If a single woman said to me that she is killing it in her career, but is struggling to find a relationship and finds it hard to communicate her feelings? Here is what I’d say...

What happens when professional success doesn't translate to personal happiness? Join me as I unravel the intricate dance between career triumphs and relationship struggles faced by successful women. Discover the power of speaking your truth to avoid the pitfalls of resentment in relationships, and learn how surrounding yourself with those in healthy relationships can transform your own. This episode promises insights into bridging the gap between the boardroom and the heart, all while exploring the pivotal role of positive language and beliefs in attracting fulfilling connections.

Ever felt overwhelmed by decisions that should be simple? Unpack the complexities of self-awareness and subconscious influences on our choices. Through personal anecdotes, I'll guide you through how childhood environments and unreliable relationships can shape a preference for independence. Understand the importance of vulnerability and authentic self-expression as I reflect on my journey of overcoming past patterns and stepping into a transformative realization in my thirties.

Feel trapped by societal narratives? Let's challenge them together as we explore reclaiming personal power and healing past wounds. We'll discuss why intimacy can be daunting and how embracing a mindset that allows for both career success and personal fulfillment is crucial. My new mentorship program, Sovereign, is an invitation to harness your energy for profound personal transformation. Ready to move from being triggered to transformed? Step into your vast potential and claim the power that's always been yours.

Chapters

• 0:00 Navigating Relationships as a Strong Woman
• 6:16 Exploring Self-Awareness and Healing Trauma
• 20:01 Reclaiming Power and Healing Past Wounds
• 26:57 Claim Your Power With Sovereign

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello everybody, welcome back to this podcast, and it is a juicy episode. So let's get into today's episode, which is basically if a single woman said to me hey, kirsty, I'm out here killing it in my career, in my job, but I'm struggling to find a relationship and I find it so hard to communicate my feelings, this is what I would say, and these are the first three steps that you absolutely need to take if you want to address this. So, like I said, work, that's not a problem. You've climbed that career ladder. You own your own business. Whatever the hell you do at work, you just do it and it's fire. You know your shit. You know how to make things happen. You are a powerhouse when it gets to work, because you always get the results.

Speaker 1: 0:45

But then, when it comes to dating, it feels like speaking a different language. Like at work, you're completely like direct as fuck, or maybe you're better at like expressing how you truly feel, or taking direction or taking leadership, but then you just feel so tongue-tied when it comes to your feelings. You don't know how to actually express your feelings. I can remember this so vividly for me, where I sat on my sofa and I'd be like looking at my partner and I'd be thinking something I would so desperately want to tell him but, like it's like, my brain and my mouth didn't connect and the words never came out. Now I'm going to be straight with you my six year relationship. There were many reasons why we split up, but the part of my responsibility in that relationship was not speaking my truth and speaking for what I want, because that led to resentment. Resentment is the number one killer of relationships, because if you are not getting out these mini resentments and it's not just me that says that, there are leading researchers that literally say resentment will kill your relationship, okay. So if you're sitting there and you're feeling like really resentful, you're not gonna wanna be intimate with them, you're not gonna really wanna talk to them, you're not really gonna want that sense of intimacy and closeness with them and guess what? It just builds them because you start to look for everything that's wrong with them. And oh my God, if you sit around with your friends bitching about your men, I am calling you out now because that is not okay, right. And if you have single friends who are like, oh my God, I'm going off on a tangent If you have single friends who you sit around with and all you say is all men are trash. Guess what? You are just going to attract that energy, because that's what you believe, that's what you talk about, that's what you say about men, that's the type of men that's going to be invited into your life.

Speaker 1: 2:30

Now, me, the other hand, I realized I was doing this and I was like, well, I'm sitting here with my single girlfriends, we're talking about all of our bad dates. We're talking about, like, how we don't trust men to show up for us. So what did I do? I literally navigated my friendship group very strategically, but, I add, like I did, I started to look for people who had healthy relationships. They were building the life I wanted, which is to have a healthy relationship, to be married, to have children. Right, that's the thing I came up with. That's the thing that I did because I wanted to be in the energy of those people. Okay, so, firstly, right, that is just a bonus. That's a bonus. That's not even getting into it.

