Lately, I've been feeling vulnerable in many areas of my life. And while I like to clean up my emotions on a daily basis, honestly, this has been a feeling I've been pushing to the side and not really wanting to deal with. I've really been resisting it, but it has been persistent and eventually showed up in a way I simply cannot ignore.

And for me, vulnerability is an interesting emotion that is often a guise for a whole range of emotions and stories that come up for us when we are in the grips of change. Like when we're changing who we be and how we show up in our world. Changing what we do and pushing through our boundaries. But also, when change is forced upon us, either by significant life events, or sometimes when we are faced with the fragility of our life.

There are a lot of reasons we feel vulnerable, and embracing our vulnerability can be a very powerful thing. So today, I'm sharing my recent experiences with it and how I'm navigating this, so that you can take a look at how vulnerability is showing up in your life and where you may also benefit from embracing it to help you move forward.

Welcome to The Self-Creation School podcast, for women who are ready to ditch mediocrity, step up and get more of what they want, and finally say YES! to a life that sets their soul on fire. I'm your host Leanne Letica, Self-Creation Coach, founder of The Self-Creation School AND Queen of YES!. If you're ready to play life by your own personal rule book, and give yourself permission to say YES! to yourself and your wildest dreams, this podcast is the place for you.

Hello and welcome to today's episode of The Self-Creation School podcast. I'm Leanne Letica and this podcast is a space where I share my Self-Creation insights, tips and strategies for saying YES! to you and a life you love, one YES! at a time.

If you are a woman who is ready to leave behind your self-doubt, your shoulds and settling for less than your fullest potential, and finally say YES! to doing all the things you know you're here to do and living the life you know you're meant for, then pull up a seat at my table and join me for a discussion every Wednesday on how to do exactly that.

Today I'm talking about embracing being vulnerable because lately I've had this lingering, niggling feeling of vulnerability. And it really hit home this past week for me that I've been pushing this feeling aside for a little while now and how that's starting to show up negatively in many areas of my life.

I'm no stranger to sweeping my feelings under the carpet. In fact, I am highly skilled at doing so and I have years of experience at it. I also have years of experience how that turns out.

So these days I am the kind of woman who spends time with my emotions every single day and time to shift the stories behind my negative emotions to stories that help me feel more positive and empowering emotions that drive me to take action towards the life I want. This is step one in my YES! Blueprint for creating a life you love, and it is absolutely foundational to everything else that follows.

But even though I sit with my emotions and practice shifting my stories daily, that doesn't mean I don't fall back into my old habits, especially so when something really pushes at my boundaries. Which is exactly what happened a few months ago during a medical emergency that I had to negotiate in a foreign language, in a medical system I don't fully know what to expect of, while lying in a lot of pain.

Now, if my life lessons and challenges have taught me anything about myself, it's that I am a highly capable and resilient woman. I know that I always come out the other side of my challenges stronger and better than ever.

So normally when I get faced with big challenges, I'm actually pretty cool, calm and collected. I know I can handle anything that comes my way, so I simply get into logic mode and I work my way through it. If I find something doesn't work, I look for the next solution and the next solution until eventually I find my way through the challenge.

But sudden and extreme physical pain has a great way of removing all logic and throwing all skillsets out the window. Yet, it was the extent that this medical situation challenged me and the level of vulnerability that hit me so hard and fast that really did take me by surprise.

Listen, the truth is it was a highly challenging situation and feeling vulnerable is a completely normal and valid way for anyone to feel in that situation. The thing is, the level of vulnerability I felt just seemed a bit out of whack, a bit of an overkill for the actual situation at hand.

Do you know what I mean? Have you ever looked back at how you reacted to a situation and thought, maybe you overreacted just a bit? Well, I think that was me on this day.

And the strength of my vulnerability and the bombardment of all the stories that were feeding it triggered my old habits in a microsecond and I got out that old broom and swept my feelings under the carpet. And on I went.

But you see, the vulnerability and all the stories that popped up that day didn't simply disappear because I'd swept them aside. They stayed beneath the surface, quietly at first and then, as I've been doing things over these past couple of months that are really pushing up my boundaries, the vulnerability in the stories behind it have become louder and louder and louder.

Still, I wasn't allowing myself to tap into it. I've been dancing around the edges. I've been continually brushing it aside because I haven't wanted to look at the real deal. I've been saying, "Oh look, there's that popping up again but listen, we don't have time for that today. So let's just close the lid on it.”

And this last weekend I faced another medical emergency, this time for my husband, which you might guess, opened the lid on my vulnerability and let it all come flooding out. To the point that I felt completely wiped out by it. And it became something I could no longer ignore because I was so wiped out by it and so highly emotional that everything else in my world actually had to stop so I could deal with it.

This is not my recommended mode of practice, by the way, but I'm human just like you and everyone else, so I had what is in reality a very normal human experience.

The interesting thing, though, is that over the last few weeks leading up to this moment, I've been seeing a lot of posts about vulnerability in my social feeds. I've received newsletters from people I follow where they've touched on the subject, whether it's been about the vulnerability of showing up on social media or launching a course.

There's literally been signs popping up everywhere around me with this repeated message of allowing yourself to feel vulnerable. Does that kind of thing happen to you too? But it took hitting me over the head with that next medical emergency before I heeded the message that vulnerability wanted a seat at my table and a chance to be heard.

Again, not my recommended way of doing things, but above all else, I trust that everything eventually unfolds for all of us, as and when it needs to.

So I have been literally forced to lift the carpet and use that same old broom to clean out all the vulnerability from under it and do the work to clean it all up. And in doing the work, and I'm very much still actively doing this work, I have come to the realization that I've actually been sweeping this feeling of vulnerability aside for much longer than just the last few months.

There have been several major signs that I have refused to listen to and the reality is I have really been making things so much harder for myself than they need to be because I've been avoiding looking into this feeling of vulnerability. I have avoided wanting to feel vulnerable because of what that would mean about me and my life.

