Have you ever set a boundary and quietly undone it within a week? Committed to saying no and said yes to three things you didn’t want before the week was out? Finally made space on your calendar, then filled it back up again because the empty space felt wrong? You’re not weak and you’re not uncommitted. You’re skipping a step that nobody told you was there. And in this episode, I’m naming it.
This is Part 2 of the three-part series What Knowing Can’t Fix. If you haven’t listened to Part 1, go back and start there, because this episode builds directly on why awareness alone doesn’t produce identity change. What I’m walking you through today is the specific step that sits between seeing your pattern and actually outgrowing it, and it’s the step the entire personal development industry skips.
Why Your New Commitments Keep Collapsing
Most self-aware, driven people do the same thing when awareness stops producing change: they go straight into action. New boundaries. New systems. New commitments to operate differently. And action matters, I’m not saying it doesn’t, but if you jump from awareness directly into action without this step in between, the action almost always collapses. Not because you’re not trying hard enough, but because the new behavior doesn’t line up with your current identity. And you cannot outperform your identity for a sustained amount of time.
This is why you set the boundary and undo it. Why you promise yourself you’ll stop overworking and something urgent pulls you right back in. Why you finally clear your schedule and then reorganize your kitchen, purge your closets, or find something else entirely to fill the space, because sitting still has never felt productive and your entire identity is built around what you can produce. The pattern always wins, because the identity underneath it hasn’t changed.
What We Talk About in This Episode
- The step between awareness and action that almost nobody names: In the Congruency Loop, awareness is the first stage and action is the third. But between them sits acceptance, and acceptance is not what most people think it is. It’s not approving of the pattern, deciding the cost was worth it, or telling yourself to be grateful for where you are. It’s something much more precise and much more demanding than that.
- Why grief is the missing piece in personal development:Nobody markets grief. Nobody builds a program around it. But real, lasting identity transformation requires you to grieve the parts of yourself that can’t come with you, and until that grief is honored, the pattern holds no matter how clearly you can see it or how committed you are to changing it.
- The five stages of grief inside identity change: Denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and acceptance aren’t just what you move through when someone dies. They’re exactly what you move through when you start to see your patterns clearly and have to reckon with what they’ve cost you. I walk through what each stage actually looks and sounds like inside this work, including the stage where high achievers get stuck the longest.
- Why bargaining is the sneaky one: For driven, self-aware people, bargaining doesn’t look like bargaining. It looks like finding a better framework, creating a new plan, or turning the pattern into another project to solve. It’s the last stand before you actually have to feel something. And your whole identity is probably built around being the person who can figure things out, which means this stage can last a very long time.
- Why the sadness stage is the one your pattern was specifically built to prevent: This is the stage that scares people the most, and the one I see people resist hardest. It’s where the weight of what you’ve been carrying actually lands. I share what this has looked like in my own life, including the moment in my therapist’s office in my 30s when everything I thought was true about myself fell apart, and what my therapist said that finally told me I was ready for the real work.
- The ring of fire metaphor: There are two options. You can stay inside the ring where the heat is familiar and manageable, or you can walk through it. Walking through means getting burned, because there is no clean, painless way through. But staying inside means the ring keeps closing in, the heat never lets up, and you just get better at tolerating it. That’s what the coping patterns do.
- Why grief is not a room to live in: There’s a critical difference between allowing grief to move through you and getting anchored in your pain. Grief is a doorway, not a destination. I talk about how to hold grief and expansion at the same time, why you can be grieving what your patterns cost you while still building something new, and what it looks like when those two things exist simultaneously.
- What acceptance actually produces: Acceptance isn’t passive and it isn’t the end of the work. It’s the bridge that makes genuine action possible, action that holds this time, because it’s coming from a new identity rather than an old one. I walk through what this looks like in real, practical, unglamorous terms.
- My own grief inside this work: From the moment my life fell apart in my 30s, a brand new baby, two young boys, my partner going to rehab, and me reaching for every book I could find because figuring it out was the only move I knew, to the specific grief of unwinding my Giver pattern and what it cost me to stop blindly trusting everything and everyone. This is as personal as I’ve ever gotten on this podcast, because this episode asked for it.
This Episode Is for You If You’ve Ever:
- Set a new boundary and quietly undone it within days because the guilt was more unbearable than the resentment
- Committed to working less and found yourself right back in it the moment something urgent showed up
- Finally cleared your schedule and then found a very reasonable-sounding reason to fill it back up
- Tried to rest and ended up reorganizing something instead, because stillness has always felt like a waste
- Done the therapy, read the books, understood your patterns, and still woken up inside them the next morning
- Turned your self-awareness into another project, another framework, another approach to solve, because that’s what you do with problems
- Had a big win and felt nothing, or felt it for about thirty seconds before the next thing was already forming
- Wondered why knowing better has never been enough to actually do better
- Had the sense that there’s something you’re supposed to feel that you’ve been successfully avoiding for a very long time
Why You Can’t Think Your Way Through This
The personal development industry is very good at selling insight. What it doesn’t sell, and what almost nobody is talking about, is what has to happen after the insight for it to actually produce change at the level of identity.
