Do you often find yourself saying “I want a loving relationship?” What does a loving relationship mean to you? Megan is one of millions of people who really want a loving relationship but have struggled for years to find one. In this episode of A Glimpse Inside’s Relationship Rescue series, host Wendy Perrotti coaches Megan to alter the approach she takes by using patterns that are already working in other areas of her life. If you’re struggling to find or deepen a relationship, tune in to get some concrete things you can do to start making that shift in your life too.
Welcome to A Glimpse Inside. I’m Wendy Perrotti. You’re listening to episode two of our four-part series relationship rescue. If you’ve missed Relationship Advice From the Trenches with Paula Jean Burns in Episode One, check it out. We dug into the everyday rough spots that relationships hit and we shared some of our personal stories about how we handled them. Paula is truly insightful and she’s a really cool cat. It was a great conversation.
My guest today has been working with me on the many ways that self-worth and the negative stories we tell ourselves and others impact the outcomes of our lives. She’s yearning for deeper connection and wants a loving relationship in her life. This is really personal stuff and sometimes it can get intense. Even knowing that Megan gets that lots of people out there maybe feeling the same way, experiencing the same struggle and so she’s agreed to let you listen into her next two coaching sessions.
Before we dive in, I want to address something that’s important about the kind of coaching that happens on this show. This isn’t about telling people what to do to fix their messy lives. First of all, life will always be messy and that’s actually okay. And secondly, in my experience, the sorts of answers that attempt to fix us are the very things that create the short-lived solutions that keep us stuck. The work we do here is about seeing ourselves, others, and life in general, clearly and without judgment. It’s about using that new awareness to interact in new ways. To experiment with our lives in real time.
We often attempt to create solutions to our problems that are just as complex as the problems themselves. With so many moving parts, we set ourselves up for failure. Here, we look for what works in people’s lives as much as we look for what doesn’t, and we build on that just like a toddler learning to stand before he walks and walk before she runs. We’re learning to live in open curiosity. We’re learning to play with the elements of our lives until we find what fits us best. We’re turning life itself into a laboratory for growth and while change maybe constant growth only happens in one direction. Absolutely nothing in nature ungrows and neither will you.
So, welcome Megan. You’ve done quite a bit of growing yourself over the past year, but before we get to that, I want to know what you’re working on now. I’m wondering if you’d be willing to tell us a bit of your story. So, listeners can have some context for the work you’re doing.
Thank you, Wendy. I always wanted the same dream as a lot of other women. To grow up and find a partner and get married and have a family and it just didn’t work out that way. I was engaged to be married in my late 20s and I was very hurt at the end of that relationship. But I was hopeful and by the time I was 40, I still found myself alone and I was in another relationship that I thought was “The One.” And I kept experiencing this type of thing where I would be in the relationship and the person wasn’t as interested in me as I might’ve been with them. And so, because of some other things that were going on in my life work-wise, I dove into my work and I dove into my career and I just sort of shut down all the while longing for a relationship.
And so, somebody told me last night, “No, this is a good thing, you’re a unicorn.”
You are a unicorn but..
And I wanted to say to them, “Shut the hell up!” Because I have found some people who look down upon people who have been single for their entire adult lives. I know that my family often doesn’t consider that I can come and visit them because they have lives and I don’t.
Yeah.
At the end of the day, it’s hard to always come home to an empty place.
At the end of the day, it’s hard to always come home to an empty place. So that’s just kind of, I guess a brief overview of my story.
Yeah. And over the past year, we’ve been working on how that story and some of the other things that happened in your life, right are real life experiences. Shape how we interact with the world around us, how those have impacted yourself worth. And some of those negative stories have worked on shifting.
So, what would you say Megan is that.. I’ll give you a chance to tell us about both. The biggest story, that you feel like you’ve sort of rewritten for yourself and the biggest story that sort of is still lingering in that negative space.
Well, I think that when we started working together, I didn’t really see it as a possibility. Now, I guess I see it as a possibility, but, especially lately, I’m really frustrated because I just don’t take any action. Because I’m still having this emotional reaction. The emotional story of it won’t make a difference. I could talk to this person online, I could meet this person for coffee. It won’t make a difference.
