‘Tell the story of the mountain you climbed. Your words could become a page in someone else’s Survival Guide’ ~ Morgan Harper Nichols

Sharing stories is part of the human experience.  We all have a story, we’ve all heard other people’s stories, & we’ve all shared our own  stories about certain life situations with people at some point.  More of us need to be sharing our stories because it’s how we connect to one another, and largely, it’s how we learn.

Hearing that somebody else has gone through something similar to us, how they have dealt with it, and the lessons that they’ve pulled from it is incredibly powerful. It gives us light at the end of the tunnel to try to start to imagine what it will be like when we get through our particular situation.

Listen in today as we dive into our stories and:

• Why stories & sharing are so important
• What holds people back from sharing
• When to know if you’re ready to share
• How to share
• *BONUS* 5 min exercise on stories

I want you to recognize and to acknowledge that you have a story to share, that you can change people’s lives. Make your story the best fucking thing to happen to you and to someone else at the same time, that power resides within you. The longer you continue to hold it back, the longer you are continuing to hold yourself back and do a disservice to those who could benefit from it.

Are you ready? Get listening right away by clicking the link above, or if you’re more in the mood to read today keep scrolling for the full transcription of today’s episode! Let’s do this!

Look for references from today’s episodes?  Find them all here:

Episode #117 – The 9 Year Affair: Lessons in Infidelity

Episode #120 – Listen to Your Gut Instinct: Stop Ignoring Your Body

Episode #96- When We’re Perfect, We’re Not Relatable with Marsha Vanwynsberghe

Episode #102- Practicing the Pause & Examining What We Tolerate with Tory Eletto

 

Hey, welcome back to the Room to Grow podcast and today is extra special! You guys, we’re going to be talking about how to share your story. This is something that I get asked about a lot, and this is going to be especially relevant for anyone who’s looking to share your story more from a business standpoint, or a little bit more publicly. All of this still absolutely applies, even if you’re just looking to get a little bit more clear on your story for your own sake, or to just share it with someone who maybe needs to hear it in your personal life as well. This is something that is really, really powerful for you as much as for anyone around you, and it’s why I’m so passionate about teaching it. I just see so many people with really powerful, incredible stories and they don’t even recognize that within themselves. There’s so much fear of judgment and there’s fear of ‘who am I to be telling this story, I don’t even know what I learned or what I pulled from this story’. We’re going to get into all of this today. It’s almost going to be a little bit kind of like a workshop style. 

 

I also have a freebie to go along with this one that I think you’re going to get a ton of benefit from. It’s actually a five minute exercise that is going to help pull your story from you and to get super clear on it in a really short period of time. I’m not even going to go into that part today, this is going to be above and beyond what we cover in this episode. It’s a really, really powerful exercise that is short, sweet, and packs a really significant punch. It’s going to help you to get super clear and to actually use everything that I’m teaching today. Make sure to run over – don’t walk – run over to roomtogrowpodcast.com for Episode 207. That’s this episode, and it will have all of the information over there for you, in order to grab that freebie that’s really going to help you to get super clear. This is important whether you are looking at this from a business standpoint, or just on a more personal level. This is going to really help you to pull some of the lessons from it and to start to move forward from your story as well, which is a really big part of all this. As well, if you love this episode today, please screenshot it and share it on social media, make sure to tag me so that I can thank you for listening, it always means so much to me. If this is something that is touching your heart, there’s somebody else out there that needs to hear it as well. If you could share it with somebody that would mean the absolute world to me. 

 

Today also kicks off the launch of Speak Your Truth Academy. If you’ve been listening to the last few episodes, you might have heard me talking about this coming down the line. That is something I’ve been working on and talking about a little bit on social media as well. This is going to be a really incredibly comprehensive, 12 week program where I’m going to be working very closely with a small group of people. I’m limiting this to 12 women, MAX. This one is for female entrepreneurs, and looking on how to leverage your story to build your business. This is going to go into everything related to actually pulling the lessons from your story, which we’re going to talk a little bit about today, getting super clear on it and developing an actual business plan around your story, and the sharing of your stories and how you can use them to catapult yourself into the business that you’ve always wanted. This is going to be a combination of not only helping you figure out your story, get super clear on it, but also to clarify your audience who you are speaking to, and the actual product or service that you want to come out with or that you maybe want to build upon what you’ve already got, and to really create a just significant plan for it that is going to help you help more people. If you’re listening to this podcast, I already know that you’re somebody who has a really big heart and you want to have an impact. That’s my entire mission is to help more people have an impact, because no one person can impact everybody else. We all have to play a role here, and we all have a role to play. I can’t wait to work with you to teach you how to take what you’ve already got. If you’re at the very beginning, I will help take you from those very beginning stages, and bring you all the way up to speaking, podcasting, writing, coaching people, coaching other people, and actually building the business that you’ve had sitting in the back of your mind forever. You’ve been thinking about it, you’ve had this idea kind of floating around, and you usually push it down, or you’re like, ‘No I can’t do that’, or you see somebody else doing something that’s really, really cool and you want to be doing that too but you don’t even know where to start. This is for you. Make sure to jump over to Speak Your Truth Academy and you can get all of the details over there. I can’t wait to share more about that. 

