“In my mind, self-awareness really is the core of everything.”

Do you have body awareness?

Being body aware means that you have enough awareness around how your body feels to help you make decisions from an authentic place.

A lot of times, we struggle with the idea that our body is trying to help us make decisions… or we are just completely unaware that this is even possible. We need to learn how to listen to our bodies. Listening to your body can help you make decisions in ways to take action and move in a direction that feels right.

IN THIS EPISODE, WE WILL DISCUSS:

• What it means to be body aware
• How to develop body awareness
• How to make decisions from an authentic place (aka listening to your body) and not out of fear
• Exactly how to listen to your body
• Moving forward in life in a way that feels good and authentic
• Activities of body awareness
• Examples of not listening to your body and what that may feel like
• Examples of listening to your body and what that may feel like
• Examples of when it’s not so clear what your body is trying to tell you
• Chakra work
• The benefits of listening to your body
• You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay
• Ways to use tools to learn to listen to your body more

I know this may be a foreign concept to some of you. Just try to be more aware of how your body feels when making decisions. When working with my clients, they begin to understand body awareness. Most of them notice their inner mean girl, or ego, showing up in their stomach or chest. For me, it usually shows up in my throat. Where do you think it shows up for you?

Learning about body awareness takes time.

One way to be more aware is to track your patterns about what your body feels like when you make a decision.

What does it feel like when you need to say no vs yes?

Louise Hays’ book, You Can Heal Your Life, is a fantastic resource to help you decipher what certain ailments might mean. For example, if you’re suffering from stomach issues, that could be an indication you’ve fallen off track and feeling like you’re not on the right pathway.

So, be sure to tune into today’s BECOME BODY AWARE episode on the Become an Unstoppable Woman podcast. In this episode, I’m sharing the importance of body awareness and how it can help you make decisions from an authentic place.

Listen to the episode via the link at the top of this page!

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

→ Apply to coach with me

→ Continue the conversation in my free online community

→ Get The 4-Day Accomplish Your Dreams Free Training 

→ You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay

Full transcript:

Episode 20: BECOME BODY AWARE

This is the Become an Unstoppable Woman podcast with Lindsay Preston Episode 20, Become Body Aware.

[music]

Welcome to the Become An Unstoppable Woman podcast, the show for goal-getting, fear-facing women for kicking ass by creating change. I’m your host, Lindsay Preston. I’m a wife, mom of two, and a multi-certified life coach to women all over the world. I’ve lived through enough in life to know that easier doesn’t always equate to better. We can’t fear the fire, we must learn to become it. On this show, I’ll teach you how to do just that. Join me as I challenge you to become even more of the strong, resilient, and powerful woman you were meant to be. Let’s do this.

[music]

Hi there, Miss Unstoppable Woman. Thank you so much for tuning into today’s episode. I’m excited to spend this time with you. Today, we’re going to be talking about how to become body aware. Specifically, how to listen to your body to make authentic choices that are right for you. I’m working with a lot of clients right now who are trying to build up their decision-making muscles.

For whatever reason, it’s just become hard for them to understand how to make decisions that are right for them. They wallow in it. They go back and forth on things. They’re just not able to take action and move forward. Sometimes they do take action. They do move forward but then it leads them down a path that just doesn’t feel right. As I’m working with them, I’m teaching them how to understand their bodies to make decisions and specifically authentic decisions. Not decisions made out of fear. What’s so cool right now in my business is that I have two different groups of clients going on.

This is the first time I’ve had simultaneous groups going on where one group is in my Become An Unstoppable Woman course which is all about pulling their blocks and all the things that are keeping them stuck. I consider that the darkness work of, “Let’s see all the things that are holding you back,” versus clients I’ve had now for a few months who were in my course called Become Authentically Awesome who have already done all that blockwork. Now, they’re flourishing and thriving in whole new ways.

I’m able to just see side by side, these two groups of clients and how the unstoppable ladies don’t understand their bodies, they don’t really understand their minds quite yet versus my authentically awesome ladies who just a few months ago were in that same place but now they’re trusting themselves. They’re feeling good. They’re rocking it. They’re living life. I’m like, “Man, this is so cool.” It’s so cool to see the process and how much people can change in a few months, of course. One of the biggest things I’m seeing is that they have learned how to understand their bodies and their minds to start to move forward in life in a way that feels really good to them and it’s authentic.

