Is “no” a word you have trouble saying?
Do you find yourself agreeing to everything others throw your way?
Are you feeling weighed down and overwhelmed with all the things you have said “yes” to?
If you relate to these questions … you are a “yesaholic.”
Maybe you were raised to say “Yes Ma’am and Yes Sir” when others gave a direction.
Perhaps you were taught it’s only polite to be courteous and helpful when others are in need.
This is all well and good, until the load you are carrying becomes too much to bear. You become mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and even physically burnt out.
Not only is it possible, but it’s also probable that things will fall apart if you don’t allow yourself to say “No” to carrying burdens that aren’t yours to carry.
God believes in tasks and processes to be with excellence, and it’s hard to do if you’re overloaded and pressed for time and energy.
While God made you strong and able to take on a great multitude of tasks without even getting a hair out of place, He also designed balance.
Learn how to tap into the balance of “No,” with today’s latest podcast.
Listen in and be inspired!
TRANSCRIPT
Are you a Yesaholic?
Welcome to the Unstick Your Mind podcast on Mimika TV. Get ready to get unstuck, align with your true purpose, and unlock your God given potential. Being a yesaholic is one of those people pleasing syndromes where we’re always so worried about what everybody thinks, and we are so concerned, is it going to make them happy? But here’s the thing. You can’t keep and make everybody happy all the time. Somebody’s going to get upset sometimes. And if you come from the school of thought that I was raised in, that you’ve got to be perfect, and you’ve got to have it all together, and you’ve got to act like you have it all together even when you’re freaking out inside. And just make sure that you say yes to everything does not result in a good, because at the end of the day, when you say yes to everyone else, you say no to yourself.
And I unfortunately had the experience of experiencing physical burnout where I couldn’t get out of bed for three months because I had pushed myself beyond my limits, coupled with the fact that I had a very emotional year where I had a business failure, very soon after one of my kids went through severe mental health issues where we had to intervene, and then I lost my mother-in-law from cancer. So talk about a triple storm. It just piled on and piled on. But I wasn’t watching the signs. I’m not very good at taking directions when I’m on. My husband says I have two gears. I’m either full blast at 100 miles an hour or I’m completely full stop and I’m laid out on the bed. And that’s not exactly my idea of balance. So I’m working on it. I’m a work in progress. I have given up my membership to a control freak’s anonymous and I’m relearning new skills.
So yes, I definitely know what that’s all about when you’re running on fumes and you just keep going, especially when you are in leadership and you have people looking to you for advice, or knowledge, and they expect the leaders to have it all together. And unfortunately, leaders are the ones who struggle too, but it’s almost like they don’t want to feel like they can share their burdens because it almost makes them weak. So we keep this facade, like everything’s fine up here, but we’re scrambling like crazy underneath. So yes, I definitely say being a people, pleaser is a very difficult place, because it’s really hard to keep up with it all. But if we can switch our thinking from being people pleasing to be God pleasing and just staying focused on what he wants us to do. That’s really where success comes.
So a lot of our people pleasing habits comes from, I always believe we all have some junk in our trunk from our childhood, right? And for me, my story goes where I grew up in South Africa with an entrepreneurial father and there was a lot of volatile, anger issues and fear. So I only learned how to function in fear. Eventually my parents got divorced when I was 10. And for me it was all that, “Look at me, am I doing great? Does mom and dad love me. Look at me, I’m performing.” And I also did classical ballet training since I was three, so for me, I’ve always been in that performance mode. You’ve always got to pull it together, straight back and arms, and smile. No matter how you’re feeling push through the pain.
I do believe it is important to embrace the pain because that’s part of the process. But for some of us it triggers something in us that gets stuck. It’s almost like a stuck record that no matter what emotions you feel as a child, they continue to follow us as adults, because what I’ve realized is that emotions don’t have an expiry date. So if you happen to be rejected when you were younger, or you had daddy issues, and coupled with that, when I was 13, I was severely bullied physically. So I had that traumatic experience, which followed me. So I kept thinking, what is wrong with me? What is wrong with me? What is wrong with me? Kept trying us and trying, thought, well, this must be what I’m doing. And maybe it’s the way I look, and the way I talk, and things that are skills and gifts that God gives us. For instance, being chatty. As you can tell, I love to talk, but I was always told, “Oh, shut, shut up. You’re so bossy. You talk so much.”