You have been taught your whole life that doing is the solution, that thinking is the solution, that figuring it out is the solution. And for most of your life, those things have worked. They built your career, your reputation, and the life people look at and admire. But they cannot reach the thing that’s been running underneath all of it, because the patterns driving your success aren’t stored where your productivity and your intelligence live. They’re stored in your body. And your body doesn’t update on information. It updates on emotional experience, specifically the kind that is powerful enough to reorganize who you believe yourself to be.
Grief is that experience. It’s not a concept. It’s not a framework. It’s not something you can download or think your way into or schedule into a 90-day program. It’s the emotional reckoning that happens when you stop running from what your patterns have cost you and let it actually land. And for most of my clients, it’s the most counterintuitive and the most important thing they’ve ever done.
Ready to Stop Skipping the Step That Changes Everything?
If this episode landed somewhere uncomfortable, that’s not a coincidence. The discomfort is information. And if you’ve been carrying the quiet frustration of knowing your patterns, understanding them deeply, and still not being able to change them, the Congruency Audit is where we look at that gap together.
In your free 15-minute Congruency Audit, we identify the specific pattern that’s been running you, what it’s been protecting you from feeling, and what it’s actually going to take to stop living inside it. Not more awareness. Not another framework. The real work, at the level where the pattern actually lives.
Book your free Congruency Audit: lisacarpenter.ca/audit
And if you haven’t yet taken the Success Paradox Quiz, do that first. Part 3 of this series goes deep into the specific grief that belongs to each archetype, what the Machine is grieving, what the Prover is grieving, what the Polisher is grieving, and what the Giver is grieving, and you want to know which one is yours before you listen.
Take the Success Paradox Quiz: lisacarpenter.ca/quiz
This isn’t about optimizing the version of yourself you built to survive. It’s about creating congruence so the life you’ve built doesn’t just look good. It finally feels right.
Listen to Part 1 and Part 3 of the ‘What Knowing Can’t Fix’ series.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:06:29 - 00:00:33:12
Lisa
You built success that looks damn good on the outside, but inside it's costing you your health, your relationships, your energy. And no matter how much you do, it never feels like enough. Welcome to Congruent. I'm Lisa Carpenter, the coach. High performers call when they can afford to burn it all down, but they can't keep living like this either.
00:00:33:14 - 00:00:58:24
Lisa
Here we rip off the mask of success and expose what's real. The patterns that you keep running, the price that you've paid, and how to build success that fuels you instead of empties you. Real success is agency. It's powerful self leadership to run your life instead of being run by it. To let your drive and your well-being finally work together.
00:00:58:27 - 00:01:09:04
Lisa
Because the real win is success. That actually feels good.
00:01:09:06 - 00:01:38:04
Lisa
Hey hey and welcome back to congruent. And this is part two of What Knowing Can't Fix. So if you haven't listened to part one, make sure you go back and dive into part one. Today we're going to be talking about the specific step you keep skipping. So last episode I talked about why awareness doesn't produce identity change, why you can see your pattern clearly, and you can see you've got this whole identity built around it.
00:01:38:06 - 00:01:58:10
Lisa
But awareness lives in your head and your coping patterns actually live in your body. So I left you with this, that there was a step between seeing your pattern and having awareness of it and actually outgrowing it. And it truly is emotional, not intellectual. So today we're going to name it. And I want to be really upfront with you.
00:01:58:15 - 00:02:29:12
Lisa
It's not what most people expect, and it's definitely not what most people want to hear, especially my clients. So before I name the step, I want to talk to you about what you've been, what you've probably been trying to do instead. Because this is where driven, self-aware people go. When awareness doesn't work, they go straight into taking action, trying a new thing, like setting new boundaries or making new commitments or creating new systems to interrupt their old way of operating.
00:02:29:12 - 00:02:56:15
Lisa
So they've created an awareness or like, I don't want to do that anymore. So I'm going to do X, Y, and Z and listen, action matters. I'm not saying it doesn't, but if you jump from awareness straight into action without this step, we're going to talk about today in between. Most of the time that action is going to collapse, meaning you will not be able to sustain the new action because it doesn't line up with your current identity.
00:02:56:17 - 00:03:15:18
Lisa
So this can look like and you've probably experienced this in your life where you set a boundary and then you end up feeling so guilty that you quietly undo it within a week, or you just go back to operating the way you were without holding the boundary, or you commit to saying no, and within days you've said yes to three other things you didn't want to do.
