the actions you take because you see how precious time is. That's another thing that we learned in this past year, that you are taking the most advantage of that time you have by being the highest level of self-care that you can bring into your life to be as solid as you need to be entering that new environment. This is your Badass Drenny podcast. I am Karine Walsh, serial entrepreneur, growth strategist, executive leadership coach and best-selling author.
Each week, I will bring you a guest or thought that will help you align what you love with what you do in order to build that Badass life and business you dream of. Is there a way I can support you as a thank you for being on my show? For those of you who have been listening to me for a while, I'm getting a lot of great feedback on that particular part of our conversation because then you are actually hearing questions you have asked by my amazing guests on the show, and you're getting additional support from some of that Q&A, which that's what I'm here for. And I personally love that.
It's like one of the gifted moments where I really am able to show my appreciation through service. So in one of the last episodes with Natasha Dewhurst, she asked first about branding initially was like her initial question towards the end of the segment on how does she translate what she's trying to offer to attract the clients that she's wanting and was having some wordsmith challenges there. But then what ended up happening was a follow-up into how you managed through trauma and how we need to have a consciousness around where trauma potentially could be holding us back today that might have happened to us way on early in our formative years. And so I'm going to if you haven't listened to that episode yet, totally cool.
I'm going to share that segment. I encourage you to go back and listen to the whole episode, but I'm going to share that particular segment because so many things of value came up in our dialogue in this segment that I want you to be able to re-listen to. And then I'm going to come back after you listen to this clip, and we're going to dive in a little deeper into what it creates for you when you have certain traumas or dysfunction or ways of learning in a disordered way, as in your formative years, how that shows up for you today in a positive way, but also how maybe if you're feeling that you've outgrown that part of you and you're wanting to learn something different to replace it and move on from it, how you can go about doing that as well. All right, check out this segment from that episode and we will jump back in right after.
The other thing that's a bit of my kind of hobby horse that really, you know, I like to speak out on is the amount of people that have had like adverse childhood experiences and for whatever reason and in whatever capacity. But what happens is it's a distraction so that that child at that point doesn't get those building blocks, those foundational pieces and we become adults without those foundational pieces and you know, it's not a blame game, it's just how it is. You know, for me, that was a big part of my journey. You know, when I was missing some of these foundational pieces, I could not say no.
I was terrified of rejection, so I would say, yes, yes, yes, yes. And I was screaming, no, I didn't want to. But I didn't have that voice and boundaries is another one, right? And we're not brought up in families where we see that modeled and we just then we become adults that can't model that.
And the thought of doing it fight and flight again gets switched on. So it's really challenging. And I see the word authenticity banded around a lot. You know, you need to be authentic.
You need to be authentic. But again, if you've had that adverse childhood experience, it's not safe to be authentic and you have to hide who you are. Until you're ready to know a notion. Yeah.
Yeah. You're ready to display it. Oh, yeah, there's a lot in there too, to unravel in that. To me, I, we all start with a foundation of learning and it's generally a conformed way of thinking.
And it's based on the skill set of who is around us as we're being raised, right? And those lessons as we're in our forming stages are the beginning of storytelling, the self storytelling, because we don't know any different. We are forming during those years. And I do believe that part of our journey is to live with that version of ourselves but to give ourselves permission to say, yes, this still works for me.
No, this does not. And in that, no, okay, if it doesn't work for me, do I need to replace it with something else or do I need to find the tools to truly move forward, let that go and become that next version of ourselves. And it's that constant evolution. But a lot of the time, as children, especially as women, we were told generally, generationally that we had to do it all and that no man should be able to, like the whole feminist movement for our generation was so critical in the do it all, but also suck it up at the same time.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. And so it was like, how do I belong? What if I don't want to do it all?
What if I actually want to receive and be in my feminine energy and have someone else show up for me every now and again? Or what if, you know, so there's all these dichotomies of society and the cultures we brought up in and the skill set of our parents and how they were raised and, you know, it's a lot. But what I love about being an adult is that we have a freaking choice. You know, like children, unfortunately, they don't.
And it's so great that you're building a family unit where you can actually show them what boundaries are. They're learning lessons from you, et cetera. Not everybody has that skill even to bring into their household. And there will be their own journey to navigate all of this, right, themselves.
