Thrive After 45™

Stop Self-Doubt NOW: The #1 Belief Holding Midlife Women Back - with Sabrina Trobak

• Denise Drinkwalter • Season 3 • Episode 31

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Get ready, because this conversation is going to make you rethink the voice inside your head! 

I had the absolute honour of chatting with Sabrina Trobak, a registered clinical counsellor, clinical supervisor, speaker, and author of the book, The Voice That Lied. 

With over 15 years in practice and 20 years as a teacher, Sabrina has guided thousands of people to untangle their self-doubt and finally see their own worth.

In this episode of Thrive After 45™, we go deep into the quiet voice that says, "you are not enough" and how it's secretly been running the show for so many of us. 

Sabrina’s journey from a teacher to a sought-after counsellor came from her own moment of realizing how deeply her core beliefs were affecting her life...even landing her in the hospital from stress.

We talk about the power of "baby steps" in managing anxiety, why the opposite of anxiety is confidence, and how failure can actually be a huge confidence booster. 

For anyone in midlife feeling like things are changing and new anxieties are popping up, Sabrina shares a powerful insight: you didn't lose yourself; you likely just never had the time to figure out who you were in the first place.

This whole conversation is a wake-up call to stop surviving and start living. 

We also talk about:

  • How to write a book about mental health for people who don't like to read (hello, chunking!).
  • Why the words you use...like saying "I choose to" instead of "I need to" - can completely change your sense of empowerment.
  • How to catch your anxiety on the upswing (at a "two out of four") before it hits its peak.
  • Why your life after 45 is the perfect time to explore your passions and step into who you want to be.

Sabrina’s wisdom is a gentle but firm reminder that you are way more resilient than you think you are. It's time to choose yourself and start creating the life you want.

Find Sabrina and learn more about her book, The Voice That Lied, on her website or social media channels:


She has a massive waitlist for her clinical practice, but her book and YouTube channel are incredible resources for anyone looking to make that shift. Go check her out!

Thank you for spending time with me today on the Thrive After 45™ podcast! If this episode spoke to you, be sure to hit that follow button so you never miss one.

And if you loved it, I’d be so grateful if you left a review - it helps more amazing women like you find this show!

Your journey doesn’t stop here - let’s keep the conversation going! Connect with me at denisedrinkwalter.com, and follow @thethriveafter45podcast for daily insp, tips, and support.

Remember, midlife isn’t the end - it’s just the beginning of a new, exciting chapter! Keep thriving, keep shining, and I’ll see you next time!

