Soul Joy: Ditch Burnout and Fall in Love with Life

Making Friends with Your Weaknesses

• Dr. Julie Merriman

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Ever faced burnout, compassion fatigue, or vicarious trauma? Imagine if embracing your weaknesses could actually boost your self-confidence and help you manifest your true desires. In this episode of SoulJoy, I'm Dr. Julie Merriman, and we’re diving deep into making peace with our imperfections. I share personal anecdotes, including my own struggles with math, to illustrate how owning our weaknesses can liberate us from the shackles of shame.

Tune in as we explore the transformative power of inner child work and the detrimental impact of outdated schema on our growth. This episode is a heartfelt invitation to become a curious observer of your shortcomings, learn from them, and let go of self-loathing. Discover how accepting what you’re not good at can lead to a more authentic and joyful life. Join us and find out why no one needs to be good at everything and how making friends with your weaknesses can help you find your life's true niche.

Speaker 1:

Hey y'all, I'm Dr Julie Merriman and welcome to SoulJoy. So in today's episode, we're going to take a little bit of a deep dive into making friends with your weaknesses. This is a necessary component of holistic, sustainable self-care, also known as wellness. Okay, fran, thank you so much for dropping by for today's episode. I appreciate it. I know that you're busy and I appreciate you making time for really taking care of you. This, as you know, is for professional helpers those of us that help others. We need to be taking care of ourselves. Well, we all need to take care of ourselves. But just a quick home chat. I don't want to bore y'all. I'll just be a minute. So I've recently turned 61. And you know, it's just such an honor to get to age and see all the goodies that life brings you. Watch my kids grow up and my grandkids and just I don't know. It's a really cool thing. So I hope that all of y'all have a great birthday this year and turn an age that is meaningful. Make every age meaningful. Yeah, okay, enough of that. Back to the podcast. Okay, so, professional helpers.

Speaker 1:

This podcast is dedicated to preventing and overcoming the occupational hazards of the career. We chose specifically burnout, compassion, fatigue and vicarious trauma. Those are just a few of the occupational hazards. So today I want to talk with you about making friends with your weaknesses. I really do a deep, deep dive on this in my book In Pursuit of Soul Joy. In fact, I think I spend chapter seven in it and maybe chapter three. Anyway, I think it's eminently important. I think that's something that society has kind of glossed over how valuable it is to own our weaknesses, understand about our weaknesses and also y'all to embrace our failures. There's something to be learned from our failures. It's not a time to be shamed, it's a time to be a curious observer without judgment and learn from what happened. So I just I really invite y'all to have an open mind about this particular episode and to just see what comes up for you as I'm talking about this stuff and just see where you fall with this.

Speaker 1:

So I do believe it's eminently important to make friends with your weaknesses because it actually increases your self-confidence. It removes the residue of shame that may be caused, y'all, by old and worn out schema that our inner child likes to put in her backpack and carry around. In my book I do a lot of inner child work and I believe that getting comfortable with your weaknesses and failures is very much based in doing a lot of inner child work. But those old schema, those are not worth carrying around in your backpack when you try to hide your weaknesses and failures. It actually creates an environment where self-loathing could rear its ugly head, where you just you're living in the world of if only and I should and I could, and just a place that doesn't feel good and y'all this mindset impedes your ability to manifest your desires Because you can't. You feel like you can't be your true self. Hell, you lose sight of your true self because you're so busy being embarrassed and ashamed of the things you're not good at or the things that you've failed at, and that is such a waste of energy. It does you no favor to be stuck in that energy. No one, y'all, no one can be good at everything. No one can be, just like in practice, where we niche down and know the client or the thing that we're best at. We need to do that in our life. We need to find our life's niche. You need to be able to accept what you suck at. We all have something we suck at and it's okay.

Speaker 1:

I mean for me, oh my lanta, it's math. I know I must have some sort of a learning disability around math. I mean I can add and multiply but, good heavens, I thought that I would not be able to graduate from college because algebra stood in my way of my degree. It's the only C on my transcript and I tell you I'm proud as a peacock on that C. I worked hard to get that done. But I'm not good at math. That's a weakness and I know that. If I have something, just like when I'm doing research, I know that crunching all those stats and stuff, that is not my forte. I can run SPSS. It makes me unhappy to run that. So I hire someone to do my stats or I team up with someone that that is their forte. I accept that that's a weakness of mine.

Speaker 1:

And failures, oh heavens. I've had so many failures. I think about when I first started teaching group exercise. Oh, that was back when Jane Fonda, you know the late 80s, when aerobics came out and my first aerobic class. Oh, it was a crash and burn, oh, and I can remember thinking I'll never be able to do this. But I didn't quit. I kept going back. I learned from my failures and I got better at it. I mean, that's just something that comes to my mind just off the cuff. I assure you there's lots and lots of things I have failed at, but I tried to learn from them. So I just encourage you to accept and I don't mean this in anything, but I would love to accept what you suck at, accept what is not your forte, and then embrace what you rock at, what you do. Well, embrace that.

Speaker 1:

And I'm not saying there's not times that we want to challenge ourselves, like learning to speak Spanish. That was quite a challenge. No, I'm not going to go live in Mexico and be a great orator. Is that even a word? See, I really suck at pronouncing things A lot of times. My students can tell you that, but it doesn't stop me from doing what I'm doing. But I mean, there are times we want to push ourselves to grow, but there's also times when we just have to embrace that that's just not my thing and that's okay.