Speaker 1: 3:08

I've gone off on a tangent, but that's so important about your environment who is around you and who, what the words are being spoken to you and what words are you speaking? Okay, cause that's what you're drawing in. You know, law of attraction, like attracts, like what you're calling in from the universe, all men are dickheads. Guess what? All men are dickheads that you know? Oh, there are so many beautiful, loving, compassionate men out there who are super romantic. Guess what the tide changes. And I am living truth of that. I have so many stories where I have been in the funk where I'm like, oh god, I'm so sick of like dating men and it not going anywhere, to like no, there is a man out there, there are multiple men, there are multiple soulmates out there who are available to me to give me exactly what I need. And then I have like these experiences with these types of men. Now we may not have like 100% met, but like that's the universe testing if you're ready, right, anyway, I'm gonna caveat that and go back to the thing I was actually going to talk about, which, yeah, whoever needs to hear that you're so welcome because my channel is open and it is flowing, okay, so I'm talking to you.

Speaker 1: 4:14

Okay, the woman who, like your job is on fire, your business on fire, whatever you make things happen, right. And then you know it comes to date and it's speaking a different language. You know how to negotiate work. You can get a pay rise outside of the pay cycle. You know how to say your truth. You know how to make million dollar deals. You know how to do all this big stuff of leading teams and presentations and whatever. But when it comes to asking for what you want in relationships, that's when you freeze, you know, and if this is like holy shit, that's me, then you're in the right place, because we are going to cover a lot today. So, like there's so much value in this, I can't even cope, like how much we're going to talk about today.

Speaker 1: 4:58

So first I want to say to you it isn't just you. I've been there. I've been there. I've worked with multiple women who have been there, and this is happening to so many women right now. Okay, and let's be really real. There's like boss, babe at work, but then quiet little mouse at home. It's not random, it didn't happen by accident. It came from your childhood. Oh my god, we're only six minutes in and now she goes. You know, oh god, but have you actually healed? Minutes in, and there she goes. You know, oh God, but have you actually healed your inner child? Here she goes. But seriously though this is what happens to girlies like us, who had to be the strong one, who had to be the responsible one, who had no choice but to have their shit together because our parents didn't.

Speaker 1: 5:39

Okay, and if this sounds familiar, we're going to get into three things. I'm going to say to you that isn't generic coaching, mentorship crap that I see on the internet. I'm going to tell you the three steps that you need to do in order to start to really step into your power. So the first things first. If another coach or mentor or anything says to me oh, just put yourself out there, maybe you just need to learn how to communicate better, it's okay, just be more confident. Or you know, you should just say the thing, I'm literally gonna scream like I was.

Speaker 1: 6:16

So I signed up to just do this small container with a coach who I quite like. I think she's a really, really lovely person, and this woman in the, in the call, brought up something and she was just like there's this block, I don't know which thing to do, what do I do? And her response was just do the thing. Now I know, and you know, if it was that easy would have got done right, this coach earns a lot more money than me, whatever, and she's out here just giving very generic advice. If the shoe was on the other foot, I would be sat there and I would be going hey, okay, what's going on here? Why is this small decision taking up so much energy? Okay, because if something is a small decision but it's taking up so much energy, there is something that you are procrastinating on, there's something that you're holding back. Telling somebody to just do it is not fully seeing the person. It's not helping them, because if it was easy to just do it, you would just do it.

Speaker 1: 7:25

If you're in your mind overthinking decisions time and time again, if you are going round and round in circles about something, you need something to break that cycle right, and that isn't going to be just doing the thing. You need to ask yourself why, and this is about self-awareness. This is your gateway to understanding yourself better and understanding yourself in a really, really in-depth way. Because all of this stuff our surface behaviors it runs deep. It runs into your subconscious mind, which is your map of the world.

Speaker 1: 7:59

Before your conscious mind has had a chance to make a decision, your subconscious has already made it, based on your previous experiences. Oh, this feels familiar to that time. That happened when I was nine. We're going to repeat the same thing, because that's what kept us safe. That's it. That's how the subconscious mind works. Before your conscious mind has caught up to assess the situation in front of you, your subconscious has pulled the trigger and your decisions are already made for you. Your subconscious has pulled the trigger and your decisions are already made for you.