 

Okay, so let’s get into this a little bit today about how to share your story, and I mean we’ve always shared stories, it’s part of the human experience, but it’s become more and more relevant than ever. When you look at things like all the podcasts out there, Ted Talks, all the really incredible speakers and stuff like that. Everyone who does those types of things, and does it well, shares stories, and everyone has a story to share. I cannot stress that enough. Every single person has a story to share. Some of you might be thinking ‘I don’t know what my story is, or I don’t have anything super dramatic to talk about. Who am I to be sharing my stories or experiences?’. Listen, there’s so many of us out there, me among them. All of us are like this, that we often need to hear the same thing. Sometimes 50 to 100 different times before something clicks, and we hear it from the exact person that we need to hear it, in the exact moment that we are open to hearing it, and in the exact way that we need to hear it, and all of a sudden, we have those light bulb moments. We’re like, ‘oh my god I’ve heard this before, but that makes so much sense’. Something just shifts in you and you can feel it within you. That’s why more of us need to be sharing our stories because it’s how we connect to one another, and largely, it’s how we learn. It increases relatability, we’re able to connect with people and on such a deep level, have empathy for people, and honestly one of the biggest reasons why I came forward with my own story about and – I’ve come forward with all kinds of stories – but one of my point biggest story, I guess, you could say, was the the one about the infidelity in my relationship, the nine year affair, and the biggest reason why I came forward with that one was because I wanted somebody out there to feel less alone than I did when I was going through it. I felt so isolated. I didn’t have anyone close to me who had been through anything like this. I felt like I didn’t have anywhere to turn. I felt like I didn’t have anyone to talk to who truly understood me. Hearing a story like that would have made such a difference to me, to help me realize that I wasn’t going through it alone. Interestingly, since I’ve come out with it, it’s become glaringly obvious to me that my story is not unique. It is not unique in the least, but there are people who connect more with me and my story than they would with someone else who has a very similar story, simply because they tell it differently, or they just speak a different way or something like that. We all have these little things about us that other people will connect with more than they will with other people. We all have this gift but if you never use it, you’ll never be able to experience how powerful it can be.

 

People buy the person, not just the service, it’s the coach over the coaching, they want you. I’ve said this before everyone has access to Google search bar, and yet, online courses have become more popular than ever before, especially now given what is happening in the world. Even before that, online courses have never been more popular.

It’s interesting because all of the information that’s in those types of courses, typically you can find that information just about anywhere on the internet. We want not only the beautiful package, that’s all in order and it’s all beautifully laid out for us. Dr. Jade Teta, my friend Dr. Jade talked about that on episode 205, about how that plays a really big role in how we sell online courses. Ultimately what it comes down to is that the same type of course can be offered by a dozen different coaches, but we buy from the person that we relate to the most, that we like the most, that we trust the most , that know, like, and trust factor. A lot of that has to do with sharing your story. We’ve never craved connection more than we do right now. Sometimes, in order to build our own resilience, we also need to be able to see that it’s even possible and that somebody else has gone through something similar to us and gone before us. They’ve walked through what scares us the most, before we ever even get, there before we ever even figure out how to get to the other side of it. Hearing that somebody else has gone through it and how they have dealt with it and the lessons that they’ve pulled from that. That’s incredibly powerful because it gives us light at the end of the tunnel to try to start to imagine what it will be like when we get through this.

