The Moment I Realized I Was Her: A Personal Transformation

In this episode, Rachel shares a profound personal journey of transformation, embodiment, and realizing her dreams through a series of emotional and inspiring moments. This episode explores how we can recognize our own growth, embrace new versions of ourselves, and create space for ongoing evolution.

Chapters
00:00 Embracing Change: A Personal Journey
08:07 The Emotional Weight of Moving
16:18 Becoming the Woman I Wanted to Be
23:52 Integration and Personal Growth

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the Teacher to Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Siccioni, former classroom teacher turned entrepreneur and mentor to educators building their own unique teacher businesses. This is a space for teachers who are curious about alternatives to the classroom, exploring private practice and other multifaceted work, and for those who want to know what success can look like beyond the classroom. I'm glad you're here. Now let's get into today's conversation. So I had a completely different episode planned for this week. In fact, I was supposed to record it yesterday. It's ready to go. And it's awesome. You will absolutely get it next week. It's very strategic, organized, and I'm excited about it because I get to talk about some of the awesome things that the teachers I've worked with over the last four years have created, things that I have would never have been able to conceive of on my own. And so I'm really excited to share that with you. But something happened yesterday. I had one of those moments where life taps you on the shoulder and says, Nope, this is the thing. This is the thing that you need you need to talk about. And so here we are. I've learned over the years that when my gut gets loud like that, I need to listen. So thank you for indulging me this week as I go a little off script. And my apologies to Mary for putting this crunch on her. For those of you who don't know, Mary is my podcast manager and she is amazing. And thank you for everything that you do, not just for me, but for all of your clients. But I know I've been a little bit of a troubled child lately, and I just want you to know I appreciate you. So I had one of these moments yesterday. Those moments where something suddenly clicks into place all at once. And you can't even really process it in real time. It was one of those where I my nervous system became aware of it, and my brain is still catching up. But I think I have enough figured out that I can share with you now. And I honestly wish that someone would have shared their experience, somebody who's maybe further along in their journey than I am even now, share their experience with this because maybe it would have made it, I would have been on the lookout for it. So anyway, that's why I'm sharing it with you. So for those of you who don't know, my family is moving. And what's funny is there has only ever been one neighborhood we said we would move to. One, because it's close enough to where we were living that our girls don't have to change schools. They can still ride their bikes to their friends' houses, they can still get to the park, they know all the streets, they can still walk to Starbucks. And if you have a teenage daughter, you understand how important that is as well. Was just one neighborhood that we were willing to move to. And it happened to be the same neighborhood that my husband and I used to drive through when we were dating. Let me know if you did this too, or if this is just kind of us. So we were dating. Some of our favorite things to do were to drive around different neighborhoods and point out houses that we liked. And we would also go to like Home Depot and Lowe's home improvement stores and even look at fixtures and kind of like daydream what we wanted our future house to be like. And we always said someday, you know, someday, that magical future version of your life that you're not entirely convinced is actually going to happen. Well, in April, it is now May, 8th, in fact, that I'm recording this, a house in that neighborhood went up for sale. And it's not the first one. Over the last couple of years, there have been three or four houses that have gone up for sale in this neighborhood. And we said, well, let's at least go look at it because it's in that neighborhood. Well, when we walked in, and honestly, the pictures online, we really did not expect to fall in love with this house. But when we walked in, we did. We fell in love immediately. It just felt so warm and spacious and light, and we didn't want to leave. We kept finding new things to talk about with the realtor, and we just we were stalling leaving. It has everything that we have wanted, every single thing on our checklist, and then things that we would never have even put on our checklist. Things that honestly felt beyond what we even dared to dream for ourselves. And I remember both of us reacting to that. Like, is this too much? Wait, this is too much. Like we're can we, we really we're not those people. Like we can't be those people. Like somehow having those extra luxuries, those things that it felt suspicious, even though we would absolutely use them and enjoy them. It just felt we weren't sure we were ready. We weren't sure we were ready to be comfortable being people who had those things, which honestly says a lot about how we had been conditioned to think just from the way that we had grown up. And I wanted to say, especially teachers or women or people who had grown up without much, you know, it goes back to that like money bias that I talked about a week or so ago. My apologies. I have no concept of time. Sleep has been very rare as we've been going through this move. But that weird discomfort that can happen when life starts becoming too good or too beautiful in ways that you didn't