I'm not sure what to say...

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Hello and welcome to Shedding the Bitch Radio, where you can discuss, debate, and get advice on how to discover and shed the bitches of fear, insecurity, self-doubt, and negative mindsets so you can realize your dreams and life purpose and create and accelerate the riches you want in life. Join us here live every Tuesday at noon Eastern and dialogue with us at 818-572-2910. You can also chat with us at BlogTalkRadio.com/SheddingtheBitch or share share your stories on our website at sheddingthebitch.com. Whatever the bitch is that's holding you back from living your life to the fullest, it's not worth giving up the riches in life that you deserve. So call in now and let Bernadette Boas know what's holding you back.

818-572-2910.

Good day, good day, good day everyone! How are you on this Spring day. It is absolutely gorgeous here in Atlanta. The sun is out. The pollen is flying. So, yes, I still have my nasally voice as opposed to the typical deep-throated voice that I usually have. But it is absolutely beautiful. The flowers have bloomed and the sky is blue, and I hope it is wherever you might be. Around the world. And I do want to thank everyone because it's interesting when you do have radio/podcast and you can upload them to the streaming services as opposed to just a few years back, people were just simply kind of broadcasting them like I am here live on a plat— on an online platform, but not as easily— easily Easy to then just kind of go at them at any time that you want and just download them and listen to them on the go. And so I find it very interesting to see the statistics of where our listeners come from, and in the strangest and most unique of places as well. So I'm grateful for that, no matter where you are, what time zone you're in, and would always love, love, love, love, love to hear from you. At Shedding the Bitch on Facebook or Twitter. So always remember to be sure to do that because, as a matter of fact, is it next Tuesday? Are we already going to be hitting April? The first Tuesday of every month, we have an episode dedicated to your specific questions, stories, and challenges. We call it Ask Bernadette or Ask Me Anything, and you can in a variety of ways, reach out and let us know what kind of question you have, what story you might want to tell, or what challenge you might be having in any aspect of your life, whether it's your career, business, or life. And what I will do along with my posse of experts around the world is if I can't answer your question or address the challenge that you're having, then I will reach out to one of them to make sure that you get the support and the help that you need. Now, if you were to post it, say you were to post it on a Wednesday and we just had Ask Me Anything the day before. Well, what I will do is, because of course you know Deborah Parker of Parker House Virtual Services, she's always online with us. That's being on Twitter and Facebook and then at the same time here producing the show. So what we will do is we'll make sure it gets to me. Then I can get you an answer and a response in a very short period of time. If we have to go off of Facebook or Twitter because the response is too long or involved, then we do that. But then we might bring it right back here on the following First Tuesday of the month and dig into it even deeper. You can always call in and join us on the call so you can actually have an in-depth conversation about it. And/or you just take the information that we've shared across one of our social media platforms. The key is, the key is we want you to get the support and the community that you need to address whatever might be going on in your world. And like I said, it's about your career, business, and life. So what's the difference? Because I've been just recently asked this question. I always say career, business, and life, and someone said, well, why do you kind of— why isn't it just in your work or in your life? Well, Some people look at my book and look at the work that I do and think it's all about corporate, and yet it's not. I'm an entrepreneur myself, and I certainly know the challenges, and I work with a lot of entrepreneurs. So career, I'm kind of putting to corporate. Business, I'm putting to those people that work within their own company and/or if their employees work for a more independent small business, and then of course any aspect of your life. And like I said, I certainly don't claim to be an expert of all things, though I do know a nice cross-section of information. But so if I don't, I'm going to go and find that person. And many of you have listened to and/or engaged with the periphery of experts I've had on the program over the last, what, 5, 6, 7 years. So, and I always have new ones popping up as well. So be sure, if you do have something you're just working through, and even if you don't want to share your name or personal information, you don't need to, then reach out on Facebook and Twitter, or more anonymously, you can email me directly at BernadetteBoas@sheddingthebitch.com. I get majority of them through LinkedIn, write, you know, through a private message on LinkedIn. And then someone just tells me I either don't want my name shared or feel free to. So whatever it is, however it is, you can always reach us to ensure that you have the support in the community and the tribe, as many people would say. Of course, we have some great previous episodes that should you go to sheddingthebits.com, scroll down the homepage, you'll see the radio button there. And all of our episodes are posted there. You can go to blogtalkradio.com/sheddingthebitchradio, find them all there, or you can go to iTunes, and soon you'll be able to go to any number of the streaming services to find all of our episodes. Uh, the most recent ones— last week we talked about regret. I'm always challenged on the fact that I always say I don't have any regrets, I don't live in regret, So I thought that might be a topic of conversation that would be of interest to all of you, and obviously it has been. Then we talked previously about can a person really change? Can a bitch really change? I've been challenged on that actually as I'm on stage in presentations. Often when I ask the audience if they have any questions, I'm often asked, you know, do you think a bitch can really change? So we discussed that. We talked mentors, coaches, and