Your Inner Authority: Claim Agency Over Your Life

What would your life look like if you stopped handing your power over to fear, doubt, or other people’s opinions?

In this video, we’re diving into how to claim your inner authority and take back agency over your life. Too often we get stuck in patterns of people-pleasing, waiting for permission, or letting circumstances decide our path. The truth is, your greatest power lies in remembering you are in charge of your choices, your energy, and your future.

You’ll learn:
✨ Why agency is the key to freedom and fulfillment
✨ How to break free from external control and influence
✨ Simple shifts to reconnect with your own authority
✨ The mindset that turns uncertainty into empowerment

If you’re ready to stop living on autopilot and step fully into your power, this message is for you.

For FREE Resources, Book Link, KB's Self-Love Merch Shop, 1:1 Mentoring and more: https://www.linktr.ee/kristenbrownauthor

Transcript

Kristen: 0:00

So let's talk about what it means to claim agency over your life. You'll hear me talk about this a lot. It's about stepping into the driver's seat of your own existence instead of feeling like a passenger just being carried along by the outside forces and other people's expectations and old patterns. So any of you who have found that you have been someone who felt like you're just being carried along through life, that you're really not in charge of your own experience, that you are acquiescing, giving in, dumbing down, staying quiet, not speaking your truth, not really owning what it is that you want and how to take care of yourself and what makes you fulfilled, then go ahead and send up some claps. If you are someone who is extort historically or currently in that place, it is so great to own it. It is so great to send up some claps because what this is saying is that I am seeing myself. I know where I was, I know what I was doing, or where I am now. That is the moment of recognition when your life starts to change. Because what we are unaware of, we can't change, we can't evolve, we can't fix, we can't heal, we can't grow. So it's through awareness that we start to see our life through a different lens. We start to see that there might be more. And if you're someone who has not had agency over your life, chances are that you may not even have noticed that it was possible. You may have seen other people doing things and wondering why that looks so different for you. Because when we give away that power so far back, it feels normal. It feels natural, it feels like quote unquote, who we are. And then we see other people doing these things and we think they're doing it wrong because here's how we're supposed to be. The rub is that those things came into place as defense mechanisms and coping mechanisms from your youth to get you through. And we've all dealt with it. Every single one of us has dealt with it on some level or another. So, this talk today is gonna be all about how to claim agency over your life. Agency is not about controlling everything, it's more about consciously directing your energy, your attention, and your decisions toward a life that you want, toward a life that's gonna be fulfilling and amazing for you instead of being the passenger, going along for the ride, people pleasing, self-sacrificing, self-abandoning, giving up and giving over. This is about positioning positioning yourself in a place of authority over your own life. And the cool thing is that we all have this inner authority. We may not know that it's there because we've ignored it for so long, but we're born with it. We have information inside of us that can lead us to having the most fulfilling and happy life. But yet, like I said, due to past dramas and traumas and experiences, we may have lost that part of ourselves. And this is not the time to shame yourself or to make yourself feel guilty or to think there's something wrong with you because there isn't. Yes, Terry just said uh it's it's about our sovereignty, and that's another word we can use. You hear me interchange these words on here quite a bit. It's about becoming sovereign, it's about saying, I matter, what I feel matters, what I do matters, my choices matter, and my decisions matter. Sovereignty slash agency is all about ownership, which means while we're acknowledging what we can't control, we are also simultaneously responsible for our choices and our healing and what life gives us and how we respond. So, yes, things come flying at us sometimes, some crazy stuff can come flying at us sometimes. And if we respond through a filter of self-sacrifice or self-sabotage or self-abandonment, we're not having agency over our life at that point. So, this is all about the inner healing work. This is about going within and saying, you know what? I'm gonna own what's mine and I'm gonna not own what's not mine. Because sometimes people are going to accuse you of things, say things about you that absolutely aren't true. One of my children is such a hard worker, so much so that her boss relies on her and says, You're the one I need because I know you'll get it done, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And she recently heard just via the grape line that there were some people that she worked with that were saying that she doesn't work. She messaged me this and I was like, I said, baby, that's the filter they're seeing you with. Don't own it, don't claim it. Because the the child doesn't stop. And she has worked her way up through that, it's a store, so worked her way up through the ranks of that store because she's a go-getter. But yet, some strange filter that somebody's seeing her through, I think it's the filter of jealousy. That was my response. I said, I think someone is jelly. That's what I wrote back. Someone's filter that they're seeing us through can really rock us because we deep down know who we are. But then we might attempt to shift ourselves in some way to try to please that other person. What's that old saying? You can please some of the people some of the time, but you can't please all the people all the time. There's some amazing wisdom in that statement. She didn't even hold on to it because we've talked so much about this type of thing. I just said, don't own it. It's not yours, don't claim it. You know who you are. And that's inviting her to stay in agency. That she can only control what she can control and cannot control the rest. The next thing that speaks to agency is choice. And choice is one of my favorite words. I love the word choice. It means that I am powerful. Not in a way that is negative. I'm meaning I have the power of choice. You have the power of