Anxiety vs Inner Voice

Aug 20, 2022

Happy Saturday morning!

In my Craft Your Talk class we are telling little short stories and I thought I would record them to practice getting in front of a camera to speak. Here are the ones I've done so far:

First time I ever heard (or felt in this case) my Inner Voice

Anxiety vs Inner Voice

I'm getting a little more used to it. I've learned to flip my Zoom recording horizontally so when I watch it's like looking in a mirror—otherwise I look very strange. Both of them took 3 takes as I didn't want to edit them in a video processor, I just wanted it to be me telling a story from start to finish since that's what I'll be doing at the end of the class. Little steps toward my goal!

•••

On "pushing my agenda" on a client

I had someone ask me the other day about what it means to coach someone who was questioning their gender. After talking for awhile I realized their question really was:

As a coach, am I going to "push my agenda" on a client?

A really good question! And not just a gender question either—this applies to all clients.

The answer is: No. I don't "push my agenda" on my clients. I don't have an agenda for my clients. Or maybe it's better stated to say that my agenda is whatever my client's agenda is. What does that mean? I follow my client's lead. My job is to help them become more aware of what they want in life. The answer is inside them, I just help them find it. Huh? It's inside already? Yeah, but it's all the shoulds and shouldn'ts that keep us from allowing the answers to bubble up to the surface—all those things that people say and do to us, often from a long time ago, that keep us staying small.

What does this mean for a client's parents who feel their child's gender dysphoria is just "a stage?" It means I won't be pushing the parent's agenda either :-)

In working with my clients, the "side" I'm choosing will always be my client's side.

If your goal is to have your child return to their front pack baby carrier and never let them go, I get it, truly.

Although it might be a little weird now as mine is taller than I am... ;-) As ManChild heads off to his freshman year in high school, I have moments where there's so much worry! The year before the pandemic we started homeschooling him so he's been schooling at home in some way from 6th-8th grade. It's both exciting and hard to let him go and be his own human. Part of me wants to wrap him up and carry him around forever. And I can imagine that if your child is gender diverse or LGB, that the worry is amped up even more.

Parenting is hard.

But back to anxiety vs Inner Voice because that's what's getting me through my own anxious time. ManChild has a lot of feelings about high school (even though going was his own choice.) I've been following his feelings and we talk about it a lot. But the other night he was kinda spiraling so I switched gears. I talked about imagining the best case scenario and also how our intuition helps lead us. He says the voice he hears is all anxiety. So I told him about what mine was saying about his freshman year.

Me: My "feel" of it is relaxed, calm, certainty.

ManChild, suspiciously: How do you know that's true?

Me: Well, I'm 52 and I've been listening to it a long time. Remember when Grandma had her stomach surgery? I just knew she'd be okay. And when she had her knee replacement surgery? I knew she'd be just fine then too. And then when she got the cancer diagnosis, my Inner Voice didn't say anything and I knew it wasn't good news. Silent. No relaxed, calm, certainty like before. I often just know things and I've learned to listen because my intuition is right.

ManChild: Well that's a big flex. (New teen vocab for me ;-))

Me: Yeah, but it's true :-)

I also want to say, there have been times when I knew, intuitively, things would be okay and the "okay" wasn't what I was expecting but it actually turned out to be better.

So, if you're remembering the beginning of this story and wondering about how we got from my client's agenda to ManChild's school—well it all made sense when I was writing it lol. If you're also saying, "Look Julia, it's not possible, everyone has opinions about things." You're right. I do. I suppose my biggest underlying agenda is equality for everyone. I talk about it, I work towards it, I write about it. People who think that some aren't worthy of equal rights for whatever reason they come up with, just aren't going to want to work with me and vise versa. And I'm okay with that :-)

•••

ManChild and I went to Pittsburgh last weekend so my brother could take him school clothes shopping. My brother knows all when it comes to clothes—apparently I didn't get that gene. A short fun trip although getting there was neither! We took the Tesla for an 8 hour road trip...eight hours in a gas car. A full electric car is easy in the day to day world. Visiting family, errands, or whatever is easy to do and the car is plugged in at the end of the day. The next morning we have a full tank of "gas." But with gas prices the way they are, I decided to give it a whirl.