00:03:15:18 - 00:03:41:13
Lisa
So you finally made space on your calendar, only to then fill it up with other things that you are very easily able to justify to yourself as to why you needed to do that. Or you promise yourself you stop overworking and then something urgent shows up and you're right back in it. Or you tell yourself you're going to rest, but instead you go back to reorganizing your kitchen, fluffing your pillows, purging things.
00:03:41:15 - 00:04:18:06
Lisa
Because the truth is, sitting still feels very unproductive and like you useless or wasted time. So your pattern always wins. And it's not because you're weak, it's because the identity, your identity underneath that what is actually driving your behaviors hasn't changed. And you cannot outperform your identity for a sustained amount of time. This is where my congruency, which is about awareness, acceptance, action and embodiment comes in and how I work my clients through the stages of transformation.
00:04:18:06 - 00:04:45:14
Lisa
Because like I said, most people want to jump from this awareness right into action and they skip the step, the second step around acceptance all together. But I want to talk about what acceptance actually is, because it's probably also not what you think it is. Acceptance is not saying that what has happened is okay. You don't have to like something to accept it.
00:04:45:16 - 00:05:06:07
Lisa
It's not approving of how things are, and it's also not deciding that the pattern is fine or that the cost was worth it, or that you shouldn't just be grateful for what you have. Acceptance is what happens when you start to see your patterns clearly, and then you stop fighting with them, or trying to fix it, or trying to think your way past them.
00:05:06:09 - 00:05:38:12
Lisa
It's what happens when you actually let the weight of what you've discovered about yourself land in your body, instead of staying inside your head about it. And what most people feel when this happens is they're able to stop running the pattern long enough to actually feel what's underneath it. And when we when we step into this place of really being with these patterns that have been running us in order to get to acceptance, there is a ton of grief.
00:05:38:14 - 00:06:06:02
Lisa
And grief is the part that nobody wants to talk about. It is the part that is so overlooked in self-development. And the truth is, grief isn't really. Like if I started marketing that I sell grief. Nobody would want to raise their hand and and show up for that. But the truth of the matter is real transformation, lasting identity transformation requires us to grieve the parts of ourselves.
00:06:06:03 - 00:06:27:20
Lisa
The coping behaviors that we've been running from that are no longer working for us, but really looking at where they came from, what they've cost us, and what it's going to look like for us to let them go. So I'm not talking about the grief that comes with the death of someone you love. Like that is also very real if you've ever experienced it.
00:06:27:23 - 00:07:00:10
Lisa
I'm talking about a kind of grief that most people don't even recognize as grief. The grief of seeing clearly what that pattern cost you. As I just said, the grief of understanding that the strategy that built your success is also the thing keeping you from ever actually being able to experience it in the way you want to. It's the grief of realizing that the version of you that works so hard was a child's best attempt at feeling safe, loved, and that you've been loyal to this your whole life.
00:07:00:12 - 00:07:23:20
Lisa
And here's why. It's the mechanism, and not just something you pass through when you grieve something, what you're actually doing is acknowledging that it's real. You're no longer trying to explain it away, or reframe it, or turn it into a growth opportunity or a lesson. You actually pause long enough to say, you know what this is? This is what happened.
00:07:23:21 - 00:07:53:13
Lisa
This is how I've been showing up. This is what it's cost me. And I can't change that. You cannot change the past. You can only look towards the future. And that's so different from just understanding, because understanding your patterns kind of keeps you one step removed, whereas grief like, puts you right inside it. It's the emotional experience that your body needs in order to update your operating system.
00:07:53:15 - 00:08:17:16
Lisa
So whereas self-help is about give me more information, give me more awareness. Grieving is actually what helps you reorganize what has been going on for you for most of your life, so that you can finally get to a place of acceptance and then start to let these things go so that you're taking action from a new identity. And listen.
00:08:17:18 - 00:08:37:25
Lisa
This is not a linear process. This is not a step by step model. We don't like, have to get through grief before we take action. It's kind of both and space, but we cannot skip the process of grief. So I want to I want to talk about the stages of grief inside identity change, because I think this is something that most people aren't fully understanding of.
00:08:37:25 - 00:08:58:29
Lisa
So, like I said, most people think of the stages of grief, of something you go through when someone die. But these same stages are exactly what you move through. When you start to see your identity patterns clearly and you have to reckon with what they've cost you, and that doesn't happen in a neat line. You're going to cycle through all of these different stages, sometimes in a single day.
00:08:59:03 - 00:09:21:03
Lisa
And I have gone done a lot of grieving over the past five years. So I'm going to take you into my experience as well so often. So the five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and then acceptance. So we're going to start with denial because this is where most people live for years without knowing it. It sounds like, well, this is just who I am.
