I Wanna See You Be Brave.

We talk a lot about being brave, but what does it actually mean to be brave? This is what we dive deep on in this episode. Find out why I don't like the most common sound bite on being brave, and how I am defining it now for myself and my clients.       

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Transcript

Welcome to " You need a coach bitch with Chris Hale. I'm your host Chris Hale. I'm a certified life coach that helps queer creatives. Take their passion, turn it into a purpose and get paid. If you are looking to make an impact on the world with your work by dismantling internalized, oppressive thought systems by using coaching spirituality and a lot of cursing, you are in the right place.

So let's get to work.

 Hey besties. How are you? I'm doing good. We have had some really nice days lately, like we are properly in spring at this point, and I could not be happier. I wanted to give you all an update on my birthday. It was last week and I did not talk about it because we had our interview with Brynn, which was just so amazing.

If you have not listened to, Do it now. Go. Listen, we covered so many topics from career transitions to d e I work in the dance space and, and how that's showing up in corporate marketing, et cetera. It was just a very fulfilling and like saturated conversation that I think that you will all enjoy. And I'm so grateful to Brynn for sharing her time.

I just feel like I'm so lucky to have all these brilliant friends whose minds I love and just want to share with you. Like who could ask for anything more, who could ask for anything more. Anyway, I want to report that I did have a lovely birthday. It was a very chill, and it started out much like any other Wednesday with me sort of working on my podcast, just doing some like light editing and show notes and stuff.

I then ended up meeting my husband and our friend Nate. Shout out to Nate for a quick midday mark. And then I went to dinner with my friend slash client slash branding expert Kelly. We did a little bit of work on this new website, et cetera. That is coming your way. And side note, it's going to be so hot.

I'm so excited to share this new look with you. Um, it just screams me and I know that you're going to love it as much as I do. And then we just enjoyed an amazing dinner, which included like this bacon that was basically like strung up, like it was on a clothes line, cooked that way, where the juices from the bacon like dripped onto a pickle and then you.

Ate the pickle with the bacon. It was amazing. So that was my actual birthday. And then on Thursday I met one of my rider dies. Um, her name is Shelly and her birthday's the day after mine. And we've been friends for over 20 years, which is a long time for me. I don't really have any friends from childhood.

So the ones that I met in the city in my twenties are like my life. We used to have these like huge parties in the city together, like shared birthday parties that were like massive. And now we just like meet up in the suburbs for, um, coffee on a Thursday afternoon. It's like, so, uh, adult and civilized.

And then Saturday, my sister and her husband came out from Brooklyn to do dinner and she had this really cute puzzle made of my dog, Ben. Um, I'm sure I've talked about Benjamin before. I'll have to share it on the gram when it's finished. It's so adorable. And that was my present from her. I definitely found a way to celebrate my birthday.

It was awesome. Very much different and more subdued than my pre Covid birthdays, but it definitely had like more quality interaction and it just felt perfect. Thank you to everyone that reached out on Facebook or Instagram or via text. I felt all of the love. Another thing I'm super excited about is all the Barbie movie trailers.

Um, I don't think I've shared this, but I used to collect Barbies as a child and I love everything about Barbie. And I'm so excited for this movie. And in the new trailer, she's like walking along in her heels and she steps out of them and she's still in the Barbie foot position, which all my dancers out there know that there was a very, like large stretch of time back in like the early 2010s probably, where the Barbie foot was all the rage in the dance world.

So, um, whether you are. A childhood fan of Barbie or you just love a Barbie foot, you should check out the trailer. It's hilarious, and I'm so excited for that movie to come out. And onto today's topic. We are talking about a pretty well known and often used slogan that I am definitely guilty of throwing around, and it's super popular in the coaching space and like self-development space.

And it goes a little something like. Bravery is feeling the fear and doing it anyway. I am sure you have all heard this, and while I do believe being able to feel and process difficult emotions and while I do believe being able to feel and process difficult, emotions is important for us as humans, and it's definitely necessary in any attempt to achieve a goal.

Over time, I've really expanded my definition of bravery because I think this simple line while. And it makes for a great generic inspiring IG post. It's a bit reductive and there's definitely a difference between being direct and useful versus being overly simplistic and not very helpful. We do not want to overwhelm our audience with information.