And eventually you start to try to please everybody around you. You start to be less of yourself. So for me, a lot of my people pleasing came from growing up with a root of rejection. And here’s the thing. You can be eight or 80. If you haven’t dealt with those roots that have been implanted in you way back when they will keep producing fruit that you might not necessarily like. Then eventually what happens is we try going to maintenance mode and we try cut off a tree here, prune a branch here, and we’ll pull off a fruit here. But if that tree was rooted in rejection, or fear, or anxiety, or anger or whatever it was, that’s going to keep growing. So that’s why I believe in God is the ultimate gardener. He knows how to garden. How to help us to plow the soil to become good soil. So we plant good seeds. So then we can be watered and get the sunshine we need from his word, and eventually grow up to be trees that provide fruit and shelter to other people.
And why I feel so passionate about, for so many years I got stuck on this me, me, me, me, myself and I. And I wanted to be the perfect soloist. Forget about being in a symphony. I want to just be the soloist that would have it all together because it’s, I could control. And that’s really what it comes down to is, when you’re in an environment where you feel you have lack of control, even when you’re a child and mom and dad are fighting and you feel like, “I can’t do anything about this.” Some of us make that promise to ourselves and a vow to ourselves that I will never let anybody make me feel like this again. And that is a vow which God takes very seriously, that eventually we make with ourselves that no matter what we are going to make this thing happen.
Which is a lot of what we see in society. High achieving millionaires, and billionaires and celebrities. We always wonder, they achieve so much yet they’re the most broken because a lot of the time they’re trying to prove themselves to everybody else, or trying to please everyone around them, especially actors and all that. They’ve been trained to perform. So if you’re not performing, you’re not getting paid. So it’s just this never ending cycle. But for us who aren’t in the public eye, but have to deal with life on an everyday basis, if that seed of performance, and perfection, and people pleasing isn’t dealt with it’ll just repeat itself again, and again, and again. So that’s why I’m so passionate about helping people walk through the process of uncovering and doing a work of inner healing of inviting God into the situation and saying, God, what are those hidden areas that maybe I didn’t even realize I had. That maybe when I was six something happened and I shut down emotionally.
And that’s the thing is, I feel, in order for us to become victorious we have to renew our minds. And what that means is we have to think differently. So what input are we putting in there? Because I can guarantee you, most people have a voice going on in their head. And sometimes, if you had to record what was going on in your head, you probably would never speak to somebody like that. “Well, that was lame. What an idiot. Oh gosh, no one’s going to like you in that.” What a mean girl. Hello, be quiet. I’ve learned that I don’t have to listen to her. I call her Ms. Biatchi. She just needs to shush sometimes because she ain’t going to rule my life.
So that’s what I would love to highlight to everybody today is that, if you’re seeing the fruits of things in your life that you’re not happy with, let this be an invitation for you to look a little deeper, to ask God to come in and to highlight those areas. But there is a caveat, I will say. It doesn’t come without a little bit of pain, because without the pain, even as a gardener, if you physically have to uproot weeds, you’re going to be sweating a bit, and it’s going to be hard work. It’s not necessarily going to be easy, especially if the roots have been there for a long time.
Are you a Yesaholic?
But let me invite you and say it’s well worth the process, because once you de weed your garden, all those fruits and trees and flowers that are there to grow and provide shelter, and food and beauty to others will be a far stronger and far more long lasting. Really. If we don’t deal with the root of rejection you’ll have either one of two things, as people will either implode and get very angry and then anger creates depression. And I believe is also why we have a big issue with mental health these days is because of those hidden roots. We like to hide things under the carpet, especially in family relationships and dynamics.
I meet and work with a lot of adults who still have issues with their parents, even though their parents are in their 80s, because of either abuse, or not feeling loved, or rejection or whatever it is. And sometimes it doesn’t have to be as serious as abuse, but it can feel like that. And I already believe that God, in his graciousness, loves us just like a good father would. And it’s hard for us for those who’ve grown up in environment where maybe we didn’t have a great example of a father who was good, and who was kind, and who was loving. So a lot of the time we have to do a little bit more hard work and really uncovering who God is and how he made us to be.
