Shift out of saying yes to everything and into embodied action

Aug 8

We are at step #4: Action.

With every cycle of assess - access - align, there is a choice of change - action.

You can take embodied action through nudging your mindset and behaviors. This is how you show up and keep moving forward even when it feels like you’re not. The previous steps (assess - access - align), as one client says, are “Guide rails to refer back to when making decisions about activities to pursue and accept.”

Action for the sake of movement just leads to saying “yes” to most everything because you think it might:

Advance your career
Help you outwork or outshine colleagues
Let you look Pinterest perfect
Make you agreeable or a ‘good girl’
???

I get it. There was a long time (ahem, like 40 years) where I was a ‘yeser’ for many of those reasons. Plus, I didn’t know what my “fuck yeahs” were, and I was too scared to voice my “hell nos”. This disconnection from our body’s wisdom is such a safe coping strategy for many of us from our childhood experiences. Add on top of that how education and academia are escape routes that also encourage disembodying.

What I understand now through my somatic trauma training is that our nervous systems can become so familiar with fight/flight/freeze/fawn that we think it’s the norm. This can cause us to feel a false sense of at ease or home in similar situations. I believe this is why I stayed so long in toxic relationships - and my biggest toxic relationship was with work - academia.

I know when I was unlearning this myself, truly safe sensations of calm and right-alignment felt so incredibly uncomfortable.

But what I know to be absolutely true is that as you start to awaken your resilience and answer the call to transformation, you will feel compelled to take embodied action every day.

You shift out of overanalyzing and overcompensating, and instead you know, feel, and embody your right choice.

With my clients, after working together for 6 to 9 months, they start to live these empowering shifts so much that they can’t stand the idea of stagnation or regressing back to old patterns. I always tell them, there’s no way they can go back. Those are old versions of who they used to be--not their becoming self.

Instead, once clients enter that stage of transformation, we start the dreaming and experimenting work together. Here are a few ways we practice this stage of transformation work: