The Create Your Day Podcast
You didn’t work this hard just to feel stuck, exhausted, or disconnected from your own life. Create Your Day is where high achieving, heart driven women come to get real about what it takes to actually feel good while building success. Hosted by Jenn Cody, your no-fluff, no-apologies bestie in your earbuds, this show dives deep into the mindset shifts, emotional wake-up calls, and small (but mighty) moves that lead to real alignment, real confidence, and a life you actually want to wake up to. If you're done with perfectionism, overthinking, and waiting for "someday," you're in the right place. Listen in for tough love, practical tools, personal stories, and a-ha moments that will leave you thinking, "Wait, why has no one ever told me this before?!" Ready to create your day (and your life) on your terms? Let’s go!
The Create Your Day Podcast
97. Navigating the Void: When Growth Feels Like Loss
Have you ever found yourself feeling unexpectedly sad after achieving something you worked so hard for? That disorienting fog where you no longer recognize yourself, yet haven't fully stepped into who you're becoming? Welcome to what I call the "identity hangover" – that strange, uncomfortable space between identities that nobody warned you about.
Growth requires shedding old versions of ourselves, like a snake discarding its skin. But that moment of standing exposed, without the comfortable familiarity of who you used to be, can feel profoundly destabilizing. What makes this experience so jarring isn't that we miss our old lives – even when they were painful or limiting – but rather we miss the certainty they provided. We knew exactly how to navigate that world, even if it was through survival mechanisms that no longer serve us.
The signs are unmistakable: achieving goals only to feel underwhelmed, second-guessing decisions you were previously confident about, feeling awkward in spaces that once felt comfortable, or even subtly sabotaging your forward momentum because it feels disloyal to your former self. This isn't weakness or regression; it's a natural part of transformation. Your brain and body are simply catching up to the new reality you've created for yourself. The silence isn't the absence of you – it's creating space where your authentic self can finally emerge.
If you're feeling foggy right now – like you should be celebrating but instead feel lost – know that you're standing at the threshold of your next evolution. Don't rush it. You're exactly where you need to be. Ready to navigate this space with support? My new Balance and Breakthroughs membership is launching soon, designed specifically for women who are constantly evolving and need guidance through these identity shifts. Visit JenCody.com to learn more and join us in doing the real work together.
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Hello friends, welcome to Episode 97 of the Create your Day podcast. My name is Jen Cody and I am your host. Welcome back. If you have been with us, if it's your first time here, welcome, so happy. I hope you decide to join us each and every week. So today, stay with me, because we are not going to do the usual.
Speaker 1:We're not talking about how to level up your life. We're not talking about how to achieve your goals. We're not even talking about scaling your business. We're talking about something totally on the other side of that, which is it can be a little bit weird, can be a little bit heavy, and it actually is disorienting. It's this part of growth that not a lot of people warn you about. We talk about it. It's out there. You can find books and podcasts and blogs about it.
Speaker 1:But when you're choosing to grow, when you're choosing to pivot your life, this is not something you really think about, and what it's called is the identity hangover. It's an uncomfortable place. It could be foggy and it's where the person you used to be is no longer. But the person you're becoming is not familiar and you don't really know who she is yet. You don't really know what that place looks like You're not really in it yet. So if you think about like a snake that sheds its skin, it's the same thing. You're shedding that part of your life, you're shedding the person you used to be and now you're just kind of standing naked in the hallway because you don't know what's put on yet and that's uncomfortable and, like I said, weird. Right, it's weird, it's heavy, it's not negative, it's just not comfortable. So if you are someone that has ever asked yourself what do I want for my life and taken the time to really be bold and go for it, you asked for the change. But now you kind of miss your old life or you feel a little bit unexpectedly sad in the middle of success. This episode is for you.
Speaker 1:So something that we talk about in personal growth a lot is how to make the pivot right, like what do we have to do to be bold, to be brave and to choose change for ourselves? And that's inspiring, it's motivating and it knocks us off our feet. It's destabilizing at best and that's, on purpose, right. We can't move forward, we can't make those changes while still holding on to the person we used to be. So when you do evolve anywhere in your life.
Speaker 1:Something always gets left behind. It just is. And maybe that's a job, right? Maybe you are working from one thing to the other, you're opening a business. Whatever it is, the person you were before at your old job is no longer, so you are leaving that person behind.
Speaker 1:Sometimes it's a group of people, a social circle that does not necessarily fit your life anymore. That person doesn't exist anymore, and so the new you doesn't really know how to be in that social circle anymore. Sometimes it's just a version of you that you needed to let go of. Maybe you were the person we spoke about last week on here, right? The person who is super self-sacrificing, always hyper-competent and always available to do for everyone else, because that's who you wanted to be until you couldn't be. So that person is now left behind.