But as soon as you become an adult, you have a choice to decide if you're going to get the help you need. You decide what society you want to be a part of. You could decide which job, career, whatever you want to go after. That choice is yours.
And it's something that the sooner we embody knowing that we don't have all the answers, but we're going to explore to find the answers is the energy of adulthood that I personally appreciate. Because I was like you very much a people pleaser, had to say yes to everything, was guilty, I'm manipulated into becoming, you know, a version of myself that was effective, but highly dysfunctional. And so I can like rearrange it all and create a version of myself. And it's still in the process.
But I'd like to say that I like to think that I'm at a place now of a more solid foundation. It still has some cracks in it, but I can stand on it and now assist others in achieving it as well, just as you. Yeah. I mean, I was like so obsessed with that segment.
Did you get all the different pieces of value from that conversation? And also for you to recognize that if you are sitting with something that was somewhat traumatic from your past, but is not present in your now, how that energy and that learning and that culpability that happened during that time, your survival scale that might have turned on during that time to get you to where you are today. And now you're recognizing it no longer serves you. This is the time to really allow yourself to realize you are not alone, that there is a lot of help out there that you can get to face whatever those moments were and decide on the story and the gifting that it gave you to come to where you are today and where you plan to go next.
So let's break it down a little bit because I know it can be a heavy topic, but I'll tell you that for my own journey and I'll give you some other shares about me. I think I just shared some as well as I was talking with Natasha is that, you know, for me, I would say my people pleasing years and the storytelling I had that others mattered before I matter and what I desire mattered was what I came to believe, I thought my role in my family unit and in life was to be. So my heart of service, which is my innate energy, my generosity is something that is innate to me, was overextended because the lack of skill said that other people had in my own family unit or who I was surrounding myself with that made me over compromise myself because I was capable in an area that they took advantage of. Now, did they know they were taking advantage of it?
I don't know, you know, like I can't go back in time and say, oh, that was their plan. It was just the circumstance of all the dynamic around us at the time. And generally, when you're in high-stress environments, all of your reactionary spaces are showing up. And for me, I am highly capable under crisis to still be functional and push through and controlling, but it became at the detriment of my own self-care.
But that was definitely in play from a very early on part of my life that until I truly got into my 30s, did I face that overextension of myself and realized that all my health issues, that how I attracted relationships into my life, the choices even I was making in my career, could go back to that learned behavior through traumatic experience where I was overextended because I thought that that was the role I had to play and that if I didn't play that role, I wouldn't be loved that created areas of overextension, overwhelm, and emotional abuse for a long period of time in my life. So when I chose to face it in my 30s and really say, I have a choice here because, as I mentioned this always to you guys, is that as adults, we have a choice. And if we don't know how to create the options for us, that is when you go seek out the help to go talk with professionals, experts, et cetera, and what it is you are trying to discover about yourself or move through so that you can find the language and articulation and identity of what you want it to be and translate all the learning from the past to the moment now as you're doing the work to say, this is what I want to take with me going forward. So if you're thinking, if you're sitting in that state of like people pleasing, right?
Like, so I'm just having you join me in my story because that's the one I want to share with you today, but you'll hear it even from others in your life where you can even see it, especially if those of you who have done that work to face the storytelling and then figure out the identity from that story you want to take forward. What do I mean by that? Being that way as a child for me, the gifts that it gave me was it showed up in me learning how capable I actually am in dysfunctional environments to then dial it up even higher and with more ease when I realized that that skill set also works in functional environments, in highly interactive and collaborative environments, in a way that would lift me up where I would feel aligned. It didn't have to be dysfunctional, to be functional, right?
So what it taught me was my capabilities at a very young age. I became a much better communicator. I was able to listen. My listening skills came from that time.
I also received the gift of working hard under pressure. It's not something I try to sit in today, but I'll tell you that it got me very far in my career knowing how to get shit done under pressure and still keep a smile on my face and make sure everyone was taken care of because that was the role I played then. So much easier to actually do it with strangers like a coworker because there's no emotional baggage there, right? But it gave me that was a gift.
