There was a time in my life when I felt a lot of shame about how I lived day-to-day and had many judgments about what was supposed to be, instead of examining why it was this way.
I explore two questions and skill sets that helped me make a significant change in my life and continue to assist me in creating a space for myself.
Join me this week to discover which small steps you can start incorporating in your life to make the changes you want to see, allowing you to become self-aware of your being, and I'm sharing tools with you to help you make a space for yourself.
Music (00:00:01) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.
Koren (00:00:19) – Hello and welcome. This is Koren Motekaitis. And you’re listening to How She Really Does It, the place where inspiration and possibility meet. 2024. Hello 2024 goodbye 2023. Here we are. Well, this year I’m planning on talking a lot about this concept of self-awareness, and I’m going to break it down over the next series of podcasts to go into a little bit more granular details about it. So today I’m going to talk about self-awareness and our mindset. And one thing I want to remind you is that as we learn, it’s really easy to get into a shame spiral and beat ourselves up and think, oh no, you know, it’s too late and it’s not possible for me. And I have really fantastic news for you. We can learn as well as unlearn old ways of being. We can learn new ways, and we can unlearn old ways that may have gotten in our own way.
Koren (00:01:24) – Because we are here to evolve in this beautiful thing that we call life. Many of us have spent much of life doing what we’re supposed to do versus doing what we want to do. I’ve had a whole bunch of guests over the last 17 years who’ve talked about their journey, and they came to this moment where the life they were living were the shackles, those shackles on, as Martha Beck would call it, the shackles, or I call it the golden handcuffs to really the life that they really desired internally. So my example is my own story that I’ve talked about here on the show. And maybe you’re new, but my own story was I had the golden handcuffs, right? I had this job in my 20s, in my early 30s that so many people wanted. It was really, really hard to get. And I had it. I was tenured at 29. I was a college professor, and I was a head coach of both the men’s and women’s team. I had a great salary and benefits.
Koren (00:02:24) – I had a pension. And let’s not forget about tenure. When a kid like me, who grew up with a lot of financial hardship and difficulties and having security, financial security, that was everything. At least what I thought back then for me, that job security. But here’s the thing I was doing what I was supposed to do versus doing what I really, really, really wanted to do. And everybody’s version of what they really, really, really want to do is going to be different. But so often the patterns are the same. We grow up being told what is safe, figuring out what we’re supposed to do to be safe. Right. So there’s two components. Some of us are told, like, you know, look both ways before you cross the street. I’m not saying that’s not a bad thing to do, but we get told a lot of the rules of how we’re supposed to live, get a really good job, get a safe job that you can’t get fired from. Become a doctor because people need doctors, do STEM majors because science is going to be more valuable than a liberal arts major.
Koren (00:03:22) – There’s a lot of different social conditioning, right? Go be an engineer because, you know, you can always be employed. Whatever the belief system of our family of origin, our cultural programming, some of us, like when I was 11 years old and my parents were fighting about money and I was, you know, so afraid in my bed at that night at 10:00 at night. My solution to not being poor was to become a lawyer. I’m not a lawyer, never been a lawyer, coached a lot of lawyers. Some of my clients really love being lawyers. But that was what I figured out what I needed to do to be safe. Right? And this, my friend, is what we call great survival skills. So either following the rules that we’ve been told or figuring out what we think is the way to keep us safe. Many of the rules that we are told growing up is, you know, get good grades. If you get really good grades, you’re going to be safe.
Koren (00:04:16) – Is that really true? You know, so they take enduring classes, right, that are gruesome and overwhelming and do it perfectly and get those straight A’s. Right. I think I asked a client recently like did anyone ever look at your transcripts? And there’s a difference between striving for excellence and learning and really applying yourself and developing that skill set versus outcome oriented. Right. There’s always context to things. But what happens is that when we play this game of getting good grades and during classes and stuff, what starts to happen is that we really learn how to do it perfectly. And the thing about perfection is that perfection becomes armor on ourselves. It’s armor. It weighs us down. It’s heavy, it creates disconnection from our souls. And then one day we buckle from that weight, from that pressure, from that disconnection, and we wake up, possibly hating our life, wanting to run away. Are quitting the very thing we’ve worked so hard to attain. And this, my friend, is where I’m going to interject.
Koren (00:05:17) – This leads us potentially to the path to self-awareness.
