#73 Let Yourself Feel Good

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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.

If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Well, hi there. Welcome back to Your Favorite You, I cannot believe we are on episode 73 already. That seems crazy to me. And also of course we are on episode 73 lately. I have had so many of you amazing women reaching out to me.

Saying that you've been listening to the podcast and that what I have been saying really resonates with you or that you've heard through my interviews with my clients, how much I have helped them, and they seem similar to you in so many ways you see yourself in them and now you're ready to start working with me.

That makes me so happy and determined to keep going. If you have ideas for topics that you would like to have my thoughts on or about, I would love to hear from you. Reach out if there's something you want to know more or hear more about. And I will do everything in my power to make that happen for you.

So, on to today's topic, many people understand why other people and themselves try to avoid feeling what I am going to begrudgingly call the quote unquote bad feelings. I say begrudgingly because I believe that all the feelings, we feel are a necessary part of life. And that all feelings deserve a place on our feelings smorgasbord and calling some feelings good and other feelings bad just diminishes the entire breadth and spectrum of all the possible feelings out there available to you in the world.

So, what I really think is that the only bad feelings are the ones that you are unable or that you are unwilling to feel. So, having said all of that as a huge caveat. I will grudgingly be using the terms, good feelings and bad feelings throughout this podcast, even though I just acknowledge and vehemently argued that this way of thinking is complete and utter bullshit.

So, back to my thoughts about feelings, it makes sense to me that we try to avoid feeling the bad feelings. Feeling frustrated, sad, feeling grief, anger, shame, feeling embarrassment, humiliation. We often go out of our way to avoid feeling these things. And everyone understands that. They get it. What is less understood by my clients, my podcast listeners, the world at large is how many humans out there in the world try to avoid feeling the good feelings.

So, things like satisfaction, happy, elation, pride, feeling unabashed, feeling honored. We all know these people, or maybe we are these people who can't just let go and find the joy in the everyday. Who were always worried that the other shoe was going to drop who purposefully keep themselves from allowing happiness in their lives.

Those who deflect compliments and praise from others. And those who use self-deprecation and humor to hurt themselves before they allow anyone else to hurt them. I have found that these people fall into one or several of the following categories. For the sake of the podcast, I'm going to use happiness as the feeling, but you can really substitute any of the other quote unquote, good emotions you can think of for the word happy.

So, if satisfied or proud fits better in your case. Please feel free to substitute whichever feeling or emotion resonates with you and see what comes up for you. So, the first category is those people who think they don't deserve to be happy because they have a less than stellar or even a terrible self-image.

The next category is the people who feel that if they lean into their positive feelings that they will become complacent and that this happiness that they feel now might be all there is. The third category are the people who think that there's only so much happiness to go around in life and they're afraid that they're going to use it all up and the possibility looms that if they are too happy now.

It will never come back to them again because they will have run out of happiness. The fourth category, how about those people who have so much need for control that they actually choose unhappiness ahead of time, worried that if they let themselves go and be free and be happy that they will become out of control.

So, they sabotage their own good feelings ahead of time, thinking nearly always subconsciously, if I can control my feelings. Even if they are bad, it feels better than feeling uncertain and out of control. And then the final category, the fifth category that I have come up with, are the people who are worried about quote unquote the other shoe dropping.

So, something good is happening right now, therefore something terrible must be just around the corner. So, they just can't enjoy the moment they are in right now. Many of us are in our forties and fifties before we realize that if we don't intentionally choose to allow ourselves to be happy, we never will be if we don't intentionally allow ourselves to feel the good feelings in life, we never will the old adage, get busy living or get busy dying comes to mind here.

I love to quote Andy Dufresne from one of my favorite movies of all time, the Shawshank Redemption. Andy was certainly right. It really is a simple choice. Living involves feeling all of your feelings, good, bad, ugly, dying involves avoiding all of your feelings. I don't want my clients or those of you out there listening to the podcast dying while you're still very much alive.

So, let's go through each of these categories and see how coaching might help each type of person. For those that have a less than stellar self-image and don't believe that they deserve happiness, I have a process where we figure out why you don't have a good self-image. You were not born this way, contrary to what Lady Gaga says.

I agree with her in the message of the song, but for this instance, you were actually not born this way, something happened to make you question your self-image and your self-worth. So, in coaching, we figure out what this was. It may be just one thing, or it may be many, it may be happened in the past, or it could still be going on.

We figure out what it is, and we get really curious. We make sense out of why you feel this way about yourself. And then we question the hell out of it. After we question it and make sense of you, I then help you to form a new self-image based in actual reality of who you are right now, not on who you were told you were by other people.

This is part of what I'm talking about when I say that I help women become their favorite versions of themselves. I love doing this work with my clients and seeing them thrive because of the intentional things they start to see about themselves and actually believe about themselves. For those who are not letting themselves feel the good feelings because they are worried that they might be complacent, these people typically have been socialized to think that anything worth having must be hard to get.

We're hard to keep, we figure out where you learned that message by getting curious. Again, we make sense of why you've been living life thinking this way, and then we question the hell out of it. You might decide you want to keep part of this way of living, or you might decide to let it go altogether.