I know that authentic word gets thrown around a lot in the personal development space. You may not know what that means. What authentic means to me is things that are true for you. So many people will say, well, here’s the research of what makes somebody “happy” or “successful.” Here’s the recipe for success and all of  that stuff. Yes, we can use stats and science and different tools that work for most people to help them. This is what I do all day but at the end of the day, you are still a unique one of a kind being.

That’s why I’m so hands-on with my clients because yes, we can take these generalized tools that work for the brain but we’ve got to individualize it for them and how it works for them because everybody’s different. Everybody really wants similar things out of life but still different things out of life. It’s really important that they understand the truth for them and where they need to go. I hope that makes sense. Let me give you an example in my business so you can get a better idea if you’re still confused, is when I entered the online coaching space about five years ago, all these business coaches were popping up and saying, “Well, here’s how to create an amazing online business.”

I went into the online space just because I could work with more people that way instead of just here in the Dallas, Texas area. I could work with anyone in the world but I was a newbie and I didn’t really know that much about business, especially online business. So I follow these coaches and they’re like, “Okay, here’s what you do. You create these courses. Then it’s passive income and people just go through the courses on their own and then you just go and you get to go live your life, and you get to go sip margaritas at the beach all day and do all this stuff.”

I was like, “Okay, well I guess this is how it works.” I started to follow the system, and I created the courses, and I started to just do self-study in a lot of ways and ended my one-on-one clients. I would have a group every once in a while but not really that much. I wasn’t very happy with that. Other people were loving it. With their businesses of, “Man, isn’t this so great?” For me, I was missing the connection. I was missing getting to get down in there with my clients. Again, individualized. That’s something that I’d love to do so much. I love learning about them, and I love just hearing them talk and I really love listening.

For me, my authentic business or my authentic life for my business wasn’t what somebody else said was amazing. It’s the same for your life too. I work with a lot of clients who go off and check off life’s boxes. Like, “Oh, I went to college. Oops, I got a house, Oops, I got married. I had kids,” or they checked off some of those and they’re still just not feeling fulfilled with that. That’s where we go in and say, “Okay, let’s figure out how to make authentic choices for you because you just followed society’s plan.” Again, authentic choices are just things that inside of you, you’re really wanting, you’re craving.

Sometimes it just goes back to certain values that you really want and you don’t know it yet or your strengths or your passions, and so many different aspects of you but it’s really important you know how to listen to your body to make those authentic choices. That’s what I want to teach you today. I’m going to break this down into three different sections. First, we’re going to talk about examples of not listening to your body and what that feels like. Then examples of listening to your body and what that feels like and what that creates. Then we’re going to talk about the hardest one of all, which is when it’s tough to decipher if something is a yes or a no.

Let me break down when you’re not listening to your body, what that likely feels like. As I said earlier, I have a group of clients right now who are in my Become an Unstoppable Woman course. That’s all about the blockwork and the things holding them back. One of the things they do in that course is something called an inner mean girl interview. In essence, I am asking them questions that are backed by neuroscientists to tap into that part of their brain where their inner mean girl lives. An inner mean girl is the voice of the ego, shadow self, false-self. It’s all the same thing.

It’s just that part of you that has been conditioned by the outside world that lives in your amygdala, which is your emotional storehouse of your brain. I’m getting really neurosciencey here, but this is where you have built this persona of yourself that’s trying to protect you but it’s really holding you back. This persona is usually very negative. It usually beats you up. It’s very critical of yourself and others. It doubts you and wants to control things that you know you can’t control but yet you get really scared that knowing that you can’t control them.

It means you avoid things. So you do things like zone out on your phone or drink too much or shop too much, whatever, and people please, and all of the things that you don’t like about yourself but that voice has come in and been built to say, “Okay, I’m here to protect you because things have happened in your childhood to impact you to make that voice.” I know maybe going over your head here a little bit, but anyways, in the interview, I am asking them those questions they’re answering from their inner mean girl. It’s so crazy cool how this happens. A lot of people say it feels like an out-of-body experience, and I promise it’s not as woo-woo as that sounds. It’s very grounded.