choice. We have the power of choice. And we get to decide every day what is serving for our highest good and all of those around us, or not. We get to decide: is this supporting my well-being, my truth, my values, my morals, or is it not? Is this supporting my returning to self, or is it supporting self-sacrifice or abandonment? Is this a choice that's going to serve me long term, or is it just short-term gratification? Choice is so incredibly powerful. It's one of my favorite words because I know what it holds. It's also about recognizing that you always have options, even in difficult situations. We always have options. And it's also about refusing to let past fear or current fear conditioning, people pleasing to make the decisions for you. Boom. In that one powerful moment where we choose differently for ourselves, we put ourselves back in the power seat. And in the beginning, it might look jumping in the power seat or the driver's seat, jumping back out, jumping in, jumping out, jumping in. It kind of looks like that in the beginning, and that's normal. Because we're testing the waters, we're trying to figure out what actually works for us. It is very rare that somebody just jumps to full empowerment, sovereignty, and agency, boom, just like that, and stays there. Because that's that is of sheer will. That's trying to overpower, and it doesn't have the foundation, the capacity to maintain it. There's this law that I've heard recently and I love it. It's called the law of sustainment. I'd never heard this before. I heard about two, three weeks ago. And the law of sustainment means any choice that we make that is rooted from a place of self-worth, we can maintain. But anything that is made from a lesser place, we cannot maintain. So when we seek to really own our true worth, true worth, the worth that's undescribable, the worth that we all have, the worth that we came here with. We're just worthy. That's all there is to it. It's unquestionable. But many of us have lost that along the way. But when we return back to that and truly claim our true worth, and sometimes that takes a minute, let's be honest. Sometimes we have to put some practices in place, we have to calm our nervous systems, we have to retrain our brain, we have to rewire our brain. Yes. But in that process, when we start to make decisions for ourselves that are for our well-being, that are coming from our inner authority, we tend to sustain them. We tend to keep going towards the goal. We don't give up. We're resilient. Because it's coming from a place inside of us that is so deep, it serves as a foundation. And when that foundation is weak, we can't sustain. Another part of agency is empowerment. That's a big topic, empowerment. But I'll break it down like this it's about trusting your inner wisdom and your acquired wisdom, and the wisdom of the ethers, universal truths. It's also about trusting your intuition. I'm not talking about fear, gut checks. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about true intuition. The messages come that are very calm and grounded and have no emotional attachment to them. And feeling that nudge inside of you and saying, that just didn't feel right to me. It's also about setting boundaries, which I talk about ad nauseum on here. Boundaries are beautiful. It's about creating a life that's aligned with your values instead of waiting for permission or validation. Sovereignty, inner authority, and agency is also about self-direction. That means that you're actively creating, shaping, and steering your path rather than being pulled off course by external influences. Boy, I have been pulled off course. I can't tell you. I can even say I wasn't even on course and got even pulled more off course. Based on all the things that I had mentioned. My old programming, my people-pleasing ways, my lack of knowing myself, my lack of trusting my inner authority, my lack of agency and sovereignty. I was all over the place. And then I'd be pulled a different direction and pulled a different direction. I was all over the place. Then I learned to really tap into me, to return back to myself. And in that center of me, I started to create my life rather than being a victim of it. I started to become victorious in certain areas where I never was before. And in any way, shape, or form, meaning overpowering anybody, being arrogant or selfish. That inner agency is so grounded when you reach it, when you get there, that the choices and decisions we make from that grounded place serve the highest good of all concerned. Not just us. And I feel a lot of people who are suffering from people-pleasing symptoms, they're afraid to make choices from that place because it means they're going to lose the love. Someone will lose the or leave leave you, abandon you, reject you, think you're awful or ridiculous. And we stay in that cycle. And we'll keep cycling and looping, looping, looping, buffering, buffering, buffering until we decide this is not working for me. I don't like this. Something's got to change. I don't know what it is. So be gentle with yourself if you don't know what it is. We hear so much out in the world of people saying, Go do this, go do that. You just need to. You just need to this, you just need to that. You just need to speak up. You just need to set a boundary. You just need to have emotional intelligence. You just need me need me. And the problem is we're standing there with our eyes wide open, our mouth agape, going, I don't know how. Give yourself grace if you're in that position. There's nothing wrong with you. It's just how your life experience has been up until now. So, in short, this is the shift from life is happening to me to life is happening through me. That I have a say in it, that I'm a co-creator, that I get to decide. Such a beautiful place to be. All right, we have Miss Robin coming up.

Robin: 13:53

Hello.

Kristen: 13:54

Hello. Well, good morning.

Robin: 13:56

It's afternoon for me, but are you a topic? Good afternoon. Good afternoon. So I am over here working on claiming monalize. I am over here making decisions for my higher good and trying to just figure out what I will do for the next year in terms of where I'm gonna move and just go get settled somewhere. That's that's just what I'm doing. And I'm trying to not isolate and listen to so many people. You gotta just do this, you gotta just do that, you gotta just do this. No, I know. Because it's just it's just not reasonable. You know, I can't just all of a sudden, you know, leave my niece and my and my daughter in the cold because they don't have any place to go. They wouldn't be able to rent a place. So that's just not even a viable.