I'm Denise Drink Walter heart whisperer, midlife mirror and mentor. And every week I am honored to share energy and space with inspiring guests whose stories reflect so many possibilities of thriving beyond Together we'll uncover the whispers of the heart, the power of midlife transformation, the wisdom that fuels expansion. Welcome to Thrive after 45. What if the quiet voice inside that says you are not enough, has been running your life? Sabrina ACH knows that struggle of the quiet voice inside and out, and she's dedicated her life to helping others break free from it. It is an absolute honor and a privilege to welcome Sabrina Roach to our show today with over 15 years as a registered clinical counselor, clinical supervisor, speaker, and author, plus 20 plus years of teaching experience. She's guided. Thousands of people to untangle self-doubt, ease, anxiety, and finally see their own worth. Sabrina's work is about more than therapy. It's about transforming the beliefs that hold us back so we can step into lives that feel whole and true. This conversation. We'll leave you questioning the stories you've carried ready to claim something better. Sabrina, I am so excited for our conversation today and to help our listeners discover how we can shift that voice into empowerment. Welcome. Thanks for having me, Denise. I'm glad to be here. You have spent, let, let's go back and get a bit of your story and then I'm gonna bounce right into, into some questions. So let's start with how did you get where you are today? So, you know, I was a, a teacher for 20 years a a and honestly I've wanted to be a teacher since I was probably in kindergarten. Uh, so that was just the path I always knew. A big part of that was I actually didn't know what other options were out there. Um, you know, when I went to high school, you took the test. That told you what you should do and you were either a nurse, a secretary, or a teacher. Um, and uh, so I didn't like blood and didn't really wanna be a secretary, so I was a teacher. Right. One of the three there it is exactly. Just affirmed what I believed about since kindergarten. Um, so I started, uh, as a teacher and uh, was a learning assistant teacher. So spend a lot of time. Working with smaller groups of kids where you just more, have more of that connection. They open a bit more about their anxiety, their stressors, their, you know, worries, their fears, and really kind of realized that I liked working with people who were struggling with that kind of stuff. So I decided to get my master's in counseling, psychology, and, uh, start to work as a school counselor. So I did that for a few years, and then I went to a workshop that was about suicide, but it was looking at suicide from that core belief of feeling not good enough, not important, not valued at the end of the three day workshop, I just, it, it just, it just resonated with me. And so I talked with the presenter and we went back and forth for about a year and he agreed to teach me his model of therapy. So I quit teaching and started my own private practice. In this model of therapy, that was back in 2010 and within six months I had a waiting list. Uh, and I've had a waiting list ever since, and I hate having to turn people away. So that's when I decided to write a book so I could at least provide a resource for people who can't access counseling for whatever reason. Right. When did the book come out? Uh, two years ago, this past summer. Okay. I'm, and I imagine it's still flying off the shelves. Oh, no. It hasn't started to fly off the shelves yet. Well, it needs to, it's slowly, it's slowly. You know, uh, Canada produces something like 10,000, uh, self-help books a year or something along that lines. Okay. And I'm little peon Sabrina in Northern British Columbia. So it's just trying to get it out there. People who read the book say, this is great, this is wonderful. I wanna buy another copy for a friend. But it's just trying to get it out there so people are aware of it. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. So can you give us a bit of a snapshot of the book in terms of what it gives the reader?'cause books present in all kinds of ways, so don't have to give us meat and potatoes, but just an idea of how it reads and what types of things for sure people would receive. Yeah, right. So, you know, I think one of the biggest things. Um, it, me being a teacher, I know that people with anxiety struggle with reading. So how do you write a book about and mental health for people who don't like to read? But I learned as a learning assistant teacher, there's things you can do to build confidence so that you feel more confident in reading. And so, you know, there's a few things in the book that are done specifically to help readers stay focused. It's written in a larger font, so it's not as overwhelming. And it's chunked into really small sections. You know, I, when, as a teacher, I'd take a page and I'd say to the student, you know, read this page. And the, I can't, it's too much, it's too overwhelming. Mm. Half the page with another blank piece of paper. And I'd say, okay, just read that paragraph. Well, no problem. I could read that paragraph. And then you just slowly move the page down and they were more able to read it in smaller chunks. So the book has a lot of visuals, a lot of diagrams, a lot of charts, um, and it's broken into really small chunks. So really you can read like a half a page and stop. The other thing I did was I provided, made it interactive. So you read a little bit of information and then you complete an activity based on your own experiences. So it allows you to kind of really apply that information in a written format where it allows you to really think through and sort through things. For sure. When you speak about anxiety, and I'm totally hearing you, former educator here. Behind the mic, um, chunking, is that the same concept, not only for reading, but do you do the same concept when you are supporting the anxiety of all of your clients chunk things so