223. Embrace the Changes in Your Life

Transcript:

  Welcome to the Connected For Real podcast. I’m Rebbetzin Bat-Chen Grossman, a marriage coach for women in business. And my mission is to bring God’s presence into your life, into your marriage and into your business. Let’s get started.

 And we are live. Welcome everyone to the Connected for Real podcast. I’m Rebbetzin Bat-Chen Grossman. I’m a marriage coach for women in business. And today with me is Makeda. And did I say it right? I hope I did. Yes, I did. Look at that. Introduce yourself and then we’ll get into our topic of change and you.

Awesome. Excellent. So yeah, I’m Makeda Pennycooke. Long name. I keep meaning to ask my mother how long it took me to learn to spell my name ’cause it’s a lot of letters. But I am a certified life coach, personal and bus professional development. But I also am a change strategist. I call myself the change whisperer because my genius lives in the space between what was and what is not yet that messy middle.

And so I walk with people across the threshold. Usually folks who come to me are stuck. And so my, in my work. I get to help them get unstuck and then walk them through that messy middle through what was to get them to what it is that they truly want and desire for themselves. And so that is my work in a nutshell.

I’ve been doing it now for a few years, but I’ve been in some sort of development, leadership, professional spiritual development for 20 plus years. I know. I don’t look it, the gray hair makes it, you know, kind of gives it away, but overall, I don’t think I look it, but yeah. Yes, that’s me. Totally. I agree.

And I have, I have gray hair too. At this point it might be already white but only in the front so that people, you know, only the ones who need to see, see the white. Everything else behind is black. Yeah. It’s so weird. But anyway, I think it’s because God wants people to know that I’m wise, even though I’m young.

I love that. Yes. Okay, cool. So I have to give you guys a little bit of background. Usually my listeners they think I’m perfect and that’s very nice. But I had a hole in my podcast. Flow. I usually am ahead and I’m usually very organized ’cause I’m very proud of myself. This is one of the things that I really got together two years ago and, or maybe even three years ago.

My podcast is by clockwork. I have the guests, I have the topics, I have a whole framework, the four pillars. I’m so proud of myself. And then I have this hole this lady who we already recorded called me and said she wants me to not put it out because she is pivoting and she no longer does what she said she does.

And so she doesn’t wanna be live on my podcast saying she’s doing something different, right? So I respect that and I took her off. But now that meant that I had a hole and I didn’t know what to do. And you guys, next thing I know. Makeda is getting on my Zoom for a Let’s Talk call, and she says, I’m a change coach.

I help people go through change and the topic is change and you. Okay? So I’m sitting there going, I love you, I love you, and she doesn’t understand what I’m talking about.

So now we’re all on the same page. I love you for being a change coach. I love you for coming into my life this week. And I’m grateful to God that he organizes and orchestrates my life because I do not think I could have done a better job at this. Yeah. No. I don’t think we could have made this happen on our own.

I do love divine right timing and so the synchronicity of it all, I heard someone say once, the synchronicity is when God chooses to remain anonymous. Mm-hmm. And I just think synchronicity is actually God screaming, I’m here and I’m working even when you think I’m not. And so, yeah. I love that. That’s amazing.

Okay, cool. So let’s talk about change. I think a lot of people are afraid of change because it means that you’re like you said, no longer doing the thing you used to be doing. Yeah. And that means getting out of comfort zone. It means going into some new places and trying new things and it’s a scary thing.

Yeah. Yeah. I like to say that fear stands as a sentinel, a guard at the edge of our comfort zone. And it has one job, and that is to make sure that nothing happens to us. It wants to keep us safe and being inside of our comfort zone is familiar and it’s well comfortable ’cause it’s the comfort zone, right?

We know exactly what’s going to happen here, and if we step outside of our comfort zone, all kinds of terrible things can happen. We might fail, we might succeed. People might laugh at us, people might never talk to us again. All these terrible things that we can imagine are outside of our comfort zone.

And so I say that now, what I’m about to say only applies in this unique situation. If you are standing in front of a mountain lion, do not do what I’m about to say. I think fear is your north star. It points you in the direction that you need to go. Now, if there’s a mountain lion in front of you, please do not walk towards the mountain lion because that’s a different kind of fear.

That’s the self preservation stay alive kind of fear. The challenge is our nervous system does not know how to distinguish between whether there’s a mountain lion standing in front of us or we’re about to do something that we’re not familiar with. And so outside of your life being in danger, and that’s where engaging with fear becomes important.

You have to engage the fear and make friends with it so you understand what it is trying to do so that you can move towards it. I love that. I love that. And one time we had a guest over and he said something about not wanting to do something because you know, blah, blah, blah. And I said, you’re basically stuck in comfort zone.

He’s like, but it’s not comfortable here. And I said, yeah, that’s fine. It’s called comfort zone because your brain is comfortable, not because you are comfortable. Yeah, yeah. A lot of times people are in comfort zone, but they’re very uncomfortable. Mm-hmm. They’re like you said, they’re stuck. They’re feeling like they’re suffocating.

They don’t see a way out. They feel like they’re looping in life, and that’s exactly what your comfort zone is doing. It’s looping. Yeah. Yeah. I like to say sometimes the pain we know is better than the joy we don’t know. Yeah. And it’s so sad because it means that we are holding ourselves back from Yeah.

From the joys that Absolutely. That are totally accessible. Totally there for us. Yeah. Yeah. If we’re willing to reach out for it. And that again, is the scary part. And I think also another thing that makes change hard is that inevitably change is going to bring some kind of ending. Something has to end.

And learning to be with that ending and be with your grief, that comes with that ending is part of that work. And we at least uh, so I’m in the US and in the western world, we don’t really do grief, right? We just are supposed to push through our grief. We have no rituals up to honor grief, at least around, beyond just the funeral and the post funeral meal and then the annual remembering.