Kristen: 14:42

That wouldn't be in alignment with your values. That's not an alignment with who you are.

Robin: 14:46

Correct. Because I'm uh, you know, you'll you'll never be homeless, you'll never be hungry kind of person. Absolutely. You know, that's that's how I feel strong. So I I can't I can't go against my values. So many people just go off by yourself, go rent your own bar. I mean, I could I could do that, but then what would that be? Just walk away from my entire family. That's crazy. So I'm not that I'm obviously not doing that. But again, I'm I'm bearing the weight of everything and it will all fall to me. My shoulders are heavy, heavy and they're not that strong, you know, literally unfortunately. Right. Um, right, right. But I'm pulling in what I have for resources, like all right, if you don't have an income, you can't we can't contribute financially. Okay, you get to do it physically. If you can't do it physically, you get to pull all your friends in and help uh, you know, get all your friends and help us move, you know, and um and I won't be able to pay any money out. I won't be able to do that. So they're doing it for you, uh, which in turn you are doing for me. The other one is you you gotta go to work. You get a full-time job, you can get this many hours, go to work, pay, you know, pay attention. It's always the oh, Halloween horror nights coming. Oh, this new video comes out at midnight. Oh, this, oh, guess what also comes at midnight? Rent on September 1st. You know, so it's it's just being real clear about that. And I'm pretty clear. I've been getting a lot of pushback because I'm saying no, but I don't care. I'll say no because it has to happen. It has to happen. Well then.

Kristen: 16:19

Yeah, it's hard. That's not a fun place.

Robin: 16:24

No, and I'm about halfway through your book, and I'm I'm still um, I'm I have to keep going back and reading it till like I really want it to sink in when I read something. I'm like, wait, let me read that again. Um yeah, so I'm in, you know, I do think of the capital T truth, and truth is is all we have sometimes besides love. I gotta say that because my friend uh Miss Cecilia would say, Where's the love? Where's the love? Yep, hello. So I'm very uh, very happy for that. I am and I don't know if you have any thoughts or anything you want to throw my way. I'm happy for any suggestions anybody has. If I'll keep everything in mind, and I have, believe me, been thinking long and hard about this. Go to an apartment, go to a house.

Kristen: 17:11

I'm gonna give you the best suggestion ever. Ready?

Robin: 17:14

Listen to my gut. Yes.

Kristen: 17:17

License to my gut. Get very, very, very, very quiet. Meditate, let go of it all. Say, I am held, universe has me, the answer is within my reach, yada yada. You heard V VA's story, same thing. You know, she was just like homeless all of a sudden, right? And that was the same advice I gave to her, and everything just fell into place. And you're gonna know, you're gonna know, and also maintaining, saying, Okay, ladies, this is what we're doing now, right? You're you're doing everything, Rob. And I think it's that last little piece for you because you already know. Yeah, I think I know.

Robin: 17:56

No, you and I know.

Kristen: 17:57

You know. I love that. Do you hear how she just reframed that? That was Robin catching herself. I think I know. And then she's like, No, I know. And you know, it's about following the signs, it's about really letting go, which is what surrender is. It's not giving up, it's giving over. And I will tell you something. This is 100% tried and true. It is never wavered. The second I let go of trying to think through it, solve it, do it, because sometimes these problems are just, they're beyond our ability to figure out. But when we let go, this crazy magical thing comes in where we just scratch our head going, um, what? Why is this so perfect? Is there a catch? No, there's not. It's because we got out of the way. I talk, I say it's we we stop mudding the waters. Because when we are overthinking and doing all these things over and over again, our brain is so muddy that we can't even feel what's coming in, or it does something does come in, and then we start overthinking that too. So this is about meditation, quiet, asking, letting go, surrender. Just I'm waiting for this to all fall into place for Robin. She's gonna get on here and go, Well, guess what happened? I love what she said about you don't know what you don't know. And I think it's important that we just sit with that for a minute and really truly allow that to sink in that you don't know what you don't know. I don't know what I don't know. Your family, your brother, your partner, your best friend, all of these people in your life, your coworker, don't know what they don't know. They just don't know it yet. And so, yes, there can be misunderstanding, or there can be a lens through which they see you that is inaccurate. But that just means they haven't had that experience yet. But we can't give up on our stance of what we do. You know because somebody else doesn't know. That's a hard place to be. That's you know what that is? That's parenting 101 right there. Where you know things. You know that delayed gratification is helpful to a child. You know, meaning like not getting the ice cream and the cookie and the candy and the things every second that they ask for it, or whatever, you know what I'm saying. You know that them going to bed at 7 a.m. I remember my kids going to bed at 7 p.m. and they slept till 7 a.m. They were 12-hour sleepers. Of course they didn't want to go to bed, and I would love to spend more time with them or joke around, but I was like, I I know this is good for them. So I I have to do this. And you know, we get the fights and the arguments and the pushbacks and the things like that, boundaries with our older kids. They don't know it yet. They think we're mean, they think we're awful, they think we're whatever they might think, but really we're doing this for them. But they don't know it yet. And I think it's a beautiful day when people start to wake up to their parents and what they went through. I my niece the other day said to me, she's I think she's around 25, and we were having a conversation and we're talking about her dad who is my brother, and she said, I don't know what it is, Aunt Chrissy, all of a sudden I just see my dad. What an amazing dad I've had. Like she went on and on and on. I just thought, yeah, I remember the day I was probably around 25 when I realized that my mother had a child die. We're so consumed when we're young in our own heads and our own experiences. But as we start to age, we start to see things differently. And I love that she shared that with me because I was thinking, yeah, I had that same experience. Because I called my mom one day and I went, Hold up. You had a child die. I literally called her and said this one day. She goes, Yeah. I was like, Your baby died. He was 16. My brother was 16. She's like, Yeah. I'm like, How did you live? You know, we went through this conversation. It was like I woke up all of a sudden. I didn't have the understanding. I didn't see she also hid hid the crying and stuff from us as well. So it wasn't really in my face. Anyway, I'm getting a little bit off a off track. Just food for thought for everybody. All right, we have Terry coming up, flying in, first class from the UK.