Speaker 1: 8:31

Okay, this stuff lives in the mind. Okay, but I'm not talking about your conscious thought. I'm talking about that little thing in your brain called the amygdala, which is your danger center, that is ready and waiting to jump into fight or flight when you are confronted with something that doesn't feel safe. Oh, okay, that fuck boy that texted you every three days Well, I'm used to that because I'm used to chaos. But that guy, that real cute guy that shows up and is continuous with his communication and he is genuine and he has consistency oh man, he's just boring. And although he's very, very, very sweet, he has a great job, he has this, he has that my nervous system just doesn't feel safe. That's literally what it's saying. It's not that he's boring, it's that you're addicted to chaos, because that's what you you grew up in. That's what your childhood was.

Speaker 1: 9:19

It doesn't mean that you lived in a chaotic household. It could just be that you had a parent that was just emotionally unavailable at times. They may have been inconsistent in their parenting, going from being really supportive about you having emotions one day to being really fucking angry with you the next and telling you to stop being so silly and pull yourself together. All of this creates this feeling of uncertainty. So that's what our nervous system adapts to and, like our subconscious, is so good at keeping us in that familiar hell over unfamiliar heaven, because our body has one thing to do and that's to keep us alive. And now we live in a society where we have complicated emotions and situations where before oh, there's a tiger there, run like fuck, has now turned into this is a passive-aggressive email from my boss, and I don't know how to interpret it. Is this person I'm texting like? Is he into me? Is he not like? What does that emoji mean? Like it's entirely different now. So we have to give ourself a little bit of grace here as well.

Speaker 1: 10:21

Okay, this stuff also lives in your heart from the emotional pain from when you trusted somebody and they let you down. That time that dad said he was going to come to your play and he didn't. That time that mum said, oh, we're going to go do this after school. And then they. And then you didn't go. You didn't go to the dance class, you didn't even go to mcdonald's, whatever.

Speaker 1: 10:40

It is the friend that says, yeah, I'll always be there for you. But at the time where you were emotionally falling apart, they were nowhere, nowhere to be seen. The partner who you thought was going to be it, the partner who said they would never cheat on you, went out there and they cheated on you. These people let you down, and when they did that, they didn't just let you down, they did so much more. They left this imprint in you of like it's unsafe to rely on other people. This is why it's so easy at work for you. You get to be this boss babe, this independent person, because it's easy, okay, and when you rely on yourself and yourself alone, you don't allow yourself to be disappointed.

Speaker 1: 11:22

I learned that the hard way. I learned it the hard way, guys, and I'm gonna be real with you. I kept people at an arm's length for a really, really long time and you know I'm going to be real with you. I kept people at an arm's length for a really, really long time and you know I'm ashamed to say that it wasn't until I was 30 that I let people truly get close to me and express who I really was. I spent 30 years of my life pretending to be somebody else because I didn't want to be too much, because I didn't want to take up space, because I wanted to do everything, my freaking self, even if it meant burning myself out and burning myself to the ground, to the point that I got sick, because I just didn't want to rely on somebody else for the potential to be disappointed or hurt again.

Speaker 1: 11:58

That is it, and that is sometimes us being our own worst enemy. Okay and I see it in clients as well this hyper independence that comes from running around after everybody else and doing all of the things, but then, at the same time, you start to become so freaking resentful because people are not recognizing you because you're doing all of the things, because you're just freaking tired and burnt out and you just become bitter and that is not a way to live, okay. So when you start to acknowledge this, when you start to acknowledge this, when you start to realize it runs deep, it's in your subconscious, it's in your mind, it's in your heart, it's in your nervous system. This is the level of self-awareness you need to nail and then you're ready to go on to the next step. Okay, so you're gonna say to me kirstie, I've heard all about this nervous system stuff and this subconscious stuff and I thought therapy would be enough to tick that box. I've been in therapy a year. I've tried therapy 18 months, two years. I've even worked with a client that has been in therapy over three years.

Speaker 1: 13:01

Okay, but the pattern still remained the same. The conversations didn't really shift and although there were small micro moments where there was progression and breakthroughs and you felt like there was progress, the underlying pattern still remains. This is because trauma doesn't live in our mind and like in our conscious thought. Right, it lives in our subconscious, it lives in our bodies and it lives in our energy. Okay, therapy is fantastic for opening the door to the self-awareness. Therapy is amazing for doing that first step I just talked about, which is really about understanding who you are and where things are coming up for you. It's about that self-awareness, which is absolutely incredible and if you have done this.

