How to Stop Feeling Like Sh*t

HOW TO GET THE MOST OUT OF THIS BOOK

Ten years ago, when I went to therapy after my divorce, I sat down in my therapist’s office and said, “How long will it take me to heal from this? Because I’m ready and I want to start now.”

I probably even looked at my watch at that moment—maybe I was hoping we could wrap it all up in an hour. I wanted a solution and I wanted it quick.

Nowadays it’s no secret personal development is a process, not a fast fix. But that doesn’t keep us from wanting a clear, straightforward answer. We want a solution. A step-by-step process that enables us to check off items on a list with the end goal of being happy, having inner peace, and healing our broken hearts. We seek out gurus and experts we resonate with and admire; we get to work and wait for the heavens to open up in all their self-help glory.

Maybe the heavens will open up, and maybe they won’t. Everyone’s path and journey through this work looks different. Some people change quickly, and some more slowly over time. Either way, I want you to learn the immense power of understanding yourself. For example, say you threw a raging party. The next morning you wake up bleary-eyed and head into the kitchen, knowing you have to clean up. You step into the darkness of the room—what’s the first thing you do? Do you start cleaning up in the dark? No, you turn the light on! You see what you have to deal with—what you need to throw out, what you need to wash, and what you need to put away.

The same goes for personal growth. First you need to see what must change in your life—taking inventory will tell you which tools will help.

I wrote this book to fast-track your own self-awareness. When you know what trips you up and keeps you from happiness, you can change course. I want you to be familiar with what makes you feel like shit and to know your values as well as you know what’s on your grocery list. I mean, you know how you like your coffee, and you know who should have won The Bachelor, but do you know how you want to live your life? Every single day? Do you know your triggers and how to recognize them? Because when you do, you’re acutely aware of your missteps and you can correct course—and that’s how you step into a kick-ass life.

In addition, I’ve put together some additional resources and support for you, such as meditations and worksheets that correspond to the habits you’ll read about in each chapter. Simply go to www.yourkickasslife.com/HTSFLS-study to find out more about that.

The goal is to pay attention to your habits, see where they’re holding you back, and try your best to do an about-face from the ones that aren’t serving you. Do this and you’re well on your way to extraordinary happiness.

THE KEYS TO YOUR SUCCESS

In retrospect, there’s something crucial I learned early on in my journey. What has been instrumental in my own success in every area of my life over the past decade—friendships, marriage, parenting, career, body—has nothing to do with being smarter than anyone else, or finding one secret or just one tool. The key has been consistency and commitment to the work. This is a lifelong thing. It’s not about reading that one book or taking that one workshop, or only working on yourself when shit hits the fan in your life. This is a constant practice. It’s about failing and starting over time and time again. It’s about having small and large victories. It’s about having aha moments about things you didn’t even realize were an issue for you.

No matter what you’ve been through, no matter what your circumstances are right now or even a year from now, your chances of having what you consider to be an amazing, kick-ass, successful life all depend on your ability to commit to the inner work and be consistent. And if you just said you don’t have time to commit, I’ll tell you what you’ll end up having time for: feeling shitty. You do have time. You just have to prioritize. The words on these pages mean nothing unless you’re willing to look hard at your own life and take action.

At the end of each chapter, you’ll see a list of challenging questions. Because it’s not enough for you to read the words, read chapters on habits that aren’t serving you, nod your head and think, “Yes, I do that habit” or “I feel that way too,” and then continue to do those things. By using the questions to look deeper into your life, you’re getting the ideas out from your head in a creative way (writing), which will help you make some actual changes. So, get out a piece of paper and answer the questions by yourself, with a friend, or even with a group.

PAYING ATTENTION

In addition to consistency and commitment, there’s one more thing I’d like to stress that will help you to get the most out of this book. And that’s paying attention. You’re going to read about many different habits and mind-sets that will resonate with you. What I want you to walk away with after reading this book is a clear idea of what each habit looks like for you (if you do it), as well as a set of tools to help you change it. The real change happens when you get good at noticing it quickly in your everyday life.

