that I didn't have time to pay attention to what I really needed to be nurtured. I was busy doing laundry and cooking meals and  keeping growing kids and clothing that fit and seeking to obey the letter of the law by reading scriptures and praying and going to church and doing family home evenings that I didn't find the time to allow this my spirit to connect with God's Spirit and receive the nourishment I needed. 

17:00 

But for me everything changed when I started to take the time to start feeding myself proper nourishment. Do you remember the story told in General Conference about the deer, I think, who got stranded in the winter snows and to keep them from starving some well-meaning people dropped off loads of hay for them to eat? Well, come spring most of them were dead because even though their stomachs were full of hay, the hay didn't provide any nourishment for their bodies and they starved to death. I think that's what I was doing for so long. I was living the letter of the law but it wasn't nourishing me. I was doing so many things in my life out of responsibility and fear rather than out of love that I was starving myself. Do you ever feel like that's what you're doing? 

17:54 

This is what I discovered for me as I started to take care of my mental and emotional health, which is really taking care of her, that her inside of me, right? She is finally getting nourished and becoming stronger and I feel her wanting to stretch forth her wings and fly and all of those years of neglect weakened her but they didn't kill her and now I feel that I'm feeding her what she needs to grow. She's finding her voice again and for the first time in years I can feel the pull to become the greatness that I feel I was created to become, that same greatness that I could feel when I was a teenager. This becoming will be completely different for each one of us, but all of us have this woman inside of us who is aching to be heard and seen and to come forth in her glory. 

18:52 

So this is my challenge to you. If you feel this woman is still holding back, still stuck inside and wanting to be seen and heard, please start doing the things you need to do to be more mentally and emotionally healthy. This isn't saying that you're broken or that you're hurting or even that you're struggling right now, but maybe you're not growing in ways that are giving her a voice. Maybe you're stuck just because it's time to up your game and you're not really sure what that looks like and where to start.Bbut let's get her out there. Let's set her free to create what she is meant to create in this world. You have greatness inside of you but only you can let her come out and fulfill her destiny and calling in this world. And I truly, truly believe that when we allow her to spread her wings and soar, will we finally find the peace and the contentment that is available to us. 

19:59 

This, my friends, is what we are meant to do in this world. I believe that wholeheartedly. I love growing up, don't you? Such an amazing place in my life. I feel like my greatest contributions are yet to come and I sometimes look around and see people my same age who are starting to think, "huh, time to just ride it out in the rocking chair," and it just kills me because I feel like these are our best years. This is the best part of our life. I hope you feel that way too, because that's when we can let this woman soar. When we can truly do what we were meant to do here. 

20:45 

Okay, that is it for today. If you haven't subscribed, please do so. Leave me a review. I know that you have not left me a review because I don't have very many of them. So if I'm talking to you, if you listen to these and you love them and you've not left me a review, if this is helping you, will you please return the favor and help me? Go onto iTunes, you can get onto that, and you can leave me a review. I really appreciate it. And share this with somebody. This information of how to be mentally and emotionally healthy is so vital for us, so vital for our growth and our development and letting this woman free. If there are other women in your life who you know need this, please share it with them. Let's get the word out and let's get ourselves in an amazing place, where we need to be. Okay, that's gonna do it for me today. I wish you all the best. I wish you every good thing in this world. And I just pray that you will see what you need to see, become aware of what you need to become aware of, so that you can start to really grow and come into your own. Have a fabulous fabulous day, my friends, and I'll talk to you next time. 

22:07 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.