Because here’s the thing. I could totally tell if I hadn’t had what I call a huge wake up call when I had to deal with those, where God’s like, “Listen, you have to deal with this whether you like it or not. Denial is no longer an option.” Things have come to your head, physically, your body, and this is the thing, is I really believe disease is dis-ease, because we are made up of three parts. We are a spirit where God resides in Jesus and Holy Spirit when we become saved. And then we have a soul. And the soul is often ignored. It’s the mind, the will, and the emotions. And this is the area we need to be dealt with, because once it gets through to our body, that’s when disease shows up.
So, just physical, being ill, when your body is run down it’s saying, “Hello, I can’t handle this mental, emotional strain I’m going through.” I mean, you know if you feel anxious you get sweetie palms, your stomach gets tight, you might get a headache, you feel nauseous. Your body’s saying, “Hello, somebody pay attention to me.” So that’s why I’m a big proponent of not just popping a pill. I’m not saying don’t take your medication. What I’m saying is, the approach to fixing problems isn’t to placate them, or hide them, or mask them. We really need to address, like, if you put your hand on a hot fire, your body’s response is going to tell you, take your hand off there. It’s hot. It’s hurting.
But what we’ve done in modern society, we’ve created entertainment. We’ve created apps, we’ve created phones, we’ve created everything to distract us from dealing with the important things. It’s almost like people are uncomfortable with their own company, and they’re uncomfortable with the silence. Being silent and thinking, “Why am I thinking like this? Why am I feeling like this?” If I’m feeling anxious, instead of me just placating it with food, or drinking, or whatever it is. Even for me, my addiction, as we mentioned earlier, was performance. Was like, how can I do something? Let me do, do, do, do. If I wasn’t working and being a workaholic I didn’t feel I was being effective enough because I didn’t want to stop and smell the roses and realize I needed to make a change.
So I would not advise people do that, because the trajectory, alternatively, would’ve been, if I continued down that path, I would’ve been distracting myself as well as those around me. And I can tell you, I always believe that the man is the head of the home but the woman is the heart. If her heart is broken, it affects everybody. The children, even the pets in the family are going to pick up mom’s moods. So if her heart is broken and she’s bringing brokenness from her past, I can guarantee you they’re going to be really difficult relationships with families. And this is what’s so sad is, how things get perpetuated from one generation to another is we have brokenness in one generation and then the next generation doesn’t want to deal with it. And then it just gets habits in the culture within a family get passed down, and down, and down and eventually the cycle continues.
Are you a Yesaholic?
So let me invite everybody today that this is your opportunity to stop the cycle. If you are in a family, whether it comes from generational curses, and that’s a whole other story, but if you have something in your family in your life and you realize this is something that you know you want to change, allow yourself to be the advocate. Raise your hand and say, “Yes, God, I want to stop this. Help me fix this for myself and my family.” Because this is what I really realized. In the crazy year that we’ve all lived through in 2020, 2020 gives us a hindsight, and insights. And even though we’ve had the crazies of the world, what I’m excited about is that people are finally stopping to breathe, and to think, and to reassess, and to look at this.
And you know what? I’ve been doing this. For example, a husband been commuting to work every day, an hour and a half every way. Never seeing his kids. And all of a sudden he’s been forced to work from home. And all of a sudden he goes, “You know what? I can work from home. I don’t need to be traveling anymore.” The necessity, it’s like it breeds creativity. So I’m excited about how, because the world has been forced to slow down. Hashtag the rat race has been canceled. Hooray. Finally. We can actually get off that bandwagon and start to think, is this how I’m meant to be? Is this what God designed me for? Maybe I’m in the wrong situation, or the wrong place, or the wrong job, or the wrong life or the wrong time.
Sometimes we can try fight and pretend that things aren’t right, but by allowing God to realign us into our purpose, saying, “This is what I designed you to be. Stop worrying about Susie Q and what she’s doing with her business. Because she made money doing that doesn’t mean you can by copying her tactics.” What has God got for you? And stop trying to please the world. Focus on what God has for you. Put those blinders on. And I’m telling you, I’m preaching to the choir, because this is something I have to deal with all the time. And not to say I have this handled. I have to remind myself daily because I know it’s one of my weaknesses is that if I don’t remind myself, what has God got for me today? Is this for me? And that’s when you realize you can shift from a scarcity to an abundance mindset.
