The Identity Factor & Why It Matters

Welcome to the beginning of a journey that is going to blow your mind and change the way you do life and show up for it in the most unexpected ways.

I have some things to show you that I guarantee you have never seen before. These frameworks and tools for looking at your life are gonna rock your world and transform not only your relationship with yourself, but with everything and everyone you interact with.

Before we jump into giving you the pieces of this puzzle, though, I want to start with one of the most important reasons why it matters so much.

If you resonate with this message at all, or think that someone else might, go ahead and share it so they can find out about it and get connected.

In the meantime, remember that you are beautiful, you are worthy, and you belong.

Talk soon, friend.

Website: robinkeesler.com

Transcript

 Hello, my friends. Welcome to the Identity Factor Podcast. My name is Robin Keisler, and I will be your host. Let's go. 

Welcome to episode one of the Identity Factor Podcast. Before we dive into all the powerful tools and frameworks that I have to give you, I wanna first talk for a minute about the reason that all of this matters.

My mission statement in my business and in my life is to help set people free from whatever it is that's keeping them from fully experiencing life the way that it exists in their wildest dreams. And what I've found over my years of doing this work is that when people feel out of alignment with that dream that they have for their life, It usually shows up in their awareness as some version of mental or emotional pain or discomfort.

This can look like fear or shame. It can look like guilt, regret, confusion, frustration, anger, inadequacy, some, sometimes there are behaviors or certain circumstances that people are able to identify. As the presumed source of their paint, but. The reason that they want their life to be different, their money, their relationship.

Sometimes it might be the way someone's seeing you, right? Someone's opinion of you that they have, or maybe there's an opinion that you don't want people to have, right? That you don't want people to think that you're. Greedy or selfish or inconsiderate, right? There are certain things, experiences that we don't want to have, and the reason that we want those things to either be different or that we don't want them to happen in the first place is because that goal or that dream that we want to have be true in our life is so that we can either avoid or escape some version of emotional pain or discomfort, and we want to feel.

A more positive, more comforting emotion instead, right? It sounds simple, but what happens is that our life then becomes a journey of escaping the pain that we don't want to feel and seeking out the pleasurable experiences that we do want to have instead. This applies again to our relationships, to our health, our finances, our business goals, our parenting, every area of our life.

The problem is that most people don't realize that there's a framework they often get stuck in that keeps them on this emotional merry-go-round of seeking the next solution over and over again. How am I going to escape the pain and how am I going to create pleasure or comfort instead? But unless you're able to uncover the secret that I'm about to share with you, you'll never actually arrive at that dream you're truly seeking because it's actually a facade that you don't fully understand.

You'll get the house, the money, the career, the public image, right? The relationship, the meditation center, whatever the success that you might be seeking. And then there it is again, that feeling of inadequacy, that feeling of confusion, frustration, shame, unworthiness, and then around again, we go seeking.

Searching, working efforting our way to find that ever elusive answer to solve the seemingly never ending cycle. So my goal is to help set you free from that. And there are a few things that go into that, but this is really the foundation that I wanna begin with and it's what I wanna talk about briefly today.

When I was in my early twenties, I did so much to try and get out of emotional pain and I really didn't know what to do with that pain. I tried coping with food as a young child and I thought to myself, well, when I'm in pain, if I eat, that helps me feel better. But it was just temporary. And as I got older and I moved into my adolescence, I began realizing that sex, drugs, alcohol, that helped me to deal with those painful emotions.

But again, it was just temporary. It would numb the pain for a moment, but as soon as the sex, the drugs, the alcohol, whatever that dopamine hit was from the food, the cookie, the cake, the burrito, as soon as it would wear off. Not only did I have that initial pain that I was trying to hide from, or cover up or escape, but I now had even more compounded pain on top of it.

From the shame, from the guilt, from the regret, from the lost relationships, right. The money I had spent, these coping mechanisms that I dug myself into. And they, they really started to make me physically, spiritually, emotionally sick. I was going so overboard trying with all my heart, with all my might to find a solution.

And not only were these solutions not actually solving the problem, but it was actually making everything worse. I had built tall walls around my heart, right? This was another, yet another strategy that I tried. Emotions weren't safe, so I pushed people away, or I would just keep them out and not let them in to begin with.

I didn't want people to see the real me because I was so scared of what that would mean. I didn't know how to deal with the pain that might come with rejection or the fear of inadequacy. So then I turned to perfectionism and achievement. The drugs, the alcohol, the food that was all making me sick.

