#34 The Power of Tiny Shifts

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Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intentions. My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend.

Hi there, welcome back to episode number 34. I am calling this one the power of tiny shifts. I want all of you listening to me each week to know that the changes you want to make in your life are available to you with coaching. Honestly, they're available to you without coaching too, but I find that having a coach helps speed up the process and prevents you from veering too far off track from what you decide you want in life and in general. It is my belief that everything about life is better with a coach, feeling that you always have someone who wants what you want for your life, someone who's rooting for you to become your favorite you. I can't overstate the power of that.

Sometimes, the shifts you will achieve when working with a coach look like a huge aha moment in a coaching session, where one change in thought changes everything. This is fun to witness as your coach. It usually involves you looking at me incredulously and sometimes calling me names. You know who you are. It's also amazing to witness this as the client. Years ago, the first time I looked straight at Maggie via Zoom and said "bitch." At first, she was taken aback because prior to knowing me, she did not swear. This has changed for the better, but at the time she recovered very quickly and said, "Ah, the coaching is working." And then we laughed and laughed.

More often than these huge aha moments, though, it is the tiny shifts.

The tiny shifts in how you think about yourself, how you think about your life, how you view the world, and how you feel about your loved ones, as well as the small different actions you start taking or stop taking, add up to noticeable changes over time. Honestly, one of my concerns when I started coaching was that if I changed too much, I might not be safe or okay. I wondered if the people I loved would come with me. You can rest assured that nothing that changes about you will be out of your control. You are the person ultimately in control of your own destiny. You will not end up somewhere and think, "wait, how did I end up here?" At least if you work with me, that is never my intention. I want you to know exactly how you ended up where you ended up.

It's kind of like what my client, Avneet, said this week to me on our last coaching call. I love you, Avneet, if you're listening. We worked together for six months with me being her coach and her being my beloved client. And she said last week, "I was washing my face on Sunday, and I just had this realization that I was happy." That is the power of the tiny shifts.

Personally, for me, I think the tiniest shift that started to change everything was being introduced to the pause. I used to have a very short reaction time to the good things in my life and the things that weren't so good. It turns out that whenever something happens in your life, that is not a true emergency. If you pause, take a beat, you take one or two or 10 deep breaths, then decide how you want to think or feel about what just happened. Then take action from that decision instead of taking reactive action. Your life changes for the better.

Another tiny shift that saves me and my clients from suffering more than we need to is trying to find the ways that everything in our lives - the good things and the bad things - have always been happening for us instead of to us. To demonstrate this from an example that just happened in my personal life, that is silly but illustrates it well, is that I was just invited by my friend Megan. This morning, she texted me asking me if I wanted to go to the Taylor Swift concert with her this summer. If you're a Swiftie, you know how hard these tickets are to get. It turns out that the date she had the ticket for is also the date of Owen's college orientation, which, of course, I will be attending with him. I haven't figured out how this conflict is going to work out for me, but, believe me, I will be looking for ways that this worked out perfectly as the date draws nearer, instead of telling myself that I could have or should have been at the Taylor Swift concert. I'm going to figure out why I'm supposed to be with Owen at orientation and not with Megan and her mom at the concert, to give another example that many of you might relate to.

One other thing that happened for me and my family was having to quarantine at home as a family during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, at the time, we had a hard time figuring out how this was happening for us. It seemed to be happening to us and against us, but with time and hindsight being 2020, I was able to figure out that I got to spend so much time with my sweet boys that I otherwise would not have gotten. We were one of the fortunate families who got to thrive together during this time.

