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MASTER YOUR MINDSET w/ Tess Brigham, Therapist & Life Coach

Discover from therapist and life coach, Tess Brigham what you need to do with your mind in order to create your most fulfilling life.

MASTER YOUR MINDSET w/ Tess Brigham, Therapist & Life Coach

Apr 15, 2019 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

“A negative feeling is just a feeling. You don’t need to believe it. You don’t need to act on it. You don’t need to do anything with it. Just accept it, sit with it, be okay with it and move forward.” – Tess Brigham

We all strive for things in our external world. A nice house, clothes we feel good in, a partner we adore, and maybe even a kiddo or two to make us feel like we’ve “made it”.

While all the external things are nice, there’s only one thing you’ll have no matter what in life: YOU.

And, what’s the most important part of you?

Your brain, of course. Particiularly your mindset.

The thoughts you have impact your feelings and your feelings impact your actions. When you learn to MASTER your thoughts and feelings, EVERYTHING in your world can change.

Helping you change your world is exactly what therapist and life coach, Tess Brigham can help you do on today’s episode.

IN THIS EPISODE, TESS AND I DISCUSS…

  • Tess’ quarter-life crisis at age 27
  • What’s the most powerful tool to create a happy & fulfilling life
  • What we learn as kids about our emotions that harms us greatly
  • What to do with your “negative” feelings when they happen
  • How to decrease your distractions
  • What to do if you feel like your mind is a scary place
  • What to do if you fear having a lack of control in your life
  • The power of fear in your life & how to make it your friend
  • The “middle school” mentality that sticks around in our mindset & why it needs to go
  • Coaching vs. therapy: what to do when

Tess has a very grounded energy that I adore. She knows her stuff and I predict that this episode is one you’ll be referring a lot later.

Be sure to listen to the episode on the link above.

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Apply to coach with me

Continue the conversation in my free online community

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Tess Brigham’s website

Tess Brigham’s Instagram

Tess Brigham on Facebook

Tess Brigham on Twitter

Kicking Ass in your 20s FREE workbook

Full transcript:

Episode 7: MASTER YOUR MINDSET

This is the Become an Unstoppable Woman podcast with Lindsay Preston Episode 7, Master Your Mindset.

[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 in training. I am so happy you are here joining me for yet another episode of this podcast. Today, I am interviewing the incredible Tess Brigham, and she is going to be talking about mastering your mindset. Particularly, on this interview, we’re going to be talking about how to understand your mindset in a way where you feel more powerful and more in tune with who you are.

Specifically, why I brought Tess on the show is, Tess is a life coach, and she is a therapist. In this episode, we’re talking about what are some normal coaching type thoughts of, if you’re having thoughts like this, maybe coaching is a better fit for you versus if you’re having thoughts or feelings like this, maybe therapy is a better fit for you? Again, we’re talking about that on the show today, but also we’re just talking about a lot of times these feelings and these emotions that we have, we think we are so weird or different or alone, or that our feelings are just too much for us to handle, when in reality, it’s just, we haven’t learned appropriately how to understand our feelings and process them.

Again, that’s one of the big things Tess and I are talking about today with feelings and fear and all that stuff. I really love this interview. I liked Tess’s energy a lot. Tess has very grounded energy. It’s a very chill interview, but very jam-packed with a lot of information. I hope you love it. I hope you take away something really powerful from this conversation. Too, I hope you hear about Tess’s information at the end of this episode so that you can reach out and contact her as well if you feel called to. Here’s my interview with Tess, I hope you enjoy it.

Hey, Tess. I am so excited to have you on the podcast today. I just want to jump right in, since we’re talking about mastering your mindset, I want to hear a little bit about your story. When was it in your life that you felt like you started to master your mindset and start to kick ass in your life?

Tess Brigham: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really happy to be here. It’s funny when I think about that, I think, “There isn’t one moment in time where everything–” [laughs] There wasn’t an “aha” moment of the heavens opened up, and I knew exactly what to do and how to do it all the time. It’s definitely been for me a journey starting when I had my own quarter-life crisis at age 27 of really stopping and thinking less about, “”What’s my goal? What’s my goal? If I achieve making this amount of money, or if I achieve this job title that I will be happy.” I kept attaching things like, “If I lose weight, I will be happy. If I make more money, I’ll be happy. If I’m in a relationship, I’ll be happy.”

