Grief, Growth, and Guts: A Journey Back to Happiness! ❤️

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Hello and welcome to the Choosing Happy Podcast.

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I'm Heather Masters, your host for today, and I have a bit of a confession to make because for a while and longer than I really want to admit, I thought I was done.

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And I mean not done just with the podcast or with coaching or in some dramatic way, just quietly done.

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Like the volume on my own life had been turned down slowly over the years until I stopped noticing that it was quieter than it used to be.

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What I also mean by that, I kind of limited myself, especially through lockdown.

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You know, I kind of noticed that lockdown didn't have that much of an impact.

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That's how quiet my life had become.

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And this week, three things happened that changed that.

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My son was on holiday with me last week and he stopped me in my tracks with something that he said.

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And I was reminded, I know I've covered this, but I was reminded of my client story and it kind of hit me differently than it had before.

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And also I've been going deep into NLP again with the help of Sunites Master practitioner work and my.

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My own contribution with AI and revisiting that work, really becoming aware of how I've been showing up, cracked something open for me.

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And this episode is me telling you all three, because I suspect there's something in here that you might need to hear as much as I needed to live it.

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So stay tuned for this week's Choosing Happy Podcast.

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Now, when my son comes to stay, we have really relaxing nights.

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We catch up with each other, and after a few wines, you know how it is, you tend to get pretty honest.

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And in my previous life, or previous years, as I was in technology and IT and consultancy, I used to say, I used to have a rule for myself that I would say yes to everything, whether it was theatre, travel, cinema experiences, and particularly travel.

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And if I got the opportunity to train somewhere for work, I would go.

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So it's taken me to San Francisco, it's taken me all over the us, it's taken me to Europe, it's taken.

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Taken me to Amsterdam a number of times, and it's taken me to South Africa and to Australia and to Greece.

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A combination of technology training and NLP courses, and I certified as a trainer in Sydney, Australia.

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Then things changed, losses came.

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I spent years caring for my parents and then lockdown.

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And quietly, without any real big announcements in my life, I started saying no.

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And once you start saying no, things stop turning up.

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And I didn't notice that.

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I kind of lost that mojo, that aliveness, that openness.

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To adventure.

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And that's the thing about grief and exhaustion.

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They're slow thieves.

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They don't take everything at once.

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They just borrow a little bit at a time.

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Until one day your son tells you he's living the life you used to live on your behalf and you realize you'd handed it to him.

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And that's a great thing except you stopped doing it for yourself.

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You stopped being the change.

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My son in that wine soaked conversation was reminding me that I had told him to say yes.

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Because you never know where the adventure takes you.

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And that ability to say yes in the moment and watch doors open and watch, watch things kind of unfold so you get to live your best life.

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And this weekend I was really reminded of this again from watching a film called the Life List where a mother leaves, encourages her daughter to complete the list of life.

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The things she wanted to take a risk on and live fully throughout her life.

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And the the mother basically I won't spoil the movie, I won't give any spoilers, but basically that's what it's about.

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About the girl being challenged to tick things off her laced within a year.

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And it also reminded me that it's the anniversary of my mum's passing on the 17th, on Friday 17th and all of this kind of coming together and arriving at once.

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And it reminded me that she didn't raise someone who was done.

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She raised someone who said yes.

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She raised someone who even if she didn't like it, was willing to go do exciting things.

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And it got me to pause and think about right now I'm kind of on the precipice of new things for myself and it's the encouragement to step forward, to reflect.

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Why am I doing right now?

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What do I want to move forward into?

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Where has that.

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I was going to say risk free.

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That isn't true.

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I wasn't risk averse.

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I was really frightened when I did most of this stuff on my own.

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And where's the courageous life embracing version of me gone?

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And I just want to share a little bit about the work I'm doing with clients because interestingly I'm encouraging them to break through and re embrace their lives.

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And I want to tell, I want to remind you about my client who I coached and when she first came to me she was feeling very similar, that she was done, that she was reaching her 70th birthday and she felt like her life was done.

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She had regrets, she felt like her relationships weren't working.

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And it's a story I'm hearing at the moment, especially in my generation of women who come to that point where we're at a crossroads where lots of things are ending and maybe we haven't taken the time to clear our past in order to make a path for our future.

