Ep 4. You Can Feel Better

I’m Kym Showers and this is Reinvented After 40, episode number four, You Can Feel Better.

Hey, friends. Welcome to Reinvented After 40, a podcast for all you women in the second half of life who are ready to take responsibility for your own well-being and create a life you love living.

I’m your host, Kym Showers, and after spending the first 40 years of my life people-pleasing and following all the rules, I was exhausted and ready for a change. I reinvented myself. I stopped outsourcing my happiness. And I’ve been brave enough to live a different kind of life.

I’ll be here each week to help you do the same thing. It’s gonna be fun. Let’s go.

Hi, friends, and welcome back to the podcast. Rolling right along over here. I’m getting into a groove, and I absolutely love it. I hope wherever you are and whatever you’re doing today, you are in your own groove and loving it. And if you’re not loving it, that’s okay too.

I’m a life coach for women like you who want to create a life that you love living. That’s what I do for me. I love my life. I create a magical life every single day, and I think that you should too. I think that every woman should be living a life that they absolutely love living.

And my clients come to me because the bottom line is that they just want to feel better. They want to learn how to generate more positive feelings, and I know how to do that. We can all relate to that wanting. We all just want to feel better. Our feelings matter. They drive us. We show up to our life or we don’t show up to our life because of the way we feel.

And the thing is is that life is 50/50. Sometimes we feel amazing and beautiful and bright and brave, and we love these feelings and wish we could feel like this all of the time. And we wish our kids and husband and friends could feel like this all of the time.

But the truth is, they don’t and we don’t, and we’re not supposed to. We’re not supposed to be happy all of the time. And, sadly to say, happy really isn’t even our goal. Life is half-negative and life is half-positive and that’s perfect.

The reality is, we feel anxious and annoyed and alone. We feel belittled and bitter and blindsided. We feel cranky and crabby and criticized, desperate, devastated, disconnected, fragile, frustrated, furious… Can you relate to all of that? No one likes to feel like this, but we all do at times, and it’s perfectly fine. It doesn’t mean anything is wrong. Nothing’s gone wrong with us or with our life.

Feelings are meant to be acknowledged and felt. Feelings are important. Our feelings are dominating our life. Feelings are a big deal. Feelings are not wrong. All feelings are right and are meant to be felt.

Negative feelings are in our body for a reason. They actually have a purpose. We can learn so much from them when we understand why they’re there. They are a clue for us, and they’re absolutely harmless. They can teach us a lot if we let them. The ironic thing is, the more we allow negative feelings—the more we learn to process and feel our negative feelings—the better we’re going to feel on the other side. That’s how it works.

So today, I want to walk you through four steps you can take to feel better. And the first one is learning to own your feelings, no matter what they are. You’re the creator of all your emotions and that is the most important thing for you to know.

Your feelings never come from outside of you. They are triggered by your thoughts that you think. And once you start owning your power and creating them, then you can get any kind of life experience you want. Everything opens up to you.

My coach says, “You don’t need to feel better. You just need to get better at feeling.” And I totally agree. The better we get at feeling all of our feelings—positive and negative—the better we are going to feel all around.

You don’t have to wait for an apology from anyone else to feel better. You don’t have to change jobs to feel better. Your kids don’t have to feel better before you can feel better. You can feel okay even if other people don’t. You are fully responsible for the way you feel, and that’s the most important thing for you to know. Own your feelings.

And next, step number two: name your feelings and then connect the thoughts that are creating them. So, how are you feeling and why?

You might be feeling overwhelmed because you think you have too much to do and not enough time to do it. Does that sound familiar? Your calendar is full. You’re behind on the laundry. You have a trip out of town coming up that you’re not ready for. Your kids are fighting. You have a project due at work. And you have grocery shopping and dinner to make. That is very familiar.

“Overwhelm” is a common feeling for all of us women. It’s a feeling that comes from a thought like, “I have too much to do, and I don’t know where to start.” We all think that thought. But the truth is, feelings don’t come from the calendar or the laundry or the kids fighting or the dinner or the job or the trip.

Overwhelm comes from our thinking. Overwhelm comes from thoughts like, “I am not keeping up.” “I’m a terrible mom.” “I’m not doing a good job.” “I’m such a loser.” “My husband will be mad if I ask him to help.” “I’m not doing anything very well.” “There’s not enough time.” “There’s not enough money.” “I’m not good at this.” “I should quit.” Etc., etc., etc.

