Deb's Daring Adventure...Lessons Learned from Daring to Lead

In this episode of the podcast, I am stepping into the arena and sharing my journey of Daring to Lead. 

I share my 5 "AHA" moments from my training and how they gave me powerful insight into #thinkingcourageously. 

From stepping into the arena and armoring up to lessons learned on self-compassion and self-judgment, I share this powerful experience with the hopes of inspiring courage for my listeners. 

I revisit my values reset, insights into the "F" word...feedback. 

And finally, I share a painful personal story about Learning to Rise and owning my story. And why writing my SFD (s**tty first draft) is allowing me to step up during this month of Domestic Violence Awareness. 

Transcript

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This is the think courageously podcast.

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I'm your host Debrah Cummins Stellato. And I'm here to challenge successful women like you to find the courage to make pivots so that you can ignite your life and expand your limited thinking about change. I'm a certified Life and Leadership coach, and I'm excited to share my stories and insights into igniting energy from within. When I was a kid, I had a poster on my wall with a quote from Helen Keller life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all. Are you ready for daring adventure? Are you looking for the best version of yourself? If so, you're in the right place. Let's embrace the adventure of sparkling potential together.

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Well, hello, and welcome to the thing courageously podcast. I'm your host, Deb Cummins, Stellato. And it's a solo show today. I wanted to do this show because I had an amazing experience a few weeks ago, attending a training with a coach and mentor that I think the world of Cindy Gardner, and the topic, the topic was three days of daring to lead. And really immersing myself in the work of Rene Brown, and her incredible, insightful, exceptional research around daring to lead, which is her latest book.

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And I wanted to do this, I really wanted to take this course, take this training for a couple reasons. I think one, okay, let's be honest. If you know me, at all, I you know, I was like, oh, get to do more learning, learning, learning, learning, school, school, school, books, books, books, this will be fun. So my continued curiosity around learning was one reason. I think the other reason is because I've read all bearnaise books, and have definitely felt inspired

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by her work

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and her teachings, and also have loved the fact that she comes from her work from a research perspective. And I think most importantly, though, I wanted to do this work for all of you. As I've been going on this journey, as I've been, you know, I can't believe it's 10 months of doing this podcasting. I'm always thinking to myself, what would be the nuggets that I would want to hear if I was the listener? Like, what's dad going to share? That might be a good takeaway for me that I can implement into my own life around thinking courageously. And I just knew by reading the book and knowing Brittany's work that there were a lot of lessons to be learned and shared. And that's why I wanted to jump in today with my very own Deb's daring adventure, they give like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, except it's just Deb's daring adventure, on daring to lead. And so I thought what I would do is just share a couple of the lessons that have resonated with me, and that I've actually found to be particularly helpful in my coaching and in my writing, in my own journey around courageous leadership.

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So the first

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notion that I wanted to share with you is this notion of stepping into the arena. And I'm a very visual person. And so I love the idea of closing my eyes and thinking about the Coliseum, I've been very fortunate in my life to have experienced being on the inside of the Coliseum. But I can also very easily conjure up a memory of standing right on the outside of it. And the idea of when you walk in, and you can feel the spirit of everything that's gone on there. It's it's pretty awesome and colossal. And I really love this idea of stepping into the arena and how we all have so many opportunities in our lives to step into the arena. So what does this mean? I mean, I think on a daily basis, we are all given a choice to either stand outside the arena or step into it. And a couple of weeks ago, in the think courageously Facebook community which I hope that you're part of or that you'll consider joining. I ask people to really think about what would make it safe for them to enter the arena of that space of sharing with other women their journey around thinking courageously. I realized that was just one opportunity for people to practice stepping into the arena.

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I also realized that every day,

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as

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parents, as leaders, as spouses, as partners, as citizens, we have an opportunity to either stand outside the arena and be a voice care, or to really step into the arena. And Bernie talks a lot about this in terms of,

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you know,

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who's sitting in the seats of our own arenas.

