#11 - Who are you?

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

thoughts, identity, role, caterpillar, dream, alice, life, baking, baker, food truck, feel, goal, bakery, shed, owning, hookah, entrepreneur, connect, noise, trisha

SPEAKERS

Trisha Barita

00:02

Hey there, I'm Trisha Barita. I'm a mother of twin girls, a wife, an entrepreneur, a psychology major, a lawyer, and a coach. With all these different roles in my life, in the past, I truly struggled with limiting beliefs in my ability to adequately juggle all these roles successfully, I often would be frustrated that time and again, I let my goals and dreams always take a backseat to everything else I was trying to do. And those dreams always seem to be on the horizon, just out of reach, until I discovered tools and thought work to help me tackle and learn to balance all of it. Now, I don't let these titles define my limits. I define my balance in life, by how I choose to show up for myself, every day. Am I perfect? Hell no far from it. But I do work every day to believe in myself, and to be present with whatever I experienced in this life, The Good, the Bad, and The really fucking ugly. to own my truth and own my thoughts. I created this podcast to talk about how that noise gets in the way of our goals as women. And now I help women and teach them tools to cut the overwhelm of noise in their life, preventing them from getting the balance they want. If you liked this podcast and want to take my free course to get started on designing your balance, and saying fuck that noise, go to Trisha barita.com, forward slash free course. Now let's get after it.

02:07

Hello, fabulous friends. So following up from Episode 10, when we talked about dreaming scary big. If you try to do some dreaming scary, big good for you. But what if you tried to do this, you know, to dream something scary big. And you're still thinking about it. Thinking about what you really want, what would make you happy. I want to talk about an obstacle that you could face when you're going after a new and different goal, which really is all about thoughts about yourself. And more specifically, because you're gonna have a lot of thoughts about yourself. More specifically, I'm talking about how you see yourself and the identity and roles that you have connected with, what makes you who you think you are. So we all identify with certain roles in our life. And we identify with things about these roles. For instance, you could have a role like, I'm an entrepreneur, I love owning my own business and all that comes with it. Or you could have a role like or an identity as you're a baker, you own a bakery, you love baking day or night. Baking is always your thing. Or, you know, I'm a wife, I love my spouse in sickness and in health. When I think about them all I think about as love. Or I'm a mom, I love my children all the time and unconditionally. A great mom spends day and night with her children and always showing up with patients and happy thoughts about parenting. I could keep going. But hopefully you get the point. See how there's a role and then I just named an example thought about that role. All of these things may be true or may not be or just may be a lot of thoughts. We often seek to identify with our roles, because that brings us comfort, because we have the same thoughts over and over again about what it is to be in these roles. You may be so connected with these thoughts. You can't even separate them. So it feels like your reality. Now imagine each identity or role you have for yourself and that you have multiple thoughts that you personally attached to it. Creating the thoughts about this identity of yourself. It's important in our development, it really is. We even start some of this at a young age. It's made up of a combination of things we believe are true or fact. Things we have experience against things people have told us about ourselves or about this identity and role. And it really generally doesn't take a lot of energy to live in the thoughts about these roles and identities, because they're established repetitive thoughts in our head, like a habit. But say you have these competing thoughts in your mind to what you think you should be thinking in each of these identities or roles. Or say someone else challenges or questions how you show up in this role. Well, that may leave you feeling unsettled. I know this seems a little abstract, so go with me, somewhere for a minute. Imagine is walking in a world of tall green plants and mushrooms, and a little girl dressed in a blue dress and white apron, pierced through the green plants, because she hears the singing of some strange voice. And then she sees Caterpillar propped up on a mushroom singing and smoking from what appears to be a hookah. You may have guessed by now, but yes, I'm taking you to the infamous scene of Lewis Carroll's slash Disney. Disney's Alice in Wonderland, where Alice comes face to face with the caterpillar. Remember, she approaches the caterpillar. And the caterpillar somewhat rudely asks her as he blows hookah smoke in her face? Who are you? If you don't recall? Well, Alice gets quite frustrated here because she says something like? I don't know, sir. I've changed so much since this morning.

