Overcoming Self Doubt with Lisa Garber
[Intro - Corinne Powell] Hello, and welcome to my podcast, Empowered to Thrive. I'm your host, Corinne Powell, and I'm the owner of Change Radically.
In this space, we'll talk all things inner wellness, and parenting will certainly come up too, because I'm a mom to four kids, so parenting is a huge part of my life. This space is designed for safety. Your inner child is welcome.
Your past self is invited to listen as well, and no matter what type of day you're having, I want you to know I'm glad to be with you. I live out of vulnerability and transparency, so come and be. Be yourself. Be messy. Invite a friend, and please stay a while. Keep coming back. I want you around. Now, let's jump into today's episode.
Corinne Powell: So today, I am very happy to have Lisa Garber here with me. Lisa left her career as a singer-songwriter over 30 years ago in search of a career that would truly reflect her core values and higher purpose.
The moment Lisa read an article about life coaching in East-West Journal in 1996, she knew this was her calling. Lisa has coached individuals, teams, and groups throughout the world.
She is known for encouraging her clients to embrace a much greater life, one full of possibilities. And I know today, we are going to be benefiting from hearing how she's going to share practical strategies and mindset shifts to help us break free from self-doubt and to help us pursue our passions with confidence. So thank you, Lisa, for being here, and we are all ears.
Lisa Garber: Wow, thank you. I'm thrilled to be here. I appreciate it. And by the way, I think everyone should have you introduce them. I sounded so impressive.
Corinne Powell: (laughter) Well, you are.
Lisa Garber: Where would you like me to start?
Corinne Powell: Well, I'm a practical person, so I mean, I know you're talking practical strategies, but self-doubt, I guess, where does it start? If someone's in the place of not pursuing their passions because of self-doubt and it's really keeping them, what can they do as one thing to start moving, even just a fingertip forward?
Lisa Garber: Yeah, so many good things you just said there. First of all, the fingertip forward is key because when you're trying to make a change, it's really important to think about the small things that you can do consistently because that's really what brings change.
If we were to think about it, a big change is more like a trauma, right? So you don't go for big change. You go for the small, consistent change.
So that fingertip is such a really good idea. So that's good to know because when we're down, full of self-doubt and looking at this ladder we're trying to climb, we're always looking at the top of it when really what we need to look at is that next little rung. What can I do today that will help me? One of the things that I've found amazingly helpful is the idea of that I can do anything for 15 minutes. Do you know where that comes from?
Corinne Powell: No.
Lisa Garber: No? So have you ever heard of the Fly Lady?
Corinne Powell: I feel like I have, but tell me more.
Lisa Garber: Well, she has like a website that's mind-blowing. She's been around a long time and she has a way in which she talks about homemakers that's adorable, you know, sort of hard to...
Maybe people who are a little distracted trying to keep their home organized and that would just be about everybody. And I went when I was trying to organize my life a little bit more, I went and looked through her things and one of her things was this idea that whatever is in front of you, you say to yourself, I can do anything for 15 minutes. I used that to write a book.
I literally, you know, you've got a blank page and a goal. You're looking at the top of that ladder. It's a finished published book. What's the rung, right? Well, the rung was to sit for 15 minutes and write anything. It didn't matter what.
Over a period of a year, I wrote a book and hired an editor, and then edited the book. And so it was a 15-minute. So sometimes no matter what you're feeling, you can't necessarily overcome your self-doubt right away.
But the best thing to do is take some kind of action, some kind of action. So yes, what could I do for 15 minutes? Or, you know, and remind yourself, I can do anything for 15 minutes.
And so even if you are full of self-doubt, you can say, well, I can do what I need to do for 15 minutes. And then you really actually set a timer. You do, because you won't. And it gives you an endpoint. All of those things are sort of psychologically helpful to move forward.
Corinne Powell: Yes. I like that key. Set an end time. Because I'm reminded of when I was a kid and my mom would give us chores. And we'd finish the chores and we thought, oh, great, we can go outside and play now. And she'd be like, no, no, no, I need this done too. And you're like, oh, come on, I thought I was done.
Lisa Garber: So when we just know, okay, when that 15 minutes is up, we've kept our commitment.
We've kept our commitment. We don't have to do anything more. Now, if you're inspired to do more, set it again for 15 minutes.
But you don't have to. There was a research done at a university in the psychology department. All the research you see about psychology are done on first-year students, essentially. These poor kids.
Anyway, they did this study. And the study was to put their arm into a vat. Vat is not really the right word. But a cylinder that was filled with freezing cold water. And they were asked to keep it there as long as they could.
