Episode 33: How to Feel Strong When You Are Your Most Vulnerable with Kathy Washburn
Kathy Washburn: [00:00:00] In this solo episode, I am talking about personal strengths. From a very early age, we are encouraged to identify, focus, and strengthen our weaknesses. Think of those report cards, the honing in of the lower grades, and the energy we spent to improve in those areas. Imagine the possibilities if we were to concentrate our efforts, strengthening what is already good and right within us.
Today the discussion takes us on the journey of exactly how to do that using the science backed tools available that help us get there. The destination is peace and ease. May this podcast be a catalyst for you to become the version of you just bursting to step forward.
[00:01:00]
Kathy Washburn: Today we are going to start the podcast a little differently. This is another podcast, uh, which is solo, and I'm going to talk about personal strengths, but I'd like to start it with a little meditation. This meditation is called Strong Back, Soft Front. It is a practice that was inspired by Roshi Joan Halifax, who is a [00:02:00] PhD and a Buddhist teacher, and founder of the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Uh, so I invite you, if you're not driving, uh, to just close your eyes for a moment, and just close your eyes for a moment. And fine tune your comfort as much as you can. Feel your feet on the floor, your seat in your seat. Notice if your shoulders are aligned with your hips. Notice if your ears are over your shoulders.
Relax your jaw.
Allow your chin to release slightly down as an act of reverence to your own heart.
And I invite you to [00:03:00] inhale
and exhale.
As you continue to breathe, begin calling back all of your energy from external demands, pressures, expectations, entanglements.
The next 15 or 20 minutes is for you. It's a time of returning to you as your own best authority,
calling back all of the energy that is usually flowing out and redirecting that flow toward nothing but you in this moment.
If it helps, see if you can turn your vision inward. [00:04:00] And as you do that, maybe even allow that energy that is usually focused outward to unsnap from you. Just release it. It'll be there when you're finished. Set yourself free to simply be,
no thinking, just sensing and feeling your body here right now.
Kathy Washburn: I'd like you to notice your back, your spine that enables you to move and be flexible while also giving you a structure and the grounding and the home for the rest of your body. The strong back that represents our ability to have composure, especially [00:05:00] in difficult situations. It represents dignity, emotional, mental stability.
Our strong back enables us to be rooted and grounded in the core of who we really are.
See if you can take that knowing. Lifting your shoulders up towards your ears and rolling your shoulders down, letting your shoulder blades, your angel wings rest in your back and see if that allows you to be a little stronger, taller, and feel that strength from the seat all the way out of the crown of your head.
Rest. And the [00:06:00] awareness of your own strength, the composure that you feel right now, and this stability of your own strong back.
Can you invite yourself to sit a little taller with dignity and grace?
Now bring awareness to the soft front. This soft front that houses our lungs, our heart. all of our vital organs. And notice how a strong back allows us to maintain a soft front with the acceptance of things as they are. Our soft front allows us to remain [00:07:00] open to life as it is without resisting or closing our hearts.
And so often without even realizing it, we walk through the world with a soft back and very little stability. That closes our heart and has us crumble forward, but when we cultivate a strong back and allow that soft front to open within ourselves, we can weather the storms of life with strength, wisdom, grace, and an open heart.
We developed the ability to actually grow as a result of the challenges that we face in front of us.
So I'm just going to invite you to sit for a moment and let this concept of a strong back and soft [00:08:00] front really sink into your being.
When you feel ready, open your eyes. You can pause this podcast just so you can write down what might have come up for you. maybe even share in the notes what rose for you. The soft front and strong back can mean very different things depending on what's going on in our lives. When I think about a strong back, I often think about having a backbone and being able to set healthy boundaries.
boundaries that enable me to keep my heart open because I can find balance between caring for myself and caring for others. Without that balance, and that [00:09:00] strong back, we can tend to close our hearts and harden our soft front to the world that we face. One of the core messages of, Dr.
Halifax's teachings is the value of cultivating a strong back. in order to have a soft front.
It means we are cultivating an ability to maintain a calm mind with emotional and mental stability.
It enables us to be grounded and rooted and strong, while remaining flexible. adaptable and open to change.
Kathy Washburn: One of the ways that I help clients cultivate a strong back is understanding their own personal strengths. Now, personal strengths are considered positive traits that contribute to your character, such as kindness, honesty, perseverance, zest, [00:10:00] creativity.