Terry: 22:27

Starship Enterprise brought me here.

Kristen: 22:30

Beating me up, Terry.

Terry: 22:33

Wow, a fantastic topic, but a very important topic, isn't it? There are only certain things that come with age and experience. Yeah, and it is difficult having somebody pass when they're young. As you say, it's easier to go off on a tangent on that. So I won't go there at this moment. Yeah, claiming agency uh over your life is um it's not always easy, but you have to do it. And once you do it, oh, isn't it liberating, KB?

Kristen: 23:01

It is it's every it's all the things, Terry, right? It's liberating, it's peace, it's fun, it's joy, it's happiness. Because I really don't think we can live the true expression of what we're meant to live here if we don't have agency. You we just can't.

Terry: 23:16

Yeah, I'm getting the chills, you know. I'm getting literal literal chills at the moment. It's because that is when your life begins. Once you do it's when your life literally begins. Your life begins every day. Always remember that, you know. Every day is uh a new moment in your life, you know. This is why it's so important not to dwell in the past. It's very easy to do, but it's it's good to remember the happy times as well. Always remember that as well. Yeah, and um I'm glad you touched on also earlier when you started to talk that um claiming agency over your life doesn't mean being a bully or a narcissist. Right. There's always these nuances, you know. People who do not listen and um have limiting beliefs, fail to fail to grasp at that point in and knowing. That's another thing. When you know, you know. So um you do. You do. When I did claim agency over my life, well, that's when I started to truly realize that I was truly alive. Yeah, so many amazing things happen, yeah. Synchronicities and things like that. Claim agency over your life, folks, and it will liberate you.

