332. Why Fall Feels So Hard (and How to Let Bittersweet Through)

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.

Hey, my beautiful friend.

Today I want to talk to you just off the cuff about something that has been coming up for me, coming up for my clients, coming up for my friends, and that is the seasonal change that we're in.

So we go through seasonal changes that are both physical and spiritual, emotional, life changing seasons, and they match each other, to be honest with you, in a lot of ways, when we're younger, our seasons are different.

I really noticed this.

When you're a younger human, you are navigating things and there's a lot of, what I'll say.

Springtime, right?

There's a lot of springtime when you're young.

There's a lot of impatience for springtime.

There's a lot of.

I know things are supposed to be growing and they're not.

We want to find that relationship and get married and have babies and engage in our career and do really wonderful, fabulous things for our lives.

And I think that when we're younger, there's just a lot of life in front of us and there is an anxious, panicked feeling about not getting it right, not doing enough to get there, not being able to get there, and not really knowing what that looks like.

And I see that right now some of my clients are young and we're coaching on these things.

But I really see that in my kids, in my friends, kids out in the world, just getting started.

Yes.

And then we reached this place and I've really noticed it.

You know, when I started life coaching, I had just.

I was in my early 40s and I was in the midst of sort of that middle part.

But now as I'm solidly in 50 and I have so many friends that are going through transitions and then I have parents who are aging and going through what that entails, and I have clients who are in their 70s and beyond.

So I've been just really exposed to all the different sort of stages that you go through in that.

What I've really discovered is that one place that gets really scary sometimes is the fall.

Right.

The autumn.

There's something about this time of year that is really unsettling for a lot of people.

And this could be because it's seasonally fall and we're seeing the leaves start to change and we're seeing the nights getting longer, days getting shorter, it's getting colder.

Now, depending on where you are in the world, you might have that.

But for many of my listeners, many of the people that I support, especially for the people that I know, because most of us live in Canada, we are going through this seasonal change.

Right now.

It's October 5th as I'm recording this podcast and it's going to be dropping late.

I normally drop my podcast on Thursday, this one is going to be coming on Monday.

And I just have really.

I've really just been noticing this transition and I really noticed it the other day when I was driving to my skating competition.

I was driving there.

It was.

It's about an hour and a half from my house and it was so beautiful.

The leaves are starting to change and there's just.

It's so interesting.

There's a heat that kind of comes in through the window.

Just that low sun.

It's very unique and it's a very unique time of year.

And it really touched my heart in a way that created pain, not in an unpleasant way.

And so it's worth talking about.

Right when that was happening, it just really made me think of my mom and it really brought back a lot of memories.

And even like when I went to hit record on this podcast, I was thinking about why is this time of year feel like that for me?

And one of the reasons why is cuz my mom passed away.

My mom passed away in August and so we had that first autumn where we didn't have family dinners that we'd had for years and years and years.

Like my mom was so good about wanting to have that Sunday dinner and have the family over.

And my kids were small and we could bring them.

But even before we had kids, my husband and I used to go go there anyways.

So it was just interesting that there was this bittersweetness that came with it.

It's a feeling that as we get older, we need to become more familiar with.

I do think that this season in life, whether we're talking about moving through seasonally what's going on physically in the environment where we live versus we're talking about the stage of life that we're in.

No matter what, we need to grow our ability to be able to experience the feeling of bittersweet.

We need to grow our capacity for the feeling of bittersweet.

And I was just having coffee with a friend.

I went and watched her son play hockey.

And it's actually how we met.

Our sons played hockey together on A team.

And I was trying to find friends here, and my husband was like, hey, there's this girl.

She kind of dresses like you.

She seems like she's really into fashion and style, and I think you should maybe be her friend.

My husband's so good about that.

And so I started inviting her to do stuff, and we've been friends ever since.

And I'd say she's one of my best friends now, which is a beautiful thing.

But she was.

She's a younger mom than me.

She had her kids when she was younger, so she's going through this stage a lot earlier than me.

Like, she's almost 10 years younger than me.

And she was just sharing what was going on for her with one child being in university and the other being in grade 12 and just moving into this transition and the feelings that were coming up and just feeling anxious and depressed at the same time, which I think is a very normal experience of this kind of season in life.

That, to me, that feeling is actually bittersweet.

It's like, oh, my gosh, I'm so proud of my kids and excited for them to be able to grow and move on and do their thing.

But also, I feel so heartbroken because life is changing and moving, and I'm saying goodbye and saying hello at the same time, and it feels unsettled and scary and difficult, and I don't want it.

And yet I do want it.

And I don't know how to make myself move through that place.

And so that's what I really want to talk about today is moving through that place.

It's something, I guess I. I had the benefit of doing when I lost my mom, and I had the benefit of moving through that when I moved, too, right?

Moving through Covid, picking up our family and moving it from one province to another and moving away from family and moving away from what we knew and moving into something different.

That bittersweet feeling come to visit me very often.

And if there's one thing I can explain to you, that is the most important part of this, it's.

We cannot resist that feeling unless we want to be in a lot of pain.

Okay?

If we resist the feeling of bittersweet, we will be in so much pain.

It is such a painful, painful emotion to resist because it's really resisting what's really happening.

We can resist and be in pain, or we can allow and we can move through it, and we can embrace it and grow our ability to have it be present, and it will grow you in the most beautiful ways.

It will give you gratitude that you don't even know you're lacking.

It will give you fulfillment that you don't even know you don't have.

That is the beauty of moving through bittersweet.

Moving through bittersweet at the beginning, I understand it feels terrible.

Okay.

It feels like somebody is chasing you and coming to get you.