That was one group. One group was given the vat to put it in and didn't get to hold anything. And the other was given this vat cylinder and said, you need to keep it in for two minutes. And what do you think happened?
The ones who had the two minutes kept it in there for the whole time. The ones that had no proper, right, no end point, couldn't keep it in there for more than 10 or 15 seconds.
Corinne Powell: Yes.
So this notion of containing something, is very helpful when you're doing something that's painful. So obviously when you're full of self-doubt and you're trying to take action on something, it's painful.
Corinne Powell: Yep, it's very hard.
Yeah, so that's sort of, yeah, I think that's a simple thing to think about and something I think most people can do no matter what state they're in. I'm hoping they're not so full of self-doubt that they can't take any action.
Corinne Powell: Yes, that's good.
Good. Okay. Anything else? I mean, I can keep going. Did you want me to just keep talking?
Corinne Powell: Yeah, you keep talking. And if I have a pressing question, oh, I was curious off-topic, but what book did you write? What's your book about?
Lisa Garber: Believe it or not, I wrote a book called Becoming a Mother on Fire, How to Be a Mom Without Losing Yourself.
Corinne Powell: Wow. Yeah. A book a lot of moms probably need.
Lisa Garber: It was a book a lot of moms really enjoyed. And I did this in conjunction with two people who were mothers. I'm actually not a mother, but they were, I was in a business together with them and they were women that I had coached in a women's group for many, many years and they've gone through a lot of wonderful changes and they wanted to help other moms to go through the changes that they had gone through. And I said, well, I could write a book that talks about sort of the process that everybody went through during that particular group.
And it was basically one thing. They were losing themselves, right? Or had already lost themselves. And you know how easy that can be, I'm sure. So that was what the book is. And yes, it did give me a love for writing.
And it did give me a basic, in it is a basic kind of coaching program, which is basically what I follow with most clients one way or another. There's sort of a basic, you know, you start here, where do you want to go and how do we get you there?
That's kind of the coaching model. So one of the things I do work with people on, I work with a lot of other coaches sometimes too and certainly, people who are business owners or trying to grow their businesses.
Their self-doubt is, it's sort of a combination of self-doubt and imposter syndrome. It's sort of, is it the same thing? It could be the same thing.
You're doubting yourself because you don't think that people will, that you have what it takes. A lot of people in business will, especially if they're in a personal growth or self-help, they think, I don't have my whole life together, so how can I help other people get their life together? So this is very common. And for people in any kind of business or who are trying to write or just accomplish something, that self-doubt can be very, very strong. And so one of the techniques I have, this is an exercise that I love. I used it myself many times. And it's called the belief narrative.
A belief narrative. So I'm not entirely sure who created this. I learned it from a course I took. It might go back to sort of NLP, neurolinguistic programming.
And sort of the granddaddy of that would be Tony Robbins. It might go that far back. And I, but I can't remember where it came from. But it's really a cool exercise. So here's how it goes.
You sit down and you think about, you know, what it is you're trying to achieve. So you just write that down. An example for me was when I went back to university. So when I left the music industry, I went to university. And I had been a grade 10 dropout. So when I went to university, I had had no high school, essentially. And so then I, and then I succeeded at university, ended up with a master's degree.
Corinne Powell: Wow.
Lisa Garber: So that was sort of, and then the next phase of my life was to build a private practice as a therapist and then eventually as a life coach. So my belief narrative was, works like this.
What am I trying to accomplish? Well, I'm trying to feel good about this next stage of my life, becoming a business owner, a therapist, a life coach, a writer, an intuitive guide, whatever it is people are working on.
Let's look back and see the times when I did succeed at something. So you can go, you can divide your life into maybe into decades. So from one to 10, what did I do that I was able to succeed at? Well, most of us learned to walk and to talk and to read and to write. We might've learned how to ride a bicycle. We might've learned how to eat with implements and knives and forks. You know, we learned how to color and draw. There are so many things that we learned in those years. And so you would write that down when, you know, I learned how to do this, this, and the other. So that's a nice list.
Between 10 and 20, what did I learn? I learned how to drive a car. I learned how to do this. You just write down all the things that you did that you did well, that you felt that you learned, that you succeeded at. And now you've got a really long list of things that you have not even thought about for 20 years or 40 years. And you're thinking, wow.
And now you take that and you start writing a belief narrative. And belief narrative starts with the same sentence over and over again. “I believe I can become a great life coach. I can be a great mother. I can write a novel. You know, I can help people in my business. Whatever it is you're going after, I believe I can find myself because…” and then you start listing, because when I was 10, I learned how to ride a bicycle. And it wasn't that easy. I fell a lot of times, but eventually, I learned how to do it. And you go to the next sentence. I believe that, see how it's a belief narrative?
