Women of Influence by SheSpeaks
Join us each week on the Women of Influence podcast, hosted by Aliza Freud and presented by SheSpeaks. Each week, Aliza sits down with trailblazing women from various fields—business leaders, social media influencers, authors, speakers, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders—who are using their platforms to create meaningful impact. Discover how these women harness their influence to inspire, motivate, and drive change, and gain actionable insights you can apply to your own life!
Women of Influence by SheSpeaks
What is 'High Functioning Codependency? Healing Your Relationships with Terri Cole
In this episode, we sit down with Terri Cole, a best-selling author, licensed psychotherapist, relationship expert, and empowerment coach. We discuss Terri's career transition, her work (and first book) on setting boundaries, and her expertise in high-functioning codependency. You will learn what is high-functioning codependency (HFC) and learn how you can recognize and address your own codependent behaviors, set healthy boundaries and have better relationships. Terri shares tangible tips and takeaways to help you change the way you approach relationships today, so grab a pen and paper!
Episode Highlights:
- Terri shares her own career change, transformation & healing process
- How should you think about boundaries and Terri's book, Boundary Boss.
- What is the Downloaded Love Blueprint and how is it affecting your current relationships?
- What is high-functioning codependency (HFC)? What steps can you take if you exhibit the behaviors of HFC?
- Overinvestment and resentment - what role they play in your relationships, how you see others, and how they see you.
Follow Terri & Learn More:
Get your free resources, order Terri's book(s) and sign up to stay connected at: https://www.terricole.com/hfc/
Learn more about Terri by visiting: https://www.terricole.com/
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Being a high-functioning codependent is you being overly invested in the feeling, states, the outcomes, situations, circumstances of the people in your life, to the detriment of your own internal peace? We're all empaths and highly sensitive people and mothers and lovers, and friends and sisters. We love our people and want them to be happy. We take it one step further Instead of wanting you to have those things and to be happy, we feel responsible for creating those things.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to the show. Hope you're all having a terrific week so far. We have a great episode for you today. If you are someone who's ever wondered if you have good boundaries in your relationships, maybe there are some relationships where you feel like you don't have great boundaries and you want to try to fix that. Or there is some codependence you have in your life with some of your relationships. This is the episode you're going to want to listen to.
Speaker 2:We have on bestselling author and psychotherapist, terry Cole. Terry has written two books, boundary Boss and Too Much and over her two-decade career as a psychotherapist she has worked with some of the most amazing clients, from stay-at-home moms to celebrities and to Fortune 500 CEOs. Terry has such a great understanding of what healthy relationships look like and how anybody can take relationships in their life and work to make them healthier. If you've ever thought about, well, what is codependence? I feel like I've heard the term thrown around so much. What does it mean and how do you know if you are codependent in any relationship in your life?
Speaker 2:The great thing about this conversation is that Terry gives us such tangible explanations about what things mean but, importantly, very tangible tips for what we can each do to enhance relationships in our lives, to make us feel better about those relationships and have a healthier and happier life. So I highly recommend that you listen to the episode with a pen and paper nearby. We will also have a link to information how you can follow Terri and learn more about what she talks about. With that, we're going to jump into the conversation with Terri Cole. Here we go, terri. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks for having me, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm looking forward to talking with you. You and I connected at an event recently of amazing women and I was blown away just by the insightful comments you were making during that conversation. I thought we've got to get Terry on the show, so I would love if you could first talk about so. You started your career as a talent agent a Hollywood talent agent and you shifted to becoming a psychotherapist and relationship expert. Tell me how that transition happened. How do you go from being a very hard job, right, a talent agent to a probably even harder job?
Speaker 1:Well, I think there's a lot of similarities in the job, but for me I was a talent agent and the last five years of my career I was representing supermodels and celebrities negotiating contracts. And this was in the 90s when, like supermodels were everything Remember George Michael, freedom, supermodels everywhere. So I was literally representing most of those women. It was a very heady time. There was a parallel process happening in my life where I had started therapy when I was 19. I stopped drinking when I was 21. So now, between 21 and 28 or however old I was when I left entertainment and 28 or however old I was when I left entertainment, my evolution was happening. First of all getting sober. So now you're like, eyes wide open, everything, feeling all the things and feeling all the things I had been numbing before. So there was a lot of growth in that, because I didn't really know who I was, who does when they were 18, 19, 20,. I was always interested in entertainment, so as I'm sort of leaping my way up the New York slash Hollywood ladder, I was kind of bi-coastal at that point. I was also in pretty intensive psychotherapy for myself, and the healthier I got, the more I realized I just got to get out of this. This toxic environment is just not for me, especially once I got into the modeling world where I was like, wow, this is really not cool.
