328. The Anti-Hero: Why Nothing You’ve Tried Has Worked

Hey, I'm Amanda Hess.

I'm a certified life coach.

But what you need to know is I'm a sensitive woman just like you, and I'm going to help you understand yourself better so that you can approach your life differently and feel really good about it.

Let's go.

Oh, hello, my beautiful friend.

Today I am gifting you a class that I did this week.

It is called the Antihero.

It is the heart of what I teach to women.

And today, it is my gift to you.

I hope you love it.

I hope you enjoy it.

Sit down, take notes, and really let the message that I'm giving you sink in.

If at the end of the class you have questions, feedback, feel free to email me.

My email is coachmanandahess.com all right, my friends, you ready?

Let's go.

The reason why I called this class the Antihero is because somewhere along the way, we have been taught that there is a way that we are supposed to be, that there is actually something wrong with you.

There's something wrong with me.

There's something wrong with how you look.

There's something wrong with how you speak.

There's something wrong with how you somehow are in the world.

And if you're like me, you've spent a lot of time and a lot of energy trying to prove that wrong, trying to show that you are good enough, trying to show that you can be the person that everybody wants you to be.

You've worked exceedingly hard at doing that, and you have turned yourself inside out to do it.

And what you start to experience is that you're coming up short.

You're coming up short no matter how much effort you put in, you're coming up short no matter how hard you try.

And when that starts happening for us, right when we're doing that, when we're, like, reaching and trying to get there and trying to be that version of ourselves.

And, like, I know I can be the best.

When we're doing that, what ultimately happens is we start just surviving.

It feels like survival, like we're holding on to the last rung of a ladder.

And while we're doing that, we are failing people, we are failing our partners.

We are failing our kids.

We are failing ourselves.

We just feel like we're always feeling.

And what ends up being the experience is we don't feel like a hero at all, right?

A lot of times, we feel like a loser.

Like, this is my experience of this.

I'm the opposite of a hero.

I'm a loser.

And so today, I Want to teach you a different way of doing this because whether or not you came into this class because you have shame that you've identified that something that is really big for you and really hard for you to navigate because of maybe being the person that was the person that initiated an affair, that had an affair on your partner.

Right.

Or you haven't had that experience at all, but you notice that you just are always doubting yourself.

You're always pissed off at yourself.

You're always after yourself, regardless of where you are in that.

I want to give you tools, I want to give you a way forward that is genuinely going to work for you.

So I want to tell you a little bit about myself.

My name is Amanda Hess.

I am a certified life coach.

I have been working as a certified life coach for over six years, but I've actually been working with women in, in a leadership self love capacity for many years of my life.

I consider myself to be a shame and self love specialist.

And that's because that has been my experience.

That is something that I've worked through.

And so I'm going to tell you a little bit about that later.

But this comes from a heartfelt place for me and it's just really important to me in this class to be able to show you how to lead a fuck y best life.

All right?

So I do swear, just want to let you know that right off the bat.

So if you got like little kids listening, you might want earbuds in.

I just, I. I feel the word is necessary because we're not going for an okay life.

We're not going for a oh, this would be nice life.

That's not the vibe.

We need a yes life.

We need to be able to have a life where we get up in the morning, we're like, yes, I get to live my life today.

I'm so excited.

That's the life that I teach women how to build.

And I am not teaching it to you from a pulpit.

Right?

I'm teaching you because this is my lived experience.

I went out and got certified and got the training that was required so that I could teach it to other people.

And I've done it with countless other women.

And that's really what we're going to be talking about today.

So today we're going to be talking about three things.

All right?

We're going to cover three things.

Here's what we're going to learn.

Number one, what we're going to learn is we're going to learn why you feel so depressed.

And anxious all the time.

We're going to talk about where that comes from.

We're going to talk about why it happens.

It's not what you think.

And I'm going to teach you what you need to do first to be able to handle that.

And everybody misses this part.

Everybody misses this first.

This part.

Okay, Number two, we're going to talk about what feelings actually are, and we're going to talk about how to make them easier.

We're not going to talk about how to get rid of them because we actually don't want to get rid of our feelings.

A lot of the things that we do in our day to day life to feel better are actually trying to get rid of feeling.

So we're going to talk about how to make feelings easier, how to make them less hard, why they are so hard, and how to really navigate that in a way that not only do we feel negative emotion a lot less intensely, but we feel positive emotion a lot more because that's what we want.

We don't want to just be numb.

We want to feel more, but we want to feel more of the good stuff.

And then the third thing that we're going to learn today is what to do with the brain that is perpetually showing you the low light real, the one that is perpetually telling you all the things that have gone wrong, what's wrong with you, the mistakes you've made, the things you're doing wrong, the way you look wrong.

We're going to really learn what to do with that brain so that you can really know.

At the end of this class, what I want you to know is I want you to know exactly the process that you're going to use when that hits so that you can stop doing that.

So it's not about being inspired.

It's not about being motivated.

All right?

We are going to learn the actual process.

Now.

It took me 40 years, okay, to learn all of this.

I learned it the very, very way, the very, very long way.

And that's not what you're going to have to do here.

I am going to tell you exactly what it is, exactly what it takes to not be in that place.

Okay?

So you're not floundering.

So you're ready?

Are you guys ready?

Yes.

All right.

Who is this class for?

This class is for the woman who is waiting for things to finally click for the thing that is actually going to work.

Not just another talking point, not just wasting another hour, but really looking for the thing that is finally going to click and finally Going to work.

This class is for the woman that wants to finally feel accepted, feel like she belongs, and feel like she doesn't have to contort herself to be able to do so, that she can just be who she is and be accepted for that.

This class is for the woman who wishes that people could see how hard she tries, that wishes that people could understand how much she wants other people to see her and.

And see her true heart.

Right?

So you are in the right place if this is you.

And I do want you to know this, and I know this is true because I've talked to so many of you.

I do know that you're tired.

I do know that.

I know that you have tried a lot of different things.

Most women that I've worked with have tried therapy and podcasts and books and maybe even other coaching programs, and they are at their wit's end and they're tired.

They're tired of always having to hold themselves together.

It's exhausting.

I know you are.

