How to Finally Get Unstuck

If you’ve ever wondered why all the podcasts or self-help books or courses just don’t work for you, this is the missing piece.

This show is for women who’ve been labeled, misdiagnosed, or misunderstood. Whether you have a diagnosis or just know deep down that you experience life differently, this is your space to stop fixing yourself and start trusting who you already are. My name is Amanda Hess. Let’s go.

Hello, my friends, and welcome. I am so excited to be able to share this with you today.

You know, over the last week, I have had the honor of creating and delivering my five-day coachathon. And in the process of doing that, I have been able to deliver some really powerful coaching to some really amazing women.

It is so important, I believe, to start looking at yourself through the lens of, I am not a problem to be solved. I think one of the biggest things that came up during all of this coaching is really showing the women there that you are not a problem to be solved. You are not broken. There is not something wrong with you. You are perfectly imperfect exactly the way you are.

You know, the title of this podcast is called How to Love Yourself No Matter What. And the reason why it’s called that is because I think that’s the number one thing that women need to have to be able to have really full, amazing lives.

And when I talk about self-love, a lot of times, love gets confused for giving up. Love gets confused for just laying down. That’s not what I’m talking about at all. I’m talking about love where it’s fierce. It’s ferocious, but it’s also amazing and delicious. You know, it creates an experience of your life that feels incredible. And not because it only has good parts, but because you’ve learned how to embrace all of the negative parts too. And you use them for the greater good of yourself and of the people who you choose to put in your life.

One thing that we talked about today in that coachathon on the last day was the plan. And I really wanted to bring it to this podcast. I wanted you to hear about the plan that changed everything for me. But didn’t just change everything for me, has also changed everything for my clients. And also can change everything for you.

I am going to take today and walk you through my method for the women that come through my program. I want you to hear how you can take what I do and apply it to you in a way that makes your life incredible. Not just okay, not just manageable, but actually amazing.

The method that I use in my coaching is called the Love Yourself No Matter What method. And it really is for the woman who feels like she’s not enough, but she’s also too much at the same time. It’s for the woman who really, really wants to change things in her life, but feels stuck, feels like she’s tried everything, feels like no matter how she does it, no matter what she changes, she ends up at the same place where it just isn’t enough to make a difference.

It’s for that woman who feels like she’s always starting and stopping and never finishing. It’s for the woman who feels unseen, who feels misunderstood, who feels like nobody really gets her. And the truth is, a lot of times it’s because they don’t.

So today I’m going to walk you through how you change that, how you go from feeling unseen, how you go from feeling misunderstood, how you go from feeling like nothing works into a space where you get to experience peace, contentment, joy.

You can put things down, you’re not overthinking. You get to think about things that make you feel excited, driven, happy. You know how to stop overthinking and you also know how to create positive emotion in your life. You’re doing a job you love, you’re surrounded by people you like. You’re doing activities you enjoy. You don’t need to escape because you love it so much.

That’s who this is for. That’s who we’re going to talk about today. This is the process to get there.

So the Love Yourself No Matter What method ultimately starts with step one. And step one is nervous system regulation. Many, many times when I’m speaking to a new client or to a woman who is really fed up, she is trapped in a stress cycle. She is trapped in fight, flight, freeze, fawn. And she doesn’t know how to get out of it.

And what happens when we’re in that state is it’s a highly agitated state. And our brain is really agitated. It knows that it doesn’t want to be in this state. So what it does is it starts scanning for danger all the time. And the thing about our brain is it really doesn’t know the difference between a bear is chasing me and my tag is rubbing me kind of funny in my shirt today. Doesn’t know the difference, reacts the same way. And that’s why you’ll find yourself in a situation where it really wasn’t that big a deal, but you completely lost your shit.

Right? And that’s why you’ll also find yourself in situations where all of a sudden after something that seemed like a really fun event, you’re in bed and you can’t get out. I saw this post the other day calling it bed rotting. And I was like, that’s hilarious, but also true. I know these feelings. I’ve been in these places. And there is a way through it.