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And, you know,

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is it the cheap seats, where, you know, people are willing to say a lot of things, but they're not willing to walk in, which is oftentimes a big fear of people who do the work that I do, especially being pretty public with my stories. And, and, you know, worrying, I actually, I don't do this worrying about what people in the cheap seats would say about my work,

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or

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is the arena filled with people that are in the box seats, which are people of privilege, who actually built the arena, who I'm judging myself against, and I'm much more likely to feel that my arena is filled with people that are in the box seats. And the other part of the arena is, so you're thinking, you know, thinking about the Coliseum, and I'm thinking about these different folks and how they've shown up in my life. There's also this place where we have to be comfortable in the arena arena, where we have to bring self compassion into the arena, so that we can actually show up authentically and be vulnerable. So that's the first sort of takeaway, that we're all faced with these opportunities to step into the arena really regularly. Practicing stepping in and understanding why we step in and how we step in is pretty powerful stuff.

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One of the things

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that

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I really

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had a huge takeaway on was this idea, like, okay, so you're stepping into this arena, and then you're putting

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on this

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armor or these shields to protect you, right? Like, that was a terrible imitation of a transformer. But imagine if I were a transformer, and I was like, just putting all these pieces on getting ready to walk in. And I think I always consider myself to be quite the pacifist and somebody and I've talked about this around energy, that I really have not used conflict or aggression as a tool in my life, I can really hardly even think of times of that. So

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So what is, you know, if I don't,

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if I don't feel like I have to

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move against an enemy in the arena,

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where I don't have to be

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aggressive, and I don't have to fight.

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What keeps me

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armored up in the arena.

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So the other two choices, we're moving away from what's going on in the arena, or moving towards what's going on in the arena. And I decided, you know, thinking this through that I am definitely somebody who move who moves towards others in the arena, the moving away would look like, um,

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I kind of just would hide

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and silence myself and not show up at all if I was moving away. But what I really thought was interesting is as I move towards dealing with the things that I need to

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brave and and rumble with,

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I tend to

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go to a place where I'm moving towards people in a sense of needing to appease and please and overcompensate. Okay, so how about this? I am the queen of I'm sorry. Um, I am known to over apologize, regardless of whether I had any influence on a situation. I am always seeking that

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Kumbaya situation.

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And so I think through this work, I really realized that that's a that's a huge part of how I show up in the arena that, you know, I want to move towards people and be the peacekeeper and sometimes what that does is it doesn't let me show up authentically or at my best.

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So

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and I've done that for years. I've done it my whole life. I don't really remember a time using either of the other shields of moving away or moving against and so being aware that I have that tendency to show up in the arena with the idea that I'm going to overcompensate is a pretty big aha. Okay. So that's number one. The second thing I wanted to talk about is remember how I was talking about the difference seats in the arena. The other thing I really got some insight on was around how I have practiced self compassion.

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And

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how that has sometimes been filtered by self judgment. So, I'm going to just read a definition because I think it's helpful. But self compassion entails being warm and understanding toward ourselves, when we suffer, fail or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring our pain, or flagellating ourselves with self criticism, self compassionate people recognize that being imperfect, failing and experiencing life difficulties is inevitable. Oh,

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my gosh, I love that so much.

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And

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I have not been

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a great role model in my life, for self compassion, I have spent a lot of time in self judgment over a lot of the mistakes that I've made, or my own perception of the mistakes that I've made. And when I'm experiencing those things, it shows up as shame. And it shows up as you know, inadequacies or less than perfect or withdrawing or getting quiet or all of those things. And so one of the takeaways that I had was a wonderful, really easy exercise around self compassion that I wanted to share with you guys. And the idea of this is that I want you to take a piece of paper, and I want you to write a note to somebody who's going through a hard time, just take a couple minutes and think about somebody in your life who's going through a rough time. Trust me, right now, we all have examples of this. So this should be a pretty easy exercise. Maybe somebody who lost their job, maybe somebody who lost a loved one that would be horrible. During COVID, maybe somebody who's dealing with a breakup of a marriage, or a loss of a parent, and I want you to just write the note, the note that you would send them in the mail. Okay. And then after you've done that, I want you to write another note. And the note is to yourself,

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as if you were writing,

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so you start with thinking about somebody else. And then now I want you to think about writing that note to yourself.