sponsors in an earlier episode. We've talked about shedding the stuck bitch. If you are stuck in whatever degree that might look like for you, we talked about some tips and advice and things that you could be doing to kind of evaluate whether or not whatever state of being you're in if you're feeling lifeless or bored or sad or depressed, you know, is it just a matter of being stuck and what can you do about that? Now that episode in that conversation kind of segues into what we're going to talk about today, which is all about if you ever find yourself at a loss for words, and I don't only mean verbal. Though verbal can get translated onto paper. And I don't even mean the written word. I just mean if you all of a sudden just are looking to be creative or looking to come up with new ideas or looking to solve a problem that you're having and you're not necessarily stuck. You just don't— your head's foggy or as I experienced recently and that's why I thought it would be good to talk about it. I just kind of got up one morning, kind of sat down. I have a big deadline on my film treatment, and this— the, the writing coach that I'm working with— shout out to Phil Lebowitz, thank you very much. I found him on Upwork. If, if you've never used Upwork, you might want to check that out if you ever need to hire, um, some help. But excuse me, um, so I kind of was— I've been so excited in working with him over the last, uh, it's been about 3 weeks. Have a very aggressive timeline, and that was one that I imposed on myself, but it also impacted him, and he was just fine with it. And so I'm in this deadline where every day and a half I have to have content. I have to have pages of, in this case, my film treatment. And I woke up one day, and I certainly know what I need to write, and I certainly am excited about writing, but I went to look at the page, and it's not necessarily blank. I think I was 14, 15 pages into a document I expected it to be about 25. And I certainly knew the context of which I needed to write, and yet my brain— and I'm not even drinking, I have to tell you. You know, many of you know if you've listened to the program before, I gave up beer for Lent, and beer is pretty much what I'll drink. If I'm drinking martinis, then you know it's going to be a A fun-filled evening for sure. But anyway, so I just— I want, you know, there was no reason for it, and I just simply sat down, opened up my journal, and then had my laptop open. And I just couldn't put two words together. I just was void, vacant, a white sheet of paper within my head. And I thought to myself, Well, that's not good. And what's provoking this? And again, it's not about being stuck. And probably many of you, if you've been listening to the program since the beginning of the year, we've talked a lot about being stuck, and I've shared with you my story of that state of being that I was in for a good January, February, into March time period until I met this Phil and we started working together. You probably can even sense that I have a lot more energy. Ignore the hacking, the hacking of pollen and allergies, but I have a lot more energy. So I don't lack energy at the moment. I don't lack excitement. I even found the passion again toward what it is that I want to be doing. And now, or I was last week, finding myself at a loss for words. So I thought that would be a great conversation for today is just, you know, have you ever come up with— or have you ever found yourself in a situation where, you know, you simply have nothing to contribute? You get to work, maybe sit at your desk at home, and just nothing's coming to you. Now you can certainly do a lot of, you know, pushing the papers and responding to emails, but when it comes to really the not creative, I'm not expecting that you're there creating film scripts or books or whatever, but just you're not able to kind of put two points together. You know, you just have nothing to give or nothing to say. You're just blank. And I just thought maybe we can have that conversation, provide you some tips and advice, and ensure that you can put those in your little toolkits and if you're not dealing with that situation, should you in the future, you know, you could pull that little piece of paper out or whatever the case might be and have some, some things that you can leverage. So that's what we're going to be talking about. I'll explain and get into it shortly, but your rich question based on this— so if this is the first time you're listening to the program, we ground you with a rich question, we call them.— and it's a question that I really want you to always go inward. You know, I've learned over the last 10 years life is about self-awareness. Everything that goes on in your world is about communication, and the way you communicate is based on kind of the state of being that you are at any moment in time. So if you want to be more productive, if you want to be more creative, more effective, more kind, more grateful, more thankful, more successful, you need to be self-aware of the state of being that you're in at that very moment in time. And in today's world where we're just rushing through life without ever considering what really is going on between our ears and in our heart, we then beat ourselves up wondering why we're not as happy as we feel we deserve to be and want to be. So your rich question is something that will ground you in the discussion that we're having for a particular day, and it just so happens today being that we're talking about Lost for Words, your question to be thinking about as we talk is, what causes you to lose your words, lose your purpose, your meaning, your value, your creativity? It's not the big being stuck. It's just, you know, one day you wake up and you're foggy, and if you happen to immediately knee-jerk respond that you're hungover or that you're just tired or, you know, the kids are driving you nuts or whatever the reason might be, that's fine. And now you kind of are aware, so now you can make changes. So just think about it. What causes you to to kind of, you know, find yourself with a blank sheet in your mind. And if you want to Facebook and tweet with us, you can use hashtags #LostForWords or hashtag, as always, #ShedTheBitch. So when we get back— excuse me— when we get back, we'll dive into this conversation and we'll get you some tips and advice that you can use immediately so you can create the riches in life you deserve. We'll be right back.