Anyways, one of the questions I ask is, “Where in the body does your inner mean girl show up?” For so many of my clients, I’d say 80, if not 90%, they say the stomach and sometimes they’ll say the chest, but it’s always stomach and chest. Every once in a while, I’ll get somebody that says in my head. For me, actually, I’m unique. It always comes up in my throat. I have them answer that question and then we unpack it later in the course to really understand how their body feels when they’re not in an authentic place, when they’re making decisions out of fear.

Because when they feel those feelings, they can know, “Ooh, okay, this is a decision made out of fear versus authenticity. I need to listen to this because maybe there’s something deeper here that I need to look at and change.” Let me give you some examples of my own life to break it down for you. Actually, a few years ago, I got married. I was so excited when I met my husband, it was just all these green lights in my body of feeling like, “Yes, this is meant for me.” Now, of course, we had periods of time where things felt like a little off, but we worked through them and then again, I would get that feeling in my body, like, “Yes, this is so right.”

That was so different than anybody else I had dated. When I look back on it now, all these other people I had dated, my body was saying, “This is wrong for you. Go away. It’s so bad.” With my husband, it was all green lights, and we got engaged, all green lights, so excited, I can’t wait to get married. For whatever reason, I just kept putting off the wedding, month after month after month of starting to plan it. I just kept saying, “Well, I’m so busy with work right now,” because I was just growing my coaching business. After six months, it became, “Okay, I just need to sit down and plan this wedding,” and then I get this like aargh feeling, no green lights anymore.

At that time, it was more in my stomach, that feeling of, “Aargh, I don’t want to do this.” Then I would say, “Well, you want to marry Jason, Lindsay. You know you want to do this.” I’d get really excited thinking about our honeymoon and our life together and being married but every time it came to the wedding, it was like, “Aargh, I don’t like this.” It was just the same feeling over and over again. I just blew it off like, “Well, okay, I should have a wedding. I think this is what I’m supposed to do. I need to give this to my family and his family. They deserve to see their kids get married even though they’re not paying for anything,” and all this stuff.

What happened was, because I didn’t listen to that, the problems just started getting bigger and bigger in my body. This is what happens for a lot of people. They don’t listen to their body. They end up making these decisions out of fear that are inauthentic, and then all of a sudden, they have these health problems like, “Oh, I’m having these horrible stomach aches all the time,” or, “Oh, I have these female issues,” or, “My heart rate is up,” or some digestive issues is what I hear so many times from women.

That’s what happened to me with the whole wedding was, for me, it was one day, I just woke up and I was depressed and I couldn’t get out of bed. That happened for a couple of days and I’m like,” What is going on with me?” “This is supposed to be one of the happiest times of my life.” I had already done all this coaching work, what is the issue here? I ended up hiring one of my coaching buddies to get me through it. I was like, “You got to help me out of this. I don’t know what’s going on.” Well, within just a few sessions, it was very apparent that I did not want a wedding. I was just not listening to my body. I just talked myself out of it to make this wedding happen.

Now, I look back on that and I’m so glad that that happened despite it being a big financial cost for us and an emotional cost. My husband and I still look at our wedding because we did end up having it. It was a lovely day, it was beautiful and all that stuff, but I look back on the wedding and think, “I could have gone without it.” He looks back on our wedding and he’s like, “I’m so glad we did it.” It’s tricky in that way because we have very different feelings off of our wedding, but for me, I learned in that experience now, I know for sure, without a doubt, what it feels like in my body when something is a no.

I’ve just grown that muscle over and over again. It even happened, gosh, about a year ago. We had a pipe burst in our house. So we had all these contractors we had to bring in to fix different things. My husband ended up taking over a lot of that project just because we had just had the baby and I was nursing and all that stuff.

One time, a contractor came in, the first few minutes of him walking in, all I got was, “No, no, no, he is not a good fit.” We ended up hiring him and it was just a one-day quick project. He did a horrible job, he completely overcharged us. Again, it was just a learning lesson of I know exactly what it feels like in my body now when something is a no and when something is a yes.

