EP102 Own Your Sh*t or Stay Stuck: Why Reinvention Isn’t Working (Yet)

What if the problem isn’t that you’re stuck…. but that you’ve been performing change instead of owning it?

This week’s episode goes straight for the jugular in the most loving way possible, and I get real about:

• Why taking responsibility isn’t about blame…. It's about response-ability.
  
  
• How childhood experiences and societal BS shape the women we become… and how to stop letting them write your story.
  
  
• The difference between fragility, resilience, and anti-fragility, and why we’re done aiming to just “bounce back”
  
  
• What it really looks like to stop living in victimland, and how to book your one-way ticket out.

This episode isn’t about bypassing the hard stuff. It’s about owning your sh*t, choosing your next response with power…. and realising your next version isn’t some perfect fantasy future. 

She’s already in you. Just buried under survival mode.

Hit play. Your next reinvention starts now.

Loads of Love,

Sarah x

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✨ And hey, if you’re reading this before the end of August 8th? Use code BADASSAF53 to get 53% off your first month in the Badass AF Book Club. Real talk. Real books. No beige advice. 

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Transcript

00:00

Hello. Hello, and welcome to the reinvention era podcast with me, Sarah Elizabeth and I have been in my full on Leo era for my birthday last week, even with broken arm, version 5.3 upgraded as we speak, and talking about version 5.3 before we get going today, I just want to remind you, or tell you, if you haven't already known, and if you don't already know, where have you been, what have you been doing? But today is the last day, Friday, eighth of August. 8 of August. 8 of the eighth is also Lionsgate, for those that know, but also it is the last day you can claim 53% off your first month in the badass AF book club, so you get a chapter by chapter, private podcast of each month's book that you can listen to, whenever, wherever you goddamn like, in your PJs, No makeup, walking the dog on the commute wherever, with the biggest takeaways, extra insights, coaching and a bit of humour, all for a tenner a month, yes, for the price of Two coffees, less than two coffees a fucking month. You get the power to change your goddamn life. It's cheaper than buying the actual fucking book on Audible for fuck sake, and you get my dulcet tones and all. But because it's my birthday month, I'm gifting you. I'm giving you the birthday fucking gift of 53% off that first tenner. I mean, make it make sense. And this, of course, you don't want to be badass as fuck, unless you want to carry on just listening to podcasts and then forgetting about them, or skimming through books not actually getting anywhere or reading them, or buying a new one at the airport and still not finishing it, living your same old beige life, day in, day out. Then, of course, if that's what you want, you crack on. You do you love. But if you do want more, if you do want to bounce out of bed in the morning actually excited for your life, if you want to like what you see in the mirror for once, if you want to strut into that meeting with confidence, if you want to understand how to turn your mood from shit to great, and learn how to shut up the fucking Inner Critic. Mine's called Margot. Anyway, if you're ready to live out that higher self that lives buried inside of you, but is aching to be freed, if you want all of that, then you know what to do. Use code badass af 53 and unlock the secrets to really living a badass AF life. All you need's in the show notes. So get in there, love. But for now, let's get going with today's episode. 

03:29

And today might be a bit of a loving bitch slap, because I do like to be your loving bitch slap in human form. Now in the best way, of course, because we are talking today about owning your shit, taking responsibility for your life, because I think so often we as women, particularly Gen X women, I have to Say we've been brought up in an era of Disney diet, where society culture has taught us really early on, really early on, that as women, we are somehow dependent on men, dependent particularly on men, I should say, which was then actually kind of reinforced by life like, for example, the fact that you couldn't get a bank account as a woman in the UK until 1975 that was after I was fucking born. And before anyone says, well, you're old, remember? And version 5.3 upgraded? Oh, hell yes. But anyway, back then, women couldn't apply for credit, couldn't get a mortgage, sex discrimination was 100% freaking legal. Never mind a gender pay gap, it was fucking gender life gap. And let's not even get started on the fact that until 1991 the year my eldest son was born, until then, a man was legally, legally allowed to rape his wife. Less than 35 years ago, it was impossible to consider that a woman would not consent to sex with her fucking husband. I mean, seriously. So, yes, yes, I get it. We were brought up in the Western world, at least in a society where women weren't equal. They were subordinate, expected to smile, serve, stay in the fucking lane, but, but even though that was the societal norm, we have a choice now in this day and age and all that, we have a choice, whether we choose to stay marginalised, silenced, undervalued, or we can stand up and take responsibility, for our own independence, right? 