00:09:21:03 - 00:09:50:10
Lisa
I'm just a driven person. This is what successful people do. Denial isn't dramatic. It's really comfortable. We love to be in self-deception. As humans. We love to be comfortable. And I like to say it's not even that you're comfortable, it's just familiar. We love familiarity. So it's denial is waking up to the parts of yourself that have normalized this pattern so completely that questioning it or questioning them doesn't even occur to you.
00:09:50:12 - 00:10:08:28
Lisa
Then we move into anger. And like I said, this is not linear how the stages of grief work, but I want you to start paying attention to them. Anger shows up when the denial cracks. It sounds like, why didn't anybody tell me this? How could I have not seen this in myself? It shows up as anger at the people who benefited from you running your pattern.
00:10:08:28 - 00:10:41:03
Lisa
The ones who you know knew they could always count on you because you'd always say yes. You'd always get the things done, or you'd always be responsible for everything. So anger is important because it means you're starting to see what it's costing you and how other people have benefited from you being in that pattern. So bargaining is a sneaky one, and it's where high achievers often get stuck the longest, because bargaining doesn't really look like bargaining.
00:10:41:06 - 00:11:01:08
Lisa
It looks like okay, so now I know the pattern. Let me find the right strategy, your strategy to fix it. It's turning that awareness into another project. It's the prover going out and trying to find a better framework. It's the machine trying to make a plan that it can execute on. It's the polish or researching the perfect, perfect approach.
00:11:01:10 - 00:11:21:27
Lisa
And it's the giver going to therapy, trying to figure out how to be better for everybody else. So bargaining is the last stand before you actually have to feel something. It's it's trying to move away from, well, if I can just figure out a different route that I'm not going to have to be with this. And your whole identity is probably built around being the person who can figure things out.
00:11:21:29 - 00:11:51:14
Lisa
So this stage can last a very, very long time. This is why get into acceptance of your patterns is such a challenging part of the work. And then comes the sadness. So this is the stage that scares people the most. And it's the one year pattern was specifically built to keep you from reaching. This is where you actually feel the weight of what you've been caring, what you've been avoiding, and what it costs you to be who you've been.
00:11:51:17 - 00:12:13:07
Lisa
This is where the tears start to come with my clients and they wonder, like, I have people sit with me all the time and say, I'm not a crier, Lisa. And then they'll start to cry. Because all of that emotion, all of that sadness, has actually been with them for years and years and years, but they've used all these coping behaviors to move away from it, so they never had to feel bad.
00:12:13:10 - 00:12:37:29
Lisa
That's why we get into these behaviors. We're trying to outrun the parts of ourselves that feel bad about who we are in this world. And it's challenging when you go from being a high performer who feels like you got your shit together into all of these stages of grief, really allowing them and feeling like, oh my God, am I like, am I going to find my way out of this?
00:12:38:02 - 00:12:59:04
Lisa
And there's days where the heaviness of when you're really doing this deep, precise, transformational work will feel like, oh my God, I don't know if I can bear this anymore. I don't know if I can keep going, but that is actually grief doing its job. It's it's not meant to feel light and fluffy. It's meant to feel heavy.
00:12:59:06 - 00:13:18:23
Lisa
But on the other side of grief is going to be so much freedom. And I'm going to share a metaphor about what this really looks like. So then the last stage of grief is acceptance. And this is why I name acceptance in the congruency loop, because this is a place that it's well, like I said, it's not a destination.
00:13:18:23 - 00:13:42:06
Lisa
So we're going to go through all these stages of grief over and over and over again as we're, pulling back the curtains on the patterns that you're running. But acceptance is a place where the resistance falls away. The resistance falls away. You're no longer in denial. You're no longer angry. You're no longer feeling sadness about it. But you're like, okay, this happened in my life.
00:13:42:13 - 00:14:03:28
Lisa
I was running these. This is who I thought I was. This is what I thought I needed to do. This is what I thought I knew was true about me. And now I understand that it's not. I know I can't change my past, but I can be fully in acceptance of of this is what's here. And this is really the doorway to creating transformation and change.
00:14:04:01 - 00:14:31:00
Lisa
So acceptance allows you to turn towards personal responsibility for your future. Instead of fighting for who you were in the past, it opens a whole new door of possibility. And these stages. Again, I want to say they don't happen in order and they don't happen just once. You can move through all five in a week and then wake up on Monday and be back in anger again.
00:14:31:07 - 00:14:49:08
Lisa
You can be acceptance about one part of your pattern and in deep denial about another. And here's the part that I think is most important. The most important thing I can tell you about this process. You can be taking action while you're grieving. As I said earlier, this is not a staircase. We're not going to finish one step before we start the next.
