What is the one thing that Daniel, Moses, David and Jesus went through?
It’s what I like to refer to as “The Humbling”.
It’s a season in life where God takes us through an experience of learning to lose the ego, to get rid of the stuff that holds us back, as we learn to humble ourselves so He can use us.
Every great hero in the bible, and in most superhero movies of today, has a similar experience. A refining, a hardship, a testing of their fortitude.
Can you relate?
Listen in and be inspired.
TRANSCRIPT
The Humbling
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.
I hadn’t realized how to function at a normal speed. If you have to think of yourself in a car, most people are at a general speed limit. We ride about the speed limit, maybe a tiny little bit over, but we don’t necessarily go on. Mom is more like zooming down the highway than slam on the brakes, zooming down the highway. A lot of this sort of unuseful energy exerted in areas that dad didn’t need to. Well, especially as high achievers right, when you know, you have a goal and you are determined, you’re not going to give up because you are going to keep going at the… Sometimes we don’t see the speed bumps and the slow down signs, we just keep ramping over them, just was functioning in adrenaline, constantly going from one crisis to another, to another, to another.
And it’s like not reading the signs that listen, you got to slow down. Because I am definitely a fixer and I’m a doer. I will go until I fall over. I go to do mode and just focusing on the task, no matter how I feel. I’ll push through pain. I have a tremendous resilience and I will just keep going often to my own detriment. My husband says I have two gears, either full blast at a hundred miles an hour or full stop when I fall over and crash. I do believe life starts to teach us in smaller lessons and the voice is quiet, but eventually it gets louder and louder until you can no longer hear it. The crisis with my elder child happened in the February and literally six weeks later, my mother-in-law passed away from cancer.
So this whole process of, “What do I do? What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?” And then it’s like the straw that broke the camel’s back. It had been brewing and brewing. And I wasn’t listening to the signs. I had stomach issues and headaches and constantly living off sugar and caffeine just to keep myself going and adrenaline. And I hadn’t realized that now I look back, I was on the point of adrenal fatigue. I just didn’t realize that. But what really happened was once I lost my mother-in-law because her and I were very close from… I’ve known her since a teenager and she was a strong woman of faith and [inaudible 00:02:11] always thinks, “Well, God’s got this, he’s going to heal her. So how can this be anything else?” Right.
And when she passed away, I had a crisis of faith. I had a crisis of mental, like, “Who am I? And what the heck am I doing here? And what does this all mean? And I literally, I have never experienced physical grief like that before where your whole body aches like you’ve just been in a wrestling match. I couldn’t get out of bed for at least three months. I just lived in my pajamas. I even couldn’t have a conversation with my mom. My mom and my sister live in England. And I’d say, “I’m sorry I can’t phone you, I’m going to have to text you,” because every time I would try talk, I just literally would be crying. I felt like blithering idiot, like pull yourself together girl, normally you have this.
The Humbling
And literally my body was like, “Sorry, you’ve reached saturation. You literally cannot.” So my poor husband was like, “What do I do with this?” I may not fix this too. They’re like, “What do I do? How do I deal with this?” But of course, the kids at the time didn’t really know the internal struggle of it. They could tell that mom was sad and not very motivated, like doing the dishes and the washing was a huge… Just to get through the day of keeping my house up to date was a huge stretch physically. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t serve my clients in the way that I wanted to and had to cut back a lot of stuff that I was just like, even social media, myself. I found that my brain kept getting like, “Oh, what’s the next thing? What’s the next thing?”
And I had to detox, take my foot off the pedal, off the gas and start to really assess what’s important to me. And I’d realized I just was very emotional about this whole process. And it started to make you question, what’s the meaning of life, right? Talk about a huge major steel wall, right, that gets thrown at you. And I just realized, this whole business has got to wait. This isn’t the reason why I’m doing this. This isn’t fulfilling. I cannot sacrifice my family for the sake of my goals. So I’d realized it was important that… I always heard the saying that says, “Women can have it all, but not at the same time, we have to realize that there’s some things have got to give. And sometimes it’s a seasonal thing like when you have toddlers and you’re like, “Oh, I can’t wait for them to be older.”
And then when there are a little older and peaceful, “Oh, I can’t wait for them to be [inaudible 00:04:19].” We keep wishing away where we are because we are not happy with the status quo, especially when you’re very goal orientated and you’re constantly pushing for more. What I’d realized, I had life throw me smack in the face with having to stop and be present with where exactly I was. I’ve always been a very big journalist since I was a kid. Like, “Dear dairy, so and so said such mean things to me. I would always journal my thoughts, right? And through this whole process, I was just documenting things. And of course I got into reading about neuroscience and the brain and behavioral modification and what medication does to your brain and whatever else, like ADHD and how to parent that and the whole nine yards.
I just threw myself into as much as I possibly could to kind of figure out how to fix things. But throughout that whole process, there was a lot of things that started to shine a mirror up. And I realized a lot of my issues I was having with my kids was a mirror of myself, for instance, anxiety. And I hadn’t realized it at the time, I had just, some people call half functioning anxiety. I didn’t even know there was a thing. I don’t like labels, but whatever, we’ll leave it at that. Through this whole process and writing things down, and I started to write down my thoughts and my feelings, I started to read it back and realize how A, some of my thoughts were so petulant like, “Really, really do you really talk to yourself like that? Seriously honey, we need to rethink [inaudible 00:05:38] in the thought process.” And to really start to see it from, because writing things down is good for your brain. It helps you to slow down and process your thoughts.