Kristen: 24:28

Nice landing there, Terry. Yes. All right, you guys, the queue is empty, so I'm gonna keep going on here. We're gonna talk about the practical ways to claim agency over your life. If at any point you feel inspired to do so, hit that circle button next to my profile picture here, and I will bring you up to share your thoughts. So, one of the first, these are not in any particular order, they're just how I wrote them down. The first one is to get clear on your values, and that means to know what matters to you the most so that your choices align with your truth and not other people's agendas. There's a lot of people out there wanting to get their way. They're using manipulation strategies, they have all these motives, you know, not high motives, and trying to get us to do what they want us to do for their benefit. But when you're clear on your values, you're gonna notice what's a yes and what's a no, regardless of what the world is doing around you. You're gonna be like, no, that's just still a no. No matter what you say, that's still a no for me. We're less likely to be pulled in a direction that we don't want to go when we're very, very clear about our values. All right, the next thing is to set and enforce boundaries. Boundaries are an action that demonstrates agency and sovereignty. Sometimes it takes a minute to get better with them because they can be scary. I had a coaching client once, and the minute I said the word boundary, she burst into tears. I kid you not. She needed to set boundary with her parents. She was in her 20s, probably later her 20s, maybe around 27, I think, and she burst into tears because in the culture that she was raised in and how the family unit was, all these things, she said, I I knew this word was gonna come up, and I'm scared to death. So don't think that if you're scared to set boundaries, that you're all it means is that you've been conditioned in a way that that seems impossible. Doesn't mean you're weak. It means your brain is telling you that is red alert, red alert, something bad's gonna happen if I do this. Doesn't mean it had anything to do with weakness, but yet on the polarity of that, or the conversely of that, we have to cultivate that strength. So it's not that you are weak, quote quote, but you do need to have the courage to work towards it to be able to set your boundaries. Take your time with that. Robin mentioned she's reading my book when she was talking about boundaries, and I almost said, Have you made it to the boundaries chapter yet? I don't remember which chapter it is, five, six, seven, I don't know. There's eight chapters in the books, in the book. I think it's I don't know, I'm not even gonna guess. But that boundary, or I'm sorry, that chapter is so I go in and out of all the things. But again, I like to write very clear and concise. You know, some people have a whole book on just boundaries. Like to me, that's way too many words. It's like, here's what you do, here's what it means, here's what you do when this happens. Like she said, she was getting the pushback. That's a tough space to be when we're setting boundaries and we get the pushback because it tempts us to fold and makes us question ourselves unless until we're stronger in our boundaries, until we're stronger in our values, until we're stronger about how we want to be treated or what what is going to be required around us, these types of things. It can be it can take a minute to filter your way through that space. So setting boundaries, again, none of this is Rome's not built in a day. You're not going to become this mega sovereign person in 36 hours. It's about moving forward in that direction. And allowing yourself to have the setback, the fallback. I've spoken about this before. My book is called The Recovering People Pleaser. My publisher wanted me to name it the Recovered People Pleaser, like it's done and gone. And I understood her point. She was great at titles and things. I chose my title, but she was trying to shift my title, and I really took it into account. I thought about it, I said, Let me think about this. I thought about it for a couple days and I said, No. Because this speaks to work in progress and doesn't have this carrot out there that you're gonna get to that. We're we are constant works in progress. That's all there is to it. It's not that I really do people-pleasing things anymore, but yet there are moments and they're rare, but they're there where I've just watched myself say or do something people-pleasing. So can I call myself truly a recovered? And someone else came on my stage once and says, Oh, you're recovered, girl, because you caught it and you changed it, or something like that. I'm like, I get what they're saying, but my auto mechanism isn't that. I still have to consciously work through things in my head. I'm just faster at it. I'm stronger about it. And even the maybe tiny bit that I people pleased somewhere, it wasn't anything that was going to affect me or anybody else. It was just something that was probably not even recognizable by anybody else, if you know what I'm saying. It was like, I just knew, hmm, that was a little pleasy there, Kristen. So allow yourself to be in process. And the third one is to stop outsourcing your decisions. This is mega, mega, mega big. Stop outsourcing your decisions. Instead of waiting for approval, practice making the choices based on your inner knowing, your wisdom, the information you've acquired so far so far, your history, your backstory, the things that you've observed. Don't wait for validation. You already know. We already know because we are connected to universal intelligence. We already do know in the deepest, deepest, deepest. It's about having the courage to do the thing that we already know, or to sometimes even trust it because that deepest, deepest inner knowing is very quiet. It's very soft. So we are like, is that enough? Because we're so used to the ego screaming at us and it being loud and getting all of our attention. It takes a minute to start to trust that inner knowing. But man, once you do, and I just had a conversation with a friend right before I joined here that said, Boy, when you and I tap into that, we are go. I'm like, Yep. We're very much alike in that department. We will, it's like once we know that and we're in locked in, it's like boom. We don't question it anymore. So that is something that to think about. Am I outsourcing my validation, the right answer, my next steps, or not? All right, I'll take a pause there so I can bring up our next guest who is our very own director of programming, Daryl with the Dashes. Thank you for joining me. And then we have Terry back in the queue. Hey, Daryl.

Daryl: 31:37

Hey, uh, can you hear me okay?

Kristen: 31:39

You're perfectly clear.

Daryl: 31:40

Oh, so wonderful. So I want to say some things are coming through for me as you're talking about this. You're kind of like saying, okay, the inner voice versus everybody else's opinions and all these different things. And I was thinking about sort of hard facts from a newspaper department that has like a news department. And that the hard facts that is looking to confirm and get the evidence and get the information and all that, there they have a driver that is way different than the editorial department, way different than the letters to the editor, way different from all that. I know we're talking newspapers and it's 2025, but let's just go back to that idea that they had to confirm with evidence before they spoke about things. This is back in the day when actually that was an important thing. And it seems like now we're leading so much based on the editorial aspect that we get all this fog about the hard facts. And the truth about the hard facts is that they don't come sometimes with enough real truth. They come flavored with the Monday morning quarterback. Hey, the team should have done this, and the team should have done that. And the coach was there on the field and he was making the calls. And you know what? You can sit back and you can pontificate all you want about what that coach should have done on that field at that time. And that's why they quote unquote lost the game. But you have to look at the whole track record of that coach. Is he a winning coach because he made the decisions that didn't look like everybody approved? And all the money morning quarterbacks that listen and watch the news and watch the sports had all kinds of things to say about it. But it's the facts. The facts were on the field. That person had to make a decision and they did the best job they could. And so it's this is what I'm picking up is that it's sort of like we sit here and we judge ourselves, right? We sit here and judge ourselves based on that evidence that is right in front of our face that, oh, this person said this, or or that uh didn't work out exactly as I thought. Oh, my bank account just went negative. I must have made a mistake. But that's not the facts department in the news. The news is actually looking at real information. And we don't know, and I'll conclude with this part for your side. We don't know until sometimes after what is really going on. And then when we do, we can use our history, just like that coach's record. We can look at our history to see what the facts were that we've in and sort of back track backtrack it and say, I went back, and you know what? I was right, and sometimes the world was wrong. Sometimes all the people were wrong, and that were good.

Kristen: 34:54

And or the coach was right, but the the team didn't execute it. There's other variables involved, too.