When you’re in scarcity, you think that all the opportunities are going to be gone tomorrow if you don’t take them up, or if you don’t do this, and someone else is going to steal your idea, or someone else is going to get that opportunity you feel you deserve, that’s a scarcity mindset. And that’s not how God wants us to function. He wants us to function from an abundance mindset. So when we see Susie Q doing well in the business you can applaud her and say, “Oh, that’s so awesome. I’m so excited for her.”
That’s going to motivate me to want to do better for myself. So that’s why I’m super passionate about what I do and excited, because I’ve seen the transformation in shifting people’s thinking and helping them to really understand. Kind of think of taking the blinders off. I’m great in helping people to peel the layers back, to understand what is the core of who God made me to be, and where does God need me?
Because here’s another thing. As adults, we get more mature, but sometimes we can still behave in a very immature manner. If you think about a five year old who meets Santa. He sits on his lap, “Santa, I want this, and I want a car, and I want a Barbie doll, and dah, da dah, da dah.” And that’s often how we approach our relationship with God is we come to him with a Christmas list. And then we get disappointed on Christmas day when things don’t arrive as planned. And then we feel sorry for ourselves. But God isn’t like that. He wants us to partner with him, because we are meant to be an army. We are meant to be going out there to help others. And if we’re so worried about our own little list and what we didn’t get, and how we wanted our prayers answered, we get stuck. So again, it all comes down to who are we pleasing? Who are we focused on, and who do we want to make happy?
Are you a Yesaholic?
And at the end of the day, once we shift that focus and say, “God, I know you have more than enough for me. It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing around me.” Sometimes it’s their time. Sometimes they’ve put in 10 or 20 years of hard work to get their success. There’s no point in me being jealous of that and feeling woe is me and having a pity party because I don’t feel like it’s working for me. When we shift into that abundance and knowing that God has more than enough for me and in his timing, because remember God’s the ultimate gardener. Just like we look outside and we see the seasons.
If you are in a winter season and it feels like there’s no growth, and the ground is hard, and it feels like it’s dry and it’s arid, and a lot of people are like, God give me the first get out of jail card. And I can tell you, the winter season is actually when the most growth happens, because if you think about when you plant a seed, first of all you’ve got to toil the soil, which can be hard getting those rocks out, and we get all those bad roots out. Then we plant the new seed, but we don’t see the growth immediately.
Germination happens in the dark. And it’s dirty, and it’s cold, and nobody knows what’s going on. But at the right time when the season changes and the timing is right, God says, “Okay, now it’s time for you to break through. You are strong enough.”
You have the roots that are rooted in God, you know exactly where you need to be, you’re in the right garden patch, and then you can start to grow. Then eventually that crop will extend past and get so much further because God is a God of multiplicity. He doesn’t believe in us gaining and doing things for ourself. Just think about how Jesus was. With the whole story of the loaves and fishes. It’s great how a lot of people know the story as faith, but for me I see it how God looks at it and he says, “I believe in your little things, I believe in your small beginnings. You just give it to me and together we can multiply it.” So that’s why I’m so excited about helping people refocus themselves, realign themselves, and say, “God, what have you got for me? Let me partner with you because it’s much easier to partner with you than to try and do it all myself, off way over there where I’m not even meant to be,” that we become more effective and much more productive for what he wants us to do in our lives.
Well, I’m so excited to have the opportunity where I can do the things I love, because back when I was a kid, I always loved writing, and I had my little journal, dear diary, and I’d write all those things out. And I never thought for one moment that I could actually do these things as an adult. And again, bringing in the people pleasing thing, I just did things and ended up in marketing and business, which I’m happy about, but I still didn’t have that connection to what I wanted to do. So fast forward all these years. After I experienced that really difficult time with my family where I had physical burnout, I’d realized that I was going through something that needed time. And during that process, I’ve reverted back to my old habits of journaling, because I like to process things through writing.
