Episode 30: Why What Used To Work... Doesn't Anymore

Have you ever felt like the way you usually handle things just… isn’t working for you anymore?

In this episode, Katie talks about the coping patterns we pick up over time - the ones that once helped us feel safe, in control, or accepted - and why they can start to feel uncomfortable or limiting as life changes.

We get into how these patterns are often shaped early on, how they quietly show up in your adult relationships and the way you see yourself, and why you might be noticing a sense of disconnect even when nothing obvious has changed on the outside.

This isn’t about overhauling who you are or getting everything “right.” It’s about building a bit more self-awareness around your habits, your reactions, and the ways you move through the world… and starting to make small, more mindful shifts that feel more aligned with who you are now.

If you’ve been feeling like you’re outgrowing old versions of yourself, navigating change, or wanting deeper, more honest connections - this episode will likely resonate.

Reach out to Katie on Instagram and let her know your thoughts on this conversation.

If you see that your patterns are now sabotaging you - sign up for Katie's KMC - The Self Sabotage Solution waitlist so you are the first to know when she opens her doors to the next 12 week group coaching program.

Katie also has a FREE resource called The Truth Code Masterclass available at https://youtu.be/AvxvD1lhpK4 which supports you to crack the lies of your inner critic and unlock true transformation, clarity, confidence and connection to your truth. 