Yeah. So, the old story that you’ve really reshaped and I’m going to congratulate you because you’ve really reshaped that one. That story that there is no hope that it won’t work, that men don’t actually love women. And even if they did, none of them would love me, was a really hard-wired story for you. So, it’s huge. It’s a huge achievement that you’ve opened the door to possibility. To look at your life and other people through a less critical lens. Through a lens that says the past doesn’t necessarily have to inform the present or the future. And so, I really want to congratulate you on that. And I bring it up now because I think that it’s important to own that as you move forward in the kind of thing that we’re going to talk about, I think today.
And then that second piece. The story that says, I’m not taking action. I’m afraid to take action. I’m going to get it wrong. That’s really been in the way in your personal life and yet not in your professional life. What’s different there?
Well, I’ve had a lot of success in my professional life. I mean, I certainly had ups and downs and I’ve had a lot of rejection, but I seem to be able to make it work. That’s not the case in my personal life. So showing up and putting myself out there in my professional life is that I have proof that it’s going to amount to something. Showing up in my personal life and don’t have that proof. I have proof that it’s not going to amount to anything.
Yeah. And that’s so important to creating growth in our lives. The belief or the story that underpins our action is what creates our outcomes. Megan, this is so insanely common in people’s lives, right? We have one mindset for one component of our life and a completely different one for another component of our life. Even though it’s one life and we’re one person, we continue to create a body of evidence that supports those two separate mindsets. What you’re experiencing is really real. Well, I keep digging in at work. Even if I get rejected, I pull myself up. I make it work. And so, I feel confident and it does work.
Even if I get rejected, I pull myself up. I make it work.
And in relationships, that’s not what happens. I put myself out there, I get rejected, I get hurt, and I put myself out there again and the same exact thing happens again. And so, we build these bodies of evidence that create the stories. Our brains don’t make up stories out of nothing. They create.
Our brain creates stories to explain the real-life evidence, right? That’s our brain is an evidence seeker. It takes what comes in and it uses everything in its database to create a story or an explanation for what’s going on.
And so, the important thing that I want us to sort of focus on for a second before we get into coaching, is this cycle that we’re talking about of taking action and belief. Because those two things are so infrequently linked in people’s minds. We want to take action and we believe that taking action is what moves us forward. And in fact, it does, right? Clearly nothing happens if we don’t take action. But what happens is we stay in this action outcome loop, and we don’t recognize that, that action outcome loop is being fed by a larger one.
We have a belief about ourselves, about other people, and about the world around us. And those beliefs inform our thoughts and our thoughts inform our emotions. And those emotions are actually what create those thoughts and emotions are actually what create the actions that we take in our lives. And those actions create our outcomes. So, when our actions are based on a belief system that’s out of alignment or that’s based on negative thinking and negative stories, what happens is we’re creating actions and outcomes that don’t work out for us. And that just feeds the belief system and creates this evidence loop.
And so, as we talk about you in relationships, we want to use the very real evidence loop that you’ve created in the other half of your life. To help inform what changes we can start to make in that belief thought emotion system. Before you take action as you take the action. Does that make sense?
It does. And I know you and I have gone around and around in this because I seem to have some sort of a mental block. Because I guess I’m a doer. I don’t know what else to say about that.
Yeah. And you know what? I think that’s a perfect place for us to pause and take our break. We’re doers, especially women, man. We are doers and we want to dig into the doing, which is great, but not before we change the belief system because if you don’t change that first, the doing is just going to result in the same outcomes. And it’s just going to frustrate us further. So, we’re going to dig into that in a minute. We’re going to take a really quick break.
So far, I’ve been talking to Megan about what she’s been working on. We’ve heard a little bit about what she wants to dive into today and what our starting point is. And when we come back from this short break, we’re going to dive right into the coaching. As always, I’m going to give her and you some things that you can start playing with to help with your growth and transformation. So, stay with us. We’ll be right back.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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