Listen, I know a lot of people think, and maybe you do too, that because I'm successful, because I live a great life, because I'm a coach, that I somehow magically have it all together. That I've got it all figured out and I don't make mistakes, that I have a perfect mindset every day, that I don't have to rewrite my limiting stories anymore or deal with things like self-doubt, fear, and negativity. That I don't have habits and parts of myself that hold me back. I do. I absolutely do.

I'm figuring it all out every single day, just like you are, just like everyone is. But what I do have is access to a powerful set of tools for helping me figure it out, and a lot of practice using them. So I definitely don't always get it right, that is part of being human. But I do know how to course correct and I do know how to shift my stories and clean up my emotions.

And I think it's really exciting that I find myself needing to course correct, that I'm not perfect and I don't have it all figured out, because despite all of that, I've still been able to experience a lot of success in my life and create a life I love that just keeps on getting better.

And I've been able to do all of that because over the years I've equipped myself with the right tools and the right support system, the mentors and the coaches, that enable me to continue to evolve and grow into my next level.

You don't need to be perfect or have it all figured out to create the life you want either. But you will make it easier to get the job done with the right set of tools and the right people on your team to help you build a solid foundation for doing this work on shifting your limiting stories, cleaning up your negative emotions, and evolving into who you want to be so you can experience the kind of life you want.

These are the kind of tools and support that I aim to share right here on this podcast with you so you can course correct as needed, just like me, and create a life you're absolutely in love with. Despite all your perceived imperfections, despite being human and having all the normal human experiences that come with that.

So back to the subject of vulnerability.

Funny enough, when thinking about sharing this episode with you, I felt very vulnerable about opening up on this, and that's when I knew it was something I absolutely needed to share with you, because I know that you are an ambitious, driven woman like myself, and you are pushing at your own boundaries every single day. And most likely also feeling a lot of vulnerability that is stopping you from saying YES! to doing the things you want to do.

And I think generally as humans, as we make our way through this thing called life, we all tend to experience a lot of vulnerability along the way for lots of different reasons. My hope is in sharing my recent experiences with it and how I'm navigating this, that you can take a look at how vulnerability is showing up in your own life and where you may also benefit from embracing it to help you move forward.

Last year, just before I rebranded my coaching business and launched The Self-Creation School, I was feeling really stuck on a lot of things. I've always had a big vision for my business, and for who I want to be as a coach and the impact I want to make. I was 100% behind the new direction I wanted to take. It just felt so right.

But as I started implementing it, it started really pushing at my boundaries and a whole bunch of old stories started popping up about not being good enough that made me feel vulnerable about putting myself out there in a way I hadn't actually felt for some time. Remember I said a moment ago I had several major signs? Well, this was my first sign.

Now, looking back, because isn't hindsight always a great thing, looking back, I think, how exciting was that? Because whenever we have a strong emotional reaction to something, it's usually a good sign that we're touching on something that is very important to us, or that is going to lead us to our next level of growth.

And when you're doing something that pushes at your boundaries and all your stuff comes out of the closet, all your old stories and lack of self-belief, feelings of not being good enough shows up, it's a sign that you're on the right track. That you are doing something that is going to have an important impact in your life and is going to help you grow who you be.

Anyway, I was stuck on some back-end things that needed to be sorted out before I could go ahead and launch my new brand. Honestly, they were really not major things, but I was stuck. You know how that is, right? Sometimes we can easily do all these super hard things, but it's the things that should be easy for us that we get stuck on.

And I was working through this with my mentor one day, and of course, we were looking into the stories I was telling myself about all of this. And I recall how clear I was about the stories I was telling myself that were keeping me stuck in that moment.

I was absolutely clear about the limiting beliefs these stories created and how these beliefs were simply not my truth. I knew exactly where these stories originated from the events that happened way back in my childhood that had first caused me to tell myself these stories about not being good enough because I rewrite these stories every day still today. Still, I just couldn't seem to move myself forward and I couldn't see why.

And this is why working with a mentor or coach is just so important because she was able to help me see very quickly why. I was numbing my emotions. My old stories of not being good enough had kicked in strong. I had started feeling very vulnerable and it took me back to a time in my life that I just didn't want to experience ever again.

So my human response was, let's just not feel this. Let's sweep it aside and overcome this by just taking action and getting it done. Just rewrite those stories, Leanne, and let's move on.

Now, you know I'm big on rewriting your story, shifting your old limiting stories to new more empowering ones. We've already been talking a lot about this today. But the key to shifting your stories in a way that does actually empower you to take the action you need to take to move the needle forward, lies in your emotions. If you don't tap into your emotions to help you make the shift, you can rewrite your stories all day long and it won't make any difference.

In my Self-Creation Shift process for shifting your stories that I share with you when you take my free YES! Block assessment over on my website, I explain something called the Beliefs Equation. So let me share this with you to help you understand why rewriting your stories without tapping into your emotions doesn't work.

Basically, there are three parts to how your beliefs get formed. First, there is an event, something that happens in our life. Then to give meaning to this event and help us organize the things that happen in our lives, we tell a story about the thing that happened. So, this is the second part of the Beliefs Equation, our explanation. So when an event happens, we give an explanation to it, and then that explanation causes us to feel an emotion. That's the third part of the equation.

So when an event happens, we explain the event by telling a story about it, and the story we choose to tell causes us to feel an emotion.

Now, we do this all day long with everything that happens in our life. But a lot of what happens just doesn't cause us to feel any kind of significant emotion. So it doesn't necessarily come to anything in terms of our beliefs. But when the emotion we feel is particularly strong, positive or negative by the way, this is when we store this whole event explanation emotion equation in our brains and it becomes a belief.

And most of our beliefs are formed in our childhood when we are ill-equipped to make sense of our emotions. And so a lot of what happens triggers fairly strong emotions for us that with an adult brain we probably would think was a bit of an overreaction. But our child brain doesn't know any better. And so we build on these beliefs year after year and decades later, here we are trying to do adult things with child-like beliefs. It's kind of crazy, but this is how it works for so many of us.

Let me give you an example. A friend actually shared this with me just a few nights ago. We were talking about not being good enough and in particular about our body image. She's a Health Coach so this is something that's really coming up for her right now as she is building her business and putting herself out there on social media.