Our brain has an endless number of thoughts to offer us that will keep us feeling overwhelmed. The interesting thing about feeling overwhelmed is that it never gives us the results we want. Overwhelmed doesn’t motivate us into action. We’d like to just be able to get caught up and get our work done, but overwhelm will not do the trick.

What happens when we’re in overwhelm, suspiciously enough, is the exact opposite. We end up doing nothing. We keep thinking the thought, “I’m so overwhelmed,” and that thought keeps us stuck in overwhelm, doing nothing. And because we don’t like the feeling, we try to avoid it by eating something instead or drinking something instead or complaining instead or shopping instead or sitting on the sofa and binge-watching Netflix instead.

In the coaching world, we call all of this kind of action “buffering.” None of these actions are helpful. In fact, these actions perpetuate the feeling of overwhelm. We all do it, and that’s just good to know. It’s good to be aware of this. It’s good to watch it in ourselves so that we can actually do something about it.

So, what I want to teach you today is that the feeling of overwhelm is not our problem. We can get good at feeling overwhelmed, and we’ll feel it less and less. The more we can practice naming our feeling, processing the feeling, the more power we’ll have over it.

“Mad” isn’t a problem. “Frustrated” isn’t a problem. “Anxious,” “stuck,” “shame” are not problems. In fact, no feeling is a problem. Humans are meant to feel all the feelings we feel. The way to feel better is to be able to name our feeling and connect it with the thought that created it—to be aware of it. That’s step number two.

Step number three is befriend your feeling. Get comfortable with it. Get to know it. Understand it. Process it. Allow it. Welcome it. Own it. It’s there. So, when we get practiced and comfortable feeling any of those negative feelings instead of reacting to them—instead of pushing them away, stuffing them, ignoring them, avoiding them, judging them, numbing them—we can start to feel better.

Becoming friends with our negative feelings is so useful. Naming them is. Feeling them is. Processing them is. Getting comfortable being uncomfortable is. Negative feelings are never a problem. We just have always thought they were. And so, we didn’t learn how to be okay with them.

But today, we’re going to start being okay with negative feelings. We might have been taught that feeling sad, disappointed is wrong and weak. So, we push those feelings away and hide them.

The feelings themselves are not a problem. It’s what we make those feelings mean about us and other people that is a problem for us. The more we allow all of our feelings or practice feeling them, the more alive we become and the less time we spend suffering.

Let’s just stick with the common feeling of overwhelm for today. We’ll take a deeper look at it. But you can insert any feeling here using these steps to befriend and process.

So, you’re gonna want to drop into your body, because emotions happen in your body, not your head. It’s a vibration that is centered in your shoulders or your chest or your stomach. Breathe into it. So, what does overwhelm feel like? Is it hot or cold? Is it loud or quiet? What color is it? Is it fast or slow? We sit with it and get familiar with it and befriend it until it passes.

If it lingers, even that is fine. We can move ahead with lingering feelings when we’re not afraid of them. When we recognize them and befriend them and even expect them, they are usually predictable and right on time. Like, “Oh, there you are, my faithful companion, Overwhelm. You can come along for the ride today. You just can’t drive the car.”

So, see, we can hold many different emotions and still get the results we want. We can feel better by befriending our negative feelings.

Step number four: decide how you want to feel, and practice that feeling. You get to choose how you want to feel about anything and everything. This is the fun of mindset work. We don’t have to change our circumstance to feel better. We don’t have to divorce our husband, quit our job, clear our calendar to feel better. We can keep our trip and our job and our bills and groceries and laundry and the kids who fight. None of this is a problem.

But that thought alone will help us to feel better. None of these things that I’m worried about are even problems. They don’t have to be if I don’t want them to be. I just think they are, and I think it’s too much, and I think I’m behind. I’m creating my own drama.

When we own that we are creating our negative experience, we can get a little movement in a different direction. We can feel better. The feeling of overwhelm won’t get you out of overwhelm.

So, what would be a more useful feeling? Well, you have lots of options. You always have choices. It’s like going to a vending machine, and instead of choosing a snack like Doritos or Cheez-Its, you get to choose a feeling like “determined” or “confident.” So, we always have options. We just make a deliberate choice. “What feeling will be useful for me today to get past this overwhelm?” And take action.