fully allow yourself to imagine or think about or like emotionally prepare for. And I remember saying to our financial planner, and if you have your own business, which now my husband and I are our entrepreneurs times two, each of us, and he has one bit, well, no, even on paper, he has two businesses. It's you definitely want to have a financial planner and a good accountant handling those things because it gets much more complicated. And I remember saying to him, okay, hypothetically, if we found my absolute dream house, could we even afford it? Because I have been trying to manifest this for years. And I know Jamie C talks about like when your nervous system is ready for it. Even though I've had this house and some of these rooms on my vision board for three years. And after we fell in love with this house, I put this exact house on my vision board because I wanted it so badly. But I also wanted to be the person who allowed myself to want it and who allowed myself to have it. And a little more about that as I go through this kind of journey with you. So he ran the numbers and said yes. And ironically, the house we ended up buying was less than the house that I thought was my dream house a year ago, which somehow made it all even a little harder to emotionally process, especially since it all happened so fast. And neither one of us, my husband and I both, I would say we are cautious risk takers. We are risk-averse entrepreneurs. And we don't like to make big leaps quickly. But like I said, the house came up. We saw it within 72 hours of it coming onto the market. The we saw it on Friday? Saturday, we saw it on a Saturday morning. The open house was on Sunday. Sunday night, we got a text from our realtor saying the owner already has an offer. Somebody put an offer in already. If you want this house, you have 24 hours to submit an offer. And I think it was like 8 30 at night. And my husband and I just looked at each other like, are we actually gonna do this? What do you what do you want to do? I love I love my husband so much. He just looked at me and said, Well, what do you want to do? And I said, I really love that house. And he said, Yeah, I do too. Do you want to go for it? And I said, Yeah, I want to go for it. And he's like, I do too. And so we did. We put in put in an offer the next day. So Monday, we submitted our offer by noon. And it was a long day. Tuesday, we found out our offer was accepted. And then I started packing. I started purging. I mean, it's been fast forward ever since. That was three weeks ago. We closed two weeks ago. Three weeks of packing, purging, donating, separating out things for yard sale or Facebook Marketplace, cleaning, moving things back and forth between the houses, attending to my daughter's emotional needs. Because one of my youngest, our youngest daughter, was not on board with this actually until this morning, when she woke up here and said, you know what, this is not as weird as I thought it would be. I think, I think I'm glad we're here. The night we told her we were moving was a three and a half hour long meltdown from 7 until 11:30 at night when she finally exhausted herself and cried herself to sleep. So it has been a beyond emotional and physically exhausting week. Plus, I still had two high school students I was finishing up with their year, just trying to get everything ready. I don't recall ever being this exhausted. The one night as we were packing up stuff frantically before the movers were coming the next morning, I was so exhausted I felt like I was a little inebriated. I was dizzy, foggy. I was I felt like I was swaying. I that was levels of exhaustion that I had not known previously. And because we are older and wiser than we were 12 years ago, we actually hired movers to move all of the things that we were not anything bigger than a box. If I can't lift it and carry it all by myself, then we had movers do it, which is absolutely something that younger Rachel would never have done. And younger Neil never would have done either. My husband would not have ever done that either. I have carried hoisted super tall bookshelves on my back like a turtle and carried them up the steps. When I moved into my third floor apartment in a hundred-year-old building, I hoofed my dresser with one of my girlfriends up those steps and into that little apartment. But not trying to do that these days. Back to that self-care thing. Take care of yourself, know your limits, those are important. But speaking of limits, you know, there's a difference between your physical limits and your emotional limits and those self-imposed limits, belief limits that you place, limiting beliefs, I guess better is a better way to put it, that you put on yourself about what you deserve. And that was something that kind of came crashing down for me. And thinking about all of these people that I admire and trying to embody them and be like them and have the type of confidence and hold space the way that they hold space for their clients and the way that they hold space for change and for innovation. And I want to be one of those people that can hold that kind of space. I needed to stop putting limits on myself. And that's something that I've been working really hard on. As we got, I worked alongside six very capable and helpful men on this moving team to get everything out of our old house, our old home. And I was walking around it, we got it, you know, empty. Then we were going to take a late lunch break for a good hour, recharge, and then get everything unloaded into the new house. I walked through our old house almost completely empty, and suddenly I could see things I hadn't seen in years. The corners, the walls, the marks, the dirt, the spaces where furniture had sat. And my eyes just welled up and they started to sting. And they are now too. Because I've been so focused on where