Transcript

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Welcome. This is to our core with Katie Murray, and this is the place where we peel back our layers to uncover who we really are at our centre, at our core. And think of it as a chat with your bestie, the one who can make you laugh until your belly hurts, who is ridiculously unfiltered, and will lovingly call you forward to help you cut through the noise and get real with yourself. Around here, nothing is off limits. And we are mixing this up with equal parts of humor and heart. So let's dive right in. So I've been thinking a lot lately about how there are certain ways that we learn just to move through our life. And they feel so normal to us. Perhaps we don't even realize that they are patterns. We have just written them off as personality traits, or this is just how I am, or this is just how I've always handled things. Yeah, what happens when at some point something just starts to feel a bit off? And you might notice it's showing up in ways like you're feeling a bit more drained after things that absolutely never used to bother you. Or you walk away from situations thinking about them for so much longer than you ever used to. Or you even start questioning like your own reactions in a way that you didn't before. And it's it's like you're almost doing the same things, responding in the same way, yet the outcome, it just doesn't feel the same anymore. Can you relate to this? Because if you can, this is what I'm going to be talking about today. It's the moment where the ways that you've always coped and managed and adapted just don't fit anymore. They don't feel like they land in the same way that they used to. And when you really look at it, most of these ways of coping, they didn't just come out of nowhere. They were shaped slowly over time. And often they came from places where, you know, it was really practical and often useful to adopt these patterns of behaviors, the ways in which we show up, the ways in which we respond. So if you grew up in an environment where things felt really unpredictable, you might have become someone who plans absolutely everything. You know, you're the person that thinks 10 steps ahead or tries to control outcomes so that nothing can possibly catch you off guard. Or if you were in a space where emotions were absolutely not talked about, you may have learned to keep things to yourself and process them very internally, often up in your head. Or if you were praised for being helpful or easy to be around, you know what? You might have naturally leaned into being a very agreeable, flexible, and low maintenance chilled vibe kind of girl or guy, whoever's listening to this. And if you've been praised for being helpful and easy to be around, you know what? That's reinforced it for you. If you've been super independent because you've either needed to be or that that's what you've seen modeled to you very early on in your life, you might have built a habit of doing everything for yourself and not really asking for any help or support from people. And none of these are random. They absolutely all make sense in context. And for a long time, they probably worked really well for you. They have probably helped you navigate situations and maintain relationships and stay in control of your environment. They've made you feel safe and secure in lots of ways. And you know what? That's why they stick. Because they do feel safe. Because they feel familiar. And therefore we reinforce them over and over and over again. Yet what happens when life changes? Or you change, and those same patterns, they just don't feel the same in terms of their effectiveness. They feel a bit out of place. So, for example, if you're someone who has become uber independent, you might notice that you struggle in situations where there is a need for collaboration or other people to chip in, and support actually might be needed and most beneficial to you. Yet you struggle. You adopt the leader perspective. You take charge in those group situations. And by doing that, you might be finding that you're not giving everyone else equal opportunity. Yet it's what makes you feel safest. You might find yourself taking on more than you need to. And it's not because anyone has asked you to. In fact, other people might be a bit miffed that you were taking charge. Yet that's what you're used to doing. And what happens when it starts to like, instead of making you feel capable, it actually starts to feel a lot like responsibility and it can feel a bit heavy. And you know what it also might like disconnect you from other people. Your ability to connect with them as a team, as a collective. And everything just stays like surface level, where you don't let anyone else in, you don't ask for help, you don't be vulnerable, you just are always in charge. That was me. I took on the role of leader a lot in situations. And I'm not just talking about in the work domain in the earlier parts of my career, I'm like going back to like school and uni and all of those kind of things. Where if there was a task, a group task, I would be sure to position myself as the leader. And I'm sure that there were other people that resented me for that and might have even thought I was bossy. And it wasn't until I started realizing that there was actually quite some downfalls to the way that I was like engaging with other people. I mean, God forbid, I might have even been perceived as a bit of a no-all. And I was doing it from a place of this is how I've always done it, this is what I know. And there were times where people have praised me for being that leader, for being the one that took the bull by the horns or grabbed the reins and showed leadership. So there was conflict in the respect that some audiences, some participants, loved that sense of leadership. However, it never allowed me to truly be a participant. It never truly allowed me to be part of a team. It didn't allow me to connect as deeply as what I could have with other people. Because this is how I identified myself as the independent one, the one that could, and I help everyone. Yeah, what if people didn't want to be helped? They just wanted collegial collective connection together. What about if it was actually me that needed to be helped? Well, I can tell you, Katie that went through school, Katie that went through uni, and Katie in her early career in government as a young leader, I didn't often let people help me. Now I let people help me all the time. And I have no problem being part of the team and not the leader. Yet I can tell you that the gap in between of learning a new way, because I started to realize and gain awareness that this wasn't it, that this wasn't landing in the same ways that it had in the past, it wasn't exactly a comfortable experience. Or maybe it's that you're someone who really tends to overthink things. And that might have absolutely helped you make careful decisions and avoid mistakes in the past. Yet you know what it can turn into as well? It can turn into second guessing yourself constantly. And you might even notice that even the small decisions take up a lot of mental space, like someone asking you what you would like for dinner. You're like, oh God, can't make the wrong decision. Um, let me think about, oh, I don't know. And then you just go round and round and