Speaker 1:I was going to school to become a psychotherapist. I literally applied to one school. I applied to NYU, which is pretty nervous, since I went to a pretty shitty undergraduate school and never thought I'd get in. But I was like you know what? I'm just going to do it? I'm going to apply because I'm not moving to like Omaha. I've been living in Manhattan for years and when I got into NYU A I was literally shocked, I swear to God. But I was also like, oh crap, now I got to go. Can't be getting into NYU to get your master's and not go. I actually continued to run the agency while I was doing an accelerated master's program and I loved it. And how I got to the point of knowing I needed to go to school and needed to change careers was that I could no longer deny the fact that I didn't care about the Pantene deal or the movie contract that I was negotiating. What I cared about was the mental health of my clients.
Speaker 1:I was getting people into drug treatment clinics, weight loss, eating disorder places Everybody was getting into therapy. I was really trying to change a toxic industry and realized that if I stayed any longer it was really going to be changing me. So instead I pivoted, switched careers and just became a therapist.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, I mean that requires a lot of insight to really understand what part of what you're doing is appealing to you and what part is not. And I think just hearing you talk about that, like the fact that you were able to take a look at your job and say, wow, I really enjoy the component of this that is helping my clients have that emotional and psychological stability right and helping them with the things that they needed, versus the business of the job itself. It takes work to get there. Now, how did the relationship expertise because you are a relationship expert how did that come about in terms of your practice?
Speaker 1:Well, I think that when you really think about what we're drawn to and what we're interested in in life, for me, I always believed that we teach what we most need to learn. So I was always most inspired by and drawn to areas in my life that were problematic, right Places where I had pain, where I was like I'm in relationships but I'm not in love, or I'm in relationships but I'm managing men instead of heart relating to them, because I was such a high functioning codependent shit out about love. So I was very motivated to become a relationship expert. Based on my own pain points and my own blocks and my own life, what does it look like to have a healthy relationship? Then I really got into it with my clients and started creating all these different ways that we could reveal the unconscious material that was blocking.
Speaker 1:So I came up with your downloaded love blueprint. And what are the questions that go in there and what do we learn from our family of origin? Hate to say it, we always go back to the scene of the crime, which is family of origin, because that is literally where it all starts. I started seeing that changing, my clients changing and then me changing, but it took way more than me becoming a relational expert to have my eyes wide open enough to find my husband or to be found by my husband per se. It really was getting into recovery from codependency, learning how to set boundaries and really healing my father wound, and I did all all of those things and then it was like my husband just fell into my lap like a feather.
Speaker 2:You have a couple of books that have done phenomenally well. You've got the newer book, the Too Much, which we're going to talk about, but one of the things that you talk about, you talk about boundaries. I think that was one of your earlier books. Can you tell us a little bit about the philosophy that you have?
Speaker 1:related to boundaries, so that my first book was called Boundary Boss. I want you to think about your boundaries as your own personal rules of engagement, so this lets other people know what's okay with us and what's not okay with us. According to me, your boundaries are made up of your preferences, your desires, your limits and your deal breakers. So not all boundaries are created equal, according to me, because they're not, but they're still important. Your preferences matter. Your deal breakers really matter, right, we need to know what our deal breakers are, what our preferences are. But what I found in my therapy practice is that so much of the time, we are these high level people pleasers and what we really want is for there to be peace and for people to be happy. So many of my clients, when I'd be like, okay, well, what are your preference? You know they really didn't know what brings you joy. They were like I don't know everybody else being happy. I was like, no, actually can't be that. We've got to find something for you. So I feel like with boundaries, it's not enough to know your preferences, desires, limits and deal breakers. You need to know them and then you need to have the skills. You need to be fluent in the language of boundaries to be able to communicate them transparently when you so choose. And therein lies the rub for most people, because most of my clients were just like I was right there at my boss's office, I just didn't know what to say.
