28 | The Brazilian Nut Effect: Why Being Big Will Save Your Life

Most of us know what’s best for us, but we don’t do it...Why? Because we’re waiting for someone else to give us permission. In this episode, I riff on permission slips, cycles, human design, and why playing small isn’t just hurting you, it could be burying you.

I share the story of avalanche backpacks, Brazilian nuts, and what it means to make yourself big in a world that tells women to shrink. Being big—trusting your intuition, asking for help, filling your cup first, taking up space—will save your life.

If you’ve been waiting for someone to hand you permission, let this episode be it.

Stay bold, stay balanced, and I’ll see you next week.

☕️ Stay bold, stay balanced, stay thriving

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Transcript

0:00:00 - (Carly): Hello, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Wherever you're tuning in from, wherever you are plugging in from, so, so happy you're here. September is a very exciting month. There's been a lot happening. I just got back from Colorado where I attended a Living Brave Live conference.

0:00:42 - (Carly): It was hosted by my mentor that I've been working with for the last year. And that's going to be a whole episode of my takeaways from that episode. What they like to call it is Burning man for women entrepreneurs, which sums it up pretty fantastically. But other exciting news in my world is I'm getting married in two and a half weeks, which is wild. I've been with my fiance for eight years, so this is just, it's all exciting. A lot's happening. I had a major breakthrough in my business that I'm so excited because it's going to benefit you all.

0:01:15 - (Carly): But really the main thing happening in my world is my one to one private coaching. So I have four spots available for the end of the year. And if this is something that you have been, you know, eyeing me from afar, looking at me on Instagram, maybe following along on my podcasts, and you're just like really ready to finish the year strong, right? You're just, you know that you're meant for more. You're ready for a change and you just need somebody in your back pocket. You need somebody who's not yourself to be a mirror, to kind of help reflect back, right? What you already know. Sometimes we are our own worst critics, right? Or it's hard for us to take our own own advice. But I do only have four spots left through end of the year for my coaching.

0:02:01 - (Carly): This is very high touch. It's transformational, which is why it's a minimum of three months. So I do offer three six or nine month packages. So that's available. That's what's happening in my world. Otherwise we'll just be pouring into this podcast, pouring into Instagram, and then some really exciting programs coming down the pipeline later in the year. So that's what we've got going on in my world.

0:02:25 - (Carly): And today, let's jump right into it. I want to talk about the word permission, right? Or permission slip. So I had just said this, right? Most of the time, we all know what's best for us. Our body certainly knows what's best for us, we even consciously, like, know what we want or we know what we need to do, and we still don't do it. Why? Because we need somebody else to give us permission to go do it.

0:02:56 - (Carly): Okay. It's one of these very lovely conditions, right, of growing up in our society, right? For about 18 years, you needed permission to go use the bathroom. So it kind of makes sense that we all have a problem listening to ourselves, right? That we need permission all of a sudden to listen to our own authority. And it's especially as women, right? I do coach women only. We're here. We have been conditioned to do everything for everyone, be everything for everyone, particularly once we enter motherhood. I have a client that's a new mom, and she's going through this, right? We're expected to show up wholeheartedly for everyone else, be the best version of ourselves for everyone, and yet it feels literally impossible to do the same for ourselves until one day somebody else gives you permission, like a coach.

0:03:51 - (Carly): So one example, I had a call with my client this morning, and she had a diagnosis later in life that gave her permission to finally be her. Right? A lot of her life, she kind of felt like she didn't fit in. She felt, you know, she struggled with some confidence, like, you know, what's going on? And it wasn't until she got that diagnosis that everything changed. Why? Because she was all of a sudden gifted a new rule book, right?

0:04:15 - (Carly): There was this shift that was like, oh, there's nothing wrong with me. I was just trying to operate from a different rule book, right? All of a sudden, she was given permission to be herself because she had this different story about who she was now. So you were just trying to operate from a different rule book. Okay, so this is why. This is just one example of why my mission is to educate and empower women through their periods, through their cycles, through learning about hormone health.