Koren (00:05:23) – You’re like, wait, Koren, I’m gonna do everything I’m not supposed to that I don’t want to do. And then I become self-aware.
Koren (00:05:28) – We have self-awareness by oftentimes our falling down moments. Okay. And so that is one of the pathways to self-awareness. And that’s also one of the reasons that people come to work with me the way that they’ve been living, that has worked and brought them great success, is no longer working internally. Right. And so we get to working on self-awareness, and there are many layers of self-awareness, and we all have blind spots. I have them, we all have them. In the other part of self-awareness, not just the cultural programming. Right. So those often we’re not even aware that we can question that programming, whether it’s from our culture or whether it’s from our family of origin, or whether it’s a rule from a friend of ours that we’ve chosen to live by. And that’s where I want to talk about self-awareness and mindset, because self-awareness looks like the stories you tell yourself in realizing what you’re really saying about yourself, right? Like really paying attention.
Koren (00:06:32) – So often we may not be aware of what it is we believe or what it is that is guiding us. For instance, an example of this is when I was raising when I had four kids at home and I had a blended family. I didn’t ever want to be a stepmom because, you know, Disney and lots of places. And it’s always the evil stepmother, right? Lots of cultural programming around that. So I knew I didn’t like that title, but I didn’t know what title. But then I would judge myself all the time and beat myself up because there were socks on the floor just in the middle of the floor. They weren’t mine, of course. They were one of four children’s. There was these crazy schedules. There was chaos, right? When you have four children, there often is. And I would judge my life compared to Carol Brady. For those of you who don’t know Carol Brady, there was a show, I think it was in the 70s. I watched it in the 70s, may have started in the 60s, called The Brady Bunch, and it was the blended family.
Koren (00:07:31) – The wife had three kids, the husband had three kids. They merged together and became the Brady Bunch. There was no talk of step. They were all happy and joyful. When I recall, the biggest problem was when Marcia got hit in the face with the football and couldn’t go into this dance because of her nose being a bit disfigured. But I would compare myself internally to Carol Brady, who was somebody I never aspired to be, except that was my measuring stick about how I wasn’t good enough and I would feel bad and feel bad and feel bad. And it wasn’t until one day that I became aware of this story that I had in my head from the cultural programming and went, wait a second, let me think about this. There’s six kids, there are knee socks on the ground. Her husband seems to always be home. My husband was never home. She has an Alice.
Koren (00:08:20) – I want an Alice. Right. Like I was doing all of this.
Koren (00:08:24) – Yes, I had two less kids.
Koren (00:08:26) – There weren’t any exes involved, right? There wasn’t any child custody issues. Or when were the kids going to go back and forth and negotiations and all of that stuff? There wasn’t any of that stuff. And here I was comparing my reality with the fictional make believe TV show. So by that mindset and becoming aware of that story, what was driving my own unhappiness is what actually let me be free of that mindset of those rules. Realizing I didn’t have an Alice who cooked and went grocery shopping. You know, there wasn’t a Sam the Butcher. And my kids are humans, and there are socks on the ground, and we work on cleaning that up. But it doesn’t have to look like the Bradys house, right? That was not the reality that was a TV show. And reminding myself over and over that was a TV show and was never my aspiration to be Carol Brady. My aspiration was really to be Marcia Brady, but then I wouldn’t even be a mom. So paying attention to the stories we tell ourselves is so important to become aware of them.
Koren (00:09:30) – And what happens is, as we go through life, we may not be aware that these are the stories, right? Like I thought, oh well, I don’t cook. And so then I’m not going to fall into this like patriarchal order in my in my house, in my marriage, there was a lot of other invisible labor that I did, and there was a period of time where I did learn how to cook, not because I thought I needed to do it for my motherly duty. I needed to do it because I was so in so much fear around cooking that I was parenting really poorly with my daughter when she would cook, and I’ve talked about that as well. So it’s really important that we become aware of the stories again, whether they’re just something that seeps in from a television show, something that maybe your parents have told you. Family. Of origin and on to grandmother, a best friend, something that she picked up culturally. Something that maybe you are on a sports team. You know, another story I was told.
Koren (00:10:19) – I remember I was a senior in high school, and I had a coach who I really, really is become a friend and I, you know, really care about him. But I remember when I was 17, he said, well, you know, girls in college don’t get faster. And I remember walking away and going, screw that.