And she recalled an incident, an event that happened back in her childhood when she was around nine years old, when her father was watching an actress on TV and commented something about how fat her legs were and how she shouldn't be wearing a short dress. Now, my friend heard that and told herself that in order to be good enough for her father, your body had to be perfect. So that right there is the explanation, story she gave to the event.

Now that explanation then made her look critically at her own body and her self-perceived fat legs and triggered a really strong emotion of not being good enough for her father and therefore, not being worthy of being loved and accepted.

So because of this strong emotional response, this story about needing to be perfect in order to be good enough to be loved and accepted, became her belief. So, if you are anything less than perfect in any way, and now we're not just talking about body size, because this spills over into everything, right? This belief gets generalized over time and gets applied to all aspects of your life. If you're anything less than perfect, you can never be good enough to be loved and accepted.

You see how this works? An event happened. These are the facts of the situation. An explanation was given to make sense of it. This is the story, the fiction. An emotion is felt, and a belief is formed. Your belief then becomes your truth. And this gets stored in your brain for future reference. It tells your brain who you are and how your world works.

Because your brain is really quite lazy, anytime whenever an event even remotely similar happens, your brain doesn't want to waste time analyzing this new event and applying logic and reason from your adult experienced brain. It simply looks for the closest thing to this event that it has stored and pulls out this old belief to remind you that you're not good enough and so you shouldn't do the thing you want to do because then you might risk feeling all those horrible emotions of being unaccepted and unloved all over again.

Essentially, it does this to try to protect you, to stop you from maybe putting yourself in a situation where you might risk being hurt. But the thing is, it's not objectively looking at the facts of the situation. It's not taking into account any new information or evidence of how you are good enough and loved and accepted. It's simply pulling out those long-stored beliefs and feeding this to you in your current situation to do what it thinks will keep you safe, not what necessarily serves you.

So this is why when rewriting your stories and basically reprogramming your brain's store of beliefs, you must tell a new story that triggers a strong enough emotion that it can become a belief.

Now obviously if you're avoiding feeling any emotion or you are unwilling to tap into the depth of your emotions, you can write a new story, but it would be really difficult for it to take hold as a new belief. And so your brain will continue to keep pulling out the old beliefs it has in storage, and you will keep being the person who believes that and acts accordingly.

When I realized that I was numbing my emotions because the emotions that were coming up for me made me feel very vulnerable, I knew I had some important work cut out for me, because here's what a lot of you don't realize. You can't just turn off the negative emotions and only feel the positive emotions. When you numb your emotions to avoid feeling them, you actually numb all of your emotions, the good and the bad.

Here's a good example of why that is. Fear and excitement are actually the same feeling in our body. We have the exact same physiological reaction to both emotions. The way we label the physical sensation we experience as one or the other is by the stories we are telling ourselves in that moment. Fear is generally a negative emotion, right? And excitement is generally a positive emotion. If you want to turn off feeling fear and feeling the physical sensations that come with that emotion, you also turn off feeling excitement.

The other thing is to truly know happiness, for example, you must also know sadness. To know calm, you must know chaos. To know confidence, you must know doubt. You see where I'm going with this, right?

So, you have to be willing to feel all of your emotions. Otherwise, you will find yourself in limbo, like I was last year trying to get The Self-Creation School launched, and not really making the progress you desire, even though you're working hard on taking action.

Now, when it comes to being willing to feel all the emotion, you have to be willing to be vulnerable to all the things that come with feeling those emotions. And what do I mean by that? Well, I mean all the stories, all the beliefs about who you are and what's possible for you. And when those beliefs are negative and they are firmly grounded in past events that have been traumatic for whatever reason, and whether or not you'd see the same event as being traumatic today, it is going to be difficult to open up and allow these emotions to surface.

Here's what I want you to know about this. It's something that has really helped me many times get past this. When you feel an emotion, what you are feeling is an energetic vibration in your body. So for instance, if you're feeling nervous, you might feel that energetic vibration as butterflies in your stomach. If you're feeling anxious, you might feel the energetic vibration as a tightening of your chest and so on.

Now a long time ago, some of these emotions were important and quite valid indicators that alerted you to a dangerous situation. But these days, most of the time in any case, you are not in any immediate danger when you feel these energetic vibrations in your body. They are quite simply just a physical sensation. The stories you attach to the energetic vibration you are feeling is what feeds your perception of being in danger or at risk of being hurt. But usually, you are not actually in any danger.

And so the question is, do you want to live out your life avoiding feeling fear and also avoiding feeling excitement because you were afraid of an energetic vibration in your body? Do you want to get to the end of your time on this earth and look back and think, wow, I didn't do all of those things because I was afraid of feeling a physical sensation, that by the way, only lasts 90 seconds if you don't attach any thoughts or a story to it.

This was actually discovered in research conducted by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, who is a neuroanatomist who studied how the brain processes emotions. In her research, she found that the physiological lifespan of an emotion is approximately 90 seconds. After this period, any ongoing emotional response is usually due to the stories or the thoughts we attach to the initial feeling.

So back to my question. If you are in fact, in no immediate danger or real risk of being hurt and an unpleasant energetic vibration in your body lasts no more than 90 seconds, do you really want to spend your whole life avoiding feelings like vulnerability or fear and therefore not doing the things that could lead you to an extraordinary life experience that lasts a whole lot longer than 90 seconds? Sometimes I also need that reminder.

Listen, knowledge is power and what I hope most from today's episode is that you gain a deeper understanding into how your emotions work, the role they play in forming your beliefs, and how you can use your emotions, both the good and the bad, to help you move forward on doing the things you want to do.

Now, what I discovered about my feelings of vulnerability is that they were just the tip of the iceberg. And I think that this is the same for a lot of us. So often what starts out as vulnerability turns into a tangled mess of emotions that really does feel sometimes like it is insurmountable. But that is also a story, by the way. "I have so many emotions I can't overcome them" is a story. It's not a fact.

The reality is, sometimes there isn't a fast-track way to clean up all of these emotions quickly. Sometimes it takes time to really get to the bottom of the stories that are feeding your emotions and pull the rug out from the very bottom layer.