It’s about stopping yourself when you’ve said yes to something you didn’t want to do and within ten seconds you said to yourself, “Well, crap. That was people pleasing.” Or when you’re feeling sad after dropping your kindergartener off for his first day of school, get home, feel the prick of tears, and start cleaning your entire house. I want you to stop and say, “Oops. I’m trying to be strong and numb out.” That’s a win. From there it’s not about beating yourself up for people pleasing or numbing out, but just acknowledging the habit and/or belief and trying on the new tools.

That’s paying attention.

However, sometimes there’s a downside to paying attention too much. You might call it “overthinking,” but it’s more than that. In personal development, many women are apt to pick their behaviors apart, wanting to label each and every thing they do. Is this good? Awareness is good, right? Is this bad? Obsessing is bad, right? How do we know when to analyze and when to get out of our heads? And what if we can’t get out of our heads—what happens when the self-analyzing is constant?

That overthinking thing is called “over-identification,” and it refers to our tendency to hyper-examine everything we do. With smart, high-achieving women, this happens more often than not.

So, if you find yourself doing that, first of all, you’re normal and I want to commend your commitment to the work. But this isn’t about compartmentalizing your entire emotional and mental state. Try your best to pay attention but also try not to overdo it. Figure out where you stumble the most and where you have room to improve, catch yourself when you see these behaviors arise, implement new strategies as you learn them, and let that be enough. And don’t forget to be kind to yourself along the way!

ACKNOWLEDGING SHAME

In the summer of 2014, I went to San Antonio, Texas, to be trained in The Daring Way™, a modality based on the research of Dr. Brené Brown. The work rocked me to my core—both personally and professionally. I’m ecstatic the topic of shame is coming to the forefront of personal development, and I’m forever grateful to Brené for her work. You’ll read a few tools and concepts in this book that stem from her research.

Shame seems to be a buzzword these days, and it’s a good thing—people are talking more about the things that hold them back from experiencing happiness. But over and over again women have said to me that they don’t think they are experiencing shame, even when they are. It’s as though they can’t identify that feeling within themselves. I understand. When we think of someone feeling ashamed, we might imagine that person has done inconceivable things and her actions have been made public: She was caught embezzling money from her church and the whole congregation knows. He was caught having an affair with his psychiatrist and people are whispering around town about it. Or maybe that person feels shamed by someone else: her mom, an alcoholic, comes drunk to the school play, or her child was sent to prison for shoplifting.

But what I’ve come to know is that shame is not only more common than we think but also happens—often—in private scenarios. I hate to break it to those of you who think you’re living shame-free, but all of us feel shame. And if we’re not facing and claiming that shame, if we’re not honestly identifying and processing it, and learning how to move through it, then shame is owning us. We’re running from a feeling that we don’t even know exists within us.

Brené Brown describes shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging—something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.”

That is a fantastic definition, and a very helpful one, because many of us aren’t conscious that we are feeling “unworthy of connection.” Let me explain what it looks like, how it manifests in our adult lives, and what it has to do with the habits you’re about to read.

I’ll start by giving you an example of a scenario I remember from my own middle school experience, one that involves public shaming.

It was my eighth-grade graduation day. I wore the pretty dress my mom and I had shopped for, and I got to borrow her beautiful cardigan sweater with shoulder pads that were too big for me, but it was 1989, so it was perfect. As my parents and I walked toward the school from the parking lot, two of the popular girls saw me. One pointed at me and said to the other, “Oh my GAWD, what is she wearing?!” And they both laughed hysterically. I had felt pretty and confident that morning, and after I had heard that, I felt horrible and ridiculous.

That was shame.

This seemingly small scenario is not uncommon; we’ve all experienced some kind of public shame or humiliation. Anyone who’s been in middle school has a story (or ten) like mine. When we were young we were shamed by family or friends or at school. As adults, we see similar shaming in our partnerships, at work, with friends, and with our families.

Another, more recent example exposed an identity that our culture deems “unacceptable,” which can commonly lead to feelings of shame. A few years ago we moved to a new state, which included a new school for my children. I was in a meeting with the elementary school principal, my son’s new teacher, and his special education coordinator. My son, who is on the autism spectrum, had his records sent over from the psychologist who had diagnosed him.

The meeting started, and the special education coordinator began to read my son’s health history aloud. She innocently said, “Colton lives with his mother, father, and sister. His mother has a history of alcohol abuse…” I have no idea what was said after that because all I could hear was the roaring of blood in my ears as my heart pumped furiously. My palms began to sweat and my armpits tingled.