Koren (00:10:34) – You may think that, but.
Koren (00:10:35) – Let me prove you wrong. And that became a driving force. It wasn’t a limiting belief. It was a bit of a fire belief, or it was an accelerator for me when I would have doubt. I would definitely lean on that, like, let me show him. And I did. It did kind of help motivate me and in a healthy way. Right. But that was his limiting belief. And now we look at the world of sports and how women swimmers and how much faster they go in their in their 20s. It’s mind blowing. But what we thought in like 1989 and 90 was very different. And he had his own limiting belief.
Koren (00:11:04) – So one of the things as a coach, you know, I partner with my clients and I’m on their team and they know that. And I am very honored and privileged to be able to have this trustworthy seat in their support sections, where they come to me and they can vent and they can share with me some of the stuff that’s so deep inside. And sometimes they’re not even aware of what their beliefs are. And I have the privilege of knowing so many parts of themselves, right? They’re beautiful, amazing and flawed clients. And when I say flawed, it’s not a judgment like we are all flawed. And that’s the beauty of us. And much like an athletic coach that can see so much of their athletes who are in that competition, who may not may have blind spots because of what their perspective is from where, whether they’re on the field or in the pool. But as a coach, we’re on the sidelines. And so there’s so much more that we can see and we can decipher.
Koren (00:11:58) – Is it physical training? Is that mindset? Is it technical feedback? Is it tactical strategy? I do the same thing with my clients. And so one of the areas I’m talking about today is about mindset. So my clients may start to verbally process or verbally vomit with me because they need to vent. I’m a safe place. They can get it out with me because I’ve earned the right to hear their story, and it helps them process what’s going on versus then dumping them in a workplace that could actually create a big problem because they haven’t flushed out their ideas yet. And it can be really hurtful, right, to somebody else. So here’s some of the stories that I’ve collected in the last few weeks. I’ve had clients say I’m weird, or this would be more impactful if I were to have kids. I’m not going to make my goal. My sales will go down lower if I’m not working 10 to 12 hours a day. Now here’s the thing. These are little rocks in a sentence or in many sentences that my clients start to say.
Koren (00:12:57) – And then I pull them out and I start to notice what is their pattern, what is the story they keep telling themselves? They may not even hear it. Or maybe they may say, oh yeah, it’s fine that I know I don’t have kids and I’m fine with that. But then later on they’re bringing that same story back in. So becoming self-aware of our mindsets, the stories we tell ourselves is one of the keys to becoming more self-aware. Okay. And this is the one I’m talking about today. I’m going to talk about it in other days. The other ones. Now, for me, I remember before I became a coach, I didn’t realize I had this limiting belief of I’m a loser, and I’ve had that most of my life. Right there was, you know, there’s a lot of hardship my family faced, and they were really doing the best that they could. And I understand that now I am a 51 year old woman. But when I was young, I didn’t understand. And so I came up with a solution of like, oh, we, we have these things because we’re just losers, right? I didn’t even have that sentence very clear.
Koren (00:13:56) – But it was so a part of my way of being. And it would show up. It could show up in athletics, it could show up socially, right? It could show up in lots of different places from time and again. And sometimes it wasn’t even there. But that was a very big, limiting belief. When I became aware of this limiting belief, that’s when things started to change. Prior to that, I tried to outrun it by proving to myself that was not the case. Right. And that’s where it became this achieving and over achieving a great deal. But I wasn’t letting go of this limiting belief. And in fact, I worked even harder to try to prove to myself. So the first step to becoming aware of those four words is that I am a loser. And then sometimes I have that other story. I’m a loser from Loser Street. The first step to becoming aware of those words that were deeply inside of me and that I unconsciously believed was to write about it, was to recognize it and own that story with myself, even in my own head, like, oh, I have this belief.
Koren (00:15:04) – And then at some point have the courage, like I did, to share it with somebody who’d earned the right to hear. Of my story. Who could hold that space? And at first they’d say, like, I don’t understand Korean. You win in everything. Why is this an issue? That didn’t help me feel like I was a loser from Loser Street. And remember what I said was that I tried to outrun it. I tried to prove it. And when I became aware of it, I was like, oh, well, I’m just going to work really, really hard to overcome that belief. And then I’ll prove to myself, see, I can work really hard.