“I believe that I can be successful in my next endeavor because…” and then you write something else down. You know, for me, it was like, because I went to university as a dropout and ended up with a master's degree. Right? Or I learned how to play the guitar and had a career as a singer. Those are bigger ones, but I also learned how to drive and how to write. I became a good reader. I read lots of books.
I just wrote this long list and you do that. And then at the end, you have a list and you can be adding to it as well. And then you read it every day. I believe that I can be successful because, and you have all these reasons.
And here's what happens. You start believing them because they're real. They're not a fantasy. I did these.
Corinne Powell: Sure.
Lisa Garber: Right? I did them. I was successful at them. You're telling yourself the truth and you're flipping from seeing only the negative to seeing the positive. I call that mindset, sort of going from victim to empower. This empowers you.
Instead of listing all the reasons you can't do it, you list all the reasons why you can do it from your past that gives you the proof. And this is confidence building. So confidence is built by looking at how far you've already come. So you know how when we're looking at goals, we look at them like, okay, I'm going to give me an example of one of your goals. Can you?
Corinne Powell: One of my goals actually is to write a book.
Lisa Garber: Beautiful. So I have this goal to write a book and here I am. There's me here and then there's this book over there and there's a gap, right? And if we keep focused on that gap, we'll keep feeling self-doubt, and insecurity. I'm not sure I can do it. There's this gap. I haven't done it yet. Will it sell it? If I do it, big gap. But if you turn back around and you say, how far have I come?
What are the things that are going to help me, and support me to know that I can write this book? So what's one thing that you've already done in your life that gives you confidence?
Corinne Powell: Relating to writing the book?
Lisa Garber: Yeah.
Corinne Powell: I took a course, like a short course on writing a book.
Lisa Garber: Great. And how did you do in that course? Did you enjoy it? Were you good at it?
Corinne Powell: So I enjoyed it. I feel like I pulled some practical tools from it. Like just sit down. You don't need to do any deleting. You just write. Just write whatever comes to you, right? You know, like taking the pressure off.
Lisa Garber: Absolutely correct. That is the thing I say to all writers. Just write. You'll edit later. Just write the book.
Okay. What else have you done in your life that gives you a sense of confidence that you can achieve something difficult like this, writing a book?
Corinne Powell: So I realized that I've done a lot of other hard things. And then I think, practically speaking, it dawned on me just recently. Oh, well, I have numerous workbooks. So those are mini books that I've already written.
Lisa Garber: So you've already written mini books.
Corinne Powell: But I didn't even think of it in that term, you know?
Lisa Garber: Fabulous.
Do you see how that can give you confidence? Yes. You're looking back. Now, don't forget, right? You've got four children. You've got to build some confidence from that, right?
The things you do to take care of your family. Those are things that are transferable skills, right? Some discipline. You know, being able to come back to things when you get distracted.
You know, finding some time for yourself. These are things that you're already learning how to do that will apply to you writing this book. How many people have you helped? It isn't a matter of the numbers. Who have you helped?
And how have you helped them to get confidence from looking at that?
Corinne Powell: Yes.
Lisa Garber: Right? Everything that you look at from that that's already happened is where you build confidence. And confidence is what helps get rid of self-doubt.
Corinne Powell: Mm.
Lisa Garber: Right? It's like, instead of trying to get rid of self-doubt, you want to build confidence.
Corinne Powell: Yes. And I like that you're saying we're coming up with these belief statements, right? And based off of what we've already accomplished, what we've done, and we're actually hearing ourselves talk in a positive way about ourselves.
I like that element to it because, you know, oftentimes that inner narrative can have, the critic can be strong.
Lisa Garber: Very.
Corinne Powell: The inner critic can rage. And for us to then be practicing this self-kindness and just changing the narrative, as you were talking about it, I thought, ah, that is a powerful piece where we hear ourselves saying the kind, good things to us about, like you said, things we've already accomplished. We've already done these things. This is truth. This is a fact.
Lisa Garber: Right. That's why it's so important what you said there because the brain will talk you out of it if it's a fantasy, right?
I can write this book has no, I think this actually is Tony Robbins. It has no legs to the table. So you have this table that says, I'm going to write a book.
And then you need legs if you're going to believe it. And the legs have to come from truth. Otherwise, your mind will go, ah, you're making it up. The mind is very tricky. And so, yeah, go find the truth and stick some legs under that table.
Before you know it, you've got 20 legs under this table and you feel better and able to go forward.