Think of this a little bit like a game of Jenga. If you pull out the blocks towards the top, your tower will probably stay standing. But if you pull the ones out near the bottom, the whole tower is likely to come crashing down. Our beliefs and the stories behind them, are like this too.

Most of us dig surface level, and we work at shifting the stories near the top of our tower of beliefs because, honestly, those are the stories that are probably not too painful to deal with, and the stories that we're most aware of. Now, you will make some progress, but your tower of beliefs is going to still be standing pretty strong.

But when you dig deep enough to shift the stories that form your beliefs at the deepest possible layer, that's when your whole tower of beliefs that you've been building year after year will come crashing down. Getting to that layer requires doing this work consistently, persistently, patiently, and with a whole lot of love and grace for yourself.

For me, these feelings of vulnerability have been an ongoing process over many months and while I thought at times I really had reached my deepest layer, still that vulnerability has persisted and so I must keep digging. There's evidently much more for me to discover around this feeling of vulnerability and why it keeps coming up and in particular, why I keep pushing it aside. So I'll keep you posted on what I find out.

But for now, let me share with you exactly what I've been doing to work my way down through my tower of beliefs and stories to figure out what vulnerability is really trying to tell me so I can push past this and reach even greater heights. Because like I said earlier, even though I haven't got this whole thing figured out, it's very much a work in progress for me, I've still been able to take action in a lot of ways over the past six months or so since this came up for me with the stories that I have been working on shifting and despite the fact that this vulnerability keeps lingering.

So the first thing for me is always permission. Giving myself permission to have this experience, to feel vulnerable and for that to be perfectly okay. For this vulnerability to persist as it is and again to be okay with that. Giving myself permission also to be okay with whatever I uncover as I start digging through my stories and beliefs.

How can you give yourself this permission? Honestly, you just give it. It doesn't need to be any harder than that. If it helps, and it does help me, write yourself a permission slip like our parents used to write us for school. I give myself permission to feel vulnerable and to be okay with the reasons that I uncover that are making me feel this way. Write it down in your journal every time you want to spend some time looking into your stories around this.

Which is my next tip. Spend some time regularly to sit with your vulnerability or any emotion you are feeling. Remember, emotions are just an energetic vibration in your body and it is unlikely you are in any real danger. So invite your feelings to the table and have a conversation with them. I like to name the emotion, "well, there's vulnerability coming to the table right now", identify the vibration that it causes me in my body, where the emotion is showing up, and how I am experiencing it.

And then simply wonder. I wonder what is behind this emotion. I wonder what it is trying to tell me. I wonder what belief it is tied to. What happened to make me believe that? What story I told myself about that event, and what other story I might also have told, that would make me feel differently?

Because then once you've spent some time, messy time sometimes, just writing down all the stuff that often randomly comes up for you when you sit with your emotions, then you can start to sift through all of that and look for the common patterns or themes, the stories and beliefs that are coming up for you. Which means then you can do the work to shift these stories and attach new emotions to them to help you create new beliefs that support you in taking the action you want to take.

You can use my Self-Creation Shift process that I mentioned earlier to help you do this. And I'll leave a link in the show notes for you to the YES! Block assessment where I share this process.

Now finally, once you have these new stories, you will want to practice these new stories every single day and collect evidence for how they are true. One thing I will say here is that sometimes going from a belief that you are not good enough, for instance, and therefore not worthy of being loved and accepted, to a belief that you are good enough and worthy of being loved and accepted, might feel like just too big of a jump.

Your brain might just find that too much to come on board with and so you do want to create new beliefs that are believable for you, that make you feel more positively about yourself and what's possible for you, but maybe they're not quite yet your ideal belief or emotion. And to do this, I use what I like to call the Beliefs Bridge, which is where you quite literally build a bridge, one belief at a time, to bridge the gap between your current belief and your ideal belief.

So for example, your current belief may be that you can't show up on social media because you're not good enough. Your next belief may be, I just keep thinking I'm not good enough to show up on social media. So you sit with that belief for a while until it feels good. Until it feels true for you. Your next belief after that might be, it's possible I can be good enough to show up on social media. Again, you sit with that until it feels true for you. Then you might move to, other people are good enough, I'm open to being good enough too. Then finally, I am good enough to show up on social media.

Each belief you lay down gradually bridges the gap and allows you to shift from your old negative and limiting belief to your new empowering belief. And the emotions you feel along the way will support you more and more in showing up and taking action that is in line with the action you want to take.

Alongside all of that I use my Daily Journal pages, which I recently made available to you to download for free, to help me clean up my emotions and stories every single day, and to also use I AM affirmations to help me shift my identity, that is who I am because of my new stories and beliefs, and collect evidence for how I am this new evolved version of me.

I'll leave a link to that download for you in the show notes. And I highly recommend listening to episode 17 of this podcast called My Three Morning Masks for Self-Created Success to get the full rundown on how I use these pages.

This has certainly turned out to be a much, much longer episode than I planned. But I hope it has been really helpful for you and that you can take comfort from knowing that you are not alone in feeling vulnerable, that you can use negative emotions like this to help you move forward, and that you can create a life you love without having to have all of this in perfect order.

It will come together as it needs to for you. And if you say YES! to allowing your emotions, good and bad, to have a seat at your table, if you continue to dig deep and shift your stories and practice your new beliefs every single day, you will soon find yourself moving those mountains, my friend.

With that, I'm signing off. And actually as I do, I have an I AM affirmation that has randomly appeared on my phone that says, "when all is well, I will look back and will be glad I never gave up". Never give up my friend.

By the way, that affirmation is from an app that I absolutely have no affiliation with, but I am openly recommending it to you right now because I love using it. It's called simply 'I AM', and you can search for that app in your app store. I use the free version and it is uncanny how it serves me up I AM statements that seem to resonate with exactly where I'm at. So give it a try, you might love it too.

I'll see you next Wednesday for another episode of The Self-Creation School podcast. I can't wait.

Until then, be the woman who says YES!

Hey, want to know what's stopping you from saying YES! to you and a life you love?

Head over to https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock and take my FREE 60 second quiz to find out what's standing in your way today and I'll send you my Self-Creation Shift process for shifting it. That's https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock. I’ll see you there.

