EPISODE 302: Confessions of a High Performance Life Coach: I Don’t Have It All Together (And Neither Should You)

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Welcome to the Full Frontal Living Podcast. I'm Lisa Carpenter, master life Coach, two driven, ambitious humans who want more out of life without having to sacrifice themselves to achieve it. I'll share how it's possible to slow down, take better care of yourself, find more peace and ease, pressure to sustainable energy, stop procrastination and overwhelm and fall in love with your life, your business, and your body.

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This podcast is for you. If you're ready to learn what it takes to thrive as a high performer, do less but achieve more. Make you and your well-being a top priority and create your extraordinaire free life. I'm so glad you're here.

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Hey, Hey, listener. Thanks for tuning in for another episode of the Full Frontal Living Podcast. And today is honestly just going to be some of my random musings. I'm actually in the car just leaving the gym, and I've been thinking a lot about, you know, the past couple years, the past decade, from the time I really started this podcast over 300 episodes ago now, and how much I've changed and grown and evolved, how much my listeners, how many of you have changed, how many new people have showed up and found my work and where I've started to make things hard on myself?

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What's working, what's not working, where I'm judging myself. So when I started this podcast, so let me preface this this episode, I think we're going to start have a series just called Lisa's Musings and Thoughts as They Pour Out of My Brain. Because, you know, when I started this podcast way back in, I think it was 2017 or 2018, I started it because I was annoyed at Instagram.

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I was annoyed that Instagram only gave me at that time like 30 seconds to record my story and I had so much to say. So I was like, You know what? I'm just going to start a podcast. And this is after having wanted to start a podcast for probably a year, but so much fear around it and it needs to look a certain way, sound a certain way.

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I need a fancy mic and so I just made the decision like, screw it, I'm just going to start the podcast because I, I need to have a platform where I can just let the words come through me without having to edit myself, without having to squeeze it into a 30 minute section. But just be real and honest and, you know, talk about what's going on.

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For me, trusting that somebody is going to need to hear the message. And if you go back in the archives of this podcast, I mean, you'll even find one where I am barbecuing chicken outside because I had a message that I needed to deliver. I believe it was about body image. And then all of a sudden there's a train going by in the background because I was at a cabin, I was staying at a cabin, a family cabin, and I was just like, You know what?

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I don't care. I'm going to publish it anyways because I'm going to trust that the message here is more important. Now, obviously over the years I've grown. As I said, as you've all grown, my message has become a little bit more refined, got a little bit more professional, all that stuff, you know, ticked all the boxes that we're told to, you know, tick as we're growing a business.

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And of course, you know, I'm somebody who works from a place of excellence. So, you know, I'm here for do it messy. And I also like to go back and clean things up. But what I've found over the past couple of years in particularly is I've really started to feel like I'm editor editing, censoring myself. I'm struggling to get my words out.

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And this is for a whole variety of reasons. And then I've put rules around when I can record, when I can't record, you know, making sure that I know what it is I want to say before I go out and say it and in essence, I've like put a choke hold on myself. I put a choke hold on myself, and I've robbed myself of my own personal magic in trying to do it right, get it right, create more success, grow my business larger, all the things because I am here to make an impact.

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So if if I know that if I do X, Y, and Z, that's going to extend my reach out into the world and help me impact the amount of people, men and women that I want to impact, then I'm going to do it. I'm going to try it. But there's this fine line between trying those things and then what?

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What were they costing me? What have they been costing me? So I'm still going to have well-produced episodes, although they're still never going to be super awesome produced. We're just I'm just not there and I like to keep it real. That's a big part of my brand. I think we have too many things that are contrived and especially now in the world of I and everything looks so polished.

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I think it's really, really important that when you tune in here, you get messy and real and raw. So, you know, the podcast will continue to evolve. But for me, I needed to come back to a place where I'm just going to hit record and I'm going to trust whatever is going to come out of my mouth is going to be what you need to hear.

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So what I wanted to share today, now that I've got all that rambling out of the way, is I was thinking about integrity as I was leaving the gym because integrity is one of my highest values. But it dawned on me this morning how integrity has also become like a noose around my neck. And listen, this happens with some of my vault, my values, and I want you to pay attention to how this might show up in your life, because this often happens with loyalty as well.

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I can end up being loyal to things other people, places and things over being loyal to myself because I am such a loyal person. Like once I meet you, if you're in my circle, like I'm like, You're in my circle. If you've been a client of mine, you're always in my circle. You've been a friend. You're always going to be in that circle.