Corinne Powell: I’m interrupted the episode to let you know that I recently paired the Change Radically workbooks with complimentary videos that expound on each topic. I teach from my heart and my experiences. This is an easy way to go deeper on your healing journey and you can do it in a way and at a time that’s convenient for you!
For a limited time all of these newly released products are on sale! Pick up any one package or grab all nine today. Go to changeradically.com/shop or find the link in the show notes. Now back to today’s episode!
You're not trying to get rid of self-doubt. You're just building confidence.
Corinne Powell: Yeah, right, right, right. Because if the voice of confidence can get louder, the voice of self-doubt gets quieter by default.
Lisa Garber: It's just, you know, and right. It's okay that the self-doubt is there. It's how much are we listening to it. How loud is it? You know?
Corinne Powell: Yeah. How much attention and focus do we give it?
Lisa Garber: Right.
Have you ever heard the term what we focus on grows?
Corinne Powell: Yeah. Yeah.
So that, you know, it comes from some of the more metaphysical teachings. But in fact, it's a brain thing that there's a part of our brains.
It's called the reticular activating system. RAS for short, RAS for short, R-A-S, the reticular activating system. And it basically sees what it's looking for. Because if you think about our lives, just walking down the street, how many zillion, trillion data of information is going on around us, right? Well, we know that with kids who have, some of the kids on the spectrum, right?
They see more than we do. They experience way more. So something in their brain isn't functioning quite right to filter. So we have this filter. And this, and so it, the filter basically says,
I'm looking at the path in front of me so I don't trip. And so you look at the path in front of you, don't trip. And yeah, you miss some other things, but you're safe and you're doing what you need to do. You go looking for mushrooms in, in the forest.
You're looking for the ones that won't kill you. Right? You're looking, that's not a good one. That's not a good one, right? You go to the supermarket and there is, in some supermarkets, if you're lucky to be in an affluent area, there is, you know, an entire row of clothes detergent, right? Laundry detergent. Like, what do you do?
Do you look and read at each one? Or do you know the box, the color of the box that you're looking for and you just go, Oh, there it is. So this particular activating system focuses on what you're looking for.
If you're looking for the ways in which you're going to fail, guess what you see? You see the ways in which you're going to fail.
Corinne Powell: Yeah.
So you can't focus on the self-doubt. You can't focus on trying to eliminate that. You simply focus on what do I want to think and feel instead? Okay. I want to feel confident. I want to feel confident.
Okay. Let's look at everything we've done so far that will help us feel more confident. Sounds simple. I know. It's actually, is simple. It's just not always easy.
Corine Powell: Exactly. Yes. Very practical. Yeah. Yeah. We got to start. Just got to start. Grab the pen and paper. Grab the notes app. Sometimes you can't. Yeah.
Lisa Garber: Yeah. Start thinking about your life and everything you've already done. You can also help yourself by doing a short thing every day. So that's the belief narrative. And then you've got a piece of paper with, you know, maybe 10 things on it and you look at it every day. I believe I can do this. Whatever the goal is. And then you read it and every sentence starts with,
I believe I can. And so that you're getting it in your head. I believe I can.
Corine Powell: Right.
Lisa Garber: Because I've already done this. You can do a smaller version of it. It's called a positive focus exercise where at the end of each day you pick three things that did go well.
You know, and they don't have to be big. What went well today? I spoke nicely to my children. I guess that is big. Right. I didn't yell. If someone's been working on not yelling, and not raising their voice to their kids, then that would be something to focus on. I did well. I was quieter today.
I ate well. I had a meeting with my boss that went really well. You know, do you just look at it, I got out of bed and went for a walk. You just start looking at the things that are going well. Again, that shifts your mind out of seeing all the bad stuff, all the hard stuff, all the difficult stuff, which keeps you in self-doubt. What was the other thing we talked about? Yeah, self-doubt and not pursuing your passions, right? Because you're feeling like you're not good enough.
Corinne Powell: Yep. Yeah. And as you were talking about listing off those three things, I'm thinking even for someone who's like, but I feel like none of that went well today. Even just if we drove from point A to point B, we got home. There was no car accident, right? We got from point A to point B, back to point A. I mean,
Lisa Garber: I drove safely today.
Corinne Powell: We can find something.
Lisa Garber: Yeah.
Corinne Powell: Even if it feels like, but the day didn't go at all how I wanted or whatnot.
Lisa Garber: Right. Yes. Yeah, you can. You can find something, three things that went okay. Maybe they didn't go well, but maybe they went okay.
Corinne Powell: Mm-hmm.
And then like you, and it isn't easy. I can tell you because of this, not just that reticular activating system, but this kind of negativity bias that the brain has, that it's much easier to see the negative and it lasts longer and it has more of an impact than the positive.