Start to figure that out with yourself now, and to be honest, this takes time, it takes a lot of trial and error. My goal today in this episode is just to open your mind to this concept of understanding your body because I want you to start to make decisions and step back and say, “Okay, how does that feel in my body?” Start to track patterns of, “Oh, okay, every time I make this decision, it feels this way in my body, and then this result happens from it. That means that I’m leading down this path I don’t want to versus when I feel this, it goes to this way and I felt this way.”

Just start to use your body as a tool to understand that because, as I said, it’s going to be a trial and error, you’re going to make mistakes along the way. I’m still making mistakes along the way, but I make a lot, lot less mistakes now because I just listened to my body right away of, “Oop, yes, this is a great decision,” versus “Oop, no, this is not a good fit for me.” I don’t wallow in that. I just hear it, I understand it, and I move forward most of the time. What I hear from a lot of women that I coach is they’re not listening ever. They don’t even know that they can use their bodies to do this. That’s one of the big things I’m teaching them. You start to understand you.

Now let me give you an example of times that I’ve listened to my body and what that’s felt like for me so you can understand yourself. When I had my daughter, for example, when I found out I was pregnant with her, everyone around me was freaking out including her dad. He was having a moment. I knew my parents were going to just be so disappointed because I wasn’t married and blah blah blah blah blah but in my body, everything was, “Yes, this is a yes.” Even though mentally I was scared to death.

This is where it can get hard sometimes. As in certain parts of our body, especially our head can say something different than our body can say. It is a game that you just have to test with. Because I can think of times in my past with different men of my body might have been like, “Yes, oh yes, go date this guy,” but my head was like, “Lindsay, this is so bad for you.” What happened later is my body knew when it was time to end it. Of, “Okay, you had your fun, let’s move on with this,” but then I just didn’t continue to listen to my body with that.

Anyways, going back to my daughter, in that moment, it was a yes, “All systems go, we are doing this.” My head was scared to death but I was like, “No, we are absolutely doing this. You got this, Lindsay, moving forward with it.” I’m so glad I listened to that. I’m so glad I didn’t let other people influence me during that time to not have her because there probably would have been something that I would have regretted because, to me, it was a very authentic choice to have her. Still, the way that I raise her now and certainly, I make mistakes from time to time, I do something,

I’ll discipline her a certain way and then I feel in my body, and I think, “Oh, that wasn’t the right choice.” Then I know of, okay, well, here is the right choice and I’m always listening with my body with that. For a lot of times, when it’s a yes, again, for me, it just feels like these green lights. I’m always thinking of chakra work. I know chakra work to some may be really woo-woo, it may be against your beliefs. For me, it’s really helped me understand these energy centers that are in our bodies, starting from our root chakra, which is down your tailbone, all the way up to the crown of our heads. Understanding, how to feel those, how to open those up, how to, again, use my body to understand how I feel, and where I should go and understand those things.

I really encourage you to go look up chakra work if that’s something of interest to you because it can really help you start to understand how to use your body more to make decisions. Again, this is something I do teach when somebody is working with me now. If somebody is against the beliefs of doing chakra stuff, we don’t go there but yes, we do talk about chakras. You can learn it on your own as well. When I have listened to my body, again, it’s just been a really great experience of like I said earlier, you have to make a decision, sit with it in your body, and then see what the outcome is.

I’ll give you an example of what I’m doing with a client right now who’s in this pickle of trying to make decisions. She had to make a really big decision with a family member recently of communicating with this person or not. She was always looking to me to make the decision for her. I was putting it back on her. I was like, “No, you know the answers.” She would go into her journal about it and let it feel in her body and then she would send me something and say, “Well, this is what I want to say.”

I’d write back and say, “Well, how did that feel?” Then she would sit in that and then she would say, “Well, I feel like maybe I need to make a shift here with this.” Okay, great. Then I’d be like, “Okay, well, how does that feel when you make that shift?” Again, what I’m doing there is I’m just asking those simple questions, how does it feel, how does it feel, how does it feel, and giving her that space to feel it in her body to say, okay, we need to shift it here and then we need to shift it here. What happened was, in those few days that we were tweaking what she wanted to say to this person, she was able to come up with something that felt really good to her about moving forward.