Koren (00:15:32) – I can do things, I can just work harder. Yeah, that didn’t work out so well. That just made me more exhausted.
Koren (00:15:38) – So learning about limiting beliefs is really important. Learning what your limiting beliefs are and how we do that is when we start listening to our stuff. And that’s a step of the self awareness that I’m talking about today.
Koren (00:15:50) – Hearing the stories in our head, like just start noticing, listening. What is it that you say about yourself? What is it that you say? What are the patterns of things that you say over and over? Writing things down is really helpful as well, right? Writing it down and reflecting, noticing like, oh, here’s this thing that keeps popping up again. Byron Katie talks about questioning our stories by asking, is it really true? You know, so for example, is it really true I’m a loser from Loser Street? No. My family had hardships. Yes to my family. Have limited skill sets. Absolutely. But I wasn’t a loser from Loser Street. But that’s what I did do. So as a young kid or maybe asking yourself, like, is it really true? You are weird? Like, I have a client that likes to self-identify as I know it’s really weird and I know I’m weird. And then she says this over and over, right? So we’re working on overcoming that identity, and it’s, is it really true that you’re weird and something’s wrong with you? You know, sometimes I’ve said like, hey, let’s fly our freak flag high.
Koren (00:16:52) – Like, let’s own our own individuality. This is what works for you. That’s okay. Right? And it’s always about context too. Like, as long as that if works for you and it’s not hurting other people, that’s okay. And then you can also ask, is it really true that you can’t have a good life if you don’t have kids? So whether I have clients that don’t have kids, I have clients that do have kids, and having kids isn’t the happily ever after. Not having kids as the happily ever after, right? But we have our chosen pathways, and sometimes our chosen pathways may be a bit determined for us by different life situations. Or maybe you have the story that you’re too much or that you’re difficult. Whatever the beliefs are, one thing that’s really important is to unpack what is swirling in your head. And this is the step of self-awareness. What is being said in your brain? What are you then eventually saying out loud yourself? Pay attention to that. What do you believe about yourself? And remember, our brains are designed to make up stories.
Koren (00:18:00) – That’s what they do. In the absence of data, our brains fill in a story. When we don’t know a story, our brains look for information that has already been given to us. Again, cultural programming. Right? That’s how my brain went to Carol Brady. It looks for what it can fill in to help make sense of this uncomfortableness that we’re going through. And my question for you is, isn’t it time to listen to your stories and unpack what is true and what is not, what is learned via cultural programming, or from our family of origin, or just plain old surviving? Back in college, I realized I had a limiting belief about money, and I had this belief that money didn’t happen to people like us, and us was meaning myself and my family, and that was the only way that I could make sense of our financial struggles. So then.
Koren (00:18:54) – I decided gladly towards money and to people that had money and I villainized money and the people with money.
Koren (00:19:00) – Because that makes sense, right? You’re in shame. Money doesn’t happen to people like that. Well screw you, you guys are all evil. Money is evil. That’s the pattern, people. And then I learned that money doesn’t care if you’re good or bad person. Take a look. There are people that are amazing, people that have a lot of money in their people that are horrible, people that have a lot of money. Money is just money and money. There’s tools to help us make money and frameworks to make money, as well as systems that can really hurt you when it comes to money. Think credit cards, debt, college student debt. Which one day will be a whole show that I can talk about, right? So money is a thing. It’s a circumstance. It’s very neutral. It’s like what I say about swimming in a in a pace clock. The clock doesn’t care if you’re a good person, bad person. If you had a justified reason for not making practice or not.
Koren (00:19:51) – It’s very objective. You put your hand on the wall, it gives you time. Money is objective. It’s maybe the handlers of the money that may not be objective. So becoming aware of what your limiting beliefs are is really, really important. For me, breaking free from my limiting belief about money was life changing. I went from a person who believed money doesn’t happen to people like me to I am really good with money. And in today’s step of self-awareness, it comes down to what do you say to yourself? What do you believe? What’s so ingrained inside of you that you’ve collected? Become aware of this again without judging yourself. Self-compassion is so important, and one of the tools that I talk about with my clients is being a compassionate observer. It doesn’t mean like, oh, it’s fine, it’ll be okay. And being really dismissive, it’s about really looking at the whole context of it and understanding and realizing how it may have limited you. Because maybe you didn’t have skill sets, maybe you didn’t have awareness and what you can learn from it too.