that they can manage piece by piece? I do that with everything I do. Okay. Um, we really talk a lot about baby steps. So not even normal steps. We need to take really baby, baby, baby steps and then before we take the next step, we need to practice that step until it feels comfortable. Once it feels comfortable, then you take another step, right? A lot of people think anxiety is kind of about the event, right? I have in school, I have anxiety test writing. Not, it's not about tests. If it was, every single student would have anxiety writing tests and they don't. Anxiety is about belief in your ability to handle it. So if I believe I can handle writing tests, I'm not gonna have anxiety. If I believe I can't handle writing the test, I'm gonna have more anxiety. So the opposite of anxiety is confidence. Okay? The more I feel confident in something, the less anxiety. So whenever you're learning a new skill, you wanna build the confidence. How do you do that? Practice, practice, practice, practice. So we chunk practice, chunk practice, chunk practice. Really, really, really important. We want slow, gradual change over a significant period of time. Gonna be way more sustainable than great big jumps and leaps. That makes a lot of sense to me. Like a lot of sense. What my father always used to say, Rome was not built in a day. That's right. Yeah. And yeah, for sure. Yeah. Right. And probably a lot of trial and error I would imagine too, right? Yeah, totally. And is there, um, something that you see with the people that you work with, with your clients, with your history? When people fall. It's harder to get back up. So they're doing the practice and it doesn't work out. Ah, right. Back to ground zero. How does that work? Or does it? Yeah. You know, again, it, it's about that building that confidence, right? So there's confidence that comes from succeeding. Right. There's also confidence that comes from failing and getting back up. You know, in the schools we have the kid who's a straight A student, a strong athlete, got lots of friends, and now you know, his girlfriend breaks up with him and he's absolutely devastated because he's never had to deal with frustration. He's never had to deal with failure. Whereas the kid who struggles academically, who you know, has to really work on creating friendships who you know is, is working hard. They're fine with failure'cause they deal with it all the time. So anything new is going to create more insecurity, more anxiety. It's getting better at realizing, hey, this is new. Something I haven't dealt with before. But I can handle it. And the more we practice building that, whatever it is, whether it's hiking or writing a test or anything in between, the more you practice it, the more confident you're gonna get. So there's, you know, there's confidence building in doing, but there's actually even more confidence in failing and getting back up and figuring it out and moving forward. I love that. I love that. That makes so much sense. And for women in midlife years, when everything seems to be changing in the world in terms of our family unit, for example, children going off to post-secondary. Life, physiology, physical stuff going on in our bodies and we're like, this is all new. And I thought I was fine. And all of a sudden these things start hitting. Do you notice that people have a new experience with anxiety that where they never had it before and is it the same process you go through in terms of your support? I think anxiety can kind of change and adapt as we, as we get older, for sure. But I think for a lot of people it's always been there. We just have been too busy to recognize it. So when you're busy working and taking care of kids and doing all these other things, we just avoid, avoid, avoid, avoid, avoid. Right now those things go away and it's like uhoh, what is going on? Um, and so we often, when when I talk with clients, they kind of come to that realization, you know, that was there before. I just didn't recognize it. I didn't acknowledge it. And again, there's a confidence piece that has to come with that. If I don't believe I can handle recognizing my anxiety, I'm not gonna do it. But once I start believing in myself more and believing that I can handle doing those things, then I can start to see things that before I just blocked out because I wasn't ready to deal with them. Right. So does Belief come before. Or does it come during the practices or does it come after? Or is it all encompassing? All of the above. All, you know, I think it, it is needed in the beginning stage. Bottom line, if you don't believe you can handle something, you're not gonna do it. So you've gotta believe in yourself that you can handle it. But then once you do it because you believe in yourself, then you believe in yourself even more. Then if it goes well, you can believe in yourself after, if it doesn't go well and you go, okay, well I could do these things differently next time, it's gonna believe in yourself even more that you can do it. So it's definitely the seed, um, that needs to be planted when you start, but then you, you are watering it throughout for sure. I love that. Yeah, I love that. And you are part of not only the watering, but you are also the sunshine and you are also the opportunity for the oxygen to be put in as the growth happens, right? So that people can reflect. Do you find people are really good reflectors, self reflectors? Or is that a journey as well? That's a journey as well? Yeah. You know, I think we've spent most of our life just kind of suppressing things. Definitely suppressing emotions. But we often, so many people are just in survival mode. Right. Yes. Just I get through the day. I gotta get through the day. I gotta get through the day. Well, there's not a lot of opportunity there for really understanding why you're doing what you're doing, seeing things at a different level. Once that you can slow that down a little bit and actually live rather than survive. Yeah. Then you all kinds of things that before you just