06:24

And that society, I've got it. Yeah, shit happened. It did totally and life too. Just let's talk for a minute about life, because it's very rare that any one of us has got through life without some kind of experience that has had an impact on us, is it? Yeah, most of us had something, even if it's the biggest trauma you've ever experienced is a tube strike. You know what? I mean? Seriously, we've all had something. But there's this thing in social work called adverse childhood experiences, and they're basically stressful or traumatic events that happened during childhood, which can can have massively long, lasting negative effects on health and well being. Now that might be abuse, whether that's emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, it might be physical or emotional neglect, or it could be general household dysfunction, or like living with a parent with a mental health condition or substance abuse or domestic abuse, or someone going to prison, or it might just be that your parents divorced, but there's like this scale of adverse childhood experiences and all of that Shit can really affect a kid's development, learning, behaviour, health, all of it depending on how many, how much you experienced. And it matters, because our first childhood experiences like I say, can end up impacting outcomes, like health education. It can affect your attachment, which affects how you form healthy relationships, all sorts of shit, because these experiences accumulated cause a stress response, the trauma response in children, and if that isn't supported and managed, guess how you grow up. But again, the big bar in all of this whether it's a shit experience in society or whether it's a shit experience in your family, or both. The point is, what happens when we don't accept that, when we blame that on what is happening for us now, because ultimately, we all have a choice to take responsibility now. 

09:16

We talked about this quite a lot in the book confidence feels like shit that we did in the book club in June, albeit it was somewhat interrupted by a flip flop incident that ended up in my broken arm. But anyway, actually, no, do you know what? That's the perfect example. It was fucking shit. It is fucking shit. It's painful. Recovery is a hell of a lot longer than I thought it was. I'm a first physio. A couple of weeks ago, couldn't even lift me arm up or turn me wrist over. It's not great, you know. But I now have the choice. I can sit and feel sorry for myself. I can blame the havaianas. I can blame the Fucking traffic light being in the way I can get upset with the pain, or or I can choose to take responsibility for what happens next and coming back to those adverse childhood experiences and or the way women were treated in society. We can blame the people that hurt us the things that hurt us. We can get angry, we can feel sorry for ourselves, or we can take responsibility for what happens next, and look, I'm definitely 1,000,000% not saying, I'm not saying that any child or adult come to that who's experienced abuse, experienced harm, experienced shit is to blame in any way, shape or form, but we can choose to take the responsibility for how we respond to those experiences, right?

11:06

So let's get into responsibility as the word itself, right? The word responsibility broken down is response ability, the ability to respond. Responsibility at its core is the ability to respond. It's about having the capacity to choose how to react to situations, both internally and externally, it's having some personal agency over our lives and taking back the power to shape our reactions. So when we say about somebody needing to take this responsibility, we are usually talking about it in a sense of more accountability, like responsibility. Taking responsibility implies that we are accountable for what happens to us. But I don't think that goes deep enough into the truer sense of rather than being responsibility for what happens to us, it's more about a responsibility and ability to respond to things or events or experiences potentially caused by other people, and making it about what it means for us, it's about understanding and recognising our own capacity to Make choices even in really fucking difficult and challenging circumstances that are driven by external shit or people, and that choice of response, how we respond, includes both the internal response, like your thoughts and your feelings, as well as the external response, like what you do, what you say. So basically, responsibility or response ability is being able to choose your response to life's challenges, rather than being passively reactive. The ability to choose how you meet your shit, not just survive it, or, as I call it, owning your shit. And for me, one of the first steps to reinventing your life into your best goddamn self starts with accepting responsibility for both what has been and what will come into your life. Even if you had no control over what happened, you can take control of what happens next.