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That's just kind of how I roll. So I was thinking about integrity as this amazing value. So integrity is all about integrity to other people following through on the things you say you're going to do. But the piece of integrity that I talk about the most that is the most important to me is the integrity for myself, meaning that I keep promises to myself that if I say I'm going to do something for me, I make sure that I do it.

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And integrity is a really, really high value of mine and it's a high value of many of my clients. It's what causes us to be always reaching for excellence and wanting to be our best. However, what kind of struck me today, this kind of thought or download was how integrity has actually been preventing me from coming on and just talking this way with you.

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Because as a coach and as a you know, I've been a coach for over two decades now, I am a very high level coach. I work with men and women all around the globe. I know that I am so excellent at what I do. I do not question that anymore. I know the impact that I have in the lives of the people that I work with.

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Where things have gotten sticky for me, though, is men these past two years have been the hardest years in my life. And let's even go back further, right? Let's let's go back into the pandemic years. Those years were really hard for me, too, because I wasn't seeing the world through the same lens as the majority. I just saw the world through the lens very, very differently from most.

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And it was very polarizing. There were very challenging, challenging years for me because so much of what was going on was bumping up against some of my really high values as well. So between, you know, 2022 now, these have been the most challenging years of my life, and I have been in it doing my work. So working with my own coaches and therapists and healers, like just really doubling down on what I need to do to support myself.

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And because of that value of integrity, it's important to me that I do that work. But I can't even begin to tell you how many times I felt out of integrity because I thought, well, how can I support other people? How can I be so great at what I do while still like finding out these pieces of myself that have actually really sunk me into shame?

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Like it is so hard and I'm sharing this with you because when my clients are doing this work with me and they're discovering things about themselves, it is so confronting. You will bump up against feelings of embarrassment and shame and frustration and rage. And like all the emotions that you've basically spent your whole life trying to run from.

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So here I am having these things reflected back to me by my own coaches and therapists and feeling so out of integrity because how can I, how can I coach? Well, also having so much of my own work to do, Who am I to lead? Who am I to lead? And I believe, you know, because I've been reflecting so much about this over the past few weeks, what I've realized is that in some ways I haven't been sharing as fully as I could be, and that's not meaning I'm going to, like, you know, bring you into my into my coaching sessions with my coach to share all the garbage.

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But what I'm noticing is, like, have I been holding back on how I'm sharing or just not wanting to share at all because of that peace around feeling like I'm not in integrity. So if I share this, people are going to see that I'm out of integrity. But the truth is, like when I don't share that I'm in it, I'm out of integrity.

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And for for the type of men and women that I work with, I know many, many things about my people, but one of the biggest things is that they are highly critical of themselves. And this is something like this is a pothole that I still find myself falling into more often than I care to admit. So it's the realization for me that being in integrity, being in integrity with my work is not censoring myself, editing myself, trying to clean things up a little bit, have a more polished message.

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Being in integrity means just hitting go on the mic, even if it means I lose my train of thought halfway through. And that's, you know, that's a that's an episode for another time. But, you know, between love, between these traumas that have gone on, these life happening, those that have really pushed my body into a state of responding to trauma, to, you know, perimenopause, menopause, whatever you want to call it, there is a story.

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I'm back and into my garage. Like real. This is real. That's my car beeping. These are all things that have really challenged even my cognitive abilities. The brain fog has been real, the inability to access my words and my thoughts. Some days has been so real and so humbling because my words are such a huge part of my identity and how I show up in the world.

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Right? You think about that. I'm a coach. Who am I without my ability to ask powerful questions, without my ability to be able to pull up my own stories and resources for my clients. So it has been very, very challenging. So I'm relooking at how I want to view integrity and how I can loosen the noose that I tied around my neck and the expectations I've been holding myself to, which were completely unconscious.

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Right. Because again, like, I want to make sure I'm delivering things of excellence. I want to make sure that if you are taking time out of your day to listen, that there is something of value here for me. But the truth is, because I've been trying so hard to deliver that value, I haven't been sharing maybe some of the more important things that I need to share, which is just what's on my heart, what's on my mind, instead of, you know, trying to get it right.

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So, you know, start redefining integrity, see what happens with that. And again, you know, one of the more common things that I hear from my clients is I don't think I'm ready to work with you yet, Lisa. Like, I don't think I'm at the level where I can work with you yet. And this is so heartbreaking for me because what that tells me is you seem to believe that I'm at a certain level that you're not enough for or that you could never be.

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And there's nothing that could be further from the truth. I am at no level. I'm at human level. I might be a few steps further ahead on my path or my journey because this is my life's work. But there is nobody there is nobody on this planet who is not good enough to be in a room with me because I am you.

