Welcome to The Wildly Confident Podcast, where we discuss all the ways to help you get more confident, make more money and get the results you want in your life. I’m Katherine Weisner, your host, I’m a certified life coach and a life coach and the creator of my own multimillion dollar business. Hey, everyone, I’m so glad you’re here. Today, we are going to be talking about one of my favorite weeds which I call the numbing weed or the self medicating weed. This is a weed that comes into our lives, kind of by choice. We actually invite this one in. And we invite her in because we want to be distracted from some of the parts of us we don’t like very much. If you’ve listened to some of my prior podcasts, you know, I refer to these parts as the shadow side of us. So the things that we don’t like, the things that we shame or guilt or blame ourselves, for all of the self judgment, we have lives in our shadow. And they’re the parts of us that we’ve really exiled out of our lifes that we’ve carved out of our life saying it’s not us. And by not owning our wholeness or our fullness, we end up playing small, we end up making ourselves so much smaller than we really are. And it also stops us from being able to, to really manifest some wild things in our lives. Because we have a limited viewpoint of ourselves. I’ll give you some examples of what sort of things live in the shadow, but they are usually judgments about yourself. And it could be that you’re not worthy, you’re not lovable. You’re nobody. If you’re not perfect, you’re not good enough. And there’s a lot of like little shadowy parts of us that we have that we tried to avoid thinking about because they cause negative emotions and our bodies, when we think about them, they might make you feel ashamed or guilty, or depressed or anxious. And so we avoid thinking those things. And the number one way we avoid those things is by numbing ourselves. So this is one of the weeds we actually kind of invite in, we’re like “hey, numbing weed, come into my garden.” Some of the different ways that numbing weed might look, it might be television, it might be getting on Instagram or tik tok, and scrolling through those, it might be drinking alcohol or doing other types of recreational drugs that might be emotional eating. And what I want to say is that doing any of those behaviors, doesn’t mean you’re numbing yourself, okay? You just need to look at why you’re doing them. And if the reason why you’re doing them is to numb yourself, you need to sit there and think is that really serving me, because that’s something I want to keep doing. And if I don’t start doing some of the micro practices I’m going to share with you later. But if you like your reasons for doing those things for drinking, or emotional eating, or watching a lot of TV or whatever it is, there’s no problem with it. Don’t judge yourself, just enjoy it. As long as you like your reasons. Keep at it. I do want to share one little story with you about how this numbing weed can really get you kind of stuck and set into almost a spin out where you keep repeating the same pattern over and over again. Let’s say you decided that you were going to do something in your business this week. And you didn’t get that thing done. And when the period of the deadline or whenever the self imposed deadline comes up and you realize like “hey, I didn’t get that done and that feels horrible.” Instead of doing that thing, maybe you decide to get on Instagram and like scroll or get on tik tok and that’s gonna feel pretty good right? You want from feeling like pretty crappy about yourself judging yourself for not being able to get done the project on time to going from like a totally distracted This feels good. Like I don’t feel negative emotions anymore inmy body. I’m not being mean to myself anymore. But guys, the project still not done. So guess what? As soon as you think about that project again, you’re going to feel crappy again. And then you’ll be judging yourself for not getting the project done, judging yourself for getting on Instagram instead of getting the project done. And when we judge we end up moving straight back into the numbs zone. So, you’re actually way more likely to go back and get on Instagram or watch TV then to use that energy to get on getting your project done. Okay? Because you’re going to want to avoid negative emotions. That is just how the human brain is. If you do not know this, I am going to drop maybe the tip of a lifetime right now for you, this might be the only thing you ever need to know about your life. Okay? So drumroll please. Okay, the tip is, everything you do, every single little thing you do, is because of how you think it’s going to make you feel. I’ll repeat that, everything you do in life, you do it because you want to feel a certain way. It’s crazy that our entire life is pretty much driven by our emotions. And it’s also crazy to think about how little we have been taught about our emotions, how to manage our emotions, how to harness our emotions, how to use our emotions, to fuel our life, how to just be with our emotions, and love them no matter what emotion comes up. I always like to say like, the bigger the emotion, the more power you’re going to be able to have to use that emotion to fuel things in your life. So, if you’re going around and numbing your emotions, numbing yourself, numbing the way you feel, because you don’t like feeling the discomfort of some of your emotions, you’re actually blocking yourself from being able to use some of the bigger emotions, but you’re not allowing yourself to have to make massive change, and to harness massive change and manifesting into your life. The reason I’m saying that you’re blocking yourself from harnessing some bigger emotions is because it is only to the extent that we can own our negative emotions and the fullness of them that we can also own, the fullness, and the depth of our positive emotions. So in order to fully expand and get the most out of some of your bigger positive emotions, such as passion, or inspiration, you also have to own your negative emotions that might be sadness or anger, you have to own it all in order to get the maximum expansiveness and fuel. The first thing we want to do when we catch ourselves numbing ourselves avoiding discomfort, is we do not want to judge ourselves, because I promise you people, if you judge yourself, you’re either just going to numb more eventually. Or you’re going to beat yourself up and use that also as negative fuel to try to get you to get yourself stuff done. And that only works temporarily. That’s why people get burnt out because they’ve been using negative self judgment fuel on themselves, to the extent that it wears them out. Self judgment is not going to fuel anything in a way that’s going to be eat with ease, and with long term productive capacity and capabilities. In order to have a balanced life, a productive, self sustaining life, where you’re getting a lot done on a consistent basis, we need to use positive fuel. So fuel about us being empowered, being inspiring, that we’re amazing that we can get things done, right things that are gonna feel positive in our bodies, not things like “if I don’t do this, I suck, and I’m the worst person in the world” and a lot of other, or it’s gonna mean something negative about me. The first micro practice is to be kind to yourself, to love yourself, when you notice that you were going to numb yourself. Whatever negative emotion is coming up, be kind to it, allow it welcome at home, it is part of you. And if you go when you go and numb it, that emotion is still there, and it’s still gonna need to be processed one day, so you might as well just process it right now. You might as well sit with it right here in this moment, and love it. A really great way of doing us is when that negative emotion comes up after you give it some loving kindness. You can observe it. You can sit there like a scientist. And just observe the sensations in your body because emotions really, are also just sensations in your body. So you can just look at it, and you can be like, “Hmm, I feel some tightness in my chest, I feel some discomfort in my stomach.” And you can handle a little tightness in your chest and a little discomfort in your stomach. The second thing I want to share with you, and dealing with how to start working on reducing your numbing weed problem is leaning into your likeness. The less you numb yourself, the more alive you are. And the more alive I am, the more rich and deep experiences I am going to have in life. And the more I’m going to be able to accomplish really big things. One of the huge emotions I use in my life is passion. I’m a very passionate person for the things I care about. But in order to feel my passion, I have to be able to feel the opposite of that, which is despair. And I have to allow that despair to be with me. The more I’m able to feel despair in my life, the bigger I allow that despair, the bigger I’m able to be passionate about things. And passion is just one of those amazing emotions that can fuel so many amazing things in your life. How are you going to invite a lightness in an invite in all of your emotions this week? Thank you for joining. I hope you come back next week. Join my mailing list to get notified of my podcast. Follow me on Instagram at KatWeissner and check out my website www.klwcoaching.com