Speaker 1: 13:43

I'm so proud of you, but if you want to make that lasting change, you have to go to the root cause and, of course, when I say your root cause, of course I mean your childhood. Now you could be sat there thinking one or two things. One, but, kirsty, I had a great childhood. Or two, yeah, I had a shit show of childhood. Okay, but we're going to talk about if you had a great childhood. It's not about that you didn't have a great childhood. It's not that you had rubbish parents, it's not that you had bad experiences, right. It's just that as children, we can have micro experiences that leave an imprint on us, that trigger our stress response, and if we have no one to co-regulate with us in that moment. So when we're talking about co-regulation, we are talking about a parent or somebody like who can hold us and help us to regulate our nervous system after a fright, after going into that stress response, if nobody is there to do that, it leaves an imprint in our bodies and in our energy.

Speaker 1: 14:43

Now you might be somebody who remembers every single thing about your childhood and if you are, I'm pretty jealous because I don't have that luxury which is a luxury, by the way, because what your brain does is it's so clever, so you might be like, oh my god, I remember big chances of my childhood, but others just feel really blank. Our brain is amazing. Our subconscious is incredible. Our subconscious is our hard drive of. Even if we delete it from our conscious mind, it still lives on our hard drive, which is our subconscious. It is so much better than a hard drive because the memory is infinite as well. So all those memories still exist within your brain. But what your brain does is that it protects you. It literally locks itself down and locks memories down and hides it from you. So you might not remember the time that you read out loud at school and you made a mistake and people laughed. You may not remember that. You may not remember it, but your body does, your energy does so. This is why it's important to realize that trauma is not in just one place. It's in multiple places within our body, and you might be like well, kristy, I was that child that had a shit show of a childhood. Well then, that explains why we are now growing up and being a woman who finds it hard to be a fully expressed version of herself.

Speaker 1: 16:01

Okay, this part doesn't need that much explanation. It kind of you know it is what it does on the tinge. You know what I mean. Like if you didn't have a great childhood, mum and dad were inconsistent. Dad left and abandoned you all the fucking time going to work because he worked like long hours to provide for the family. You're not thinking, oh, I love dad for providing for the family when you're five years old. No, you're thinking, oh my god, why is he abandoning me? Why doesn't he want to spend time with me? That's what you're thinking and you know you might have had childhoods where dad shouted all the time and that made you feel like, okay, I have to be really small and perfect so that he doesn't shout anytime like all the time. This is what my mum did to me. She would shout all the time. So I felt like if I was perfect and I kept myself small and I kept my emotions really small, I would reduce the stress in her life and I would just never go shower down.

Speaker 1: 16:54

It could be that mum is really highly critical of how you looked as a child, so you want to feel invisible because you don't want to get picked on. This might have been followed up later by feeling that vulnerability and being vulnerable at school To people bullying you, and that reaffirms that. And I'm going to talk more to this in a minute Because this is really important About the layered experience, but I'm going to try and stay on track for now. And you have to understand these aren't just memories, these aren't just experiences. These are your current operating systems, your body number. One thing is to keep you alive. Guess what? It's going to try and keep you alive the best way it possibly can, based on the experiences that you've had.

Speaker 1: 17:39

Okay, so that little girl who learned to be small and perfect because her dad kept shouting you edit your text 17 times before you hit send that girl who made herself feel invisible so she wasn't criticized. You literally freeze when a good man sees you or you make eye contact with a man at the gym who's relatively good looking. You may have felt like you had to walk on eggshells because your parents were inconsistent with their support and love for you. One minute, they're supportive of you being upset because Sandy Jane didn't want to speak to you for a minute. Then the next day they're angry with you. Or just stop being so silly and get over it. Okay, it isn't baggage, it isn't. You know, it's not about being dramatic. It's about your nervous system doing exactly what it did to keep you safe.

