AwakenHer with Corissa Stepp
"AwakenHer" is your beacon of hope and strength, focusing on turning the pain of past relationships into the power of self-discovery and renewal.
Hosted by Corissa Stepp, this podcast serves as your guide through the complexities of healing and personal growth. Each episode unveils the stories of women who have triumphantly navigated their way through life's storms, alongside actionable advice from experts in the field. "AwakenHer" is not just a podcast; it's a movement towards self-love, resilience, and a joyful new beginning.
Join us on this transformative journey, and embrace the empowered woman you were always meant to be.
AwakenHer with Corissa Stepp
Do THIS to Cultivate More Confidence and Courage
In this solo episode, I dive deep into the ONE thing you need to do in order to become more confident and courageous. And it may surprise you!
That ONE thing is to tackle the nagging voice inside your head that seems to have nothing good to say. Isn't it time you learned to harness the power of your inner critic and convert it into a tool for self-discovery and transformation instead of letting it undermine your confidence?
In this riveting episode, we dissect the workings of our inner critic, revealing how a deeper understanding of its triggers and narratives can help rewrite limiting beliefs and heal inner child wounds. Affirmations alone won't cut it - be prepared to roll up your sleeves and do the necessary inner work.
Shifting gears, we delve into how this inner critic is tied to the formation of self-sabotaging patterns and habits that can impede your progress toward your goals. It's not all doom and gloom, though. We'll decode the 'why' behind these patterns, providing insights that can kickstart your journey of self-discovery and transformation.
Tune in to equip yourself with the tools to disrupt these habitual patterns, silence the discordant voice inside your head, and step into a more confident and fulfilling life. Let's get started!
Click here for the FREE Pipe the F Down Guided Meditation!
Send us a Text Message to let us know what you thought of this episode!
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Corissa is a Holistic Trauma-Informed Coach & Narcissistic Abuse Specialist™ who empowers women after they’ve endured narcissist trauma to rediscover who they are, reclaim their power, and find the clarity and courage to move forward and live a life they love. Corissa is also a recovering people-pleaser and codependent who has endured way too many narcissistic relationships to count! She coaches not only from her knowledge and training but also from the wisdom she has gained from her own healing journey.
Book a FREE 30-min Clarity Call HERE.
Ways to connect with Corissa:
Podcast Website
Website: www.corissastepp.com
Book: The Savvy Girl's Guide to Thriving Beyond Narcissistic Abuse
Instagram: @corissastepp
Facebook: Corissa Stepp
Free Quiz: Is My Partner a Narcissist?
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Welcome to the Stepping Into Meaningful Relationships podcast.
Speaker 1:I'm your host, carissa Stepp. I'm a relationship and human design coach, and this podcast is designed to help you create a stronger connection to yourself so you can transform the relationships around you, whether that be with your partner, a friend, a parent, a child or your business. We will be looking at relationships through the lens of human design, and my guests and I will bring you the tools, tips and tricks to create deeply meaningful connections with others. But first let's start with you. The most important relationship you have is the one with yourself. Thank you for tuning in. Now let's get to today's episode. Hey, hey, everyone.
Speaker 1:Welcome back to another episode of Stepping Into Meaningful Relationships. I am excited to be chatting with you today about the one thing you need to do in order to become more confident and courageous. Now, it's something we've talked about before, but what we're going to be chatting about today is about lowering the volume on our inner critic and using him or her for our own benefit. So if you are ready to step into a more confident, courageous version of yourself, then you're in the right place as we dive into befriending and quieting our inner critic. Now, some of you may be sitting here thinking I have an affirmation practice, right? I spend hours a day staring in the mirror giving myself these positive pep talks and reciting these positive affirmations, and yet you may be doing that and still finding that the negative chatter never seems to end. So the struggle is real. Right, the struggle to quiet our inner critic can be really hard. But here's the game changer, right? While we can't completely drown out our inner critic entirely, we do have the power to control the volume at which our inner critic speaks. And even, as I've alluded to, we can befriend our inner critic and use them as a key to unlock a deeper awareness of our unhealthy patterns and negative, limiting beliefs.