And for some of you, you may have even already decided before you got on this call that whatever we're going to share here isn't going to work for you.

And I just need you to know if that comes up for you, and it will, because I will share things that might trigger you or might trigger a response.

I've tried that before.

I've done that before.

And I want you to know that is just your very human survival brain just running in, trying to protect you.

So I've got you.

I would love for you to stay to the end of this presentation if you can, because I want to take you all the way through.

All right?

Take you all the way from the front of this to the back of it so that you can see all of it before you make that decision.

Let's talk about before we, like, move into the next part.

What you have tried, you can put it in the chat if you are able to, the things that you've tried.

And I'll talk to you about things that I know my clients have tried and that I have tried over the years.

And the first one is white knuckling.

Who here has tried to white knuckle their way through this?

All of us.

Right?

Everybody.

White knuckling.

Looks like pasting a smile on your face and trying to be positive.

How are you doing?

Great.

Fine.

Everything's good.

Trying to push positive affirmations in.

Going to the grocery store and pretending like it's all okay.

Going to work and putting on a fake smile.

But at the end of the night really just kind of falling apart.

Not bawling your eyes out necessarily, but the anxiety, like, reaching up inside of you, like there's fingers coming out of, like, your throat.

You know, ultimately, when you're doing that, there's a cost.

The cost is the tiredness that other people can't see.

The cost is just being tired in a way that sleep doesn't really fix.

And the thing that it does is it leaves you deficient of being able to go after the things you really want.

It doesn't give you the energy.

You don't have energy to go after a Fuck, yes, life, if this is what's happening.

Because you are spending all of your time and energy on survival.

And so it works until it doesn't, and then it doesn't work because that tiredness, that exhaustion robs you from all the things that you might be out trying to do or being excited to try.

Right.

Other things that I know people have tried is books.

Who here loves books?

Or podcasts?

I would say that podcasts almost take precedence over books now just because of how many.

There are a lot of conversations with women that tell me that anytime they're alone with their brain, they've got a podcast in their ears.

And I think that we do that in an effort to feel less anxious and to feel less fear and to feel less sad.

But the problem with it is the minute we pull it out, all the thoughts come back in.

We can't go to sleep with a podcast, so we've got to fix the narration that goes on in our mind, like that little narrator that's telling you how your life is and who you are and how it's going.

We have to fix that.

And the thing is, is the books, the.

The podcasts, they don't give you the ability to really change how you navigate it.

You try to do maybe what the book says, you try to do maybe what the podcast says.

You can maybe do it for a day or two or maybe a week, but then you go and you fall back into what's familiar.

And to me, the reason why that's happening is essentially, we haven't fixed the root problem.

The root problem, that there's a dysregulated nervous system.

The root problem, that there's big feelings that you don't know how to handle.

The root problem that there's a story being told about you that you don't know how to fix.

I know that a lot of you might have gone to therapy and that you might have done a lot of therapy.

I have done a lot of therapy, and I will tell you, therapy, it can be good.

There's nothing wrong with therapy.

It's just that it's probably isn't going to solve this problem.

Not in the same way that we're going to talk about today when we are having that experience.

What we're trying to do is we're trying to consume, to try and change how we are so that we can have a different experience.

But consumption doesn't actually create change.

And we actually need to have somebody working with us specifically to be able to rewire some of the things that we're doing.

And our brain, the way just our brain works is it craves familiarity.

It craves what it already knows.

And so as soon as we try to do something different, it feels so uncomfortable and so different.

And we might do it to an extent that we can't really maintain that we will just bounce back to the thing that we were doing before.

Because it kind of works if you think about drinking at night, right?

It takes the edge off.

I don't have to feel so much.

If I have a glass of wine, it tones down the anxiety.

It's just it bounces back in the morning.

And the thing that was creating the anxiety is still there.

And that's typically what's going on in a lot of these experiences.

So I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself.

All right.

I'm going to tell you my story because I think it's something that will help you understand what I'm going to teach you.

And I've already started teaching it.

And just bear with me.

Sometimes I'm a little all over the place.

But I promise we're going to bring it back together.

But I want you to know that at the end of this presentation, I do have a bonus for anybody that's here live.

So if you can stay to the end, I have a self draw, self love journaling tool that I give only to my clients that I am going to give to you for being here live.

So if you stay to the end, I will give you that you will be able to go and get it before we're done.

All right.

But let's talk about me a little bit so you know a little bit about me so you understand where I'm coming from.

So I have always been somebody that has had intense emotions since I was little.

I've always been like this.

I have been told I'm too emotional.

I have been told I'm too intense.

I have been Told I'm too much.

I. I have been told that by the people who are supposed to love me the most.

And so you probably have to, whatever version of it is for you.

And the truth of the matter is that I am those things.

I am emotional.

I am intense.

I do have a lot to say, just why I'm here.

But my parents, my peers didn't know how to help me.

When those things got out of balance, which they did, they came out in my reactions.

The way that I interacted with other people.

I would say, knowing what I know now, I'm a neurodivergent person.

Everybody has different experiences with that.

You know, you want to call it adhd, asd, which is autism spectrum disorder.

I definitely could qualify for that.

I was even having a conversation with one of my friends at skating today about how she's like, ocd, and I was like, oh, I think that's also a part of me.

But in dealing with that neurodivergence.

And I do think that we're all on a spectrum of neurodivergence, to be honest with you.

We all are not the same.

We are all different.

We are all unique in doing that.

There are things that some of us deal with that are more intense than for other people, and that was really, really true for me.

But because of the emotional intensity that I experienced and then the rejection that I would experience on top of that, what happened for me is that I learned to shove that down.

And that's what a lot of us do.

So we take how we naturally are, how we naturally are experiencing things, and we see, oh, this is not celebrated.

This is not good.

And so we shove it down, and we shove it down, and we shove it down.

And that can last for a little while.

We can mask, we can pretend, we can perform, and we are born performers in the world that we live in, but it doesn't last.

And so for me, what happened was, after I had my second baby, I couldn't keep that performance under wrap.

I was not doing okay.

So I ended up having a really full, horrible, painful, nervous breakdown.

And we don't call it that anymore, But I think that we all understand what that looks like.