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So my client was just coming up to her 70th birthday and she was really dreading.

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One of the big things was she was feeling like she was running out of time and she wasn't sure what she wanted to do, what was missing.

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She was an excellent coach.

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That's how I'd met her before.

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And she just felt exhausted.

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She didn't want to coach.

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Her life was flat and she felt that someday she was just dragging herself out of bed.

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And even that felt like a achievement.

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And when we work together, what opens up was kind of a clearing.

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We didn't have a strategy.

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That's not how I work.

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I work with what's in the room.

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Something that Sunay has taught me.

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And there was so much weighing her down.

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We did an Incomplete Messes and Millionaire day exercise and she cleared with enthusiasm.

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She cleared her list.

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You know, she's still working on a list.

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She's got that there and she's working through it.

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And in the sessions that followed, we did a lot of clearing work.

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But in addition to that, we worked on helping her see who she truly was, helping her to step in to her powerful self and to be able to build a future from there.

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She said to me that the tools she thought were long done with turned out.

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They were waiting.

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They were always there.

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We just had to clear enough space for her to find them again, to find that passion to reignite the coaching that she wanted to do.

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She trained as a lifeguard to support her local community pool.

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This is at 70 years of age.

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She re enrolled in the ICF accredited coaching training and she is attracting clients and now gets out of bed excited for the day.

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She told me that the coaching changed her experience from feeling like she was running out of time to doing what was really important to her.

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And those were her words.

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And I think about them a lot, especially at the moment.

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And then there's the third thing.

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I've been going back to my NLP roots.

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I hadn't really moved away from them because NLP is the thing that has helped me be resilient through the many shifts and turns in my life.

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And over the last few weeks, I've gone back to working with Sue Knight, who has shaped everything I do and everything I believe about what's possible for people.

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And something in Revisiting that work at this moment in my life has helped open things up to me.

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It's opened something up in me that I haven't felt in years.

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My skills over the years.

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And you know, I've shared this again in previous conversations, that I've spent years accumulating the right toolkit for exactly this moment in history.

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This combination of tech and writing and AI and NLP and personal development and coaching.

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The.

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The world is changing faster than most people can process.

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And I've spent my entire career helping people process this change, navigate the loss, work with tech, reclaim identity and choose who they really are, choosing themselves again, choose that I'm not redundant and for myself, I am, for the first time, maybe exactly what's needed in this moment.

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It's that joining the dots thing.

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And I wonder if that's true for you.

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Not the NLP or the AI, but the thing you've spent your life building.

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The.

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The lessons you've learned through life, the actual courses you've taken, the skills you've built, the thing that came from the hard years and the losses and the reinventions.

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The thing you might have started to quietly dismiss.

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It's not enough or past its moment.

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What if it isn't?

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What if you too are built for this time and you just haven't said it out loud yet?

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What if this is your time because you've experienced so much already and the world is speeding up in terms of change, that everything's uncertain?

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What if this is your time to step forward and help and support and be the change?

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So, just to close, three things arrived this week that reminded me I'm not done.

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My son living the life I used to live and will be living again and crediting me with teaching him to do that.

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A woman who trained as a lifeguard at 70 and is now coaching others into their power and working in a room full of NLP master practitioners that handed me back to myself, that helped me join the dots and recognize the importance of the work I'm here to do right now.

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And I'm recording this three days before the anniversary of my mum's day death.

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And I think this is the episode she'd want me to make.

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She didn't raise me as someone who was done.

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I know that deep in my core, I'm not someone who's done.

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And neither did your parents raise you as someone who's done.

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So here's my question for you, and I really mean it.

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I want you to stick with it today.

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What did the hard years ask you to put down.

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And what would it mean?

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What would it feel like to pick it back up?

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You don't have to answer the question, just stay with the question, even if it's for a few days or a few weeks.

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I'll be back in a couple of weeks, and I promise the next chapter of this podcast and my life is going to be worth listening to too.

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So choose Happy and I'll see you soon.

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Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to this week's episode.

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If you enjoyed it or think it would be valuable to others, please do share.

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And if you really enjoyed it, please leave me a review.

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It really helps the podcast.

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All of the links are in the show notes, and I look forward to seeing you next week on the Choosing Happy podcast.

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Sam.