At 27, it really all came crashing down on me. Since that time, I am older now-

[laughter]

Lindsay: Just by a little bit.

Tess: -just by a little bit. Since that time it’s been an ongoing process of, “Oh, I’m the only one in my head. I have the ultimate control on how I decide how things are going to be, how I think about them, how I feel about them,” and that people can take everything away from you, but they can’t take away what goes on in your head. It was this ongoing journey of, “Oh, wow, this is–” It evolves every year. How it looks and how I show up and all of that evolves. I don’t know if you’ve ever read the book, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

Lindsay: No.

Tess: It’s an amazing book where he talks about– he was in a concentration camp during World War II. It’s not a fun page-turner story. He survived because they stripped everything away from him. What he realized was, “I can survive because I created meaning for myself.” He would collect scraps of paper to start working on his manuscript. Again, he was a doctor. He would counsel some of the other people in the camp on their issues, obviously. It’s unbelievable what they were going through. He created meaning for himself, even in a place of torture. My feeling is that if he can get through that, I can get through any of this by really working on how I talk to myself.

Lindsay: How did you have that “aha”, Tess, to realize that it was in your head and how you talk to yourself?

Tess: Part of it was just melting down and realizing that something needed to change. I went to graduate school for counseling psychology, starting to study, starting to read these kinds of books and slowly and surely over the years, realizing that it was on me to decide how I’m going to show up to things, that it’s really about me taking personal responsibility for how I think and how I feel.

There isn’t one particular moment, but being in that program forces you to obviously look at yourself. I always tell people that you don’t have to go to graduate school, that it’s really about awareness and having awareness of what’s going on with you, having awareness of how you’re thinking, how you’re feeling, how you’re behaving.

Lindsay: So true. That brings me to this guide book that you have, Tess, Kicking Ass in Your 20s and Beyond: Adulting Made Easy. You talk about feeling the feels. Really stating this happened to your head in a whole new way and understand feelings, which we are not taught at all, how to do that in the normal world. Talk to us about feeling the feels and what that means to you and what that looks like.

Tess: Feeling the feels is really about starting from a place of acceptance. What happens is when we’re kids, we have these feelings and we feel sad, we feel mad, and instantly, I’m a parent myself, so I’m not here to blame parents, what kids learn very quickly is you’re having a negative feeling, you’ve got to figure out a way to either push it down, not deal with it, or really deal with it, really yell and scream, get it out there and be cathartic or whatever it is. We just don’t learn how to sit and manage our feelings.

The number one thing I see with my clients is they feel like just because they have a thought or a feeling that it’s true, that it’s something they need to act on. One piece that comes out a lot is around, I’m in a meeting and I feel really anxious and I feel like I’m not as smart as everybody else. I’m like, “That’s a feeling, that’s great, but you don’t need to believe it, you don’t need to act on it, you don’t need to do anything with it, you just accept it and sit with it and be okay with it and move forward.”

What I see with my clients is they have these feelings and they feel like, “Oh my God, I’m not feeling confident about myself, what’s wrong? What do I need to do to feel more confident? Okay, maybe it is something.” Then they start to go down that rabbit hole. If you stop yourself in that moment in time and accept the feeling, recognize it, accept it, you will be able to get through it much faster than anything else, and don’t put a ton of weight to it.

The other piece that I talk about is don’t run from the negative feelings because we tend to just focus on, “Oh, I’m working on being happy, I’m working on being satisfied, I’m working on this.” Your anger, your sadness, all those feelings are important. There are no good or bad emotions, just the emotions that you have. Just because you’re feeling angry doesn’t mean that you need to fix it, solve it, do something about it. It’s information.

To feel the feels is really about gathering the information from your life, and that information is telling you something. If you find that every day you show up to work with a pit in your stomach, then it’s not about you making more money, it’s not about you working harder, that there is something going on with you. That’s information. What are you going to do with that information?