Lately, I've been feeling vulnerable in many areas of my life. And while I like to clean up my emotions on a daily basis, honestly, this has been a feeling I've been pushing to the side and not really wanting to deal with. I've really been resisting it, but it has been persistent and eventually showed up in a way I simply cannot ignore.

And for me, vulnerability is an interesting emotion that is often a guise for a whole range of emotions and stories that come up for us when we are in the grips of change. Like when we're changing who we be and how we show up in our world. Changing what we do and pushing through our boundaries. But also, when change is forced upon us, either by significant life events, or sometimes when we are faced with the fragility of our life.

There are a lot of reasons we feel vulnerable, and embracing our vulnerability can be a very powerful thing. So today, I'm sharing my recent experiences with it and how I'm navigating this, so that you can take a look at how vulnerability is showing up in your life and where you may also benefit from embracing it to help you move forward.

Welcome to The Self-Creation School podcast, for women who are ready to ditch mediocrity, step up and get more of what they want, and finally say YES! to a life that sets their soul on fire. I'm your host Leanne Letica, Self-Creation Coach, founder of The Self-Creation School AND Queen of YES!. If you're ready to play life by your own personal rule book, and give yourself permission to say YES! to yourself and your wildest dreams, this podcast is the place for you.

Hello and welcome to today's episode of The Self-Creation School podcast. I'm Leanne Letica and this podcast is a space where I share my Self-Creation insights, tips and strategies for saying YES! to you and a life you love, one YES! at a time.

If you are a woman who is ready to leave behind your self-doubt, your shoulds and settling for less than your fullest potential, and finally say YES! to doing all the things you know you're here to do and living the life you know you're meant for, then pull up a seat at my table and join me for a discussion every Wednesday on how to do exactly that.

Today I'm talking about embracing being vulnerable because lately I've had this lingering, niggling feeling of vulnerability. And it really hit home this past week for me that I've been pushing this feeling aside for a little while now and how that's starting to show up negatively in many areas of my life.

I'm no stranger to sweeping my feelings under the carpet. In fact, I am highly skilled at doing so and I have years of experience at it. I also have years of experience how that turns out.

So these days I am the kind of woman who spends time with my emotions every single day and time to shift the stories behind my negative emotions to stories that help me feel more positive and empowering emotions that drive me to take action towards the life I want. This is step one in my YES! Blueprint for creating a life you love, and it is absolutely foundational to everything else that follows.

But even though I sit with my emotions and practice shifting my stories daily, that doesn't mean I don't fall back into my old habits, especially so when something really pushes at my boundaries. Which is exactly what happened a few months ago during a medical emergency that I had to negotiate in a foreign language, in a medical system I don't fully know what to expect of, while lying in a lot of pain.

Now, if my life lessons and challenges have taught me anything about myself, it's that I am a highly capable and resilient woman. I know that I always come out the other side of my challenges stronger and better than ever.

So normally when I get faced with big challenges, I'm actually pretty cool, calm and collected. I know I can handle anything that comes my way, so I simply get into logic mode and I work my way through it. If I find something doesn't work, I look for the next solution and the next solution until eventually I find my way through the challenge.

But sudden and extreme physical pain has a great way of removing all logic and throwing all skillsets out the window. Yet, it was the extent that this medical situation challenged me and the level of vulnerability that hit me so hard and fast that really did take me by surprise.

Listen, the truth is it was a highly challenging situation and feeling vulnerable is a completely normal and valid way for anyone to feel in that situation. The thing is, the level of vulnerability I felt just seemed a bit out of whack, a bit of an overkill for the actual situation at hand.

Do you know what I mean? Have you ever looked back at how you reacted to a situation and thought, maybe you overreacted just a bit? Well, I think that was me on this day.

And the strength of my vulnerability and the bombardment of all the stories that were feeding it triggered my old habits in a microsecond and I got out that old broom and swept my feelings under the carpet. And on I went.

But you see, the vulnerability and all the stories that popped up that day didn't simply disappear because I'd swept them aside. They stayed beneath the surface, quietly at first and then, as I've been doing things over these past couple of months that are really pushing up my boundaries, the vulnerability in the stories behind it have become louder and louder and louder.

Still, I wasn't allowing myself to tap into it. I've been dancing around the edges. I've been continually brushing it aside because I haven't wanted to look at the real deal. I've been saying, "Oh look, there's that popping up again but listen, we don't have time for that today. So let's just close the lid on it.”

And this last weekend I faced another medical emergency, this time for my husband, which you might guess, opened the lid on my vulnerability and let it all come flooding out. To the point that I felt completely wiped out by it. And it became something I could no longer ignore because I was so wiped out by it and so highly emotional that everything else in my world actually had to stop so I could deal with it.

This is not my recommended mode of practice, by the way, but I'm human just like you and everyone else, so I had what is in reality a very normal human experience.

The interesting thing, though, is that over the last few weeks leading up to this moment, I've been seeing a lot of posts about vulnerability in my social feeds. I've received newsletters from people I follow where they've touched on the subject, whether it's been about the vulnerability of showing up on social media or launching a course.

There's literally been signs popping up everywhere around me with this repeated message of allowing yourself to feel vulnerable. Does that kind of thing happen to you too? But it took hitting me over the head with that next medical emergency before I heeded the message that vulnerability wanted a seat at my table and a chance to be heard.

Again, not my recommended way of doing things, but above all else, I trust that everything eventually unfolds for all of us, as and when it needs to.

So I have been literally forced to lift the carpet and use that same old broom to clean out all the vulnerability from under it and do the work to clean it all up. And in doing the work, and I'm very much still actively doing this work, I have come to the realization that I've actually been sweeping this feeling of vulnerability aside for much longer than just the last few months.

There have been several major signs that I have refused to listen to and the reality is I have really been making things so much harder for myself than they need to be because I've been avoiding looking into this feeling of vulnerability. I have avoided wanting to feel vulnerable because of what that would mean about me and my life.