And so I ended up going to see a doctor, going to see a therapist, going on antidepressants, and being diagnosed with postpartum depression.

But what I found was that I didn't continue with therapy because nobody suggested that's something I should be doing, which is fascinating.

But then also, the.

The meds made me feel very flat and that was not good for me either.

And so when I went to try and fix that, I ended up seeing a psychiatrist who called it a personality disorder in a 45 minute appointment, which is insane.

It's wild.

And I have been through the wringer with all of that.

It was painful and difficult and there was a lot of shame that was associated with it.

Trying to parent two small kids while my mom ended up getting a brain tumor and passing away and my family was exploding.

And all of this was going on at the same time as I was going to group therapy with a bunch of people that were nothing like me.

It was crazy fascinating when I look back.

But here's the thing.

All of that set me up for being able to find somebody that was a coach.

I love her dearly.

She's going to be a guest on my podcast either this week or next.

I'm just not sure when I'm going to put her podcast episode up.

But she was the first person that said to me, there's nothing wrong with you.

This is not a problem.

We can get through this.

We need to stop beating you up.

That is not working for you.

This is crushing you.

It's ruining your life.

I went to her because I was really searching for help in my marriage because I was so angry, I was so frustrated.

I was so resentful.

And so this is how I found this work.

And I think the biggest thing that I learned in that experience and I could, like, honestly cry talking about it to you right now is it was like, oh, I'm not the asshole I thought I was, right?

And so, so crazy for me to call, cry on this call with you, but, oh, I just need you to know the same is true for you.

And this is the thing.

The hardest part for me was carrying the shame, right?

The shame of there's something wrong with me.

That was like the hardest part for me and having it reinforced everywhere I went all the time.

And maybe the same is true for you.

In fact, I think that it is.

I've worked with enough women to know that shame is poison.

Shame eats you from the inside out.

It's corrosive.

It'll ruin your life.

And what I see is that most women that I know can't take a compliment, right?

You look beautiful today.

Oh, no, I don't.

I'm tired.

Look at the bags under my eyes.

Right?

You're really good at that.

Oh, no, I'm not that great at it.

This other person's better.

We just are doing that perpetually.

We're Reading through a text message, looking for how it could be a rejection of us.

It's approaching the things that we're doing in our life from the standpoint of I hope I'm not fucking it up.

And this is how I really approached my life for so long.

Hyper vigilant of how other people were receiving me.

Hyper vigilant of how I was doing it wrong.

And in doing that, I was putting so much pressure on myself and putting myself in this enormous pressure cooker where I couldn't exist and have any peace.

And what I know is that this is going on for all of you too.

That this is happening in your own way, in your own life.

Like, how is this happening for you right now?

If you think about your life and what's going on for you, where's the pressure cooker?

What's wrong with you?

And how do you.

How does that dial get turned up and all this pressure gets put on and you start shrinking underneath of it till you have to explode, not because you want to, but because you literally can't hold it anymore.

This is so common.

This is so common.

And what I find and the thing that I really hate about a lot of the stuff that I see online, when it comes to going after your dreams, going after your goals, getting the life you want, showing up as the person you want to be, the thing that I hate about it is that it hides under things like you need to be held more accountable, you need to be more motivated.

This is a you problem.

And what I want you to know is it's not a you problem.

It is a you problem and that we need to fix it for you.

But it's not because you're somehow lacking.

It's because if you are giving up, if you are having excuses for why you can't do things, if you are self sabotaging yourself, that's just a survival mechanism that's going on inside of you because the pressure is too much.

And the thing is, there's not a lot of messaging out there teaching us how to fix that or what to do about that.

So it's not so much that you're giving up on what you want, it's that you are ultimately not able to move forward because the pressure has you backed into a corner.

And I just need you to know that I know how that feels and I know how to move you through it.

So that is why I've labeled this class the anti hero.

And it's.

It's literally the heart of what I want you to understand.

Today, okay, we have all been taught a version of a protagonist, right?

The.

The person we hope for in a story.

And I remember when I was talking to.

Just not that long ago, I was talking to my son's girlfriend, and she was telling me that she was reading the babysitter's clubs.

Books.

I said clubs, but you know what I mean?

Club.

And I remember reading those books.

And I said to her, I was like, oh, it's interesting.

I remember reading those books.

And I remember the girls were like, blonde, five foot six, quiet, sweet.

Good.

And that's how you were supposed to be.

That was the version of life.

That's who I was supposed to show up as.

Yes.

And then I went look at myself, and I was already 5, 9.

I was a size 10.

I experienced intense emotions, and I was loud.

And I realized in that moment that they weren't talking about me.

That wasn't.

I wasn't the hero.

That I wasn't the picture of the hero that was supposed to be there.

And I have had that reinforced in 150,000 different ways in my life.

And what I need you to know is that you have, too.

What I didn't realize then, what I realize now, and that you might not even fully realize right now is that that person was completely fictional.

They were made up.

No woman, no woman has ever been her.

She doesn't exist.

She's not real.

But all of us in this room here today, we were handed her as the ideal.

That's who you're supposed to be.

Sweet, grateful, kind.

Don't want so much.

Be smaller.

Desire less.

Ask for less.

Don't be a problem.

We have all received that programming.

And the problem is, no matter if it's the person that you are, and you looked at that person, you're like, I am five, six, and I am a size six, and whatever.

It's not the point.

Right.

The point is this, like, version of perfection that we have been handed again and again and again since we were very small.

That, first of all, is unattainable, and second of all, isn't real.

And third of all, that's the way you say it.

I don't even know if we want that because I don't know.

That creates the life that we want.

And so we've just been really trained to desire to be somebody that we're not.

That the how we are isn't how we should be.

That we should be somehow different.

Yes.

And so what I look at is the antihero.

So who here is familiar with the Avengers, possibly.

Nobody.

Anybody.

Anybody familiar?

All right, listen.

Doesn't really matter.

There's a character in there called Loki, and he does bad things.

Okay?

And the thing is, is you watch these movies and you see this character and you see him start to evolve, and you realize this character is actually not all bad.

It's not all bad.

Has some good qualities.

There's some things that he does that, first of all, they make sense.

They come from a painful place.

This.