00:14:49:11 - 00:15:15:04
Lisa
The congruency loop is actually a figure eight because you're always in multiple places at once. You can be grieving and building. You can be taking new action simultaneously, but you cannot skip the grief. You can take action alongside of it, but you cannot take action without it. Okay? Because like I said, it's not going to sink in at an identity level.
00:15:15:07 - 00:15:36:17
Lisa
So let me give you a metaphor of what this looks like. And this was shared, by one of my dear friends years ago, and I still use it to this day, the ring of Fire. So picture, if you will. You were standing in a field and there's a giant ring of fire around you. Now you have two options.
00:15:36:17 - 00:16:04:05
Lisa
With this ring of fire, you can stay inside the ring where the fire is going to stay all around you, and the heat is never going to let up. But it's familiar. You know what that heat feels like. You've been managing it your whole life, or you have the option to walk through the fire, but walking through the fire also means you're going to get burned, because there is no clean and painless way through.
00:16:04:07 - 00:16:27:02
Lisa
But here is the difference. If you stay inside the ring of fire and you try to avoid feeling the stages of grief that go along with this transformational work, that ring of fire is going to keep closing in on you, right? So by the time people get to me, they are feeling the heat of their life. They are feeling the heat of their life.
00:16:27:04 - 00:16:33:17
Lisa
Things do not feel congruent. They want change. Things are getting hot.
00:16:33:19 - 00:16:57:05
Lisa
Unless you choose to step through the other side. That heat is never going away. You just get better at tolerating it. And this is what these coping behaviors do. So most people choose to stay inside that ring of fire, even though it's so hot, because it is so much more familiar then what is going to happen if I step through that ring of fire?
00:16:57:05 - 00:17:18:12
Lisa
Lisa, I don't know what's on the other side. What if it takes all my skin off? Right? There's a real fear around stepping through the unknown, especially when it comes to feeling things that you don't want to feel. Especially when it comes to acknowledging parts of you that you're like, oh my God, I do not want to see that about myself.
00:17:18:15 - 00:17:38:08
Lisa
So most of the people come to me. They've tried every framework, every strategy, they've tried new commitments, they've been in group programs, have been in therapy, they've read all the books, they've done the thing, and they've been attempting to make the Ring of Fire more comfortable for them, instead of actually doing the precise work that allows them to walk through.
00:17:38:08 - 00:18:01:01
Lisa
And that's grief. Grief is the walking through the fire. And I can tell you, I mean, I probably don't even need to tell you, but we're going to talk about it anyways. We skip this step for a few reasons. The first is simple nobody talks about the fact that this is required. Nobody said that between awareness and change, there's a grieving process.
00:18:01:04 - 00:18:21:18
Lisa
Most of you were told to just understand yourself, and you did. You were told to take action and you did. But nobody mentioned that there's something in between that has been that has to be felt and not solved. The other reason is deeper for most of you. You spent your life learning how to not feel bad. That's why you have these patterns.
00:18:21:24 - 00:18:45:11
Lisa
They are sophisticated, lifelong strategies for staying ahead of the feelings that you don't want to feel. And grief requires. The opposite of everything you've been trained to do requires you to stop, to feel the exact feelings your entire identity was built to outrun, and most of you were never given permission to feel grief or sadness. You were told to get over your feelings.
00:18:45:11 - 00:19:08:13
Lisa
You were told that your feelings didn't matter. You were told to toughen up or move on, or look on the bright side, or be grateful. And what you learned from that is that feelings are not a solution, that doing is the solution. Thinking is the solution, and figuring it out is the solution. But for deep identity level transformation, this is not a doing solution.
00:19:08:13 - 00:19:39:27
Lisa
It is a feeling solution. And that is the most counter-intuitive thing that you will ever hear, like even to wrap your brain around, that requires you to grieve. Like, what do you mean there's no step by step guide for me to do this, Lisa? What do you mean? I can't just strategize my way out of this? And I know this intimately, because there have been so many times in my life as a, I will say, a recovering overthinker, a machine, a doer.
00:19:40:00 - 00:20:08:28
Lisa
I did not want to feel my way through things, even though now I know that being able to feel my feelings is a superpower. Being, highly kinesthetic is a is a superpower. So, you know, when when my life blew up in 2023, I wanted to find a solution. But I also knew there was no solution. I had to keep forcing myself to come back into my body and feel what had happened, to feel the deep grief.
00:20:09:00 - 00:20:31:26
Lisa
Because grief doesn't give a shit what you think. Grief just needs to be honored. It needs to be felt. All those stages of grief needs to be dealt. And, I can even remember a time this was, you know, way back decades ago now. When I started my personal transformation journey, my partner had just gone off to rehab and I was like, how do I fix this?