0:04:49 - (Carly): Because on my own journey back to myself, back to my power, back to living this wild life, that was my permission slip. I started learning about hormone health, my cycles. I went off birth control about five years ago. Now. That was my very first permission slip to be myself, to do what was best for me. Okay? So in a world like, where I thought everything had to come from. Force, hustle, push, just like, go, go, go, go. I thought that by doing more, I would somehow be more creative. Like, I couldn't slow down in this world. I didn't know how to receive.

0:05:32 - (Carly): I was disconnected from my body, from my energy. I shamed myself for not being able to show up the same way every day in life. Like, right, why was that workout so hard? Or, oh, my God, why am I so tired today even though I slept the same amount as last night? Right. There was so much, like, guilt and shame and expectation of, like, why I couldn't just keep up with everyone around me. And then, of course, burnout happened and I was disconnected, and I, you know, didn't think I was creative and all of these assumptions and stories I told myself.

0:06:03 - (Carly): But then I started going down this rabbit hole, this path of learning about my and my body on a cellular level. And then I also learned how our cycles can actually reconnect us back to our own intuition. And so it was through this journey and this learning that I realized, oh, I'm not supposed to. I'm not supposed to be able to show up every single day. That's not my superpower. My superpower lives in cycling every 28 days. Right. I've talked about this before. You know, if you're kind of new to my love of cycle syncing and hormone, I do have another kind of a mini series in this podcast called Feminine Freedom, and I talk a lot. The first episode in that series is all about hormone health, so tune in there. But this is also my jam, so just follow me on Instagram. You're going to learn a lot about it. But it was my permission slip.

0:06:58 - (Carly): Learning about my body and my biology as a woman in a scientific way. Understanding that in your luteal phase, you know, your progesterone is slowly rising, but estrogen and testosterone is lowering. Like, you're supposed to really not have a lot of energy or not supposed to, but I often don't have a lot of energy, and that's normal, right? I finally gave my permission myself, permission to slow down, to stop pushing on the days when it wasn't there, because maybe my. My superpower was something else. My energy was elsewhere.

0:07:33 - (Carly): And so that's also why I love human design. So those are my two jams and two tools that I use with all my clients is learning about their hormones and learning about their human design. That's also why people love, like, astrology and all these things. It's little breadcrumbs back into who they are. It's a tool, it's a vocabulary. It's a permission slip that helps them give permission to act, be, and feel the way that they've always felt. What they've always known is themselves, but they maybe just couldn't do it right? And so it's that perfect first Shift.

0:08:06 - (Carly): That's why it is my tool. It's my vehicle that I coach women through to help them reconnect to themselves. And so all of a sudden, we get to relax, we get to be a little more confident, we get to be a little more free because we realize, oh, this is who I am and this is who I get to be. And so these tools like cycle syncing, like hormone health, right? They give you the permission that you couldn't give yourself. Talked about it before. It's part of whatever our conditioning is. It's like for some reason, we cannot give ourselves the permission that we give everybody else.

0:08:40 - (Carly): But that's okay. It's okay to look for these tools outside of yourself at first. That's how we get started with change and transformation. Because eventually what will happen is you will start to be able to give yourself permission as you start to build that bridge between your mind and your body again, as you start to reconnect with your authority and your intuition and your power. And that is when things get really spicy, okay? That's when we start to get brave, right? So we use these tools to get us started, to get us on the path, to get us momentum.

0:09:18 - (Carly): And then we start to be our own authority, our own permission giver, and we start to get brave. We start to take a step in the direction of our dreams. We stop playing small, because here is the truth. Playing small is not hurting anybody else but you. In fact, it might even get you killed. Okay? So see, in snowboarding, when you venture out into the backcountry, so this is the unpatrolled area where the mountains and it's just raw wilderness, right? And so a lot of these very seasoned, these good backpacking or backcountry snowboarders, they wear something called an avalanche backpack.