Speaker 1:Now hear me out. First things first, right? You get to decide how much attention you even pay to your inner critic, right? So if you have spent endless hours reciting positive affirmations, then the reason why it's not working for you is because of your subconscious mind, right? Your subconscious mind holds the beliefs and the perceptions that have held you back. So you may be sitting here thinking, okay. Well, how do I stop criticizing and doubting myself, don't? We all have an inner critic? And we do? Right. But maybe it's time to tell your inner critic to pipe down. So, while it's not your fault that you carry these inner-tiled wounds, these limiting beliefs that have impacted your behaviors and your patterns and your actions and your thoughts, it is your responsibility to do the inner work to rewrite these limiting beliefs and to heal your inner-child wounds, especially if you want to number one confidently step into your most powerful and authentic expression.
Speaker 1:Number two be able to ask for what you need in your relationship. Number three feel safe standing up for yourself and your values without fear of confrontation. Four create deep and fulfilling emotional connections with others. 5. Be comfortable using your voice and being visible in your relationships in business and in your community. 6. Feel seen, heard and recognized for who you are, without overgiving, sacrificing or compromising, and ultimately drop the mask that you've been hiding behind out of a fear of rejection or abandonment.
Speaker 1:So are you ready to tell your inner critic to shut the F up? Pardon the curse, although I didn't actually say the bad word. So if you're ready to do that, then here's what I'm going to encourage you to do. Number one I have a brand new free guided meditation called Pipe the F Down that you can listen to. That is a powerful tool that's designed to help you silence your inner critic, find your courage and rebuild your confidence. The other thing I encourage you to do is that, when your inner critic does show up and now you're aware, right when you hear that negative chatter in your head I would love for you to take a minute pause, take a deep breath, get curious and begin to ask questions. Right, begin to dive deeper into understanding the narrative that has been created. What is that narrative that it's trying to protect you from? Right?
Speaker 1:So our inner critic, if we look at this from an internal family systems perspective, the inner critic shows up as a way to protect us. Right? If we hold these intertiled wounds, potentially that we are not worthy, that we're not valuable, that we're not important, that we're not lovable, then that inner critic shows up to try and protect us from actually feeling that right and I know that sounds sort of counterintuitive, because you're like wait a second. You know why would my inner critic come and start criticizing me? As a way to protect me from feeling not valuable, like it's just making me feel worse. It makes me feel even less valuable, right? However, our inner critic shows up as a way to and this sounds backwards but motivate us to keep going, to continue to prove our value. Right, to prove that, you know, this negative chatter is not correct, right? These negative thoughts that we keep believing. It's a way of like, it's almost like a sick way of motivating us to kind of keep going and to keep pushing and to keep trying and over-efforting and over-giving, and so I know that sounds probably like a little bit backwards, but that's generally what's happening, right?
Speaker 1:The inner critic is also trying to prevent us from really seeing some of these deeper narratives that are running in the background. I think it's almost like a distraction away from it. But really, you know, the idea here is that I want you to start to get curious about you know, what is it that happened? That maybe is triggering your inner critic, right, because usually your inner critic is not just going to be responding to you doing the dishes, right? There's going to be something that happens. Your inner critic is going to show up, it's going to make you feel badly for how you handled the situation, for something that you did, something that you said, and, as a result, that negative chatter starts to begin. So pay attention to what's triggering you, or what's triggering that inner critic to show up so that you can get curious and ask more questions to try and understand.
Speaker 1:Well, what is it that happened that pointed towards some sort of perception that I have about myself, or a limiting belief or narrative that I'm telling myself, right, and I want you to kind of almost imagine replaying the scene of the trigger to try and understand a little bit more in tune into how you feel in your body, what emotions came up for you during that incident, so that you can start to uncover what it is that that inner critic is really driving at, right, and it could be just the idea that you're not important, right, it's actually highlighting for you that inner critic. Yes, it could be motivating you, but on the other hand, what it's doing is it's highlighting actually for you your deep inner wounds, right, your insecurities, and it's kind of harping on that. So it's almost like if you can work together with your inner critic to become more self-aware of your triggers, of your deep inner child wounds, then you can actually start to do the work to heal those things, which will, in effect, lower the volume on your inner critic, right, and then we can actually train our minds. And this is more of like a positive psychology approach where we can start training our minds to really look out for more of the positive things instead of focusing on the negative. Right, because that's another part of this is we have to rework our brains because we're very much geared towards, like a negativity bias, right, where we're going to believe something negative much more easily than we will believe something that's positive. So if we can, at the end of our day, focus on all the positive things that happened right, or even like the positive things that people have said to us or things that went well for us that day, right, and we can celebrate those like little successes and wins that we have throughout the day, then we're going to focus more on the positive than we are on the negative. So that's another way in which we can sort of quiet this negative inner chatter that's happening in the background.
