Wanting What You Want | Ep #5

I’m Andrea Giles, and you’re listening to The Heal from Infidelity Podcast, Episode Five, Wanting What You Want.

Hello, and welcome to the Heal from Infidelity Podcast, where courageous women learn, not only to heal from their spouse’s betrayal, but to become the boldest, truest, most decisive and confident versions of themselves, ever.

If you know there’s more for you than the life you’re currently living, but don’t quite know how to get there, you are in the right place. Stick around to learn how to create a life that will knock your own socks off. Is it possible? It is, and I’m here to show you how. I’m your host, Andrea Giles. Are you ready? Let’s dive in.

Hello, friends. Welcome to Episode Five of the podcast. I’m so excited to be here and to share some new things with you today. But before I do, I want to just take a minute and thank you sincerely, so much, for those of you who have gone and left a review on iTunes for me. It helps other people to find the podcast when you leave a review. It gives credibility to the podcast, so that people know that it’s something worth listening to. So, thank you so much.

And before I move forward, I want to go ahead and read a few of the reviews that you’ve left. Megan, she says, “Wonderful podcast. Andrea is an amazing coach with some real life experience, that has given her the ability to fully understand her client’s point of view. Her story is proof of how much having a life coach can change every aspect of your life. Check out her podcast. I highly recommend it, as well as subscribing to her emails. They are awesome.”

Thank you, Megan. Thank you. Thank you.

This is from Tisha. “Listening to Andrea in these first few podcasts, I already don’t feel alone and a bit stronger to move forward. I feel like a lifeline has been thrown out to the water to grab onto. Her words are healing. Looking forward to more.”

Thank you so much, Tisha.

This one is from Niner Nat. “Andrea has been my coach, as I have been going through my divorce. Her expertise and coaching style is exactly what I needed, as I transition into a new chapter of life. I have been able to stop blaming myself and start recognizing my truth. I am very excited she has a podcast, so I am able to listen and refresh on what I have learned.”

Thank you so much, Niner Nat. I appreciate all of you so very much for leaving a review. And, if you haven’t yet, I would love it if you would. It truly helps so much for other people to be able to find me.

So, now I’m going to go ahead and get started on the actual podcast.

Okay, so what I have for you today is one of my favorite things to talk about and the starting point for all of my coaching. Okay? I always start with helping my clients get clear about the things that they want, their highest desires, the things that light them up. What does that have to do with infidelity? I will get to that. I promise.

So, as women, we often cannot remember the things that we really want. We kind of have been conditioned, some of us from the beginning of our life, to believe that our whole purpose is to serve others. We’re there to make other people’s life better. And if there is something that we want, we often think about it in terms of how it will benefit other people, rather than just wanting it for the sake of wanting it.

So, I want to try a little exercise. Okay? Wherever you are right now, I want you to think of something you want. I don’t care what it is. I don’t care if it’s a physical thing, like a home or something to put in your home, or closed from a certain store, or a feeling that you really just want to feel more of the time, or a relationship, a kind of relationship that you want. Literally, nothing is off limits here. Okay? Can you think of something?

Okay, so now, I want you to notice what resistance comes up to that. Can you feel some resistance? What’s it saying? So, do any of you remember Debbie Downer from Saturday Night Live? She goes, “Wah-wah.” Well, she doesn’t say that, but you hear the music soundtrack of, “Wah-wah,” when she’s talking because there’s positive people around her, and she always is there to tell the thing that brings the people down. Okay?

Do you have a Debbie Downer in your brain? We all do. Okay? What is Debbie saying to you? Probably telling you all the reasons why you should feel guilt for wanting whatever you thought of, to remind you that others will be there to judge you, that you’re being selfish, or other various forms of judgment from your own brain. Right? We are really quick to pooh-pooh on what we want.

But what if I were to tell you that listening to the things that you want is the very thing that will help you to grow the most? Let me explain. Okay?

We all were born with desires. We all have things that we want. There might be things that you want that you remember from when you’re really little and that you’ve kind of pushed away, forgotten about, whatever. Okay? But we all have them. Sometimes, they are very, very buried, and sometimes they’re so buried that we really don’t even know what they are.

But I want to invite you to lean into those things. I want to invite you to remember what they are. What are the things that you want? What if you could believe that they are given on purpose? And that, by honoring those desires and making them a reality, it’s a way of showing up as your highest self, with your highest form of self-expression? It’s showing the world who you actually are. What if going after the things that you really want, are the actual markers along the path, showing you who you would need to become to get there? I’ll explain more about that in a minute. Okay?

To comfortably have the thing that we want, we often have to grow. And by stepping into the things that we want, that it allows us to show up in the truth of who we are, and it allows the other people around us to do the same. Now, I’m going to give you a couple examples of this. Okay?

I have a client who came to me with struggles about infidelity and trust and things like that. And when we went through this exercise of asking what she wanted, one of the things she said is, “A really nice car.” She really wants a nice car. And her brain immediately went to judgment, of what others would think of her for having this thing that’s so nice and judging herself for not using the money to help other people, feeling guilt for even wanting it, when there’s other people who need money more than her. “Why should I even want that?”