If you think about one of your friends or maybe a colleague that you admire, I invite you just to like, think about their personal strengths that you believe they have, and maybe even think about a few of their weaknesses.
Now, I'm going to also invite you to think about your own personal strengths. What might those be?
Maybe even what might be your weaknesses?
Now when I ask clients to do this same thing, almost every time the strengths list for another is long and full of wonderful sentiments and statements, while the weaknesses of another's list usually contains just one or two, or maybe not even anything at all. On the other hand, when I ask clients to list their own personal strengths, their list is minimal, while their weaknesses list almost double in length.
So [00:11:00] many humans have a difficult time talking about what is good and right within them. In fact, when I ask a client about their weaknesses, they have an arsenal ready and waiting. And when I ask them to talk about their strengths and how they used one to adapt to something, it's crickets.
I would like to invite you to change that.
We often see strengths in others that we also have. So if you think about those strengths that you witness in your friend or colleague, you could probably claim one or two of those yourself.
Why are we doing this? When we are aware of and engage in our own personal strengths. We make our back stronger. If you think about this, uh, when we were younger. When I was younger, I spent a lot of time working on what I was [00:12:00] not good at. I had a really difficult time with math, so I worked with math tutors, I stayed after school and had extra credits trying to increase my math ability.
I actually even ended up going to college for finance and spent 25 years in the financial industry, which has a lot of math involved in it. But I look back and I wonder what would have happened if I put more energy and effort towards what I was good at. I was good at What would have happened had I had that ability to take What I was already really good at and make it stronger.
This is the same effect that we have as adults to focus on what is good and right within us. We have the ability to strengthen our own spirit, [00:13:00] align with our own, core being or our authenticity and, increase our wellbeing.
In fact, Dr. Ryan Nemec, who is the chief science officer at Uh, the VIA Institute on character tells us that strengths have been found to predict well being and have been linked to increased happiness, well being, work satisfaction, work engagement, meaning, self efficacy, self esteem, goal achievement, positive effect, vitality, and lower perceived stress.
You see, when things are going well, we can use character strengths to help us see what is best for in ourselves and others. And when things are going poorly, we can use character strengths to give balance to the struggles that [00:14:00] we face, shift our focus from the negative to the positive and avoid becoming overcritical by thinking about our strengths rather than what is wrong with us.
One of the things, one of the first things I do with clients is direct them to via character. org to take the strength survey so that they can start getting in touch with who they are at their best. The character strength survey summarizes. 24 character traits, and, we all have all of the 24 character strengths.
We just have them in different doses. You want to think of it that way. And, uh, I start working with clients with their top five. Five, which we call in the positive psychology coaching world, your top five signature strengths. So I would invite you to do that whenever you [00:15:00] have a moment and, see if they align with who you know yourself to be.
Kathy Washburn: So I'd like to share, um, a personal story around personal strengths for me. Um, and this is where it all began. Um, Um, it's, it's the catalyst of where I began to experience positive change and it all started, uh, through the action of focusing on my strengths. So
in June of 2016, my marriage ended. It ended in betrayal, which happens for a lot of marriages, unfortunately. And this Betrayal just shattered my definition of family, love, loyalty. It was like a major artery of the map defining me vanished instantly. [00:16:00] And with it, fault lines rippled as I questioned my foundational existence, distorted my entire history.
It was a really challenging time in my life, and it happened to coincide with both of my sons leaving to study abroad, um, and also aligning with, the end of my career as just six months prior to the end of my marriage. I retired from my 25 year career. So needless to say life as I knew it was no longer.
I did not feel like I had a strong back. In fact, I think I spent many, many hours curled up in a ball. Um, protecting my soft front, but on one particular dark night, I googled in desperation. I actually have no idea what I put into the search [00:17:00] bar, but it came up with the course, the science of happiness that was offered at UC Berkeley, greater good science center through, um, a platform called edX.
I signed up that same night, and I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning, absolutely gobsmacked with new intellectual knowledge about positive psychology, emotions, and personal strengths. I finished the online course and searched for more, which resulted in my enrolling in, uh, the positive psychology certificate program.
And that was just at the, the beginning of a 7 year journey of what I call my own master's degree in positive psychology coaching. But one of the catalysts. Of creating a [00:18:00] new identity for myself was actually discovering my personal strengths. I, I still marvel at the fact that I was 50 years old at the time.