Lindsay: Yes, it’s so true of as kids, we’re programmed either good or bad, good or bad. We’re taught that, too. It’s like, “You’re a bad boy,” or, “You’re a bad girl if you do da-da-da-da-da-da.” We have to switch that programming. There is no good or bad in regards to emotion, it’s all information, like you just said, which sounds so easy, on paper, right?

Tess: Yes.

Lindsay: What I find, Tess, is we’re moving so quickly in our world, especially with our darn phones. We’re scrolling. We’re scrolling. We’re scrolling. So many times, I have walked away from my phone, and all of a sudden, I feel mad, or I feel some other emotion. I think, “Where did that even come from?” but because I was moving so quickly, even just through my scroll, something hit me, and I didn’t even realize it. I have to go back and say, “Okay, let’s backtrack. I was feeling fine until this thing.” With that said, Tess, and we’re moving so quickly in our world, we need to tap into our feelings more, what can we do to start to feel our feels in this busy world?

Tess: What I find so interesting is that now that we’re all attached to our phones that everybody is having to spend time working on detaching from the phone, [chuckles] doing something that we had never talked about in our society, which is learning to put the phone down and move away from it. I always start with trying to find some sort of practice of mindfulness, of meditation.

You hear the word “meditation”, and people want to run in the opposite direction because they feel like, “Oh God, that’s not me. I can’t quiet my mind.” I usually have people start with doing something, where they just detach from the phone and sit quietly and take a deep breath in, take a deep breath out, release the air, sit for a moment, and sit still with your thoughts and feelings.

Mindfulness and meditation are different. With meditation, what I love about it is that it’s a time in your day where you stop, you put everything down, and you’re able to recognize your thoughts that you’re having. “I’m thinking about my shopping list for later. I’m thinking about what I’m going to eat for dinner. I’m thinking about that meeting.” What you do is you just allow those thoughts to, in a balloon or a bubble, just float away from your mind, and then you bring yourself back to the breath. You’re going to have another thought, which is, “Oh God, how long is this going on for? Am I doing this right?” Then, you just allow that thought to go away and go off into the bubble.

What I find is, is that people who are able to sit down and do that, even for two to three minutes a day, what they start to learn is to be present in the present moment, but also what I was talking about earlier, attaching too much meaning to all the feelings because we have these feelings, we attach meaning to it, and then we want to analyze it and look into it. For two to three minutes a day, you’re going to have thoughts that you’re not going to act on, judge, think about, feel. You’re just going to let them float away.

Lindsay: I love how you said, “Not judge.”

Tess: Yes, that is a big piece because-

Lindsay: It’s so big.

Tess: -we judge everything, ourselves, and everyone. I read a– God, what’s the name of the book? I can’t remember it now. I remember this author said something like, “You can’t be judging someone else and loving yourself at the same time.”

Lindsay: Yes, so true.

Tess: Anytime you’re judging, either whether it’s yourself or someone else, you think you’re feeling better or superior, but you’re not, you’re being tough with yourself and the people around you. It’s only doing you in.

Lindsay: It goes back to that, I don’t know, what you want to call it, strategy, theory, whatever, that says, “Whatever you judge in other people, it’s really what you’re judging in yourself.”

Tess: Yes, absolutely.

Lindsay: When I heard that at first, I was like, “I don’t get it. Tell me more.” At the time, this is when Paris Hilton was really big, I was like, “I think she’s trashy.” And it was like, “Then you see trashiness in yourself.” I was like, “No, I don’t. I do not.” [chuckles] It’s so interesting when we start to explore our minds and go beyond just the surface of how much stuff can come up.

For a lot of people, Tess, they fear that so much. They do not want be with their thoughts. That’s when they pick up their phones, or these distractions, or it’s food, or it’s going out, or whatever. We all have our distractions or toys. To that person, who is like– they’re secretly fearing what they may find, what do you have to say to that?

Tess: That it feels scary in the moment, but getting to the other side is worth it. It is absolutely worth it that we are it. You, yourself, the people that come into your life, who come and go, and even those your family, your partners, yes, they’re there for long term, but in the end, we’re really going through life on our own. We are seeing it through our own eyes. We’re doing it on our own. There is something of, I know it feels scary to sit with yourself and sit with the thoughts, but that the work is worth it. I think that the older I get and the more I look at myself and the more I’m willing to turn inward, the happier I get, the more satisfied I feel, the stronger I feel.