we were going and so focused on making sure that everybody had what they needed, and that both of my daughter's emotional needs were met, and that my husband wasn't too stressed out, and that my students were taken care of, and that I was still showing up for my clients, and that I was still getting my podcast content out there and, you know, kind of nose to the grindstone. I was so busy doing that I there really wasn't much time for being and reflection. I was so physically active moving that I, I, other than some quick yoga stretching, I wasn't even doing yoga in the morning anymore. And so I was walking around that house, like actually processing what we were leaving. We brought our youngest daughter home in that house. Our oldest was only nine months old when we moved in. Every first day of school picture we'd ever taken happened on the stoop of that house. We saw some of the hardest seasons of our marriage in that house, and we survived them there too. So many firsts happened there. So much love happened there, so much growth happened there. And like I said, my youngest was really struggling with leaving because that was the only home that she'd ever known. And I remember telling her, it's not the house that makes a home, it's the people and the memories, and we get to take those with us. And I believe that, I really do. But grief and gratitude can exist together, and you can be deeply ready for a new chapter and still mourn the beauty of the old one. But then something else happened. And this is a part that gave me chills. I was kind of expecting to finally have that moment that I just described. Everybody else in my family had had it. My daughter, my youngest, was having it for an extended period of time and feeling it all very deeply. And it happened for my husband and our oldest daughter just the night before. So I was expecting to have that bittersweet moment of reflection and nostalgia and awareness. But then this happened. For years now, I've been making a vision board and I use it as the wallpaper on my phone, on my Apple Watch. I even create a desktop wallpaper with it. And I probably shared it on my social media too. I'm certain that I have. So if you've been following me, you've definitely seen it. But before I was doing those vision boards, I used to do quotes. I used to make like quote collages. And I would have them on my bullish board. I even had them in my classroom. I would have my students create their own quotes and we would do a whole lesson on words and how words, meanings can shift, you know, like the difference between a quote and like a meme. And anyway, I'll talk about that another time. So I used to be really into quotes. And for some reason, over the last several weeks, my phone kept randomly switching back to my original lock screen from years ago. This is like eight screen screens ago, at least four or five years ago, probably when I was first thinking about launching the private practice teacher, actually. So it just kept doing it like multiple times a day. And it would always go back to this one, this original collage with this giant quote right in the middle. And it says, Don't just dream about the woman you want to be. Wake up and be her. Multiple times a day. I pick up my phone and there it was. My my home screen had changed or my lock screen had changed back to this old one. Again and again. And other than thinking it was annoying and thinking that my phone was glitching, I really didn't think about it until that moment when after the movers left and I walked through that house, that empty house, and then sitting now in my new house recording this, which has taken me two days to get through, by the way. I started to laugh because it popped up again and it hit me. I'm the woman that I wanted to be when I put that quote on my phone four years ago. I'm her now. Right now. I I have woken up and am her. I became her. The woman I was trying to inspire myself to become when I made that lock screen is here, living in my dream house, recording a podcast that sat on my vision board for a year and a half doing work that I genuinely love. A business that has not just changed my life and my family's life, but other lives as well. And maybe what hit me hardest is not that I like found myself. It's I found myself multiple times over the years. I'm over halfway through my 48th year on this planet now. I've I've found myself multiple times. It's that I have become this person that I wanted to be, this person that I've been trying to bring to life into existence. I'm her now, in this moment. And I feel it in my bones. Even though my brain still can't fully wrap itself around it. And I don't know, maybe it won't, and maybe it doesn't have to, honestly. And it's not fake. We're inauthentic. I'm not abandoning who I was. It's not one of those like fake it till you make it things, and there's no imposter syndrome anymore. I feel more like expanded, integrated, even. Like I've taken everything that I have lived through and experienced and witnessed and transmuted it into being this version of myself. I think sometimes personal growth gets talked about like there's this true self buried underneath, and we have to like find her again. Um, or if we heal enough or rest enough or journal enough, we'll rediscover the person we were always meant to be. And and I don't mean to say that in like a flippant way, and I apologize if it comes off that way. And I think that there is some truth in that, but honestly, this is not that's not what it feels like to me. It feels more like alchemy. Like every version that I have ever been still exists. The exhausted teacher who's terrified to leave the classroom, the entrepreneur trying to prove that she could make this work, this idea has value. They're all still here. But something new has also been created out of it. And not by erasing these