Listen, I know a lot of people think, and maybe you do too, that because I'm successful, because I live a great life, because I'm a coach, that I somehow magically have it all together. That I've got it all figured out and I don't make mistakes, that I have a perfect mindset every day, that I don't have to rewrite my limiting stories anymore or deal with things like self-doubt, fear, and negativity. That I don't have habits and parts of myself that hold me back. I do. I absolutely do.

I'm figuring it all out every single day, just like you are, just like everyone is. But what I do have is access to a powerful set of tools for helping me figure it out, and a lot of practice using them. So I definitely don't always get it right, that is part of being human. But I do know how to course correct and I do know how to shift my stories and clean up my emotions.

And I think it's really exciting that I find myself needing to course correct, that I'm not perfect and I don't have it all figured out, because despite all of that, I've still been able to experience a lot of success in my life and create a life I love that just keeps on getting better.

And I've been able to do all of that because over the years I've equipped myself with the right tools and the right support system, the mentors and the coaches, that enable me to continue to evolve and grow into my next level.

You don't need to be perfect or have it all figured out to create the life you want either. But you will make it easier to get the job done with the right set of tools and the right people on your team to help you build a solid foundation for doing this work on shifting your limiting stories, cleaning up your negative emotions, and evolving into who you want to be so you can experience the kind of life you want.

These are the kind of tools and support that I aim to share right here on this podcast with you so you can course correct as needed, just like me, and create a life you're absolutely in love with. Despite all your perceived imperfections, despite being human and having all the normal human experiences that come with that.

So back to the subject of vulnerability.

Funny enough, when thinking about sharing this episode with you, I felt very vulnerable about opening up on this, and that's when I knew it was something I absolutely needed to share with you, because I know that you are an ambitious, driven woman like myself, and you are pushing at your own boundaries every single day. And most likely also feeling a lot of vulnerability that is stopping you from saying YES! to doing the things you want to do.

And I think generally as humans, as we make our way through this thing called life, we all tend to experience a lot of vulnerability along the way for lots of different reasons. My hope is in sharing my recent experiences with it and how I'm navigating this, that you can take a look at how vulnerability is showing up in your own life and where you may also benefit from embracing it to help you move forward.

Last year, just before I rebranded my coaching business and launched The Self-Creation School, I was feeling really stuck on a lot of things. I've always had a big vision for my business, and for who I want to be as a coach and the impact I want to make. I was 100% behind the new direction I wanted to take. It just felt so right.

But as I started implementing it, it started really pushing at my boundaries and a whole bunch of old stories started popping up about not being good enough that made me feel vulnerable about putting myself out there in a way I hadn't actually felt for some time. Remember I said a moment ago I had several major signs? Well, this was my first sign.

Now, looking back, because isn't hindsight always a great thing, looking back, I think, how exciting was that? Because whenever we have a strong emotional reaction to something, it's usually a good sign that we're touching on something that is very important to us, or that is going to lead us to our next level of growth.

And when you're doing something that pushes at your boundaries and all your stuff comes out of the closet, all your old stories and lack of self-belief, feelings of not being good enough shows up, it's a sign that you're on the right track. That you are doing something that is going to have an important impact in your life and is going to help you grow who you be.

Anyway, I was stuck on some back-end things that needed to be sorted out before I could go ahead and launch my new brand. Honestly, they were really not major things, but I was stuck. You know how that is, right? Sometimes we can easily do all these super hard things, but it's the things that should be easy for us that we get stuck on.

And I was working through this with my mentor one day, and of course, we were looking into the stories I was telling myself about all of this. And I recall how clear I was about the stories I was telling myself that were keeping me stuck in that moment.

I was absolutely clear about the limiting beliefs these stories created and how these beliefs were simply not my truth. I knew exactly where these stories originated from the events that happened way back in my childhood that had first caused me to tell myself these stories about not being good enough because I rewrite these stories every day still today. Still, I just couldn't seem to move myself forward and I couldn't see why.

And this is why working with a mentor or coach is just so important because she was able to help me see very quickly why. I was numbing my emotions. My old stories of not being good enough had kicked in strong. I had started feeling very vulnerable and it took me back to a time in my life that I just didn't want to experience ever again.

So my human response was, let's just not feel this. Let's sweep it aside and overcome this by just taking action and getting it done. Just rewrite those stories, Leanne, and let's move on.

Now, you know I'm big on rewriting your story, shifting your old limiting stories to new more empowering ones. We've already been talking a lot about this today. But the key to shifting your stories in a way that does actually empower you to take the action you need to take to move the needle forward, lies in your emotions. If you don't tap into your emotions to help you make the shift, you can rewrite your stories all day long and it won't make any difference.

In my Self-Creation Shift process for shifting your stories that I share with you when you take my free YES! Block assessment over on my website, I explain something called the Beliefs Equation. So let me share this with you to help you understand why rewriting your stories without tapping into your emotions doesn't work.

Basically, there are three parts to how your beliefs get formed. First, there is an event, something that happens in our life. Then to give meaning to this event and help us organize the things that happen in our lives, we tell a story about the thing that happened. So, this is the second part of the Beliefs Equation, our explanation. So when an event happens, we give an explanation to it, and then that explanation causes us to feel an emotion. That's the third part of the equation.

So when an event happens, we explain the event by telling a story about it, and the story we choose to tell causes us to feel an emotion.

Now, we do this all day long with everything that happens in our life. But a lot of what happens just doesn't cause us to feel any kind of significant emotion. So it doesn't necessarily come to anything in terms of our beliefs. But when the emotion we feel is particularly strong, positive or negative by the way, this is when we store this whole event explanation emotion equation in our brains and it becomes a belief.

And most of our beliefs are formed in our childhood when we are ill-equipped to make sense of our emotions. And so a lot of what happens triggers fairly strong emotions for us that with an adult brain we probably would think was a bit of an overreaction. But our child brain doesn't know any better. And so we build on these beliefs year after year and decades later, here we are trying to do adult things with child-like beliefs. It's kind of crazy, but this is how it works for so many of us.

Let me give you an example. A friend actually shared this with me just a few nights ago. We were talking about not being good enough and in particular about our body image. She's a Health Coach so this is something that's really coming up for her right now as she is building her business and putting herself out there on social media.