That’s what we tend to do. We tend to look outward for things. Really, everything is inward. We know what we like and don’t like. We know what makes us happy and unhappy. We know what makes our heart sing. It’s not about looking outside of it to do it. The problem is that having a drink, buying a new shirt, hooking up with some random stranger, all of that is very exciting in the moment and fun, and it does something. That’s the part I think that’s so hard is that it is hard to sit with your feelings, it is hard to sit with these complicated things.

That’s why I tell people to start with two or three minutes a day of sitting with them. Don’t start with an hour. [chuckles] It’s too much, but start from a place of building it up because you will eventually get there and your mind won’t be such a scary place.

Lindsay: It’s so true. I wish you can see me, Tess, because I’m like, “All praise hands” over here. I’m like, “Yes, yes, yes, it’s so true.” It’s so funny because there’s been so many months I do this goal planner every month, called Power Sheets. At the beginning, it says, “What are you fearing for the month?” There have been months, Tess, that I’ve put down my fears, and those fears have come true.

If I had a launch and it ended up not doing well, I’m like, “I’m scared I’m going to lose this money.” I ended up losing the money, but then, after the fact, I was like, “What I created in my mind was so much scarier than me actually doing it and actually facing it.” That brings me to the next point of what you have in your guidebook, where it says, “Make fear your friend.” Tell us about that.

Tess: Yes. I use this description, which is that you have to think about fear as not driving the car that you’re in, but riding as a passenger. You cannot get rid of fear. I think what happens is, is that we either really try to get rid of any fear, try to control our lives, this I see a lot, which is, “I’m going to control my life as much as I can so that nothing unexpected could happen, nothing new, and nothing that I can’t control, so that way I won’t be fearful, I won’t be anxious, I’ll be fine.”

Or I see people who swing to the other side, which is that everything is fear-based, everything they do is based on anxiety and fear. They feel like, “I don’t have a choice. I just have to keep running. I just have to keep listening to the fear.” What I say is that you cannot get rid of anxiety and fear, we need it. It’s important. It’s part of our DNA. We have this thing in our brain called an amygdala that gets activated when we sense danger, and we either get into fight, flight, or freeze mode. We need that. It’s the same thing that, when we start to skid in a car, we get that feeling inside of ourselves and everything slows down and we’re able to really stop and course correct. We need this part of ourselves.

We can’t get rid of it completely but you need to be the driver. Don’t run from it and don’t pretend it’s not there but make it your friend. Accept it. See it. Sometimes you’re going to feel a feeling of, “Boy, I don’t want to do this presentation. I feel fear.” Think of the fear as your friend and go, “Thank you. I appreciate you showing up. This means that this is important to me and I care, but I’m still going to go ahead and do it.”

What fear does to people all the time is that it prevents us from doing so many of the things in our lives that we really, really want to do. We tend to think that so-and-so they’re always out and about doing stuff thinking they never have any fear. It’s like, of course they do. We all have fear. The difference between someone who’s out there doing it and you is that they didn’t let their fear run their life. They made fear their friend. They said, “Thank you. Great. I’m going to go.”

There’s a great book called Emotional Agility. I think it’s Dr. Susan Brown. I hope I got her name right. She has this great quote and I use it a lot which is, “Courage isn’t the absence of fear. Courage is fear walking.”

Lindsay: That’s so true.

Tess: That’s what I say to people. It’s like, “Okay acknowledge the fear. That’s great and then keep going because it’s always going to be there.” Even the people that you see who seem so confident and so with it they’re scared. It’s never easy.

Lindsay: I can’t stand that when people sometimes I’ll meet them and they’ll say, “Oh you got to do that, Lindsey,” or, “You have this,” or, “You have that.” I’m like, “You have it too. I’m not some super woman here. This is just me making the choice of, ‘I’m going to do this no matter what even though I feel so scared and I’m going to do it anyway.’ ” I think for me the biggest thing I’ve had to get over initially at least when I started doing personal development work was just the fear of feeling my feelings, to be honest. Do you encounter that a lot too, Tess, with people?