Speaker 1:You know, oftentimes we find that our inner critic shows up as a way to sort of help us self-sabotage, right? So what I'm talking about digging a little bit deeper and getting curious when your inner critic shows up. You know, understanding that maybe you have some self-sabotaging patterns that are showing up and trying to get curious about why. You know, why is this self-sabotaging pattern showing, right? Am I trying to, you know, stop something from happening or am I trying to ruin something that seems to be going really well?
Speaker 1:And oftentimes, when we do this deep inner work and we start to get curious about it, you know we could realize that perhaps our subconscious mind is resisting us even trying to meet that goal right, or allowing something good to come into our lives. And it could be that, you know, there's a fear around again not being worthy enough to receive right, to have this really good relationship or have this really great opportunity come our way. It could also be that, you know, our mind is trying, our subconscious mind is trying to protect us from a perceived negative outcome, right, like, oh well, if I take this job that sounds so amazing and it sounds like it's so aligned for me, but what if I take it and I fail? Right, what if I get into this relationship and I spend more time with this person and I fall even more in love with them and then they break my heart, right? So that's where, like our inner critic, when we tune into what it's saying and what potentially the motivation is for it, right, what the underlying perceptions are, you know it can really help us and a lot of times, you know, these self-sabotaging patterns of the inner critic will show up and it's reflecting back to us that there's some kind of underlying fear that we need to face. Right, whenever we're in an uncomfortable situation.
Speaker 1:Even your mind likes comfort, right, it likes things to stay the same. So any kind of change with a new situation, a new relationship, a new opportunity, may be perceived as painful. Right, it may potentially be potentially painful or potentially might lead to this, like again, negative outcome. So what happens is is, you know, the inner critic shows up and the self-sabotaging patterns show up, which forces us to fall back on these old, unhealthy habits to maintain the comfort right and perceived stability that our mind craves. Right, the mind is trying to keep us safe at all times.
Speaker 1:So you know, understanding that this is a pattern right, where the self-sabotage can be like a habit even that comes up and is oftentimes voiced through our inner critic. It can lead us to again, like, become more aware of these patterns, be more aware of why they're showing up. Right, it could even lead to procrastination. Right, it could lead to people pleasing. It could lead to perfectionism. Right, like your inner critic could show up and be like well, you're not doing a good enough job, or you need to try harder, or you need to be there more for your partner, or you need to give more, or you need to do more in order for this to work out. So your inner critic can really sponsor a lot of these really unhealthy patterns of behavior that we need to disrupt, right? We need to break the habit of those patterns and those cycles. So once you start to tune into your inner critic and you're able to focus and identify what those are, it then helps us gain a better understanding of when they're showing up and then drowning out that inner critic.
Speaker 1:Right, being able to take that volume and dial it down, because then we can understand ourselves better like, oh, I know why this is showing up, I know why you know my inner critic is saying these things. She's trying to keep me safe. She's trying to prevent me from failing. She's trying to prevent me from going out of my comfort zone. She's trying to prevent me from facing confrontation or conflict or something else that might be deemed uncomfortable. Or maybe she's trying to keep me from feeling inadequate in some way, especially if this is around a lot of like your goals, like your goal setting that you're doing for yourself, whether that be in your business, or just like your personal health goals, for example.
