691: Maybe You’re Not Lost… Maybe You’re Just in the Middle of a Reinvention

Maybe you're not lost, not at all. You're right where you need to be doing exactly what you need to be doing right now. Despite. I know, despite how everything else looks around you every now and then the road curves, turns, can turn pretty sharply as well. And maybe that's where you're at and you're looking. Where is that straight, flat, beautiful, easy road. Why do I feel like I'm at a wall? Well, it's just a turn. It's a sharp turn. Let's look at it. Let's do this. Today as we jump into. Maybe you're not lost. Maybe you're just in the middle of a re invention. Flow Dreaming still kinda Woo Woo is just what it sounds like. An escape into the world of W. Also a ride into you and how to feel happier, wiser and more self aware in every way. It's your ultimate journey into personal growth and inner power. We'll explore ideas like how your energy self influences the kinds of opportunities you encounter, or how your personal growth can drive your business growth, or even how that feeling of being stuck is really always coming from something else. We just have to figure out what. That's right. We're a dash of woo woo. A sprinkle of self care, a heap of problem solving and pattern busting, and a giant cup of encouragement. We're going to relight so much passion, purpose, self love and confidence in you that you practically stagger. I'm Summer McStravik, your host and welcome to Flow Dreaming. Still kind of woo Woo. I am again warning you it is still springtime at the summer McStravic residence. And the birds are going off and the sirens from the fire station nearby my house is also. They're going off. And the planes, I don't know who's flying, but they're flying all day long. So you're going to hear various things in my home office. Thank you for putting up with it because I just decided that I am tired of editing out every little time the cat jumps on the table and so on. Let's talk. Let's talk about your reinvention. I have a little story that I want to start with and I think it might, you know, put some things in perspective and then we're going to go into. What do you mean I'm reinventing myself? How is that possible? I didn't even know that I was. Well, listen up. And warning. Yes, there are some curse words in this one marked explicit because I just can't seem to help myself. All right, this little section, a Little snippet today is called Mrs. Hendricks hair. It's been rainy, really rainy, as if Seattle had taken its wet, sniffly gray butt and sent it right down to San Diego and no one here can quite figure it out. And aside from the mudslides, floods and falling coastal cliffs, my hair has also been complaining. My flat iron sits unused because one, I got so used to not using it these last few years and two, I once you stop giving a shit, it's kind of hard to do so again. I was sitting in my car a few days ago in the wet, drizzly Trader Joe's grocery store parking lot and just thought I'd take a look at myself in the sun visor mirror before walking in. Friends, you already know that was a bad move. I saw myself. I saw my hair. But what I actually saw was a startling moment from 30 years ago. I saw Mrs. Hendricks stare back at me. My old high school English teacher. You know the one, she obsesses about Jane Austen and Sylvia Plath, has at least three cats, may or may not have a crabby long standing husband, but mostly she has that wild graying frizzy. Haven't dyed it in a long while so you can clearly see the dye line. Untamed head of witch's hair that flow foofs out on all sides. I have become Mrs. Hendrix. It took a moment. This was a lot to process. Every now and then there's a shift in how we see ourselves. Our position in the world changes, like a planet wobbling into a sudden new orbit in the solar system. Everything has to shift to accommodate it. Oh my God, I thought. I filled my basket in a daze and I drove home quiet. I went upstairs to my bathroom and assessed the wattle under my chin, grabbed my stomach fat with a fist. I poofed my hair with my fingers. I have definitely become Mrs. Hendricks. Think about what this means. She was one of my most favorite teachers. She didn't give a shit, that's why. Not about her hair, not about a whole lot of other stuff. And every other teacher at my school did. They gave way too much shit about things, I thought at the time. Mrs. Hendricks Let me write bad poetry about lilacs and dark moody boys and bands and gave me an A anyway. She didn't give a fly's ass about learning how to write the SAT essay. I wondered, was there a moment when she became Mrs. Hendrix or Mrs. Smith or whoever it was for her? Did she actively become that person? Or did it just kind of happen over the slow moving avalanche of time until One day she noticed her hair and the sun visor of her own old VW bug. My point is, we're all going to reinvent ourselves multiple times in life. We will all have those moments of what. What exactly has happened here. Sometimes it happens without you paying attention. Sometimes it happens precisely because you're finally paying attention. Where are you at? Who are you becoming right now at this very instant? Is the you you are becoming creeping up on you? Or are you actively involved in your this is who I am next self? I suggest you go to your bathroom, poof out your hair, and ask yourself this very question, because your next decade very much depends on it. Well, there. A