What she learned was actually something much bigger than just making that decision. She started to learn how to use her body and her feelings in that body to make decisions. Now, she has that little bitty power back of, “Oh, okay, I remember when I made that really big choice, how can I apply that in these smaller decisions I’m making every day?” Which is simple things of, “Should I get this lunch or this lunch? Should I do this or should I do this tonight?”

I hear from so many women too that they don’t even know what fun is anymore, they don’t even know how to listen to themselves. It kills me. I’m just so grateful I get to work with them to turn that back on because for so many of them, they’ve done things like people-pleasing for so long. Again, that inner mean girl has come out and they just don’t even know themselves anymore. It’s so important that we get in there and we learn who we are and then, again, learn our bodies.

Hopefully, you’re following me today on this one. I know this one could be over some people’s heads because it is a little bit more advanced and it does require more work. It requires self-awareness and not everybody has that just out of nowhere. You have to cultivate that. It’s so important we have self-awareness, not only for ourselves but for our family. So we’re not running around triggered all the time and making these stupid choices because when we’re making great, smart, authentic choices, we feel good, our family feels good, our world feels good. There are stats even show that we’re better managers in that way, not only professionally, but of course, in our households and for ourselves.

Self-awareness really is the core of everything in my mind. It’s just so important that we know who we are and where we want to go and then adding in the body piece. I know that’s just more than what I can give you on this 20, 30-minute podcast today. I just want to open your mind enough to know you can use your body to help you in so many ways and when you’re experiencing these health things over and over again, especially there’s something there.

One of my absolute favorite books out there is You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay. The reason I love this book is because she talks about what’s going on mentally for you to create certain health problems. For some, I know it’s really woo-woo and out there, but I found it to be so true in my life. The way I was introduced to this book was actually from one of my coaching buddies, shout out to Judy Eichhorst, who helped me during my wedding. You remember when I told you that I was just depressed. I didn’t know what was going on. I was having all these stomach issues.

I’m not going to get into details but it wasn’t pretty. She said, “Hey, have you ever heard of this book by Louise Hay?” I said, no and she’s like, “Well, stomach issues are about falling off track and feeling like you’re not on the right pathway and things of that sort.” I was like, “Yes, that’s exactly how I feel.” We were able to use that to open up what the problem was is that I didn’t want the wedding. It was just so big for me because I do think sometimes we can read certain things or we see patterns in ourselves and then all of a sudden, we start this self-fulfilling prophecy of, “Okay, when I feel this way with this person, that means they’re going to be a cheater,” or, “That means they’re going to be this,” and, “Oop, there they are. That’s what happened.” It’s hard to know sometimes what comes first, the chicken or the egg, right? In instances where those things happen where like I said, with the wedding, I didn’t know what’s going on, she brought the book. It was like, “Yes, that’s exactly how I felt.” I just didn’t know it.

That’s where the magic of tools like that can help because there was no way you could have a self-fulfilling prophecy or manifest that. It just happened to be true. That’s what made me a big believer in that book, and I’m always going toward it. Even just recently, my kids got sick. We had a cold or they had a cold and then I was doing so well, I didn’t get it. Normally, I don’t get it when my kids get sick. Then a family member came over and was really irritating me. What happened was, I didn’t even really get congested or get the depth of their colds, but I got a sinus infection from it.

When you look up sinus infection in Louise’s book, it’s minor irritation with a close family member or someone that’s close to you. I was like, “Oh, my gosh. Once again the book is right.” I just really use that tool to help me to sometimes understand, “Okay, what’s going on in my body? What is my body trying to tell me that I need to clean up in my world?” I know I’m throwing a lot at you here but I do want to cover one more thing before I go today. That’s examples of times when it’s tough to decipher.

I must admit, even though I’ve been doing this work for a while now of understanding myself and my body and the yeses and the nos, there are still times that I don’t know and there are still times that I get it wrong. It happens a lot with relationships that I had before I did coaching work, to be honest. Because I had gone so many years not listening to myself or not knowing how to listen to myself, to be honest, that now when I’m with them, I go into old patterns or just an old way of thinking even if I’ve had time apart from them. It’s harder for me to decipher, “Okay, should I stay in this relationship, should I change this relationship?”

