What if I am Broken?

Welcome back! I hope you had a great weekend. Before we dive into today's content, I want to give a little refresher: We will be moving through this course in spirals. 

When you think of change, envision the spirals in an onion. Let's take the idea of setting a boundary. In the first spiral, we notice that we need to set a boundary we start looking at HOW to set a boundary. In spiral two, we start experimenting with boundary setting and learn the messiness of boundaries, dealing with pushback, and disappointing people. And then, we enter spiral 3 we learn how to regroup and hold the boundary. In each spiral, we are visiting the same idea, learning how to set boundaries but on a deeper and deeper level. 

I have designed this course in the same way.

We will visit four topics in 3 different spirals. We will visit the topics of Beliefs, Feelings, Body, and Self-loyalty 3 different times--going deeper and deeper each time. 

Today we start our first spiral and our first theme, beliefs. This will be the first of three times we will be looking at beliefs. Each time we will dive deeper and deeper into the power of beliefs and their role in HFA. Like we did with Foundations, we will spend two weeks on Spiral 1 of Beliefs. But from now on, we will add one week of implementation. During Implementation week, You will receive 2-3 new short episodes on the Self Loyalty School Podcast, which offer suggestions on how to get messy with the topic, journal prompts, worksheets, or things to pay attention to. Implementation Week is designed to allow you time to let the topics sink in, get messy with the ideas in real life, and also catch up on past episodes if life got in the way.

Over the past two weeks, we laid the foundation for this work. There are 4 concepts I want to remind you of: 

First: Anxiety works in 3 layers at the root is shame, then anxiety, then the unhealthy coping skills we have learned to deal with the anxiety. 

Second: the key to quieting anxiety is Self-Loyalty. When I trust my values and principles and make decisions from a place of self-loyalty, the self-doubt, rumination, and hustling aren't as intense. 

Third: The characters that play a role in your anxiety -- whether it's making it louder or quieting it down. The Monger, the inner critic; The BFF, the voice of self-indulgence; and Biggest Fan, the voice of self-loyalty

And last but not least: A.S.K. The process to hear from The Biggest Fan, 

A. Acknowledge what you are feeling.

S. Slow down and get into your body.

K. Kindly pull back to see the big picture. 

I value my thoughts. I love analyzing, debating, and clarifying. If there is a way to beat something to death, I am all about it. This love of my intellect is one of my favorite traits, and it comes at a cost. By valuing my thoughts and beliefs so much, I rarely take the time to get them out of my head. My beliefs can keep me trapped. Over the next two weeks, I will be unpacking some of these common beliefs for people with HFA, which keep them trapped in anxiety. But today, I want to look at the biggest belief. 

The biggest belief is I am broken.

There are some variations of that belief: 

I am BROKEN, so I need to push harder

I am broken because I have anxiety

I am broken because I am imperfect

I am BROKEN, and THEY know more than me. 

Shame is at the root of our HFA. 

For way too many years, I believed that I was broken; everyone around me had it figured out but me. And so, I hustled and hustled—believing that I could out-perform my anxiety. There was so much shame and self-doubt. It was easy to keep it a secret; if I didn't share it with anyone, I could keep it from myself too, so I hustled and pushed myself to exhaustion.

Even how I ran my business was all about hustling and overachieving.

Last summer, I spent many days copying and pasting blogs from my old website to my new website. In my early blogs, I say all the right things: acknowledge your feelings, get into your body, incremental change, etc. I was writing about what I had read and studied. What other experts who said they had healed their anxiety were doing. When I practiced acknowledging my feelings, it did help at the moment, but it never healed me permanently like people said it would. The shame I felt around my anxiety was compounded by the idea that I must be doing it wrong because I still had anxiety.

The messages of the outside world fed this even more—marketing experts and fellow coaches would say people want to see a solution, they don't want to hear about the struggle, and they want to know it is fixable. So I kept preaching that it was possible to be fixed; meanwhile, this inauthenticity drove my anxiety even more. Now I WAS a fraud because I was teaching something I wasn't living and didn't honestly believe. 

And then, one day, my Monger was hammering me—you are broken—who do you think you are—you will never heal yourself. And I surprised myself by answering back, what if I am broken? What if I will never heal? And it wasn't in a ridiculing way but in a so-what? Who cares? Kind of way. What if it is true, and my pretending it is not is just making it worse? 

It is one of my favorite ways to challenge this message of you are broken? Or you are wrong, or you are going to fail. So what if I am? It reminds me—you don't need to hide that. You ARE broken as a human being. You have positive AND negative traits. What if, rather than hustling to hide our brokenness, we brought it out into the light? This is an act of self-loyalty. The hidden part of High Functioning Anxiety, the secret shame, the belief that you are broken, is one of its most challenging factors. This belief drives everything else. And I know right now? If I were you listening, I would be thinking But Nancy, HOW can I possibly do that? I know it probably feels a little huge and uncomfortable to own your brokenness—that is ok. That's why we are taking baby steps. For now, 

Notice how often you hear your Monger telling you some version of this lie—you are broken. And then lovingly reply—what if I am?

And if you have ANY thoughts, questions, or ah-ha’s about the content—send me an email at questions@selfloyaltyschool.com or fill out the Q&A form. Ask Nancy Jane, and I will answer them in the next Q&A session. Q&A sessions will be recorded and appear on the Ask Nancy Jane podcast feed and in the member area on the last Tuesday of every month.

See you Tomorrow!