weren't able to see because you weren't ready. There was too much other things on your plate. I love what you're saying. Can you say that again? You said very clearly because you weren't ready. It's not because you didn't do what you were supposed to do, it was because you were not ready and available. Right? Yeah. There, you know, you really, you have to believe in yourself. You can handle doing it. Otherwise, you're just not going to do it. Whether that's responsibility, whether that's awareness, whether that's feeling your emotions, whatever it is, if you don't believe you can handle doing it, you're not gonna do it. And that's often where that core belief comes in. If you feel not good enough, not not valued. You are not gonna believe in yourself. You can handle things, so you end up avoiding all kinds of things. The more you avoid, the more you're feeding that anxiety.'cause you don't believe in yourself, you can handle it. The more you're reinforcing that core belief. So it all, all, they all spiral into each other and just create this massive snowball effect that we end up carrying with us. And it nothing stays the same, either gonna get better or get worse over time if you're not making a real conscious effort to challenge it. It's gonna be getting worse, right? Right. So if you're in the audience right now going, oh, that makes sense because things are getting worse for me, so I need to step back and take a different lens of opportunity here. Right? Right. And so what I even challenge my clients on that is, no, you don't need to, but you can choose to. That feels different, right? Need is again, it's that survival. I gotta get it push. No, I choose to do this. For me, that's way more empowering. That's got more ownership, more responsibility, right? So we gotta be careful of even the words that we're often using for ourselves. That, are they actually feeding that insecurity, that self-doubt, that core belief, that anxiety, are they actually allowing us to challenge ourselves to do things a bit differently? For sure. Right, right. When you say about, um, choice. We always have a choice in the way we think, in the way we respond, in the way that we decide we're gonna show up or we're not gonna show up. Every day, choices are being made and if you take it through the lens, you want to share so deeply in terms of you are enough, then that will help with that shift, won't it Long term. For sure. The, the more you believe in yourself, the more that core belief is good enough, important and valued. The more confident you're gonna believe in yourself, that you can make choices. Um, if I, you know, if my core belief is not good enough, not important, not valued, I'm gonna struggle with making decisions, I'm gonna struggle with having a voice.'cause I don't believe in myself. I can handle doing it. So I don't do it. As that core belief shifts, now I feel more confident in myself that I can make those choices, make those decisions. So instead of letting life happen to me, I am now actively creating the life that I wanna create. You mentioned at the beginning of the show. This is so good. Thank you for all these nuggets. I'm just like lapping them up. Thank you. You mentioned at the beginning of the show that you started in education because that was the litmus test that came out, that you were the educator, right? No blood. Nope. Not going to nursing. Thanks anyway. Even though they're helpers that do all the amazing things differently, it's all cool. Right? So. After years of helping so many people get untangled about that painful belief that they're just not good enough. Is there a time you can recall that you came face to face yourself with that voice in your own life? And what did it take for you to stop letting that take over the show and you took the reins and made that choice and decision? No. I'm doing this. So there was a significant impact that happened when I was teaching, but I didn't clue into it until I went to the workshop. So when I went to that workshop and he was talking about the core belief, not good enough, not important, not valued. It was just like this whole ripple effect came into effect where it was like, oh, now I see why I did what I did. When I was working as a teacher, I was teaching science. And I remember going into a classroom and, um, I forgot the beakers. We needed 250 milliliter beakers and I didn't have them. And so instead of going, okay, kids, gimme two minutes, I gotta run back and grab the beakers, I'll be right back. I said that, but on the way there, I beat myself the whole way. Beat myself up the whole way. Oh, you're so stupid. How could you forget those beepers? Why do you have to do this now? The kids are all gonna think that you can't even do anything. You're so incompetent. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? I didn't even realize I was doing it because I did it quite regularly, right? Mm-hmm. Shortly after that, I ended up in the hospital because I was getting these really, really bad headaches. They did, uh, lumbar puncture because they thought I had some sort of a brain aneurysm or something like that. When they, uh, removed the needle from the lumbar puncture, it didn't seal up. So I continued to have fluid, spinal fluid, um, coming out of the the, um. Spinal cord, whatever it was, right. I'm like, I said, I'm not Gotcha. Anyways, I ended up in a black room for five days. My head felt like it was going to explode, and they said There's nothing wrong with you. And I was like, there's something wrong. And so I did start to realize then, okay, there's nothing going on here. This is stress. This is me kind of beating myself, putting up too much pressure on myself. So there was a slight awareness and a a bit of a shift, but I still continued to do what I did. It wasn't a. Until I really became aware from that workshop of, oh, this is way deeper than what I was doing before that I was really able to kind of heal and sort through things for sure. Wow, wow. Can you still, this is maybe a bizarre question, but