 

If you’re in the middle of a really shitty set of circumstances right now, it’s really hard to see the other side. I’ve been there. When you’re in it, it’s really, really tough to see it. You can have everybody tell you, you know, it’s not always gonna be like this and whatever. Yeah, that’s all well and good, but when you’re in the depths of depression, or really tough, tough circumstances, it’s so hard to be able to see that. When we can hear that somebody else has a similar story, or even hear a story that isn’t necessarily similar, but when we hear threads of our own story and threads of ourselves in someone else’s experience, there’s nothing more powerful than that. That is transformative.

 

There’s a quote that I absolutely love from Morgan Harper Nichols, and she says, ‘Tell the story of the mountain you climbed. Your words could become a page in someone else’s Survival Guide’. I wrote that quote down in my journal and I looked at it, day after day after day when I was in the depths of dealing with this whole infidelity situation. I had a very clear purpose that was getting me through, and that main sense of purpose was I need to share this. I felt innately from the very beginning, that I would need to come forward with my story, but that’s a little bit unusual. A lot of people don’t feel that way for a really long time. That’s partly why I’m coming forward with this episode, because I want you to see the power that resides within you, that you have the power to be able to come forward with something that can change somebody else’s life. One of the things that was really powerful for me when i was thinking about the ways that I could come forward with this to try and help somebody else is that – and this was absolutely true for me and I’ve talked to others that it has been true for as well – it gives you a sense of purpose to help you move through your own circumstances. It helps you to express yourself to fully step into and own who you are, and to feel understood. That’s like a basic human need, where we, we just all really want to feel understood. We all do it. It’s a desperate need that so many of us have. A lot of times a lot of us end up feeling misunderstood, but when we can express ourselves in this way and to share a portion of ourselves, it helps us to feel grounded and connected and routed to other human beings, part of this bigger human experience that we’re all moving through. It can also be a really important part to your own healing and defining peace and forgiveness within yourself. That was absolutely the case for me. I just felt so strongly that it was going to be an integral part of my own healing to be able to speak it into existence to speak my truth into existence.

 

From a business standpoint people buy from those who share their stories in a way that allows the person on the other end to connect with them and relate with them and feel like they know them on a deeper level. It comes back to all of these things: connection, relatability, empathy, all of that. When you come forward, you lend your own courage to those who need it most. And you encourage them to come forward with their own stories. It’s a win win. What I want you to think about is what do you want to see more of in the world? It’s not enough to wish for it. You have to be it yourself, if you want to see more of it. And if you want to see more connection, if you want to see more empathy, resilience, courage in the world, what does that look like for you? What does that mean to you?  if you want to see more of it, you’re going to have to start showing up that way yourself. There are a lot of things that hold people back from sharing. I completely understand that there’s so much fear, so much fear and all kinds of different fears. 

 

I mean, one of the biggest ones is ‘what will people think of me?’ This was a big one for me when it came down to coming forward about infidelity, because having a partner be unfaithful to you for that length of time, the immediate thought that went through my head was, everyone is going to think that I must have just been a terrible partner. Often when we think of infidelity, there are all kinds of stereotypical reasons that come to mind that all of us have heard before or maybe even experienced as to why infidelity happens. Yet, none of those stereotypical reasons were true in my particular case, but as I was coming forward with it, I thought, well, everybody’s just gonna think that about me. Everybody’s going to think all these terrible things, and, you know, how could I have been so stupid to have not seen it? There are so many different things. There was so much fear, so much fear. Then there’s comparison, you know, who am I to be the authority on this? Who am I to come forward about this? Who am I to share my story? What does my story matter? Or thinking that your story isn’t as significant as someone else’s? I hear this one a lot, especially because, let’s just be honest here, my story is juicy, so called, there’s a lot of dramatics attached to it. That’s all well and good, or whatever. However you want to look at that, but part of the problem is that then sometimes the people that I work with will compare themselves to my story and they’re like, ‘well, my story isn’t nearly as significant or dramatic as yours’. Listen, you don’t have to have a dramatic story. 