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You are me. We are all just on the same journey together and ultimately we're all going to get to the same destination, which is we will leave this planet. So when somebody chooses to come into a space with me, they're choosing to step into a room full of love and acceptance and compassion and, yes, hard hitting questions and confrontation, not meaning I'm confrontational.

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You will be confronted, having to stare down yourself. You will be confronted with who you are and who you're being in that room with yourself, in that relationship with yourself. But I guarantee you, I am no better than you. This work is hard. It is messy, it is humbling. It is incredibly vulnerable, and it is so worth it.

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I want you to know that it is so worth it. Because when we allow ourselves to be who we are, which is what I'm doing in this episode, I'm just saying like Lisa, just record the episode and be who you are. Because I just I didn't even realize that I was slowly starting to put on these masks again.

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And truthfully, in part, I think it was just because I needed to protect myself while I was walking this, you know, we'll call it a healing journey, but I'm not serving you. If I put on masks and if I've given you the impression that I have it all together, I am so sorry. I so do not. And if you choose to not work with me because you're like, Wow, she doesn't have her shit together, that's an opportunity for you to actually look at how much you're judging yourself for not having it together.

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Because when we're judging other people thinking they don't have it together, there's a part of us that knows they are showing us what's happening inside of us. So I want to invite you into a room where you don't have to have it all together all the time. That's not what this work is about. It's not about getting to a place where you're done and you get off the ride.

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You're going to have peaks and valleys, you're going to have moments and hopefully years where you're like, Wow, everything is so amazing. And then life is going to life. You're going to be welcomed into an opportunity to expand again and look deeper at yourself. You're going to be confronted with like, Wow, I thought I already handled this. Speaking from personal experience, I thought I already handled this.

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I thought I thought I'd done the work around this. And there, you know, there it was. There was another route was deeper that needed to work, that I needed to work through. So anybody coming into a room with me, you're not just getting my coaching expertise, my ability to ask like, phenomenal questions that will literally knock you out of your boots.

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You're also getting the decades of wisdom that has come from me being in this work with you, the decades of wisdom, from listening to other people's stories, from having to learn how to feel my own feelings, to confront my own vulnerability, to try and soften to it. And there's still days that I hate crying. There's still days that I hate feeling vulnerable.

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There's still days that I want to push through when I know I need to rest. There are still days that I get this so wrong it's not even funny. So that is what I wanted to share with you today. I just wanted to welcome you in to the behind the scenes. I'm going to continue to do more episodes like this where I'm just going to riff.

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I'm going to go back to kickin it old school like I did back in the day where I just let it riff, share how I'm feeling, share what's on my heart, and trust that you will get the message and wisdom that you need from it. And you know, let the chips fall where they may. Thank you so much for tuning in.

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Thank you so much for being along this journey with me. I appreciate you more than you know, especially if you're someone who's been here from the very start. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And I will catch you on the next episode. Oh, before I go, though, we have some really exciting things coming up. We've got masterclasses pretty much every month.

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So if you're not on my mailing list, make sure you check the link in the show notes to get on my mailing list. And if you are interested at applying to work with me, head over to Lisa Carpenter dot C a forward slash WW m. Fill out an application and we can talk about all the different opportunities that are available to you.

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Until next time, I will catch you on the next episode.

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Hey. Hey. Before you go, I'd like to ask you something. How much longer are you willing to put yourself last to keep pushing through, hoping things will magically change while feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and disconnected from the life you truly want. Tell me if this sounds like you. From the outside. Most people think you have it all figured out.

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But the truth is that on most days you feel like you're barely holding it together. Your life is full of responsibilities and there's a high demand on your time and energy. You know you can't drop the ball yet. You're terrified it's going to happen. And worst of all, you're already taking the hit because you often end up at the bottom of your to do list.

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You've achieved so much, yet deep down, what you want most is more ease, more fulfillment, more joy, more you. And that is exactly what reclamation is all about. This isn't just another program. It's your opportunity to finally break free from the patterns that are keeping you stuck and step into a life that feels aligned, intentional and fulfilling. It's a safe space to have conversations that matter with women who get you and share your complicated relationship with vulnerability.

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Imagine having the support, the tools and the accountability to create real, lasting change where you're no longer just surviving, but thriving. So if you're done with feeling stuck, overwhelmed, and constantly running on empty, it's time to take that first step. Head to Lisa Carpenter, dot K forward slash reclamation and say yes to yourself, yes to the life you know you're meant for.

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Because if nothing changes, nothing changes. As I'll see you on the inside.