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And what happens is it really shifts the

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impact

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around being compassionate to myself, like the words that I would use with a stranger or somebody that was an acquaintance are sometimes and oftentimes way kinder than the words that I might use to myself or for myself when I'm going

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through a difficult situation. Like

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my note of self compassion to myself was, dear Deb, I've been thinking about you so much over the last few days, thank you for trusting me with your story. I just want you to know that I'm here for you when you need me.

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And,

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you know, it's the same story, but it's for myself and giving my self permission to be self compassionate. And, and I love the power of this, like what that does for us. Another one of Bernie's quotes is I commit to practicing empathy and self compassion, screwing it up, and circling back.

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I commit to practicing self

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up to practicing empathy and self compassion,

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screwing it up,

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and circling back.

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So

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this self compassion shows up for many of us as asking for help. And asking for what we need, like,

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how

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can we ask for what we need, in a way that feels comfortable and compassionate. And so that's, that was a big takeaway for me not again, something that I practice and also kind of ironically, with a lot of the women that I work with, I'm not really sure that they would say this is their best thing either. I think that they, many of the people that are part of my coaching community are people who are dedicated to service and being heart centered, and making sure that others are okay, but not necessarily giving themselves the grace and space to take care of themselves. So that was a second lesson. So we've got

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the concept

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of the arena, and we've got the idea of self compassion. The third thing that I really love doing and for those of you who have worked with me know that I love doing that work around values. And so it was really cool to work from pronase list of values and to peruse over that, and then just to pick two values.

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And I

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was able to take those two values, and really think about how I'm translating those values into action. So I'll share with you my two values, my two values are around gratitude and growth, gratitude and growing. And I picked these two values, because, again, those of you who are listeners to the show, know that I've really leaned very heavily on this concept of gratitude, through my grief process, that gratitude basically wins every time over grief if you practice it enough. And so I'm creating so many more opportunities to lean into being grateful and being in a space of gratitude. And that means sending love packages out to my clients, and my friends and people that show up for me all the time. And the other value for me is around growth. And this is something that's so important to me, I actually think I got a lot of this for my mother, which is that like, she instilled in us to be lifelong learners. And I instilled that in Allie to be a lifelong learner. And whether it's through books or learning, it's hugely important. But I what I realized through this process was that

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the growth

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is not just about my growth, it's about providing opportunities for growth for other people, because I'm grateful that I've had those opportunities. So these two G's are like really intimately connected for me. And I loved exploring that piece of things. I'd also say what was really kind of interesting is that, so there were seven other women in this training with me. And what universally seemed to pop up was that COVID has really given all of us an opportunity to re evaluate our values that

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however, many months ago,

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when this started, I feels like 500 years, but whatever it was that, you know, we might have gone into our lives being very clear about a set of values. And for some people, I'm sure that hat stays steady, but circumstances change, and it's okay for your values to change. And, for example, I've had some of my clients talk about the fact that they've really, really found a new joy and passion

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about

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being parents,

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they are women who've been running around and use somebody whose words that I heard today with their hair on fire, and being at home with their children has given them such a different perspective, or having that relationship with their spouse where they're sharing the same workspace and spending quality time together. Or, you know, one of the values that a lot of people are talking about is like, they can't wait to experience the value of freedom. And how can we create that in our lives? Under the circumstances of COVID. Like freedom doesn't mean recklessness. It means freedom. It means freedom to be who we are, it means so many cool things. So I really enjoyed doing that exercise again. And I have actually translated that into some of the work that I've been doing with my clients lately. So, okay, so we've gotten through three, the fourth one for me, was around the whole experience of feedback, and being courageous on feedback. So I just talked before about like, I'm that person who has the shield to overcompensates and tries to make people happy with me. And that showed up for me in a way professionally, where sometimes I have not really leaned in to giving authentic feedback. And what I really learned through this course

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was

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if I keep my values around growth and gratitude in place, I can align the feedback that I'm giving to somebody else in the context of growth in gratitude. It's really interesting. Also, I've been spending a fair amount of time thinking about like, where my own stuff came up around feedback and getting feedback and giving feedback and I was able to pinpoint it back to a couple of things. One was I grew up in a family where everybody got a trophy. I can barely remember getting in trouble. I remember what one or two times where I got really In bad trouble one was when I started a food fight in a cafeteria, spaghetti fight that was not good. I got a lot of feedback. There was a lot of feedback from that. And also, I really remember like, so I was equating feedback with trouble. So I remember being like 13. And I was on a family trip to the Outer Banks.