And she recalled an incident, an event that happened back in her childhood when she was around nine years old, when her father was watching an actress on TV and commented something about how fat her legs were and how she shouldn't be wearing a short dress. Now, my friend heard that and told herself that in order to be good enough for her father, your body had to be perfect. So that right there is the explanation, story she gave to the event.

Now that explanation then made her look critically at her own body and her self-perceived fat legs and triggered a really strong emotion of not being good enough for her father and therefore, not being worthy of being loved and accepted.

So because of this strong emotional response, this story about needing to be perfect in order to be good enough to be loved and accepted, became her belief. So, if you are anything less than perfect in any way, and now we're not just talking about body size, because this spills over into everything, right? This belief gets generalized over time and gets applied to all aspects of your life. If you're anything less than perfect, you can never be good enough to be loved and accepted.

You see how this works? An event happened. These are the facts of the situation. An explanation was given to make sense of it. This is the story, the fiction. An emotion is felt, and a belief is formed. Your belief then becomes your truth. And this gets stored in your brain for future reference. It tells your brain who you are and how your world works.

Because your brain is really quite lazy, anytime whenever an event even remotely similar happens, your brain doesn't want to waste time analyzing this new event and applying logic and reason from your adult experienced brain. It simply looks for the closest thing to this event that it has stored and pulls out this old belief to remind you that you're not good enough and so you shouldn't do the thing you want to do because then you might risk feeling all those horrible emotions of being unaccepted and unloved all over again.

Essentially, it does this to try to protect you, to stop you from maybe putting yourself in a situation where you might risk being hurt. But the thing is, it's not objectively looking at the facts of the situation. It's not taking into account any new information or evidence of how you are good enough and loved and accepted. It's simply pulling out those long-stored beliefs and feeding this to you in your current situation to do what it thinks will keep you safe, not what necessarily serves you.

So this is why when rewriting your stories and basically reprogramming your brain's store of beliefs, you must tell a new story that triggers a strong enough emotion that it can become a belief.

Now obviously if you're avoiding feeling any emotion or you are unwilling to tap into the depth of your emotions, you can write a new story, but it would be really difficult for it to take hold as a new belief. And so your brain will continue to keep pulling out the old beliefs it has in storage, and you will keep being the person who believes that and acts accordingly.

When I realized that I was numbing my emotions because the emotions that were coming up for me made me feel very vulnerable, I knew I had some important work cut out for me, because here's what a lot of you don't realize. You can't just turn off the negative emotions and only feel the positive emotions. When you numb your emotions to avoid feeling them, you actually numb all of your emotions, the good and the bad.

Here's a good example of why that is. Fear and excitement are actually the same feeling in our body. We have the exact same physiological reaction to both emotions. The way we label the physical sensation we experience as one or the other is by the stories we are telling ourselves in that moment. Fear is generally a negative emotion, right? And excitement is generally a positive emotion. If you want to turn off feeling fear and feeling the physical sensations that come with that emotion, you also turn off feeling excitement.

The other thing is to truly know happiness, for example, you must also know sadness. To know calm, you must know chaos. To know confidence, you must know doubt. You see where I'm going with this, right?

So, you have to be willing to feel all of your emotions. Otherwise, you will find yourself in limbo, like I was last year trying to get The Self-Creation School launched, and not really making the progress you desire, even though you're working hard on taking action.

Now, when it comes to being willing to feel all the emotion, you have to be willing to be vulnerable to all the things that come with feeling those emotions. And what do I mean by that? Well, I mean all the stories, all the beliefs about who you are and what's possible for you. And when those beliefs are negative and they are firmly grounded in past events that have been traumatic for whatever reason, and whether or not you'd see the same event as being traumatic today, it is going to be difficult to open up and allow these emotions to surface.

Here's what I want you to know about this. It's something that has really helped me many times get past this. When you feel an emotion, what you are feeling is an energetic vibration in your body. So for instance, if you're feeling nervous, you might feel that energetic vibration as butterflies in your stomach. If you're feeling anxious, you might feel the energetic vibration as a tightening of your chest and so on.

Now a long time ago, some of these emotions were important and quite valid indicators that alerted you to a dangerous situation. But these days, most of the time in any case, you are not in any immediate danger when you feel these energetic vibrations in your body. They are quite simply just a physical sensation. The stories you attach to the energetic vibration you are feeling is what feeds your perception of being in danger or at risk of being hurt. But usually, you are not actually in any danger.

And so the question is, do you want to live out your life avoiding feeling fear and also avoiding feeling excitement because you were afraid of an energetic vibration in your body? Do you want to get to the end of your time on this earth and look back and think, wow, I didn't do all of those things because I was afraid of feeling a physical sensation, that by the way, only lasts 90 seconds if you don't attach any thoughts or a story to it.

This was actually discovered in research conducted by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, who is a neuroanatomist who studied how the brain processes emotions. In her research, she found that the physiological lifespan of an emotion is approximately 90 seconds. After this period, any ongoing emotional response is usually due to the stories or the thoughts we attach to the initial feeling.

So back to my question. If you are in fact, in no immediate danger or real risk of being hurt and an unpleasant energetic vibration in your body lasts no more than 90 seconds, do you really want to spend your whole life avoiding feelings like vulnerability or fear and therefore not doing the things that could lead you to an extraordinary life experience that lasts a whole lot longer than 90 seconds? Sometimes I also need that reminder.

Listen, knowledge is power and what I hope most from today's episode is that you gain a deeper understanding into how your emotions work, the role they play in forming your beliefs, and how you can use your emotions, both the good and the bad, to help you move forward on doing the things you want to do.

Now, what I discovered about my feelings of vulnerability is that they were just the tip of the iceberg. And I think that this is the same for a lot of us. So often what starts out as vulnerability turns into a tangled mess of emotions that really does feel sometimes like it is insurmountable. But that is also a story, by the way. "I have so many emotions I can't overcome them" is a story. It's not a fact.

The reality is, sometimes there isn't a fast-track way to clean up all of these emotions quickly. Sometimes it takes time to really get to the bottom of the stories that are feeding your emotions and pull the rug out from the very bottom layer.

