Episode 132 – What’s in Your Toolbox?

As you’ve navigated your life you have probably experienced joys, disappointments, successes, failures, and many other things.  Life brings a lot of joy, and also has a way of throwing curveballs. Whether it’s personal setbacks, career challenges, relationships, or health issues, at times you’ve probably been faced with something that tested your patience, strength, and sense of self. The good news is that in the process you have learned ways to cope and deal with things.  In today’s episode of Your Personal Power Pod, we look at the challenges you might have faced, the powerful lessons you learned, and the coping skills you developed along the way, that have helped you grow stronger, wiser, and more resilient.

We want to hear from you, whether it’s your stories about how self-esteem and personal power affect your life, or topics you’d like us to address in future episodes. 

We’d love for you to review our podcast. Do this on your streaming service or visit www.yourpersonalpowerpod.com , click Contact and drop us an email. 

You can also find us on Instagram and YouTube at Your Personal Power Pod.

Also, if you’d like to make changes in your personal or business life, spending time with a coach can make all the difference.  Sandy is offering a free consultation, so contact her at sandy@insidejobscoach.com and put COACHING in the subject line to schedule a free call.

Thank you for listening to Your Personal Power Pod.  We look forward to hearing from you.

And, until next time, find your power and change your life!

Transcript

Shannon: [00:00:00] Welcome to Your Personal Power Pod, a podcast about aligning yourself with the life you want. And here are your hosts, Sandy Abel and Shannon Young

Sandy: Shannon, we are back. It's so fun to do this again. How are you today? 

Shannon: I'm great. Thank you. I'm excited to be solidly in the holiday season. I know not everybody feels that way. Hopefully those of you who don't appreciate the holidays have a different time of year that is super special to you. I really like this one.

It thrills me to no end that when I go shopping there are Christmas carol's plane. 

Sandy: You've always been a Christmas person. 

Shannon: Much to my husband, chagrin. 

Sandy: I think it's because you're all heart and Christmas is all about love and being with your people, and that's just you all over the place. 

Shannon: That's the thing for us.

It's not necessarily about religion, but just I like the [00:01:00] sentiment behind it, which is all love based. So. Thank you. Yes. Anyway, yeah, so happy holidays to you. Yes. 

Sandy: We'll be doing a few more and wishing everybody a happy holiday. Yes. But we are into December and it's very exciting. Today we're talking about things that you learned through your life.

We're calling it what's in Your Toolbox, because I was listening to a woman who had been through some struggles. She said I had to look deep into my toolbox to find the resilience, but I knew it was there. It was on the bottom, but it was there. That really resonated with me. As we go through our lives, we have challenges and we have wonderful things, and we learn from all of it.

We put it in our hypothetical toolbox and then they're there for us when we need to go find them and use them. 

Shannon: I like it. It's true, 

Sandy: and that's what you did our last episode. We talked about their cancer diagnosis and you reached deep into your toolbox and brought out some amazing tools. 

Shannon: Yes. I don't even think I'd known they were [00:02:00] there.

Right. If I had gone through that 20, 30 years ago, yeah, it would've been a totally different story. Doing it now was less than ideal, but great because I just don't do drama the way I used to do drama. 

Sandy: Yes, that is true. 

Shannon: Partly it's because I'm just tired, 

Sandy: but also because you have grown and you have gotten a lot of wisdom and knowledge and experience that have helped you camper down the drama.

'cause drama just gets in the way. It can't function if you're being dramatic. And I think you've realized that and don't do it anymore. 

Shannon: And my husband very sweetly said he was in awe of me because he said You were the happiest cancer patient there's ever been. And he said, thank God you're the one who got it, because I would've been a nightmare.

I.

First of all, the older you get, the more you know you can live through stuff you didn't know you could live through. 

Sandy: Exactly. 

Shannon: You [00:03:00] realize that most things are not gonna kill you, some things might, but if that's the case, then just have a good sense of humor through it as much as you can. So, yeah, but I think that's part of it too.

The longer you live, the more your toolbox fills up, even without you knowing it. 

Sandy: That's the thing. Life brings a lot of joy and also throws you curve balls, whether it's personal setbacks, career challenges, health issues like Shannon had, or relationship issues. The longer you live the more you're gonna have to deal with that stuff.

But the good news is that in the process you learned how to cope. 

Shannon: Hopefully, 

Sandy: yes. Hopefully. Shall we look at? The lessons life teaches you. 

Shannon: Yeah. 