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And

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I was a little boy crazy. And so I met some boy like, probably with my family going out for ice cream or something. And then I snuck out and met him for for something totally harmless. Like, there was nothing, it was completely innocent. But I remember how pissed off my parents were. I mean, I think that I got like, spanked, which I don't like have any memory of ever getting spanked ever, zero, none. But again, I think what's interesting for me is because I got so little negative feedback or constructive feedback as I was growing up, I really was not very experienced at receiving it or giving it as I became an adult. And the first time that experience happened for me was when I was working as an intern in college. And I remember this woman who was my supervisor, my, like the, she ran the organization. And she said to me something around, like, you get so defensive when you get feedback. And

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that stuck with me,

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that

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that feeling of like, Oh, I show up getting defensive, showed up with me for years and years about giving it to other people giving feedback to other people.

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So again, you

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know, a lot of this daring to lead work is really thinking, in your own life, about the stories that set things up for you. And, you know, recently I had a conversation at a courageous conversation with somebody who was a potential client, and I was delivering feedback. And just this subtle shift of showing up with understanding my values around gratitude, you know, this person asked for feedback, I was delivering the feedback. And, and hopefully, that was, I was in gratitude for having the experience to do that. And hopefully, they were in the experience of embracing that on their end. And also growth, like all of these are steps along our journeys for growth. So that was another big thing for me. And the final thing I want to talk about is the hardest thing, which is the learning to rise, and it's pretty cool. There's an assessment that you can take on daring to lead. And I scored the highest on this concept of learning to rise.

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Like, really

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no shit, I have a podcast called thinking courageously, I must have learned how to think courageously and to think about learning to rise. Throughout my life, which I have. I am Brazilian, and I am gritty. And I've dealt with some interesting stuff. And so it was interesting, because I had scored, you know, parenthese marks scored well on this part of things. But this was also the hardest part of the three days for me. And so I want to share something that happens, about rumbling with our own story, as Rene says, and I'm going to use this quote, because I'm obsessed with it. I'm totally obsessed with it. So Renee says like Brittany and I are besties. But when what bearnaise says when we deny our stories and disengage from tough emotions, they don't go away. Instead, they own us,

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they define us.

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Our job is not to deny the story,

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but to defy the ending, to rise strong, recognize our story and rumble with the truth until we get to a place where we think yes, this is what happened. This is my truth. And I will choose how this story ends.

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Okay, I'm going to really try not to cry, but

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that quote defines the why behind this podcast and thinking courageously and the work

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that

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I'm hoping to inspire so many of you around in thinking courageously. So what we had to do was to choose a

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moment where we were facedown in the arena.

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And to think about what that felt like and I had to work through and some of you have heard me talk about this and I think this is an especially important story this month, which is Domestic Violence Awareness Month and between being married to Alice dad bill,

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who is a

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fantastic guy, and my husband Fred and the love of my life, I had a very big bump of a relationship,

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somebody

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that

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I was married to, and that I thought was this. I don't know what I thought. But I got to explore some of this, during this. And so my face down arena moment came when it's like, so clear, and I'm sure you all can imagine this, it's just so clear to me, after years of being picked on and verbally criticized, and feeling diminished, and feeling like I could not make somebody happy. I mean, this guy told me the night we got married, that we should never got married, it was the biggest mistake of his life, like, that pretty is a pretty shameful moment for me. Um, but there was a night there was a day that this guy who will forever be called Ctrl, Alt Delete, took an electric razor, from the master bathroom and hauled it at me, like with such force, I didn't get hit

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by it.

