Episode 30
Stuck In The MUCK | LAYC30
Stuck In The Muck
Here I grow again! But not without resistance and getting a little dirty.
In this episode, I come clean about how it feels to resist the urge to struggle against fear, frustration, and the imposter syndrome.
I share some tools and techniques to reassure our monkey-minds, and slowly extricate ourselves from the psychological muck and move on gracefully.
My recent practice of The Morning Pages from Julia Cameron’s The Artist's Way has stirred up some shit for me. I no longer need Tarzan to swing by and yank me out of the emotional pit I’ve fallen in.
Learn how my special Mastermind group is a lifeline and excavating my subconscious is an essential part of my rescue.
Quote:
“ . . . You're not stuck. You're just committed to certain patterns of behavior because they helped you in the past. Change the formula to get a different result.”
~Emily Maroutian
Bonus:
Transformation Decoded YouTube Channel
Episode 12 - Stuck in the Muck
Summary/bullet points of advice
“When I feel stuck, I typically ask myself a few questions. What am I avoiding? Why am I avoiding it? And what's it, what's it based around. Is it a story from the past that I've made up or maybe experienced and haven't let go of yet?”
~Jackie Ulmer, Street Smart Wealth
“. . . the word that comes up for me, in that, is this uncomfortable. And I think we're uncomfortable with being uncomfortable. And so muck is kind of dirty. It feels like something we're supposed to avoid. Part of life is muck and you just have to be in it sometimes in order to get out of it,”
~Lee Woodward, Woman In Disguise
RESOURCES:
https://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/
About the Host:
Isabel Banerjee
Your Next Business Strategist and Transformation Catalyst
Dynamic, a self-made entrepreneur who overcame obstacles with an unrelenting positive nature, a farm girl work ethic, and a conscious choice to thrive rather than survive, Isabel Alexander Banerjee cultivated an award-winning, $10 million+ global chemical business and grew it from dining room table to international boardrooms.
Isabel’s strengths include the ability to initiate & nurture strategic relationships, a love of lifelong learning and talents for helping others maximize their potential. An inspiring speaker within both industry and community, she is a driving force behind those with the courage to follow her example of thriving against the odds.
With 50+ years of business experience across diverse industries, Isabel is respected as an advisor, a coach, a mentor, and a role model. She believes in sharing collective wisdom and empowering others to economic independence.
Founder of the Lift As You Climb Movement (www.facebook.com/groups/liftasyouclimbmovement)
and
Chief Encore Officer, The Encore Catalyst (www.theencorecatalyst.com) – an accelerator for feminine wisdom, influence, and impact.
also
Author & Speaker ‘Who Am I Now? – Feminine Wisdom Unmasked Uncensored’ (www.IsabelBanerjee.com)
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/isabelalexanderbanerjee/
Thank You for Listening!
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Transcript
Welcome back friends.
Speaker:And I'm a warning you right now, today could get a little dirty on the podcast.
Speaker:In fact, I will be flinging some mud.
Speaker:I am shoveling out some of my own shit, and that's why this episode
Speaker:is called stuck in the muck.
Speaker:So if you're curious, or if you're feeling a little stuck yourself right now, put
Speaker:on your rubber boots, put on an old shirt or a rain coat and let's get in
Speaker:and see if we can excavate some of this bullshit that is going on in our heads.
Speaker:That makes us feel like we are stuck.
Speaker:Feel like we are stuck is a bad thing.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:If you're all geared up, let's get going.
Speaker:Now, let me set the scene for this conversation.
Speaker:About 12 months ago, early on in our life's experience with a global pandemic.
Speaker:At a time when we thought 3 months was cruel and unusual punishment in terms
Speaker:of social isolation and restricted access to our routines and loved ones.
Speaker:I shared my feelings with my co-hosts on transformation decoded.
Speaker:I will put the link to that YouTube episode in our show notes.
Speaker:Well, let me explain the purpose of that YouTube show.
Speaker:I have been in a mastermind group, now for about 3 years, and it's a very unique
Speaker:mastermind because it's just 3 of us.
Speaker:Sometimes I refer to us as the holy Trinity.
Speaker:Three of us have been coming together now for three years, almost every Monday
Speaker:morning of the entire calendar year.
