28: The “Do It Anyway” Mindset

What if the bravest thing you can do is try before you feel ready?

Daffney picks up where last week’s conversation with Dr. Brooke Resch left off: the idea that taking care of yourself often sounds simple in theory, but feels much harder in real life. Especially when you’re juggling responsibilities, navigating fear, and trying to show up for other people. In this episode, she shares a small weekend moment with her daughters that turned into a bigger lesson about fear, confidence, and why sometimes the most important step is simply doing it anyway.

In This Episode:

• (01:05) Progress over perfection
• (04:10) Why your nervous system is always “on” as a parent
• (06:00) Setting a time limit to make hard things feel possible
• (07:30) The power of trying before you feel ready

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey, friend, whatever you're doing, whatever you're afraid of, whatever you think that you can't accomplish today, do it anyway. You know, the only difference between you and a professional athlete is this mindset. It's this mindset that I may fail, I may not be perfect, I may make a fool out of myself, I may cry, I might get frustrated, but do it anyway. You're gonna make mistakes, but you're definitely gonna learn from them. And you never learn if you don't make those mistakes. Welcome to Don't F and Shrink, the podcast, where we stop playing small and start showing up big. I'm your host, Daphne Allwine, and I'm here to cut through the noise, ditch the self-doubt, and get honest about what it takes to live and lead with unapologetic confidence. Each week you'll hear unfiltered conversations, powerful stories, and in real life strategies to help you take up space in your life, your work, and your world. So buckle up because shrinking is not an option here. Let's dive in. Fitness, wellness, health, it's a progress. You are not gonna get it right. So whether you're cooking leftovers and making the most you can by throwing some extra eggs in, just try. Just try. It's there's so much fear around trying and not being perfect or not having the right collaboration of ingredients or efforts or skill level. But nobody who has ever been good at anything has started that way. One of my biggest hurdles is I had zero mom skills. It always felt like to me, being a mom felt like a constant struggle. I always felt as a kid that I was sort of a burden and my job was to grow up as fast as I could to be the biggest helper possible. If you haven't had the ability to understand the joy of childhood and all the mistakes and glory and creativity that it is, it can feel really scary. I know it did for me. It felt incredibly terrifying. But I have to tell you, this weekend was quite a triumph for me. I have a four-year-old and a 14-month-old. And these are, as you know, if you're a parent or you've had kids this age, it can be really scary from a safety perspective that there is not a lot of prefrontal cortex activity going on. There's a lot of impulsivity in their physical expression. And there's a lot of chances to be unsafe and feel uncomfortable as a parent. So finding ways to navigate can sometimes in my mind felt like a prison. Like sometimes I felt like I had to keep them inside the house so that I could keep them safe from anything else outside. And that's not like me. I've always been an outdoors person. I've always been somebody who enjoys being outside. And it seems so strange in this chapter of my life to feel like I needed to stay indoors to keep these young ladies safe. Like that, it just didn't translate. I wasn't being myself. I wasn't allowing myself to be outside and be myself. And I think that's where a lot of women talk about losing their spark, losing their ability to be themselves because you are and your nervous system is set up this way, that when you are biologically at this chapter of your life wired for safety, it is draining. It is absolutely overwhelming that even though you're sitting comfortably, baby in a couch or a chair watching your kids play, you also know that the hypervigilance, and this is again, this is biological. This is not you making this choice. This is something that's necessary. It's really hard to move away or to find the right support that allows you to step back inside your own body without that hypervigilance going on in the back of your head at all times. So one of my victories this weekend is we finally had great weather here on the East Coast. And I decided to baby step it. So just by myself, two girls, this may be easy for a lot of other people. This might be something that's so simple to pack up your kids and go. For me, it is not something, you know, the all the challenges I've had in my life, by far, this has been my greatest challenge is finding the way to navigate this. But this weekend, I started very simple. I started very easy. And I chose a very well-organized garden center. This gave the both girls an opportunity who are sort of mostly on foot with the youngest to be around plants and dirt and things that, you know, even though there might be some safety concerns, for the most part, they're just gonna get dirty at the very most, and just allowing them to experience these plants and the these situations that are essentially groped in, right? It's a it's a contained area where they can kind of explore and see and ask questions. And I also set a timer in my mind because as somebody who is aware of that hypervigilance and that energy at all times that's coming from you, I just set a timer in my head that in that we would accomplish whatever we're gonna accomplish in an hour. And if that means picking our favorite seeds, you know, finding a few things to plant, grabbing a bag of, you know, organic dirt for them to play in. It really was an outing that I, while not easy, not everybody wanted to get along at every moment, it was an hour. So, like any good workout, give yourself a time period. You would never try a new exercise. You would never try a new skill and do it for three hours straight. Like no one, whether it's your brain, whether it's your nervous system, whether it's your muscle structure, you would never tax yourself to that level initially. And knowing your body and acknowledging what's going on in your body is probably the key to parenting or existing, that I wish I had known or I wish I had been taught in in my earlier days or as a kid. What we know from psychology is that kids until they're five, you know, and and possibly seven and greater in some cases, really, really require your nervous system to regulate themselves. So if you are constantly stressed, if you're constantly fearful, if you're worried or over-anticipating their needs without letting them feel what's in their own body, I have learned that the best thing you can do is just be in the same room with them. Just allow them to feel whatever they're feeling and acknowledge to yourself that those are their feelings. And your only job in that moment is to say, here's how we're gonna fix this. So I am going to say to you today, friend, that whatever is scaring you most, whatever feels like the biggest mountain in front of you, just try. Just do it. Just be part of that messy process. I have a table full of uh dirt all over my backyard and my back deck because that's what gave them so much joy and so much joy for me to just allow them to make a mess and feel so confident at that time for them to just explore it and figure out. And I hope you, mom, dad, whoever is listening right now, that you do the same today. Do something that feels messy, feels silly, because that is genuinely the first step to any long-term success in what you want to be and how you want to feel. It's all neural pathways. It's all you priming the pump, it's all you doing repetitions. So I encourage you today, make a mess, do some reps, and enjoy your life every single moment. I'm looking forward to talking to you guys next week. We are going to dig into some more topics about what it's like to be a mom in a high-stak situation. I'm gonna meet next week with Elizabeth Dempsey Baggs, who's actually running for Congress in Virginia. She's a mom who is taking fosters on top of her own children and running for Congress as a former veteran. She has everything to gain by showing her children how to show up for their community and as a woman and as a mom. Have a great week.