Koren (00:20:59) – Then what can you do to help change the trajectory of that situation? Again, with money, I realized that there were tools and it was objective. One day, with my self-awareness of the Carol Brady story, I realized I was comparing myself to Carol Brady and The Brady Bunch, and I realized that it was fiction and I was living a real life, a nonfiction life that was really messy and that helped me break free from my own limiting belief. It was that self-awareness that helped me transform. And going back to what I said earlier, it was through those falling down moments, right? It was through judging myself. But then it was when I finally looked at, okay, why am I judging myself? Right? The falling down moment was me judging. I want to be clear about that. Me judging me. And then it wasn’t until I became compassionate and had empathy and I could look at why am I judging myself? What is that about? And realizing where it stemmed from. That’s where freedom came.
Koren (00:21:56) – Another way to think about it is being self-aware is like walking through life with your eyes wide open, and we’re still going to have blind spots because there are areas that we can’t see. And that’s why it’s important that we don’t go through life alone. Right? We have people to go through with. We are in teams. And next week’s episode, I’ll discuss more about the next step in self-awareness, which is emotional intelligence. Today I’m going to wrap up about mindset. So the evolution of our life is following the rules generally, right? Because we need to survive. We need to be safe. We need to follow the rules. We’re part of this system, the order. Right? Our parents want to make sure we fit in. And then here I talk about we want to belong and then who are our people, right. And the evolution of our lives, in addition to following the rules, is there’s guidelines and there’s frameworks of those in charge. And they could be our parents, teachers, bosses, cultural programming.
Koren (00:22:49) – Right. And as we evolve, we start to develop our own agency in life. And this evolution happens with self-awareness. And it’s a process. And as you do this, my invitation for you is to be self compassionate. Be kind to yourself. Let go of judgment to yourself or others. Right? We may start out judging because that’s what we do, but then when we can look at that falling down moment of judgment and understand and gather insight, letting go of our judgment of ourselves or others, being curious, focusing on learning and growing versus judging, which is armor and self-protection. And it gets us in our way. As you become self-aware, it will be messy. And yes, it does become so incredibly beautiful and freeing. I’m still a mom of four. Bonus mom of two. Birth mom of two. I’ve raised four kids, right? And I no longer have that judgment of I need to be Carol Brady because I realized that is fiction and I live in non-fiction life. Start listening to what is going on inside your brain.
Koren (00:23:59) – And one great way to do this, not the only way, but is to write. Just declutter it and get it down. Write down these thoughts and just start to notice what are the patterns? What’s the message that keeps coming up and up? And then you’ll start to see what that limiting belief is. Declutter that magnificent brain of yours. Treat it like a boutique, right? Whatever. If you like fancy purses or you like, you know, these high end stores treat it that way instead. Most of us treat it like Walmart, where it’s just crammed in with a whole bunch of stuff. We need to let that stuff out, so write it. The other is hire a coach who will be your trusted partner and help you with your blind spots, as well as help you create this self-awareness and live your life proactively as a deliberate creator versus surviving, fighting, reacting, and leading yourself to burnout. All right, my friend, until next time when we talk more about self-awareness. I’m smiling big for you.
Koren (00:25:01) – Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you’ll love my weekly emails. I know you’re thinking, Karen, really? Do I want another email in my overflowing inbox? Yes you do. Yippee skippy you do. These are short. They’re sweet. On Fridays, I send out the Friday podcast. It’s a great reminder that there’s a new show and it comes straight into your inbox of the latest episode. Awesome. You click on it, you go straight. Because we all need reminders. We have busy, full lives. And then on Sundays I have my Sunday Love column and these are emails I write from the heart. They’re filled with love. We need more love. We all do, myself included. These are short emails where you get a quick takeaway so you can incorporate this into your life, because people often want to know what to do and how to do it. And maybe sometimes it’s a story that you get or there’s like one time I wrote about the ten ways to practice gratitude, and that became such a great tool when one of the readers was struggling and the middle of the night, because it can be a scary place in our brains in the middle of the night.
Koren (00:26:15) – And she remembered the email that I sent about ten ways to practice gratitude. And she was able to practice gratitude and fall back asleep. That was an awesome lesson for her to incorporate into her life. Go to the show notes and there’s a link in the show notes where you can sign up and get these emails in your inbox.
Music (00:26:33) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.