Speaker 1:So so much of Boundary Boss, the book is. I mean, there's a whole chapter that's like hundreds of scripts so that you have the words right at your fingertips. But those? I could have just done a book on scripts, but it wouldn't actually stick right, because we need to understand the internal experience. Why is this so hard? Why am I so afraid? And it all goes back to our training, right? This is be a good girl. If you don't have anything nice to say, buddy, don't say anything at all. Like you know, we all know what was expected Be compliant, be nice, be helpful.
Speaker 1:You should give anybody the shirt off your back. The more self-sacrificing, the better you should give anybody the shirt off your back. The more self-sacrificing, the better, and that's not true, but that is what we learned, and so there was so much unlearning and unraveling that I did in Boundary Boss for the women and men, because lots of men read it, although I wrote it through the lens of sort of for the female experience.
Speaker 2:So what is the downloaded love blueprint? What does that mean it?
Speaker 1:means that you have a paradigm in your unconscious mind around a lot of things around love, around codependency, around boundaries, around finances, around sex, around sexuality. I want you to think about it like an architectural blueprint for a house that someone else designed, maybe decades ago, where, when you're in a family of origin, again this goes back to what influences your love blueprint or your boundary blueprint your family of origin, the country and culture that you grew up in, the societal norms that you grew up in it could be the number you were in the family, If you were the youngest or if you were the oldest.
Speaker 1:those things also can influence what was expected of you, what the culture said was expected of you.
Speaker 2:What.
Speaker 1:I saw with my parents was my mother doing all the domestic stuff, my father making all the money, so he had all the power. Us being afraid of my father. We were always hiding things from my father, not telling him things. I mean, he would walk into a room, me and my three older sisters. We would all just be like bye, Like literally scatter like cockroaches, Can't wait to get away Because we. That was the relationship.
Speaker 1:So, for me, what did I learn? Men were people to be managed. Don't tell the truth ever what. I cheated on all my boyfriends until I really grew up and got into therapy because I was like whatever, who cares about them? You know the way men are. That influenced my love footprint, because it's what I saw, because modeled behavior is also leaves a huge imprint on us and we, you know, I give you extensive questions that you can answer and once you start thinking in this way, in this way therapeutically, you really start to be able to figure out the riddles of your own life, right when you're like why can't I figure this out? Oh, you can figure it out, you definitely can figure it out.
Speaker 2:So, if so, okay. So we all have our own love blueprint, which which, likely, we didn't even create ourselves, but sort of learned from our experiences, cultural, the things you mentioned. Yep, how, what does it mean to be a high, functional codependent? And is that only related to your romantic relationships? Does it go beyond?
Speaker 1:that it definitely does so. High functioning codependency, which is what the new book it's called Too Much A Guide to Breaking the Cycle of High Functioning Codependency. It was sort of the next step in the evolution of people who are figuring out boundaries and figuring out love. And now I'm moving into because if you're a high functioning codependent, I'll tell you my definition of what it is. My therapy practice is filled with women like you and women like me and our friends and all the people we were gathering together with, who are highly capable, highly competent, intelligent women, sort of masters of the universe, but doing it all. We're doing all the things for all the people.
Speaker 1:If I would notice a codependent pattern in a relationship but I would say, hey, what you're describing this is codependency. They would immediately reject the notion. They'd be like yeah, no, incorrect, not me. They're like terry, I'm not dependent on squat, everyone's dependent on me. I'm making all the money, I'm making all the moves, I'm doing all the emotional labor. When something gets done, it's because I do it. So who am I dependent on?
Speaker 1:And I realized, oh, my clients don't know what codependency is, the notion, that there's a weakness to it and you've got to be enabling to be a codependent and it's got to be your romantic relationship. And those are all myths. I was left with a conundrum, which is well, how could I help my clients with the problem that they definitely had if they didn't see themselves my definition? And when I changed it is when I added the high functioning to codependency and told my clients they were all able to raise their hands and say me I'm the high functioning to codependency, and told my clients, they were all able to raise their hands and say me I'm the problem. It's me not to quote Taylor, but I will. In that instance, it's a fact without shame. So instead of being like that can't be me, they were like you're right, I'm burnt out.
Speaker 1:I'm exhausted I'm kind of resentful Like they were able to now with this reframe, they were able to see themselves in the problem. So if we were to define it, or the way that I define it is, being a high functioning codependent, is you being overly invested in the feeling, states, the outcomes, situations, circumstances, finances, careers, friendships of the people in your life to the detriment of your own internal peace? So I'm going to make that distinction because we're all empaths and highly sensitive people and mothers and lovers and friends and citizens and sisters and obviously we love our people and we want them to be happy.
Speaker 1:I'm not talking about that high function and codependent. We take it one big fat step further and, instead of wanting you to have those things and to be happy, we feel responsible for creating those things.
Speaker 2:And it's interesting when you say it in that way and you talk about just also codependence, because I get the high functioning part which makes it probably more palatable to women who are go-getters and achievers to say, wait, maybe it can be me if you add on the high functioning part, but it's the part about the codependence that I think many of us don't really understand is, when you just explained it to me, I thought more immediately actually about my children than I did about romantic relationships, Mm-hmm romantic relationships. The word you used was overinvestment. How do you know that you're at that overinvestment point?
Speaker 1:First, let's establish that any flavor of codependency garden variety involved with an alcoholic or high functioning, the foundation of that behavioral pattern is an overt or covert desire or attempt to control other people's outcomes.
Speaker 2:What does it say that you're? What does it mean that you're trying to over-control the outcome in terms of we love our people?
Speaker 1:It's very hard for us to tolerate the suffering of others. Other people's pain makes us extremely uncomfortable. So we work really hard in all kinds of situations to avoid conflict, to make sure others are happy. We're very outwardly focused. How do we know if we're overinvested? Well, you can start by taking a resentment inventory. If you are overly invested in the outcomes of all these people so much of the time we really can't control it right, they don't take our advice when we give them, when we so lovingly auto-advice give to everyone, not just kids.
Speaker 1:There are behaviors and I think it might be helpful for listeners if they could see. You know, like what are the behaviors of high functioning codependency right? Like what does that actually look like? The first and the easiest one to identify is we just feel compelled to fix other people's problems. We feel responsible for fixing other people's problems. We overgive, we go above and beyond. We do things that a lot of times people are not asking us to do. We are also hyper-independent, meaning we're not great at asking for other people to help us. We're not great at worrying about our needs. We want to make sure everyone else right, so we're always ready to jump into damage control for other people. We're amazing in a crisis.
Speaker 1:We can also become frustrated and kind of bitter because people don't take our advice. Sometimes it gets exhausting, right, you can get burnt out. Sometimes it gets exhausting, right, you can get burnt out. We have the auto accommodating behavior. So, with auto accommodating, I actually share this story in the book that I was at a hair salon in New York City on a really busy Saturday which I usually don't go because it's a zoo in there and they put something in my hair that I was going to lay in the sink for like 20 minutes and now the sink line is backing up.
Speaker 1:I'm just laying there like an idiot, like I'm not doing anything. I'm just laying there with something in my hair. People need sinks and with each person their little robe getting in line, I'm more and more and more anxious. I'm like why aren't they? I could move and what this is? This flow could be so much better. I don't get what they're doing. Anyway, raise my hand. I finally I call over the assistant and I'm like you know I could move and she was like uh, okay, we do this every Saturday, terry, we're good. But the point of that story is like what is the cost to me laying there sweating something that's not on my side of the street taking responsibility for something that's not mine, right? I could have been resting my tired brain listening to a podcast calling my mama. There was a million better things I could have been doing but instead I was like I need to help. These people are waiting. It's terrible. I need to help.
Speaker 2:These people are waiting, it's terrible, ridiculous.
Speaker 1:So I tell that story on YouTube and it goes viral. This is in the beginning, when I was like I'm definitely on to something, because even after all these years of therapy, I still feel overly responsible. Because when you're an HFC, you feel kind of overly responsible for the world, not just your family or your children or your husband or your girlfriend, right? I'm in a situation I'm on a bus, I'm on a train, I'm anywhere. I mean, I actually opened the book, the new book, with a story. It was probably 22 and there was a 19 year old kid. It's 1030 at night. Obviously there's nobody ever on the train track because it's a Monday night at 10.30 pm. And then I see this kid waiting on the platform and immediately my helper pinger is like hmm, I wonder what this kid's doing here. He was 19. I was probably 22. So I start chatting him up on the train and I go what are you doing? He was holding a little blanket. This is why I noticed him and he said oh, I was hired to like.
Speaker 1:I came out to Port Washington, I was supposed to drive a car back to Indiana and then they just canceled the gig. I go. So where are you going. Keep in mind, this was the late 80s. He goes I'm going to Penn Station, I'm just going to sleep in the station. I was like, no, you're not. Have you been to Penn Station? Dude, you're going to die. You're definitely not doing that. He was like, well, I don't know anybody in New York. I was like, yeah, you do, you know me. And this is how I came to take a perfect stranger home to my studio apartment that I shared with another woman, didn't even call her to see if it was okay. That's how responsible I felt. That's how responsible I felt. So my point with HFCs is that we feel not just overly responsible for the people we love.
Speaker 2:We can also feel overly responsible for the world, for the people who are suffering, for the people on the same plane as us, for some kid on a platform you know it's interesting, as you were talking, I was thinking to myself, the name of your other book, Boundary Boss, just kept popping and like, how do you create the right boundaries for yourself? So I want to quickly ask you, because we're talking about these high functioning codependents as if, okay, this is a bad thing, which, yes, I can see that. But I want to ask what's the downside of being an HFC?
Speaker 1:Well, you don't respect the sovereignty of the people in your life, so your relationships suffer, you're exhausted and probably have an autoimmune disorder, might end up with cancer. Tmj, menopause hits and you can hate everybody, trust me, because you're exhausted, unchecked. Hfc-ness is a one-way ticket to bitter land, and that is the only stop on that train. You become a total martyr. Wow. So we don't want that.
Speaker 1:And the saddest part to me, and the most tragic, is that we could live our whole lives thinking that we're being in service of others and ultimately live our lives being unknown, yeah, by the closest people, by your husband or your wife, or your grown children or your best friends, because we're so busy thinking about you.
Speaker 1:We're so busy making a plan. We do this thing anticipatory planning right. We're the puppet masters to managing people and situations. Which where are we in any of that? We are not there and people don't know us. And, trust me, I've had women coming into my therapy practice in their sixth and seventh and eighth decade of life being like I've done it all. I've checked every box. Kids went to Ivy League schools. We have money. I go to SoulCycle three times a week. I kind of like my husband. We travel, I'm on all these boards. Literally, they'll say is this all there is? Why do I feel so empty?
Speaker 1:And I'm like because nobody ever knows you. That's why. Because you built your life checking boxes that somebody else constructed and nobody in your life knows you. Because if we say yes when we really want to say no to keep the peace, as Cheryl Richardson would say, we create a war within ourselves and not to mention, like I'm just thinking about children.
Speaker 2:If you're somebody who has children and you're an HFC, what that might look like is not giving your kids agency to make their own mistakes, because you feel over-invested in trying to control the outcome for them, right, and what you're really doing is putting them in a situation where, at some point, they're not going to have you there and they're not going to be able to figure it out.
Speaker 1:What you're really doing and this part was so painful for me when I realized what a raging HFC I was in my life was you are centering yourself as the solution to everyone else's problems. I want to say something quickly. There are three things that I feel like I want to make sure we get to that people can take with them. Yeah, one if you're an auto advice giver, if you can't stop giving people your grade A advice your kids, your partner, your grandkids, whoever it is I'm going to ask you to stop and instead, instead of telling anyone what to do or what you think the first thing you're going to say when somebody comes to you with a problem is okay, before we get into it, tell me what you think you should do.
Speaker 2:When someone comes to me with a problem, I think what I might. My natural instinct is to hear the problem and then try to solve it.
Speaker 1:I get it, but now you're not gonna. Now you're going to say to them okay, before I say anything, what do you think you should do? And then you're going to stop talking.
Speaker 2:And if they say I don't know.