We don’t really have traditions that honor grief. I think the Jewish tradition, Jewish faith has more ritual around that. Most of my folks who come to me are not from the Jewish faith, and so learning to be with grief is something completely new for them. And because grief is typically only tied to something dying it’s surprising to people when I say it sounds like there’s a lot of grief here that needs honoring.

Right. I love that you’re bringing this up. I love that you’re bringing this up because there’s a song that talks about every beginning has an ending, you know? And then, you know, the ending means that tomorrow we begin again. Yeah. And so it’s this like, you know, rhythm where things die and things are born and things die, and things are born.

Yeah. And, and it’s, it’s mind blowing that we could talk about change and forget to really address this point. And I’m so happy you did. Yeah. Ah, something has to die. You have to leave the job in order to start a new one. You need to stop going out with that guy. If you wanna start going out with a new one, like Yeah.

Something has to go. And it’s so hard. It’s so, so hard, so hard. And what I like to say is, I, I’m a Disney girl. I do love a good Disney show. But I also love musical theater. Musical theater really is my happy place. But most Disney shows where the stories start with once upon a time, and then it ends the end.

Right. And I like to say every, the end holds the promise of a once upon a time. Yeah. And you know what? What’s crazy is that most of the Disney stories start with the end. Like her parents disappeared into the seed. Right. You know, or her wedding it started. Exactly. Exactly right. So every the end there is a new thing to be found if we’re willing to, to see the period, not as an end, but as a beginning.

Right. Yeah. And find that opportunity. It’s that it’s that life, you know? Mm-hmm. Yeah. My nature shows us this all the time. All the time. You know, things, things look like they’re completely dead. Mm-hmm. Dead. I remember when I was little, my mother’s very into nature. Very. And her father also. So it like goes down to generations.

Yeah. Everything looked dead. The tree looked completely dead. And then she said, watch this. And she broke the branch and showed us that there’s still green inside. Yeah. And it was so exciting for me as a kid to realize, wow, there is life underneath something. Yeah. That I don’t see. Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely. And I think that’s I like imagery and so all great things begin in the dark. All great things, right? I plant to seed in the ground and I don’t know what’s gonna happen in there, but I have a little bit of faith that if I water it, nurture it and do the things I’m supposed to do with it, it will turn into the plant or the flower or the whatever I’ve is hiding in that seed.

But it’s gotta get in the dark and beyond that, it has to release the shape. The identity of being a seed in order to be able to then embrace the bigger possibility of it, right? The bigger the thing, the greatness that is living inside of that seed can only find expression in the dark first before it manifests above the ground.

And so one of the driving principles in my work is that there is greatness. There is a seed of greatness inside every single one of us divinely planted. And it is the responsibility of our lifetime to rise into that greatness. And my sense of greatness is gonna be different than your sense of greatness is gonna be different than someone else sense of greatness.

And part of rising into that greatness means that there has to be some endings. Just like, oh, if you have a plant and it has outgrown the pot that it’s in, you gotta transport it to another one to get it to expand and grow even more. And so when I think about how. People approach change, they’re often only focused on the fact that they are uncertain and they don’t know what’s gonna happen and they, they can’t access possibility or even faith.

Right? And so how do you move through that is there’s an an embodiment of trust and a reminder that so much of what’s happening is happening inside. And when there is an opportunity, when God puts something in front of us and says, Hey, I’m inviting you into this thing. I believe that it’s an invitation ’cause God recognizes that potential, that greatness and is giving us a chance to have that be brought forward.

I love that. I love that. I love the thought that there’s a seed. The size of the seed, you know, versus the size of the tree it turns into, you know, yeah. There was a rabbi who used to walk around with apple seeds in his pocket because he wanted to constantly remind himself of the mind blowing effect of just one little seed, and the gigantic possibilities of what could happen.

Just, you know, with one seed. Yeah, yeah. You know, like one apple seed will then create an entire tree that will create hundreds and thousands of apples. Yeah, yeah. You know, throughout the years, and I think to myself, can you imagine if we stop being so scared to leave the seed, to grow out of the seed, to, you know, change our shape to all that fear and just let ourselves grow.

We can expect some real big things just because of nature. Not even because we’re so cool. Just it just naturally the thing to do, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nature teaches gives us so many lessons, right? I think why the autumn and fall is my favorite time of the year is because, not just because the trees change all their colors and it’s beautiful and spectacular, but also because there, there’s trust every fall.

The leave the trees saying, okay, I’m gonna let this go. It’s pretty, I like it. It’s been helping to keep me covered and it’s had a place for the birds and I love the birds but I’m gonna let it go and I’m gonna trust that in four months, five months, six months. Spring will come again and these leaves will find their way back in bigger, more glorious, more splendid, DTUs way.

I make words up sometimes. And they teach us that, right? Every year I get to see that. I get to be reminded that there is beauty in letting go, and there is deep faith to remind myself that spring will always come again because we created by the same divine creator that made the trees. And so we have the same rhythms inside our own lives.

Right? Spring will come again, and I get to trust that. Yeah. I love that it’s so important for us to remember that we don’t always live in spring. You know? Yeah. Which I think the Western world is really, really striving to live in spring and then spring again. And then spring again.

And there is this like never ending spring. You’re constantly growing your business. You’re never losing money, you’re always growing and always showing up and always on call. Yes. Yes, yes. And that’s not how it works. And there is rhythm. And if we could follow those rhythms, not that we need our businesses, you know, I run my own business.

So our business don’t have to follow the same rhythm as nature. Like I don’t need to just ’cause it’s winter. Doesn’t mean my business has to be in a winter season. And when my business gets in a winter season where maybe there’s not as many people coming in, or as much revenue coming in, rather than panicking, thinking, I need to hustle, hustle, hustle.