And. To focus on what was good and right within me, um, my top five signature strengths are kindness, appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, leadership, and love. They do describe who I am when I am in line with my own authenticity. One of the things that, I also marvel at is the fact that we are often asked to be at our best in the worst of times.
By that I mean, uh, as a cancer survivor, I was being asked to make decisions about a future that was so unclear to me. I don't know how I mustered, um, the ability to, to [00:19:00] agree, disagree. or move forward with the protocols that I was being introduced to. It was the same thing when I got divorced. I was a hot mess and at the same time I was needing to make decisions, specifically financial decisions, for my future and the future of my sons.
It's really hard to be at your best when you're feeling at your worst. And this is where The personal strengths come in, so I'm going to just share a little story with you about how they worked for me in that divorce situation.
Kathy Washburn: Um, and then I want to introduce the same ability to you on a smaller exercise so that you can take that away with you.
with the help of my therapist, I created a plan for every single mediation meeting that I was involved in. [00:20:00] Um, Now, just to set the stage for you, my mediation meetings involved two lawyers, both of them male, um, my lawyer and my ex husband's lawyer, a mediator, and then also my ex husband who, always arrived with, um, A certain swagger that came from, I guess, being in love with somebody new.
I always felt like he had an air of pity for me. So this situation was extremely challenging to say the least, but I was equipped with a plan. So my therapist and I, came up with this idea of writing down my top five signature strengths on sticky notes and putting them on the dashboard of my car. And before I got out of my car, I would read those top five strengths out loud.
[00:21:00] kindness, appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, leadership, love. And I would promise to myself that nothing would come out of my mouth, unless it was from one of these drinks. Right? How in the heck do you do that? Well, this is how. When I got triggered, And believe me, I got triggered instead of reacting, I would push myself away from the table so I could take a breath.
If I still felt rattled, I would turn around, turn my whole body away from the table. You know, the two lawyers, ex husband and the mediator, I would turn around and get my bottle of water or a pen out of my bag that I strategically placed behind me. This Action would give me even more space to regulate my own nervous system.
If that didn't work, I'd pick up my [00:22:00] bag and ask for a five minute break. And in the restroom, I would splash water on my face and take a few more breaths, and then intentionally take note of what was good and right in the moment. And these were very simple, good and right things, like my fingers moved, I could feel my lungs inflate, and then I would tell myself I was okay in this moment.
There were times when I even gathered up enough courage to strike a power pose, which as Amy Cuddy told us in her 2012 TED Talk, that a two minute power pose can help you boost your performance. Uh, nail a presentation or get some leverage in a critical negotiation, which I was a part of. So I would often just stand in front of the mirror in the bathroom and strike my little power pose.
But once I got myself under control and I [00:23:00] felt that my nervous system was relaxed or at least regulated, I would go back into the meeting able to respond from a place of strength. Now, permission to be human. On two occasions, I was just too upset and I texted my lawyer and told him he needed to reschedule because nothing good was going to come.
I was too dysregulated. I was too upset and I could not make decisions for my own financial future from that place. I knew that not showing up as my best was going to be detrimental to the financial future for both myself and my sons. Now, I can tell you today, seven years later, with a strong sense of pride that I did get my portion of the financial future that we had spent 25 years building.
I was able to do this because I had gained the psychological resources, the intellectual [00:24:00] resources and the social resources I needed to build resilience and help myself create the future I wanted.
Understanding my own character strengths and that these were the capacities for my ability to think and feel and behave. It is my positive identity. My personal strengths I knew reflected who I was at my very best. And that's who I wanted to show up as, even at the same time of being a hot mess.
So the paradox. is the ability to feel strong, even at our most vulnerable.
When we understand our specific signature strengths, it allows us to move forward in situations, pleasant or unpleasant, more gracefully with a strong back. and an open soft [00:25:00] front.
Kathy Washburn: So I'm going to leave you today with your own ability to mine for some gold inside of you. I invite you to recall a difficult situation in your past and see if you can identify a personal character strength that helped you through and even think about how it helped you through.
Now, of course, you can do this without, uh, doing the via character survey, and I have found it for myself and clients that it's a more ease, easeful transition into, um, discovering your personal strengths if you fill out the survey, but recalling a difficult situation about your past. And seeing that you had strengths that got you through it allows you to now think about maybe a current difficult situation
[00:26:00] and believing in yourself because you know that it's true. How could you call upon the same inner strengths to help yourself move forward with some ease?