That was a gift of that time. That was a gift of my people pleasing time was all the skill set that I learned. What I had to shift was creating the boundary and the acceptance of this is a skill I have. Don't shut it down.
Go find and create the environments where I feel appreciated and there's reciprocation for it and that I am basically not taken advantage of in those environments. I had to learn the language to create the boundaries of the new setting, but not shut down the skill because there was a period of time where I was definitely going through my healing and facing this part of me and trying to sit in a lot of forgiveness of those who had overextended me. But really, I was also didn't have the skill to create the boundary for them not to overstep, right? So I had to go through not only forgiveness of how I showed up in it, but also acceptance of it's still something that I love doing.
I just have to find the environment to do it. And when I was in that healing phase, I became very closed off. I didn't want any type of form. I had to practice basically that part of me not showing up at all so that I could really figure out what is the right setting for that side of me to show up in.
And sometimes you have to do that if you've ever done work on managing or how you can relate or be in relationship with a narcissist, for example, distance is one of the practices to help you make sure you're not always compromising for someone who has an agenda that will always overtake any sort of desire of your own. And that's just narcissistic behavior. This is a very, very light surface base. You guys can go and read more about narcissists and the best way to deal with them.
But I'm just giving you an example of distance sometimes from the behavior or the environments gives you a different perspective to then decide what do you want to take with you from this? What do you want to make sure it never happens again? And what do you want to make sure when you do decide to do it again? What does it need to look like?
So when we're sitting in this energy of looking at past trauma or figuring out triggering, like what's triggering us today? And is it from something from the past and lately, I've been working a lot on the present past because as you know, you've been listening to me for a while, if you're new to me, welcome, but it's something that I will always hit things head on and do the work when I'm finding something that is a bit unraveling within me or I'm discovering something about myself. Because I would like to get to the higher aligned way of being than sitting in something that no longer serves me, that energy that brings me down into a lower frequency than who I know I can be. And so I take the bull by its horns, it's basically how a lot of people describe me and I like to be immersive about it and do the work.
So now that I have all these tools in my toolkit for when I feel triggered or when something comes up for me that I'm trying to heal through or learn from or decide in this next version of myself that I want to take this with me, I do the work, right? But what I'm realizing now is that I'm dealing a lot with my presence past. So when you ultimately start to do the work from childhood, let's say, if you haven't done that work yet, and let me just tell you all of us in our forming lives and our formative years, and even those of you who have children, it's happening to your children, whether you like it or not, however protective you want to be, it is part of our growing nature to feel things that don't fit in our true essence of who we are. That's how we become who we are.
And that's how we decide what we like and don't like. So we have to go through it. Otherwise, you're creating a facade that everything's always going to be okay. And this is where high anxiety comes up when it's not okay.
If you're not letting your kids feel what it feels like when it's not okay and creating nurturing environments to let them express it and grow within the discomfort with the right support around them, then they will be less functioning in life on their own because there, of course, is a lot of trauma happening to us every single day, which is what you know, this past year was for all of us. And that's what I mean by the present past, is that a lot of us were triggered in this last year based on the pandemic year we had and all the impact to our health and finances and relationships and home environments, etc. That triggering was happening nonstop. It's why mental health issues have risen or the need for mental health assistance, because if you haven't been on a journey like mine where I started super young trying to get the help I needed, because I knew in my heart that there was a better way to be.
And I was able to find the resources to help me along the way. And I still continue to invest in the assistance I need right now that the present past also has its own wave of trauma that is needed as well to be faced. And what I would recommend for any of you listening who is who feel a little bit untethered right now, not really grounded in your footing, having a bit of uncertainty around like how to manage through this, or if you've been the person who's the pusher, like I used to be for many years and push, push through. And I would say last year, I definitely went into push mode into an area of my business that, you know, I would say on a fulfillment scale, maybe is like a seven out of 10, but I knew it would drive revenue for us.
And that would give me certainty during a time of uncertainty around finances. So I leaned a lot that way, but it didn't necessarily fulfill me and bring me up to where I know I'm meant to be right now. But I did it as a reactionary to the year we had right, a lot of us are sitting in that compromise of self and our choices because of the circumstance. We are as we're moving forward now into this next year, we're thinking about, okay, things are starting to open up, we're trying to get ready for what I like to call reentry.
