A Love Letter to You | E101

Why don't we consider today's podcast episode a love letter to you from me. Let's go.

Well, hi. I'm so glad you're here. I'm Chris Plackey. Welcome to the Leadership Is Feminine podcast. Today, I want to talk about you, and I want to talk about how incredibly important you are in the world. And I want to talk about why I think sometimes you question that and why sometimes I think you allow for things in your life to happen that are not in your best interest. I am at the heart of what I do and have been forever, is a coach. And even before I knew what coaching was, I was that friend who would.

Tell all the creepy dudes to get away from my other friends. I was always advocating and arguing and focusing on how to help my friends be stronger in unhealthy relationships. I sort of have just been this person. And when I was a younger leader, I had a lot of women who worked for me. And I would watch these women make very, very dumb life choices. And I'm not trying to be insulting. I think all of us would agree this is not a good decision. And so much so that I used to say that I needed to have, like, the stupid girl class where I would invite all these younger women into a classroom and start talking to them about how to have more self agency and how to tap into where they have control over their lives and where they have authority and where they're abdicating that, whether intentionally or unintentionally, to people who do not have their best interest in heart. And I feel very passionately about that. Like, it's visceral. And so while the lane that I've worked in for most of my career has been in leadership, I have honestly, really and truly the work that I do in the world is to hold a space for powerful and successful and lovely and healthy and gorgeous and incredible women to be vulnerable and to work through the places and spaces of their lives where they know they're working against their own self interest, but they don't know how to stop. And so this podcast is for you, because I know how capable you are, but I also know how lost you can become when you stop believing in a new possibility for yourself despite your success. It's this weird relationship I believe a lot of successful women have. And when I say successful woman, I want to be really clear. I'm not talking about just women who make a lot of money. I'm talking about women who have relationships, have long marriages, who that are healthy, that have children that they love, that they have families that they're very attached to, that they live in a beautiful place. They. They love their life. Like, there's a lot of ways to define success. So I'm not just talking about people of money, okay? I'm talking about the woman who feels, in a lot of ways, incredibly proud of the life that she lives. And yet, despite all of that knowing and all of that joy, you still run into these corners of your life where you're like, this is a train wreck. How do I stop doing this? And then what you do is you use that little corner of your life to define how not good you are at everything else that you're amazing at, and you don't leverage the very skillset that got you all these other things in your life that you're so proud of and that you love so much that you don't leverage any of that for this little dark corner. Because that little dark corner becomes a corner that you use to divine who you are in the world. And that is a lie. You are incredible. You are capable. And I am even more profoundly affected because yesterday in the lab, we had a guest expert who was Eleanor Beaton, who was just one of the most beautiful souls on the planet. And she shared a couple of things with us that really was profound. But one of the things that she said was, what if 20 million people did your work? And so I wrote that down for myself. What if 20 million women worked with me? So unfathomable. And yet I think if 20 million women worked with me, I can imagine a world where it would become silly to think that women would ever question how capable they are, that women would ever question their worth, that women would ever question their ability to achieve whatever they want. That women would ever question anyone who treats them poorly. That women would ever put themselves in a circumstance where anyone would be cruel to them, dismissive of them, insulting to them. I hear so many stories. I just. I watch how women tolerate abject cruelty from people who say they love them. From their children, from their partners, from their bosses, from their parents, from their siblings. Like, that is not what you were here to do. That is not what you were put on this planet to be. Is this other person's target for their undeveloped, poorly expressed emotional immaturity. I feel so passionately about this because I do see women who are running multimillion dollar business enterprises who still allow. Tolerate this absolutely insolent behavior directed at them. It's so boggling to me, and it breaks my heart because you're so amazing. It's a no. I was just talking to a client and she. She's in my sage program and we just had a really amazing retreat in Rhode island. And she went back and she had a new sense of self agency, new sense of self empowerment. Right. She really focused on her locus of control. What. What she has influence and control over, which is, of course, always her own decisions for her own life and her own everything. And she got some feedback, like, what the hell did you guys talk about at that retreat? Right? And I'm like, well, that's what we do. We embolden you to be you unapologetically not. Like, you're cruel and mean. That's unnecessary. Nobody needs to be that way. Cruelty and meanness and abruptness and dismissiveness is all that is, is an indication of someone else's insecurity. That is not expressing a true sense of who you are. That is deflecting. That isn't being you. Right. Being you is just being honest. It's a yes or a no. Being you is just telling the truth. I'm not interested in doing that anymore. Thank you. It's not anger, it's honesty. But when we do that, when we learn who we are and we allow ourselves to be who we are and we. And we do so with total permission, it changes the world. My vision is to prove the power of one thriving woman. Right? And the reason that has a. Has been the vision of this business is because I see how people's lives change when they learn how to thrive. And the same woman I'm talking about, she also said the impact has been huge in her own life, with her kids, with her husband, with. Like, she's honest with herself, which therefore means she's having a more honest relationship with the people that she loves. If people don't want to love you for being honestly who you are, why are you with them? They're not with you. They're with the version of you that you show them by thinking that you're pleasing them. You are so amazing. You are so capable. You are so lovable. You are so talented. I think so much of all of that is just too darn buried inside of us that we stop believing it. And we don't have enough people in our lives who remind us.

Oh. So I, you know, I made a lot of changes over the last several weeks in my business that will continue to happen. It's all really good news. If you're a current client, you're not going to be unhappy. So I just always want to emphasize that I am all in on my clients and future clients. I just know that there's a real truth here. And I think the truth that needs to be told is that we want simple answers to problems. But we, and I'm using a collectively, we don't necessarily want to walk the path of the answer. What we really want is just to sort of have the instantaneous, real length.