Speaker 1:Your inner critic can show up and try to basically keep you the same, keep you in the status quo, because otherwise you know you might actually try something new and something different and, oh my gosh, what if it doesn't go well. So how do we begin to just change our patterns? Well, obviously it's hard, right, because a lot of these patterns are habits. The patterns become habits when you know they are in our subconscious programming. We just kind of revert back to them. It's such a subconscious thing that we're not even aware of it. And that's why I want you to bring awareness to your inner critic, to your habits, to your patterns, to your limiting beliefs, to your self perception, so that you can identify when things are happening that are triggering these patterns and behaviors and these thoughts. And so, once you build the awareness around it, then you can start to actually set, you know, let's just say clear and firm boundaries, right Boundaries around building up small positive habits gradually, because if we try to make too many significant changes at once, when we're trying to disrupt and change our patterns and our behaviors and our thoughts, your nervous system is basically probably going to feel overwhelmed and when that happens, you're just going to end up giving in to old destructive patterns.
Speaker 1:Instead, right, you're going to go back to these old unhealthy patterns because, again, they feel safe, even though we now are aware that they're unhealthy. These patterns and these habits are ways in which we've learned to cope and so when we're triggered, we are constantly relying back on our innate coping strategies and mechanisms that have been in place for years. At this point, right, these are strategies and mechanisms that we have taken on, you know, from our childhood. Right, a lot of these, again, like I mentioned, these inner-child wounds, they come from our childhood trauma, and so you know it can be really hard to make a big change very quickly. Right, to just like, like I said, like just silencing your inner critic is going to probably not feel necessarily quote unquote safe to do, even though you know we consciously are aware that it's destructive, right, or self-sabotaging in its own way. So the idea here is to take small steps right, to make small changes, to even take potentially some of your habits and tweak them a little bit so that they become a little bit healthier, right, like, making these small little micro changes are a really good way to start eliminating some of these, you know, negative beliefs and unhealthy habits that we have.
Speaker 1:What I love to do to help people rewrite their limiting beliefs and start to disrupt some of these patterns and cycles is I love bringing EFT into this. So EFT is the emotional freedom techniques you may have heard me talk about them before or tapping, because it's been proven to rewire neural pathways right, or, in other words, rewrite your subconscious programming or AKA, self-limiting beliefs, and it's a technique that you can use on your own, you know, or you can work with a practitioner like me. And it's really this very gentle technique that helps you access the deeper layers of your subconscious and has been scientifically proven to lower your cortisol levels, right, your stress hormones. And when we're triggered, what happens? Right, our stress hormones, right, our cortisol, like spikes, it goes up, you know. It rises within our bodies because we're responding to a potential threat or a stressful situation, right, which we perceive whatever's going on that causes us stress, we're perceiving it as a threat, right, that's kind of like the way that our nervous system works. It's a subconscious belief that something that we are facing or enduring is a threat, it's dangerous, and that's why we go into fight or flight or freeze or fawning and people pleasing right.
Speaker 1:So, anyway, I don't want to kind of get too much off on a tangent here about EFT, but it really is, I believe, a very effective way of working through a lot of this. But I would love for you to download my brand new free guided meditation. In order to do that, there will be a link in the show notes so that you can get access to it. This guided meditation is another really good way to help you bring more awareness to some of these patterns, but also to help you let go of this inner critic right To help you dial down on the volume. And then, of course, there are additional steps that you'll need to do, as I've mentioned and outlined for you in this episode, which I really hope you found helpful.
Speaker 1:So if you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch with me. If you have any feedback for me on the meditation or even on this episode, I would absolutely love to hear from you. If you have an idea of something that you'd like for me to talk about on the podcast. Please feel free to also shoot me an email, because I'm always looking for feedback and ideas.
Speaker 1:I'm here to serve what you guys need as my audience, and I want to do that in the highest and best way possible to provide you very valuable content that's helpful and that's going to improve your life right, improve your relationship with yourself and, ultimately, the relationships with everyone else around you. So until next week, everyone, be well. If you're hearing this message, that means you've listened all the way to the end, and for that I am truly grateful. If you enjoyed this episode and found it valuable, would you mind leaving us a review wherever you listen to podcasts and sharing it with others? If you'd like to connect with me for one-on-one coaching or human design reading, you can find me on my website or on social media. Also, if you have a topic you'd like me to discuss on a future episode, please DM me. Be sure to tune in next week for another episode of Stepping into Meaningful Relationships.