Corinne Powell: Yeah.
Lisa Garber: So it does take intentional work to shift out of that negativity into a more positive way to look at things. Like I say, from victim to empowered, but it's just even from negative to positive.
And that doesn't mean that bad things don't happen. It just means that good things also happen.
Corinne Powell: Yes.
Lisa Garber: Right? They also happen. So a lot of people will argue about a positive mindset because they think it's, you know, you're ignoring the stuff and that's, you're not ignoring the bad stuff. You're just trying to be more balanced and not getting dragged down by the bad stuff because it will drag you down.
Corinne Powell: Yeah.
Lisa Garber: So the positive, looking at something, three things that went well, is just helping to exercise that muscle.
In the beginning, when I do coaching with clients, I always talk about wins, you know, so how did your last week or two go? What were your wins? And when we first start, they're going, oh, I win.
I don't know. I have no idea what my wins are, right? I say, well, let's look it over and we come up with a couple. But after a few weeks of working together, I ask, what were your wins? They go, oh, I'm ready for you.
I've written three things down that went really well over the last, you know, couple of weeks that were really good wins. So they're, they're retraining their brain to start noticing.
Corinne Powell: Yeah.
Lisa Garber: Yeah. So when, can you imagine if now you are being reminded of your wins and you're noticing the things that are going well, can you imagine what that does to your inner life?
Corinne Powell: Yes. Yeah. Big positive shift. And, and as you were just saying what you were saying, I kind of thought about, you know, like when people are saying, well, we don't want to avoid what's like negative, just focusing on the positive.
Like what came to mind is, you know how sometimes maybe a kid is having, they're, they're experiencing an emotion that feels big to them. They're disappointed about something. Let's just say, and an adult in the room is like trying to bring the positive out of it. Well, but still we get this or it's going to be okay because of this. And sometimes I feel like that is the place where the emotion needs to be able to be present.
Disappointment is this emotion that maybe feel uncomfortable even to adults. And then after the emotion is felt, we validate or, you know, we, we notice we say, yeah, I get how that would be so disappointing. Maybe we offer them a hug.
Then I noticed that actually naturally we can come to the place where we can see what's good and what's positive. This happened to my daughter the other night. Now that I'm saying it, she has a really severe egg allergy and she also is off of gluten right now. We were at a birthday party and I thought the ice cream cake was going to be fine for her to eat because we'd bought ice cream cakes and she's been able to have them. But this particular one, sure enough, had egg in the vanilla ice cream.
And, you know, she wasn't comfortable even just separating it, having the chocolate because who knows what might have touched. She felt her disappointment severely. I mean, she burst out into tears and was like, see, we should have brought the other dessert that we had at home. I knew this was going to happen and look, I can't have this.
And she just felt it so intensely. And in that moment, it would be, a part of me knows it'd be easy to say, oh, but look, they have another option for you. They just pulled out chocolate bars and marshmallows that they have in their cabinets so you can have something. But she actually came to the place where she was able to appreciate the option, after feeling her feelings, and letting her tears out, I hugged her at one point.
She made some big statements, you know, about basically how awful life was. And I said, I know it's really hard to have this allergy, isn't it? Hard. It affects, you know, just a lot of the day-to-day things. And then she just came to that place where she was like, all right, I'm going to warm those marshmallows up and melt that chocolate. And she thoroughly enjoyed them. They were the giant marshmallows. She got half of a chocolate bar, four giant marshmallows, and probably more sugar than was even going to be in her little slice of cake.
But it's letting the whole process happen.
Lisa Garber: Yeah.
Corinne Powell: I know I came out of actually being stuck, staying stuck in the negativity because I didn't actually have a parental figure necessarily help me return to joy, to co-regulate, to meet me and validate me in my big uncomfortable emotions. So I got stuck. But for her, she's able to feel them and kind of move through them and get to this place that you're talking about and so I just say that because I think what you're saying is really important. Helping our brains to see what's good.
Lisa Garber: Yeah.
Corinne Powell: And because sometimes we've just been so stuck in seeing what's difficult and hard and how our life is miserable and everybody else has it better than us that we have to train our brains because it didn't naturally get to experience it in a way that it could have.
Lisa Garber: Well, I love what you're saying. First of all, it's great parenting.
Corinne Powell: Trying.
Lisa Garber: I'm sure you've worked hard on this. Lots of work.
And it shows emotional intelligence and you're absolutely correct that it's very possible that we can get stuck in our negativity. We've been talking about sorts of self-doubts.