But what we need to first understand is that your brain when you are in that state is looking for more problems and always finding them. So your brain is just A, not very good at determining whether or not something’s an emergency, and B, not very good at getting out of this state on its own. So we have to be able to find ways to interrupt that and to start changing that. And the way that I do it is through nervous system regulation. And that is a fancy word for getting your body to calm down, getting your body to calm down so that then subsequently your brain can calm down.

And there’s a number of ways that we can do it. I’ve talked about them many, many times on this podcast, but ultimately it comes down to doing things that are simple, doable, and repeatable. I’m talking about things that you could get a five-year-old to do. It doesn’t need to be this mega complicated way of getting it done. Do those things work? Sure. I’m sure they do. But in my method, we’re talking doable, simple, a five-year-old could do it. So move your body.

Get yourself into nature and use your senses. Your sense of sight, your sense of smell, your sense of touch, your sense of sound, taste. We’ve got to use those senses, tap into them, start bringing in some pleasure. Pleasure is extremely regulating.

The truth is that we need to start here so that our brain can start understanding that we’re not in danger. So the way that I look at it is we’re creating internal safety. I’m safe, I’m okay, nothing’s happening right now that is an emergency. I don’t need to have this response right now. But rather than telling somebody to calm down or telling yourself you should be able to calm down, instead of that, we pick really simple, doable practices and we do them again and again and again, day after day after day.

So nervous system regulation isn’t about what you do in the moment. Although yes, you can do it and it will be effective. But it’s more so the repeating of the steps, the repetitiveness of it, and also really getting in tune with what is going on with my body right now. And what does it need? What do I need right now?

If you stand in your bathroom and look at yourself in the eyes and take a deep breath with your hand on your chest and ask yourself, what do I need right now? Nine times out of ten, what will happen if you’re in a full-blown stress response is you’ll start crying. And that’s how you know, oh, my nervous system is out of regulation. It’s just not calibrated. So we need to calibrate.

This is something that we do again and again and again. And with time and with repetition, it grows your ability to handle the stressors that come up. It grows your ability to know what is an emergency and what isn’t an emergency. It grows your ability to have that experience and know the next step forward. We always start with nervous system regulation.

You know, I was coaching on these calls on this coachathon, and I asked my clients on the last call because I had a couple clients on there. I was like, hey, what is the first thing I ask you if you come to a call or you message me on WhatsApp that you are not doing okay? And they both said, you ask what we’ve been doing for nervous system regulation. And I’ll tell you right now, their answer is typically, I haven’t been. So that’s where we start, regulating the nervous system.

Step number two is learning how to ride emotional waves. We will often find ourselves in this situation where we’re kind of in a freeze and then a flood. So we freeze because we feel the emotion and we don’t want to feel it. And we might actually like scroll or do stuff to numb it out. And then when we let the thoughts back in, it floods and then we feel it so, so strongly that we just like tip over back into a stress response.

And we just find ourselves going flip-flopping from freezing to flooding, freezing to flooding, freezing to flooding. And it’s really, really hard to manage and it makes us start to feel a little crazy.

The thing is you might believe that because you’re doing that, that you’re feeling all the feelings, but actually you’re under-feeling. And what I mean by that is you’re either reacting to emotion or you’re resisting emotion, but there’s no processing and there’s no allowing.

And what you do need to do is you need to learn how to process and allow emotion. That’s just a fancy word for I need to figure out what feelings feel like in my body. I need to be able to identify them. I need to be able to know what they are. I need to know what they feel like. I need to recognize that I am safe and okay with this feeling.

You know, a couple of my clients who are on this call, both of them actually, experience panic attacks. And I have walked both of them through a panic attack more than one time. And I will tell you right now, they don’t really have nearly as many anymore and they don’t need my help getting through them because they know how to process panic.