Tess: Oh, yes. I experienced it myself which is, we have a lot of feelings that we don’t really love about ourselves. What you said earlier about what we see in other people, that judgment, we have those feelings and those fears. It is much harder to look inward and take ownership of, “There’s a part of me that feels really jealous of this person,” and own that and acknowledge it than, “I’m just going to trash them and be judgmental,” and all of that. It takes a lot more time and energy to do that, but in the end it is a much happier better place to be because I always say it’s very freeing.

If you’re not so attached to managing your anxieties, if you’re not so attached to always pushing down your feelings, you’re really, finally free to be able to experience things but also be free to focus on other things. Some people their whole lives are just bogged down with, “Oh my God. Oh my God. How do I look? How do I feel? What are people thinking of me?” It’s like, “No.” I always say, we are very self-involved creatures. We are so self-involved. People do not care what people think. They don’t care.

Lindsay: I remember my first therapist telling me that, was like, “Lindsay, people are in their own world and they’re not really just sitting around thinking about you.” It was like, “What?” It’s so true which brings us to the next point of stop worrying what other people think. It goes back to again when you’re in this whole self discovery process, you realize at the end of the day how much you really do care but how freeing, like you said, it can be to let that go.

Tess: You know what it is? The thing is that we get conditioned. What’s so hard is, at a point in all of our lives whether we’re in middle school or high school, there was a time where everybody was paying attention. Do you know what I mean? In middle school and high school, we were really paying attention to what everybody wore and what people were doing. I think it got less and less, but I think that we keep that middle school mentality with us for so long thinking that when we walk into work everybody’s really analyzing what we’re wearing that day and what we said and who we hung out with and and all of that. Nobody is.

I always tell people why that person sneered at you, or why this person doesn’t like you, why your boss is mad, it’s got nothing to do with you. It’s got everything to do with them. It’s their own stuff that unfortunately it’s not okay. They’re unfortunately taking out on you. Listen, we all take things personally, but it’s hard to just really detach from how other people are treating you as being the truth because it’s not the truth.

Lindsay: What you said there, if anybody’s listening who’s never heard that before, I’m going to go back and I’m going to repeat it, is whatever somebody is doing to you is really something that’s about them. It’s not about you. I remember the first time I heard that I had to really think about that for a couple of days, if not weeks and understand that. It is so freeing, like you said earlier, to live that way and realize when someone’s being a jerk to you it’s not about you. Many people just personalize and take it in. Gosh, it is not a way to live at all. It’s horrible. Oh my gosh.

Tess, I want to get back into talking about when you were saying about feelings. You were saying, “Feel the feels,” and sometimes we feel these anxieties. Sometimes we go through these periods of maybe depression. If somebody is listening and they’re like, “How do I know what help I need to get? Is this a therapy issue or a coaching issue?” Because this whole personal development world is blowing up but it’s very unknown of, “Where do I need to go?” What would you say to someone since you do both? How can they figure out where to go?

Tess: The majority of what people struggle with is– accommodate is depression and anxiety. Depression shows up as unable to eat or sleep, or eating too much, and sleeping too much, unable to get out of bed, feeling loss of interest in things that you used to love, and feeling really, in a very dark place of like, “Maybe, what would life be like if I wasn’t here?”

I will say that there are a lot of people who don’t know that they’re depressed because they’re getting up and going to work every day. Even though you’re getting up and going to work and doing the things that you do, if you are going home and putting the covers over your head and not getting out of bed until the next day, when you’re letting things pile up and the things that you used to love you’re not doing, that is depression. If you feel like you’re experiencing those kinds of symptoms, you want to go see a therapist.

The same with anxiety. We all have anxiety, as I said. None of us are ever going to be able to get rid of it. If you’re having panic attacks where you feel like you might be having a heart attack or dying, if you’re anxious in every single aspect of your life to the point where you’re not eating, not sleeping again not taking care of yourself, you don’t even need to be having panic attacks per se, but feeling these moments of sheer panic where you can’t do the things that you need to do, that’s anxiety.