0:10:02 - (Carly): And you shouldn't have to use it because you should be smart. You should be using your AVI training. You should not be putting yourself in those situations. But should an avalanche ever happen, ever pop, you have this backpack on, and you just pull this little trigger kind of near the straps, and all of a sudden an airbag inflates, right? So envision, like, avalanche happens. It sweeps you off your feet. You're getting tossed around in this snow. It's catching all this debris. Like, there's just a lot happening.

0:10:32 - (Carly): So why all of a sudden does this airbag help save you? Okay, it's because it makes you big. So you're tossing down this mountain, there's all of this debris around you. This just kind of like medley of Things, right? And all of a sudden your body mass is bigger and therefore you float to the top above other things. Have you ever wondered why when you open a jar of those mixed nuts, those like big ass Brazilian nuts are always sitting right?

0:11:05 - (Carly): It's because they're the biggest, right? It's the ones that nobody really ever eats, but it's because they're the biggest nuts, okay? So there's actually something called the Brazilian nut effect, right? Where the things that are bigger float to the top. And so society has taught us, especially as women, that being big, taking up space is bad, that being too much is bad, that asking for help when you need it is bad, right?

0:11:35 - (Carly): All of that is wrong. All of that is conditioned according to who? Who wrote that rule book? Some schmuck in the 1800s who thought that women should be quiet, polite, and only speak when spoken to. Asking for help when you need it. Choosing to invest in yourself, that makes you big. Fully and unapologetically expressing yourself, and that makes you big. Choosing to fill your own cup up first before giving your all to everybody else, that makes you big.

0:12:06 - (Carly): Trusting yourself, your intuition, your desires, even when it doesn't make sense to other people, that makes you big. And guess what? Being big will save your life, right? In the wild ride that is life, like life is an avalanche, sometimes it sweeps you off your feet and just carries you into unknown places, right? And if we continue to make ourselves small, we are going to get buried in the avalanche of life.

0:12:44 - (Carly): But when we can allow ourselves to be big, to be ourselves, to be expressed, that's when we get to rise to the top. That's when we survive the avalanche. And all of a sudden, life is amazing. Think about the wild ride. You survived life on top and you feel alive and amazing and accomplished doing that. I do not condone anybody to actually put themselves in an avalanche situation. I just feel like I need to say that. But being big is going to save your life, okay?

0:13:20 - (Carly): So where in our lives are we playing small? Where can you give yourself permission? So that is the beauty and the power of having a coach, right? A reflection back sometimes to get started, to get ourselves unstuck, to get ourselves out of this little cycle. Sometimes it does just take someone or something else to give you that permission. Learning about your biology as a woman, learning about our on a cellular level, who you are, or it's a human design reading that your friend had you take back in 2022, that changed your whole life, right? My first human design reading gave me a vocabulary for myself. That I didn't have at first, right? Miracles come wrapped in all sorts of weird ways, but that was my biggest tool is hormone health and cycles, right? Learning about the science of who we are and then connecting that into the soul of who we are.

0:14:21 - (Carly): So whether you're ready to give yourself permission, sometimes I will have my clients literally write themselves a permission slip, right? Like think back to when your parents signed a permission slip for you to go on the field trip. Write down your desire, write down what you want to do, and literally sign it. Give yourself permission. Or if you still can't do that for yourself, go find someone who can be the permission for you.

0:14:48 - (Carly): Invest in spaces, in women, in coaches, in support, in mentors who can be that permission for you until you can give it to yourself. So remember, being big. Making yourself big will save your life in this wonderful avalanche that we call life. I love you all. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Coffee with Carly again. As always, if you want to join the weekly Brew, that is just basically an email every week where I share riffs, insight stories, kind of similar to what we do on the podcast, but straight to your inbox every week.

0:15:28 - (Carly): Tips, all of that, what's also going on in my world, special offers, birthday giveaways, all those things. And then most of my influence, my value is on Instagram and this podcast. So if you love what you hear, if this is your first time tuning in, I would absolutely love if you subscribed, left a rating or review wherever you're plugging in, Apple or Spotify, it means the world to me. And as always, everybody like a good cup of coffee.

0:15:58 - (Carly): Stay bold, stay balanced, and I will see you next week.