round, and the other person's just like, can we make a decision here? I want to eat. Or it might be that you replay conversations in your head long after that have happened, wondering if maybe you just said the wrong thing or could I have handled this better? And I I see this a lot with people that I talk with, particularly people who identify as overthinkers, and they rationalize it with I'm not perfect, and I want to continue to grow and evolve, and I want to develop, and I know that this personal development space is never done. And so they continue to always strive for being better when actually they can continue to grow whilst also putting to bed how they handled a certain situation without overplaying it over and over and over and over and over again. The overthinking about handling it better that's a great reflective tool. Yet when it continues to play on repeat in your head, then it's self-sabotage. Because it's not actually changing action. It's just getting you stuck in your head. And then that probably prompts emotions like regret and shame. If you are someone that has always avoided conflict, you might find that things don't actually feel resolved anymore. You know, all those things that you have just let go of because you're this chill person and you've just got this great ability to just like let things wash over you. They're not resolving. Instead, they're building up quietly. Because the sweeping under the carpet has made the rug really lumpy. And because of that, you know what you also might discover is distance in your relationships, or you notice that certain topics they just never get addressed. And so then they repeat themselves. Because they're sitting under the surface. Or there's the pattern of like always being the strong one. Spoken about this on multiple occasions on the podcast. This was me, the person who holds everything together. You know, I loved being the person that was the dependable one and the steady in times of crisis, you know, when people needed or when situations needed it to be. Yet over time, you know what it often creates is that there's no space for you to have honesty with the fact that you might not be traveling okay. That you might struggle to share when you're having a really hard time. And you feel like you just have to keep things together even when you're exhausted. Another one that I see very common coming up in conversations is this desire to always be busy. Because often we link busyness with productivity and we link productivity with worthiness, contribution, achievement. And so we fill our time. There's always something we have to do. There's also always something that we need to check off on the list, you know, and that can feel really good. It can give you structure and it can give you a sense of achievement. And also it can be very, very saturated in a proving energy. You might find it really hard to just be still. You might notice that in those moments of stillness, you immediately reach for your phone or your to-do list to review or measure yourself up against, or something to occupy your time in that moment of a gap. And if you look at them individually, none of them might feel that extreme on their own. Yet they can really start to limit you when they're the only way you know how to respond in situations. And I think the shift really begins when you start noticing the gap between what you're doing and how it actually makes you feel. And can we just like pause here for a minute? Because I'm seeing a theme lately of people not acknowledging or having language to describe how they feel about things. It's like it's almost too vulnerable to actually add a feeling to it. And so we analyze everything. And so if I had a coaching client come in and I was asking them about what their goals were for coaching and how they wanted to feel at the end of this, you can absolutely guarantee that the majority of my coaching clients will immediately latch on to the tangible outcomes that they would like to see happen in their life during the coaching and when they walk away from coaching. And a lot of the time they avoid the second part of that question is how do you want to feel? Because I think there's a lot of conditioning in society, and there's a lot of things that are happening in the world that encourage us to numb ourselves and not have an emotional reaction. Particularly for women, let's make this quite gender-specific at the moment. If you're a woman, you may have been conditioned that emotional displays might paint you in a light that makes you look unstable or reactive or unprofessional or whatever story that you've created around emotion, it's so prominent in so many women that I work with that it'll be like, I don't want to look like a crazy person. And so we've labeled particularly emotions that might involve guilt, sadness, hurt, shame, anger as negative rather than valid in a lot of situations. And we suppress it and we numb it so that we can always appear measured. And in that experience, we numb ourselves of the experience of fear. You know where that emotion goes, stored in the body. You know how it shows up in illness intention. Emotion is energy in motion, it's supposed to move and it's supposed to be felt. And often we don't even have the language about how we feel about things. And we might respond with I just think that and if you are in a conversation with me, I will often interrupt that. I mean, I'll let you finish, and then I'll interrupt with a question which is that's great that that's what you think, and how does it make you feel? Or how do you feel about this? So that you can start to bring a unity between the way in which you think and the way in which you feel because both are valid. All of these things that I'm talking about, they might feel really small to you. It might feel like realizing that you're actually relieved when plans get cancelled. So, you know that Wednesday version of Katie that's midweek slog, and she's like, Yes, I would love to go out on Friday night. This is gonna be amazing. You know, there's memes out there about the fact that, you know, who I am at the start of the week might be an entirely different person by the end of the week. And when my Friday night plans get cancelled, I might be like, this is the best thing that could ever happen to me. Are you relating? Realizing that you feel relieved when plans get canceled, even though you may have been the one that agreed to them or even organized them. Or even noticing that you are actually feeling physically tense emotions stored in the body. In conversations where you are just trying to keep things smooth instead of actually saying what you truly think or how you feel about something. You might notice it in feeling just a little bit flat after achieving something that you've worked for. And perhaps it might have had something to do, just little thing to do with the fact that you may not have given yourself any space to enjoy it before moving on to the next thing. Because, you know, society tells us we need to be productive and we need to have a like plethora of achievements behind us because then you'll feel worthy. And you know what happens when we don't celebrate ourselves in the small moments or even that thing that we've been goaling for and we've achieved it, and then we skip on to the next thing. Oh my goodness, it