Speaker:It's been on zoom.
Speaker:It's been virtual that entire time because I live in a different city
Speaker:from 2 of the other members and we have very, very busy lives.
Speaker:The three of us are entrepreneurs.
Speaker:We are evolutionary women.
Speaker:We are not letting ourselves stay stuck in the muck for longer than necessary.
Speaker:So my co-hosts on the show are Jackie Ulmer of street, smart wealth and
Speaker:Lee Woodward of women in disguise You will on this podcast often hear
Speaker:me refer to them because with them in concert with them, I get smarter.
Speaker:I get to work through a lot of stuff.
Speaker:Sometimes it's their stuff that we're working through.
Speaker:That indirectly benefits me in my awareness about what I'm doing
Speaker:what's happening, or it may not be immediate, but it'll come up later
Speaker:on in my entrepreneurial experience or my evolutionary woman journey.
Speaker:And that's the benefit of a collective mastermind where one head
Speaker:becomes magnified exponentially by the years of wisdom in the room.
Speaker:So going back to Transformation Decoded, and the YouTube series, it
Speaker:happened because of the pandemic prior to what will prove out to be a very
Speaker:interesting part of our history...
Speaker:Lee and Jackie and I, had committed to purchase time in a professional recording
Speaker:studio, a radio studio, and we intended to have a weekly or bimonthly show
Speaker:where we could share wisdom and invite guests on the show and interview them.
Speaker:So needless to say, pivot in the pandemic...
Speaker:We didn't want to lose our intention around that and our enthusiasm.
Speaker:So we decided to get started by meeting on zoom, recording
Speaker:it and sharing it on YouTube.
Speaker:Ultimately that education, that experience, became this podcast for me.
Speaker:I realized that I had a voice that I wanted to share.
Speaker:I had life experience that I wanted to share with others and
Speaker:that going on my own show, was an additional way that I could do that.
Speaker:So circling back to our theme today, stuck in the muck was our topic,
Speaker:July, 2020 on Transformation Decoded.
Speaker:And since that 12 months.
Speaker:Truth is I've been in and out of the muck on different occasions But right now.
Speaker:I really feel like I'm struggling and thinking about that again.
Speaker:I realized if I can share some of my experience around how to capture
Speaker:the benefits of feeling stuck and not allowing myself to get pulled
Speaker:down in the muck and suffocate.
Speaker:Then it's my responsibility to offer that up to you.
Speaker:I'm a farm girl.
Speaker:I was raised on a cattle farm.
Speaker:So muck is something that I'm quite intimately familiar with.
Speaker:Also rubber boots.
Speaker:We had a lot of cattle on our farm and of course, cattle means
Speaker:manure or in plain language shit.
Speaker:And of course there's lots of water as well, and lots of feet tromping
Speaker:around in the earth, the shit, the water, and it makes muck rich,
Speaker:organic fertilizer kind of muck.
Speaker:And it's the consistency of setting cement.
Speaker:When you're walking through it, let's create some imagery for this picture me...
Speaker:Lookin' cute with my pigtails and my jeans and my high rubber boots.
Speaker:I'm walking through the barnyard.
Speaker:I am on a mission.
Speaker:I got something in my mind, something to do a place to go.
Speaker:I don't have time for anybody or anything to get in my way.
Speaker:Full steam ahead.
Speaker:And then suddenly without warning, inconveniently, suction
Speaker:takes hold of my boots and I am jarred to a stop instinctively.
Speaker:I want to keep going.
Speaker:I want to muscle through this resistance, yank my feet out
Speaker:of the muck and keep on going.
Speaker:But I learned the hard way as a child, when the muck grabs you...
Speaker:Stop stop for a moment and recover your position.
Speaker:Otherwise, if you continue to try to move forward too quickly, while
Speaker:you are off balance, your feet come right out of those boots and you are
Speaker:hurled face forward into that muck.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:Let's get that image out of our minds.
Speaker:You don't need to have a picture of me in your head with
Speaker:my face planted in the crap.
Speaker:It's been a lot of years since I was that girl with the pigtails on the farm.
Speaker:But once again, in my life, I feel like I'm stuck in the muck.