It becomes a reminder to say, or an invitation to go, oh, this might be a chance for me to rest. Right? So I think about when my schedule, so if I look at my calendar and suddenly people start canceling for whatever reasons, my first instinct. Now this has come from years of practice and growth. So don’t for any reason think that I’m super evolved.

This is a practice. But when that happens, I go, oh, well I wonder why God has opened up my schedule like that. I wonder what it is that I might be needing that God the divine is saying, let’s give that to you. Let’s give you a little bit of rest that maybe I don’t think I need because I’m in hustle mode and God is saying, Hmm, maybe you do.

And so we’re gonna open up your schedule a little bit. I love that. I love that. So help us practically get from one side to the other. Yeah. There’s a change. Everybody is facing a change. Everybody is facing something that they’re being called to step into. Mm-hmm. And it means having to let go of something.

It means having to jump onto something. It means having to have the faith that it’s actually gonna happen and it’s actually gonna work. There’s a lot here. Yeah. So let’s get practical. Yeah. I do love a good practical step. So one of my favorite statements, I say it so much that I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be on my tombstone, is that baby steps count.

So when we are on the threshold of change or trying to move through change, or we know something is coming, we always fall into, or many people fall into the trap of thinking I have to make big, giant leaps. And it is the big giant leap that feels too fearful, too hard. And so I’m always like, well, let’s find the baby step.

What’s the baby step that you can take? And for many people, the first step is pausing long enough to acknowledge that something needs to change. To name it, to say out loud, what is the thing that needs to change. And then breathing into that, like really allowing your body to go. Okay. Yeah. So that’s the thing.

You know, and then just breathe into it. Allow yourself to feel it. And part of what makes change difficult is the uncertainty. I don’t know what’s coming. It’s true. You don’t. Right? And so how do you find some measure of grounding in the season of uncertainty? And so there are a couple of things that I teach.

One of the things that I think helps is understanding what’s about to happen, right? The cycle that you’re gonna walk through. And I have a little framework that I think about how people move through change. And so I like things to be easy. And so I, it’s the five E’s is the cycle that we move through when we’re going through change.

The first is the event. So something happens, a decision we make, a decision someone else makes for us that pops us into the cycle. That’s the event. The second is the emotion. So we get a wave of emotions. Now those emotions are not always like fear or sadness. Sometimes it’s like excitement and joy because yes.

Your daughter is engaged and is getting married, and that’s a great excitement and that’s a pretty big change right in her life, right? And so there’s still joy, there’s still excitement, and there’s still loads of uncertainty, right? So all these emotions come third step is the exploration phase where I really need to think about, well, what is coming up for me with all of these emotions?

What does this change gonna mean for me? Like I gotta stand in a place of getting curious about what is happening for me. And then as I do that exploration   comes the enlightenment. The ahas that make me go, oh, yeah, okay, I see that. Oh yeah, no, that makes sense. Oh yeah, I can do that. Right? So the ahas that come, and then with that then comes the embrace.

I’m ready and able to step in and go, all right, I am ready to do this change. So event emotions exploration, enlightenment, and embrace. Now, I just said that in two minutes and I quoted that and wrote it out as if it was this nice, linear, predictable path and it is not right. You move in and out of those stages as you navigate your way through.

What I have found is that people just understanding that that is to be expected helps take away some of the energy, the activation around, oh, this thing is happening that I didn’t think was gonna happen. Okay, well. It’s one of the emotions that we’re coming up and we’re gonna get curious about what’s really going on.

And we’re gonna get curious because inside of that curiosity is some enlightenment, something that’s gonna help to move you forward, right? And so I try to help people to understand that framework, not because we’re gonna walk through it one step at a time, but because those are the stages that you’re gonna feel while you are in this messy metal space.

And we’ll continue to face the self-doubt. We’re gonna continue to have the conversations with fear, and we’re going to uh the practices to get uncomfortable, get comfortable being uncomfortable, learning to live with the uncertainty that is about being present to the here and now, and staying present to what’s in front of you here.

So part of the practices is, first of all, you gotta acknowledge it, name the thing, breathe into the truth of that, and feel it in your body. Understand the cycle that you’re about to step into from an intellectual standpoint, and then recognize that that first step is the hardest. It is the hardest, and it doesn’t have to be a giant leap.

It can simply be a baby step. I love that. Okay. I love the baby step. I love it. I love the baby step. I’ll tell you what, our brain goes well, baby steps don’t actually count. They do. They do. I know they do. I know it up here in my head, but so many of us are sitting around going, yeah, that would be cool if I could do a baby step.

But you know, no, I actually need to do like a million baby steps for it to count, and I’m not really consistent. I don’t really feel like doing that, so it’s probably not gonna work, so then I’m not gonna gonna try it. Right. There’s like you’re looping in your head, right, that looping is trying to protect you from getting outta comfort zone.

So Exactly. Don’t let it, don’t bite it, don’t let it, right. We, I tell my clients, we need to interrupt that spiral, that spiral that you are in. We need to interrupt it because you’re gonna talk yourself out of doing the thing you know you need to do. So we need to interrupt that spiral. And there are a couple of tools that I use to interrupt the spiral.

My first go-to is mantras, so I love a good mantra. Right? Be here now is a good one. So not. Six steps up front, but right here, my favorite for a long time was I’m very good. I love having a plan and a backup plan. And on a really good day, I would like to have a backup to the backup plan. So that is how I’m naturally wired.

And then God has said, Hmm, that has just not how life is gonna go. And so I have learned to work with what is exactly in front of me right now, but my mind still wants to run six steps ahead. So my mantra has become that is not what is in front of me right now. Oh, that’s a good one. That is not what is in front of me right now, and that forces me back into this moment in time.

So that spiral that you just gave, that I we’re all very familiar with, we have to interrupt that spiral by asking what is in front of me right now? What is the next right step? I already told y’all I am a Disney girl, and so I call it the Theology of Frozen because in the second frozen movie.