 

Let me tell you something, when I was a nutrition coach I had peers and colleagues who’ve had these really dramatic stories about massive amounts of weight loss or these pivotal moments and eating disorders that they’d overcome and all this stuff. I was like, ‘wow, I don’t have anything that major’. I had my own struggles, my own stories. I won’t bore you with all those with all those today, but I had my own struggles and stories around food and nutrition and exercise and not being very kind to myself and my body throughout all of those various periods of time. I didn’t have anything over the top dramatic, but I’m going to come back to the same point again, it doesn’t matter. You still have a story that somebody else needs to hear, and guess what, just because you don’t have a dramatic story – so called, whatever that definition is supposedly even is – somebody else doesn’t have a super dramatic story either. Then they’re actually going to relate to you even more because they feel all the feelings that you have gone through and that you’ve experienced, they’re going to go like, ‘wow, is she reading my mind? It feels like she’s in my head right now’. That’s how you establish trust with the people that you want to have as clients, your ideal clients, you want them to think to themselves, ‘holy shit, did she read a page in my journal? How does she know this? It’s like, she knows what I’m thinking’. That’s when you’ve gotten to know your customer and your clients really, really well or your potential clients, because you have gone through experiences similar to them. You’ve walked through things that they are dealing with or that they’re struggling with, and you’re able to help them. Are you not doing them an enormous disservice by NOT coming forward with your story and not helping them, not allowing them to have somebody to relate to, to look up to or solve their problem in some way, presenting them with a potential solution? That’s doing them a huge disservice.

 

When we get stuck in this whole idea of, ‘my story isn’t enough, my story isn’t insert x adjective here, my story isn’t dramatic enough, significant enough, my story isn’t important enough’, whatever you want to plop in there. That’s all indicative of not stepping into your worth. That is really at the root of a lot of the fear and the comparison trap and, and all of these other words, imposter syndrome, all these other phrases and words that we’ve come up with, to define what ultimately comes down to not stepping into your worth. And not thinking that you are enough by yourself that you are not enough in your own skin. That’s, that’s really what that comes down to. I want you to really examine what is currently holding you back from sharing your story in the first place.

 

Here’s something else that was really powerful, and I actually heard this from not only from my friend Marsha, who was on the podcast, the episode was called When We’re Perfect, We’re Not Relatable. Marsha VanWynesberg, she’s fantastic. I referenced that in the show notes. She said this to me, but I also heard it from several other people as well, and that is ‘no one can say anything to you, that’s worse than what you’ve already said about yourself’. That was a really big shift for me, because when I came forward with my story, it was only about eight months after it happened, which I think that some people would argue was quite quick. Especially given you know, the significant length of time that my former partner and I had been together and all of that and yet, I was ready. I could feel in my bones that I was ready. I felt as though I almost didn’t have a choice. Of course I had a choice, but it felt like such a deep need to come forward. It wasn’t even just that I wanted to come forward, it was that I felt deep within me that I needed to come forward, for my own sake as much as anyone else’s. Even though I was terrified, I had a lot of concerns about what people would think of me and the potential judgments. If the haters and the trolls were going to come out to play and call me all kinds of names, or say terrible things about me or whatever, my need to come forward with the story for someone else to feel less alone, overrode all of that. In addition to that, this whole idea of recognizing that we are our own worst enemies. Is there anything that anyone can really say about you that you haven’t at some point likely thought about yourself.

 

I’m not saying that that’s a good thing. It’s not a good thing, but because we are our own worst critics, we are so fucking hard on ourselves that usually by the time you come forward with a story you’ve likely already said all of those things and dealt with it and moved forward from it. If you haven’t moved on from any of those really negative harsh things that you’ve said to yourself, then you might not be ready to come forward with your story in the first place. If you have gone through those really dark moments and you’ve moved through them, you’ve moved past them, then Isn’t it time to come forward and share? No one else can hurt you any more than the hurt that you’ve already at some point likely inflicted upon yourself verbally in your head. You say these things to yourself and hopefully move past them. If you haven’t moved past them, then that’s part of what I’m going to get into about whether it’s time to come forward or not. If you haven’t moved past that, then you are not ready to come forward yet. It doesn’t mean that you can’t ever, it just means that you have some more work to do before you’re going to be ready and fully prepared to move forward.

