Living Into Your Potential

Welcome to the Design Your Dream Life podcast, where it’s all about helping moms live their best lives. My hope with this podcast is you’re more inspired to become the mom you are made to be. I’m Natalie, your host, a wife, boy, mom, dog lover, Chicagoan and former lawyer turned professionally certified coach. If you’re here to grow, I can help. Let’s go.

Hello my beautiful friend. Welcome to the podcast. Today we are talking about living into your potential. I wanna do this episode because of the new Grow You class that is being released on December 1st in just a few days on goal setting, I am teaching a class on Empowered Goal Setting. I haven’t taught a goal setting class in a couple years. If you’re not in Grow, You my friend, get in there right now so you can get this class. I always find it fascinating when I’m talking about my program and Grow You and someone says, oh my gosh, I know someone who would benefit from that so much.

And while they’re well intended, what I think they miss is that if you have a healthy human brain, this work is for you. It’s not for the person who needs medical help or a psychologist or a therapist or um, needs to sort of fix what’s going on for them that I definitely think there is a space for. It’s just not the space that coaching is in. The space that coaching really helps is for being future focused. Goal setting is a huge part of this. So if you, my friend, are living your life thinking that you want next year to be the year that you set and achieve some really big goals for yourself, whatever big goals mean to you, it can be that you wanna stop yelling or it could be that you wanna lose 50 pounds or anything in between. This my friend, is for you.

I am going to be not only teaching this class but offering lots of coaching opportunities. So you’re gonna get one-to-One support from me inside Grow You on how to better and more effectively set and achieve your goals. So with that in mind and with this time of year being such a fun festive time, but also kind of on the brink of what’s to come, which is all of us thinking about our New Year’s resolutions and what changes we wanna see in next year, and there’s sort of this surge of motivation in January, which I think is fun and really great to kind of jump on that bandwagon of. I also think that the kind of fuel that you feel, that feeling fuel, whether it’s um, drive, ambition, motivation, or some other emotion that fuels you for your goals in the other months, February through December, that is what matters most because that is 11 twelfths of the year.

So I want you to just keep in mind that the work that we’re doing here applies no matter what season it is. And that if you can get a sense of how you want to change your life and really create a plan to do it, you 100% can using these tools. It doesn’t need to be January when everyone and their mom is talking about setting goals and New Year’s resolutions. You can have that kind of energy for your life in June, in July and in December. So we are doing goal setting in December to get ahead of January and so that you can really feel motivated throughout the year regardless of kind of what’s happening in your circumstances and whether other people are motivated around you. So with that, it kind of perfectly ties into today’s topic, which is living into your potential and I want to kind of teach this concept here and hopefully break your brain a little bit.

It’s really simple and yet I think it’s really helpful. So a lot of people will come to me and they’ll say, I wanna work on some goal because I really just want to reach my potential. And I say, that’s impossible. You can never reach your potential. Do you know why? It’s because your potential always exists out in front of you. I looked up the definition of potential and it said potential is the qualities or abilities that may develop into something in the future. Okay, that definition probably isn’t surprising, but when you match it up against the phrase that we often use to reach your potential, you can never reach that. You can accomplish a goal. So if you set a goal to lose 25 pounds and you lose 25 pounds, you have accomplished that goal. You have not reached your potential. Maybe you want to tone your legs or maybe you want to stop eating sugar or maybe there are other things that you want to do to improve your health.

There is always more work to do and always more improving that you can work on. And now I say that cautiously I want to make sure that you know, as a student of this work, it’s work worth doing because you are a human being, an imperfect human being. I like to say we’re perfectly imperfect. And so there’s always more work to do, but that doesn’t mean that something’s wrong with you. So in the health example, it’s not that something’s wrong with your body, it’s just that you have a human body, which means that there is always going to be room for you to grow. And so I like to think of living into my potential. To me, it feels much more abundant when I think about reaching my potential. It feels like where I’m at right now isn’t good enough and that’s lack or scarcity.

It’s thinking that the body I have right now isn’t good enough or the money I have right now isn’t good enough and to reach my potential as a business owner or an entrepreneur or someone who wants to make a lot of money, then I need to kind of be somewhere I’m not. I need to reach a certain point and that’s simply not true. You can take on whatever identity you want, you can start telling yourself you are a patient mom, you are a loving mom, you are a connected mom. Even if you are someone who finds themselves yelling and snapping right now, you can change your identity by deciding how to think about yourself and then you can live into that new identity. And in that sense, you are living into your potential, my friend. I think about the shift I made from really using more of my masculine energy and masculine emotions like those productivity and ambition and sort of, um, motivation.