We wanna give them easily digestible content that helps them get incremental. But we also don't wanna underestimate their capacity for nuance. Remember, as Glennon says, we can do hard things, and that includes metabolizing nuanced concepts. So I am now defining bravery as being honest with yourself and doing what feels most true to you in any moment.

Let that sink in for just a second. Being honest with yourself and doing what feels most true to you in any moment. Now, why have I shifted toward this definition? It's because. What I've noticed in all my hours of coaching people on basically any topic that you can possibly imagine, one of the hardest things we can do is to tell ourselves the truth about who we are and what we want.

The person's judgment we fear the most is actually our own. We have a way we want the world to see us, and that means we need to try and be in alignment with that version of ourselves, and that often leads to us attempting to deny our own truth. So being brave is admitting the things that you believe make you a bad person.

And I think you could ask any queer adult, right? Like I'm in my early forties, so anyone like a ziel or older, um, how long it took them to actually admit to themselves what makes them queer, right? We were told that it was wrong, even sinful to be who we are. That equated to us being bad people. So it's kind of hard to admit to yourself that you are in fact an aberration.

We're gonna wanna keep that quiet, right? We learn to quiet that inner voice, that deep knowing of ourselves, and it gets replaced with all the ways that we should, right? Quote unquote, should be showing up in the world. And that then translates into what we should want. We learn to distrust our. And the world around us confirms that this is what we need to do if we wanna survive.

So if change happens in the smallest, most incremental steps, the first step that we can all take is just being a little more honest with ourselves. So what is one thing that you want to tell yourself the truth about right now? It can be really small. And it's just us. It's just you listening to this podcast.

You can pretend that we're in a session together. Um, that is the true beauty of coaching. That is, if it's executed properly on the part of the coach, the beauty is a neutral judgment free space. That is the gift I give all my clients. It's the most important thing because our judgment is the scariest thing in the world.

So I hold that space for them. When they cannot, I model what it looks like to be curious about their desires instead of shaming. It's really hard to give yourself that gift. So pick the one thing. What is it that you've been lying to yourself about? Tell yourself how you really feel about it. Then sit with it for a second.

What comes. Some common reactions to this might be like, I had no idea that was in there. That happens so often in a coaching session where I'll ask a question and someone will answer and they'll be like, oh my God, I didn't know I was thinking that. Right? We are really good at hiding our true thoughts from ourselves, or maybe not our true thoughts, but like we have a whole range of thoughts and we decide which ones we're gonna intentionally engage with because those ones.

Are in alignment. All right? They're in integrity with the vision of ourselves that we're trying to uphold. And some of these other ones just aren't, and we don't wanna look at them. Um, another reaction might be like, oh, I don't wanna say it. Or maybe you just like cringe, but you might also feel a huge sense of relief.

Lying to ourselves is a burden. And finally being honest can feel like freedom, and we're all going to be in different places in regard to how honest we are with our. I have clients that can't decide what they want to eat. Right. And that can be steeped in like the morality that we've been brainwashed into around food.

So you might admit to wanting all the carbs, but then your brain is like, we aren't allowed to have carbs. We can't eat bread. Bread. It's the devil. Right? We were all brainwashed into that. I. Or it can be about not really having like an internal locus for decision making, meaning that you outsource your decisions to other people.

And I've definitely been guilty of this, right? We base what we want on what others might want or what they might not want. So whatever the area is that you want to practice, being more honest with yourself around, try and make it somewhere with like little to no consequences. And I realized that I gave the example of food, but for some of us, me included, food is not it.

It's not gonna be the way. There's a lot wrapped up in that particular area of a lot of our lives that getting honest with might take some time. I know I am not there with being able to be neutral about that. So no shame if you aren't either. Just like pick a different thing. But that's what's so ironic about this, right?

Is that like. My clients that are coaches have the hardest time withholding that space for themselves, right? Me, that's me. We have a tendency to use the work against ourselves and almost like gaslight ourselves into believing that we just haven't done enough work on ourselves yet when a persistent desire keeps coming up.

This literally happened with two separate clients recently that wanted to leave the romantic relationships, one of whom I'd been working with for a year, and I pointed out that we'd been doing this work. It's been almost a. And they actually got to a place where they could be happy and see their partner through this lens of love.