Speaker 1:I want you to tell me what you would do. You can say, babe, I will, I'll give you my two cents. But right now it's so much more what you think is so much more important than what I think, because it's your life. So let's spitball it, let's brainstorm it. You don't have to know it, perfect, but what does your gut say? Because I trust your gut instinct. So do you see the difference between us, fearfully and in a reactionary way, providing what we think is the answer? Yeah, which you don't know.
Speaker 1:One of the things, elisa, that brought me to all of this information that was like this pivotal moment in my life was I had one of my sisters who was in an abusive relationship. She was actively alcoholic. She was living in the woods in upstate New York in the middle of winter. She had no running water and no electricity. The woods in upstate New York, in the middle of winter. She had no running water and no electricity, literally. So that's an HFC's nightmare.
Speaker 1:I'm the youngest of four sisters and so my life even though my life was exploding at that time I was newly. I was a bonus mom to three teenage sons. Newly, I just got married. I just switched from being a talent agent to being a therapist. My whole life was exploding, but I couldn't stop obsessing about saving my sister.
Speaker 1:So I was crying to my therapist, bawling my eyes out, and I was like what am I going to do? I've done everything, I've done everything. And she said, terry, let me ask you something. What makes you think you know what your sister needs to learn and how she needs to learn it in this life? And I was super defensive and I was all like I think we can agree that she doesn't need to do it with this abusive piece of shit in the woods without running water. And she said I cannot agree, tara, because I'm not God and neither are you, but do you know what's happening for you in this situation? I didn't Hello, tell me what is happening for me. And she said you've worked so hard to create this harmonious life, your sister's dumpster fire of a life.
Speaker 1:Well, she didn't say that I said that, but, yes, is messing with your peace. You want that to be fixed, so your pain will end. I was like, wow, that's unbelievable. That's so true, she is not lying.
Speaker 1:Now, ego-wise, I had to accept, wow, that my desire to save my sister was a little bit more about me than I would have liked to have think. I really wanted it to just be like Mother Teresa type love, but it was a combination. Of course. It was love and control. I wanted to control. So she helped me learn about boundaries. She helped me put boundaries with my sister and say, hey, I cannot talk about this guy with you anymore. I can't talk about the situation. I love you. If you ever want to get out, I'm your person. And less than nine months later, my sister called me and said are you still my person? I said I'm getting in my car. I picked her up. She went back to school, got sober. My husband and I helped her in an appropriate way. Instead of her baby sister putting on the cape and being a hero of her life story, which creates shame and all of this shit, she is the hero of her own life story.
Speaker 1:And that sticks. She's never been in another abusive relation, but this was decades ago. We have to understand that the cost to our relationships, even if we're doing it in this very stealthy way, it looks like support, it feels like love. We have got to respect people's right to be sovereign. And when you think about love, real love, the flex, real love is not fixing someone's problem. It's being in the foxhole during a dark night of the soul and not treating them like a problem to fix, but witnessing them with compassion and love and accepting where they are.
Speaker 2:What a great way to illustrate the point and thank you for sharing that because I think it gets at the boundary conversation. It gets at the high functioning codependent. It gets at why it's not good for us and people in our lives, why it's not good for them and our relationships.
Speaker 1:The quality of our relationships, because when you start recovering from this, you realize that a lot of times people either are afraid of us or think that we're boundary bullies, because we always have opinions, because we always think we know what's best for what they should be doing. What can we do differently? So we've already talked about one thing you can do differently is you're going to ask expansive questions instead of giving answers. So that's one Second thing before you agree to do anything, because another element of being a high functioning codependent is that we're over-functioning, we're doing too many things, we're doing more than our share in many relationships. So you're going to have these two questions.
Speaker 1:I have the bandwidth to take this on without becoming resentful. And number two do I even effing want to do it? Because, as HFCs, we barely ever even ask like do I want to do this If someone else wants us to? We're sort of like twisting ourself up in a pretzel to try to figure out how to do it. We really have to stop and go. Hey, do I even want to do this?
Speaker 2:Which is related to the one before, which is bandwidth to do it without being resentful, Because if you don't really want to do it, even if you have the bandwidth though, you're still going to be resentful.