We can get stuck there if no one has validated us. If we're walking around and don't even realize that we're just trying to have somebody say I'm so sorry that this has happened to you.
I can see that you're really in pain. If you didn't get that like you said when you were little, then it is and you're not getting it now either from oneself. I guess you can give it to yourself also because I think this sort of idea of self-parenting or re-parenting is very powerful. But then yes, you don't move.
You're stuck because you need to be validated. Just like you validated your child. This is really hard. I get it. This is really a bummer. It's an old word. You know, this sucks and I get it. And so yes, yes. And then the child feels completely seen and heard and you're right. And then the emotion now can move out. And now yes, you're right. And I could say, all right.
You know, with an adult, you just say, okay, I can't. All this is not working. What can I do? That's the other great coaching question. You hear people saying this didn't work. I can't do that. This won't work. I don't want to do that. Well, okay. I hear all that. I hear this.
I hear all that. What can you do? It's like, oh, okay. Well, let's see. What can I do? This is when the 15 minutes, you know, you could set the tire for 15 minutes and do something. But yes, well, what can I do? But you're right.
There's a, what's the word I'm thinking of? When there's a movement, there's almost like a pathway that emotions need to go through. And it's almost like, you know, hits you in your primal brain area. And then you go through all the emotions of it. And then little by little, it starts to loosen up. And now you can go back to your thinking brain.
And now you're able to ask that question. Is there something else for me to eat? Right. But unless you acknowledge and allow the energy. You know, energy. Emotions are energy in motion.
Corinne Powell: Yes!
Lisa Garber: If it's not moving. You're in trouble, right?
Corinne Powell: Yes. If we just simplified it, like you said, energy is in motion, it needs to move.
Lisa Garber: It just needs to move. And there's so, you know, you're validating her, helped her to move her emotions.
If you've ever done emotional freedom technique, tapping, have you ever heard of tapping?
Corinne Powell: I've heard of tapping.
Lisa Garber: Yeah. Tapping. The whole point of tapping is to move the emotions around. I use that a lot with clients. You know, getting out and going for a walk.
Breathe breath exercises. There are the sort of things that are just there to help with, the emotions to move. The thing that happens with self-doubt, which isn't so great, is that we believe what we're thinking.
And so that is a big problem. Believing what we think we're thinking. We've somehow, we think the mind knows everything. Does not. It does not.
Corinne Powell: Yeah.
Lisa Garber: It's wired. It's programmed. It's responding automatically to things. It's, it's just not really to be trusted. Until, you know, you have to step back and sort of witness it and, and sort of help yourself to understand what really is going on. Self-doubt is often just believing. Things. Negative things that we say to ourselves. And we believe them.
Corinne Powell: Right.
Lisa Garber: I was listening on my walk today. I was listening to Byron Katie. Who has this? Something called the work. And she asks the question, is it true? I thought, oh,
So you hear something in your head. Oh, I'll never be able to write that book. Is it true? Am I absolutely sure that this is true? And then you start meditating on that and you think, I don't actually know that this is true. It's sort of a feeling. It's a fear for sure.
You know, fear is always underlying most of that stuff, right? Maybe I'm afraid I might not be able to write the book, but do I really believe I can't write the book? Is that true? It's a great question. It's great to question your thoughts. Your beliefs.
Corinne Powell: Yeah.
Lisa Garber: You self-doubt.
Corinne Powell: Right.
Lisa Garber: Is that really true?
Corinne Powell: Right.
Lisa Garber: I mean, I was telling you before we started that, I am working on. Search engine optimization right? I'm no spring chicken. I'm in my senior year. And I'm working on this search engine optimization. I'm not a 20-year-old. You know, and there was a huge bull self-doubt. I'm not going to get it. I'm not going to understand what they're saying. I'm too old for this. All that was going through my head.
And I just thought, okay, thanks for sharing. And then I thought, What have I done in my life that could help me to realize that I might be able to achieve this?
I went to university at 33 years of age without a high school diploma. I wrote an exam. I passed it. You know, it's like, I have to keep reminding myself. I didn't know how to use Instagram before and I actually know how to put posts up now. You have to remind yourself, but I sure thought “I can't do this”. I don't know why. Self-doubt. I don't know why.
Oh yeah. I do know why. I mean, it's a protection mechanism. So humans want to feel safe and secure. And of course, we do. We want to make sure that nothing hurts us and that we live. Sure. So that is our strongest, isn't it?
That's really our strongest impulse. To stay alive. And, you know, anything that's out of the ordinary and gets us out of our comfort zone is going to cause us to have a stress response.