 

Shame cannot survive being spoken. We’ve all heard Brene Brown say this, and only you can decide if your story happened to you, or if your story happened for you. There’s a huge difference between the two, and very early on in all of this happening in my life with my entire life falling apart, I kept repeating to myself over and over again, this is happening for you, this is happening for you. Even when I didn’t believe it, there were days where I did not believe it. I still would repeat to myself ‘this is happening for you’. There are going to be better things that come to your life because of this really shitty set of circumstances right now, this is happening for you, you are growing from this, you’re going to be a better human. I kept repeating that, like some sort of mantra, I probably was talking to myself. If you’d known me at that time, you probably would have seen me walking down the street and saying that to myself or something, but it’s really a powerful reminder. If you’re in the middle of something right now, I want you to try and remember that there are going to be things that come from the situation that you are either currently in or have dealt with in the past, that never would have happened for you if you hadn’t gone through them in the first place. That doesn’t mean that your circumstances are a good time. I’m not going to bullshit you with ‘everything happens for a reason’ and stuff like that, because when we’re talking about things like tragedies and deaths, that’s a little bit different you can pull meaning from those circumstances, but I will never tell anyone who’s lost a loved one that it happened for a reason. I think that brushes off someone’s very real, deep grief. That’s a situation where you can pull up any story, any set of circumstances that you’re dealing with.

 

 It’s more about pulling the meaning from it and pulling the lessons from it, which is kind of what we’re going to get into a little bit more, and when to know if you’re even ready to share. You know, this is kind of what I’m talking about that you have to be far enough past it that you’re not still in the midst of it. You need to be able to talk about it without crying. You need to not still be dealing with the immediate after effects. This sounds odd, maybe to some of you but your body will tell you. You will know and Episode 120 is all about listening to your intuition and gut instinct, I strongly recommend checking that one out. It’s going to give you a lot of insight about how to start really tuning in with your body, and actually listening to what your body is trying to tell you. Our bodies are far more intelligent than we are, far, far more intelligent. I could feel within me when it was time to come forward. I probably would have come forward a little bit sooner, not a lot, but I probably would have come forward a little bit sooner if it hadn’t been for tying up some loose ends around the selling of our joint home and some financials and all that stuff. The timing was right for me, and you will know. 

 

The other thing is that when it comes down to things like share versus overshare. You always know when you’ve overshared, when you’ve put something out there that you can’t take back, you know it immediately. This is why I also teach my clients about boundaries and setting boundaries when it comes to sharing your story. You know, what are you willing to share and what needs to stay behind closed doors? I had a podcast host interview me a few months ago, and that episode actually isn’t even out yet. I had to ask him to cut a question that he asked me and my response out of the interview afterwards, because it crossed one of my boundaries, but it caught me off guard when he asked, so I did answer it in a little bit of a roundabout kind of way. I wasn’t even okay with that. I could tell immediately, my entire body just kind of froze. I’m very comfortable talking about the story around the affair and all that. I knew immediately that a boundary had been crossed. That wasn’t his fault. That was me not then immediately responding with I’m not prepared to answer that question. Instead, I did go ahead and answer it, but it was coming from a place of fear and I felt so uncomfortable. There’s such a difference between being uncomfortable and stepping into discomfort. Your body will tell you, you will absolutely know, and a lot of this comes down to self trust. A lot of us don’t trust ourselves and don’t trust our bodies to be able to know the difference between the two. I promise you, when you start to actually lean into that trust in yourself, you will know, there will be no mistaking it and you can be very out of your comfort zone about something but still be willing to talk about it and be okay with going down that road. Whereas being flat out uncomfortable, there’s a huge difference. When you’re flat out uncomfortable, you’re stepping into territory that you shouldn’t be stepping into. I mean if we’re talking about something that is public, like publicly sharing something, or even just sharing on a private level, with a loved one, it doesn’t matter. There’s a difference between putting yourself in discomfort and putting yourself in the zone of being fully uncomfortable, and that’s when you’re oversharing.

 