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But that was the that was when I was the most vulnerable and most facedown in the arena,

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where I decided like, this story

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that I had been telling myself about this marriage

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had to change. And it's only now

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through going

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through this experience that I'm able to really

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own it in a different way.

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So the story that I told myself was there was a lot of blame. And how did I get here, which is so many of us who are survivors often think to ourselves, like, How stupid were we? Like, how did this happen? I'm smart woman, I master's degree, I was almost 40 at the time, like, you know, now what's next, I'm just a failure at being married, I'm just a failure. On my beliefs, which were part of what courage is all about. We're that I'm strong, and that I'm smart. And at that moment, laying facedown in the arena, I moved in to the back room of our house. And I basically never talked to this person again. And all I did was

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I wanted to do was protect

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my daughter and protect myself.

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And so the

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way the process that Bernie shares about dealing with this, and this, I've been calling it exfoliating lately, like getting shedding all this shit

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on his writing,

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writing your own shitty first draft of the story. So I'm going to share that with you. And I'm going to share this unfiltered story in hopes, again, that it might inspire you to think about, you can do this shitty first draft. And then what's so cool is that you get to choose how the story ends, going back to that incredibly powerful quote.

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So the story I told myself,

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during that time, when I was facedown in the arena, was, you know, what other person do you know, under 40? That's been divorced twice? What's wrong with your judgment? Deb? How did you let it get to this point? You're smarter than this. You didn't listen to what he said carefully enough. You should have stopped this when he said, this is the biggest mistake of my life. You should have said,

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I can't change anyone.

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You should have protected your daughter. Whoo, that's a hard one. You should have had your eyes on this. You should have seen this coming. You should have asked for what you needed. Which was really hard. You should have been less worried about what others would think you should have trusted your intuition. And how we know that's a shitty first draft is that it's has to be honest. It has to be unfiltered. It has to be unedited. And it has to be possibly unchangeable.

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I am choosing to share this story.

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Right now, even though the first thing that comes up for me is all this shitty first draft shame stuff in the hopes that it gives somebody else the opportunity to

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rewrite their story and so

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I, without a doubt, like shedding this story has been really tough and sharing this story, specifically with all of you about like, what was going on inside of my own head? Let me just say it. This is not it's not easy. But again, I didn't do this podcast to play safe. I am not doing this podcast to play it safe. And I want to go back to that definition again, about the rumble with writing our stories.

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Right. So

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for so long, I, I was able to tell the story, I was able to say that I was in this marriage. That was horrible. That was unfulfilling, that was unrewarding. It wasn't until I joined the board of turning point that I felt like I needed to come face to face in the arena with what had happened. And it wasn't until I went through this workshop, and did this work on myself that I really started to understand that saying it out loud, is just incredibly powerful. Right? It's just incredibly powerful, because it's out

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there, like it doesn't have any power over me anymore.

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So I'm going to share this quote again with you. And I want you to consider it. As we continue to think courageously as a community as women in all the parts of our lives. So when we deny our stories, and disengage from tough emotions, they don't go away. Instead, they define us. Our job is not to deny the story, but to defy the ending, to rise strong, recognize our story,

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and rumble with the truth

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until we get to a place where we think yes, this is what happened. This is my truth.

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And I will choose how this story ends.

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So I hope you've enjoyed this little journey of mine of

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Deb's Excellent

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Adventure of daring, bravely.

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And

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looking forward to using this work moving forward in the context of coaching and what gets in our way of showing up in the most powerful way that we can as women. So with that, I will say let's continue to

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write our stories.

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And let's continue as always to think courageously

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Have a great day.

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Thanks again for showing up for another edition of the thing courageously Podcast. I am so grateful to all of you as my listeners and I'd love you to take the opportunity to rate and review this edition in this episode of the podcast

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on your favorite podcast player.

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I also want to invite you to join me in the think courageously Facebook community. Again, it's the thing courageously Facebook community

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where

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about 300 women are engaged in a conversation about thinking courageously, we'd love to have you. And finally I would welcome you to check out the think good company website at www. The think good company.com. And as always, I encourage you to step into your brave to shine your light and to always think courageously. Thanks again. And we'll be here and in conversation.

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Powerful conversations

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next week.