06:55

But Caterpillar keeps asking, Who are you? And Alice continues to struggle to explain herself and who she is getting more and more frustrated? Well, of course she did. Of course, she got frustrated. Challenges to your current identity by someone else, or even yourself, of who you think you are. And setting aside all of Alice's other problems. Okay? Well, it can be very frustrating. And at this point, Alice was questioning who she is herself. Really, it's because it's safer for you to feel like you know who you are, or at least you think it's safer. And letting go of what you know about yourself, or what you've identified with, it doesn't feel safe. It brings out all the thoughts all the all the thoughts about, you know, what you may be thinking you need to know or feel to be secure, and to feel safe. I mean, if you're not this role, or you're not this identity, who are you. and easy way to think about this is like a professional athlete who experiences you know, a career ending injury. And they're struggling to move forward because the identity or role of being that athlete, and what they believe it means about themselves, and even maybe what they believe it means about their worth, just makes it very difficult for them. Oftentimes, if you feel challenged on your identity or role, all of a sudden, you may even find yourself defensive. You defiantly want to defend this identity or a role, even if you're not quite sure of it's still being right for you. I mean, how many of the things that you tell yourself and you tell others about who you are, are really applicable anymore? are really something that you connect with? Or is it just something that you repetitively say about yourself? So you just say it again. I mean, in this long life, you can be all kinds of things, all kinds of identities and play all kinds of roles. Some of them will feel forced upon you by things that happen in your life, a shift a change, and some may be subtle. One day you may wake up and you look around you and you feel like you don't know who how you got there. These thoughts can conflict you know, with your new goals, and become an obstacle. Let's go back to the examples. Let me let's let's just take the baker that I brought, let's just take this, this woman Baker, let's call her canvas. She's an entrepreneur, she owns a bakery. She identifies with this role of a baker. Her thoughts about bakers are that they love baking always. And when she has a bad day and does Someone baking, she often has thoughts that it doesn't align with, you know how she thinks she should feel as a baker. And then she feels worse, actually, she, she has thoughts about how she's thinking the wrong thoughts about this identity role that she should be in. And then she has thoughts about feeling bad about that. And saying one day, she starts thinking about owning a food truck where she cooks and delivers barbecue. And she started doing some barbecue on the side and really loved making the food. But it didn't match her current situation of owning a be a bakery and being a baker. And she has these conflicting thoughts, she feels conflicted. Her identity as a baker means she needs to love baking. And that's, you know, what she's good at what she's, you know, spent all of her time and energy on. So what does all this mean for her to have this other sort of goal coming in for her this other type of dream? So she spends a lot of energy fighting these thoughts, because her thoughts about being a baker, mean, she can really only be a baker, she truly loves bake. You see what I mean? Does that make sense? You know, her, her potential goal of what she could possibly follow to become is conflicting with what her current identity or thoughts about that identity and role are. So instead of trying to lean into this new dream, and figuring that out, she stuck spinning out about how she has this identity of being a baker, and it's being threatened and she can't reconcile it with these new thoughts and dreams. I know at first, you may think this is silly, you're probably like Candace should just do both.

11:43

Mythical Candace should bake on certain days and do the food truck other days. Or maybe she just ditch the bakery and go after the food truck during. But I'm telling you, I've coached clients through these identity and role situations. And when you're on the inside, it's not always that simple. And it's easier, you know, to look from the outside and say, it's really no big deal. Because it's not your circumstance and your thoughts and your feelings. I don't think you have to let go of the identity or role necessarily to move forward or to get after your dreams. But you may find that thoughts you have around that identity or role are no longer serving you where you are in this life and where you are wanting to go. So you may need to shed pieces. Those thoughts you claim make up this identity and look at everything, you know, considering what you do want to embrace from that roller identity and what you may want to let go. If you started with a blank slate of that identity or role, what would it be? What could that role look like? If you let go of everything that you knew, you feel like you know about, you know, being in that role or I that identity, you may just need to ask yourself like the caterpillar asked Alice, who are you? What are these roles and identities that you have? And what are the thoughts you tell yourself about what you should be doing? Or how you should be showing up in these and challenge those? And what if, what if to get to what's possible for you, you have no other choice, but to shed some of the thoughts you have around your current identities and roles you connect with now. So you can have the capacity and ability to have the new thoughts that are absolutely needed for you to connect and accomplish your scary big dream. Much like a caterpillar cocoons and then sheds it all to turn into a butterfly. And I'll leave you with that. Now go get after it. You got this

14:18

Hey, thanks for listening today. If you enjoyed this episode, and are a woman ready to say fuck that noise, so you can start designing the balance in your life. Go take my free course to get started at Trisha barita.com forward slash free course. Now Have an awesome day and I'll see you next week.