And you can decide that you can feel the good feelings without ever stopping and becoming complacent. You see that allowing your positive emotions to have a place in your life does not. In fact. Lead you to a laissez faire attitude about everything in life. You still get to set goals and accomplish your dreams.

And you get to enjoy all of the good shit that comes your way because of it. For those of you who think about good emotions as pie, and you think that you have the possibility of using it all up, or you think that if you're happy, somehow, you'll be taking the ability to be happy away from other people.

We figure out where you got this message by getting curious, I bet you might be sensing a theme here. We make sense of why you might be thinking this way, and then we question the hell out of it. You get to go out and practice feeling the good feelings, noticing that you have an infinite ability to feel them.

And in fact, they actually grow and feel more comfortable to you over time instead of feeling like they are diminishing. And you notice the more you're willing to feel your happy feelings. The more it gives other people that you care about in your life permission to do the same. You, feeling happy does not detract from others feeling happy.

It adds to it and eventually over time it compounds for those of you who feel the need to have control over every aspect of your life. So, you intentionally sabotage yourself from feeling happy before you ever feel it. We figure out where this behavior was modeled for you, not with the intent to blame the other person who modeled it, but to understand them and to recognize that they likely did not know that they had a choice.

And now that you do know that you have the choice, we get curious about what it would look like to release the grip of control, what it would look like to go with the flow of life instead of working against it, constantly swimming upstream all the time, getting mad at other people who don't seem to be as anxious as you are, what would it look like to release the reins and just be, be who you were always meant to be a human being instead of a human doing.

You start to see little glimmers of the good feelings, tiny fleeting moments that you allow, and nothing bad happens. In fact, over time, quite the opposite. You start to recognize that you never really had control anyway. All you had was pretty significant anxiety. I love that quote by Liz Gilbert. She says, quote, you are afraid to surrender because you don't want to lose control, but you never had control.

All you had was anxiety, unquote. So, you start to believe that you get curious, surrender some of the control you were pretending to have, and you see what happens. In my experience, both personal, my control enthusiasm, and now after working with so many clients who struggle with this. Again, the positive feelings just grow exponentially, and your life becomes unrecognizable in so many incredible ways.

And honestly, the negative feelings don't feel as bad. It's kind of a mindfuck for those of you just waiting for the other shoe to drop. According to the Googles, the phrase of waiting for the other shoe to drop comes from the late 19th and early 20th century, Google says in the tenements of New York City.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, apartments were built with bedrooms on top of one another. It was common to hear your upstairs neighbor take off a shoe, drop it, then repeat the action. It became shorthand for waiting for something you knew was coming. This is a completely normal phenomenon for those of us who have sustained any form of trauma in our lives.

And if you've been listening to this podcast for any length of time, you know that I subscribe to the idea that each and every human on the planet has sustained some form of trauma to varying degrees throughout our lifetimes. It is normal for our brain to fill in any gaps of what we don't know will happen in the future with all of the negative possibilities.

And the more trauma we have sustained in our lives. The more our nervous system wants to be constantly vigilant in order to keep ourselves safe. So this makes sense. Again, we get curious, make sense out of why you might be living your life waiting for the other shoe to drop. We question the hell out of that.

We find all the times in your life where the other shoe actually did not drop. And we start to build our belief that allowing ourselves to feel the positive feelings when life calls for it. And allowing ourselves to feel the negative emotions when life calls for it actually allows us to live a much bigger and more fulfilled life than we ever dreamed possible for us.

I hope that this helps you figure out why you or someone you love might not be able to let themselves feel good. I hope it helps you see the benefit of feeling all the feels available to you in the universe. I hope it encourages you to get busy living, go out there in the world and actually let yourself feel good.

If you think I missed any categories, or if you think I'm way off the mark, I would love to hear from you. If you absolutely love this podcast, I would love to hear from you too. I'm not opposed to feeling good in my life every day. If you're a new listener and you have not gone into iTunes to rate and review the podcast, I would be so honored if you took a moment to do that.

Also, if this really resonated with you and you want other people to hear it, Please, share it with your friends. It means the world to me when you do that. If you want my help with feeling good, I'm currently offering one on one coaching for those of you who desire one on one coaching. Don't delay on feeling good.

Schedule your consult today. And also, although the group for this late winter, early spring is closed, I will be starting another group probably in late spring. So there's availability for you to receive group coaching in a container with me as well. All right, folks, I will see you next week.

Hey, everybody, don't go quite yet. I want to let you know all the ways that you can work with me.

If you've been listening to this podcast and maybe especially you have listened to episodes where I interview my clients, and you are thinking like the older woman in the diner in the classic Meg Ryan, Billy Crystal film, When Harry Met Sally... In the film, Sally is proving a point to Harry by faking an orgasm while in public at a diner. Sally finishes, so to speak, and then takes a bite of her food. The older woman in the next booth says, "I'll have what she's having." If you've been thinking, "I'll have what she's having," this is your sign from the universe to schedule a consult with me.

I have a few spots available for one-on-one coaching with me. This is a space where I am laser focused on you and your brain for six months at a time. I will also be doing consults with women who want to join my next group coaching cohort, which will likely start in the spring of 2024. The way to contact me is to go to my website, Melissaparsonscoaching.com, go to the Work with Me page and click book now to schedule your consult. I will look forward to hearing from you. Let's make 2024 your year ever as you become your favorite you.