Think of this a little bit like a game of Jenga. If you pull out the blocks towards the top, your tower will probably stay standing. But if you pull the ones out near the bottom, the whole tower is likely to come crashing down. Our beliefs and the stories behind them, are like this too.

Most of us dig surface level, and we work at shifting the stories near the top of our tower of beliefs because, honestly, those are the stories that are probably not too painful to deal with, and the stories that we're most aware of. Now, you will make some progress, but your tower of beliefs is going to still be standing pretty strong.

But when you dig deep enough to shift the stories that form your beliefs at the deepest possible layer, that's when your whole tower of beliefs that you've been building year after year will come crashing down. Getting to that layer requires doing this work consistently, persistently, patiently, and with a whole lot of love and grace for yourself.

For me, these feelings of vulnerability have been an ongoing process over many months and while I thought at times I really had reached my deepest layer, still that vulnerability has persisted and so I must keep digging. There's evidently much more for me to discover around this feeling of vulnerability and why it keeps coming up and in particular, why I keep pushing it aside. So I'll keep you posted on what I find out.

But for now, let me share with you exactly what I've been doing to work my way down through my tower of beliefs and stories to figure out what vulnerability is really trying to tell me so I can push past this and reach even greater heights. Because like I said earlier, even though I haven't got this whole thing figured out, it's very much a work in progress for me, I've still been able to take action in a lot of ways over the past six months or so since this came up for me with the stories that I have been working on shifting and despite the fact that this vulnerability keeps lingering.

So the first thing for me is always permission. Giving myself permission to have this experience, to feel vulnerable and for that to be perfectly okay. For this vulnerability to persist as it is and again to be okay with that. Giving myself permission also to be okay with whatever I uncover as I start digging through my stories and beliefs.

How can you give yourself this permission? Honestly, you just give it. It doesn't need to be any harder than that. If it helps, and it does help me, write yourself a permission slip like our parents used to write us for school. I give myself permission to feel vulnerable and to be okay with the reasons that I uncover that are making me feel this way. Write it down in your journal every time you want to spend some time looking into your stories around this.

Which is my next tip. Spend some time regularly to sit with your vulnerability or any emotion you are feeling. Remember, emotions are just an energetic vibration in your body and it is unlikely you are in any real danger. So invite your feelings to the table and have a conversation with them. I like to name the emotion, "well, there's vulnerability coming to the table right now", identify the vibration that it causes me in my body, where the emotion is showing up, and how I am experiencing it.

And then simply wonder. I wonder what is behind this emotion. I wonder what it is trying to tell me. I wonder what belief it is tied to. What happened to make me believe that? What story I told myself about that event, and what other story I might also have told, that would make me feel differently?

Because then once you've spent some time, messy time sometimes, just writing down all the stuff that often randomly comes up for you when you sit with your emotions, then you can start to sift through all of that and look for the common patterns or themes, the stories and beliefs that are coming up for you. Which means then you can do the work to shift these stories and attach new emotions to them to help you create new beliefs that support you in taking the action you want to take.

You can use my Self-Creation Shift process that I mentioned earlier to help you do this. And I'll leave a link in the show notes for you to the YES! Block assessment where I share this process.

Now finally, once you have these new stories, you will want to practice these new stories every single day and collect evidence for how they are true. One thing I will say here is that sometimes going from a belief that you are not good enough, for instance, and therefore not worthy of being loved and accepted, to a belief that you are good enough and worthy of being loved and accepted, might feel like just too big of a jump.

Your brain might just find that too much to come on board with and so you do want to create new beliefs that are believable for you, that make you feel more positively about yourself and what's possible for you, but maybe they're not quite yet your ideal belief or emotion. And to do this, I use what I like to call the Beliefs Bridge, which is where you quite literally build a bridge, one belief at a time, to bridge the gap between your current belief and your ideal belief.

So for example, your current belief may be that you can't show up on social media because you're not good enough. Your next belief may be, I just keep thinking I'm not good enough to show up on social media. So you sit with that belief for a while until it feels good. Until it feels true for you. Your next belief after that might be, it's possible I can be good enough to show up on social media. Again, you sit with that until it feels true for you. Then you might move to, other people are good enough, I'm open to being good enough too. Then finally, I am good enough to show up on social media.

Each belief you lay down gradually bridges the gap and allows you to shift from your old negative and limiting belief to your new empowering belief. And the emotions you feel along the way will support you more and more in showing up and taking action that is in line with the action you want to take.

Alongside all of that I use my Daily Journal pages, which I recently made available to you to download for free, to help me clean up my emotions and stories every single day, and to also use I AM affirmations to help me shift my identity, that is who I am because of my new stories and beliefs, and collect evidence for how I am this new evolved version of me.

I'll leave a link to that download for you in the show notes. And I highly recommend listening to episode 17 of this podcast called My Three Morning Masks for Self-Created Success to get the full rundown on how I use these pages.

This has certainly turned out to be a much, much longer episode than I planned. But I hope it has been really helpful for you and that you can take comfort from knowing that you are not alone in feeling vulnerable, that you can use negative emotions like this to help you move forward, and that you can create a life you love without having to have all of this in perfect order.

It will come together as it needs to for you. And if you say YES! to allowing your emotions, good and bad, to have a seat at your table, if you continue to dig deep and shift your stories and practice your new beliefs every single day, you will soon find yourself moving those mountains, my friend.

With that, I'm signing off. And actually as I do, I have an I AM affirmation that has randomly appeared on my phone that says, "when all is well, I will look back and will be glad I never gave up". Never give up my friend.

By the way, that affirmation is from an app that I absolutely have no affiliation with, but I am openly recommending it to you right now because I love using it. It's called simply 'I AM', and you can search for that app in your app store. I use the free version and it is uncanny how it serves me up I AM statements that seem to resonate with exactly where I'm at. So give it a try, you might love it too.

I'll see you next Wednesday for another episode of The Self-Creation School podcast. I can't wait.

Until then, be the woman who says YES!

Hey, want to know what's stopping you from saying YES! to you and a life you love?

Head over to https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock and take my FREE 60 second quiz to find out what's standing in your way today and I'll send you my Self-Creation Shift process for shifting it. That's https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock. I’ll see you there.