This is something that has happened to him and created him.

And he actually just wants to be loved like everybody else, which is crazy when you think about watching an Avengers movie.

But it's the truth.

It's why those movies are popular and people love them.

And what you start to realize is you hope for this person.

You want them to succeed.

You want them to win, even though they've done bad things.

And that's what I really want for you.

Whether or not you've done bad things or not is something that we would really want to work through anyways.

And, like, who decides what's good and what's bad?

Everything's on a spectrum.

Nothing happens in a vacuum.

Nonetheless, though, we want to really look at this, like, idea of, you are a whole person.

You are both good and bad ruled into one.

You will always be that you've always been.

That you were never supposed to be anything but that.

That is the point.

That is called being a human.

That is existence.

And what I also want for you is to transform you into a woman that's on her own side.

I want you to be on your own side.

That is essential.

And for too long, you were raised to do the opposite.

You have been socialized to be the person who beats yourself up, that decides you're not perfect, that you always have to be different than how you are, that you.

You've got to raise yourself up to a higher standard, that this is how you find success in your life.

And it's bullshit.

It's such bullshit, and it's ruining your life.

And so this is the point, right?

We need to learn how to be okay with being ourselves.

We have to love that about ourselves.

And it's something that right now is an impossible goal.

Like, as you're sitting here and we're on this class here together, being okay with yourself is.

I want you to know it is an impossible goal.

And the reason why is because you don't know how yet.

But what I want you to know is that I don't care about how.

That's the beauty of what I Do.

It's not about how.

It's about who.

Who do you need to become?

What version of you do you need to become to put down the thought, I should be different?

And what I'll tell you is you're one belief away from that woman, not one strategy away.

I'm going to walk you through my method, okay?

It's a very simple method that I use with all my clients.

And it's three steps.

Step one is to regulate.

Okay?

Step one is to regulate.

Step two is to allow.

Can we see all this?

Yes.

Step three.

I do know step three, but I just want to write it the way I said it is to think on purpose.

I call it the self love method.

Love yourself no matter what method.

All right?

So regulate.

Why that voice in your head never shuts up.

Okay, I know you know what I'm talking about.

When you wake up in the morning and you feel the dread, you feel the anxiety.

It's under your chest.

It's there.

You go on your phone, you scroll.

It's not going away.

Gets a little worse.

You get up, you're like, oh, God, I'm gonna feel like this all day.

It starts coming in, you start sniping, maybe at your husband or your kids.

You start feeling panicked about work.

That feeling, right?

And it shows up in all these different places.

And by the end of your day, you're exhausted because you've been doing it all day.

You can't put it down.

All you want to do is escape it.

That right?

We've talked about, like, what the.

The experience of that is day after day.

So what you need to know is that that voice that's talking to you, you're doing it wrong.

You fucked this up.

You did this.

You did that.

You're not doing this.

We don't have enough money.

You haven't lost enough weight.

Your face looks old.

That person doesn't like you.

Whatever is coming into your brain, none of those thoughts are true.

Now, for some of you, you might have some awareness of that.

You might be like, I know I need to think more positive.

This is not what I'm talking about right here.

Okay?

How do we shut off your thoughts?

The first thing you need to understand is that your thoughts are never true.

But before you can even do that, we need to look at how to be able to talk to yourself when you're feeling panic.

Because what's really happening is you are in a panic response, right?

You're in fight flight freeze.

And so when you're in that response, it's a fear response.

And your body, in the words of Tony Robbins, is basically saying fuck everything and run.

And the thing is your body doesn't know the difference.

It doesn't know the difference between a bear is chasing you and you're worried that your sister in law might be mad at you, doesn't know the difference.

It reacts the same way.

It drops adrenaline into your body and you start running through this.

So what we need is we need to actually regulate your nervous system.

First.

We need to pull you out of the panic response.

Now in order to do that, we need to regulate your nervous system.

What does that mean?

It means that we do things to get your body to calm down without having to use your thoughts.

That's what it means.

And a lot of people have a lot of different tools.

And you might have been told you should meditate.

Sure, if it works for you.

I don't personally meditate.

I don't think it's necessary.

Some people love it.

It's.

It can be a tool.

But there's hundreds of tools.

In fact, when I was doing group therapy, I had a whole book of them.

I know I didn't know how to use any of them, but I want to show you an example of something that we do.

So when I talk about this with people, I talk about it using the example of a teeter totter.

And that's why I'm using my pen, because it's just the easiest visual because I'm not a great artist.

If I was to draw it for you.

But I want you to think about this teeter totter.

It's an old wooden teeter totter, like the one you would find at a playground years ago, right?

Maybe even longer.

But anyways, hopefully you can all know what I'm talking about.

So those teeter totters didn't really have a lot to them.

They were a wooden plank with just a piece in the middle that allowed it to go side to side, up and down, whatever you want to call it.

And if you go to those teeter totters in the park, they wouldn't be like straight, right?

They wouldn't sit like this because there's no spring.

So one end would be down and one end would be up with nothing on the teeter totter.

That's how your nervous system works.

So sometimes your nervous system is out of whack just because there's no, there's nothing balancing it.

Right?

So if you think about this analogy and you think about this side of the teeter totter being all the things that you're dealing with in your life, all of the complexity, right?

Who you are, how you are, the words you've been taught, the way you've been taught to think about yourself, the way that you've been taught to navigate the world, that is all sitting on this side of the teeter totter.

So I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not pretty enough, whatever it is, right?

But then you've got the real actual, like, building blocks of your life.

Your marriage is sitting here, your relationship with your kids is sitting here, your relationship with your parents, your job, people's health concerns, your health concerns what's going on in the world.

All of these things are sitting on this end of the teeter totter.

These are your stressors, right?

Some of these things could even be good things.

But at the end of the day, this is where they sit.

And then on this other side of the teeter totter, where we're looking at balancing your nervous system, right?

We want to be adding things to this side of the teeter totter to be able to create more balance in your body.

So what we tend to do is think and think and think and think.

And if you've ever been the kind of person that thinks and thinks, what happens?

You think more terrible thoughts, right?

If your brain is deciding that something is really terrible, it's just gonna think more terrible thoughts because it's.