little essay I wrote about a moment. Yes. That I actually experienced a couple of weeks ago when I suddenly saw myself having, you know, gone in a direction that I didn't realize I was going in until she stared back at me and I had to pause, hit the pause button and say, what's going on here? And then I recognized, yes, I am still in the midst of a reinvention. And not all reinventions happen incredibly quickly. It's not like, voila, here I am, the new me. Sometimes our reinventions take years. They take time. They lift to the surface and recede, lift again to the surface and recede, lift again, until finally it stays. And there it is. Something new. A new us, a new being. Some of our reinventions are quite dramatic. We get a divorce, we leave our partner, we leave home, we lose someone we love, and bam. Sets it off. And we rail and curse and pound our fists at it. But there it is. It's happening. There's no going back. Other reinventions, like I said, are happening slyly in the background. And you're just wondering, confused, wandering, wondering, confused, wondering, wandering, confused, not realizing you're actually in the midst of that slow moving avalanche of time, that kind of reinvention. I'm doing today's episode because many of us are actively in the phase right now. Maybe you've recently completed a phase. Maybe you're not in it at all, but you've been in it before. You wonder if it's coming again. And I can almost promise you, yes, it will. We seem to go through multiple reinventions in our lives. We go through points of revitalization and what's being revitalized. The low, empty, depleted, confused, stuck, unsure, lost self. The tides go in and the tides go out. This is our life. A constant state of rejuvenation, reinvention, depletion and loss. And this Is why, again, I'm devoting today to. To a chapter from my new book. Not what I just read you, Mrs. Hendricks hair. That was more of a personal essay. But I want to give you a chapter, one of the very first chapters. By the way, this book is coming out on April 25th. Of course, if you're listening to this in the archives way deep, the book's already out. It's probably been out for months or even years. But as I sit here recording this with you now, it's coming out in like a week or two. Like you, you still have time, by the way, to pre order and get a ton of extra goodies. Free flow dream I created just for this book, as well as workshops, live with me, all kinds of stuff. So go check it out. Amazon, et cetera. But this chapter is chapter three. Yes, you can reinvent yourself. And I want to share it with you, because today I'm not showing you how to reinvent yourself. Honestly, I just wrote an entire book about it. But I want you to understand that it's possible. And I want you to understand that you may be in the midst of it right now without even realizing it. You're calling it something else. Stuck, Depression, procrastination, burnout. You're calling it something other than reinvention, Revitalization. I want to call your attention to that and let you know that you're in a good place. You are in a good place. So let's jump in as I read to you. Chapter three. Yes, you can reinvent yourself from stuff nobody taught you. The book. It's what, maybe a Thursday? It's late afternoon. Your week kind of sucked. Work was stressful or insanely boring, as usual. Or if it wasn't work, it was school or spinning around at home all week, getting shitloads of nothing done, even though everything seemed important at the time. At any rate, you're at a stopping point, a hold your horses moment where the rider pulls back on the reins. You're facing your computer or your phone or your tv, wondering what's next for you in your life, or if this is all there is. You toy with the idea that you have depression. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. But you do know that what's in front of you for the next five years, ten years, is untenable. I just can't do this anymore, you realize? So how do you reinvent yourself? Can you even. You Google it? All the articles recommend that you take deep breaths, explore new hobbies. What bullshit. You feel incredibly underwhelmed this is another Thursday lost in time. I know you know the feeling of doing the same things you've been doing for years and not being sure anymore about their value. I know you also know the feeling of knocking your head against the same wall over and over, hoping eventually something will work out, go big or get you to that next level of success via a bigger income, a happier home, a relationship, any of a hundred things that tell us we've finally broken through to the next level of success instead of spending yet another night in the foxhole of nothing ever working out. You need to reinvent yourself. I need to reinvent myself. How? How? How? You look back on all your past reinventions. They all happened without awareness. You were doing one thing, then slowly began doing another. Then that other thing became your main thing. It was organic. You evolved. Why isn't that happening now? Why do you feel like you're clawing onto the present even as you're wishing it away? Because this time you're afraid. You have bills to pay. You have kids to support. You have less energy. Your body is sagging and getting tireder earlier. And the thought that you only have time or ability to pivot seems much harder to believe. Your life doesn't feel rolled out in front of you like some