What does it need to look like? And how can you prepare yourself right now so that when everything is in a more stable environment for you to go and enter into it, you're not going into it on an unsettled footing. You're actually stepping into it more empowered, more knowing of yourself, more self aware, more aligned so that the actions you take, because you see how precious time is, that's another thing that we learned in this past year, that you are taking the most advantage of that time you have by being the highest level of self care that you can bring into your life to be a solid as you need to be entering that new environment. Because as we saw, it could be swept up from under us, all these external things can be swept up from under us in a hot second.
And then who are you going to be standing there? The most important asset you have is you and how you take care of you first. And so what I'm recommending here is to get the help you need, reach out to the professionals you need to talk to, hire the coaches you need to work with, whatever it looks like for you to manage not only any sort of past true past trauma that has been re-triggered now because of the stress circumstance you're under, but even to work through the present past so that you do not take the energetic disconnect that may have happened in this past year and some into your future endeavors. It's really important to invest the time in checking in on these things for yourself so that you know every step you take going forward is an aligned step that is your truth, that is who you want to be in this lifetime, however long you have, because that is the one thing you get to control is what you think about yourself.
And whatever trauma that has happened in the past by whoever it happened with or from, whatever that circumstance is, what I would love to also share with you as a method that I use is forgive once you understand how you want to take things forward is to forgive whatever energetic pull that you still might have from others that were involved during that time because it doesn't make sense to put so much weight in something that doesn't truly have to exist right now. And I know our family relationships are deep ones and we get scared sometimes to feel a little bit untethered from it, but I'll tell you that a healthier relationship with yourself and the boundaries you create and the communication you have and the way you actually tell people how they can be in your life is a much easier way to show up in life than having to dummy yourself down or feel less than in order to surround yourself by people who just will continue to take advantage of who you are. This has been coming up a lot in conversations I've been having lately and I wanted to make sure we had the dialogue here because I feel like you need to hear it too. I know that you're sometimes can feel alone in your journey on it all and I just want you to know you're not.
I go through it myself. My clients go through it. My family goes through it. My friends are going through it and we seek out the help.
It's the one thing that I always encourage is to go talk to the right person that's a fit for you, the right professional, so that you can get on the other side because there is another side to it. It does not have to sustain in this way. I'm telling you there's a framework you can work through to get on the other side and make it what you want it to be to stand in all of who you truly are as you step forward on your badass journey. So I want to thank you for giving me time today and of course please go reach out to who you need to talk to for it but you know I'm here too and if you need help navigating finding the help that with whatever it is that's going on don't hesitate to reach out to me and ask and ask me to say hey Kari do you know who someone that is a master at dealing with this or if this is my traumatic moment or I'm trying to work through this thing, this moment, this trigger, whatever it is, do not hesitate to ask and if you feel like I am a safe place for you to ask that question because you know I am I will be discreet and confidential about whatever you send me in this realm of questioning so that you can get the support because that's what I'm here for I'm a conduit for you to align what you love with what you do every day but truly to become who you're meant to be and love on yourself every single day because that honestly is blissful living in my opinion that's that's being badass is when you can show up loving yourself first that's badass living but please reach out to me so feel free to email me at kzw at karinewalsh.com or hello at karinewalsh.com and I will help you navigate finding that help you need and connect you with those amazing people in my network or people I've worked with or if I even feel like I can help you through it you know I'll reach out and tell you that as well but I hope you have an amazing rest of your day love on yourself as much as you can you know I'm here for you and I will see you in the next episode.
Wasn't that such a great episode? I know you've got amazing take aways from that but I would love for you to do for me if you can help me extend my reach just go ahead and subscribe to the show so you get the latest notification and listen before anyone else also if you could go ahead and post your review your five star review will help me get other people interested in this conversation and extend my reach of impact most of all I would love for you to share this with your community it means so much to me to have you as a listener and I would love to connect with you so if you have any questions you would like me to answer on this show go ahead and email hello at karinewalsh.com and my team will make sure that I get your questions so we can get them answered on the show for you thank you so much for listening today and I'll see you on the next episode.