We have a negative bias.

That's actually how our brains are built.

If you think about the survival brain, what it does is it's like what's wrong is its set point, and it's looking for that all of the time.

And so then once it's determined something's wrong, the background system of your brain is trying to find all the ways that's true and all the ways that's real.

So worthwhile noting that if you try to use your brain, what's going to happen without meaning to is you're going to make this side heavier.

And we don't want that.

So when I'm teaching nervous system regulation, I'm like, we need to add things to this side of the teeter totter.

Now what do we add?

There's a lot of different things that we add.

There is pleasure, there is breathing, there is movement, there is nature.

There are thousands of things you could add there.

But what people think is, I need one big thing, like what's the meditation I do, what tapping script do I use?

Whatever it is for you, right?

What book do I Read.

What podcast do I listen to?

It's none of those things.

What we actually need to do is we need to realize that what we're going to add here is little pebbles and grains of sand.

Okay?

The beautiful thing about that is we can keep adding them until we find the balance.

And it's very effective.

But in order to be able to determine them, we need to find the ones that work for you.

We don't need the thing that takes you from zero to a hundred.

We need the thing that takes you from zero to two.

And then we need to add the thing that takes you from 2 to 5.

And over time, as we're adding the things that are working for you, we're using things that feel good for you, that feel amazing for you.

We're helping you feel better in that moment.

Plus, it's giving you the balance.

None of it is using your brain.

This is the part of regulation that is being missed.

It is personal.

It is nuanced.

You don't need to know the things that work.

You need to learn how to develop the things that work for you.

That is what's required.

Every single person is different.

And what I want you to know is this teeter totter is always evolving.

There's always new things coming on this side of the teeter totter, and we can try to pull them off, but no matter what we do, we still have to have this balancing piece.

So regulation has to come first.

And I will tell you, I worked with a client about a year ago, maybe a little longer, and she was dealing with this.

She was having regular panic attacks.

And because she was having these regular panic attacks, and they were about travel, she could barely leave her house.

And when we started working together, we literally worked on regulating her nervous system.

Not in the moment of panic, but building up over time things that work, being able to understand what's going on in her body and to not be afraid of when those feelings would come in.

And in doing that, she was able to go on a trip to Greece.

On a trip to Greece, this is somebody that had a hard time leaving her house.

So if she can do that, you can do that.

All right, now the second part is allow.

And allowing is all about emotion.

All right?

Now, most people, when they experience emotion, they think that it's thinking about emotions.

That's not what emotion is.

Emotion is actually the vibration that you feel in your body after you think a thought.

And we think hundreds of thoughts every day, and it creates hundreds of different variations of sensation in your body every Day.

But emotions, especially big emotions, what you want to understand about them is that they are like waves.

So how I always teach emotion is an emotion is going to come in, it's going to go up, it's going to peak, it's going to go down, it's going to go out, and it's going to do that if you do nothing.

It's not going to do that if you resist.

And so if we are saying to ourselves, I don't want to feel this feeling.

I can't handle this.

I'm not.

Okay, Any version of that, and we start pushing back on the feeling, then the feeling will hit the wall, it will go back, and it will come back.

That is essentially what we do.

And so when we brace, when we are rejecting how we're feeling, when we don't want to feel it, when we are in our head and not in our body, because we are just.

We have these big brains and we always really, to use them, we end up playing a game of what I call emotional Whack a mole, right?

Have you ever played whack a mole?

Well, you got the little hammer and you got the little moles, and you hit one and another one comes up, and you hit one and another one comes up.

That's what your emotions are doing to you right now, because they're not being allowed because you're not dropping into your body, being able to name the emotion because you can't get to the vocabulary to even understand.

Like, this isn't just anger.

This is resentment or frustration or overwhelm.

This isn't just sadness.

This is desperation.

We, we can't name those emotions because we're so scared of feeling at them.

We're not even looking at them.

We're not even talking about them.

And we live in a culture there nobody talks about them.

Like, God forbid, God forbid you talk about how you're feeling, right?

Nobody knows what to do with that.

So we need to be able to let the feelings through.

And you might be listening to this, thinking, great, that's the last thing I need, is to be feeling more feelings.

I can't handle the ones that I'm already having.

But, but what is also important in this allow part of the process is we need to grow your emotional capacity.

And so when I talk about this, what I mean is we're getting stronger.

And when I say that, it can be misunderstood because what people can hear is, oh, I need to tolerate more emotion.

And I'm like, no, you don't need to tolerate more emotion.

Absolutely not.

It's the last thing I want for you, is for you to tolerate more emotion.

And I think of tolerating emotion.

This place where we are holding it, holding it, holding it until we can't hold anymore and then we drop it.

That's how we do tend to handle emotions.

And it's not working.

Growing emotional capacity is like building a muscle.

So if you think about building a bicep, right, if you think about wanting to make your bicep bigger, you're gonna do bicep curls.

If you do bicep curls every day with 5 pound weights, and then you up it to 10 pound weights, and then you up it to 15 pound weights, you are going to grow the strength of that bicep.

So at the begin, a 25 pound dumbbell might feel really heavy and impossible.

Whereas if you build it up over time with reps and you grow your capacity, you grow your strength, that weight isn't heavy anymore.

And that is essentially what I'm talking about.

When we're talking about growing emotional capacity, it's really a matter of I can handle a lot of different emotions and they're not knocking me down on my ass.

I'm not afraid of feeling them.

What you might not realize is that anxiety, which most people talk about feeling, is actually a fear of feeling that when we're anxious, it's because we're afraid of feeling something else.

And so we get rid of anxiety by learning how to feel.

And it's something that we have really moved away from as a culture.

It's not something we talk about, it's not something that we teach in school, it's not something we know how to do, but it's actually a skill.

Because what you want to be able to do is you want to be able to approach your life with not reckless abandon.

But if you think about that, fuck, yes, Life we talked about before, you want to be able to walk through your life and start not being afraid of feeling when you get it wrong, right?

When you mess it up, when you make a mistake, when you fail, when you're embarrassed, right?

We want to be able to open ourselves up to those emotions.

But if we're always afraid of feeling, we can't do that.

So we're gonna stay small.