So, for me, you guys, I like the feeling of “determined,” and I use that every single day. I operate from this emotion regularly. I think thoughts like, “Listen, Kym Showers. You know what to do. It’s not too much. You’ll figure it out. Just start.” So, I think like that and talk like that to myself and then I create determination.

When I’m feeling determined, I get my work done, and that feeling drives me to act. The first thing I do when I’m feeling determined is sit down, write everything out that is on my mind so I can take a look at it. I make a list of the actual tasks that I need to get done in the order of importance. Then, I get busy doing them and checking off my list. It’s amazing how quickly I am out of overwhelm. Determined does the trick for me every single time.

So, how about you? What can be your go-to intentional feeling to get you out of overwhelm to take action? It might be “motivated,” “inspired,” “focused,” “determined” … Practice any of these feelings any time you want to.

You will gain so much control over your life when you take responsibility for all of your emotions, good and bad. Your brain wants to blame your husband or blame your mom or your friend or your bank account or your job, but the minute you do that, you give away all your power.

So, take it back. Stop the blame game. It’s very unnecessary. It’s just a practice that you can start un-practicing. Decide that you want to feel better. Accept that you are creating your experience. Sad, mad, disappointed, overwhelmed, left out, nervous, anxious, grumpy, grouchy, annoyed. Feel it all. Own it all. And create the exact life you want.

I can’t tell you how much this has changed me, you guys. I used to feel anxious in my relationships, so afraid to hurt someone’s feelings or afraid that I would feel left out. So, to deal with my anxiety, I worked overtime to make everyone happy. I was afraid to feel anxious, and so I became a people-pleaser instead. Instead of just feeling my anxiety, which now I can do, I abandoned myself because I didn’t know how to be comfortable with anxiety.

I didn’t know that actually learning to feel negative feelings was the key to my freedom and confidence. But once I got better at feeling and owning my feelings, I broke the habit of people-pleasing, and my entire life shifted. I’m telling you that this is the key to your freedom. This is the key to your confidence. This is the key to reinventing your life.

Get good at feeling, and you’ll feel so much better. Get practice at taking responsibility for your emotions and you’ll feel so much better. Know that you are doing it right and there’s nothing wrong with you. This will solve for any bad habits that you’re longing to break free from—overdrinking, overeating, overspending, people-pleasing… Any of those habits that are taking the place of feeling your feelings.

I love what Glennon Doyle says in her book Untamed, and I’m going to just read you a quick little paragraph she wrote about how she learned how to feel her feelings. She says, “I did not know that all feelings were for feeling. I did not know that I was supposed to feel everything. I thought I was supposed to feel happy.

“I thought that ‘happy’ was for feeling, and that ‘pain’ was for fixing and for numbing and deflecting and hiding and ignoring. I thought that when life got hard, it was because I had gone wrong somewhere. I thought that pain was weakness and that I was supposed to suck it up. But the thing was, the more I sucked it up, the more food and booze I had to suck down.”

And that is just brilliant. And I know you can relate to that and I can relate to that, and that’s just so helpful.

So, I just want to leave you with that today and encourage you to pay attention to your feelings. Start getting very comfortable with them. And I know we’re so good at positive feelings, but let’s just allow and welcome and open up to our negative feelings and stop being afraid of them and stop pushing them away and hiding and avoiding and resisting them, and definitely stop reacting to them.

That will give us so much leverage in our life and empower us and take us to the place we’re longing to go. Self-confidence, self-trust, and just creating a life that we love, love, love to live.

So, thank you, thank you, thank you for listening today. I love you so much. Have the best week, and I will see you next time.

To celebrate the launch of the show, I’m going to be giving away a few of my very favorite things to five lucky listeners who follow, rate, and review the podcast. And it doesn’t really have to be a five-star review, though, of course, I would be ever grateful. And I do hope you love the show. But I do want your honest feedback so I can create something awesome that provides a lot of value for you.

So, please visit KymShowersLifeCoach.com/PodcastLaunch to learn more about the contest and how to enter. I’ll be announcing the winners on the podcast in an upcoming episode.

Thanks for listening to Reinvented After 40. If you want more information or resources from the podcast, please visit KymShowersLifeCoach.com.