Speaker 1: 18:25

And now this is your biggest cock block, because it served you up to this point, this operating system, grand. Thank you so very much. But now we just don't need this. Okay, we don't need to live like this anymore. We are adults, we are women, we are fully in our power. We do not need to result to this. So this is where now I want to talk more about step three, which is another component which is really, really important to consider, but also talking about those layering experiences which I just mentioned. So I want to talk about those layering experiences before we get into step number three. So say, for example, you grew up and you found it really hard to speak to your parents about your emotions.

Speaker 1: 19:09

Next up, this threads into oh, I've got my period for the first time. I don't know what's happening. I never had that conversation with mum or dad about what's this, but I just know that I feel dirty and it feels like I can't tell anyone. Then you go into a relationship where you feel like you have to dumb your emotions down because you don't want to be too much, you don't want to be too needy, you don't want to be too this or too that, because society tells you, like, that's not what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to be there to save our man. So every time that you're sat there on the sofa and you stare across to him, the resentment builds because you can't tell him that the fact that he never asked you how you were today really bothered you, the fact that he made himself a cup of tea and didn't ask. These are really really small, micro things.

Speaker 1: 20:01

Then you get into this stage where you end up trying to avoid all sexual intimacy and avoiding sex altogether, because your partner does things that makes you feel uncomfortable, but you don't know how to use your voice and say no in the moment, so it's easier for you to avoid it. Then you throw yourself into work, distance yourself further from your relationships. You haven't got anybody you can talk to about this and things just spiral from there. And this is just one tiny, teeny, teeny, tiny example of how one thing threads through every stage of our life and compounds the story that we tell ourselves. It's not safe for me to share my emotions. That's the key story there. But then what happens is it starts to breed different experiences for us. Okay, right, well, I feel ashamed because I can't share my emotions. I feel ashamed about things that have happened to me, but I can't use my voice and open it and tell people about what's happened because I don't have that emotional connection to anyone. And I'll even lie to my therapist and lying to your therapist is actually so freaking common because we are always in that stage of like we don't want people to judge us. So intimacy is the step three.

Speaker 1: 21:17

Okay, I want you to take a moment and I want you to take a nice deep breath in and breathe out. I'm going to ask you when you think about your intimate history, your intimate relationships, how do you feel? You might have had a bodily response. You might have had something flashing to your mind. You might be wanting to say to me Kirsty, it was a shit show car crash, I don't even know, I don't want to think about it, I've not had a great time. Or you might say some were really good and some were really bad. And if this was your response, your body is still carrying those stories. Your body and your mind knows those stories and they're carrying them.

Speaker 1: 22:05

You might say I'm over it, don't care about that person. But you might, you know, you might be like it. Don't care about that person. But you might, you know, you might be like I don't care about that dickhead. Guess what? That's the anger attached to it. That's anger. Anger is only the, the surface level emotion. How are we going deeper? If you're angry, why was he a dickhead? Did he disappoint you when you needed him? Was he not there? Like, did he say things to you that reminded you of your father? Did he say things to you that made you feel bad about yourself? But did you ever say to him no, I don't like it when you say that to me. Was it really hard for you to use your voice and set your expectations in the relationship? Did you argue all the time because it was impossible to have a civilized conversation and communicate your feelings properly as adults? Now, like I said, this isn't just your mind holding things, it's your body, it's your energy. She keeps the score.

Speaker 1: 23:07

And now I'm going to get really frank and say if there have been situations where choice was taken from you, where things spiraled out of your control, where you said yes but you really meant no, where your mind consented and said yes, because I just want to keep the peace, and this is what girlfriends do, but you didn't really want to. To keep the peace and this is what girlfriends do, but you didn't really want to. This was never, ever your fault. Okay, it was never your fault. This isn't about blame, it's about freedom, because there's that really like popular saying of when a snake bites you, you don't chase after the snake, asking why. You just work to get the poison out, and the more that you drink anger and you expect the other person to die. The only person that's suffering is you.

Speaker 1: 23:54

So I don't care necessarily about what's happened before. I care about giving you peace. I don't care what's happened. I don't care if it was shameful, if it was hard, if it was difficult, if it was something that you just couldn't believe happened to you, if it was something that you just couldn't believe happened to you. If it's something that you're angry about, whatever it is, trust me, after 12 years of working in the criminal justice system and working in a prison and having extensive sexual abuse training, I know how to deal with these situations. I don't care what's happened, I just care about your peace right, because if you're carrying this around, you absolutely deserve to move forward and you have the power to do that. This is where you get to claim your power back. Okay, in these situations which took your power, you have the opportunity to call it right back and no more staying small, no more playing safe, no more letting the past run the fucking show, because you're not her anymore. You get to be the version of you that you absolutely deserve to be.