We were in a new city where I knew no one. Minutes before, I was having a friendly chat with these women whom I felt could be my friends. When she read aloud, “His mother has a history of alcohol abuse,” I wondered: Should I interrupt and tell them I’ve been sober for years? Would they gossip about me? Were they judging me in that moment? I felt the overwhelming need to run, defend myself, and cry all at the same time.

The thing that all shame stories have in common is that the people telling them feel like shit. Really, really horrible. There’s no other emotion like it. As Brené Brown says, “Shame is a full contact emotion.” It’s a feeling so universally hated that when we experience it, we never, ever want to feel that again. Ever. We may not consciously think this, but deep inside, we know we want it gone.

My shaming at middle school graduation happened more than twenty-five years ago, and I remember those feelings as if I felt them yesterday. The details of it are still vivid—I even remember the names of the girls who laughed at me. The feelings from that seemingly small incident embedded inside me and started to shape not so much who I was, but how I behaved.

That’s why it’s so important that we understand how to identify shame before we even start thinking about the fourteen behaviors that we’ll read about in this book. We all have an instinct to avoid shame. Whether we’re aware or not, we go through life trying our best to avoid it, and that avoidance becomes a force that drives our own undermining habits. This is where perfectionism, people pleasing, blaming, self-sabotage, numbing, isolating and avoiding, control, overachieving, and all the other habits you’re going to read about are born. If you’re regularly participating in any or all those behaviors, guess who’s driving the bus? SHAME.

If you’re not learning about shame in your own life, it can take over by pushing you to participate in any of the behaviors you’re going to read about in this book. If you think you don’t have any or not much shame, you’re probably in a constant state of running from it.

When you read through the habits in this book, know that most likely you’re using them as protection. Know that these habits are the things you do to protect yourself from shame, and appreciate them for trying to shield you—and then get ready to let them go.

Because when we’re engaging in perfectionism, people pleasing, numbing, and all the other habits, we’re not actually creating a solution to the problem. At best, we’re slapping a temporary and crappy Band-Aid on a wound that needs more attention. And that attention looks like this:

SHOWING UP

You’ll read a few chapters that include the phrase “show up.” And it may seem obvious, right? Let me break it down for you…

Showing up is being willing to engage with something uncomfortable when you’d rather back off and say, “NOPE!” When you show up, you allow yourself to feel scared and awkward and out of your element. But you also feel inspired! You dig deep, do the work, and feel brave all at the same time.

That’s what it means to show up.

In your daily life, when you face a difficult and uncomfortable situation—negative self-talk, a conversation with an ornery coworker that sucks but is necessary, difficult kids—you have two choices:

Did you notice that both of those choices include being scared? Because we can’t go through life and be brave and live kick-ass lives without fear being a part of the mix as well.

By showing up and doing the work, you’re making a declaration that you’re tired of being mean to yourself and of engaging in habits that make you feel bad and that you’re ready to change. I commend you to the nth degree for that.

And sure, there will be moments when you feel so strange and awkward that you wish you could run from your own feelings and your own awareness. That’s okay. Of course, it feels awkward. You’ve been behaving a certain way for decades; it’s going to take more than a minute for you to feel comfortable implementing more healthy behaviors. I don’t know anyone who looks forward to hard conversations and setting boundaries. “Yay, I can’t wait to have that awkward talk with my mom about how I can’t have political arguments in my house anymore.” But it will all get so much easier! You will feel the fear dissipate, and you will feel confidence and energy take its place.

So, to the broken-hearted, uncomfortable, and afraid women of the world: Welcome. We’ve saved you a seat. You’re just like us; we love you the way you are, and you can still want to change for the better. There is one thing I know for sure: when a woman is determined to change her life, when she pays attention to herself and what she’s after, she’s unstoppable. And that, dear reader, is you.

I’m ecstatic for you that you’re committing to learning more about yourself. Because if you start learning more, you’ll begin to make good use of these new tools that can make you feel better, and you will become a changed person.

And when you become a changed person, one who is kinder to herself, you inspire others. The ripple effect can move mountains, and women have the power to change not just ourselves but the world.

So, push your sleeves up, put your hair in a ponytail, and let’s get to work.