Speaker 1:That version of yourself is gone. We need to leave her behind, and it's okay if that makes you feel a little bit sad. It's okay if that makes you feel unexpectedly nostalgic for things in your life that you don't even think were that good. It's not about it being good, it's about it being comfortable. So this is not a negative, it's not a weakness. It's literally grief that you're feeling, and we think of it when we're in this place. We think that we're grieving our old life. We think that we're grieving our old identity, and I'm here to tell you that is actually not what you're grieving. What you're grieving is the certainty of that old identity, because it was comfortable, right, even if that person was completely overwhelmed, completely burnt out, always performing for someone else's approval. She was familiar approval. She was familiar and she knew how to navigate the world you lived in. So when we think about getting to that point where we're going to make a change in our life, we get to the point where we're like this is not sustainable anymore, I need to make a change.
Speaker 1:Up until that point where you found out where you realized, you came online and realized, yeah, this isn't going to work for me. Up until that point, there's a pretty good chance that you were navigating the shit out of that world. You just knew exactly how to operate from morning to night as a survival mechanism. So, even though that is not a good thing, it's a familiar thing, it's a comfortable thing. And now you're walking into this new chapter of your life and you don't have a script. You don't know what's going to happen next. You don't know how you're going to feel moment to moment, because you're learning how to navigate this new place and your nervous system can be like what the heck is going on? Are we actually safe here? Is it okay for us to be in this space? We don't know yet.
Speaker 1:So that happens a lot to us as well, like if we're moving from point A to point B, there is a moment where we have to let go completely of the old place to jump into the new one. You know it's like monkey bars. When you were a kid, do you ever remember like climbing from the monkey bars, one hand going from one to the other, rung to rung? You could not move forward until you let go of the monkey bar that you were holding on to. And that's what happens in our life, and for that brief moment it can be unsafe. So it's normal for our brains to be like hold up, what's going on. We need safety and we need it soon. And our initial instinct is going to think that safety is where we came from, because it's comfortable and familiar, even if it was painful. There are tons of people out there who are super comfortable in their pain, so it doesn't mean it wasn't painful just means it was comfortable.
Speaker 1:So when you think about this, let's get really real about how you might be feeling, because there are signs. If you're kind of feeling like I might be speaking to you but you're not sure, let's talk about it, because one of the first indicators that this is happening to you is that you hit a really big goal and you're feeling like eh, or you're terrified and you have no idea who this person is that lives in the reality of hitting this goal. You should be proud of yourself. You thought you were going to feel like, oh my God, I am unstoppable, but instead you feel now, what do I do? Who am I now? And that's a signal that you outgrew who you were before the achievement, but you haven't recalibrated to the person that you're going to be now that you have achieved it.
Speaker 1:You also may find yourself second guessing everything that you used to be really sure about. So maybe this is as simple as like, let's say, you switch jobs. Maybe you're not sure, maybe you're not sure, maybe you're not sure, maybe you're not sure, maybe you're not Even down to like what do you dress like for this new job? How do you present yourself? Maybe you feel a little bit awkward in rooms that you used to be really comfortable in. You may be finding yourself questioning all your decisions and asking yourself is this me? How do I make it me? This is the void, right. It's not a breakdown, it's a reassembly of your life. It's taking all of the pieces that are that make up you. You took them all apart so that you can be in a new reality and now you're putting them back together and you're wanting to feel comfortable right away and it's going to take some time.
Speaker 1:How many of you have low-key, kind of sabotaged your new growth because it feels disloyal to your old life? It feels disloyal to your old self. This can be something you know, especially when it comes to social and friendships and relationships, relationships number one, oh, my goodness, I can even say going through my divorce, there were times when I just wanted to hold on to that old life because I felt like it was disrespectful to my old self to want a better reality for myself and for my children. So I was telling myself that I wanted change. I was telling myself that I wanted to live differently, but something kept pulling me back and it was that comfort of even though we were so unhappy, I was comfortable in that unhappiness. I didn't know what was going to happen on the other side of that, so that took a lot of balls to make that decision, you know, and to put yourself in that position. There's a lot of people out there who don't know how to take that step without it being so terrifying. So sometimes that's how we're feeling.
Speaker 1:This is just keep pulling us back into staying in the bad relationship, staying with a group of friends that keeps you down, staying in a place where you're overworked or undercharging, overcommitting yourself. And we do this because on some level, we do feel guilty. We feel guilty for wanting more. We feel guilty for growing, especially if it means leaving other people behind. We feel guilty for changing. We feel guilty for standing up for ourselves and saying we deserve what we deserve.
Speaker 1:So if you've always been the strong one, the reliable one, the over-functioning one for so so long you've lived your life that way. You built your identity on that, and now, if you're not available for that anymore, you definitely could be feeling that you're betraying some version of yourself. You're betraying what other people expect of you. But that's not self-sabotage, it's actually self-preservation. It's preserving your identity. Your system is trying to keep you from losing that familiar you, even though she was so unhappy. And that is sad, right, it's okay for that to make you sad, you know, I think a lot of us when we move forward.
Speaker 1:And let's take relationships out of it for a second. If we just talk about work and you think about some of you out there who have tried for a big promotion, let's say, and you work really hard and you level up your game at work in a big way and you get the promotion, well, now that means that you're gonna be working on a different floor with a different group of people and you're so happy about it, right, you worked so hard for it, but it's still a little sad. You're not gonna see your friends anymore that you used to see every morning to have coffee together. You're not going to sit next to the same person that you used to discuss what was going on with your kids, what was going on with your family. So Things changing can bring a level of sadness, even when we're doing something that should make us happy.