A lot of the Telsa superchargers are at gas stations which feels nice as we are used to stopping there already. I had what my mom called, "a Karen moment" (apologies to the Karens in my life!) when I complained to her on the phone about the 4 gas cars hanging out in the charging area lol:

The eight hour trip up to Pittsburgh took thirteen and was filled with extra charging stops (my fault because I wasn't ready to trust the car's ability to figure out when/where I needed to stop), a one hour traffic jam south of DC, and then Tesla deciding to reroute us along the scenic route through Maryland instead of I-95. Ugh. ManChild and I were like zombies when we arrived. On the way back we went the West Virginia route which was really pretty and only took us ten hours. Still sucky compared to eight but we figured out that if we brought all our food and only stopped when the car needed to charge, that we could get it down to eight or nine hours which would be more doable. We learned a lot!

Besides shopping we went to the natural history museum and of course had to be goofballs. Poor ManChild, saddled with the two of us!

If you don't get why we thought this was funny, we can't be friends ;-)

•••

Someone asked me to pronounce my last name for them, so I thought I'd share that here since you might be wondering too! I know you want to call me her name:

Also, if you don't know who that is and what movie the meme is referencing then we can't be friends ;-)

And as much as you want it to be, I'm not Old MacDonald although I do have a farm.

My favorite butchering is the telemarketer who says, "Can I speak to Julia Mac...Mac...Mac...?"

The most common one I hear though is Mac-MOH-nay-gull. Nope. That's not it either.

When I first saw B-Rad's last name written and said, "Mac-MON-uh-gull?" he knew I was the one. ;-)

•••

ODDS AND ENDS

Someone was naughty! Rayn watched me move Wynter and Sweetness back off the gate so I could get Muletta (the farm truck) out. I trusted her! She took off like a shot, running back into the woods and munching on things and then just as I was walking up to her with a halter, she zooooooomed off around the driveway to the upper pasture! These are her, "Haaaa! I'm super fast! You can't catch me sucker!" hoof prints:

 Lots of deer outside my art studio lately:

 

The Polar Bear smelled like the goat barn so:

Look how puffy!

Playtime! Lucy getting ready to jump on my head—"You're in for it now lady...":

And Lucy being annoyed at me for not playing with her while I'm writing, "Fine. Whatever. You're not my real mom."

MEMES OF THE WEEK

 Ok, it's not a meme, it's me being goofy back in...2006 I think? Late 30s and still a child ;-) And it still makes me giggle. Also, love my curly hair at that length!

Also not memes, but I really want to go hiking with this guy and his pack of mutantly large goats! He breeds, raises, and trains these goats to do this and always has fun little videos of them crossing creeks and stuff. Just cool. He takes people on hunting trips too so if that freaks you out, maybe you don't follow him :-) 

This one made me laugh because we actually had this happen many years ago with our Border Collie Onya who was barking her head off one morning at 1am, we told her to stop it and she did. When we got up, B-Rad's car had been stolen!

Up until this week this was what we were living:

I almost can't even post this because the "your" bothers me so much:

If you are in my area (Apex, NC and surrounding areas) I'm offering a special deal for you to come try out neurofeedback and/or coaching!

Half off your first neurofeedback session ($35 for 45 minutes instead of $70)

$25 off your first Equine Gestalt Coaching session ($100 for an hour instead of $125)

Half off your first Reiki session ($45 for an hour instead of $90)

Please take me up on these—and yes, you can use all three, in fact I encourage it! Doing neurofeedback or Reiki before a coaching session puts you in a regulated state which the animals love and is ideal for the work. Doing neurofeedback or Reiki after helps you process your session :-) so it works either way. The coaching setting is beautiful with the horses, donkey, and goats and in my air conditioned neurofeedback room you have a view of the pond and the wildlife that surrounds it. We are in a covered barn for coaching so are in the shade and out of any rain or weather. Reiki can be inside or outside in the barn, depending on weather and client wishes.

You can read about neurofeedback here!

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