Those emotions were really helpful in my upbringing and in schooling and I still use them, but instead of being so one-sided, I now access and utilize particularly at home and in my personal life, much more feminine emotions of calm and peace and joy and love and connection. And I think about how making that shift was me living into my potential. Now, on the other side of that, I don’t think I’ve reached my potential. I think now this is the new baseline. So if you think about your life satisfaction on a scale of one to 10, I think you can be satisfied at like an eight, let’s call it. And then that eight can all of a sudden become your new floor at like a two. So just stick with me here, there was a time where you wanted the life that you currently have.

I remember wanting to be married and have a family and to, you know, celebrate Christmas with kids and little ones and, and and host. I remember just wanting so badly to do that and now it’s just a normal day. It blows my mind. And so when I think about how awesome that is, I don’t think about how okay, I’ve reached my potential. I just think about how that was a growth journey for me that I’ve lived into and now I can think about what’s next. And I think some people think, well why do that at all? And it’s a really good question because if you’re growing from lack and you reach a goal, there is no incentive to keep going because the growth journey felt so terrible. So if you set out on a journey to lose weight and you are fueled by self-doubt and you hate your body, but you kind of white knuckle it and use willpower to get that result, once you reach that result, you are not gonna wanna keep going in any direction with respect to your health goals because it has been so painful for you on that journey.

And that is not what I’m suggesting. What I’m suggesting is to sort of clean up your thoughts and feelings so that you are satisfied and even love where you’re at right now and you want to grow into the future. So whenever there’s something in my life that I like, but it’s hard for me to love because I wanna change it, instead of thinking this isn’t good enough. What I think is it’s a good start. I was coaching someone once and she was talking about the money in her checking account and how she wanted there to be more money in her checking account. And I said, well, instead of thinking that the money in your checking account right now isn’t enough, like there’s not enough money, which is sort of the brain’s default go-to thought, how about a thought like it’s a good start. This is a good start that is embracing and accepting and approving of the money and wanting more.

Do you see how that’s so different from rejecting the money and saying it’s not enough? You could apply the same thing to your home. I have experienced this myself and um, and utilize this tool just for little things around the home. Um, the color of the walls immediately, I wanted them changed when we moved in and I thought, you know what? It’s a good start. It’s freshly painted. It’s nice that it is cohesive and it’s not terrible. It’s a good start and I wanna change it. For those of you who live in a home and you want it to be bigger, you want a bigger home, instead of thinking that your home is too small, you can think it’s a good start. So instead of thinking that where you’re at now is not a good enough or you need to be fixed, how about thinking it’s a good start and then deciding you want to live into your potential for your life and create new and different life experiences just because you want to.

I don’t think that you always have to be growing, but I do think that without growth for an extended period of time, it requires a lot of numbing and a lot of escaping. So if you don’t grow, like a lot of people don’t after, you know, they’ve sort of reached their “destination” in their career after college and kind of settling down whatever that looks like for them. A lot of times since there’s not a specific roadmap like there is kind of from birth until you’re mid to late twenties, a lot of times what will happen is settling and not growing and then needing to escape to find any sort of happiness. So a lot of vacations, a lot of overeating, a lot of overspending. It’s needing external false pleasures to really make you feel happy. And the problem with that is that the more false pleasure you have, the more you need.

And I think that this is just backwards. I think that when you realize that’s what’s happening, then you can focus on getting internal pleasure, the pleasure you create from your thoughts and feelings intentionally, and then you can focus on growth and who you want to be and grow into into the future, which is so amazing because you shift your focus from consuming to creating. So when you are seeking a lot of external pleasure, you’re consuming a lot. You’re either eating a lot or drinking a lot, or um, vacationing a lot or shopping a lot or working a lot like whatever it is, you’re consuming a lot in a way that is necessary for you to feel any sort of happiness. It’s like that little dopamine hit we get, but there’s that negative consequence. So if you eat and overeat and do it to escape your feelings, you probably will have some negative consequences for how you feel in the long term.

And goals and growth help you shift from consuming to creating because you shift your focus to what you want to do with your life in the future.