And, so, what I reminded her is that, for her to be the kind of person that sits behind the wheel of that car comfortably, she has to grow. How does she have to grow? Let me explain.

She has to grow the belief that she’s worthy of having things that are nice. She has to grow the belief that she can always take care of herself and create the things that she wants. She has to learn to believe that what she wants matters. She has to learn that it’s okay for other people to have judgements of her, and that it has no bearing on her, her worth, or her ability to have the things that she wants. Okay?

Another client came to me and she desperately wanted to learn how to stop people-pleasing. She wants to learn how to stop saying yes when she means no. So, what people-pleasing is, is it’s a form of trying to manage what other people think of you. Like if I say “Yes, even if I don’t really want to, then they’ll think X, Y, Z about me.” Okay?

The problem with people-pleasing is that we are not actually honoring how we feel or what we actually want. So, for her, she really wants to learn how to say yes when she means it and how to say no when she means it. Okay?

So, if she becomes this person that stops people-pleasing, it requires practice of answering, even to herself, what she wants to say, yes or no. It requires her to look inside to get those answers and then say them out loud, and even allowing the people around her to think what they want, to judge her, and even for herself to hold space for her own negative emotions.

So, even if she knows that she wants to say no to something, for example, and she might feel uncomfortable, and part of her growth is making space for her to feel uncomfortable and staying in it and honoring that she actually wants to say no. She’s not making it mean that she feels uncomfortable, so that means she should have said yes.

She’s growing, making space for negative emotion. She’s learning to trust that she can have an opinion. She’s learning to trust that she is the expert of her own life. She’s stopping trying to manage others’ opinion of her, and she lets them think what they want.

Again, she’s letting herself sit in the discomfort of doing something different and allowing that tension to be there, as she practices doing this thing that’s new to her.

I have my own example with this. So, we moved into the house that I’m in one year ago, and my coaching practice was … It was growing. I was coaching. I was not coaching a ton of people at that point, but I was coaching and consistently doing things for my business. And at first, when we moved here, I was okay, just having my office in my closet, had a really big … I do have an exceptional closet. It’s a huge, beautiful closet.

And, so, I set up a desk in there, and I was going to be okay just having my office in my closet and making it look pretty and making it look professional. And I was fine with that.

But what I really wanted was this room next to my bedroom, that one of my kids was using. I really wanted that room for my office. I wanted a place where I could go in, that was mine and mine alone, to do this work, to grow my business, to coach my people, not a shared space. I really wanted that.

And I had a lot of pooh-poohing on that in my mind of, “Well, what about the other kids? And “Shouldn’t I give them the room?” And “I can just stay in the closet. It’s okay for me just to stay there, and isn’t that selfish of me to want a whole room just for me and for my purposes?”

And anyway, I grappled with that a little bit, but ultimately, what I really wanted was to have this office, this office where I could look outside and have a pretty view and have some privacy and not be in a closet. Right? And guess what? I honored that, and I made it happen.

I had the conversations. I opened it up for problem-solving with my other children and said, “Okay, this is something I really want. I want to make it happen. I want to have an office. How can we make this happen?”

And the thing that’s so amazing about that is, by me honoring what I really wanted and saying it out loud, even if others were not necessarily thrilled with that, it allowed them to be in on the conversation of figuring out a solution and making things work for everyone. Okay?

So, oftentimes, we think about having what we want as having somebody else not have what they want. And what if the opposite is true? What if we are actually opening up space for other people to get out of their own way and solve their own problems and make choices for themselves, that make them happy, rather than waiting for other people to do it for them?

So, ultimately, I did get my office. I’m talking to you here from my office, and it worked out for everybody. Is it a little bit crowded in some of the bedrooms? Yep, it is. I have a lot of kids. But guess what? They’re doing okay, and I’m showing them that it’s okay to have things that you want. And hopefully, when they are adults, they’ll speak up and ask for the things that they want too.

So, why do we have such a hard time asking for what we want? A lot of us grow up thinking that, like I said before, everything we do is for the benefit of other people. And, so, we have what is called a reflected sense of self. And I want to just chime in and say that a lot of the things that I’m talking about in this podcast, I learned from an amazing therapist, named Jennifer Finlayson-Fife. If you haven’t listened to her, go listen to her. She’s amazing. I learned a lot from her. And she teaches this concept of a reflected sense of self versus a solid sense of self.

So, if you’re holding up a mirror outside you, and everybody, the people going by, they’re the ones giving the reflection, showing you who you are, and then you’re absorbing that and believing their stories about you, that’s a reflected sense of self. Most of us go through our life with this idea of what other people believe about us, and then we think that that’s who we actually are.

If other people believe we’re good, then we believe we’re good. If other people think poorly of us, then we think poorly of us. If we’re not getting the messages quick enough with validation, then we start to doubt our worth. We start to wonder who we are, and we don’t have that solid sense of self to answer that question.