Sorry, I’m laughing because I don’t, I don’t, I didn’t watch the second frozen movie, so I’m just sitting here at the edge of my seat waiting to hear what happened. What? Alert. Spoiler alert. Okay, so Anna thinks she’s lost Elsa and she has lost Olaf, and she has lost everything that has informed her life up until now.

And she is deep in her grief and she’s in a cave. While she’s deep in her grief and the song she sings, there’s a line that says, I will do the next right thing. The next step. What is the next small baby step that I can take that is going to move me forward? What is the next right step? So interrupt the spiral.

What’s in front of me today, here in this moment, and from this place, what’s the next right step? Amazing, amazing.

You know, which movie I like by the way? I watched a very long time ago, but I, I gave my kids an entire doctorate on that movie. I just gave them a whole like two hour speech while they were falling asleep about why it was such a good movie. It was trolls. The first trolls. Yes. It was so good. It was good.

It was about limiting beliefs. Yes. It was about believing in the right thing and knowing that it’s gonna be okay. Oh, there was so much good stuff. So much good stuff. Listen, I love a good animated movie and I might be a little bit outside of animation. Their target audience and I love a good anime and if there’s music in it, I’m in.

I’m hooked. I am there.

  Hey, before we continue the episode, I want to ask you something. Are you ready to get answers from God directly, feel more in love with your husband and more supported than ever? Run the business of your dreams without having to sacrifice any other part of your life? That is exactly what my one-on-one private coaching is for, and I want to invite you, just you and me.

For a free deep dive discovery call, this is a 60 minute free call where I ask you lots of questions and we extract the three main things that are holding you back. I then put together a personalized plan for you where I create a roadmap of recommendations. With practical steps, the call is free and so valuable in itself.

So go book yours today. Now back to the show.

 I was just listening to one of my favorite podcasts is called The Lazy Genius, and she was talking about the steps to Problem Solve. That’s what it was called. Anyway, I think there was like 12 steps and she did a two part podcast series on. The 12 steps to actually problem solve and become a good problem solver.

Yeah. And that she talked about a lot is make it smaller, make the problem smaller. Focus on the first step. Yeah. And not anything else. You know, just really minimizing because our brain automatically makes it worst case scenario, biggest problem ever. I can’t do this, there’s no way. And she’s like, what if we could just.

You know? Yeah, yeah. Look at the tiniest little thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember my niece who should not be old enough to be having a baby, ignoring the fact that she’s 30 years old. She had a little boy three years ago, and when he was learning to walk, right? So he was moving out of crawling and we had a family thread running of like, he’s so close, he’s so close, he’s so close.

And then when he took his first steps, everybody lost their minds. Everybody, my sister, my niece, who was living with my other niece, like everybody was so excited that he had taken his first steps and he would go across the room and then he’d fall down, and then he’d take a couple steps and then he’d fall down, and then he’d take a couple steps and he’d fall down.

And we are all celebrating him taking those steps. Even when he fell down, we’re like, it’s okay. Let’s do it again. And I wonder if we might not just give ourselves the same level of grace while we are moving through something we don’t know how to do. My little nephew didn’t know how, what walking was. He didn’t know what that was.

He’s trying to find his legs and figure it out. And he is stripping and he is stumbling along the way, and we’re still celebrating him. So if we take that and bring it to this scenario of finding the baby step and moving through the messy middle and change, we can celebrate, oh, I’m finding my legs and I’m going and I, maybe I stumble a little bit.

I’m gonna celebrate rather than judge or yell or tell myself how terrible I am and or comparing ourselves to somebody else. I nephew not comparing himself to anybody else. He’s just over there doing his thing, right? And so if we can offer the same level of grace. To ourselves that we would offer to a little one who is trying to learn how to walk, right?

You had eight children, I’m sure. When your children were learning to walk, you were never saying, come on kid, I can’t believe you’re doing that. You need to get going, right? You need to get over it and get doing this thing. That’s just not how we function, right? It’s not what we do. So can we offer ourselves the same level of grace and kindness?

And when I say kindness, I don’t just mean kindness, I mean ridiculous levels of kindness. What would it feel like as you are navigating uncertainty to offer yourself ridiculous levels of kindness? What would that look like and how might that shift and change your experience of what you’re walking through?

I love it. I love it. It’s so true. I have to tell you something. I was at a business conference last week. And the, you know, I live in Israel. We went through two years of war. The war is not really over, but they say it’s like, you know, slow down. We’re all still on high alert, right? Everybody’s business is not really functional and we’re all trying to pick ourselves up.

So they did an entire conference called How to Get Your Business Back on Track After A Big, you know, down. Mm-hmm. And it was fascinating. First of all, the person they brought to speak said that he’s been in business for 20 years and every two years or so there is something, there’s a war, a pandemic, a thing.

There’s always something. He even remembers when they did like the, you know, don’t buy from Israel thing and he lost all of his business from Europe. There’s so many things that come up in business that are going to you know, be the event like you said in your first. You know, the first E was event, there’s gonna be so many events and he says, expect them.

No, they’re coming. You’re not gonna have a smooth ride. It’s just how it’s, I think one of the things that threw a lot of businesses off was the surprise effect. You know, there was the Corona, we all just sort of like picked ourselves up and then there was the war, and then there was the other war. And like we are constantly picking ourselves up and we’re thinking, when do we get to breathe?

Yeah. And this guy gets up there and says, guys, this is it. This is what we’re, you know, this is what we’re in for. Yeah. And a lot of people were disappointed with his a attitude because they’re like, I just wanna hear good news. I wanna be told that it’s gonna be easy to run my business from now on. But in reality, I think it was the best thing he could have done because he’s really giving you an look into what life is really about.

Life is going to have these things and you’re get stronger. And be better and better and bigger and bigger if you can lean into it. Mm-hmm. So that was really powerful. But then this keynote speaker spoke about taking a tiny step, like you were talking about the baby step. She says, think of one thing that you can offer your audience and do it right away.