Daryl: 35:01

There's all the players, it's the other team, there's all these kinds of things. It doesn't see none of that stuff to me. As you as you were saying this, you gave me the idea, the insight is that we have to stop and say it's the long-term record of getting it right, right? That's what matters. Yeah, like auditing that, and that's where you find your true north is the fact that you know what? Over 50 years or 40, 30, whatever your lifespan has been, it's when I got it right against all the noise, against all the other junk. And so back to your boundaries thing. I'll say maybe the boundary has to be against that wall. Firewall that off a little bit. Get better at doing that and trusting yourself, like you're saying. And so you'll be spot on, I think.

Kristen: 35:57

Yeah, beautiful, Daryl. Thank you so much for that. I also like when Daryl was talking about this, it has spurred this thought of me, and I won't quote him directly, but he was just referring to that part in the talk where I was talking about finding your own validation or finding your own answers. Then the answer can come, you guys, sometimes through somebody else. It can. But again, it's going to be your inner knowing that goes bingo or ding ding ding or ooh, I never thought of that. See what I'm saying? So it's not like it's wrong to outsource and get other people's ideas. In fact, I want to say I think it's brilliant. Like Robin was saying, she was like, if anybody has any ideas, let me know. Because she's open. And sometimes we don't have all the answers. But there's many times that people bring me stuff and I'm like, pass, pass, pass, pause. Hmm. Either the way they presented it, how they said it, what it has to do with, whatever, makes sense. So this is not that we bypass what everybody else is saying all the time. No, not by any means. Go seek, be open, but trust you at the bottom line, trust you to know. Alrighty. Terry's coming back. Terry squared today. Terry times two. Let's do it.

Terry: 37:16

Wow, yeah. Let's say third time's a charm as well, don't they? Maybe I'll come back three times. Wow, it's um oh a great segue in synchronicity again, because what you've just been saying is what I wanted to touch on in a way, you know. And Daryl, yeah, if I was a talk show host and my first show, Darrell was a first-time caller, that'd be a win-win, wouldn't it? And unless the talk show host was um wasn't very good. But anyway, that's another story. Uh oh, um as a judgment there. Oh, sorry. I please forgive me. My sense of humor sometimes gets me in trouble, K, but believe it or not.

Kristen: 37:55

I think you're funny. I just crack up and smile, but I don't interrupt. So just keep just keep going.

Terry: 38:01

Okay.

Kristen: 38:02

I edit these, right, for my podcast. And sometimes I'm I hear myself giggling and ooming and awing, and I'm so I'm trying to be more quiet.

Terry: 38:12

Um, yeah. No, look what what you were saying about how people some people are very quick to give advice. And um, yeah, as you said, see, this is the paradox of life. Sometimes you need to ignore people, sometimes you need to listen to what they're saying. Sometimes the universe is speaking through them, you know. And this is um only comes from, well, claiming your agency over your life and your sovereignty, you know. But yeah, I was thinking of an analogy a little while ago. Now, when when um sometimes people try to tell you how to how to live your life or what's good for you, yeah, it's like going into a farm and a pharmacy and picking up a total stranger's prescription and expecting it to do you good. Yes. Yeah, that come came to me while I was listening to you, you know. But also taking on board all what's been said by you and uh other people. So, yeah, but this is where only by listening to your inner self and experience, and sometimes you do have to make mistakes. And yeah, isn't it funny how sometimes um some of these coaches in sports, you know, they have a few bad runs and all of a sudden they want to get rid of them. Yeah, and the supporters of the team want to get rid of them, things like that, you know. But um, without um the trials and tribulations and learning what works and what doesn't, how you're gonna be the best you can be, you know.

Kristen: 39:36

Exactly.

Terry: 39:37

I think I've said all the side KB.

Kristen: 39:40

Um That's why I stopped I why I stopped watching NBA because I was a Phoenix Suns fan way back in the day, and I loved this team. And then all of a sudden they just broke and we went to the, you know, got the championship, and all of a sudden they broke the whole team apart. I was like, Where is everybody? It's like, well, no. I'm like, you just had this winning team. What are you doing? Again, I'm speaking out of my ear because I don't know these things, but yeah, it was very heartbreaking to me when they just kept getting rid of people. I was like, they're at the top of their game.

Terry: 40:09

As I say, um I do I do like to be in a present moment, but sometimes I do like to go on the YouTube and look up classic football games from the UK, you know. And we when um that was only on like £500 a week or something silly like that, KB. And they did it because they loved it, you know. I was passionate about it. And there were some great um football players in my youth, and um there's a guy called George Best. I don't know if you're familiar with him. And um his life, well, his life, many books I wrote about his life because he did become an alcoholic. But believe it or not, he plays some of his football after he had a night on the booze, believe it or not, it's it's incredible. But um, there's many paradoxes in life and the universe. Yeah.

Kristen: 40:55

Did you watch Ted Lasso?

Terry: 40:57

The name rings a bell. Can you quickly remind me who he is?

Kristen: 41:00

Ted Lasso is a show and it takes place in the UK, and it's an American guy that comes to the UK to because this woman, it's a long story, but anyway, she invites him because she thinks she's gonna ruin the football team, the soccer team. But he doesn't. It's just such a great show if you have an opportunity to watch it.

Terry: 41:22

I will I've heard a few people mention it. I will look into it, but um something I want to say quickly. Sometimes it's not this or that, it's this and that.