Panic’s a feeling. Panic’s a feeling that you feel in your body. We don’t feel feelings in our head. We don’t think feelings; we feel feelings. So when they experience panic, they know what to do. They know how to ride an emotional wave and they understand and have safety in knowing that this feeling, just like every other feeling, won’t last.

The truth is we often only feel feelings for a few seconds. But the reason why we feel – we think we feel them for hours or for days or forever is because we’re in that freeze flood all the time. And because we are, we’re not processing the feeling. So the feeling just keeps coming back. It keeps hitting us again and again and again and again. And it’s because it just wants to get through.

And if we just let the wave go through, we start to build our confidence in I have the skill, I have the ability to let this wave move through. And when I do, it will come back up. But as long as I stay practiced in the allowing, it will start to get easier. The waves sometimes get smaller and farther apart, and sometimes we just grow our ability to ride that wave and we become stronger and better at it.

But this is the process of processing and allowing emotion, is riding that emotional wave. So that’s step two, right? Step one, regulate your nervous system regularly all the time with simple, doable steps that you’re constantly putting in place that feel good when you’re doing them, but also create a lot of good for you. And then we are riding those emotional waves and we are becoming expert surfers of emotional waves.

Step number three is changing your beliefs. Now, that’s a big step. So I want to break it down. And I thought that maybe some of the easiest ways I could do that on this podcast is talk about some of the specific coaching that I have delivered on this.

On one of the calls, I was coaching one of the women that was on there, and she was talking about how her adult sons live at home and they don’t have jobs. And the stress and the pressure that she was feeling because this was what was happening, and she didn’t know how to navigate it.

And the things that she had tried were not working. She tried nagging, she tried reminding, she tried getting them emotional and mental support. She tried to hook them up with things that would help them get going. But the more she tried and the more she over-functioned and the more she hyper-functioned for her kids, the less they did, the less they took responsibility for, the less they were able to do.

And so when we were coaching on this, what we discovered is that one of the beliefs she had is that they couldn’t handle being on their own. They can’t handle it. And so because the belief is they can’t handle this, they don’t have what they need to be able to be successful, they can’t be successful, they won’t be successful.

When she has those kinds of thoughts, it makes her feel afraid. And then when she feels afraid, she over-functions. She’s doing everything for them. She’s running around behind them. She’s trying to prop them up and push them forward and dragging them behind her. And what’s happening is she’s feeling more and more and more anxiety, more and more and more fear, and more and more powerlessness.

So when we coached on this, we looked at what if your sons do have the ability to be successful already? That’s actually something they can be successful without you having to interfere, that they have the ability to figure this out, that this is figureoutable.

And I really think that this is figureoutable is one of the things that you could use to help yourself get through anything. Because a lot of times what we do is we look at all the things we’ve done so far that haven’t worked and they aren’t working. And so we look at it and go, I don’t know how, and therefore it’s not figureoutable. I’ve tried everything I can think of. And then we fall into a pit of despair. And it’s really common because we think that the most important thing is that we need to know how.

But actually, that’s not the important thing. The important thing is what we think and what we believe. We don’t need to know how, we need to know who. And when I say that, what I mean is we need to figure out who is the person that figures this out? What do they think? What do they believe? How are they approaching this? If this was actually a problem that was solvable, what would be different about this person? How would she think differently?

And so when we talk about beliefs and changing your beliefs, we had to change her belief. Change her belief that she tried everything and that it was a lost cause, because the only thing she knew how to do was to run around behind them and that wasn’t working, and change it into this is figureoutable.

The other belief we had to shift was the idea that she was responsible for how her kids felt, that she needed to motivate them for them to feel motivated. So we had to shift the belief that was her job because it isn’t.

It can’t be because we can’t change how other people think and we can’t change what other people feel, not even our kids, not even our teenagers, right? We can’t change that. We can influence it, we can show up for it, but we can’t change it. And when we start pulling that into our realm as being our responsibility to fix that for them, that’s when things break. And that’s when you’ll find yourself in that panic because it is unsolvable if you believe that that is your job.