Speaker:I've been straining and struggling against this resistance for a couple of days until
Speaker:finally I remembered what I have to do.
Speaker:I need to stop.
Speaker:when I willed myself to pause and go quiet for a little while and stop
Speaker:struggling against this unpleasant, uncomfortable feeling, I started to
Speaker:think about when did this come up?
Speaker:You know...
Speaker:What possibly happened to trip me up, and put me in this muck?
Speaker:What's new?
Speaker:What am I doing different right now?
Speaker:And hello, the light came on.
Speaker:I recently bought the book, the Artist's way by Julia Cameron.
Speaker:It was a recommendation by my friend and mastermind, partner, Jackie
Speaker:Ulmer, and I have adopted the morning pages practice for the next 12 weeks.
Speaker:I'm only a few days into that practice as I'm recording this episode.
Speaker:And that means for a quiet period every morning, I am obligated to myself to
Speaker:write out 3 pages of long hand thoughts.
Speaker:What ever comes out of my brain onto that paper is what it is.
Speaker:I'm not supposed to think about it.
Speaker:I'm not supposed to punctuate it, worry about my spelling or my
Speaker:pen ship or anything just dump...
Speaker:And perhaps if you are like me, you realize from time to time, the
Speaker:old crazy stories that exist in our subconscious stories that we thought
Speaker:we had rewritten the ending, Old beliefs and patterns that we thought
Speaker:we had corrected that periodically, just show up again and become the
Speaker:new shit that we have to deal with.
Speaker:Until the muck brought me to a halt.
Speaker:I had not realized that the exercise of journaling was me dumping
Speaker:out a lot of garbage in my head.
Speaker:A lot of garbage that I didn't know that I was accumulating.
Speaker:The analogy of stuck in the muck reminded me of the old Tarzan movies,
Speaker:where some hapless individual would fall into a quick sand pit and they'd
Speaker:be struggling instinctively to get out.
Speaker:And the harder that they struggled, the more they were getting
Speaker:pulled down into the quick sand.
Speaker:Now of course, the good news is that Tarzan always arrived
Speaker:just in the nick of time.
Speaker:The lesson, of course, from these old movies was don't let your
Speaker:monkey-mind trap you and create a greater peril by struggling.
Speaker:Pause.
Speaker:Be still be with yourself quietly for a while until you sort it out.
Speaker:Is Tarzan going to swoop in, on a vine, and grab you?
Speaker:Or do you reach out to a branch and pull yourself out of the muck?
Speaker:The important thing to remember is...
Speaker:Don't struggle and make it worse for yourself.
Speaker:Give yourself the time, even though that goes against my nature.
Speaker:My strength finder includes activator and maximizer as
Speaker:part of my signature strengths.
Speaker:So I want to do it.
Speaker:I want to make it happen right away, and I want to act on it, but
Speaker:I am trying very hard right now to remind myself that I must slow down.
Speaker:I must allow myself to settle into the muck where I am now.
Speaker:And look around myself and take stock of the circumstances.
Speaker:Obviously the struggle in the muck, is about not feeling
Speaker:comfortable with who I am.
Speaker:Where I am right now.
Speaker:Rather than push against that too hard.
Speaker:I'm trying to slow down and think about that.
Speaker:What's the resistance.
Speaker:What is it that I in my subconscious have been struggling with and have created
Speaker:this feeling of being stuck in the muck.
Speaker:What can I do with that opportunity?
Speaker:So I learn from it in the Transformation Decoded episode.
Speaker:Lee and Jackie and I talk about different times where this has happened in our
Speaker:personal lives, our professional lives.
Speaker:You know...
Speaker:Here we are women...
Speaker:We're always marching forward.
Speaker:And we shared with you some of our own strategies on how to get out of the muck.
Speaker:It's apparent I have some work to do right now, but I promise I'll come
Speaker:back to you and share what else I have learned about this process of
Speaker:excavating myself from the muck.
Speaker:In the show notes, I'll include the bullet points from the YouTube
Speaker:episode of Transformation Decoded and my mastermind partners wisdom.
Speaker:I hope it will help you in your own muck excavation.
Speaker:Goodbye for now my friends, I am excited to find out what we dig up together.