Speaker 1:So, like everything else, I really want you to be able to experience this in a way where you feel like you have the tools to move through it right. It doesn't have to be like this forever. Obviously, you're moving towards the better version of yourself, the better job, the better relationship, whatever that is and in order to do that, it's not this is not a fake. It till you make it situation. It's not like just act like you're okay until you are, I want you to. Really, when you're in this, like deep in between stage you can call it what it is.
Speaker 1:So maybe it's saying, you know, I miss the version of me who got instant praise for being the one that did everything. I miss the version of me who held everything together. I miss the schedule, I miss the chaos, I miss the performance. It's okay to miss the things that we're choosing to leave behind and there's a reason why, right. Sometimes, you know, I think back to so many, so much of the work that I've done on myself and so much of what I've been able to leave behind. But I do still have moments where I miss that version of myself.
Speaker 1:And, you know, sometimes it's about feeling needed, which we all know is just human nature to feel that way. So we won't heal from what we are not willing to face. We won't heal from what we're not willing to really name. So I want you to name this. I want you to think about what is it that is making you that weird, sad? What is it that you're nostalgic for, and allow yourself to feel it because it's okay. It's time to move past that. And being in this place does not mean that you are behind, where you should be. It just means that your body and your brain are catching up to this new person that you're becoming. They're catching up to the new reality that you've chosen for yourself. So this is not really a problem to fix. It's more of a space to hold. So think of it like this If you just got out of a long, exhausting relationship, are you going to jump into the next one with perfect clarity?
Speaker 1:No, of course not. You're going to have your reservations. You're going to need time to detox yourself from the patterns that you had and the patterns that you recognize in the relationship. You need time to figure out who you are. So this is no different. Whatever it is, I want you to stop rushing this reinvention and allow that person to come forward on her own time. This is about choosing intimacy over clarity. So intimacy, when I say that I'm talking about being intimate with yourself.
Speaker 1:When you're in this in-between place, clarity is what is seducing you. Clarity is what is begging you to come back to your old self. You want the next plan, you want the next strategy, you want the next shiny goal, but what you really need is to be quiet and intimate with yourself. Allow yourself to be uncertain. Let your intuition speak to you. Don't stuff it away, don't try to make sense of it, just let it speak to you. And this is how you actually build a new self. It's not through answers. It's through deep and uncomfortable presence with who you are in the moment, who you are at your core, and recognizing who that person is.
Speaker 1:Because a lot of you who are pivoting in your life right now, you don't really know what that next version looks like. This is how you find out by being still being uncertain, naming the things that you miss, because when you don't do that, you're always going to wonder what's wrong. Why do I feel the way that I feel? Why am I not happy for what's coming my way? Why am I not happy with what I've chosen for myself? And it's not that you're unhappy, it's that you don't know what that looks like yet. So this is how you learn that. Allow yourself to say I really miss that person, I really miss who I was. Even if it was uncomfortable and painful, it's okay to miss that person, it's okay to miss that energy in your life, even if it was energy that you couldn't wait to get away from. All of a sudden it feels comforting to you.
Speaker 1:So here's what I want to leave you with. I want you to think of your growth as something that is not a constant rise. It's kind of like I don't want to say two steps forward, one step back although that might be the best metaphor now that I think of it Because what it is, it's a constant taking apart followed by reassembly. Take it apart, reassemble it, take it apart, reassemble it. And in between those two things, in between the disintegration, the taking apart and the reassembly, there's going to be grief, there's going to be emptiness, there's going to be emptiness, there's going to be awkward silence with yourself, because you no longer know who you are. And the important takeaway today is knowing that the silence is not the absence of you. It's actually creating space where the real you can come forward.
Speaker 1:So if you're feeling foggy right now, if you feel like you should feel great but you kind of feel like, meh, I just feel lost and I just feel broken and I feel like I'm second guessing myself. You are at the entrance of your next evolution. You are at for those of you who think about things in like the divine feminine you are at the birth canal right of your next evolution. Take a break, take a breath. Don't rush it. You are doing it the right way. It's a painful process, so if this hits deep with you, it's something you needed to hear. If you think you know someone that needs to hear it, share it with a friend that you know that has been kind of like quietly unraveling in the background.
Speaker 1:I want to be there for her too. So I hope that this information was valuable for you. I want you to take this information. This is how you create your day. This is how you create your life in the best way possible. If you need help navigating this space, I have a great program that's launching soon. It's going to be Balance and Breakthroughs. It's a membership. It is for women like you, who are constantly evolving and changing, and you need the support to do it right. So this is not about productivity, it's about identity. Let's do the real work together. Head on over to JenCodycom, get all the details, so I'm looking forward to seeing you here next week. And until next time, take care of yourself, take care of each other and go out there. Create your day the best way possible. Have a great one, everyone. You.