Just take the tiniest little action. Because when you’re holding a lot, you’re not moving. You are holding and holding a lot, is not doing anything for your progress. It’s only getting you more and more stuck. So you just take the tiniest action, start moving forward, and you’ll see that it will change everything.

Now I walked outta that speech, you know, the, the, the keynote speaker keynote I wrote down in my journal. I said, I’m going to do a workshop on decision making because that is a very specific result that everybody’s dealing with, that I have a method that I teach that I’m so excited about. So the next day I sent out an email.

I have this idea, I have no idea. I haven’t built it yet, but I know it’s gonna be amazing. You want, you want in for half price? And I just sent it to my entire list and I started getting messages like, yeah, I want, I’m interested. I wanna hear more. Yeah. Like, I didn’t even give them a link. Yeah. I just said I had an idea and it’s amazing how she was right.

As soon as I put it out that I had an idea, the next day I already had the link and I already sent it out, and I have to give you a spoiler, I forgot to switch it from test mode to live. So when people bought, it didn’t go through because it was un testing, so their credit card wasn’t charged and nothing actually happened.

But I had a list of seven people who attempted to buy on that first, you know? Yeah. Couple of hours. And I thought, isn’t that amazing that I took action? I started getting responses. People are interested and seven people were willing to, you know, jump in. Yeah. And they weren’t even charged, like, you know, whatever.

Thank God, thank God. All seven of them rebought when the thing was live. And I’m so grateful. Thank you for doing that. ’cause I was like so worried that somebody was gonna like fall between the cracks. Yeah. It’s amazing. I’m almost filled up. The thing is on Monday, which is tomorrow. Mm-hmm. In, in the big scheme of things.

Yeah. Because we’re recording on Wednesday, but this is actually going on Sunday. Yeah. And then the, the next day. Yeah. If you haven’t signed up yet, go and sign up. The link is below. It’s gonna be amazing, but it’s really so powerful. The baby steps mm-hmm. Are really healing. Mm-hmm. You know, we’re talking about grief, we’re talking about Yeah.

The emotions that we’re feeling. We’re talking about a lot of very deep stuff. Yeah. And people who are listening from the outsider thinking, oh, we’re just talking about change. We’re talking about things that change in your life. Oh, it’s this like fuzzy, fluffy. No, it’s real deep stuff that you’re going through and when you take action and it’s tiny.

You are still healing. Yeah. Something big. Yeah. Yeah. And the mistake that I think people make is believing that they have to be done with the emotion. Like, I have to stop grieving before I can take, I need to stop being sad before I can, do I need to stop feeling fear. This is the big one. I need to stop feeling fear and then I will take the step.

No, that’s not how that works. You’ve gotta take the step, take it with you while you take the step. And I truly listen how I function in my life is the belief that my life and my work is a partnership with the divine. There are things that I can do and I’m gonna do those things.

And then there are things like being on a random call talking about where I am. Getting a chat and chatting with you, our call being set up shortly after your, have the fallout. You know, the person who asked not to have their episode go live. We, we could not have orchestrated that. That’s an example of a step gets taken and my step was on my end was grow is my word of the year.

So every year word shows up and wants me to embody it. So grow is my word for this year. I wanna grow my business, I wanna grow visibility. And one of my goals is to get on more podcasts. And here I’m amazing. Right? And you got all the best podcasts. Like this is the one you’re gonna put on your website. I start out with the bar so high, the rest of these podcast people go have a lot to live up to.

Yes, exactly. I’m like so proud to be that. Like the big names, you know, like as seen on connected. Exactly.

I love that. But you know how you were saying you, you named the five Es and then you said, we don’t actually go through them linearly. Right. And I wanna tell you something. One time in the beginning, beginning of our business, of my business eight years ago maybe it was even more, I was listening to Kathy Heller.

Her podcast was really one of the best podcasts. ’cause she’s so good at helping people live through the fear and take action and actually believe and hear examples of other people doing it. She’s great. So she said fear is allowed to come along, but it doesn’t get to decide, you know, touch the radio.

It doesn’t get to drive. And I thought, oh that’s great. You know, I love visualization. I love seeing my little fear, you know, sitting right here next to me in the car. And then I realized it’s not just fear, it’s an entire van full of little creatures that are all coming along with me. Yeah, it’s not just fear, it’s all of them.

They’re all in the car and they’re all trying to tell me something and I’m just supposed to go forward. Just keep driving, keep driving, keep driving, keep driving, and don’t look through the rear view mirror. ’cause if you look through the rear view mirror, you’re gonna see all those things that are back there trying to hold you back.

Right? I mean. I could talk to them. I can let them tell me stories and stuff. Yeah. But they don’t get the control. They don’t where we’re going. Yeah. So good. They don’t get to change the music. So good. So good, so good. It’s bringing up for me how I help people think about engaging with fear. And I wonder if I might share that.

If that feels like a yes. I love it. Go for it. So I think about right, fear is not your enemy. That like, is the first thing I need people to get. Fear is not your enemy. Fear is an invitation. It is also not an indictment against you. It’s an invitation. And so I say to people, listen, you need to sit down and have a conversation with your fear.

This is what it boils down to. And so it does involve a little bit of visualizing and sort of thinking about, like imagining you said, you know, your fear is a passenger and you’re in the driver’s seat of your car, right? So if you are feeling fear, what if we took a moment and just had a conversation with your fear?

And just ask it, why are you here? What? What do you want me to know? What are you trying to protect me from? Right? So have a conversation with your fear and then ask it, what’s the story? There’s a story here. What’s the story I’m telling myself? What’s the story that I’m allowing fear to whisper to me?