Speaker 1:That is absolutely accurate. Another thing that is important is the boundaries, right? So we talked about that. What do we do in our minds, right? What do we do in our minds when we want to change that? Your friend is telling you I'm gonna start a new bit, a new etsy business online, and I'm gonna sell something that you think is like not gonna sell and it's gonna be done right. Instead of saying what you honestly think, because her Etsy shop is her idea, you think and this is a Mel Robbins actually has a book out called let them and in your mind you're going to say better, yeah, yeah, let other people live, man, let people do what they got to do.
Speaker 1:Yes, and then let me. Let me focus on my life, Because think about this If we look at the macro of all of the stuff that we talked about, right, it's all of this bandwidth and energy out. I'm focusing on you and this other person and the people that I work with and my clients and whatever it is. When you get into recovery and you start thinking, let her, hey, maybe I'm wrong, why do I think I know everything? Right? Maybe this is going to be a hit and she's going to be a billionaire? I hope so. Let her, let her live.
Speaker 1:What you're also saying is let me hold on to some of my own bandwidth, let me focus on me, let me up my self-consideration right. So this is what I call it. It's different than you know. Under this umbrella of self-consideration is self-care, is self-love. Self-consideration is do I want to do this? How do I want to spend my time, my energy, my money, right? What do I want to do? And when you have been habituated into this behavior, where you're focusing so much on others, it's rare that we're really rocking self-consideration all the time which those three things need to matter to you more than what anyone else in the world wants, thinks and feels.
Speaker 2:I'm kind of blown away. It's such an important approach to thinking about this Like sacrifice myself, like it doesn't matter if it's hurting me, yep.
Speaker 1:We must get to the place of surrender, and that for me when I was younger, it was like a dirty word what Never surrender, you know, and yet we must surrender to. What is what we realize is that being uncomfortable will not kill you. Yeah Right, you'll be okay and other people will be okay, and we have to be okay with disappointing other people too. I want you to think about on the other side of being an active HFC. If you identify with this, if you feel like you're doing all the things for all the people, you feel kind of underappreciated, you're exhausted, you're burnt out, is so much more joy and expansion. We need time to know who we're becoming, to choose who we're becoming.
Speaker 1:You know, when people talk about authentic self, I always feel like there's this misunderstanding out there, as if if you just peel away a bunch of layers, then your authentic self is just going to pop out and I'm like, no, we need to work on who do you want to become? What are you willing to do to become? Are you brave emotionally so you can start setting boundaries with people? Tell the truth about what you do and don't want in your life. Right, those are choices that we make.
Speaker 1:I don't think that we just get to peel away layers and suddenly we have this fully formed, authentic self. I think we have choices to make about who we want to be in our relationships and in the world and who we want to be to ourselves. You know, and that's the most important, literally the relationship you have with you is the most important one you'll ever have with anyone, because it sets the bar for every other relationship that you have. So if you treat yourself like shit, you never rest. When you're exhausted, you're literally telling everyone in your life oh yeah, this is cool, you don't need to consider me, because I don't consider me.
Speaker 2:Terri, I could talk to you for hours. I want to give people a way to follow you and to hear more. What is the best way for them to do it? Well?
Speaker 1:I have a gift for your people because there's a lot and I know it's a lot.
Speaker 1:So all you do it's HFC little toolkit that I created. It's got like a video, it's got a downloadable thing that you can do. So you just go to terricolecom forward, slash HFC and you will find it right there and in that same page you'll see there's a link. You can buy the book there with all the bonuses. On that same page you will see that there's a place where you can sign up if you want to join my membership.
Speaker 1:And I meet weekly in my membership and I love it. So it's it's just this, but it's just every single week. So we meet four times a month. It's women, and mostly women, who identify a lot of them as being HFC, whether you're the over or the under functioning type. But it really is the only way to to sort of work with me consistent, consistently. But I also have a mastermind that starts in March. March 1st is when it starts for any entrepreneurial women who would like to be less exhausted, less bitter, make more money, figure out their limiting beliefs. That is a nine-month deep dive with me and it's very small.
Speaker 2:Wow, all right. Well, we're going to put links to what you just talked about to hericoldcom forward. Slash HFC. We will make sure that people have access to hear these things. This is so helpful, terri.
Speaker 1:Thank you for spending this time with me today. Thank you so much for inviting me. I really enjoyed my time with you.