Sandy: Since you don't get to choose the challenges, it's important to know that even the most difficult moments carry lessons for you. 

Shannon: You didn't ask me this this year, but you have asked me in the past, when I've gone through challenges, why did you bring this into your life?

Which is a horrible question. 

Sandy: Sorry about that. '

Shannon: cause it makes you responsible for the things that are happening to you. You don't always want that, but it's a great question because you are [00:04:00] like, oh yeah, maybe I put this here subconsciously because I needed to learn its lesson and that kind of helps you get out of it and change your perspective.

Sandy: Right. And you did not deliberately bring cancer into your life, but you learned so much from it that maybe on some other level there's a reason that it was part of what happened for a few months for you. Mm-hmm. You might not see it when you're in the middle of it, but you went with the flow. And you were open to new paths.

It's all about how you choose to deal with it. And then the important thing is learn and then save that lesson. Just put it in the toolbox so it's there for the next time. 

Shannon: Yes, being able to ask, what did I get out of this? I think does a couple of things. And help you appreciate the hard times you've been through.

Right? And look back at them differently instead of thinking, oh my gosh, that sucked, right? I feel like, yeah, that was less than ideal, but some really good came out of it. 

Sandy: And those are the tools and the coping skills that you've developed that help you navigate the ups and downs of life. Those are the ones you need to hold onto.

Shannon: I'm also a firm believer that. [00:05:00] Being willing to look at it deeply enough to get the lesson makes it less likely you're gonna have to go through the same kind of thing again. 

Sandy: Absolutely. If you don't learn the lesson, unfortunately you're gonna find yourself in that same place. But if you've got the lesson, life will give you other lessons to learn.

Shannon: Oh, great. Bring on the different ones. 

Sandy: Yeah, I agree with that. You were gonna have to deal with the same thing over and over again if you've learned what you needed to learn. 

Shannon: Oprah had a saying, and I'm not gonna get it exactly right, but the idea will be correct. She'd say, when life's trying to get your attention, it throws a pebble.

If you don't acknowledge the pebble, it throws a rock. If you don't acknowledge the rock, it crushes you with a boulder. Whoa. That's why operating at a burnout level for years. Well, you're probably gonna get sick, right? Because you're not looking at the lesson. 

Sandy: Yeah. When life gets overwhelming, it's easy to get caught up in that spiral of worrying about the future or replaying past mistakes or whatever you do to beat yourself up.

And it can help to just be mindful. Just stay [00:06:00] present and observe your thoughts. Don't judge 'em. Just observe 'em. Be in the moment, like you said, 

Shannon: that's really hard. Observe your thoughts without judgment. How do you do that? 

Sandy: That's a really good question. I don't judge myself a lot. I mean, I am honest with myself, and if I do something that violates my values or hurts somebody else, I try to fix it, but I don't judge by saying, oh, that makes me a bad person, or I must be awful because I did that.

It's like, no, everything I do has positive intentions, so I don't need to negatively judge myself. Does that make sense? 

Shannon: It does. I also think it goes deeper than that. It's because you learned a long time ago to love the whole you, which includes the shadow as well as the shiny, sparkly parts. 

Sandy: Oh, always.

That's the whole self-esteem thing. 

Shannon: Right? But if you don't have that, if you think my shiny, sparkly parts. Are the only parts of me that have value and the only ones I can let people see than if you're having thoughts that maybe aren't so sparkly, then it's really easy to feel [00:07:00] shame around that. Yes. So you have to be able to claim and love your whole self.

Sandy: Yes, absolutely. In order to be able to just 

Shannon: watch your thoughts because your thoughts are not who you are. 

Sandy: Not at all. Your thoughts create your emotions, but your thoughts are not who you are. Who you are is that amazing little person you were when you were born and who grew up to be an incredible adult, but who might have had some negative input along the way where your view of yourself got warped a bit.

Shannon: Oh, I like that. Got warped. 

Sandy: It wasn't through anything you did, but you have those voices in your head now and it's really important to be able to sort through. Whose voice is that? Is it valid? Do I need to even pay attention to it? And what is real for me? Who am I not, who am I defined by other people, but who am I?

Shannon: Yeah, it's 

Sandy: a process to figure that out. And young people, teenagers are trying to figure that out. They don't have a clue who they are yet. And so they're looking all around at social media and influencers and their friends and everybody to, to find who they are, and [00:08:00] that's not who they are. 

Shannon: It's easier than ever now to distract yourself and sometimes doing this kind of internal work is uncomfortable.