I have to ask it. Can you still remember that pain that you went through in those five days or no. No, I, I remember I was in pain, but I don't actually. You don't recall? You don't like I don't. I remember it, but I don't feel it. Yeah. Perfect. Right. Like when I think about it, I don't feel that pain. No. Which to me tells me you healed. That part of you? Yeah, for you know, and since I've started, because I still was getting headaches, they definitely got a bit better'cause I was managing my stress a bit more. But I was still getting these really bad headaches. I haven't had a headache like that now in almost 11 years. Because I'm aware of what my stress looks like or my anxiety looks like. As it gets higher and higher, I put strategies in place. So I manage it before it gets to that point. And in the book we talk about all these more subtle symptoms of anxiety. That we often don't realize. We know what our anxiety looks like when it's like at its highest peak, but we don't necessarily know what like it's like as it's growing, which means we're not doing anything about it until it's really, really high. Whereas now I know what my anxiety looks like at, you know, a two out of four, a three out of four put strategies in place. I don't have to get to that. Four to four. I love that listeners. That's perfect. Perfect information for you to sit back and reflect, whoa, imagine what could happen if I started understanding that I am enough, and understand where the anxiety begins so I can do that reflection and grab the book. And also Sabrina, you are doing some amazing things on YouTube. Tell us about what's going on there.'cause that's exciting for those in the audience who were really visual people, right? Yeah. So, um, yeah, just a couple months ago I started working with a guy to help me kind of promote my YouTube channel as a way of hoping to try to sell my book. You know, I've spent the last two years trying all kinds of different things. One of them was podcasting. So I have done quite a few podcast interviews. I did this one podcast interview where this guy said, you know, I can help you get your YouTube kind of up and running. I had a YouTube channel before that for, I don't know, maybe two, two and a half years or something. Mm-hmm. Put a little bit on it. Not a lot. Uh, my total views in three years was 764 or something like that. Okay. Yep. In these last two months, really promoting and putting a lot of shorts out. Right now I just reached a hundred thousand views, total views, um, in, in my videos. And now we're starting to do more of the longer videos where we're going into more detail about some of this stuff as well. So, you know. Hopefully it sells book, but really I'm, the purpose of doing the book is just to provide more information to people so they can see and understand things differently. And if people are able to do that through the YouTube channel, that works for me too. That's still the, you know, the purpose of doing this is to try to provide support and help as many people as I can. For sure. Exactly. Like you shared near the beginning of the show, the wait list is huge. There's a reason because what you do is help people come home to themselves. Right. And I, and, and that's why you're on my show because you're so aligned with what we talk about here. You are in the driver's seat, and there are times where you feel like, I can't do, I don't know. Well, where am I? I am lost. Sabrina will have, will have all of her contact information in the show notes so you can find her, you can find the channel, you can find the book that as you explore the book, you'll be able to piece together what's going on behind the scenes for yourself and come up with the strategies that work for you as part of that journey. When we are getting ready to do our close, I always love to ask this question. Is there one thing that you would love to make sure that our listeners, our audience, our community, really hears from you as a last nugget of truth that you wanna share? You know, I'm 57, um, and you know, I think that, you know, 45 after really even after 40. Once the, the kids are gone, things are kind of quieting. It really is your time to figure out who you are. And I have a lot of clients that kind of say to me, you know, I, I lost who I was. And I often challenge them on that and say, no, I don't think you did.'cause I don't think you ever really found out who you were in the first place. You spend your whole life trying to please your parents, please your teachers, please your family. Please your kids, please, your partner. Please. Please your, please, your boss. You never really stop and think about who you wanna do. So I think, you know, at this stage in your life where things are a bit quieter, this is a great opportunity to really stop and think about. Who do you wanna be? Who are you? What are your passions? What are your challenges? You know, what are the things that you, you know, you, you wanna learn and grow and figure out more of, you are way more resilient than you give yourself credit for. And if you take little steps on exploring that, um, in a year, you're gonna come a really long way. I love that. Sabrina, thank you so much for being with us today, sharing your wisdom, and like I say in the show notes, we'll have all the information that you need in order to contact Sabrina and see what she's up to. She's all over social media. I follow her everywhere. It's. Great to see her snippets and her shorts full of such great information. So thank you. Thank you for taking that journey that you had to take. I believe always have believed and will always believe until my last breath, that what we have been given, we are exactly where we are supposed to be. So thank you for taking the journey you've taken and doing what you do every day to make a difference for yourself and those around you. Thanks for having me. I enjoyed our conversation. What activated in you Claim your Sovereignty Me Academy expands you. Until next time, have a wonderful day everyone.