Physically. My body was at. In disarray, utterly. And it was costing me dearly, not only financially, but in my relationships as well. And again, in my own mental health. The way that I was talking to myself, my identity, the way that I saw myself, my self image had just been torn to shreds. And so I thought, there's gotta be another way.

What if I could find, let's go up a couple levels, let me find a, a higher level way to deal with this problem. And so I thought, what if I get a degree? What if I get two degrees? Would that be enough? It was not. What if I got a, a big fancy career that everyone would respect? I became a critical care flight paramedic.

I worked in school districts and government offices. Any careers with clout that might make me feel good about myself, that might make me feel good enough to get the approval from the world that I was looking for. The acceptance, the love to help my, to make myself feel important, to feel like I mattered in the world.

I started earning what felt to me like insane amounts of money. I could travel as much as I wanted. I had two weeks off every month. My income was utterly in disposable. I could do anything that my heart desired. I ga engaged in codependency and people pleasing, right? I tried everything and here I was with this life, all this, the money, everything I wanted externally, and yet I was utterly miserable on the inside.

None of it worked. It was only temporary. And as soon the pain of rejection, the fear of inadequacy, the grief and the regret of all my life choices would just come barreling back at me, and then I would be stuck yet again with that question of what to do with all this pain, which was now compounded in staggering ways.

And I can tell you when you get to the place in your life where you have the money, the success, the career, the house, all the things that you are wanting, and when you arrive at that dream, that thing that you thought would finally be the answer, and you arrive there only to find that there is an emptiness still inside you.

I can tell you from personal experience that is one of. The most painful things, it's almost easier to experience that pain and that emptiness when your life is a disaster, quote unquote, and you feel like you have an excuse, right? I was in the depths of my addiction. I was really just creating external excuses.

To validate my internal pain, and once I removed those external excuses, and I created a life that from the outside looked successful, and then I still had that gaping hole inside, that pain felt unbearable. The pain began to turn into depression, self-judgment, apathy, self-loathing, despair. Truly, I was at the bottom of my barrel.

I had lost my identity, my authenticity. When I looked around at my life, I didn't even recognize it. It didn't seem like a life that I was gonna be living, not when I was young, for sure. This was not really what I thought this dream was going to be.

I was completely stuck in a cycle of stress and burnout that I did not know how to get out of. I had lost my power, my energy was completely drained, my ability to dream, what I refer to as dream fatigue, which was. At an all time high for me, and I was truly beginning to lose my faith. And in fact, I might even say that I had lost it, and then something happened.

I found something that changed everything. I went looking for it because I knew, I knew I needed something different. I needed a different answer. All of this stuff that I had been trying, I had gone through everything. None of it was working. I had tried to numb the pain with food, sex, drugs, alcohol, anything.

I had tried to outrun it. I had tried to overachieve it with money and career and success and accolades. None of it worked, and I was. Truly had become physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually sick, unwell. And then I found radical acceptance, and that was the beginning of a journey that changed my life forever.

It was a journey that would eventually, Revealed to me the secret to everything that I had been unknowingly searching for. It would eventually lead me home to my true identity. It would eventually lead me home to that undeniable, untouchable, irrefutable. And Radiantly beautiful sense of worthiness and belonging that would finally allow me to get off the merry-go-round of seeking anything outside of myself for answers ever again.

And that my friends, is what this podcast is all about. I'm about to take you on a journey of self-discovery that will bring you home to the truth of who you really are. A journey of radical self-love and personal healing that will forever change the way you show up in your life, in your relationships, in your business.

It will transform the way that you see yourself. It will transform in profound ways. The way that you treat yourself, the way that you talk to yourself, it will change what you believe to be true about who you are at the very core, and it will impact in remarkable ways the way that you move. Through each and every goal or endeavor that you go after, it will allow each of your goals in your dreams, in your endeavors.

It will allow them to be fueled by a divine motivation and a guidance and a truth instead of the deficiency fueled energy that most people don't even realize they're living in. That one shift alone will make your heart come alive, but we're not gonna stop there. This is all just the beginning. And so I'm here to invite you on a journey of self-discovery that will blow your mind, and it'll set you free from things that you didn't even know or keeping you contained.

So are you ready? Let's go.

If you enjoyed this episode, take a screenshot of it for me and share it on your favorite social media platform so that your friends can find out about it too. And in the meantime, I just wanna invite you to remember that you are beautiful, that you are worthy, that you belong, and that you are powerful beyond measure.

See you next time.