You are listening to Shedding the Bitch Radio with Bernadette Boas. We are inspiring individuals around the globe to discover, confront, and shed their bitches of fear, insecurity, and negativity so they can create the riches in their career, business, and life they deserve. Be sure to check out Bernadette's book, Shedding the Corporate Bitch: Shifting from Bitch to Rich in Life and Business. Available on Amazon and sheddingthebitch.com. We also want to thank our sponsors: North Georgia Tax Solutions, who offers a broad range of tax services for small to corporate size clients. Go to ngtaxsolutions.com to learn more. And Parker House Virtual Services, who provides virtual assistance and social media support for small to medium size businesses. Email deborahparker@parkerhouseservices.com. Deborahparker.va@gmail.com for more information. To become a sponsor or advertiser on our program, email us at mediarelations@sheddingthebitch.com. Shedding the Bitch Radio airs every Tuesday at noon Eastern time. Be sure to go to blogtalkradio.com/sheddingthebitchradio and follow the program for all of the updates and announcements of our guests and show topics. Now let's return to Bernadette and Shedding the Bitch Radio.

Welcome back, everyone. Today's conversation is all about turning the tap on of your creativity, your great light bulb ideas, and kind of removing that time when you might just be feel like a blank sheet of paper or just very void and vacant and empty of just anything going on between your two ears. As a writer, and really I will say for any of you, and there's a large percentage of you nowadays with social media, the world is about content. The world is about expressing yourself nowadays. The world is about really kind of telling your story. And sharing what it is that you do in your life. And whether that's in pictures, in sharing other people's quotes, or your own unique quotes, whether it's doing videos, whatever the case might be, even if it's a podcast or a radio show, or just an article or a blog post. Between Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and Pinterest We're all expressing ourselves. And so now if you think about and kind of break this down all the way to that simplicity of just social media, you know, have you run into a situation where you've gotten in front of your laptop or your phone and you went to express yourself, whatever that might be, and yet you're like, hmm, I really want to respond to this post, but I really, what am I going to say? And I'll find myself when I do that, I'll be like, "Amen." Like that's the extent of my post when I feel this way is amen or great post or what a fantastic idea. Really nothing even worth me even posting. Just hit that like button and move on. But that's what kind of a simple way of you considering the question about at what times or what triggers you losing your words or losing your, you know, expression. And, you know, as a writer, I have to say it doesn't happen to me a lot, but it happens to me enough to where it is frustrating as hell. Like last week when here I have this deadline. I know exactly what I need to be writing. I know what I need to be writing. What I was having trouble with is how I wanted to express it. And of course, I could sit there and write sentences, which I started doing, and when you looked at it, it was very— it was very generic. It was very bland. It had nothing in it that, from a film script perspective, you know, anybody would ever look at. But I did— I just continued to write anyway, and I said, you know what, I'll just come back to it and beef it up.. But I wonder if you can relate to that, and, and if you can, then keep that in mind, and I'll share with you what my own coach— now Phil's my new writing coach. I've been working with him for the last 3 weeks. He's a film and TV writer, focus on the comedy side, a number of genres. But Joan, as many of you know, She's been my business/personal coach since 2009, and we meet every Monday afternoon. It's now changing because my writing schedule, but, um, you know, for the last, what, 10 years now, we've been meeting once a week for a half hour, hour at a time, and I get to leverage her as a sounding board and get advice and a motivator and a cheerleader and everything. And when it came to writing, because she's also an 8 or 9-time bestselling author in the fiction space. So she would often tell me when it came to writing and came to not writing blocks, but just this idea of, you know, not finding the words that you want to use to express yourself. She would tell me that the mistake I was making was I'm that type of person that every sentence that I write, I immediately go back over and start editing and fixing the grammar and making sure it's absolutely perfect. And she would challenge me day after day, month after month, year after year, because remember, I've written my book, I've written a number of other ebooks and whatnot, and then I've been working on this script for the last 3 or 4 years, and she would say you're causing this loss of words, not getting stuck, but this loss of words because you're trying to do 2 things at once. You're trying to multitask. And as much as we all, especially women, want to believe we can multitask, you really can't. Yes, can you chew gum and walk at the same time? That's one smartass response I'll get from people when I say this. Certainly you can do that. But think about it. If you're at your— if you're in your office and you're even thinking you're working on two projects at the same time, you're really not. You're moving from one project to another project, one project to another project, because each one of those have different requirements, different thought processes, different decisions. So you might feel as if you're working on two different things, but you're actually only working on one thing at a time.