This is where things get tricky sometimes, because when it comes down to how to share I often will tell people to write out their story, write it all down. Then you can almost go back and highlight the details that are most relevant, because you want to take note of the details that are most relevant to get your point across while leaving the rest of it out. For anyone who is familiar with my story, and for anyone who isn’t, you can go back and reference Episode 117, The Nine Year Affair and Lessons and Infidelity. I want to make something very clear. There are a lot of details that I do not share publicly. Either in that episode or now, nor will I ever share publicly because they’re irrelevant. There are details that are juicy, and perhaps from a more egotistical standpoint, they’re hurtful to me. But do they further the story? Or do they underscore the lessons that I learned? Not really, I can get those lessons across and my point across without sharing those details. So one example is that my ex had a secret house 170 meters from our driveway, and I debated if I was even going to come forward with that or not. When I say I debated, like I spent a good two or three months wrestling with this a little bit, this is why you don’t come forward with your story immediately. When you’re in the pain of it, and you’re hurting, it’s way too easy to cross lines that then you can’t take back. You can’t take back what you’ve put out there. That’s why you need to get super clear on what you’re comfortable with first, before you ever come forward with it at all. That one detail about the secret house down the street. I wrestled with that because I thought, ‘is that relevant? Are there lessons specific to that detail that are important for me to share?’ I came to the conclusion that it was relevant, and I came to that conclusion after speaking to a couple of really close, trusted friends and mentors and loved ones as well, who helped me with that decision. Ultimately, what it came down to was the fact that it played a really big role in the trauma around the situation, and some of the pain that I was going through and some of the resilience that I had to develop because of that specific detail. That was why I came forward about it. But there are lots of other details that sure, like hurt me significantly in the time and are not particularly pleasant, but they aren’t relevant for me to share in any type of public capacity. So I withhold all of those details, because they don’t matter. They don’t change the outcome. They don’t change the ending, and they don’t change the lessons that I learned. The only details that I’ve shared are the ones that further the story somehow, in the sense that they give something to the person listening, they give something of value to the person listening, not gossip, not the juicy details are whatever, they give something of value. That’s the difference. 

 

When we’re thinking about how to pull these lessons out, so you’ve written out your whole story, you’ve written out your story, you’ve kind of taken a highlighter and pulled out some of the most important details. You also have to own your role in the story too, because if you just come forward, as ‘X was done to me’ and played the victim card, that doesn’t serve you or anyone else. I’m always very clear that abuse is a little bit different here. Abuse is a bit of a different conversation, but outside of abuse and domestic violence, and that type of stuff. You, you still have to own your role. Even though I could certainly fall into the victim, playing the victim card if he cheated on me, he did all of these terrible things to me. I mean, I guess I could argue that but how I also view it in a much bigger way is that I played a role in that ‘look what I was tolerating’.

 

I actually did a fantastic episode with Toria Leto, who is a well known therapist based out of New York State. She’s incredible, I will reference that episode in the show notes as well. That episode is actually all about examining what we tolerate. That was one of the really big things for me. Why was I choosing to trust someone, that my body was screaming at me not to trust? Why was I going against all of my instincts to trust that person? What was missing within me to want to trust that person that I was being shown again and again, I couldn’t trust? I had to take responsibility for all that, I had to take responsibility for my role in what happened. That doesn’t excuse the other person’s actions, by the way, I need to make that very clear. It doesn’t excuse what somebody else has done or have behaved. This empowers you to recognize that you have control over yourself. You can’t control anybody else, but you can control yourself and your own actions and your own behavior and the way that you show up. When you can step into that role, that’s going to give you a really powerful, elevated place to be able to speak to the lessons that you have learned from the situation. If you go on stage or if you go on a podcast or whatever, and you’re just sharing ‘he did this to me’. The end. No one is going to be motivated from that, including you, by the way. If I shared my story from that place that would just make me feel like garbage all the time. I don’t want to be stuck in that place. Absolutely not. I want to be able to share my story from a place where I somehow ended up with this shitty set of circumstances. This is my role in it, and this is what I have learned from it.

 

Any motivational speaker that you look to in the world? Go look up a bunch of TED Talks, go look up some of the favorite people that you follow or that you really look up to? Do they ever speak about their stories in a way of like, ‘hey, this thing was done to me’. Full stop. No, they don’t. They share their story, and then they share their role in it. They share what they learned from it. They share how it changed them in some way, how it shook them to their core, how it built their resilience, how facing adversity helped them to become a better human. What shifted in their lives because of it. These are the kinds of lessons that you need to be looking at when it comes to sharing your stories. What did you learn that alters you and alters how you show up in your life? How has it shifted your priorities? There’s so many different things that we can look at here. These are the types of things that when you are looking at this story that you’ve written out, you kind of highlighted some of the most important details and stuff like that, then you can start looking at the lessons. This isn’t going to happen overnight. This is going to take some time and effort to really think about and to start to dig into sometimes you can actually be really helpful to also ask the people closest to you and say ‘hey, how have I changed since this situation happened? How have you seen me shift or evolve or grow in some way since then that thing happened?’. Ask other people, because then you can start to really get a sense of how much things have shifted for you in ways that you might not even see within yourself until somebody else points it out to. It can be really, really powerful to ask for the opinions of those closest to you that you trust, and that know you really well, to start to kind of get the ball rolling if you’re feeling stuck on some of those lessons and being a little bit unsure about that.