Speaker 1:

We can outsource the things that we don't. That aren't our things. You know the things that we can't do, like I cannot change a flat tire. I have no interest in learning to change a flat tire. I, that is I if my tire is flat on one side, it really throws me into a tizzy and I I'm not going to. That's just one thing I'm not going to deal with. Maybe that's it's true, though I'm going to embrace that and I outsource that to someone who can do that. It's actually y'all to be able to delegate and outsource and know the things that we're not so good at. That's a bad, a badass skill. In actuality, that is a good skill to have.

Speaker 1:

I think our society just and I touched on this a minute ago I just don't think our society does a great job at encouraging failures and embracing weakness. I have worked with people over the years that are running fast and furious from their weaknesses and they're spending so much energy and their root chakra is just almost cement. It's so stuck with energy that it's robbing them of quality of life. We need to just embrace these things, because when we don't, it creates a false narrative. We're not able to live authentically. All of us fail, all of us have weaknesses. It's called being a regular human being weaknesses. It's called being a regular human being. Only when we're able to embrace all of us can we make room for inviting what we love into our life and y'all.

Speaker 1:

This is holistic, sustainable self-care, wellness, this being able to embrace all of yourself and not pretending to be something that you're not Y'all. We've got nothing to hide. We're living authentically, and this helps us to be comfortable in our own skin. And by doing this, we actually set ourselves up for going bigger and fully living in this life that we love, that we've taken the time to create, based on sustainable self-care, packing our life full of things that feel yummy and good to us. So when we don't do this y'all, it gets in our way of manifesting that life that we love. So I'm going to give you the activity for this week and again, this is all about embracing, being at peace with the things we're not so good at, and being at peace with the failures that we've experienced, and not letting shame and embarrassment get in our way. So the activity I'm about to share with you if you subscribe to my email list, I'll send you a weekly email, and in that I include a bonus PDF of this activity. You just go to my website, juliemerrimanphdcom, and sign up for my seven day self-care challenge, and that gets you on my email list.

Speaker 1:

So today's activity I have named roadblock, and it's really. It's a fun little activity to do, but with roadblock, when we're denying or trying to hide our weaknesses, we actually create roadblocks in our life that hinder us, as I said, from manifesting our desires. So for this activity you're going to need a piece of paper, and if you really think this sounds like fun, get a poster board or something big. But start with just a piece of paper, and I've included on the PDF. I actually have this kind of laid out for you, but anyway, just a blank piece of paper does the same thing.

Speaker 1:

So on this piece of paper, you draw an X at the top of the page to represent where you're starting. Here's my starting point. Then, at the bottom of the page, you draw a box to represent the desire you want to manifest, and you actually write the desire in the box. So maybe the desire is to live fully and authentically, whatever it might be. Now you're going to draw a road to represent your manifesting journey, and this road includes and embraces all of your weaknesses. So make the road interesting. Like you go from the X at the top, the starting point, you make the road twist and turn and wrap around down to the bottom of the page where your box is your desire box is Lots of twists and turns. You've done that.

Speaker 1:

Then you draw possible roadblocks one could find in a real road, like a fallen tree, maybe a bridge that's out, maybe some road construction, traffic jam, whatever it might be. And then you label those roadblocks with real challenges, real weaknesses, real failures that you've faced, like I overcommit, or I give up too easily, or I can't change a flat, or I have a quick temper, or I'm scared. I have a lot of fear when I try something new and I quit. I mean, whatever it might be, I think you get it so. So there's the bridge that's out. Let's say that's labeled. Um, I overcommit. And then further down on the road there's a traffic jam and that's labeled I have a quick temper. And then further down there's some road construction and that's labeled I give up too easily. I mean that's that's.

Speaker 1:

You've created a roadblock that would be a realistic roadblock and then you go in and use one of your own weaknesses to label that. I hope that makes sense Y'all. If we open space for it, we can learn so much from our weaknesses and failures. Again, you just embrace, you don't judge, you be a curious observer and you approach it with lots and lots of tenderness and love. Okay, so you've gotten all the roadblocks put in place and you've labeled them with things that are actually about you. Like I said, quick temper, give up easy, whatever it might be.

Speaker 1:

Next you're going to flip it. How are you going to remove those roadblocks, such as take a detour? Maybe you draw a tractor to use to remove a tree that's fallen across the road. Maybe you create a bridge to go over a train track, because the train always is blocking the road. Whatever it might be, you just using your creativity and having fun and you're being playful with this activity. You go in and remove those roadblocks.

Speaker 1:

Then you label these flips with real ways you can overcome weaknesses and failures that might be getting in your way to get to that desire that you're trying to manifest. Like I will take the kids to daycare once a week and open up some space for me to do some of these things I really want to do, or I'll actually ask for help. Or maybe I need to meditate more to build calmer neural pathways. Or maybe I'm going to hire a mechanic to change that flat tire, which I know you probably wouldn't hire a mechanic, but I think you get the idea. Whatever may be a solution, you label each one of those roadblocks with that the flip. So yeah, this is a fun and really non-threatening way to bottom line problem solve really non-threatening way to bottom line problem solve.

Speaker 1:

So get out your markers, set out some time, just make make it. Make do a B time here. Once you've created your roadmap, it's important that you process it with a trusted party, because often, as y'all know, the ahas occur during the processing. So my hope for you with this fun little activity, is for you to fall in love with all of you. Soul joy requires this, as does holistic, sustainable self-care and wellness. Okay, that's it for today. Please subscribe to this podcast. Wherever you listen to podcasts, please leave a review. Helps me reach more folks and until next time, take care of you.