older versions, but by integrating them all together, by learning and grieving and surviving and trying and failing, building, rebuilding, and expanding my capacity little by little over time, and eventually becoming someone capable of holding a life that these older versions of me couldn't even fully imagine. And I think that's what really hit me, standing in that house, not just, oh wow, I achieved this dream, but more I became the version of myself capable of sustaining this reality. And that's different. That's powerful. And weirdly enough, not at all scary. I think when I was trying to fake it until I make it, when I was trying to be this person before, it kind of felt like wearing my mom's clothes when I was a little kid. You know, like I don't know if you ever did that or wear like your parents' clothes and walk around in their shoes and they just feel a little big, but you're trying to really embody them and have their attitude and their sass. And I'm simultaneously picturing myself doing that in my own mom's clothes, but also picturing my own kids doing it in mine. It's that's how it always felt before. That's how fake it till you make it felt before. That's how, that's how that quote had always hit me before. Wake up and be her. It was like, act as if, act as if I had that life, act as if all of these things that I have wanted for myself already happened. And I didn't really know how to do that. And maybe you can relate to that. I've been trying to do those things, trying to visualize those things. That's why it was all on my vision board. And I never felt like I was doing it right. But I think for me, and I'm processing this in real life time with real time with you right now, it's more about having the impact and aligning my nervous system more to the reality that I'm I am actually having this impact and making the space for that in myself, a space for that to live, a space for me to be the person, not that it has all these external markers. I feel more successful when I'm wearing nice clothes. But for me, it's more about being the kind of person who can do these things, who can help teachers realize their own dreams, who can help teachers create these businesses that allow them to do the work that is fulfilling for them outside of the confines of a traditional classroom, to be able to be both the mother and teacher that they want to be, instead of feeling like there's constantly a war between those two identities. It was more about creating space. Within myself to allow myself to be the person who was doing that actual work. And I have been for the last four years. I just didn't feel like I was. I don't know. I hadn't created that space inside, I didn't created that space for that part of my identity to exist within my nervous system, maybe. So this new version that I am embodying now, like I said, it doesn't feel scary. It doesn't feel like imposter syndrome. It feels right. It feels like home. And it occurred to me that this it's different and made me think of other quotes that I had sort of hung on to and recycled and put out into the world because they spoke to me in hopes that they would have that they would speak to other people. And the one that came up was old ways don't open new doors. And the definition for that just sort of expanded for me as well that we can't keep recycling the same patterns, the same fears, the same limitations, the same limited beliefs, the same identities, and simultaneously expect to create something truly new. It has to evolve. It needs a spark. And honestly, the image that keeps coming to mind is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Not the monster, but the moment of creation, the spark. The impossible electric moment where all of those separate pieces suddenly become animated into something entirely new, not disconnected from what came before it, but built from it. Transformed into something capable of functioning in a completely different way. And I think maybe that's what embodiment actually is. Slowly becoming able to hold more. More responsibility, more impact, more visibility, more joy, more grief, more abundance, more complexity, even more simplicity. Something I've been working on just this year has been visibility. And I talked to a couple of my teachers about this in our one of our more recent group meetings about visibility and about getting comfortable being seen, because you have to be seen in order for people to know that you exist. And so one of the things that I did in order to help me get more comfortable with visibility was to open the curtains in my office. I had shears. They had this nice soft light. But when neighbors or people were walking by, they couldn't see in. And so I realized that that was one of the ways that I was hiding. I don't need privacy when I'm sitting at my desk. I'm sitting in front of my computer. I'm talking to you. I'm publishing these things on the web. I think it's okay for my neighbors to see me working in front of my desk. But it was about just becoming more comfortable with more visibility. And then one day realizing I'm not preparing to embody her anymore. I am functioning as her. And the wild thing is, I didn't notice it happening. Thank goodness for the nudges, because I have been so focused on the work. I've been so focused on, you know, creating this capacity for more and opening the curtains and making the impact and doing the work of leveling up, of showing up and being consistent and working towards my goals and all of it. I've been doing all of the work and doing it. And I hadn't looked up in a while to really appreciate how much had actually changed. And so thank you to my phone for bringing that quote so annoyingly and so often that I realized, oh wow, I am her. I I woke up and I'm being her. And as I've been processing this, it made me think of something that one of my