We're not gonna do the things we wanna do, we're not gonna try the things we wanna do.

And we're gonna think, oh, I need to be more motivated.

But actually what we need to be able to do is we need to be able to handle Feeling all of the feelings, the plethora of the feelings.

One thing you might not realize is that life is 50.

50.

I have a strong belief that 50% of the time we feel negative emotion and 50% of the time we feel positive emotion.

And if that is true, no matter what we do that, I just want to be good at feeling all the feelings because in order to have more positive feelings, I'm going to have to be able to be better at having more negative feelings.

That's just the truth.

And you can do that?

I've done that.

I've taught my clients to do that.

That is possible for you.

Okay, number three, thinking on purpose.

This is the last step, and it's really important to know this.

Most other people lead with this being the front step, the first step.

We can't start here because your body is not ready for that.

We've established that.

And we need to be regulated and be able to allow and process emotion to be able to move into this place.

But once we're here, we can start looking at the story that you tell.

Now, there's one thing that you need to know that's so important in this class, which is shame is always a liar.

It's not the truth.

Shame comes from a message that says, there's something wrong with you.

You are a terrible person, you are worthless.

You are unlovable.

That is never true.

And we have to learn how to undo that.

Thinking that is essential.

If we don't learn how to undo that thinking, it just lives in there and fucks with you all the time.

And that's what we don't want.

So the first step is believing that shame has no good use.

Who here is ready to believe that?

Put me in the chat.

Are you ready to believe that?

Nobody has put me.

Everybody should be putting me.

Thank you.

One person, two people.

Okay, good.

It should be everybody.

Everybody should be saying, me, I am ready to let this go.

I'm not doing this anymore.

It doesn't work.

Shane is a liar.

And ultimately, when we feel it, we immediately move into a fear response.

When we feel shame, we move into a fear response.

Because our very worth to the world and to our, like, general sense of being is being told that it's.

It doesn't exist.

Like, we have no worth.

Ultimately, shame is saying you have no worth.

And if you think about that, of course that's going to create a fear response inside of you, and it's going to be visceral, it's going to be really quick.

And so we need to untangle it and how I like to untangle it is going back to what we talked about before, which is we've been measured against a standard that doesn't exist.

The standard of perfection, the standard of being, I don't know, pious, of being a delicate flower, of being always beautiful and always wonderful.

That's the standard.

Can we all agree the standard is crazy and that we don't want to buy into the standard, that the standard doesn't work?

If the standard worked, you wouldn't be here.

We wouldn't be having this conversation, because it does not work.

Shame is just not what we think it is.

It's a feeling that goes into our body when we believe a story that was created by somebody that wasn't us.

So we need to learn how to be on our side.

We can have nuance here of, yes, I have this thought, I have this belief about who I am and how I am and how the world sees me.

And it feels very true.

And also, I can build a new story.

I can build a new line of thinking.

I can start finding connection for myself, love for myself, nuance for this.

I can start believing that I'm not a bad person.

I can start believing that it's possible for me to get what I want.

I can start believing I'm beautiful.

I can look in the mirror and realize I've been programmed to think the things that I'm thinking and that it is possible to change the way that I think.

So here's what I put.

I put this on my Instagram yesterday.

I was like, who here is a parent?

You may or may not be, and it's okay if you're not.

Even if you're not a parent, have you ever had a pet in some form or another, in one way or another, you have potty trained something.

Okay?

If you've potty trained a toddler, you can change the way you think.

If you've taught a dog to go outside and go pee on the lawn and not in your house, you can change how you think.

It isn't about thought swapping.

It isn't about affirmations.

It's about going in and deconstructing what you think so that we can start constructing what you're going to believe.

Instead, we need to change the story that you tell about you so that you can start feeling those positive emotions.

So what are the emotions you wish you could feel, that you want to feel?

What are the ones that you're like, I want this.

You can put it in the chat.

Most Women will tell me that they want to feel calm, that they want to feel peace.

But what about this?

What if you want to feel desire?

What if you want to feel excited?

What if you want to feel.

I don't know why the words aren't coming to me today, but exultant.

Is that a word?

I feel like it is.

Happiness, pleasure, joyous.

Yes.

In order to feel those things, we must learn how to think thoughts about ourselves.

Of self worth, of self belief, of I love myself, I take glorious care of myself, I believe in myself.

I'm on my own side.

Even just saying those words, those are the things that are going to give you those feelings.

Not getting better.

Not being better.

Not because of how other people see you or receive you.

Not because you're skinnier or smarter or nicer or more successful, or you don't lose it on your kids, or you don't freak out at work, or you never have road rage.

Like none of those things.

That's not what's required.

It's retelling the story of you.

Now, in order to do that, don't forget, we gotta be regulated, right?

That part comes first.

We gotta be able to handle all these emotions.

That comes second.

Then we have this.

When we do this, what happens is we get to have self love.

I always say to my clients that self love is a practice.

It's something that we do every day.

It is not something that is a destination that we arrive at.

But every time we practice it, we get better at it.

And every time we get better at it, we get to feel better.

And when we feel better, we get to do better things.

And then what's so cool about it is that the next thing we want things again.

Remember that girl that wanted things, that wasn't just surviving, that was like, I want to be an astronaut, I want to be a singer, I want to be an actress.

I want to be whatever.

She gets to come back.

I'll tell you.

Listen, that girl lives in me.

That little girl lives in a lot of my clients.

She's in there.

I'm going to be competing in an international figure skating competition at the end of the month here.

In a couple of weeks, I guess.

Not the end of the month, the middle of the month, you have her inside of you, whatever that looks like for you.

And you might think, oh, my God, I would never figure skate.

That's cool.

You definitely don't have to, but you probably want to do more than read books and just be.

And you can.

If we do all of these Things.

If we take the shame off, if we regulate your nervous system, if we get you to a place of feeling alive inside of your own body, you get to have these things.

That is what you get.

You get the fuck.

Yes.

That's what I want for you.

The woman who does these things.

The woman who has this.

What I want to do is paint the picture of her for you.

So she's an expert on her own nervous system.

Okay?

The woman that is creating that life, she is an expert at her own nervous system.

She knows what works for her.