So you have to be willing to be uncomfortable for a while and be quiet and listen for your own. Voice in and amongst all the other noise in your head and tease apart where the messages are coming from 

Sandy: Exactly. Just take a few minutes to breathe deeply. Ground yourself in the present and focus on your senses.

What do I hear? What do I see? What do I feel, 

Shannon: and know that you have intrinsic worth just because. You are here. 

Sandy: Exactly. 

Shannon: You don't have to earn that. You may need to change your behavior to live up to the person you'd like to be. But we've all done bad things. We've all had bad thoughts. I don't even wanna say bad thoughts.

They're just thoughts. They become good or bad, depending on what you do with them. 

Sandy: Exactly. 

Shannon: You can shift and make better decisions starting today. The past doesn't dictate [00:09:00] who you are 

Sandy: and you can always reframe your negative thoughts. 

Shannon: Yes. 

Sandy: Remember that you can challenge them. Instead of thinking I'm overwhelmed by everything that's going wrong.

Reframe it to, I have a lot on my plate, but I've managed difficult situations before and I can handle it too. See, that's something in your toolbox. Mm-hmm. That you know you can handle Difficult situations. If you shift the focus from a feeling of helplessness to empowerment, you'll move ahead just fine.

Shannon: I've been around a long time and I've had some really strong emotions around situations in my life and I've had some pretty strong feelings that I knew how things were gonna go. 

Sandy: Mm-hmm. 

Shannon: And a lot of the time I've. Probably been wrong. I mean, really, you can think this is disastrous. I'm never gonna get over this.

I'm never gonna succeed, I'm never gonna be loved. All of those things, those great big fears that we have, 

Sandy: that's drama. 

Shannon: Well, but it's also a legitimate fear. I mean, I know it's kind of live there. Yes. And they don't know how to get out of it. I've learned. To [00:10:00] ask myself or just to even kind of put the phrase in front of my brain, what if you're wrong?

Sandy: Yeah. 

Shannon: What if you don't have all the information? 

Sandy: What if you don't know how it's gonna turn out? 

Shannon: What if you don't know how it's gonna turn out? And that's incredibly liberating. Yes. 'cause being able to accept that you. Don't know, everything isn't just, you don't know all the information that's out in the world to be had.

It's that you can't predict. You can put things on a course to go a certain way, but you can't predict. So just being able to introduce a question mark can kind of help you keep breathing if you're not breathing. 

Sandy: Absolutely. And gratitude. 

Shannon: Oh yeah. 

Sandy: Gratitude can be profound. 'cause it helps you focus on the positive and realize that there's still a lot of good in your world.

And even if it seems like your entire world is crumbling, just go outside and see how beautiful the trees are, smell the air or get in touch with things that are still wonderful, even though there may be difficult times inside. 

Shannon: Yeah. I remember being so grateful some mornings [00:11:00] this past year that I didn't have to think about what to put on.

Yeah, I'd left the clothes that I'd worn to radiation out. The day before. Yeah. So that I could just put them on the next morning and not think about it. Yeah. Because I didn't have the energy to try to figure out what to wear. 

Sandy: And you were wise enough to be grateful for that. Something as simple as your cup of coffee in the morning or a good conversation with a friend, or the fact that your cancer treatment was two blocks away.

Yes. You don't have to go very far. It's all good. There's always things to be grateful for if you take time. To sit down and identify them. 

Shannon: Yes. And it shifts the vibrational track that you're on. 

Sandy: Yeah. It's a reminder that there's still beauty and light and that things are good, 

Shannon: and then you can create more of those moments by setting boundaries.

Oh my goodness, 

Sandy: yes. Boundaries are so important. You have to be able to say no to things that drain your energy. Cause you unnecessary stress. You have to be able to respect yourself with boundaries and in relationships. Oh my goodness. I see so many people who allow their personal boundaries to be violated in [00:12:00] relationships.

And you don't have to do that. 

Shannon: No. It's about respecting yourself. Yes. As much as you respect other people. Mm-hmm. And taking care of your own energy. What did I see somewhere last week that said something like, boundaries aren't about keeping people out, they're about teaching people how to come in. 

Sandy: Ooh, I like that.

Yeah, and that is so true. And once you start saying no to things that aren't aligned with your values or needs, you'll feel more in control and at peace. 

Shannon: Another one is just embracing the fact that life is full of good and bad, and not all of it is gonna be fun, but all of it is probably gonna be valuable.