Speaker 1: 24:58

And we are told all the time as women if you have a family, you can't have a career. If you're a career, you can't have family. If you have this, you can't have love. Well, guess what? That's all fucking bullshit, and we don't have to play by those games anymore. What we need to do is we just need to say fuck it and I'm gonna have everything, and I want you to claim that now. I want you to just sit there, think about it and just think I am claiming all of my power right now and say it a few times. Say it out loud, like it gets to be so exciting and so invigorating, like I claim my fucking power back like this is it? Like this is incredible and I'm gonna be honest. I'm really sorry I didn't present you with an unrealistic oh, we can sort your shit in 24 hours, or this is a quick hack, or whatever. The latest thread or fucking trend is on social media. Oh well, I'm going to teach you how to do this and you'll feel better in an hour. No, like, no like.

Speaker 1: 25:58

Everyone is screaming at you these quick fixes and it's a bit like a diet. You can do a quick fix, but then guess what? You? You go on your diet. I don't know you slim fast. That's the first thing that jumped to mind. You go on your diet, I don't know you. Slim fast that's the first thing that jumped to mind. You go on your slim fast diet for two weeks. You lose the weight, but then you bounce back worse, because your body is just being wrecked by.

Speaker 1: 26:16

Whatever you're doing, okay, it's not addressing the root cause. It's doing something that is surface level and temporary. So that's not what I do and, like you know, I've been there. You've probably been there where you have spent bags of money on people and there's little to no progress, and I get it. Why should you invest even more? I'm in that situation right now. Whenever I'm investing with somebody, I'm like why should I invest in you? Because there are so many people out there who are saying they are doing things, but they're not. And I'm going to be honest with you. I've walked the walk. And I'm going to be honest with you. I've walked the walk. I've walked with 250 women and I only want to work with women who know that they can make shit happen. And if you are that woman, I will walk with you too.

Speaker 1: 26:57

Okay, this isn't sticking a band-aid over a fucking gaping wound. At the end of the day, it's deep, it's dark and it's sacred, transformational work that will literally change your fucking life. Why? You've just heard me talk for the last half hour about all of the reasons why, and this isn't even the tip of my knowledge or my experience. Okay, and don't forget, I channel all my messages from my clients. Okay, so I'm not giving you a cookie cutter experience. Oh, we're gonna do this and that or whatever. No, I open my channel. I channel down the exact messages that you need to hear right now so that you can move forward with your life, and I will know stuff before you even tell me, right, so there's no point lying to me, because I'll know anyway, and this is what brings me into my new one-to-one mentorship called Sovereign.

Speaker 1: 27:50

We've talked about power an awful lot today on this podcast, and this isn't just a heal your relationship program, it's not. It's deep, sacred reclamation work. It's moving from triggered to transformed. It's bringing that boardroom power into the bedroom. Because, let's be real, if just communicate better or just do the thing worked, you would have already done it.

Speaker 1: 28:20

If you are interested, there are limited spaces because inside this container the energy is wild.

Speaker 1: 28:26

It's big, it's like being immersed into the ocean.

Speaker 1: 28:30

I don't know if you've ever gone scuba diving, but as you dive down and you look out and there is just no end to the vastness that can be your energy, to the way that you can show up in rooms and your energy speaks for you.

Speaker 1: 28:44

This is, this is you being in your power. So if you are that woman that makes things happen, sovereign is here for you. All you have to do is get in contact with me via email, via Instagram, whatever. Get in contact with me and I want you to say I claim it. So I know it's you from this podcast listening. I know that you got to the end of this podcast and you were fired up and you were ready, and you're ready to claim that power. I really hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope you come back to revisit it time and time again, because every time you listen to it you'll hear something new that will resonate with you at a different time. I've thoroughly enjoyed this experience of talking about this and, yeah, I am sending you so much love on your journey and for you to step into your power.