Right? And the thing about fear in its effort to keep you inside your comfort zone where you can be safe and comfortable and nothing can go wrong, is it takes a little bit of truth. Just a little bit and wraps it up in, I’m sorry. It takes a little bit of a untruth. Something that’s that’s true, but it wraps it up in all of these untruth.

So that you lose sight of the little bit of truth and everything else around it becomes more powerful, becomes louder. So an example is a client of mine who was in a role that had pre had historically been held by people with lots of degrees, right? They had lots of letters behind their names and she did not she had years of lived experience, but she didn’t have the fancy degree.

So her fear took that one truth that she didn’t have the fancy degree and wrapped up all this other narrative about her qualifications and could she do it and she’s not capable, and all these other things that caused her to believe that one little untruth as true. Does that mean it took that one thing and wrapped all these other things around it to amplify it and make it feel like, oh, that thing is a bigger deal than it is?

And so we sat down with her fear and just asked her, okay. So you have, you are not as qualified. You don’t have the qualifications, the, the certificates, the letters. What other qualifications do you have? And she was able to see all this lived experience that actually informed how she showed up, the choices that she made that was actually moving the team that she was on forward in some big ways, but she couldn’t see it because all she could see was the fact that she didn’t have the letters behind her name.

Engaging with her fear gave her another perspective, another way of seeing what is actually true here and taking what is true and discarding everything else. That is not true. And I could keep going, but I think I’ve made my point. Spend time with your fear. You know, I told you I love, I love, visualizing it. Yeah. I love seeing what fear actually looks like and what’s actually going on and things like that. And so one of the things I do with my clients is we go into a meditation and I, I create a guided meditation on the spot for them. Mm. And we go through the conversation, live with fear, oh, I love this, but from, not from like up here in our brain, right.

Really down into our body. Like, where does fear live? What color? What does it look like? What is it saying? What does it sound like? And then, you know, a whole conversation back and forth, like, really, what are you trying to protect me from? Yeah. And what’s actually going on? And what do you want? Yeah. Yeah.

And my favorite one at the end of the whole thing, after you get all the information from fear, is like, what’s your favorite food? You know, and it’s usually that comfort food that you go for to try yourself down, you know, quiet, that nagging voice down and it’s usually like a junk food that you know, you shouldn’t be having, but you have it anyway.

Yeah. It’s so funny how every time it comes up that, oh, that’s amazing. I didn’t even realize that’s what fear likes to eat. Yeah. And then of course we get rid of fear or we let it go. Yeah. Or we let it stay and we let it change. Yeah. And it’s so beautiful. So beautiful. What women are able to do once they go through that experience.

Yeah. You know? ’cause when you go down to the subconscious and then up to the super conscious and then you know, sort of shift everything around. You’ve basically reprogrammed your brain. Right? And a lot of women think like, okay, so what’s my homework? Like? That’s it. There is no homework. You already did all the work.

Just did some big work. Yeah. Yeah. Like what? That’s it like, yeah. Now all you do is just get to enjoy what you did. Go live your life. Yeah. It’s really amazing. It’s really amazing. What an impactful thing it is to deal with fear. Mm-hmm. From a place like that. Yeah. Yeah. Where it’s not the enemy, right? Where you’re not demonizing it, but allowing yourself to really engage with it to get the wisdom that’s there.

’cause it’s there for a reason. So why has it shown up? And when you can figure that out, I do love this idea of asking fear what its favorite food is. My answer was chocolate covered cashews because chocolate makes everything better. But yeah, this is good. So good. That sounds yummy. I was just thinking when you said demonized.

I was helping a young girl client, usually my clients are married women, all of my clients are married women. But every so often somebody will say like, can you help my teenager or can you, you know, talk to someone? So I do, you know, like one-offs and, and things like that.

And there was this girl who couldn’t for the life of her pass the driving test because she was so scared of the driving instructor. And we did a meditation and I basically asked her, what is the instructor here for? Mm-hmm. And, you know, just to be scary. Mm-hmm. To, to intimidate me to whatever. It’s like, no, he’s here to pass you.

He’s the only one who has the power to sign on that dotted line and say, she passed. So then she’s like, oh. Oh, he’s here for me. You know? And it was such a shift. He’s not here to scare you. He’s not here to be intimidating and big and you know, overwhelming. He’s here to sign on the paper that says you are allowed to drive from now on.

Hmm. And then, oh, okay, well if he is actually on my side, then he is not scary anymore. You know? And then I could thank him and I could actually be nice to him because he’s here for me. Yeah. It’s so, I think that, you know, once you said that, it suddenly made me realize it’s the same with fear. It’s the same with all these emotions.

The emotions are here to help me to actually get me to pass the test. Oh my God. Yes. On my test that I passed. Yeah. Yeah. And I’m demonizing them going, you’re not supposed to do that. Don’t be here. Yeah. Go away. No, no, no, no. I want you here. I’m gonna thank you for being here and I’m gonna be very excited when I get that piece of paper that says, you’ve passed the test.

I love this so much. I like to say that our emotions, feelings are neither bad nor good. We judge them, right? Fear, anger, bad joy, happiness, good. Right? So the, our emotions, neither bad nor good, they just are. And they come with information. They cut every emotion that we have, every feeling that we have brings information for us, the key is to be with the thing long enough to understand or get to the information that it has for you.

And whether that is joy, I don’t know how to explain how happy. Musicals make me at, at my bone level. They make me so happy. And when I was like, well what is that joy about like what is my joy wanting me to know in that moment? And it’s that every musical has these really great stories or threads of hope weaved through them.

I don’t care if it’s late Miss, which is my favorite Broadway musical, Hamilton, which is my second favorite Broadway musical, or the Sound of Music, which is my favorite movie, or ami, the original 1982 version only, right? They all have these threads of hope inside of them. And I am a woman who wants to hold onto hope in the face of a world that wants to rob me of all of my hope and all of my joy, right?