So as I was going through these things, dealing with the grief, and the anxiety and all these things, as I was journaling then God was saying, “You are in the process of writing a book.” And I was like, “What? Say what? What are you talking about? No one’s meant to see this. This is nasty. I don’t want anyone to see this.” And eventually I realized, he said, I didn’t put… Well, let me rephrase it. I didn’t go through this for no reason, not to say that God caused the pain. He can use it. He says, “This can be great fruit for other people to help them through the same thing.” And that’s what I’d realized, and it hit me like a ton of bricks one day, that writing and sharing testimony and story has power, because it says in the word, there’s power in our testimony in the blood of the lamb, which means that when we share with others how God has helped us through a situation it empowers them to take the steps that they need to get unstuck and to move towards their blessing.
So through that process I’d realized I was writing a book. So I had previously written more how to marketing books in the business space. But really in 2016 I felt the Lord was calling me to share my story. And at first I was like, oh my God. I fought this. I didn’t really want to do this. It was scary. Why do I want to do this? But I’d realized it wasn’t about me. It was about the people that I was meant to help. So I published the book and soon after published a smaller book called Mindset Makeover: How to Renew Your Mind and Walk in God’s Authority. The first one was Worrier to Warrior: A Mother’s Journey from Fear to Faith, which is really my story of walking through this dark period, going through what some people call the dark night of the soul, working through that in a healing process, and allowing God to walk me through step by step, everything from fear and anxiety, pride, depression, people pleasing, rejection, and really looking from a scriptural perspective.
And since then, like I say, once the bug bites and you realize how important books are and when you get onto this and now that I’ve got my system down, I can actually write them much quicker. So right now I’m in the draft process of writing my book number nine, which is called, Heart of a Champion: How Ordinary People Achieve Extraordinary with God. And the reason why I’m excited about this is it really empowers people to realize that they don’t have to be super special. If you just think about it, we think about the characters in the Bible, and we’re like, oh, Mary, and Daniel, and Joseph. They were so amazing. And they were so special. They must have been born with a halo around their head. And what I realized is they were just ordinary people. The big difference is they were completely surrendered and they said yes to God.
That is it. That’s all the requirement God needs. He just needs a willing heart, somebody who’s able to do the work, and who’s able to, no matter what their mistakes, because we all know, even if you look at King David, everyone thinks he was this fabulous king, but we know he messed up real bad, but when God saw him as a kid, he saw something in him that he could use because he was teachable, he was surrendered, and he was willing to do what God wanted him to do. Like in the story of, we all know the story of when David killed Goliath, and everyone’s like, “Whoa, what a hero.”
Are you a Yesaholic?
And that’s why I believe mindset’s so important, because if you think about the story, really, back when he was there, his brothers had been camped out in the valley opposite to where Goliath and his camps were. And in the bible it says that every day Goliath would come out taunting them, and teasing them, and mean saying mean things. Really verbally abusing them. And then so David comes along and he’s like, I’m going to go take my brothers some food, and put some in my rock sack. And he’s like, “Hey bro, how’s it going? Why are you all so sad? What’s with the long faces?” And he’s like, “We’re not going to win this. This guy Goliath out there, he’s taunting us.” So David goes out and takes a look at this dude, and sees him acting belligerently and shouting profanities. And he’s like, “Oh, did you just insult my God? I’m going to give you a piece of my mind.” So out he takes a stone, and throws his stone, and whack’s him dead.
So he severed him from his mind and he took action because he was not privy, and being in this environment of being abused mentally and being told you were an idiot, or how bad or how stupid he was. He didn’t believe that because he had stayed focused on God. And the other thing to remember is, God didn’t expect him, he even tried to put the armor on and it weren’t going to help, because if it doesn’t fit, if the outfit doesn’t fit, it’s not going to work for you. What tools worked for him was the smooth stone and the sling, because he spent hours, and hours, and hours on the brook, looking after his sheep, minding his own business, practicing. So God will always use what we already have. He doesn’t expect us to be something we’re not.