It’s a beautiful thing aside from over consumption and really needing to escape your life. Another reason why growth and living into your potential and goal setting is so important is because without it, your brain will be focused on problems to solve that are in your circumstances that you might not want it to be focused on. So for example, I had a client once who was having a lot of challenges with her kids and them listening and just really feeling like she wasn’t doing a good enough job as a mom. And I coached her about a year after that on her goals for her business, and I asked her how everything was going with her kids and she said, oh, I’m not even focused on that anymore.

And it was so interesting because what I noticed was that her brain shifted from the problems with her kids to solving the problem of her goal. So just notice when your brain has a problem that it wants to focus on, the other things in your life don’t matter as much. And so with a goal, you sort of create intentional problems that your brain can solve. I like to tell myself that my brain is a problem solving machine. It wants to solve problems. And so if you are in a season of life where you have space to set and create goals, I think it is one of the best uses of your brain because it gives you problems where you can solve them by living into your potential. Your potential is just that it is yours, it is something that you live into based on what you truly desire and what’s on your heart.

It is different than everyone else’s. I think we definitely all can relate to broad general goals. We all want to be richer, be healthier, be happier, but when we really get more specific, it is so much more nuanced than that. And so what’s really important is that you tap into your desires and what kind of growth and change you want for yourself. For example, it might be that your family wants to see you succeed in a certain way, and so they ask you questions like, are you having kids yet? Or, um, do you plan on applying for that new job yet? Or whatever it is. And so you sort of feel this outward pressure, but remember they’re not living your life and you wanna make sure that you are creating the results for yourself that you want. So it’s okay, typically it’s coming from love from these other people, but you wanna check in with yourself and ask yourself, what kind of growth do you want?

What is your potential out in the future that you can live into? It might be a growth journey that’s completely internal that others wouldn’t necessarily notice. I remember coming back up to Chicago to visit and I went to a, a party for one of my girlfriends and a guest there said that I looked so southern and it was just such a huge compliment and really validated my journey from just feeling more masculine in my emotions to more feminine my emotions. Because as we all know in the south, there’s that sort of, um, ease and flow and I, I think of Charleston as one of the most feminine cities and and I really had, um, taken that on in a way that I was really proud of and that was a transformation to me that was so unique to me. So what is it for you that you want to live into your potential next?

Is it that you want to stop yelling at your kids? Is it that you want to lose weight? Is it that you want to downshift in your career to working part-time? Or is it that you want to upshift and you want to go for that promotion? Is it that you want to redecorate your home and something else that’s sort of in your environment or external? Or is it internal? Do you want to shift from someone who is really fast paced and impatient to someone who is more laid back? And of course there are infinite ways that you can change your life and grow in the future. The goal is to do it intentionally to the extent that you can’t. So what I mean by that is sometimes life presents us with circumstances where that’s our growth journey. So if you are going through a cancer battle right now, for example, I’m thinking of one of my family members that is a growth journey that you’re probably wishing you didn’t have or you would never wish on someone else.

And yet that’s your journey for right now. If that’s your journey, you absolutely can still grow through it. And for those of you listening who don’t have a circumstance like that, that have the space to create a goal or something to work on in the next year, really think about how you want to do that. What transformation do you wanna see? And don’t just think about how you can be motivated about it in January. Think about March, think about May, think about the summer. What can you continue to work on and grow into, into the summer and into the fall? And in all of the months, it doesn’t need to take all of your time, it just needs to be the focus that you want to have for that part of your life, for the growth part. So if you want to lose weight, it’s deciding that you wanna commit even though you know that there’s gonna be spring and summer and fall when you are tempted to overeat.

And it’s okay if you’ve never done it before. All of this living into that, I’m talking about living into your potential is very future focused. That’s what I love about it. I have a couple weight loss clients right now and I love just blowing their mind with this work because what you can do is just flip your consistency. So if you’ve been consistent at not losing weight for so long, that’s great. You know how to be consistent. We just have to flip it so that you can be consistent losing weight and you 100% can you just have to be more future focused about it and direct your brain to what you want it to focus on. This is the work of intentionally creating your life. It is some of the most fun work that I just love and it is an honor and a privilege to be doing this work with you, my friend. So think about how you wanna grow in the next year. Come in to Grow You so I can coach you and help you live into your potential. I’ll talk with you next week, my friends. Take care.

Thank you for being here and listening now. Head on over to natalibacon.com/coaching to learn more about Grow You, my membership for moms, where we take all this work to the next level.