But where—

when it comes to creativity of any kind, You certainly, and what she challenged me with is, I certainly can't try to be creative and try to edit myself. And editing you can look at as a means of judging yourself, evaluating yourself, analyzing, correcting, editing. You're editing yourself. And so it's almost like you can't be sad and be grateful at the same time. So think about that. They always tell you, if you're in a, in a bad mood, if you're sad, or if you're just not feeling yourself, then shift into really focusing on being grateful and thankful. And when you do, you'll start kind of opening up and you'll start feeling better, because you can be sad while you're being grateful. At the same time, you can't hate while you're loving. Now, that nowadays seems to be, um, wrong because there's so much hate and junk in the world. Um, but when you think about it, you— at the very moment in time that you're loving, you can't at the same time hate. So she was, you know, trying to trying to convey this message to me. But she never put it in that respect. She just said, "Try just to flow with your creativity and then go back and edit." But I came across this article which made me think about this topic for today. I came about this article that looked at it in a different way than Joan was conveying it to me. Not that there was anything wrong with how Joan was conveying it to me, This explanation actually hit a nerve because it was saying that what I was doing is, and you might be doing yourself, is when you're trying to create or come up with new ideas or you're trying to find words and yet at the same time, let's go back to the social media example, at the same time you're so worried about what other people are going to think about your response on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or you're worried about whether or not that video that you're taking, if you're going to look good enough in it in order to post it. Or if you are a writer of any kind, if you write this thing, will anybody want to read it, and would anybody gain any value from it? So the moment you start editing, evaluating, analyzing, critiquing, criticizing, judging, you're shutting down your creativity. And when I read this just, I don't know, 4 or 5 days ago, I really thought to myself, wow, you know, I like Joan's reasoning for just letting your creativity flow, but being kind of, you know, I'm the right-brain left-brainer, but being that person who likes to, who likes order, who likes process, who likes not systems, but I like to understand why I'd be thinking the way I'm thinking and all that. I thought to myself, that is a more valuable statement, valuable reasoning for me to try once again, to try once again to just let my creativity flow, not worry about the editing and evaluating, and see what that does to me. So I sat down, I think it was the next day, maybe the day after that, and I sat down and I just said, okay, Bernadette, this is what you're going to do. And I purposely kind of talked to myself about it. And the next thing you know, I'm just sitting there typing away. And I wrote the 3 or 4 pages I needed to write faster than I had written, you know, the 1 page that I had worked on before that. And it just flowed and allowed me to kind of let go and not worry about the being perfect, perfect, and it being, you know, just as, as it needs to be. And I said to myself, now there's a way and a good kind of technique to help one kind of go away and not worry about losing words, but just kind of letting themselves some space to then open up the floodgates of creativity and letting letting their new ideas and thoughts flow. So I thought I would share that with you because if you ever do kind of say to yourself, okay, what am I going to write today or what am I going to post today or what am I going to talk about today or what ideas am I going to share with my teammates or with my friends or whatever the case might be and you're finding yourself with not a clue of an idea or something to contribute, you could just kind of sit back and say, you know what, I'm not going to worry about what other people think. I'm not going to worry about how it's received. I'm not going to worry about whether I get a like or I get a follow, and I'm just going to put out whatever comes, you know, comes to mind and go with that. And I— if, if you're like me or you're like what, you know, happened to me just a couple days ago, then you might find yourself being able to find the words when you find yourself in a state of being where you're just one blank sheet. Make sense? So that would be kind of the one thing that I would, I would share with you. We're going to take a quick break. I have a number of other thoughts and ideas for you in this subject of kind of how do you How do you find the words when you're at a loss? When we get back, so we'll be right back.