The Humbling
And when you start to see it on paper and you start to hear how you talk to yourself, you realize this isn’t so great. I wouldn’t talk to someone like this. So this whole process is like what I would call an inner healing process as I had to work through each piece for myself, because the saying, you’ve got to put your own oxygen mask on before you can help anyone else, especially us moms, we are terrible at that. We want to help everyone and then we wonder why we gasping for air. Well, I’d find I had to do that first. I really had to spend some time with self care and understanding and so what I did is I closed my business for 18 months. I did nothing, shut down my business accounts. I took off all the pressure off myself.
I stopped updating on social media and normally I’m very social. So, and I thought the world will come to an end. But honestly, nobody really noticed unless they were very close to me. Most people don’t care what you post on social media. Most people are more interested in their own lives. So we obsess, yeah, we obsess about trying to keep everyone entertained on our social feed when they don’t actually care. So for me, I had to go back to the basics of celebrating tiny little wins. And this is actually a concept called Kaizen as of little wins. It’s actually known. And it’s very important for the brain, especially when you are challenged with a lot of stress, just to slow things down to what I call micro decisions. Let me do a micro decision, see the result of that, celebrate that result and feel like I’ve accomplished it.
Like, “I actually unpacked the dishwasher. Yay. Let’s have a celebration. Now let’s pack the dirty dishes. Now we got to get over that.” Because some people can get immobilized by tiny little decisions is because we’ve over saturated ourselves with so many decisions and our brain eventually just started to shut down. So for me, I had to get it back down to the basics and I had to listen to my body and say, “I needed to rest.” The reason why I shut my business is I didn’t even want to get email from people. I didn’t want to feel like I was on the clock. Right. I didn’t want to feel I had any obligations. I just needed to go AWOL for a while where nobody had to know my business, because I’m not one for sharing everything in my breakfast on social. I’m very strategic what I share, and just to really respect my own personal space for my own self care, because I’d realized I can’t help other is unless I help myself.
And primarily the first things first, I had to heal me in order to help my immediate family because without that support network, what’s the point, right? So through that whole process, I just had to allow myself to go through the grieving process and process things and eventually I got to a situation where I was feeling very sorry for myself and this is one of those clear moments. I’ve heard God talk to me and he says, “You need to take your eyes off yourself and go help someone else.” And I was like, “Okay.” And I signed myself up to my local church and started volunteering, doing stuff like I have a background in TV production and video and hosting and being on camera. So I was like, you know what? I’m just going to go in the back and do camera laying cables and helping people.
Nobody knew who I was. They didn’t know I had a 20 year old boss. So this is the thing is what Lisa learned was that a lot of us can feel so fixated on our own problems that we start to… We just get selfish is another… I can’t put it any other way. We get so self-absorbed and selfish that we are not any good to anyone else. That really, it is important to be able to take your mind off your own problems and to see other people who are less fortunate than you and to provide value because part of what I was doing, and I didn’t know it at the time, now that I look back is I was retraining my brain to realize I had value. So by providing my skills, what I could do, and I always say, you look at stories in the Bible, you look at stories in the world, I call it the humbling.
The Humbling
Every great person has to go through a humbling experience in order to be great. You cannot lead from a place of vanity or arrogance or pride because eventually it comes back to bite you in the back. If we look at… Talking about faith, we look at Jesus had to humble himself in order to be used. Moses had to humble himself. He was technically raised as royal in the kingdom with the royal family. He had to humble himself and be a local shepherd. We see these things, a lot of these overnight success stories of people in the media, we think, oh, they just arrived, but you look back, most people who are passionately focused on doing something great and transforming lives have been through some kind of humbling experience because there’s something that happens when you realize I cannot do this on my own.
Because I have a problem with the word self-help, there’s only so much self that you can help. It’s great to understand that you want to help yourself, but there are limits to what you can do for yourself. This is why we need other people. This is why we need a support network. That’s why, through this whole process, I really realized I needed help. And I had to put my pride aside and say, “You need to get yourself back to ground zero and realize where your value is.” And I had a 22 year old who was my boss. So talk about the humbling, half my age, but I just had to faithfully show up. And for those 18 months or so that I did that, I was just saturated into doing one thing and focusing on where are the good things? What can I put in myself?
And spent a lot of time in self development and reading and really got hooked on this concept of coaching and what coaching means. And I’m not a therapist, I don’t come from a therapy background, but for me I’ve always been fascinated about how brain and behavioral analysis is one of my geek art and stuff like that. And neuroscience like, “Ooh, this is how it works. Oh, that’s so fascinating.” So I really went on this quest to figure out how can I help me help my family and help others? Because during this process of journaling, when my child was going through a crisis and I was grieving, I’d realized I was writing content for a book. So in that process, I thought that I was just doing this for me. And I remember feeling like you need to share this.
And I was like, “What? You want me to put that out there? Are you crazy? Why would I want people to know the junk on my trunk?” But I’d realized when we’ve got experiences to share with people and books are amazing testimonies and thought pieces and mission pieces, if we can be brave enough to put ourselves out there, it is amazing how it helps other people go through the same thing.
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