And the non-negotiables were still there. They weren't going anywhere. So the next step was just admitting that she didn't want to do the work inside that relationship anymore. Right. She had wanted to break a pattern. That's why she came to me and she did. She'd broken the pattern and now it was time to choose something.

Another reason why we often are not willing to tell ourselves the truth is that we have this belief that we're, we're gonna have to do something with that information, right? So if we're honest that we really just want to leave our job, we will have to leave it immediately, right? Like we're not gonna be able to like do anything else.

Like once I see it, I can't unsee it. And that's true. Like once you see it, you can't unsee it, but it doesn't mean you have to act on it, right? When I finally decided it was time to stop teaching dance, I did it for another year and a half because I was not ready to have the conversation about it with my boss.

I had to first give myself permission to not want to continuously be managing my mind around it. It took so much energy and brain power. I was actually being coached on it, and I said the words, I know I can just manage my mind around this. And the brilliant coach said, you can, but do you want to? And right then the answer was a.

Her curious question allowed me to be honest about that and not feel bad, right? Not tell myself I was giving up or that I wasn't mentally strong enough. I could, but did I want to? This is one of the best ways I have found interact with my brain. When I hear a should happening, I stop and say, no, no, no, no, no, Chris, not should.

It's not a should. I could do this thing, but do I want to? And then I listen for the answer. And the answer can come in a lot of ways. It can be words, it can be a sensation in my body. If it's a yes, I feel expansive, it's a no. There's a constriction somewhere. And if it's a yes, but like I'm terrified, I'll feel a little nauseous.

But anyway, you don't have to do anything. That's my point here. But we do sort of frame our truth as this like ugly thing about us, right? It's the heart beating under the floorboards driving us mad. But really we can just know that we don't want to be in our job or with our partner or even like out with our friends, right?

And we can still stay. How many of you done that? I've been like, oh, I don't really want to go out right now, but I'm going. When we do that, it gives us access to our agency. We're staying on purpose. We know we want to leave. But we're making the choice to stay and when it's time to go, if that's what we truly desire, we will.

That is exactly what happened to me with dance. I didn't leave when it made the most sense, actually, like when I was working 40 plus hours for the life coach school and teaching dance and doing all these other things, right? That would've been a great time to leave because it would've like released some pressure.

But I left when I made the leap to building my own business, and it's because. If I was going to really focus on that, I needed to be all in. And the time and the energy that it took to talk myself into making that drive and getting myself into the head space to teach and the recovery the next day meant I was missing out on two days that I could be dedicated to building a coaching business.

So I was no longer willing to do that. It was steady money, but at a much greater cost than what I was bringing in. And now I wanna just acknowledge that I'm being super specific here in dissecting this, like platitude or whatever we want to call it, because sometimes your bravery will mean facing fear, but other times it will require confidence, patience, softness, even compassion, especially for oneself is one of our bravest emotions we can feel.

The willingness to see our own humanity and the humanities of others takes courage, especially when we've been taught to dehumanize people with quick labels so we can just move on. Never having felt anything. Bravery is about getting closer to yourself, and this sound bite can trick you into thinking The fear, feeling part comes first and then you take action, and that is rarely the.

You're gonna be bringing that fear or the anger or the shame with you on that journey while you take action. But the content of that bravery will look different every time because not all moments of bravery look the same. So I want you to think about that this week. Think about the places. You have been hiding from yourself, and the bravest thing that you can do is to just shed a little light on that corner that you think is darkness in you that you've been running from, but really it's what makes you exactly who you are.

Be curious, be honest, be compassionate, and be brave. To quote Sarah Barres, I wanna see you be brave. Oh, you gotta love Sarah. Did you listen to her interview on Glennon's podcast yet? We can do hard things. Go do it now. Anyway, that is all for this week. New website is launching very, very, very soon. And with it, my new course on intuitive scheduling, which will be entirely free.

So if you are not already on my list, go sign up now so you can get first access to that shit. It's fucking fire. Also like share, subscribe to the podcast if you have not already leave a review. All of this stuff really helps, right? There's all the algorithms and shit and I don't know anything about it, but I know it all helps.

So hook me up Y. I love you. Have a great week. We'll talk soon. Bye-bye.



If you are loving what you're hearing here on, you need a coach, bitch, please subscribe like and share with your friends. And if you want more information on how you can work with me, one on one. Go to theonlychrishale.com where you can find me on Instagram, theonlychrishale.