You are listening to Shedding the Bitch Radio with Bernadette Boas. We are inspiring individuals around the globe to discover, confront, and shed their bitches of fear, insecurity, and negativity so they can create the riches in their career, business, and life they deserve. Be sure to check out Bernadette's book, Shedding the Corporate Bitch. Shifting from Bitch to Rich in Life and Business, available on Amazon and sheddingthebitch.com. We also want to thank our sponsors North Georgia Tax Solutions, who offers a broad range of tax services for small to corporate size clients. Go to NGTaxSolutions.com to learn more. And Parker House Virtual Services, who provides virtual assistance and social media support for small to medium-sized businesses. Email Deborah Parker at deborahparker.va@gmail.com for more information. To become a sponsor or advertiser on our program, email us at mediarelations@sheddingthebitch.com. Shedding the Bitch Radio airs every Tuesday at noon Eastern time. Be sure to go to blogtalkradio.com/sheddingthebitchradio and follow the program for all the updates and announcements of our guests and show topics. Now let's return to Bernadette and Shedding the Bitch Radio.

Welcome back everyone. Today we are talking about finding lost words, finding your creativity, if all of a sudden you, you know, dried up for new ideas and new thoughts and new topics or things that— new solutions to whatever it is that you might be dealing with or working on in your career, business, or life. We want to kind of give you solutions. I want to find some easy, simple tips and thoughts that you can consider in order for you to find your words. Now we talked about the fact that nowadays especially, more than ever, whether it is at work or at home, with social media we have kind of all turned into content creators, which means we all have turned into creatives. Creatives being people who have to put words together, or have to put thoughts or ideas or concepts stories or whatever the case might be and share them with others, whether it's a small or a large group. So, excuse me, so that is causing a lot of stress for individuals. It's causing people to actually get up, whether young or old by the way, whether, you know, students all the way up to professionals. And it's causing a challenge and stress to kind of come up with new ideas, to come up with different ways of going about things, different ways of saying things or telling things or sharing things. And every once in a while you get up, you sit down, you're out with friends, you, you know, might be at work, and you're just finding yourself feeling like an empty slate, a blank slate. You're not able to, you know, to come up with the great ideas that you had the day before. Well, that's caused by a number of things, whether it's stress or overwhelm or just life as a whole. But more so, there's ways for you to be able to kind of, you know, jerk yourself out of it. The first thing we talked about, and I'll only mention briefly, is just as opposed to trying to be a perfectionist, which I will kind of raise my hand being guilty of that. Let your creativity flow without feeling as if you need to critique it, evaluate it, edit it, analyze it, judge it, even before you're done kind of putting it all together, so to speak. Separate those two functions. Look at them as functions and say, I'm just letting my creativity flow regardless of what it might look like on a piece of paper, on a blog post, in a photo, on a picture you're drawing, whatever the case might be. And then go after that and spend time cleaning it up and making it pretty, so to speak. The other thing though too is, and this really surprised me that I found myself victim to it. Over the years at work and at home, I've kind of been known to have some degree of OCD, and I do not like working in a mess. I actually don't like working with really anything on my desk other than whatever it is I'm working on. So that might be my laptop, my journal, Post-it notes, you know, in this, in this case we've been talking about my script,. It could be if I'm working with a client, just my notebook, my client notebook. Everything else is typically clear. There is nothing else around me kind of restricting my space and what I always viewed as restricting my creativity. Well, the same day I was realizing that I was coming up blank last week working on my script, I also sat back and Coco and a couple of other dogs were playing out in the yard, and I actually sat back at my desk, in the chair at my desk, and I swirled around and I looked at both my cocktail table that I have in the office and my actual desk, and I realized that I had been working amongst a pile of you know, I do— I journal everything. So I have a different journal for a lot of different things, whether it's my budgets, my, you know, expenses, that kind of thing. I have journals per client, I have journals per project, I have journals for tracking my gratitudes. You know, I'm kind of a journal fanatic. And I kind of looked around all of a sudden at both this table and my desk and realized that I have allowed myself over the last several weeks to get so busy and so in my head and so consumed with what I was working on that my desk was all of a sudden in a shambles. And I said to myself, that also could be a contributor to why I woke up on this particular day, sat down, and was just feeling very void of ideas. Because I'm just not accustomed to working around piles of stuff. So I had to kind of sit back and pull my chair out, you know, let the dogs continue to play. Actually, I put a gate up so they actually didn't come in, and I made sure I spent the next half hour cleaning up both that table and my desk and making sure that everything's in their normal place so my space was clear. So my advice back to you based on my own experience would be determine for yourself what, you know, your environment, what kind of setup does it need to be in order