Instead, what we can do is give them their feelings back. And we can understand that, you know what? I love you, but you’re an adult. And so you have the ability to figure this out. This is figureoutable.

I set the standard. Here’s what I expect. I expect that you’re out looking for a job. I expect that you’re a productive member of this household, that if you live here, chores are getting completed, things are being done. And we set the expectation. Now, I don’t know exactly how she needs to frame that or what needs to happen for that to move forward, but here’s what I do know. She has to change the belief that this is an unsolvable problem. And she has to move into this is figureoutable. It’s not how we do it that matters. It’s who shows up to the problem that matters.

Now, we can also break apart other beliefs that we weren’t able to get to in this session. But things that we would be working on together is the belief that that’s a reflection on her or that it’s her responsibility that they haven’t figured out yet how to get out there and get a job and get going.

That they absolutely have everything they need to be successful right now and that you maybe interfering is the problem. And that there could be a huge benefit in them being a little bit more uncomfortable. And that there would be a huge benefit to you being able to let that go. And that also would be very uncomfortable, but also very healing.

Changing your beliefs is more important than changing what you do. It is imperative that we start looking at what we think. When we don’t, we end up stuck because unknowingly, we have thoughts living under the surface that are saying we don’t know what we’re doing, we can’t do it, it’s not possible. We’re not lovable, we’re not successful, we’re not good enough. We have all these thoughts living under the surface. So we must reprogram those thoughts.

Now, on top of that, what I will also say that is also equally as important here in this method is what I call the garden. So we have a garden in our brain, and our brain is the garden. Okay? And a lot of times there’s a lot of weeds growing in the garden.

I like using this analogy because I have a flower bed here at home. And this flower bed had cedars in it, and they were just an eyesore. They were half dead. They were a fire hazard. Honestly, I hate them. They just breed bugs. So my husband took those out for me, and then it was just dirt. And lo and behold, this spring rolls around, and what starts growing in there? All kinds of enormous weeds. Like so many big weeds.

And those weeds got so big and so prolific so fast. I didn’t even take care of them. They just show up and grow. So I went into the garden and I weeded it. And then, ou know, a week later, I look over there, you know what’s growing in there? Weeds. And what I realized was, I need to get something planted in there. So I weeded it again, and I planted sunflowers, and I put some dahlias in there, like not seeds, I actually put the dahlia plants in there so that there was some plants already in there. Planted some sweet peas in there, watered it, and then they started to grow.

And lo and behold, a couple of weeks go by, and these sunflowers are already so big. And the dahlias look happy. The sweet peas are starting to come. And you know what there’s less of? There’s less weeds. And as those flowers grow in, there will be less and less weeds because there will be less room for weeds.

So what I think is especially important when we’re talking to neurodivergent people, sensitive people, traumatized people, is that we have been led down a path where we think the most important thing is weeding the garden. And what I mean is that I have to fix how I am, how I show up, how I talk, the way I am with people. I have to fix all these things about myself. And when we believe that, what happens is that we’re just always weeding, but we have all this empty dirt and we don’t plant anything there.

So what needs to be planted is thoughts that are going to give you the life you want. So we’ve got to start thinking about how we’re going to love yourself. What are the thoughts you want to think about loving you, loving your life, loving your personality, loving the way that you are. We’ve got to start planting those seeds and nurturing them and watering them and growing them. And the beautiful side effect of growing thoughts that confirm self-love, self-worth, self-trust is that that garden then needs less weeding.

And I really do believe that that is one of the biggest issues that we’re experiencing right now with so many people being diagnosed with psychological illnesses or being diagnosed with a disorder is that we are so problem-focused that we’ve lost the plot, which is we need to build upon the things we want to grow.