Kristen: 41:32

Oh, wow. Sometimes it's not this or that, it's this and that. I love that. The words of wisdom from our numers. My goodness gracious. The next one is to shift from victim to creator mindset by asking yourself, what can I do instead of why is this happening to me? Massive, massive, massive, massive way to put yourself in the power seat of your life. Because I was in, why is this happening to me? I this sucks, I hate this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And while I was staying in that, I was just swirling the drain. I was just hovering down there near the bottom. It wasn't until I finally said, you know what? What can I do here? Where's my power? And at first it looked like, screw all you people, I'm gonna, meaning my former partners, I'm going to rise to the top and I'm going to have the most amazing life, despite what you did. At first, it looked like that for me 15, 16 years ago. And if that was, if that's where I got my power, that's okay. That's not where I stayed. Because as we heal, we don't even care about that. We don't care about revenge or living a best life as your best revenge and all these. We stopped caring about that. But my good, my goodness, if that's what gets you started and lets it lights a fire under you, then do it. Stop paying the victim. Stop owning the victimness. Yes, you were victimized. Yes, crappy things happened. Trust me, I know. I have a PhD in betrayal based on so many experiences in my life. And you get to decide what you're gonna do with it. So shifting from victim to creator. Take responsibility for your patterns. Ding, ding, ding. Huge one. I'm gonna ring my bell. Notice where you self-sabotage, people, please. Repeat cycles. Notice. I'm doing this again. Dang it, I did that again. Why do I keep doing this? Patterns have so much information. So much information if we're willing to go in and look at the pattern, own the pattern, recognize the pattern. Don't be shameful about the pattern. Just say, oh my gosh, I have this pattern. What's driving this train? When you recognize what's driving the train, you are gonna be able to start to choose differently. That's just the way it works. Sometimes we gotta know that first. Next one, claim your voice. Speak your truth, even if your voice shakes, even if it's scary, even if you're afraid of what someone's gonna say. Speak your truth. Throw it all out on the table. This doesn't mean be a jerk, bully, arrogant. That's not what I'm saying. What matters to you? What are your feelings? What's your take on it? What's your opinion? What do you need to say to somebody? What is on the tip of your tongue that you're shaking in your shoes to say? But your inner being is saying, say it, say it, you know you gotta say it. Being willing to speak up and claim your voice. The next one is to choose your environment. Why is that? This is all about surrounding yourself with people and spaces and environments that feel good, that grow you, that expand you, that encourage you, that motivate you, that light you up where you feel love and not attack. Not environments that shrink you, that you want to stay quiet and small, and you leave there absolutely drained of your energy. What feels good and right? And then doing that thing. I started doing that too. And here's the thing, you guys, it wasn't like I had to just stop being friends with somebody. It's just I just decreased the amount of time I was around them because some people I love dearly, but holy moly, they were in some season in their life that was not fun to be around. I didn't even say anything. I just started to pull back. And it depends the tier, what tier they're at, how close their inner circle is to you. Like, are they in the first tier, the second tier, the third tier about how you handle it, right? But being willing to handle it, do I say something? Do I not say something? Do I just pull back a little bit? Or is that being passive aggressive? Am I being, you know, questioning yourself? All of this is sovereignty, all of this is agency. Because you get to choose every single step of the way. The next one is to practice self-trust. And this means trusting yourself to do what you say you're going to do. Honor the word to yourself. Keep your promises and follow through. Hey guys, yes, I'll go with you tonight to celebrate Bob's birthday, but I'm leaving at nine. Then 855 comes up, and everybody's having a blast, and they want to give you, you know, they want you to stay and sing one more karaoke song. And oh, please, it's not fun without you. And then you stay. You've just broken an agreement with yourself. This is not necessarily about pleasing the other people. This is about pleasing you. This is about teaching you that I got your back no matter what. And I will take care of you in the best possible way. The next thing is taking aligned action, even if they're little teeny tiny baby steps toward what you want to build. Momentum will come from that. Because as we take these baby steps forward, like let's say when I decided to write my second book, my first step always is writing an outline. That was a baby step. It's just an outline on a piece of paper. And then I rewrote it again and again and again and again and crossed it out and decided, and three days later I had another idea. You know, that it seems like such a baby step, but just writing the outline ignited me. It inspired me. It made me want to do more. Momentum started to build. Do you know what it feels like to write? If you're a writer, you know this. If you're not, you won't. To write the first sentence. I knew the first sentence of my book. I knew the first sentence, and that's all I knew. I see you, soul sibling. That was it. Where do I go from there? What's the second such set sentence? But I didn't allow myself to think what I had to write. I just said this is just gonna be for my heart, and that's all there is to it. That's it. But the momentum will come naturally as you start baby steps in the right direction. So keep that in mind. And then the last one is to rewrite your story. This is sovereignty, this is this is agency, this is claiming your inner authority by rewriting your story, which means reframe the old narratives of powerlessness into ones of resilience, choice, and growth. This is saying, Yeah, I was that, but I am now, even though it's not 100%. It's being am statements that you're using over your life, over yourself. It's not claiming that old version of you anymore. There's something so powerful of that. Because when we continue to identify with the identities of the past, we're gonna stay stuck in that. But when we start to claim who we want to be, who we are aiming towards, and using I am statements to get there, our choices and decisions will align with that. Welcome, Stephen.