for you to be as productive as possible, for you to be as creative as possible and as effective as possible getting whatever it is that you're doing done. And I'm not talking just work stuff. I'm even talking at home. You know, if you are a stay-at-home mom, or dad, or you work from home, or if you are at work and you work at a cubicle versus an office with doors, ensure that your workspace or your project space or your chore at home space is in a condition that will cause you to thrive in productivity and effectiveness as opposed to shut you down. So, for instance, I remember A couple of my sisters are the same way. For having 12 kids in a house, I guess my parents, without us really knowing, taught us all to really kind of clean up after ourselves on a regular basis to the point that we're always, we're always, you know, with a towel or picking up things and putting them in baskets, but our spaces were always very well kept. So I remember being at my sister's house not too long ago, probably Christmas, and I walked in her laundry room and she has 5 kids and some are grown, some are not even teenagers yet, and there's a lot of laundry. And yet all the time it's in a very, very clean, orderly fashion. And this particular day, 'cause she has a bathroom, you have to walk through the laundry room to get to her bathroom, And on this particular day, it was, I'll call it, I'll say it, it was a mess. And I was shocked because my sister, even with 5 kids, I remember when Mary Grace, her oldest, who is now 25, my goddaughter, I remember when she was crawling, my sister taught her after she got her diaper changed, she taught her to take the diaper and crawl over to the trash can and throw it away. I mean, that's how she, you know, we were raised, but that's how she also raised her kids. So I was just stunned. And I, you know, so I kind of went back into the living room where we were sitting, and she was absolutely exhausted and just frazzled. And I kind of said to her, I said, well, I kind of can see that because of your laundry room. She's like, yeah, I don't even know where to start. It got her to a point of kind of shutting down., of being very kind of void and vacant. And, uh, so I looked at my desk the other day and I looked at this table in front of me and I said, that's exactly what is also contributing to this loss of words, to this blank piece of paper, blank mind, is all this clutter. So do what you can to create an environment, uh, that works for you. That— now some people are very productive in messy, messy, messy environments. If, if you, you know, I had a boss that I would go, go into his office, his desk and his credenza was just piled high in client folders and binders and you name it. And he never failed to be able to find whatever it was that he was looking for. And he was one of the most on top of things bosses I've ever worked for. He, he did, you know, he never took a note but yet he remembered everything you've ever told him, you know, and it drove me crazy at times. So however you work best, however your creativity flows in whatever environment that might be, set yourself up for success by making sure if you are a fanatic like I am and need, you know, to have space and to breathe, then make sure your environment is Situate it like that. If all of a sudden you wake up one day and your environment that is typically clean and— clean and free is now cluttered, then just take time to clean the clutter, and most likely all of a sudden your creative juices will start flowing again. Now, of course, there's other things that get in the way of people finding a lack of words or a lack of expression, lack of ideas, lack of creativity. And that is also obviously what I kind of mentioned it before, but overall fear, uh, fear of judgment, fear of disappointment, fear of failure, feel fear of success, um, you know, not meeting expectations, you know, social media since we've been talking about that a lot, that certainly sets people up and debilitates people, paralyzes people from even hitting, you know, a comment button or hitting a like button because, you know, am I saying the right things? Am I posting the right things? Are people going to like it? What kids are going through nowadays with the pressures on them for likes and follows and tweets and Instagram, you know, whatever. I'm certainly happy to be, you know, a baby boomer beyond all of that pressure. But certainly fear as a whole can certainly dry up any degree of creativity or words or expression for someone. Now, but I always come back to, and you know it because I say it a lot and I'll continue to say it a lot, if you can take this one word, fear, make it all capital letters, put it on a poster, Underneath it, put, you know, false evidence appearing real. So you put, you know, the fear, it has dots after each, so it's an acronym, F-E-A-R. And underneath it, the definition for that fear is false evidence appearing real. And really think about what that means. False evidence appearing real, real, real, blah, sorry. Consider what that really means. It means that what you're telling yourself, what you're creating between your ears, that stress, that anxiety, that depression, that sadness, that pain. Not to say what you're going through isn't real, but if you have lived at least a day on this earth and have dealt with a struggle or a challenge or heartbreak or a pain, um, or a major situation and you woke up the next day, you're still living, you're still breathing, you were still, you know, surrounded by, by people. You realize that you've succeeded in getting through one situation, you can succeed getting into another situation. And that's how I've always interpreted this false evidence appearing real, is what you think is is going to happen to you rarely does from a negative, bad, heartache perspective, and therefore what you're drumming up in your head is not really as bad as you're making it out to be. Does heartbreak hurt?

Sure.