And you.

You gotta run as fast as you can, because that feeling is gonna eat you.

But I promise you that it isn't.

What this is is what life is all the time.

One thing that I've really grown to understand in my business, through the people I've helped and just moving through the different seasons with my clients, as they get older and age, and these things start to show up.

Bittersweet is something you can really love in your life.

It is something that will be very healing for you, if you can allow, will give you a kind of love that can feel very healing.

But in order to be able to do that, there's a few things you need to understand that you're not doing right now.

Right.

So, number one, I guarantee that you have spent too much time distracting yourself.

And that's not a judgment on you.

That is simply an observation of helping so many people through this.

Like, when we judge ourselves in that way, it shuts us down and we can't get curious.

And I don't want you to judge yourself right now.

I want you to just notice that we busy ourselves because we think.

I don't want to wallow.

Like, I hear that from a lot of people.

Oh, I'm wallowing.

I'm like, you're not wallowing.

You're struggling with how to process this information.

You're struggling with how to process this emotion.

That's it.

You're not wallowing.

But you may need to get some help with really understanding how to allow and process an emotion, which is going to require you to slow down.

You can't be distracted all the time.

That won't work.

So we have to build up your safety in feeling emotion.

Yeah.

Because if you don't feel safe feeling emotion, of course you're going to distract yourself, because otherwise you're not going to make.

Just won't work.

I can't do it either.

So in order to grow our ability to feel emotion, there's just.

There's a few things we need to do.

We need to get your nervous system way more regulated, which means it requires way more than you think.

Okay.

We're not talking.

Oh, we have to sit there and meditate and do Mantras and da da da da da, and go on some Buddhist retreat.

I'm not meaning that, but we do need to find ways to actually ground you.

And most people, even when they're trying to ground, are actually distracting.

And so I'm always gonna offer you a discovery call here, because this is something that you must learn and understand.

And there's just a change between distracting and grounding.

And the activities can look exactly the same.

I do a private podcast for my clients that I do every week, and then there's over 500 podcasts in there because I used to do it every day.

And so there's a million different little pieces of this in there.

But what I will say is that in our podcast today, I dropped in talking about really noticing the difference between distraction and grounding, because the activity can look the same, but the intention makes all the difference.

We need to have intentional grounding activities in our life to be able to grow our ability to handle emotions that are popping in as you get older.

We need to be able to grow bigger.

We're always growing our capacity.

That is required.

When people say to me, like, it's harder when you're 70, I'm like, yeah, it is.

You have bigger life things showing up at your doorstep.

It's true.

That being said, if we can grow your capacity, then it doesn't trip you up.

You are able to handle it.

You do fine in that.

It's not heavy.

Okay.

So we've got to grow that capacity, and then we need to grow the skill of letting an emotion through.

Once you know how to let an emotion through, it's just all about practice.

It's all about reps, and sometimes that can be really difficult to do on your own.

It can be a very challenging thing.

Because when was the last time you were taught this?

I wasn't taught it at all.

I will honestly tell you that even when I took coach training, they talked about allowing emotion a little bit.

What I'm going to tell you is, with the way that I experience emotion, which is on steroids, I need a lot more help than that.

I needed really to work this through in a way that worked for me.

And now I teach it to you because it's just.

It's being able to feel safe while it's happening.

And I've had the real honor of being able to help so many other people go through this.

And I've also had the gratitude for the few people that have been able to help me through it.

And what I will tell you is once you have that experience, then you start to learn exactly what to do when it's going on for you.

And as we grow this ability to house that emotion, we get to see all the beautiful kaleidoscope parts of it.

And there are beautiful things inside of it.

There really and truly are.

You can't see it right now.

It's okay.

I posted on my Instagram today, and I was saying how I was reading this Rick Rubin book that I just.

Am just in love with.

It's such a beautiful book, and I recommend it to anyone that will listen.

It's such a beautiful book talking about creativity and just working with your mind.

It's called the Creative Act, A Way of Being.

It's a beautiful, beautiful book.

I love listening to it on audible because Rick's voice is so soothing and so beautiful.

But what he said in the book was, on gloomy days, he reminds himself that even when you can't see the sun, it's still there.

And such a powerful reflection of, like, how we move through negative emotion and the way that I teach it and the way that I show my clients how to do it, because we need you to be able to trust that there's safety in that.

And why I just really believe that coaching is so powerful is because it's so, so helpful to have somebody there doing that with you.

You know what I'm saying?

That being said, those are the two things that need to happen for us to be able to let the emotion of Bittersweet through.

And when we can let Bittersweet through, we start to find the beauty and the acceptance, and we can start to really look at what your brain is saying to you and pull out the lies, pull out the stories that don't help, pull out the stories that aren't true.

And when you can start doing that all together, then what happens is you start to build your emotional confidence around things ending.

Okay?

And we need to do that.

We need to grow our emotional confidence around things ending, because things will always end, but things will also begin.

And so when we are going through a fall season, it's understanding this is just a fall season.

And yes, we might go through winter, but spring is coming, and we can.

We can.

We can relax into it.

We can let ourselves find what's good and joyful inside it.

And even if we can't find the joy in that moment, we can find what's coming comforting, like, genuinely.

And in doing that, you will just seamlessly move to the next season.

And it's a really, really beautiful, powerful journey.

Anybody can do it.

You can do it.

So before you start to lament the season of fall, I want you to really consider the words that I've shared with you here and really consider growing your capacity for the emotion of Bittersweet.

It will change your life in the most beautiful, amazing ways.

My friends, this is what I have for you today.

I hope you have the most present day and I will see her next time.

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.