What I always tell people who come out and who reach out to me is I’m really evaluating and asking questions. A good therapist or a good coach should be able to really tell you, “No, this is what you need. No, this is what you don’t need.” If you’re experiencing something or if you have a history of mental health issues, I always tell people to start with the therapy because that’s usually what is going on.

I say that people who want or need coaching are at a point in their lives where they still have the fear, it’s still there, but they’re at a point where they are doing well in their lives that they have a goal that they want to reach, that they want to take their career to the next level, they want to have better relationships. I always say that therapy is really about what’s happening to you today and how the past has affected you. Coaching is about where you are today and where is it that you want to go in the future?

Coaching is great for anybody who’s very action-oriented, who likes to have goals and homework and direction. If you feel like you’re in a point in your life where you’re able to manage your emotions well on a day-to-day basis, but there’s something from your life that you’re missing or you need that extra push or you need that mindset help, where you’re showing up to work and you feel good about it, but you keep getting into your head every single day and that’s not working for you, coaching’s a great place for that.

I know that it’s really tricky for people to understand the two. I always tell people that ask a lot of questions. Any good therapist, any good coach will spend some time with you on the phone and ask you these kinds of questions about where you’re at, how you’re feeling and what’s going on to get a sense of, where it is that you fit in, in that.

In my practice, in San Francisco, I’m a therapist but I do incorporate a lot of coaching techniques. What I tell people there is, “The therapy piece is really looking at the underlying issues and how your childhood affects you today, the thoughts and beliefs and the thought patterns and behavior patterns that you’re experiencing today. That’s the beginning work,” and that the coaching work is really the other side of it, which is really looking at how do you take things to the next level?

I’ve certainly had clients that were in therapy and also working with a coach at the same time. I think that, if you have the time and the resources to be able to do it that’s awesome.

I don’t know, Lindsay, you might have a different feeling on this. I think that you do have to do the work first. Coaching’s not really going to work if you’re still really struggling with some some traumas and things that happened to you in your childhood.

Lindsay: I completely agree. Even things that we wouldn’t necessarily designate this trauma. For example, I’ve had clients who her trauma was, there was a girl on a soccer field who called them a bitch once and that has just played in their minds without them even knowing it. We had to look at the past and those thought patterns to be able to again address the present and move forward.

I incorporate some of that in my practice, Tess, a little bit of that, and it sounds like you have a hybrid of that as well. Some people they have a lot of trauma. I’ve had especially, early on in my coaching career, people who were highly abused and they thought, “Okay, I’m ready. I’m ready. Yes, I’ve gone to some therapy but I’m ready for coaching,” they got into it and they really weren’t ready yet. They needed more work with that.

I love what you said their, Tess, is that a good therapist and coach will ask you a lot of questions and be able to help you go the right way because as I’ve been doing this for years now, I know those questions to ask, the difference between the two. I really loved what you said there, that a lot of people think, “Okay, I’m having these thoughts to doing these things,” and they initially go to therapy.

That’s what I did back in the day was because I didn’t know about coaching. When I did know I thought it was totally bullshit, what was out there. As I went to therapy and then it was just like, “Okay, see you next week,” I wanted more. I had this yearning of, “I need more action oriented steps. I need that homework you said.” You got a little bit of drive. Yes,

you may have anxiety, yes, you may have some bouts of sadness and all those feelings and stuff, but really what I needed at that time was someone to say what you have said on this podcast which is just gold, I hope as a listener you’re taking this in, is I needed that therapist to say, “You’re just feeling feelings and that’s okay,” versus, “What was wrong with me? Why do I feel this? I don’t know.” There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just feeling feelings.

Tess: Again, I’m much older. I have stuff from my childhood that still it hurts when I think about it today. It’s difficult and it’s tough and it will never go away. It’s a wound, but I’m not in the trauma of it. That’s the part people have to remember which is you’re never going to get to a place– We keep thinking that we’re all going to get to some place where everything is gone and no pain and no nothing. That’s not the goal. The goal isn’t to be painless.