Does tragedy create fear? Absolutely. But the proof in the pudding is the fact that you get up and you move forward and it doesn't— it doesn't— not— I don't want to say kill you. It doesn't debilitate you. It doesn't take you out. It doesn't knock you down. And even if it does, it's only for a period of time, short or long, but eventually you find your way back. And finding your way back is what you want to hold on to when it comes to this, when it comes to overcoming fear, is not that you're not going to go through quite crap and not— you're going to deal with heartbreak and deal with shit that, you know, that comes up. But the fact that you are going to get beyond it, and it's that beyond that you want to focus on, because you'll realize what you're worrying about today at this very moment in time, tomorrow will look very different, feel very different, and be very different. So why consume yourself with it right now? All right. So that's where fear comes into play. We're going to take a quick break. When we get back, we'll continue providing you some tips and advice for overcoming loss of words or expression or creativity. We'll be right back.

You are listening to Shedding the Bitch Radio with Bernadette Boas. We are inspiring individuals around the globe to discover, confront, and shed their bitches of fear, insecurity, and negativity. So they can create the riches in their career, business, and life they deserve. Be sure to check out Bernadette Boas' book, Shedding the Corporate Bitch: Shifting from Bitch to Rich in Life and Business, available on Amazon and sheddingthebitch.com. We also want to thank our sponsors, North Georgia Tax Solutions, who offers a broad range of tax services for small to corporate size clients. Go to NGTaxSolutions.com solutions.com to learn more. And Parker House Virtual Services, who provides virtual assistance and social media support for small to medium-sized businesses. Email Deborah Parker at deborahparker.va@gmail.com for more information. To become a sponsor or advertiser on our program, email us at mediarelations@sheddingthebitch.com. Shedding the Bitch Radio airs every Tuesday at noon Eastern time. Be sure to go to blogtalkradio.com/sheddingthebitchradio and follow the program for all the updates and announcements of our guests and show topics. Now let's return to Bernadette and Shedding the Bitch Radio.

Welcome back everyone, we are talking tips and and advice and some tough love about finding your way back from losing your words, expression, creativity. And in today's world of all of us have opportunities every moment of every day to share our creativity, our expression, our words via social media, whether that is in actual writing or video or radio, podcast, There's so much nowadays that every one of us are content creatives. Well, let me rephrase that. Every one of us are content creators, which makes us creative. And yet, there's times when every one of us, I'll challenge the fact that every one of us can raise our hand and point to a time when we wanted to say something or express something or share something and yet nothing came to us and/or we were just blank and just feeling as if whatever it was that we might have thought of was going to be of value to anyone. So we kind of just wiped the slate clean and found ourselves in a black hole. Of emptiness. And one of those, the key things that cause it, and therefore you can overcome it, is also what we do say to ourselves in between our two ears. It's not our heart, because if we're really paying attention to our heart, if you're paying attention to your heart, who you really are, who you truly know you to be It's not going to be what you're telling yourself between your two ears. And/or, I should say, not necessarily that, but that what you're telling yourself between your two ears can certainly muffle or even silence what you're truly feeling in your heart. So if you can get control over those limiting beliefs that you're telling yourself between your two ears, then you're always going to be able to tap in and truly respond and create and innovate and express what's going on in your heart. And some of those limiting beliefs, and you know, this is a regular conversation that I have with clients from both kind of at home, I'll call it, you know, clients that I have that are just friends in the neighborhood or people that have met me and they don't, they're not looking to address anything, you know, in a career or a business. But I also deal with it when it comes to entry-level people, high potentials, and, you know, senior level, C-level, CEO-level type of individuals. They all got junk between their ears around whether or not they feel they can do whatever it is that they want to do, they are worth doing and having whatever it is that they want to do and have. You know, there's a lot— there's that fraud mentality that, that successful people feel that they're a fraud and that someone's going to find them out, that they don't really— don't deserve to be where they are, or they're not smart enough, or they're not creative enough. I certainly, you know, will live in this space sometimes. As much work as I've done on myself over the years, and, you know, I always share that here, with the Shedding the Bitch community. But I can sit down at any time, you know, and working on my script, for instance, and the story really ever going to make it to the big screen? And if it did, who the hell am I to think that I could, you know, tell a story or write a story that would be put onto a big screen, you know? And, you know, so we all, we all will have some form of limiting belief that also stifles ourselves creative-wise. And what we need to do is we need to kind of get control and get a handle on that. And simply what I do that you might be able to leverage is what I talk a lot about is simply take an inventory of what have I done successfully when it comes to being creative. So as far as the writing, for instance, well, I wrote and published a book. I not only did that, but then I had a lot of people read it, a lot of people buy it, a lot of people put reviews on it. And if you, you know, if you did— side note, if you do want some laughs, go and read the reviews of my book Shedding