00:20:31:28 - 00:20:48:20
Lisa
Like typical. Like, how do I fix this? I didn't want to be in the sadness of the grief of what had happened to my life. I had a brand new baby. I had two young boys. Everything had fallen apart. And so what did I do? I started reading all the books. I'm going to figure this out. I'm going to figure this out.
00:20:48:22 - 00:21:12:24
Lisa
And I read a book that was about me and my patterns. And it it literally took me to my knees. And I remember I still remember to this day. I walked into my therapy room and I was like, oh my God, I am so broken. Like it was the realization that everything I thought to be true about myself was not, in fact, the truth.
00:21:12:26 - 00:21:37:07
Lisa
These were behaviors that I had adopted to cope with my life, my circumstances. For, you know, my whole youth. And I was in my, 30s at the at the time. And I remember my therapist looked at me and said, great, are you ready to start just being with what needs to be honored now? Are you ready to stop trying to think your way through this?
00:21:37:10 - 00:21:44:00
Lisa
Now you're ready, Lisa. Now you are ready to do the work.
00:21:44:02 - 00:22:18:03
Lisa
And, it was the hardest work I ever did because I couldn't just talk my way out of it. I had to be so present with what I was feeling, and there was a tremendous amount of grief. The other thing that I think is important to talk about when it comes to grief, and I touched on this earlier, is that grief isn't just about, grief just isn't about what we're experiencing, but it's also about grieving what our parents could or couldn't give you in the relationship.
00:22:18:06 - 00:22:25:26
Lisa
It's also grieving the things that you didn't even realize happened in your life that impacted you.
00:22:25:29 - 00:22:43:13
Lisa
You know, there were there are so many clients that come to me, and when I have them fill out their intake form, I ask them if they had a safe and stable environment growing up, and almost every single one of them says, yes. And then I'll go on to ask them a whole bunch more questions about their family and their family history, to get some more context from where they're working from.
00:22:43:16 - 00:23:15:28
Lisa
And nothing that they tell me supports them growing up in a safe and stable environment. Yet they've told themselves that that was safe and stable, because that's the only context that they had for safe, safe and stable. So this is also about grieving the realization of how you had framed the world. It's grieving parts of yourself, the identity that you built to cope and survive because it can't come with you into the next version of who you want to become.
00:23:16:00 - 00:23:38:13
Lisa
Or at the very least, you got to put them in the in the back seat. So I know for me, a big part of my work when I initially started this work was grieving my giver. So if you haven't taken the Success Paradox quiz yet, make sure you head over there and take it. Lisa Carpenter, aka Ford Slash quiz so you can find out what your archetype is, your main archetype that's driving your behaviors.
00:23:38:15 - 00:24:02:20
Lisa
So I was a big giver, and I had built such a huge chunk of my identity around being the good person, the agreeable one. I would bend over backwards for everybody else, and I took a lot of pride in being that person, and I never actually questioned if I was, truly giving from the sake of wanting to give, or if I was giving because I was looking to be like, to be loved, to belong.
00:24:02:23 - 00:24:26:11
Lisa
And never question that. I had to grieve the parts of myself that blindly trusted everything in my life. Like I had this, like, Pollyanna version of me that I had to grieve because I have learned that, you know, I can't just blindly trust people, even people that I love dearly. Trust is something that needs to be earned and proven over and over and over.
00:24:26:13 - 00:24:58:26
Lisa
And it was like feeling like I lost this beautiful, innocent part of myself that that couldn't go with me. And I still feel sadness about that. But I also chose that I wasn't going to stay in my grief, that I was going to get to this place of acceptance around these parts, having to start to fall away so that I could step into the new version of me, the new identity of the a new identity of me that was going to move forward powerfully with an open heart.
00:24:58:28 - 00:25:30:04
Lisa
It was really painful. Like, I don't wish grief on anybody, but having walked it so many times myself, grieving while taking action, coming to this place of acceptance and accepting things I did not want to accept, but without getting through the grieving process so I could get to the place of acceptance, I would still be trapped in the pain of of all the different things that had happened in my life, I would still be trapped in the pain of what these coping behaviors were costing me.
00:25:30:06 - 00:26:11:06
Lisa
So for those of you who are listening, who are here because you're like, wow, this, this version of success that I'm living doesn't feel the way I thought it was going to. It's about dismantling all the parts of you that innocently believed that if you tick the boxes, you are going to get to, to to feel a certain way, grieving the parts of you that need to redefine what success is going to look and feel like, and how much of your success was built on the backs of very small, innocent parts of you, childlike parts of you that were just trying to run away from feeling hurt and from feeling bad.