You need your pain because if you don’t have pain you don’t know what the flip side is. You can’t experience great joy without experiencing great sadness. The pain is important. It’s how much that pain is affecting you on a daily basis and it’s how much it’s ruling your life. There’s a big difference between someone who has this deep pain and trauma, who is feeling like, “I can’t get up in front of this room of people,” versus someone who’s feeling like, “Oh my gosh, this is really scary. I don’t want to do this.” That’s the part that is really, really tricky.

Again, I always tell people that a good coach, a good therapist will be able to identify it and help you and point you in the direction. Again, I always say feel those feels when you’re with this person. If you’re with the therapist and you’re like, “No, I need more from this,” then talk to the therapist about it. Some of it is you have to trust your own instincts. If you are with a coach, and you feel like, “Oh my God, I’m going into these really raw places but my coach keeps giving me homework and I can’t do the homework,” then it’s time to take a step back and go to a therapist.

Lindsay: Yes. Again, I love what you said that you’ve got to trust your intuition, which is what we’re talking about so much on the podcast. Go with your gut, whatever feels right, and don’t be scared to say something to them because that was something that I take blame for back– I say, “Oh, therapist, I wish you would’ve done that,” but I wasn’t sharing with her, “Hey, I want more. I need something else.” I just kept thinking, “I’m just not doing this right,” or whatever it was.

Again, what Tess gave you today is just the start of what she even offers in her free guide. You guys have got to go download this guide because I have it, I downloaded it and I was blown away, that it is so good, Tess. I cannot believe you’re giving it away for free.

Tess: Oh, thank you.

Lindsay: Where can somebody go to find you and find the guide if they want it and all that stuff?

Tess: You can go to my website which is tessbrigham.com, and you can download the free workbook, the guide book. If you can get on my mailing list, I’ll let you what I’m up to in the future. I have lots of things in the works. If you’re interested in coaching and you think it’s right for you, lots of times I do this session. It’s on my website, if you go to it, which, I think it’s testbrigham.com/workwithme.

It’s a one-hour session with me. It’s paid, but really, the idea of it is and I still believe this, which is, it’s an opportunity for you and I to get to know each other, where we can start the work. You complete a questionnaire. I read through it. I know exactly what it is that you want to work on. We talk, we work on it and then I give you resources and homework and homework assignments. Then I check in with you a couple of weeks later to see how it’s going.

It’s a really great opportunity. It’s how I love to work, which is a great opportunity for you and I to get to know each other for you to be able to go, “I’m ready for this. This is what I want to do. I want to work more,” or to go, “This was good. I solved the problem. That’s it. That’s all I needed.” I also find, I’m sure you find this too, where people feel like they have so many problems and you’re like, “It really is just one or two things.” It feels so overwhelming in your mind but sometimes I find, over the years, that someone, they just needed an hour to download to someone and help them contain it and ground them and-

Lindsay: Feel the feels.

Tess: -feel the feels, exactly. That’s a way to work with me in a very low, what’s the word for it? low cost, low commitment way to get to know each other.

Lindsay: I hope, if you feel called to go work with Tess that you do. Go download her guide book because, like I said, it’s really good. The design of it is really pretty too. You will be glad that you got this. Keep up with Tess because she is creating some amazing things in the world. Tess, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s such a pleasure.

Tess: Thank you. It was so fun. Thank you so much.

Lindsay: All right, my friends, that is the end of the sixth episode, my interview with Tess. I hope you loved it. Now, in two weeks or so, I will be back with another episode on May 1st. This episode is one I’ve been researching for months now. I’m going to be talking about toxic femininity. I’m going to be giving you some specific things to know if, A, you are a toxic female and, two, how to change that. It’s a very powerful episode, so I hope you’ll come back and you will join me for that one. Again, thanks so much for tuning in today. Until next time, all my love and blessings. Remember, you’re only as unstoppable as you believe you can be. Believe in yourself. You got this.

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Hi! I'm Lindsay

Hi! I’m Lindsay Elizabeth Preston. I’m a certified & trauma-informed life & leadership coach who has spent the last decade helping successful women create lives that feel as good on the inside as they look on the outside by using my neuroscience-backed coaching process called, Awakened Woman.


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