And sometimes, you know what? That can be really hard to figure out. You know, on this call, on this coachathon, I did coach on what do you want? And this isn’t the first time I’ve coached on this. So I coach clients on this all the time. It’s one of the hardest questions to answer when you’ve spent the last 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, 60 years trying to solve the problem of you. So we have to change the thoughts and the beliefs so we can start tapping into what we want. So we can start opening up that corner of your brain and letting those seeds out so we can plant them and grow them and nurture them.

The last step in this process, step four, is implementing this daily into your life. So ideas are not enough. The reason why we love listening to podcasts and we love listening to audiobooks or reading self-help books or taking a class is because it feels really good. It’s like, oh yeah, I love the thoughts. The thoughts create these most wonderful, the wonderfulest feelings inside of us.

But then what happens is we turn it off and we go back to our day-to-day life and it’s the same. And we’ve implemented nothing. And when we implement nothing, nothing changes. Nothing changes. It’s not enough.

That being said, I also don’t believe in applying a bunch of pressure and being like, here’s the five things you have to do today, and you better make sure you get them done by 5 a.m. Like, hey, I’m a neurodivergent person too. That’s not going to work for me. I don’t work like that. You probably don’t either.

Instead, though, what we want to do is start opening up a space inside of us where we’re trying to implement one of these things every day. We’re either looking at regulating our nervous system, or we are looking at allowing emotion, or we are considering the thoughts we want to think on purpose. And then rinse and repeat and go again, rinse and repeat and go again.

What I do find is that many people believe that at the end of all of this, when we do these things, then I won’t have to try so hard and it will be easier. And what I’ll say to you is it will be easier, but not because you don’t have to try so hard, because you want to try so hard. Because you will see the benefit of applying these things. You will start to see it working, and then you’ll want to do more of it. This isn’t about becoming a different version of yourself. This is about letting yourself be yourself and loving that and being excited about that and using that as the fuel for your life. This is what works.

So if this sounds amazing to you, I want to offer you a chance to get on a call with me. On this call, it is a judgment-free zone. I am not judging you. I don’t have a judgment for you. I don’t believe you’re living your life wrong. There’s nothing you could say that would shock me or that would make me feel like I needed to reject you. I just accept you as the beautiful, imperfect human that you are. But I will see you. I will hear you. And I will see things that you can’t see.

Because over the years of doing this, what I have discovered is that many of us can’t see what’s under the behavior. Many of us can’t see the thoughts that are driving the behavior. Many of us just can’t unpack the complexities of what’s happening between what we’ve been taught and what we’ve learned and how we apply it to ourselves in a very automatic way.

So a discovery call is an opportunity for me to really help you see what you can’t see and then show you how we could use this in a way to really help you. And how you don’t need to be completely different, and how we don’t need to change everything, and how you don’t need more motivation or more accountability because my friend, you do not. But you do need love, and you do need understanding. And it can start with me, and then it can move to you.

Right now, I am offering a coaching program called The Year of You. That program takes you from now to a year from now. And I like to look at it from the standpoint of, if you just moved one degree to the left and you walk five steps, you really haven’t changed your trajectory much. But if you move one degree to the left and you go a hundred miles, you’re in a completely different place. And this is how I think about doing work like this over the course of a year. Imagine taking this program as I’ve stated it here for you, and having me as your coach help you implement it day after day for an entire year.

I have worked with so many women from every walk of life. We have solved every kind of problem. We have talked about marriage, infidelity on both sides of the fence, children, parenting, neurodivergence, panic attacks, grief, dating, loss, you name it, we’ve done it. This process is what will create the opportunity for you to be able to handle anything that life throws at you in a way that feels grounded and secure and like you.

So if this sounds amazing to you, if you see yourself really wanting that kind of experience, I invite you to book a discovery call with me. Just go to amandahess.ca/bookacall. Let’s get on a call. Let’s apply this directly to your life and your experience. Let me help you see what you can’t see. And let’s talk about whether or not a Year of You would be the best thing that could ever be implemented in your life.

All right, my friends. That’s it for now. I’ll see you here next time. Bye.

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.