It’s really hard especially with my family of origin to decipher certain things sometimes. That’s where I’ll lean on my husband because he’s really great because he’s not so close to those relationships or my own life coach and we’ll decipher through things. I’ll pull out my journal. My journal can really help sometimes when I don’t know how to decipher through things because I can tap into different parts of my logical brain to help me decipher through things. My body, again, it’s hard to feel it because I had gone so long not knowing what was good and what was bad. Does that make sense?

Even to be honest with you, I still struggle in my relationship with my husband to decipher, “Should I be putting up with this or not putting up with this? It’s little things with him of– I’ve mentioned in other podcasts he has some OCD tendencies. Sometimes I think, “I should just love and accept him as is.2 Then some days I’m like, “Hmm, I don’t know if I should have a boundary with this or not.” It’s gotten to a place where I’m tired of not being able to decipher in those moments, the decisions. We have hired an outside relationship coach to help because I haven’t even been modeled to good relationships in my life.

I’ve never really seen a relationship where I’m like, “Yes, that’s exactly what I want.” That can help to allow us to make decisions toward authenticity and what we want because we have a model for that. It’s just such a process. I hope you’re getting some great takeaways from today’s episode because it’s one of those topics, again, where it’s just like a bigger process than what I can give you today Really my ultimate goal for doing this was for you to understand, hey, your body’s there, your body’s a resource, listen to it and maybe look up some chakra work, maybe look up Louise Hay’s book You Can Heal Your Life, maybe it’s time to do some coaching with me to really understand your body more. I don’t know. Just know your body’s there and your body’s always giving you messages. If you’re continuously not listening to those messages, it’s going to create more problems in your life versus if you know how to listen to that, you become so unstoppable, so on fire, so amazing.

I’ve done really well at developing the muscle of decision-making with clients. I have a process where we do a consult call, and I know the feelings now when somebody is yes and I know when somebody is a no. I will tell them on that call. I did it just last week. Somebody got on the call and I was like, “You know what? I just don’t think this is a good fit.” It took me some time of understanding how to understand my body and how it felt when somebody was a yes and where that was going to lead in the coaching process versus when somebody is a no and what was going to lead to other results in the process.

Again, it’s going to take time. It’s going to take you just going out there and failing and failing and succeeding and failing and succeeding and failing. Just knowing that you can use this body of yours to help you make choices. It’s so empowering and so amazing and so awesome to be able to have this resource to help you. When you’re not listening to it, that’s where a lot of health problems can come on and you’re just not feeling good about life because your body’s screaming at you, “Hey, we need to change something, hey, hey. hey,” but we just don’t know how to change that.

This is one of those episodes where I was like, “I would love to say what are your takeaways?” This is what I do with client calls sometimes and I’m like, “What are you taking away from the call today?” It’s one of those I’m like, “I wonder what the listener is thinking right now.” Again, hopefully, you’re walking away with some great stuff. If you’d love to give me feedback on this episode, I would love it. Send me an email, [email protected]. Now if you know you want to start coaching with me, you want to take my free coaching assessment to see if we’re a good fit and then we’ll do a consult call, go to lindsayepreston.com/assessment. You can go take that and we can start exploring if working together is right.

That’s all I have for today, my friend. I hope it was helpful for you. I hope you’re walking away with some takeaways, some aha moments. I’m just so grateful you’re here and you’re taking in this stuff because in some world, this stuff is out there. Listening to our bodies, how interesting, how weird? A fun fact for you is that I’ve been doing some research on the Bible lately and it’s been shown that certain passages or verses from the Bible have been taken out that show how our bodies are so powerful, and listening to our bodies. Words out of Jesus’ mouth that were taken out because different kings and dictators along the way said, “We don’t want people to understand their bodies. We need them to look at us and have control over them.” It’s unfortunate. I encourage you to go google it and look it up yourself to find some of those resources if you’re still on the fence of, “I don’t know, Lindsay.” It’s been very interesting how we’ve been programmed not to trust our body when our body is so powerful.

I’ll leave it at that. Until next time, my friends, remember, you’re only as unstoppable as you believe you can be. So believe in yourself, you got this.