So joy tells me, oh, I get to hold onto hope, right? Same with when I get angry about something, I’m not gonna judge my anger. I’m gonna get curious about my anger. Well, I’m gonna discharge my anger, and then I’m gonna get curious about what’s happening with my anger, right? So I’m gonna discharge, I’m gonna take my pool noodle and hit the wall a few times.

Get the anger out and then I can get to the information. But they come with information for us, and so if we don’t judge it good or bad, then we are able to access the information that it has for us.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

I don’t know if everybody knows this, but like you said, emotions are neutral and when you can realize that, oh, then it takes away a lot of the stress about feeling certain ways. Yeah. You know, oh, I’m not feeling happy. Something must be wrong. Like, excuse me, nothing’s wrong, you’re just.

Our go-to thing is that there must be something wrong. Yeah. There must be something wrong. Yeah. You know, oh, my kids aren’t unhappy. Oh, that means that I am not a good enough mother. Right. If something isn’t, you know, as it’s supposed to be, why, why are we doing that to ourselves? Yeah. If they’re all neutral and they’re all here to teach us something, could we all just chill?

Right. And not, and not first of all, place meaning where there is no meaning, right? So don’t make meaning where there is no meaning. Right? If you’re not happy, maybe it’s cold outside and you don’t like being cold. Or I just moved from North Carolina where during the summer it’s hell’s front porch, right?

It is so hot that it feels like an inferno. And so instead of judging what is happening, get curious, replace the judgment with curiosity, right? If I’m not happy and I’m thinking I should be happy, well. When the word should shows up, someone else’s expectation is driving the conversation. So who says that you should be?

Fill in the blank. Who says right? Where are you picking that up from? Right? Where is that story originating? And when you, when you replace the judgment with curiosity, that’s where you get the learnings. That’s where you get access to new possibility. Rather than staying stuck in, oh, woe is me. Something must be wrong with me.

I need to fix myself. You don’t need fixing. You don’t need fixing you as you are. You’re perfect. It’s created in the image of, yes you are. You are perfect, and there is nothing in you that needs fix. This is my issue with the coaching industry in some ways, is there’s too much narrative out there that’s trying to tell people that something is wrong with them, that they need to be fixed.

It’s why I don’t like the phrase becoming a better version of myself, because that word better already has judgment attached to it. So what if it’s not you becoming a better version of yourself? What if it is actually you becoming more of the you that is already inside of you? What if that’s what you’re doing?

Which brings us back to that seed, you know, everything’s in the seed. You are just developing the seed. You know, another thing that’s really wonderful is when a little seed starts to sprout, the worst thing to do is pick it up and check, you know, and like, is it, is it growing? Okay, put it back. Is it growing?

Okay. Put it back. And kids will do that sometimes. Yeah. When they’re trying to see if like something is growing. But no, it only grows when you leave it alone. Right? Right. Yeah. And the things that happen in mystery, right? Some things that are, are a mystery. They stay a mystery, but that’s not our domain.

That’s God’s domain. That’s the domain of the divine, right? The things that happen in mystery, the things that are happening in the dark. That’s not our domain, right? That belongs to God. Our job is to do the things that we know to do. So continuing with the analogy of the seed, right? We’re gonna water it, we’re gonna tap it down.

I don’t garden. These thumbs are brown. Not because I’m black, but because I don’t know how to garden. But rumor has it that when you water and you’re supposed to tap it down and feed it and give it like, and nourish it, right? There are things that we do that we are meant to do. And then there are things that are happening in the mystery that all of that belongs to God.

Yeah. And if we do our part, and God will do God’s part, the seed will burst forth through the ground, and then we’re not done. We’re just beginning to tap into our potential, right? And so that’s not just a, I’m just getting started in business, or I’m just becoming a parent for the first time, or I’m just beginning.

That is us tapping into our potential. So long as we have breath in our lungs, we’re only just now tapping into our potential. That is my belief. And we’re constantly tapping into that seed. You know, there’s so much in there that you’re never finished and you’re never done. And there’s always amazing things that can grow and come out.

It’s so fun. It’s fun, and it’s not more work. It’s more opportunity for discover and more opportunity for delight and enjoyment and new things to emerge, right? I get delighted every time I learn something new about myself and I go, wow, who knew I could do that? Oh, well, isn’t that fun that I can do that thing now?

Whatever that thing might be, right? We get to like be delighted as we get to see these new layers of ourselves rather than being in fear of. Letting go of what we once were in order to embrace who we are becoming, right. And the biggest change that I navigated in my life involved me leaving an organization, a church that I had helped started, and I had an identity there.

I was someone with authority, somebody in a position to like make decisions and execute on things and drive organizational or drive the organization forward. That was my whole identity. When I left that I lost my job, lost my faith community, lost my identity, lost my sense of who I was, lost my friend group, lost all kinds of things.

But in that, in the face of that ending, who, what I discovered on the other side, the level of self trust, my ability to stay grounded in the essence of who I am, to walk in a higher level of confidence than I’ve ever done before. Because I honored all the parts of me, not just the pretty parts, like I sat with all of me, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Real resulting in this layer of confidence that I could have gotten no other way. Man, I celebrate that I made that decision at the time. I was like, have you lost your ever loving mind, girl? Have you lost your mind? And on the other side of it, I really just knew that it was the best thing that I could have done.

Now, five years in that chaos of uncertainty, not so much fun. Not so much fun. And it has informed the work that I do. Yeah. And so I don’t regret it. It’s amazing that God sends everybody a change and it’s because we need to grow. Mm-hmm. I was thinking, you know, you were saying it’s not hard work it’s delightful work.

I’m thinking. Can you imagine if you didn’t get to grow? If you didn’t have to grow? Mm-hmm. You’d be suffocating. You’d be like, okay, that’s it. This is where your limits are. That is suffocating. So yeah, not growing is actually not an option. Right, because it’s terrible. Yeah. It stops you from doing the thing you’re naturally supposed to do.