students said to me several years ago because this student graduated in 2019. So this was a little while ago. But I remember him saying to me, Madame, you're always pushing us to grow and improve and be better. And that's good. He's like, that's one of the things I like about this class. He's like, but sometimes it can feel discouraging to never know when you've actually arrived or actually like achieved a goal. I think it would help me if I had more opportunities to see how far I've come. And he was right. He was absolutely right. And I think that a lot of us spend so much time becoming and growing and working that we never pause long enough to realize that we've already become someone. We're so focused on the growing, the healing, the changing, pushing, surviving, reaching, achieving. And we don't stop often enough to say, wow, look how far I've come. Look at what I've done. And maybe that's especially true for teachers, you know, because teaching trains us to constantly be chasing a moving goalpost. Right. We're always, always being pushed to improve and asked for more and to do more with less. So even when beautiful things happen, there's barely time for us to let them land and to notice them and appreciate them before we jump into, okay, what's next? And I think what I'm realizing right now is that integration matters too. Yes, working for your goals is important. Yes, hard work is important, growing is important, but integration is important too. Actually allowing yourself to settle into the version that you fought so hard to become, to give yourself time to actually just be there and be comfortable there and to look around and explore the corners of your new life, the way that you explore the corners of your new house to fully embody it, to get things right where you want them to be, and to enjoy them being there. And honestly, I think moving has always sort of been like one of these benchmark moments for me, or like hallmark, goalpost, I don't know, whatever you want to use moments for me, because I moved so much growing up. 20 times by the time I was 20. And some of that was because my stepdad was in the army, but some of it was because of instability in my own childhood. And when I think back about my childhood, I don't organize my memories by age or grade. I organize them by what houses I was living in and what school districts I was in. That's how I remember my childhood. And so maybe that's why moving feels significant to me. Maybe that's why, you know, this is one of those moments. I mean, three years was the longest I had ever lived in a single place until this house that I just left. And I was there for 12 years. It's the longest I've ever lived in a single house. And I honestly don't think I've ever felt like I was really at home. But I feel like I could really be home here in this house that I'm sitting in right now. So I guess that was really this episode, what this episode was about. A pause point, not because I've made it or because growth is over, or I suddenly have everything figured out, but I had this aha moment, this moment, and I wanted to share it with you because maybe you are also so focused on growing and working and becoming. And it would be helpful for you to pause and to look up and to realize how far you've come and maybe notice that this person that you've been trying to be for so long, you are actually walking in her shoes now and they fit. They're your shoes now. And they fit because you are her. You are this person that you have been working so hard to become. So maybe this week, instead of focusing on where you still need to grow, take a moment. Try to pause long enough to notice what's already changing within you. Not because it's finished, not because you're ever done evolving. I don't think we ever do. But because sometimes we move through transformation so gradually, and it's so easy to get caught up being a human doing that we don't realize that we're already embodying some of the capacities, strengths, boundaries, wisdom, courage, vision that the older versions of ourselves just simply didn't possess yet. And I think those moments matter. I think the moments when you stop long enough to realize something new has been created here. I'm not the same person I was this time last year, this time last month, this time 10 years ago. And to realize that something new has been created. And not to disconnect you from who you were, but built from every version of you that has come before, just now integrated, expanded, alchemized, and perhaps becoming capable of creating impact in ways that you could not have created from these older versions of yourself. There's something else that I've been seeing a lot recently, and that I do believe, I've come to believe, is that every new level of your life requires a different version of you to sustain it. Not a fake version or a performative version, but an evolved one, this alchemized one. And I think that's what I'm really sitting in right now is that not that I have found myself, but the realization that I have spent years becoming this new version. And somewhere along the way, life sparked. And I am now her. I look forward to talking with you next week. I hope you have a great week. And I am excited to share the um the episode that I have prepared for you next week about all of the awesome things you can do as a private practice teacher, what you can actually sell. And we'll even talk about pricing a little bit in there too, as we talk about the different types of things that can be on your menu of service. I'll see you then. Thank you for listening. If today's episode resonated with you, please share it with a colleague or leave a review. This helps the conversation reach other teachers who may need it. You can learn more about what I do and how to work with me at theprivatepracticeteacher.org. Best wishes always.