Steven: 49:22

What a good lead-in.

Kristen: 49:24

Thank you.

Steven: 49:25

You're welcome. I think in 17 and 18, the biggest thing I had to learn to get my autonomy back was to figure out that the person that I was trusting the most, i.e. my ex, she was in victimhood, and we basically lived and made sure everything was done from the fear end. It's like, okay, if we cover all these bases, it's like this bad thing won't happen. And if we do all these pl all this planning and planning and planning and planning, this bad thing won't happen. All that does is the bad things that happen are less than five to ten percent of the people experience that, and so that that became a thing probably ten years into the marriage. It's like, okay, yeah, something's gonna happen, and it and and less than ten percent of the people are ever gonna experience this because that's just uh how it happened to us, but that was the universe showing us this is what happens.

Kristen: 50:25

So when you were dealing with such a fearful person back in the day, would you say you were less sovereign?

Steven: 50:34

Oh, yeah. If there was going to be a discussion as to making choices, there would be all kinds of reinforcement of the fear on her side, and if I couldn't come up with ways to just knock that fear down, then it was valid. And I remember so I believe she was she's an only child from and my mother-in-law 30 when she had her. And I remember one time I was I've been listening to somebody else who I would go visit every now and then, and I said, uh, I brought a book uh redefining anxiety and left it at her house. And she says, because I said, you know, I said, We all make choices. I said, You want better results? Make better choices. And she says, you know, I think I was probably in my late 30s, like maybe 35, before I realized I had a choice. And I'm thinking, if if my ex lived her first five years of her life under that, no wonder. Because oh, don't do that, or upset this, or don't rock the boat, or don't do this, or don't do that. And it's like, you know, it was hilarious because in the beginning of figuring out who I was, I took that class and I I went out and I asked a bunch of people, mainly women that had known I had just met, and I said, Okay, I needed five to ten things that you like about me. Good listener on was on all the lists. And then you look at the uh stresses that my ex was under, doesn't listen to a darn thing I say. And I'm like, Well, when you say something important and back it up with facts as opposed to fear, maybe maybe this guy's going to listen. And I think that was part of me going, okay, this is completely off the rails, and I don't need to listen to this.

Kristen: 52:18

Yeah, I think some point maybe along your journey, Stephen. Thank you for coming up. You started to see that this is not working for whatever reason. Like that part inside of you that knew this person was fear-based, and it just wasn't resonating. So you tried to go along to get along, but at some point that just didn't work. And then what can happen, everyone, in these types of situations, that we can completely lose ourselves because we have someone hammering us on the daily with something opposing to what is going on in our mind or in our hearts, in our psyche, in our inner knowing, in our soul, in our being. We see truth, capital T truth, but we have this person hammering it, hammering at us. Eventually we can start to question who we are. And this is the case often with narcissistic type people, where they are so out of touch with light and so out of touch with love, capital L, love and truth, that when we come in with it, they fight us because they don't want to see it. They want to stay in the dark, so they will do every means possible to try to make us wrong. When we've been in that situation for quite some time, it can be very, very oh, so distressing. This is why a lot of times when people finally get out of those relationships and they start to find themselves, they're standing here like they're in a whole new world. And the world starts to reflect back who they truly are, and they're like, What was I even in? It's a very confusing time for a lot of people. Stephen messaged and he said, Yes, true. Go along to get along and question your inner self-esteem. Yeah. It's pretty par for the course with these types of situations. I appreciate you all for joining me today. This has been a beautiful conversation. I hope it ignited a light inside of you. I hope it sparked something inside of you that where you can maybe potentially start to be more sovereign and to really start to become your own authority. And if you're interested, click on my profile picture here, go to my Link Tree, and you're gonna find my YouTube channel, my free resources, my book links, my self-love merchandise shop. And I always offer 40% off one-on-one coaching sessions for my numers. And you can find that by going to my website, which is one of the tabs, and at checkout, you can type in Vibers Rock, V-I-B-E-R-S Rock, Vibers Rock, and that will give you 40% off if you're interested in running some type of life occurrence past me or you want to you have a particular topic you want to heal from, whatever it might be. Also, when it comes to my free resources, I have Say No with Confidence, 25 Ways to Politely Decline Without Guilt. I have the People Pleaser Quiz, I have the Self-Love Quiz, I have the Self-Love Checklist, I have the Personal Bill of Rights, Cultivating Emotional Intelligence, Daily Com Oh, Daily Confidence Checklist. I haven't done that one yet. That's still, I created it, I just haven't gotten it on my website yet. I have, let me see, what else? Um, 20 self-love journaling prompts, all these things to help you reset this foundation that I talked about way in the beginning of this conversation. Because when we reset that foundation of self self-worth, our entire world changes in such a beautiful, magnificent way. Thanks for listening, everybody. Much love to you. Have a most beautiful weekend, and I will see you on Monday.