reeks of proving energy. And it comes from a root belief of, you know, I'm just not good enough and I've got to prove that I am. Or I'm just not worthy to be here. So you know what starts coming through your pores and absolutely overwhelming your body? Imposter complex. Or you may know it as imposter syndrome, where you feel like you're a fraud and you just got that achievement through fluke. It was an accident. Shit, I need to go for something else. Then maybe I'll feel good enough. Maybe then I'll feel worthy. And so you start stacking achievements as evidence of productivity to link you to your worth. What about if you just enjoyed the moment without immediately moving on? How much more would that land for you? Instead, if you are a serial achievement seeker, you may find that you are not getting the buzz, or it certainly doesn't last very long. And you pivot really quickly to looking at what else you can achieve, achieve in your life. These moments, they don't often come with like these huge epiphanies and big realizations. They can be really quiet observations that pop up again and again and start to repeat themselves. Until eventually, you know what? You can't unsee them anymore. And this is when a lot of people come to me for coaching. They will be like, I have just realized that I have formed this pattern of people pleasing, of self-sacrificing, of constantly being in my head and overthinking, of never being satisfied, of always being in the pursuit of something, of being fiercely independent and letting no one else help me in life. And it's not working anymore. Help me. And you start to recognize your own patterns, and it can feel really uncomfortable. Because you know what happens when you recognize something, you immediately have choice. You can't change what you can't see, yet when you see it, ooh, then you Got a choice about whether or not you are gonna change it. And so before you might have just been reacting as you always have. Now you're aware. And this can be where things can feel a little bit awkward. Because once you're aware of a pattern, it does not automatically mean you know what to do instead. So you might find yourself in situations where you pause before responding, which you never used to do. Or you might feel unsure about how to act because the automatic response that you would have always defaulted to doesn't feel right anymore. Yet the new response, yeah, that doesn't also feel very natural either. So for example, we're looking at the Uber independent chick or guy, if you're used to handling everything on your own, asking for help might feel really uncomfortable. Even though you can rationalize and you can logically and analytically know conceptually, this will probably make my life easier. Or if you're used to keeping things inside, you not sharing how you actually feel, might feel very vulnerable or exposing, even when it's completely reasonable and welcomed. Like the environment may be welcoming you to be more you and share more of your authenticity and how you're actually feeling about something or what you actually think about something. It does not necessarily mean it's going to feel comfortable for you, though. If you're used to staying busy all the time, you know what? Sitting still might feel boring and you might feel really restless, like you should be doing something more productive than this. This stage, it can feel really clunky. Like you're just kind of figuring it out as you go, and it doesn't always look polished. It can look like saying something and then thinking about it afterwards, or trying something new and you know, not being sure if it landed the way that you wanted to. Yet I think the most important thing to hold on to in this is that just because something doesn't work for you anymore, it doesn't mean that it was wrong. It probably served you really well at some point. It just might not be what you need now. And if you need a permission piece in this, I want to remind you, it's absolutely okay to change if something's not working for you anymore, if it's not serving you anymore. This is your life. You get to change it. And you don't have to have it all figured out in one day or straight away. You don't need to replace absolutely every single pattern overnight. And maybe it's been that I've been talking in this episode and you've been like, oh shit, I identify with multiple of those examples that Katie's given me. I'm the person that loves to be the independent strong one. I'm also the person that doesn't share how I'm feeling about things. I'm also the person that constantly is in pursuit of achievements and the next thing to tick off my checklist. That can feel very illuminating. And I don't want you to take from this episode that you need to suddenly become a completely different person. I do want to invite you, though, into just noticing when something feels off in your body and giving yourself permission to respond a little bit differently, even though it's absolutely probably going to feel unfamiliar to you at first. So it might look like slowing down before reacting. I used to be the person that would respond immediately. It didn't matter whether it was a text message or an email or in a meeting. I I had created a story that my quick responses demonstrated competency. Like I didn't need to stall for time to think I just knew it. Yet what I actually realized was that when I pause, when I take a breath, I one, give myself the opportunity to consider what they've actually said, which involves listening instead of being up in your head and formulating your response. And it also allowed my delivery to land more effectively. So what I said landed because I wasn't like rapid fire back to them. So yeah, maybe the first step for you is going to be giving yourself permission to slow down before reacting. Even letting yourself sit with something instead of immediately fixing it. Whether that's in your life or that you've somehow created a narrative that says that you should get in there and fix other people's lives because then you'll be the hero. Maybe it's being a bit more honest with yourself in small moments. And then honest with other people. Letting things be slightly uncomfortable instead of absolutely smoothing everything over straight away, yet actually never resolving anything. And they may not, those very small shifts, they may not seem like much of the time. They they may just feel like just little pauses, breathing, staying silent when you normally would have jumped in to try and fix or solve. Yet over time, they start to change how things feel for you. And you know what? Over time, that is actually the foundation of what's going to create something entirely new for you. Thanks for spending time with me today on To Our Core. If something landed in your heart or gave you a much needed giggle, consider sharing it with a friend who also may need this as a timely reminder. And go on. You know you want to. Give me a five-star review so that this podcast can land in the ears of many, many more people. Because remember that life is too short to stay on the surface. Keep living, loving, and laughing all the way to your core. Go make life great. And if you want support around this, go to the show notes to find out more. Until next time, I'll meet you back here with more truth, laughter, and a whole lot of heart.