TikTok version of how to solve any problem. Here's what I know is if you enter a space where you experience heartfelt witnessing, where you allow someone to truly hear you, this is what I believe is so much of what I do. I create space for women to be heard and seen and validated. And then I create space and offer you an alternative truth. I offer you another way to believe what you've been telling yourself. I offer you a perspective that says, what if that wasn't true? And what if this was true instead? And then we step into another world. As soon as we dismiss the pain of the problem and we allow for the possibility of a solution, it changes everything. Just happened on a call I just led. I was working with a woman who's just mired in a problem and I coached her through several questions and then I said, well, what if we just did this instead? And she's like, I can't believe I didn't think of that. That's a great idea. Like, of course you didn't think about it. You haven't allowed yourself to be witnessed in the truth that you were telling yourself so that someone else could help you walk through out of it. So then we do this possibility piece, right? We talk about what you're capable of and we don't just keep it up in the ethers. And then all the mess of the world and like feeling like a la la la, we anchor that, we ground it down, we turn it into something real that you could do today. This is what I do over and over and over and over and over again with my clients, with myself. To be honest, as soon as you realize how much authority and control you have over the life that you're living and the decisions that you make, it will change everything. Even that problem that you're wrangling with right now, you feel like you can't get out of it is solvable, but you're not going to solve it from the same perspective that you're in today. If you've been tuning in and you listen to me, you know, I lead retreats in Hawaii and this is why I do them. I know the history, I've told you the history that I know that women just need to sort of step out of their lives to disconnect from their lives in order to reconnect to who they are. And you have to be able to go out of yourself to do that. And I will tell you now, I have led now retreats over the last several months in different locations other than where I normally do my Hawaii retreat. And while those have been really, really fun, and I'm going to continue to add those into what I do in my sage program, there is something special about Hawaii. And maybe it's because I feel more special in Hawaii. But regardless, if you are feeling disconnected and you know it, you know that you're not making decisions in your best interest, you know that you feel challenges that you're not sure how to express and work through, you're the person this is for. Not because I want you to come to Hawaii and like vent, but because I want you to come to Hawaii and release. So I did decide to do a public Hawaii retreat. If you've been a listener for a long time, you know, I normally only do Hawaii retreats for current clients or alumni. I. But since I did a podcast for the Life Coach School, well, probably about a month ago now, about doing retreats, I've had a tremendous amount of interest and I want to serve as many people as I can in this space. So I'm going to do a public. I'm calling it a public Hawaii retreat, which basically just means you don't have to be a current client. And I'm going to do a info session that on March 21st. So if you would like to learn more and come to that and you're not already on my mailing list, I will be mailing it out to people who are already on my subscriber list. If you're not on the subscriber list and you would like to learn more, just go to ChrisPlacki.com HawaiiInfo and you'll get the information for the info session. But I wanna come back to ultimately that I believe that the work I do at these retreats is the ultimate expression of love that I can give to women. And I watch it happen every time I do it because when women arrive, it's always very disconcerting for people to leave. And they have a lot of story about leaving family, leaving kids, leaving business, just stepping out of your life for however many days and then that as soon as you get there, it all dissipates. It's like this magic elixir. Like, oh, wait, and then we can really, really, really do some powerful work. You got this body and this brain and this soul, right? This is all yours for this journey of this lifetime. There is so much that we can do with who we are. But I do believe that the day to day living that we all are a part of has created a collective numbness. And that's why there's a lot of people who feel a lot of anguish. If I feel it hurts, so I'll just stay numb and I'll eat and I'll drink and I'll shop and I'll stay busy with my business, or I'll stay busy with my kids. And then I don't have to really notice how I'm not realizing my own dreams. But you only get one love. This is it right here. This body, this brain, this spirit. This is it. And I want nothing more than for you to tap into her and listen to her and honor her. Who you are deep inside. She is your greatest, greatest advocate, teacher and sage. She knows the truth. And when you take a few minutes to listen to her, or a couple days with your toes in the sand, I know it will reveal to you a version of what's possible in your life that either you dream about or that you won't ever just let yourself know is there. It will come to you. I want so much for women to know how powerful they are, how capable they are, and how much is waiting for you when you allow yourself to tell the truth to you. So I hope this podcast today served, as if nothing else, a big hug to know that I appreciate the pain and challenges of day life, daily life. I think that's probably why I'm recording this one.

I've been going through some of it myself lately, and it's a great reminder that even when things feel hard, even when problems present themselves you didn't see coming, all of those things can are true for every single one of us. At the end of the day, it will always be about how you rally and how you tell yourself the truth about what you really want and you honor it. As soon as you honor that, it changes everything. And that has been the truth for me. I have had problems that I've had to face that I did not choose, that I would not have wanted. But when I chose how to solve them in a way that was honest to who I am, I feel free. If I choose to solve a problem because of how everybody else wants me to solve it, I feel powerless. I am in charge of my own life, and so are you. Thanks for tuning in. In other news, Are you on my private subscriber list? If not, why not? Our private subscribers get to find out about things that nobody else gets to know about. And you certainly will get to find out about what we're up to right now. With some big changes coming, you'll be invited to a preview experience, but only if you're on the private subscriber list. How do you get on the private subscriber list? You're dying to know. Go to Chrisplackie.com and scroll down just a little bit. You'll see a little green button that says join the list. Go. Put your name right there and we will make sure that you get the updates that you have now earned because you are a private subscriber. We'll see you there.