 

But most of all, do not let your story define you.

 

That’s a really big part of this. When I came forward, my biggest concern above everything else, above the fear of the judgment and what people would think of me and all of that, was the assumptions that people would make everything. Above all, the biggest thing that I feared was being known as nothing more than the girl who was cheated on for nine years. That was my biggest fear. I talked about that at length endlessly with mentors and my therapist, coaches, loved ones. I was so worried about that one aspect because I was so concerned that by coming forward with this particular, super dramatic ridiculous over the top story that somehow ended up landing in the middle of my life. I was so worried that that would define me for the rest of my life, and I was reminded over and over again by multiple people, I now really recognize it to be true, that you get to decide the meaning that your story takes for you. You have choices of what you allow your story to do for you, as well.  I was even given examples at the time of people who are huge, huge names in their respective industries at this point, who came forward with major stories years ago when they were at the very beginning of their career. Most people who follow them now or who know them don’t even know that story about them, because maybe they don’t talk about it nearly as often. It’s not as much of a defining moment for them anymore, but they’ve done so many other things in the world, and they’ve accomplished so many other things, and they have just become a really incredible human that that story is not what defines them.

Most people don’t even remember that about them or notice that about them, or even if they do know it, they don’t define them by it anyway.

 

It’s so often in our own heads that we make this up and we think if I come forward with this, this is how I’m going to be known for the rest of my life. That’s highly doubtful. But we are very egotistical beings, it’s just a human trait. We think that if we come forward with this one thing, that that’s all anyone is ever going to remember about us. It’s not, there is so much more to you than your story, whatever your story is. There’s so much more to you than that. What it comes down to is, are you kind to people? Are you a great friend? Are you trustworthy? Are you responsible? Are you spontaneous? Do you love dogs? I could go on all day. There’s all kinds of other traits about you, that are so much more important and your story is not a trait about you. Your story is something that happened in your life. You’ve now been given this story and you get to decide what to do with it. You get to decide how to put it to work for you. You get to decide how to put it to work for other people who need to hear it, to learn from it, to have an impact on them, and to help them grow in their own lives, so that then they can go have a positive impact on other people. 

 

I want you to remember this, and I want you to recognize and to acknowledge that you have a story, that you have a story to share. That you can change people’s lives. Make your story the best fucking thing to happen to you and to someone else at the same time, that power resides within you. The longer you continue to hold it back, the longer you are continuing to hold yourself back and do a disservice to those who could benefit from it. 

 

Make sure to go grab the freebie that goes with today’s episode. It’s going to walk you through a five minute exercise all about stories and how to not only pull your stories from you, but to really start to learn from them and more specifics on how to pull the lessons from it, it’s a really, really powerful exercise I think you’re going to get a ton out of it is not anything I’ve covered today. It’s totally different. It’s above and beyond what we’ve talked about today. Make sure to go check it out, Speak Your Truth Academy. I’ve never offered anything like this before, and in a world where we’re just craving so much more connection, I have been feeling that I have been craving like, like so much more connection on a really deep level. I’ve missed doing more hands-on coaching, which is why I’m extra excited about this because we are going to be working together so closely. That’s why I’m limiting the number of spots. It’s only 12 female entrepreneurs. Sorry, guys! This one’s only for the ladies, and it’s only 12 female entrepreneurs that are going to be in there. We’re going to develop a really beautiful community together. I’m gonna be with you every step of the way, helping you build your business and helping you share your stories and using them to leverage your business as well. So, so excited about this.

 

If you have anyone in your life that you feel needs to hear this message or if this really resonated with you, please take a screenshot and share it on social media, it means so much to me make sure to tag me I’m over @emilygoughcoach, and we’ll be back on Tuesday.

 

Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. I’m so grateful you took the time and it means the absolute world to me. For any references in the episode and all show notes. Be sure to jump over to roomtogrowpodcast.com, and if this episode touched your heart, it would mean so much. If you would take a quick second to hit subscribe, write a review and share on social media or with someone who really needs to hear today’s message. It makes such a difference to keep this podcast going so I can continue to bring you amazing content and absolutely incredible guests. Be sure to tag me on Instagram over @emilygoughcoach so that I can thank you in real time for listening and connect with you. We’re back every Tuesday and Thursday with brand new episodes and I’m looking forward to growing with you

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