00:26:11:08 - 00:26:44:09
Lisa
So grieving these identity partners are pattern story isn't about someone dying. It's about the parts of you that have to die, the beliefs that made up your identity that aren't true anymore, the survival strategies that can't come with you, and the grief. The grief can feel like death. Because in a very real sense, a version of you is dying so that you can step into a new version of you, and that is you that is so powerful.
00:26:44:11 - 00:27:02:22
Lisa
So I want to say something important because I don't want you to hear, feel your grief and interpret it as, set of camp in your pain and live there. Okay. I am a very big believer in emotions. Are energy in motion. They're meant to move. We're not meant to just get anchored in them and stay them. Stay there.
00:27:02:22 - 00:27:25:28
Lisa
And grief needs to move. It needs to be honored. It needs to move through you. It is not meant to become your new identity. If you go from being the machine or the prover or the polisher or the giver, to being the person who is always processing and always in their grief and always in the heaviness, you've just now traded one identity for another, and we get so afraid of getting caught in our grief as well.
00:27:25:28 - 00:27:41:17
Lisa
This is part of the reason why people don't want to go into grief, because they're like, I don't, I don't want to go there. I'm afraid I'll never get out. I remember thinking when I was told like this, you need to feel what's going on for you and thinking like, if I start crying, that's going to be like a tidal wave that hits me and I'm never going to stop.
00:27:41:17 - 00:27:59:23
Lisa
I'm never going to find my way out. I'm going to drown in my grief. But there's a difference between allowing grief to move through you and becoming attached to your pain. Grief is a doorway. It's not a room I want anybody to live in. But in saying that your grief is going to take as long as it takes.
00:27:59:23 - 00:28:24:11
Lisa
And this is why we work with coaches, because as your coach, I'm not going to let you stay in the grief. So I'm going to hold your feet, the fire around the things that you need to feel. But I'm also going to keep you in the energy of taking action, of being in personal responsibility, of allowing that to move so that you don't stay trapped there.
00:28:24:13 - 00:28:48:26
Lisa
And it will soften providing you're actually moving through it, feeling your emotions, not running from them, having the conversations you need to have, and taking care of yourself in the process. You have to keep walking. You can't sit down in the ring of fire and call it healing. So even in my deepest moments of grief, I was still showing up for myself.
00:28:48:29 - 00:29:08:24
Lisa
I was feeling what was going on. I was still showing up in my business. I was still caring for my clients, and we have the capacity to hold grief and also amazing things happening at the same time. We can do both. Most people struggle with that, and this is the power of of coaching and being guided through the grief process.
00:29:09:00 - 00:29:30:03
Lisa
You'll feel supported and it gets so much easier then to be with it. So you learn how to hold the duality of grief and expansion at the same time that you can be grieving what your patterns cost you while building something new. Simultaneously, both things can be true. We just need to look at which one needs to be honored today.
00:29:30:03 - 00:29:57:06
Lisa
If grief needs to be honored, trust me, it will not miss you. It will find you, but so will the possibility of what's on the other side. So acceptance again, like this is where we're moving through when it comes to the grieving process. Because acceptance, it's it's not just a moment. It's a practice. And it looks like the least impressive thing you've probably ever done.
00:29:57:08 - 00:30:18:28
Lisa
It looks like feeling the tightness in your chest after you've said yes again. And instead of trying to fix that feeling or distract yourself from it, you stay with it. You allow yourself to feel like, oh my God, that doesn't feel good to say yes. It might even look like going back and saying, you know what? I made a mistake.
00:30:18:28 - 00:30:59:13
Lisa
I need to say no. But allowing yourself to be with the discomfort of what happens in your body when you say yes, when you don't want to. It might look like having an amazing win in your life, and allowing yourself to celebrate it, and noticing the parts of you that do not want to celebrate it. The parts of you that, want to deny wanted deny that it really mattered, want to diminish your accomplishment, but letting yourself sit there and feel the win, letting it land and grieving the parts of you that never let yourself win before.
00:30:59:15 - 00:31:22:19
Lisa
How many times you did something so cool and you didn't let it. You didn't let it land in your body. It might be not raising the bar immediately when you accomplished something and moving on to the next thing, letting yourself have some space and time before you're like, I need to fill the empty space in my calendar. I need to have something else that I'm working towards.
00:31:22:26 - 00:31:39:04
Lisa
I'm currently in this season right now, having launched the Success Paradox quiz. I'm kind of in the season of like, okay, we're not doing anything else right now. We're just going to talk about this Lisa, instead of the part of me, the the machine and the prover that are like, oh, but what else can we create? What can we go create now?