Yes. Do. Yeah. And instead, can you just let yourself naturally grow without forcing it and trying to fight it and, you know, making it a whole deal. We were once going for advice and the rabbi said. You’re either going to get up off the chair or you’re going to be taken with the chair in your hands, you know, holding the chair to your, to your tush.

Yeah. To your bottom. Like you’re either holding the chair and walking away with the chair, or you’re just getting up and you know, gracefully walking off. So there is certain situations in life where the option is not to stay. There’s either you get up or you are made to get up. Yeah. So it’s just about how you wanna do it.

Yeah. And I think it’s so amazing to have people like you who actually, you know, I sort of think of it as like a doula. Like you usher the new life in you help the change naturally happen without having to make it too, too difficult or too, you know, dramatic. It just, change is gonna happen. Let’s lean into it.

Let’s stop making it into a whole. Crazy drama story thing. Yeah, I agree with that so much. And yes, thank you for that. Is the privilege I, my work feels like a privilege. A privilege. I get to come alongside people in very difficult times and helping them to, I say I hold onto hope, hence my musical theater thing.

I hold hope and folks can’t access it for themselves. And I hold possibility when people can’t access it for themselves. ’cause it is hard and it is challenging and it is difficult. And what I appreciated about the guy at that conference was, he’s like, listen, this is, this is the normal. We gotta normalize what is so we figure out how to be with it, right?

And how to operate within the framework of it. And that’s part of what I do is normalize. This is not surprising. Like you feeling the way you’re feeling, it’s not surprising. It’s part of the work, right? It’s part of how you’re gonna move through this. And it’s a practice. And that’s the thing I say over and over again.

It’s a practice. Everything is, it is not a one and done. It’s not a one. And done. I moved, I relocated from North Carolina up to New Jersey because I needed to get closer to family. And I pulled every tool in my tool chest to make that change, to walk through that change. And my first night here, I woke up saying, I might have made a mistake.

I might have just made the biggest mistake. And I breathed through that. I was like, no, no, no. That’s your head. What’s in your body telling you Nikita, my body was like, no, this is the right change. This was the right move. Right. And so everything I teach is because I’ve walked it and also because I genuinely believe, listen, the God of the universe is so big, right?

And I I’m of the Christian tradition and part of what drives my understanding as a Christian is that we have been created in the image of God. And God is very big likes to move the stars around just for the kicks and giggles, right? And so if I’ve been created in the image of God, then, then there must be all kinds of possibility inside of me that I don’t know about yet, right?

And then also I am a creation of the divine. And the trees are a creation of the divine. And the birds are a creation. And the tree is never trying to be a bird, and the bird is never trying to be a lion. And the lion is never trying to be a fish. They’re simply being who they have been created to be. And where we get in trouble is when we look at someone and think, I should be like that person.

And then now I try to become like that person instead of simply being who I am and really discovering, living into and embodying all of the greatness that is in me because there is no one else like me. Really. This is good for the world, that there is just one of me, but I am the best

me there is. I love that. I have to tell you, there was a mug today. I was just in this place and on the mug. It said, be yourself. Everyone else is taken take. Exactly. So good. It was so good. Oh, I love this conversation and we could probably talk forever. Yes, no doubt. Let’s get everyone go into your website and seeing how they can work with you.

How can they find you? All right. Brilliant. So I’m on Instagram, Makeda Pennycooke. Listen, if you just Google Makeda Pennycooke, you’ll find me. But my website is Makedapennycooke.Com. I’m on Instagram is Makeda Pennycooke. Instagram is really the only social media that I am the most active on. I also have a freebie for your community, and so it’s a just a short worksheet.

It’s called Permission to Pause. I said earlier the very first step that’s always the hardest is just to acknowledge that something needs to change. And that worksheet is that permission to just say out loud, not to everybody. Not shouting it from a rooftop, but just saying it to yourself.

Yeah. Okay. That’s amazing. That comes Permission to pause. Permission to pause, and that’s my free gift to your community. It’ll be in the show notes, all the things, but I would love for folks to go ahead and grab that and then, yeah, follow me on Instagram, but if you ever wanna reach out, I would love, love, love.

I always think it’s a privilege to get to support folks, and so if you’re on the threshold of a change and you don’t quite know. What to do? Are you too terrified to figure out that first step? I would be honored to have a chance to talk with you. I love it. I love it. And I’m just gonna remind them one more time, because there’s like less than 24 hours to the session that we’re doing.

It’s a workshop, a 90 minute workshop where I’m going to teach The CALM Method ™ specifically about making decisions. And then we’re going to workshop people’s decisions. So everybody’s gonna raise their hand and send it in the chat, and we’re gonna go through it and actually make decisions. And you’re gonna walk out feeling really confident that you made the right decision.

And I love how you said you woke up the next morning and thought I made the wrong decision. But no, it’s really, if you do it right and you follow the steps and you know how to make a decision, there’s no such thing as the wrong decision, right? Yeah. Yeah. And the fact that you moved forward was the right decision.

Yeah. So I love that. Our whole conversation just like wrapped up so beautifully. Yeah. I love it. Yay. Yes. Make sure you check out the show notes and there’s also an email that’s sent out every time that there is an episode that goes live, which is every week on Sunday.

You are such an amazing guest. Thank you for coming. Oh, thank you. Thank you listeners for being here, and don’t forget to be connected for real.

 And that’s it! Thank you for listening to the very end. I would love if you can leave a review and subscribe to the podcast. Those are things that tell the algorithm this is a good podcast and make sure to suggest it to others. Wouldn’t it be amazing if more people became more connected for real? And now take a moment and think of someone who might benefit from this episode.

Can you share it with them? I am Rebbetzin Bat-Chen Grossman from connectedforreal. com. Thank you so much for listening and don’t forget you can be connected for real.