Another example of a tiny shift is now, every time my clients or I say or think the words I should, I have to, I must, I need to, we consider if those statements are true, who says that you have to, that you should, that you must, that you need to. If it's you, and these are things that you truly want to do, that's fine. You just need to change these statements to I can, I want to, I'm willing to, I choose to, I get to. This tiny shift puts all the power back into your hands. You become the champion of your story instead of the victim to what other people want for you. To give an example of this, instead of thinking I have to pick up an extra shift at work if I want to be able to go on that trip, it becomes I get to pick up as many extra shifts as I want to make it possible to go on that trip. Or thinking I should spend more time with my parents can become I choose to spend this time with my parents. Perhaps thinking I must clean up the kitchen before I go to bed can become I'm willing to be the one to clean up the kitchen before I go to bed so that when I wake up it's clean, unless you live with ravenous, raccoon-like teenagers. But that might be my own personal story.

Now, just because these shifts are tiny does not mean that they are easy. You have learned to be a person, but you haven't learned to take it easy. You have likely been living for quite some time without pausing and breathing before you respond to something. You've probably been living under the thought that life is happening to you and not for you. For many years, you have very likely been telling yourself that you should, must, need to, or have to do things that you really want to do for decades, so nothing has gone wrong. When you decide to try just one of these tiny shifts and you find yourself going back into old patterns, remember that your brain always wants you to take the path of least resistance, and your well-practiced states of being, thoughts, and beliefs are going to be easier for your brain to handle.

It takes time, intention, and practice to start making these tiny shifts that add up to a huge difference in your life. This is one of the reasons why, as your coach, we work together for six months at a time. You may decide you want to try one of these tiny shifts. You get to practice it, do it well, and get new results, and we get to celebrate the heck out of that. Or, you might forget that you wanted to try a new way and do things your old way. In that case, we get to acknowledge that you temporarily went in a direction that you just don't want to go anymore. You get to decide how you want to treat yourself. As your coach, I get to encourage you to be loving and compassionate toward yourself as you're learning this new skill.

At first, you will only recognize that you did things differently than you wanted to after the fact. Then you start to recognize it as you're doing it. Eventually, with enough practice, love, compassion, and reminders, you start seeing that you have a choice before you act. And then, after enough time, it becomes second nature, and you will really feel awkward when you do something the old way that you used to do it. It takes time and attention, my friends, that's all.

My invitation to you is to pick one tiny shift in how you think and feel this week. You can choose one of the examples I gave, or you can pick something else if that feels more appealing to you. Once you do this, the universe will get to work and provide you with numerous opportunities to practice. I promise nothing has gone wrong when you're having to practice the new idea repeatedly. It's just the universe's way of asking if you're sure you want to make this change. And then you keep saying yes, I'm sure. And then the universe will probably offer you a bigger opportunity to practice, essentially asking if you're sure you want to make this change. Then you can say yes, I am sure, or you can say no, actually I want to go back to my old way, and that option is available to you too.

If you try this, please let me know. Tag me in your post on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. I would love to hear about you practicing this out in the wild. And, of course, if you want help with this, please reach out to me. I'd love to talk to you about how I can help and how you can join my next group, starting in August. I encourage you to book your consult now to get on the waiting list for the August 2023 group. Thanks so much for listening. I will see you all back here next week.

Thank you for listening to the podcast and loving on me all the time. Although the doors are closed for the inaugural group of women wanting to become their favorite versions of themselves. No worries. You still have the opportunity to work with me in a group setting. This group is for you since you are listening to my podcast, you will get amazing coaching plus the beauty of a community of other women who are interested in thriving as much as they can, and you also will want you to succeed at becoming your favorite you.

There is benefit that is undeniable from watching another woman being coached on an issue you've had in the past, or one that you're currently having. Our brains just see so much more possibility when we are not the ones in the hot seat. You'll also have the ability to come every week and share your vulnerability and watch others share their vulnerability.

We know that shame only grows in silence. There is power in being held by other incredible humans who are often caught in some of the same traps that you are with your thinking.

Please go right now to www.MelissaParsonsCoaching.com/group and schedule a consult with me so that I can hear how I can help you, and we can decide together if you are a great fit to join the group.

You'll need to join the waitlist. We start in August. Please join us. You will not regret it.