00:31:39:04 - 00:32:04:12
Lisa
Lisa so just being with this like this is expansive. Being in the expansive space of not adding anything else in it might be about sitting with any type of guilt you're feeling when you're trying to rest and not getting into it. Like saying, okay, I'm not going to die. Guilt is just showing me like there's a part of me that believes that I have to be productive all the time.
00:32:04:14 - 00:32:24:01
Lisa
I took yesterday and basically spent the whole day napping on and off, which is quite unusual for me. I was incredibly tired, but I also have a very full week and another week of travel coming up, and I was just like, Lisa, we get to rest. This is how we're going to show up and perform as our best over the coming weeks.
00:32:24:03 - 00:32:55:14
Lisa
And I didn't have to feel bad or guilty about it, but there was a part of me that wanted to. So you just you stay with the discomfort. This is what looking through the walking through the fire looks like. You stay with the discomfort. It might look like feeling grief for a younger version of yourself who built this entire identity to feel like you fit in, and then realizing you never had to do any of that to fit in, that you don't have to prove yourself to anybody.
00:32:55:17 - 00:33:23:03
Lisa
That if you want a seat at the table, just go sit at the table. So acceptance is this beautiful. Bridge it. It's what makes genuine action possible. Because when you're actually move, when you've actually moved through this grief pattern and you're no longer trying to change yourself from a place of self-improvement, but you're you're starting to move into a place of personal responsibility around what you want to change.
00:33:23:05 - 00:33:45:13
Lisa
You're saying, I see what this has been. I feel what it is cost me to work from this pattern, and I'm choosing something different now because I'm ready, not because there was anything wrong with me. I didn't know what I didn't know, but now I know. And now I know that that part of me, those patterns can't go with me.
00:33:45:15 - 00:34:08:13
Lisa
And I'm going to do different. And you've given yourself that time to grieve, yet to grieve what you didn't get. I mean, you know, so often we talk about, you know, there's so much talk in the self-development world about trauma. I talk about like little T trauma and oftentimes trauma or the trauma is things you didn't get that you wish you had gotten when you were little.
00:34:08:19 - 00:34:36:16
Lisa
And if you have listened to the Success Paradox podcast that goes with the quiz, you'll hear that many of these coping patterns came from things we didn't receive as children, and accepting that those things happened and they're not right or wrong or good or bad. They just were. But what what does it look like to be responsible for who you are today and what you want different in your future?
00:34:36:18 - 00:35:08:18
Lisa
And that is the difference between action that collapses and action that actually holds, that is grounded in this new identity that we're stepping into. So in the next episode, I'm going to go all in on all of this, and I'm going to walk you through what grief actually looks like for each archetype, specifically what the machine is grieving, what the polishers grieving, what the prover is grieving and what the giver is grieving and what becomes possible on the other side.
00:35:08:21 - 00:35:30:04
Lisa
So that episode is one you might want to listen to alone, because that might be the episode that really hits you the hardest. And that's going to be one of the episodes that I'm most nervous to record, because I'm going to share a lot of my own personal moments of grief as I've unwound these archetypes in my own life.
00:35:30:04 - 00:35:54:03
Lisa
So again, if you haven't taken the Success Paradox quiz, now is the time. Episode three will be out next week. We're going to name the grief that belongs to your specific archetypes. You do want to know what your archetype is, and trust me when I say you're going to learn your primary and your secondary. But truly, almost every single client I work with is a combination of all four.
00:35:54:05 - 00:36:15:04
Lisa
Now, if someone came to mind while you were listening to this episode, I would so appreciate it if you would send it to them. Especially if it's somebody you know is really into self-development and they keep trying to change things and they're like, why do I keep coming back to the same place? Why can't, why can't I just make the things that I want to be different in my life stick?
00:36:15:06 - 00:36:46:00
Lisa
This episode explains why to them. So although grief isn't a fun ride, when I promise you what I absolutely guarantee you is when you allow yourself to really get intimate with these parts of yourself, with these patterns, with these coping behaviors, and you allow yourself to grieve in whatever way that looks like for you. And this is why people get stuck in this second stage after awareness, like before they get to acceptance.
00:36:46:00 - 00:36:54:03
Lisa
That's where all the resistance shows up because people resist that grief, period. But this is where the magic happens.
00:36:54:06 - 00:37:18:06
Lisa
This is where the magic happens. So I hope you learned something today about the transformational process that you hadn't known in the past. I look forward to catching you on the next episode. So before you do anything else, head over and take that quiz and I will catch you on episode number three
00:37:18:08 - 00:37:18:26
Lisa
of
00:37:19:03 - 00:37:21:00
Lisa
what knowing can't fix.
00:37:21:00 - 00:37:30:04
Lisa
That's the name of the series What knowing can't fix. So part three of what no, I can't fix. So I will catch you all on the next episode. Thanks for being here.