She knows what's coming up for her and what to do next.

She knows how to handle herself.

She's ahead of herself.

She's not reacting to herself.

She is always in tune with her.

This woman is emotionally resilient.

She is a badass.

Not because she performs and is always strong and look at me.

But because she's, like, always willing to go there with herself.

She knows how to do it.

She's not afraid.

She's like, okay, we can do this feeling.

Let's do it.

I can mess this up.

Let's go again.

Let's pick myself up.

Emotions just don't scare her.

This woman has her own back as a habit.

So when the thoughts come in, and they will, because we are inundated with how we should be different than how we are and how we should be less happy than how we are about ourselves and that we should change the way we look and smell and smile and B, that is gonna always be coming at us.

But she also has a voice in her own head that's saying, hey, it doesn't have to be like this.

Hey, we can do this differently.

Hey, I don't think we should think like this.

I think we should think like this instead.

That's who this woman is.

This woman leads with love.

First.

She recognizes that it's an infinite resource, and she uses it on herself and she uses it on other people.

And it comes freely out of her because she's just.

Just happy.

I think that this woman has nuance, has grace for herself.

That's what this process creates.

Is it very simple?

It is very simple.

The thing that I want to talk about is how you do it, right?

How you get there.

People will ask me, can I do this on my own?

And you can try it.

Okay, I'm not going to say you're incapable of it, because that's not true.

But let's just really look at what it requires.

Yeah.

So to regulate, there's tools.

There's lots of tools.

Oh, my God.

There's more tools than you can shake a fist at, right?

But how do you know which one to use?

And how do you know which one to use and when to use it?

And what about the ones that aren't really viewed as tools?

One of the big ones that I teach my clients is pleasure.

Pleasure is a natural regulator.

So how do you know when to use those?

And what do you do when you're mid spiral?

You're in the middle of it, you're losing your shit.

How do you know what to do then?

I don't know about you, but when I can't get my brain to shut the fuck up, like, if that was 10 years ago, I would have had no way to handle that.

I just had to ride that out.

My family's not winning from that experience.

I look at allowing and I look at building emotional strength, emotional capacity.

And I think about it like going to the gym.

Everybody knows if you go to the gym, you can build muscles.

But do you know what weights to pick up?

Do you know what exercises to do?

Do you know what order to do them in?

Usually, no.

And with emotional capacity, what I find is it's the same, how do you know?

And then thinking on purpose.

I think this is one of the hardest ones, the ones that I see women come up against again and again.

Because how do you know which thoughts are true and which thoughts are fake?

How do you know the ones that are actually helping you and the ones that are hurting you?

As a rule, that is very, very difficult to figure out, especially if you're in this place.

So what I want to talk to you about is coaching.

I want to talk to you about coaching because I know it works.

It's the very first thing that's ever worked for me.

And it worked for me so wholly and completely that I changed my whole life and became a coach because of it, because I think it's so important.

Coaching is not a course, right?

So when we do coaching, this isn't, oh, here's a module.

You read it, you go do it, you come back, we talk about it.

It's not that at all.

It's also not therapy.

Okay?

Coaching, if you really knew what it was, you would have gone looking for it a long time ago.

In coaching, if you coach with me, and I can only really speak to that experience and maybe other coaches that I coached with, my entire job is you.

And I think that's really cool to have somebody whose job is to help you have your own back.

That's my job.

When I'm coaching you, it's to make you feel better about you.

If you think about the title of this webinar, that's why I titled it, that you are the antihero.

We are going to hope for you.

We are going to build you up.

We are going to see the nuance in you.

The thing about coaching is that it's also practical.

So it's not just woo.

Woo.

I love woo.

I love some woo.

I'm not going to lie.

I do.

But even if you don't love woo, it won't matter because it is practical.

We are talking about real life experience, about what is genuinely happening inside of your own life.

That is the.

The purpose of it.

Right?

What my clients will often say to me is, amanda, I start hearing your voice inside of my head.

And that is a good thing.

That is a good thing because I am the voice of reason, right?

You want to hear my voice telling my side of your story.

You definitely want that.

And over time, that transforms into their own voice.

They don't need to hear my voice because they hear their voice.

But it's a different version of the story.

Now let's talk about just the difference between coaching and therapy, because I do think it's important to talk about.

What I will say is that therapy is about understanding typically, and I think that it is worth something.

But I always look at therapy and think it's always through the lens of there's something wrong with you.

And that is my number one issue with it.

And what I love about coaching is that it assumes that you are whole already, that there actually isn't anything wrong with you.

And so we're being proactive.

We're talking about what's going on for you right now.

We're not trying to fix something that happened five years ago or 10 years ago.

It's just not what we're doing.

The other thing about it that I think is different in coaching is that I am and you are a hundred percent on your side.

So even when I became a coach, what I will say is there was a way of learning it where you were meant to be.

They call it being outside of the pool.

Okay, so basically how the analogy works is you're standing on the pool deck and the person's in the pool drowning, which is terrible thought, but anyways.

And you know, they know how to swim, and you teach them how to swim from the pool deck.

I actually think you need a little more than that.

And so it's not like I'm gonna Go and move into your house and be with you every day.

But I am going to throw you a flutterboard or at least a donut, right?

And I'm going to maybe get in and hold you up for the first little while and teach you how to, like, kick your legs and kick your arms and, like, you can do this.

I do think, to an extent, that is the type of experience we're talking about here.

I'm on your side.

I'm not neutral.

You don't need neutrality.

You need somebody that's fully on your side.

Now, that's not saying that we're gonna always agree, but somebody that's on your side.

You don't need neutrality.

You need confidence, and you can't have confidence right now.

So in order to be able to create confidence, you need experience.

In order to have experience, you need to be able to start doing these things and be able to have somebody that is saying, yeah, you're doing a good job up, because that's going to give you confidence.

And the more confidence you have, the more you'll be able to figure this out and do this in a way that makes real sense for you.

I think that ultimately, the tools that I've given you here, some of them, I haven't broken your brain, like, who.

I've never heard of this before, but it's not really about that, right?

The thing is, even knowing the tools, you still don't like yourself.

Even knowing the tools, you still can't handle being inside of your own head.

And so.