And so embracing that whole journey of growth, 

Sandy: which is exactly what you did for this year. You were the model for that. You're the role model for everybody. For that. 

Shannon: I don't know. I just put my head down and was like, what are my choices? You just do what you do. 

Sandy: Well, your choice was to struggle, suffer and probably get sicker or to say, well, this is annoying.

Let's do this other thing and move on. And that's what you did. I loved it that you called it cancer light. That was just so perfect and it set the tone for [00:13:00] everybody because you embraced the growth journey. You didn't fight it. 

Shannon: Yeah. What a weird year. It's been a really weird year. It's rare that you get to see your growth.

Sandy: Yeah. 

Shannon: Five years, 10 years on. You can be like, oh, that's why I had to go through that. But sometimes life puts things in your path that you know you're growing. 

Sandy: Yeah. Right. 

Shannon: You can feel it and you hate it because it's not fun and it hurts. 

Sandy: Yeah. Right. 

Shannon: But you can be grateful for that. Too, because sometimes coming out the other end of something, a different person, you know, forged by fire, 

Sandy: you don't always have to have control over what's happening, but you have to control how you respond, and that's exactly what you did.

Shannon: I like that you say growth is messy. 

Sandy: Yes, because 

Shannon: it's, it's. 

Sandy: Some people take such effort to not get in any kinda situation that will make them grow. They don't take the risks. They don't step out and go after that new job or that special relationship because they're afraid it might not work. They don't ever give themselves the opportunity to [00:14:00] grow and learn and put things in their toolbox so their toolboxes are kind of empty, 

Shannon: right?

Sandy: You gotta remember that the lessons you learn along the way fills your toolbox and gives you the skills you need to cope and heal. Move forward and live a great life 

Shannon: and you know, you have to give yourself credit. Yes. We've all been through really difficult stuff. It's different stuff often. Yeah. We've all been challenged.

I mean, otherwise there's no reason for us to be here. Really. Yeah. Evolving is the name of the game. Have some compassion for yourself. Have some pride. Yeah. You've gotten through hard situations. You've probably learned more than you think you have. I had a friend a couple of months ago going through a really hard time, and she made a really funny comment about how life is really miserable right now, Uhhuh, which probably means I'm growing.

Sandy: Well, good for her. She's very wise. 

Shannon: Yeah, it should be noted that you can also just be having a really hard time and not be growing, so be careful how you respond to things 

Sandy: and make sure that you are [00:15:00] getting new things to put in your toolbox. So you might wanna just ask yourself, what tools have I picked up along the way in my life?

Look back and see, did I learn to be resilient? Did I learn to be patient? Did I learn to do less drama? Did I learn to be kind and fun and friendly? What have I learned? And make sure that it's in your toolbox and you can access it when you need it. 

Shannon: I like that sometimes we look at hard situations. And just can't wait till they're over.

Sandy: Yeah, 

Shannon: that's fair. Totally. When life is hard, life is hard. Right. And that makes getting up every day not a whole heck of a lot of fun. Yeah. But you are gonna be different at the end of it, and hopefully feel grateful for having gone through it. Let yourself be proud and take inventory every once in a while.

Sandy: Exactly. Give yourself credit for the strength and resilience you've shown because you've earned that credit. And please be gentle with yourself. 

Shannon: Always. 

Sandy: Always, always. So the bottom line is, as you go through life, you'll experience successes, challenges, and failures. Sometimes things turn out as you hoped and sometimes they don't.[00:16:00] 

The great thing is that there is always a lesson when things don't work out, and this can be even more valuable than success because you've gained new knowledge grown, increased your resilience, and added valuable new skills to your life toolbox. So when things don't turn out as you wish, always find the lesson and put it in your toolbox so you'll be ready for whatever comes next.

And remember that every step, no matter how small is a success, 

Shannon: and then tell us about it. We love it when you tell us your stories about how self-esteem and personal power have affected your life. And then if you have topics you wanna hear about, please let us know. We wanna talk about what you want to know about.

You can email us. You can go to our website, your personal power pod.com. Click contact and drop us an email. You can also just contact Sandy. sandy@insidejobscoach.com. Another cool thing, from wherever you stream, you can text us. There's a link on your streaming platforms that just says Send a text, so you can do that.

And then you can also subscribe to our YouTube channel and share our podcast with [00:17:00] your family and friends. And then again, if you wanna learn about how coaching can change your life, contact Sandy. Sandy at Inside Jobs Coach. We look so forward to hearing from you, and until next time, find your power and change your life.