So, a solid sense of self is where we have an idea of who we are. We might not have a perfect idea, but we have somewhat of a foundation of who we are. And we go around the world or live our life with this foundation of generally liking who we are, knowing who we are, having a pretty solid sense of who we are.

And when we have that solid sense of self, we also are more easily able to connect with the things that we want and with the God-given desires that He has given us, that we know what those desires even are. We trust that they’re there for a reason and trust that, by leaning into those things and really just saying, “Okay, you gave me this desire for this car. You gave me this desire to have my own space here. You gave me this desire to be able to stop people-pleasing,” and then leaning into knowing that that is your growth, that, to become the person that feels comfortable there, you have to step into growth.

And when we feel judgment, from either ourselves or from other people, we aren’t quite shaken as much because we’re building that foundation of who we are and trusting that this process is going to just end up serving us and the people around us so much better.

One thing to be aware of is that, sometimes, we have a big resistance to good things, whether it’s other people giving us good things or giving ourself good things, and sometimes it can be a control move. Sometimes, we falsely believe that we have the upper hand if we are not allowing those around us to give to us. Sometimes, we want to have this superiority. And really, what that boils down to is, kind of wanting to have that victim role of, “I do everything for everyone else, and I don’t let them give to me,” because there’s something about you that believes that you have to be in that role to be valuable, to be seen.

What if you’re willing to walk away from that and try out a new way? What we can do, what is available to us, is co-creating a system in our family, in our relationships, where we tell the truth about who we are, and we then allow the people around us to do the same.

When we are not telling the truth, we are not only dividing ourselves from the people around us, because we’re not really allowing them to see us, but we’re also dividing us from us.

And in the words of the wise Abraham Lincoln, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

We are actually dividing ourselves from ourselves when we are not telling the truth about what we want, or hiding what we want, or masking what we want, or making it somebody else’s problem to give us what we want and then being disappointed when they don’t.

The truth is, you cannot contradict your own values and your own desires and not suffer. You’ll know that you’re living out of an integrity, even if it seems like a virtuous thing. Okay?

So, our very self-development is actually driven by these desires. These desires are what tap into the prefrontal cortex, or the highest part of our brain, the wise part of our brain that knows what’s good for us. This is our wise, older self, that knows that this leaning into the things that we want is going to be the thing that will help us develop into what we’re capable of being.

When we lean into our desires and trust that they’re put there on purpose, we develop a tolerance for error and failure. We become more emotionally mature, as we’re willing to feel and experience different things than we were before. We respect ourselves more. We know that others might not agree with us, but at least we know that we are being honest and true to our highest self. We become willing to have conversations that might be tense, and we’re willing to stand there and allow the tension, from a place of maturity and strength, rather than cowering because we’re afraid or think that we don’t deserve to be heard. We are willing to allow that tension. That’s pretty powerful.

Okay, so what does this have to do within infidelity? It has everything to do with infidelity. Our trust has been broken. The things that we thought were, were not. We become disoriented, and the most upsetting about it all, is that we stop trusting ourselves. We start asking questions like, “How did I not know?” We second-guess everything.

So, stepping into what you want and honoring it starts to build that foundation again. We are honoring ourselves. We’re learning to keep our commitments to ourselves, and we’re teaching our brains that we matter.

And as we build the trust with ourselves, we show up differently in our relationships. We become more direct. We say what we mean, and we mean what we say. We don’t try to control anyone, but we truly make the decisions that best serve our highest desires, and we welcome people into that.

Our tolerance for tension grows, as we find new ways of being in relationships, whether we stay in the marriage or not. We are changing the relationship with ourself.

So, my friends, what you want matters. You matter. Whether it’s honoring your desire to garden, or to eat clean food, or to have a higher paying job, or to have your own office, or a clean, organized space, or a relationship you both thrive in, a pet, piano lessons, or anything else you can dream up, I want you to remember this.

That desire was put there for a reason. You listening to that and honoring it and seeing it as a marker on a path towards your greater good, towards what you are capable of, will help you get there faster, much faster than by denying it and hiding it and pretending like it’s not there.

The honoring of that person is the very thing that will help you grow. And as you become the person comfortable asking for it, you’ll grow in your capacity to have even more. It’s like magic. We build momentum for ourselves.

And not only do you become the strongest version of yourself, by you stepping into who you really are and what you really want, you’re inviting other people to do the same. You’re giving them permission to do the same. It has a ripple effect.

So, what do you want? Take some time to deeply answer that question. Of course, the objections will come, but I want you to lean into the trust that you are worthy of good things, and that you will become the person that you came here to be, by making those things a reality. They are yours for the taking. Go get them.

Thank you so much for being here again. I appreciate it, and I will see you next week. Bye.

Thank you for listening to the Heal from Infidelity Podcast. If you would like to be kept in the know about upcoming free classes, new podcast episodes, and other ways of working with me, go subscribe to my weekly email. You can subscribe at andreagiles.com/lies-about-infidelity/.

Again, it’s andreagiles.com/lies-about-infidelity/.

I will see you next time.