long, deep pile Persian carpet. It feels like a narrow, gray sidewalk choked with old gum. You need to reinvent yourself. I need to reinvent myself. How? How? How? First, I take that stupidly long deep breath, and then I recognize that I'm different. I'm older. I have more seemingly rational reasons why I can't be successful piled up in the deep, dark corners of my mind. I've built up barriers to change that hold me locked into a rigid walled garden of what I can be, how much money I need to earn, and how long it'll take me to do anything else. And those walls may very well be absolute bullshit, but for the moment, I'm believing them until I stop. Stopping means that I exhale. I give myself time to evolve again, slowly, like before. I still have the same pressures, the same responsibilities. I have the same fears that what I make or become next won't happen fast enough or be financially supportive enough, or be in any way as good as what I had before. But then I see that what's really happened over time isn't about any of that. It's about trust. Somewhere along the way, our trust broke. The trust that we could reinvent ourselves successfully. There. Stop. Feel it for a second. What if you have utter, total, deep, solid Trust a knowing that reinventing yourself will be wildly and spectacularly successful. Uh huh. You would do it in a hot second. So now we see the key, what we're missing. We no longer have that trust. We used to back when we just let ourselves shift and evolve without even really thinking it through. But now every shift is calculated against our potential losses. So how do we fix that? We do it by getting right back to that old original feeling. Reinventing yourself will be wildly, spectacularly successful. Not might be, not has to be, just will be. If you can't feel that, then you are totally, 100% committed to staying where you are instead. Nobody takes any leaps if they can't feel themselves successfully on the other side of the chasm. And just because you can't see that chasm doesn't mean it's not there. Nobody put an expiration date on your life and said you can't have any success after this. No more pivots for you. Time's up. Nobody said that but you in your limited, small minded, untrusting, fearful thinking. Deep breath. You want to reinvent yourself? Here's how. Make time for it. Create space for it. Carve time out in your day to let your mind wander and grow. Cancel the silly time sucking things you have in your life that keep you distracted from yourself from dawn till midnight. You know what those things are. Tell everybody you know that you have a new hobby and it's non negotiable. You're committed to redeveloping. Trust that your reinvention is going to be wildly successful and you're giving yourself the time and space to nourish this into reality. Don't give yourself a hard deadline. Your deadline is whenever the pie is baked. It's unknowable right now. Just get the pie in the oven. Stop thinking that the reinvented you has to be more successful and bigger and better in every way. Maybe the newly reinvented you is shy and searching and lovely in your sweet naivete. Be okay with that. We don't know who's going to come out in the new you. All we know is that they've been waiting for you to open the oven and let them out last. Don't fear it. Don't fear them. They aren't losing anything, they're gaining you. Give them time and space to emerge and they give you new breath. Stop fearing that you'll lose your income or your family or that you don't have the time or space for this. Start reminding yourself that you've done this before, and it was easy. Last time. It just happened last time. You don't need the buildup of fear around it. That fear is a new thing, and it's a lie. You can pivot right now. Commit, make the time and do it. Remember, I'm doing it with you. Reinvention is a thing, a real thing, not just a hazy yearning. It needs its own space and a generous, warm welcome. Don't let it be some amorphous longing that you distractedly think about. Make it real. Make it like me. Right now. Today, in my gray pajamas, banging away on a keyboard to you. I'm reinventing myself right this moment, through this simple act of writing and reflecting. Reinventing myself into what, exactly? I don't know yet. In the beginning, you usually don't know. I haven't published a book in 11 years. Maybe I'm going to be an author again. Maybe not. Maybe I'll pull my coaching company apart at the seams and rearrange it into something bigger, brighter and more relevant than ever. Or maybe I'll pivot completely and become a virtual travel agent specializing in exotic truffle hunts. Maybe I'll go through this with you and discover that I'm just simply ready to retire. Maybe my reinvention is not to get some bigger, greater, more wildly successful plateau. Maybe it's just to learn to be. To savor the delicious ray of sun peeking through my office window as I listen to my dog slobbering in his sleep. See, I'm open. But no matter what it ends up being, I commit to it. I commit hard. For me, this feels like taking all the other options off the table. By this, I mean I don't really have other options, now, do I? I can sit here in my pajamas for another week, another month, a year, just kind of longing and waiting and growing more frustrated and distracted. But that's not really an option, see, It's a default. Whereas choosing that feeling of hope and commitment right now is powerful. I reclaim my