I know it sounds funny, but the actual stress response is: If I write a book, I got to write a book. What if I can't write this book? What if nobody wants to read this book? What if I fail? What if it's a terrible book? The brain thinks: “I'll die”.
Now think is maybe not the right word. It has a sense of anything that's out of the ordinary, out of the comfort zone that puts you out there.
Like what if people reject it? Well, what is so difficult about rejection? Exactly. Well, it means that we'll be out in the forest by ourselves and we could die.
These is the underlying principles of emotional intelligence. So that we're every, you know, it's fear, it's risk. It's a sense of danger, right? Writing that book gives you is somewhere in you is dangerous.
It feels dangerous.
Corinne Powell: Yeah.
Lisa Garber: And, and you have to say. Recognize that our fears, what drive self-doubt.
Corinne Powell: Yeah.
Lisa Garber: Normal, very normal. But so we look at the fear. Well, what am I exactly afraid of? And it's always something bad will happen. We don't always even know what it is, but. I'll disappoint everybody.
I won't, you know, something bad will happen. Then you have to ask that question. Is that true? You know, and what if that happens? So what if I disappoint people? So what if I get some rejection?
What will it kill me? No, it won't. Nobody's going to die from me writing this book. Including me.
I know it sounds funny. It's very extreme, but the point is that fear is the fear of dying. You know, surviving is better than saying dying. It's a fear of somehow being at threat, not surviving.
Corinne Powell: Sure.
Lisa Garber: And it's not true. The things that we want to do that stretch us out of our comfort zone, literally will not kill us. But our brain is so wired to keep us safe and tight that it creates all these silly ideas and those are our self-doubts.
Corinne Powell: Yeah. As you were talking, and as you mentioned, the forest analogy and what you were saying, even I was seeing like, also there's this strong fear of, will I be alone? Because like this, the scene of the forest that you mentioned. I saw myself or someone there alone, but then I said, oh, but if I knew there was someone there with me, even if I failed. Failed didn't write the book. I think you were talking about it. And I'm in the forest. If there's someone there with me, in my failure, what a difference that makes. And whether that's us there with our inner child. Or another loving safe human, that connection that we have, that makes an incredible difference. I just think that on the healing journey, that's so much of it, it’ss us learning a lot of times for the first time. Yeah. I think it's so important. That we're not alone. That we can show up for ourselves, even if somebody doesn't. Or that in the process, someone else is showing up for us, you know?
Lisa Garber: And there's many layers where people can show up. I mean, isn't that, usually isn't that sort of the key to people who have religious spiritual lives, right? Is that they have a sense of, I'm not alone.
And they have many names for it in many different ways in which they talk about it. But it's that it's that sense of I'm not alone. That gives them a sense of confidence that I don't exactly have because I don't really have the ability to dive into that. I wish I did. But, that sense of not being alone is wonderful. And yeah, I love that. I love that. Yeah. We can do that for ourselves by saying.
And I listened to you talking about reparenting that. I think, right. You did a… Yeah, you did it like a beautiful…
Corinne Powell: Yeah. So I did a self-parenting talk.
Lisa Garber: I don't know if we use the same book. Did we use the same book to do it? Did you use a book?
Corinne Powell: No, I kind of pull from a lot of different things.
Lisa Garber: Okay. Oh, yeah, because you're very intuitive. So, I had a book. Because I do that. That's what I do. I do books.
Corinne Powell: Sure.
Lisa Garber: But this is 30 years ago, this book. And I, in fact, I just. You know, and I'm referring, I refer this book to people all the time. I learned how to dialogue with my inner child and as my loving parent.
Because I had been dialoguing with my critical parent.
Corinne Powell: Yeah.
Lisa Garber: For so long my poor inner child was slightly traumatized.
Corinne Powell: Yes.
Lisa Garber: And so I learned the difference between, the voices. Between the critical and the loving parent, I learned how to dialogue it. So it's that sense of if there's. And I do this a lot. I say this a lot to clients. You need to call on the adult right now. In this problem to your kid to solve.
And that's not fair. Be the adult. Bring the adult in the loving, caring adult. Right. Right. And take some responsibility for what's happening here. You know, I had to do this with food.
So I've had a terrible sugar addiction for my whole life. And it was just like six months ago that I got into a program and talked about it. You know, you know, this, it wasn't a 12-step program. I had tried those. It hadn't worked.
Literally, I was able to bring the adult in and realize it was my kid. Who's of course, who wants the sugar? Not the, not my thoughtful adult. The kid who wants the sugar and to be able to say, no, sorry.