So this is why coaching is so effective, is that we are doing it week after week after week, and it's being held steady and consistent.

I do want you to also consider the cost, right?

The cost of waiting another year, the cost of waiting another month, the cost of waiting another week.

Because we look at these things and we think, oh, it all sounds good, but maybe now's not the right time.

Time.

Maybe I can wait.

Maybe this can be something I do later.

Maybe I'll do it after the kids are done school or after school's done session, blah, blah, blah.

We always have our reasons.

And I just think about the cost that this had on my own life.

40 Years.

I was over 40 before I figured this out.

And I. I spent tens of thousands of dollars.

I did.

And nobody said to me, these are skills that you can learn.

And nobody knew how to teach them to me.

And if I'd have known that, I mean, I think about five years prior, ten years prior, I just think of the.

The lack of Suffering that I would have had to go through.

You don't have to suffer.

And it's something that I just.

I look at and go, if we don't fix these things, if we don't address these things, if we don't start making you be about you, you just spend one more year being unhappy.

Why would you spend one more minute being unhappy if you don't have to?

I will tell you that the easiest way to start talking about this is to talk about it.

So what I would like is for every person on this call to book a discovery call with me.

You can book it right now.

On this call.

You can go to amandahest.

I'll put it in the chat.

You can go and book that call right now.

Now you want to book that call right now.

It's a free call.

It's an opportunity for you and I to talk about what's going on in your life specifically.

And we can talk about exactly how we would apply this and how this would work.

This is not a call where I am going to hard press sell you because I don't believe in that.

But this is a call where I'm going to sell you on yourself.

And you may have never had that experience before, and I want you to have it.

I want you to have it at least one time so that you can really feel what that feels like.

I know that a call like this can sound scary, that I've yet to have a call with somebody where they get off the call and they're like, that was so horrible.

Okay.

Always it is.

That was amazing.

I feel like this is the right direction for me.

I understand myself a little bit better.

This is what I want for you.

I want for you to understand yourself a little bit better.

This is a free call on Zoom, one to one, just you and me.

I'm going to be on your side and by the end, you're going to know exactly how your situation changes when you do this.

And if coaching feels like a good fit, then we can talk about it.

And if it doesn't, we can just leave the call.

That is the purpose of the call.

That is what we're doing together.

Now.

Here's some things you might be thinking.

You might be thinking, this is about money.

And I'm going to let you know, yes, this is a real investment.

You've got to invest in yourself if you want to be able to create change.

What are the things we already invest in?

I was really thinking about this the other day.

I was having a conversation with one of my clients, and I don't work with men very often, but he's a man.

And he was, like, telling me how he didn't have the resources to invest in this other thing he wanted to do.

And then he told me he was going to Norway, and I was like, what?

What do you mean you don't have the resources?

You're going to Norway.

We do this all the time.

I don't have the money.

I don't have the time.

It's all a lie.

It's all your brain lying to you.

Because ultimately, there's just fear there.

Fear that it's not gonna work, Fear that it's gonna be one more thing that you're gonna try that's not gonna make a difference.

Fear that you're the person, that you're just gonna be the exception.

Fear of how it's gonna feel if you do it.

It's just fear.

And so here's the thing, and I. I will tell you this.

There's two steps you take before you work with me.

Step number one is booking the call and having the fear of booking the call because it feels scary.

That's your first transformation.

You're willing to have a conversation about making things be different in your life.

The second transformation is after you book the call.

You do the call, and you decide you want to move forward, and you decide you're going to invest in yourself.

That's the second transformation, and they're both huge, and they will change everything in the best way possible.

And the thing that you get to have is you get to have somebody by your side that has done this with countless other women.

This is my client, Robin.

There's nothing that is more valuable than the money I've spent on coaching.

It has been completely priceless.

And you know what's so funny is when she came to the call, she was very nervous.

We actually did, too, which I don't typically do anymore, but I did with her.

And after we were done coaching, what she said to me is, I've tried everything else, and if I don't try this, then what am I even worth?

And I just thought that was such a crazy statement and such an interesting statement, but ultimately, her and I, we got done coaching, and she took off.

Her life has been completely changed.

She came to me feeling very uncertain, very unsure.

She was married.

She was unhappy with her career.

She was unhappy with her personal life.

She was lost and confused.

And at the end of coaching, she had changed her career.

She had done some new things in her personal life.

And now I know she's thriving.

And I think the cool thing about that whole scenario is that she ended up referring me, her mom.

And I worked with her mom, and then I worked with her mom's best friend.

And these are the things, right, that doesn't happen if people aren't actually creating the change that they want to create in their life.

The truth of the matter is that you can change your life.

It is available to you.

But we don't need to change who and how you are.

We just need to change how we approach you.

It needs to be more personalized.

It needs to be you on your own side.

You need somebody holding you steady all the way through.

And the way that we explore that is by booking that call.

So what if you booked that call right now?

You went to amandahest ca bookacall.

You click on the link, you book a discovery call.

What would that take?

Who is the version of you that does that?

What changes in your life if you do?

What gets better?

What's the best case scenario?

What's the most amazing thing that could happen?

These are things we don't think about.

These are the things I want you to think about today.

Have I sold you on you?

Can you see the benefit of selling the story with you being the protagonist, the person you hope for, the person you root for?

Do you feel that?

If you feel it even 5%, that means you're on the right path.

That means we're going the right direction.

We need to keep going.

That is the path forward.

All right, listen, this is what I've got.

This is my class.

If you want to keep the conversation going, book that call.

Book that call.

I see Sarah has already booked it.

Amazing.

I can't wait to meet you on that call.

This call is available to you.

It is not a high pressure environment.

It is an opportunity, like I say, for me to sell you on you.

And this is what I would love to be able to do for you.

All right, my friends, that is it for now.

I hope you have an incredible Thursday.

If it is indeed Thursday where you are and when you're listening to this and otherwise, I will catch you next time and I hope to see you on that call.

Bye for now.

Thanks so much for listening today.

If this podcast is helping you, please follow wherever you listen and consider leaving a review.

It truly helps this community grow and allows me to support more women like you.

I'm excited to see you back here next week with a brand new episode.

Until then, take care, friend.