the Corporate Pitch. But don't read the 5-star, 4-star ones. Read the 1 or 2-star ones, because I'll tell you what, one way to get over your own limiting beliefs and this false evidence appearing real is to do something that takes as much heart and time and effort as writing a book, put it out there, and then get these negative reviews, but be okay with it. And that's when you know you've grown, because you could be okay with it and keep writing and ignoring kind of what those haters are saying, and/or you're taking them— that information in and using it to better whatever it is that you might be doing. So you need to kind of get a grasp on whatever those limiting beliefs are because it'll go right back to what we spoke earlier about, and that was fear around false evidence appearing real. Whatever you're telling yourself in between your two ears isn't necessarily truth. You know, my saying that, you know, how, how can I even assume that what I write is going to be good enough for someone to not only buy and then want to produce, but then put it out onto, you know, a big screen. And trust me when I say I've had people say to me, uh, you know, why don't you just work on trying to get it onto a video that you put on YouTube, or a TV, you know, something for TV that would be down on, you know, channel 5003. And I'm, you know, and I fortunately look at them and say, well, thank you very much for that information, but that's not you know, my plan. That's not my goal. So recognizing and admitting and confessing and being aware of your limiting beliefs will also help you to want to address them so then you can put them aside and kind of push through them so you can kind of let that flow of creativity pour through. And once you do, you'll realize that you'll be able to handle it even that much better the next time another limiting belief kind of gets you feeling like a blank piece of paper without any degree of expression. And then lastly, and this is one that definitely gets a lot of people that I work with, that I talk to, that I just even partner up with, and that is the fact that today we are so inundated with information. So say you did want to go and write a book. You think you do have some stories inside you. You have something to say. You have expertise that people should and want to know. You can find 9,000 books on writing, writing of any kind, how to write, how not to write, what systems, tools, and processes you should put in place, what applications you should be using, and I'll tell you what, you— if you're like me. You're reading a lot of those, you're viewing videos about a lot of those different things, and all of a sudden you're just paralyzed with information and you can't do anything. You can't make a decision on anything. Which procedure or process or outline should I use? What application should I buy? How much money should I spend? Whatever the case might be. And the next thing you know, your whole idea of leveraging your creative juices goes right out the window. So all I will say there briefly is just be very, very, very careful about the amount of information that you take in and make the decisions for yourself. Certainly seek advice from others as far as, for instance, if you are about to journey into an area that you're not an expert, but there's a lot of experts out there, Go to those experts and ask them, but then be very good at being able to consider what and take in what you want and throw out what you don't want or what doesn't feel right or what doesn't fit your mode of operation. And just learn to be very good at filtering and delineating between all the data that's coming at you because there are tons of it. All right, so that is one way of getting very empty, void, blank of expression and creativity in your words. And so you just need to kind of get your handle around it and filter it out and, and pick and choose and be very, um, discriminate about what you allow to take in. Will you allow to influence your creativity and what it is that you're— you want to work on. Excuse me. Now, very simply, I also want to say, when it comes to that idea of, you know, seeking advice, seeking information, seeking research, seeking data of any kind, The only thing that you really can do is get into a mode of operation of not only delineating and making decisions on things, but even testing them and learning how to test and fail quickly. So you're either going to test and fail or you're going to test and succeed. So test and plan to fail or succeed very quickly. Assess it and move on from it. You don't want to spend a lot of time there or the next thing you know that will be kind of preventing you from your creative juices flowing. And then just let it go, let it flow. And I do come back to the first suggestion, and that is keep creativity and editing separate. And I don't mean editing in the functional perspective of grammar and spelling. I just mean consider editing to be evaluating, critiquing, judging.— you know, wanting to be perfection. Keep that separate from your creativity, and that in itself will help you find your words, find your expression, find what it is that you want to say and be and do. And then go and do what you need to do to clean it up, so to speak. All right? So I hope that would help those of you that might be feeling a little void. Of ideas or thoughts or topics or just overall creativity. And I'll look forward to having you right back here next Tuesday at noon Eastern time, but remember, it's going to be Ask Bernadette. So go to Facebook, go to Twitter, email me at BernadetteBoas@sheddingthebitch.com, go to LinkedIn and send me a private message. Let me know what it is that you need help with, what question you have, what challenge you might be dealing with, what story you want to tell, and I'd be more than happy and I'd be very honored to be able to support you with that. So for all of us at Shedding the Bitch, I'll talk to you next Tuesday at noon Eastern time. Take care, everybody.

Thank you for listening to Shedding the Bitch Radio with Bernadette Boas. Join Bernadette every Tuesday at noon Eastern as she helps you shift your bitches to riches. And the dialogue is always going on at sheddingthebitch.com. See you next week.