But we're not doing that. We're not going to binge today. And here's why we're not going to do it. No, we're not going to eat ice cream today, and here's why we're not going to do it. And so bringing that adult in is so comforting. And of course, in the beginning, the kids, you know arguing and then eventually the kid goes, yeah, okay. I guess I'm not going to get any ice cream. It's very quiet and very happy because the kid doesn't really want to be in charge.
Corinne Powell: Yeah.
Lisa Garber: Yeah. It really does want to have an adult there. And so I love what you're saying if you're in the forest. So for you in this book is to recognize. If I'm rejected, if not, nothing goes well. It doesn't mean I'm going to be alone.
Corinne Powell: Yes. Yeah.
Lisa Garber: It just means I might be sad. I might have to try again. I might have to send it to an editor to get it and make it better. There are so many ways in which we can succeed at something.
Corinne Powell: Yes.
Lisa Garber: You know, but can't, if we don't do it. Right. We have to be. But to know that, you know, you're. You're always there to comfort yourself. Someone is always there loving you. And it's you. That's really good work. Really good work. Yeah. Right.
Corinne Powell: It's hard, but in the end, it means that we know somebody will always show up for us. Cause if we'll always show up for ourselves, right? We can't determine what other people are going to do.
Lisa Garber: No.
Corinne Powell: But when we create that relationship with ourselves. Especially when you go from having been the critic. From having been the bully. To now being the. The friend to being, you know, The one that cheers you on. It's like, whoa.
Lisa Garber: I believe in you. Here you go. How do you help? How do you manage yourself? Doubts. You bring that loving beautiful parent into you and say, Hey, little one, I believe in you. I believe in you and take the responsibility to take the steps that are required for success. That's the adult's job. It really is.
Very much allow the self-doubt to take the adult out of the scene. And I've said to a lot of people over the years and to myself, you need to keep promises you make to yourself.
You need to keep the promises you make to yourself because otherwise you have no self-trust. Which means you have self-doubt. So even if you start with, so I mean like the 15 minutes, what it helps you do is, oh, I did it.
Corinne Powell: Exactly. Yeah.
Lisa Garber: I kept the promise to myself. It's like, you can feel yourself rise up a little bit.
Corinne Powell: Yes.
Lisa Garber: And the more you do these little things, the more the self-doubt starts to lower down because you're now building self-trust. I can trust that. If I say I'm going to write for 15 minutes today, I am going to write for 15 minutes. You feel good about that.
Corinne Powell: Yes. Yeah. Cool. Wow. That's great.
Lisa Garber: Deep stuff.
Corinne Powell: We could keep going. Did you have more thought on this topic that you did have bubbling in you?
Lisa Garber: No, I think we touched on the three really important strategies, practical strategies. We had the belief narrative, the sort of, we did get to some self-parenting, this notion of really taking responsibility as the parent and, and believing in the, you know, once the victim to empowerment. Yeah. We talked a little bit about that too. Positivity.
Corinne Powell: Okay. Yes. So where can my listeners find you and is there anything, you know, else that.
Lisa Garber: Yeah, I'm in a condo by the lake in Toronto. Although you'll never find me because I hardly ever go out.
I'm always here writing and doing stuff. I go for walks every day. Yeah. I have a website, I have Instagram and I have a newsletter. So my website is my name, lisagarber.com.
At my website, there are ways to get a freebie. The freebie is about improving your mindset. Just your readers will enjoy it. And if you do that, you'll get put into my newsletter, which mostly comes out every Sunday, except this week when I just forgot to do it. And I'm on Instagram at @lisagarbercoaching.
Corinne Powell: Okay and I'll include all of that in the show notes so that they can.
Lisa Garber: Thank you. It'd be lovely to hear from people who are listening and find out what they thought about today. Yeah. How they might use some of these strategies.
Corinne Powell: Yeah, this has been good. I appreciate your being here and your time. Thank you, Lisa.
Lisa Garber: Thanks for having me.
Corinne Powell: If you enjoy the conversation that you just heard and would like to hear more around topics that were brought up, here are a few previous episodes that I would suggest you go ahead and listen to.
From season 4, episode 12 - How Salad Proved I'm Healing. From season 5, episode 7 - The Impact of Emotional Neglect. And from season 5, episode 9 - Perks of the Healing Journey.
[Ending - Corinne Powell] Here we are. We've come to the end of another episode. Sit back and reflect on what you heard. What's the one thing that resonates with you that you can take away and do something with? Let's not just listen. Let's listen and take action.
Now action may look very different for us, but it's doing something with what we hear. I hope that you'll share today's episode with a friend that you think would also enjoy it. And please come back next week.
I hope that you have a fabulous week and that you remember when you pillow your head at night, when you're going through your days, that who you are is good. And I'm glad that you're alive.