power, starting right in my heart and gut. When I shake my tiny fist at the universe and say, oh, yeah, buddy, this is going to happen, it starts now. Commitment is something that blooms through you. Can you feel it? Can you feel that deep knowing that you are changing and growing, that it's a good thing and that you are committed to doing it, well, I'm gonna leave it at that. The chapter continues and goes into a series of prompts. All 40 chapters in the book have prompts at the end that ask you to journal, reflect, think, discover, open up. Sometimes they ask you to do actual things, processes, techniques, stuff. But that's why you have to get the book. You get all that. My point, I think, as you listened, is for you to understand that reinvention is good. It's continuous. We have broken faith that we can, or lost trust that we can do so successfully. Every time we near it, we pull back a little further as we age, oftentimes a little less trusting that it'll work out, that something newer, better, fresher will emerge. And I just want you to know that whatever you may be feeling right now, whether you're in this phase or you've recently been in it, or you remember it from your past, or you sense it coming up for you, why can't it be wildly successful? Why can't it be you entering the most brilliant, fulfilling and wonderful era of your life? It can be. How are you going to show up for it? How are you going to embrace this? Are you going to commit to it? Are you going to acknowledge it? Sometimes just the acknowledgement is all it takes to start really becoming that new direction, to let go of the anxiety, the stuckness. Let's acknowledge. Hey, I'm reinventing myself right now. I don't know how long it's gonna take, but I feel very positive. Very positive. Now, normally we'd be stopping at a certain point for shower thoughts or mailbag, but today, I don't know, doesn't feel quite perfect to do so. So instead, we're going to wrap up a little more quickly, and I want you to just keep musing on this, I don't know, thought experiment. What are you becoming? What are you reinventing? What parts and pieces of yourself. Because the minute you stop reinventing yourself, revitalizing, refreshing, you're getting busy. What? They say you're getting busy living or you're getting busy dying. So I'm going to close today's episode with another prompt of sorts, not the one that's necessarily in the book. I want you to think, what parts of my life or myself could use some renewal, could use some revitalization, could use some reinvention. And maybe it's only a singular area. Maybe it's explaining away your whole self right now, maybe all of you. But consider it. Think about how you want to do it. Notice, too, that reinvention doesn't necessarily mean personal growth, pushing yourself, becoming hugely successful. It just means allowing that new person, that new set of desires, that new set of goals, that new feeling of faith or hope or anticipation for your future to rise. Up in you. Where could you use that the most right now and then instead of waiting for it to just kind of happen like haphazardly, organically? Remember Mrs. Hendricks hair? How can you instead begin to cultivate it? Support it? What can you give yourself to support it? Of course I have a bajillion ideas for you. It's all in my book. Am I hitting the book thing too hard? I think so. I'll back off, but I swear another week or two it'll be launched. You won't hear about it again, but lots of love to you all again will return in a future episode to shower thoughts and mailbag and some personal updates. But today I just feel like there's a lot to marinate on. So I'm going to let you go now. Give you lots of love, lots of encouragement, tell you you're doing just fine where you are right now and I'll see you next time for another episode of Flow Dreaming. Still kinda woo woo. Sometimes we need a good old cathartic do over. We've been flat lining, emotionally spent and wrung out like an old washcloth. We want to feel a different way, be a different way. We've plateaued. We're stuck. We need to gain purpose and direction and feel good again. We want to find the same self worth, confidence and inner strength that got wiped away from years of frustration, disappointments and emotional depletion. We're ready to up level and go bigger and when we do, we want to know that we'll be wildly successful at it. This is what's kept me busy these last couple of years. I wrote a book all about how to reinvent yourself up level and find your path again. I wrote three books actually, but only one is on its way to you. It's called Stuff nobody taught you and I took all the lessons from MI school and wrote them out. Not only that, but I go through MI School in the book with you, right alongside you. We both reignite and maybe even reinvent ourselves by the end. There are 40 actionable lessons. I want you to read just one small chapter a night and then do or think about whatever I ask you to do at the end. It's a formula and it works like crazy. If you pre order the book today, I've got some fabulous bonuses for you. You can find it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kindle, wherever you get your books. If you're listening to this and the book is already out though, don't worry, I've got some goodies for you too, including downloadable worksheets that will make reading it so much easier. So here it is. Stuff nobody taught you. I sure hope you love it.