And that’s where it ties back to the people pleasing things. If we stop trying to please everyone and wear somebody else’s shoes, I have this saying that, I created a Pinterest graphic that says, trying to wear someone else’s shoes is ill fitting, uncomfortable, and not my style. Because what is the point of walking in someone else’s shoes, if they clearly don’t fit. So, that’s why we need to think, are we doing things in the way, using the tools, wearing the outfit, being in the situation to please everybody else, because we cannot be effective if we are walking someone else’s path. So that’s why it’s so important to understand that we all have a champion within us. We all have that calling that God’s looking, he searches, roaming the earth looking for people willing.
If we are just willing to say, “Okay, God use me however you want. I will give up my control freaks anonymous card, I will stop trying to be perfect, you just use the loaves and fishes that I’m giving you.” And it might not feel like much, but God is the God of multiplicity. He is the one who helps to grow that. As long as we are willing and able, and will surrender, he will do great things in us. Well, I would just say, don’t give up hope. You are not alone, because a lot of the time when we go through hard things, the enemy tries to keep us in isolation. Especially if we think about the world we are living in and how we are kept separate from everyone else. That is really how we are on our own and we’re left to our own devices with our own thoughts. Sometimes we can get to up to all sorts of trouble.
So let me encourage you today that you reach out, find resources, read books, listen to podcasts, watch videos, connect with other people, broaden your mindset, because at the end of the day you can only grow personally. When you have of awareness. Living in denial is not an option anymore. We have to deal with these issues. If we want breakthrough we can no longer throw our own pity parties and be victims in the corner. We have to decide today whether we are willing to stand up, do the hard work, and be the victors we want to be, because there only are two ways to go through something. And the only way to endure that is to push through and embrace the pain, because without pain there’s no gain. Right? And that’s why I’m excited to share that with people, and just embrace that sort of go getter, everyone can do this. It’s not just a sugar coated, yeah, yeah, yeah, being a cheerleader. No. People who know me, people who get connected to me know that I am a straight shooter. I’m going to tell you that ain’t working.
One thing I didn’t mention earlier was, I actually do competitive figure skating, but I was not a skater as a kid. I learned to skate at the age of 33, after going to the rink with my daughter on a birthday party, and realized it’s something I always wanted to do. Now, my background is a ballet dancer, and we were always taught, straight back, shoulders back type. You cannot do that on the ice. It’s counterintuitive, you’ll fall over. So as a personal mission for the last 10 years, I have been retraining my mind and my body and my muscle memory to adapt to this new way of doing things. And the only way to do that is through repetition, doing it again and again. I’ve had a coach that I show up at the rink every week. Every Tuesday she knows I’m going to be there and she will not let me off the hook, because accountability is important.
I would much rather stay at home in my jammies, thank you very much. But if she’s not going to tell me to get off my toukas and get myself on the ice, whether I feel like it or not. Some days are good day, some days are bad days. I even arrived, when I’d got sick the one day, and she’s like, “You don’t look well enough. You need to turn around and go home.” But I made myself get there. So I would encourage people today that, make sure that if you want to grow, first, we make the decision that it’s time for a change. Denial is out the window. Second of all is being aware of that there is a problem, because if we don’t realize we have a problem we cannot fix it. And thirdly is to make the decision and to take the baby steps. So whether it’s go for a walk each day, or change your diet, or read a positive book, or listen to a podcast, or start writing the book that you want by journaling. Start with baby steps, because there’s a thing called compound interest.
You know, Einstein came up with the theory of relativity and all that kind of stuff. But the most important thing he talked about was compound interest. That little disciplines practiced every day will eventually result in the success that you need to get to where you are. It’s not this overnight success thing that, oh my gosh, I’m just going to put it in the microwave for two seconds and it’ll be done. Sorry honey. That’s not life. So I’m really excited about being able to share this and training with a book that’s coming out as well as a mentorship program that’s going to accompany the book to help people walk through this process, because I know the importance of accountability. I can hand you a book and it’s great, and your life gets busy, but if someone’s not going to say, “I’m going to see you Tuesday. We’re going to show up and do this.” It’s not going to happen. So I’m really excited about connecting with people and sharing those resources.
Are you ready to change your brain to change your life? Discover how to break limiting beliefs, stop self sabotage, and unlock your full potential by rewiring your brain using neuroscience coaching and faith-based principles. Come and join my coaching program, Unstick Your Mind today.
Come and join my coaching program Unstick Your Mind today!