14:15

I said about us in the Book Club doing this with the queen of confidence herself, Erica Kramer, and she wrote this great section in the book confidence feels like shit about taking responsibility, or rather not taking responsibility and being a victim. And I'm just going to read this bit because it really highlights what I'm talking about, the victim mentality is the disempowered mindset that led me to living in victim land for most of my life. I set up a tent and capped out in victim land, eventually got my citizenship and made it my home, actually, let's be honest, I was the fucking mayor of victim land. I bought land. Bought. Tea and had a pity party with all my negative neighbours on the daily I lived in victim land for such a long time I didn't even know there was a way out. Nowadays, I don't spend much time, if any, in victim land. I mean, I might do a layover in victim land. I might stop there briefly because I'm having a moment, but then I'm like, oh shit, oh yeah, I know where I am. I'm in victim land, and I don't like this fucking place, but I clearly need to be here right now. So let me feel my feels, have a pity party of one, and then get the hell out of here. If you don't commit to working on your shit, you don't even know you live in victim land. Some people were born and raised there. They put their kids in school there and die in the victimland cemetery, right? See, I love the way she wrote that, because it's so fucking true, isn't it? And we get that choice whether we stay in victim land or we take this responsibility and the ability to respond in a way that works for us to escape victim land and get to Happy Land, isn't that kid's toy. Oh, anyway, you get the gist, right?

16:23

But actually, it's not even about bouncing back like nothing happened. It's about coming back stronger because it did happen. There's this concept that I've been reading about called anti fragility, right? And it's kind of like, you know, those, like Japanese bowls that get repaired with gold Kintsugi. They call it. It was actually my branding for the divorce chapter and the divorce book club. But anyway, basically, in Kintsugi, they don't hide the cracks. They highlight them, because the break is the beautiful part of the story. Because the thing is, I feel like with this responsibility thing, most of us were raised to aim for resilience, weren't we? You know, get back up when life knocks you down. Stay strong. Keep going. And yes, yes, resilience matters, of course, but it ain't the top of the ladder, because resilience still implies recovery, bouncing back to who you were before the hard thing happened. It's survival valuable, yes, but still, just survival. Like a bouncy ball, it doesn't break, but it doesn't grow either. Then there's fragility, where any kind of disruption absolutely fucking breaks you like a glass ball absolutely shatters under any pressure, you know, avoid discomfort at all costs. You live in reaction to life. But then there's this third category, anti fragility, and that means you don't just survive the storm. You get stronger because of it. The pressure doesn't crack you. It sharpens you. It doesn't ruin you. It shows you who the hell you are. You don't just bounce back. You build back. Imagine like a giant inflatable ball Some bastards popped it now you can stay deflated, shrivelled up on the ground, or you can use the shit as air as power to to get that ball back up, even bigger and stronger than before, and that is where responsibility comes in, because anti fragility isn't automatic. It's not a trauma badge. It's a choice. It needs what I call grown ass woman responsibility, the ability to meet life's curveballs and go, Okay, this really fucking hurts. This broke something in me, but now I get to decide what I build with the pieces. You don't just react, you respond intentionally, powerfully on purpose, and that that is the root of reinvention, not becoming a new version because you broke, but becoming a clearer, fuller version because you chose not to stay broken. Does that make sense? So. So even something as basic as my current broken arm status, I've got an arm that won't lift, a pain that's lasted longer than I wanted to, and yet here I am podcasting, creating, not despite the break, but through it. That's anti fragility. in Motion, not fluffy, just freaking real.

20:21

And look, I just want to say again, this is not about not feeling shit like Erica said. We might have a bit of a stopover in victim land. Have a bit of a pity party. Believe me, I think I was the fucking queen of victim land at one point. La la mayor. But what this is about is about responding differently, choosing to respond differently, choosing to grow from the shit, coming back to those adverse childhood experiences I've talked about the start, yes, all the research looks at those experiences and trauma And the cumulative negative consequences of the shit stuff, but, but not every person who's had shitty experiences, not every person who's experienced trauma will end up in a negative outcome. An awful lot of what society defines as successful. Those people, successful people considered successful people have experienced a hell of a lot of shit, hell of a lot, but have chosen not to let it define them. It's like the story I've said about before. You can have identical twins brought up by the same parents in the same household, in the same culture, in the same society, yet, and yet, they end up completely different. Why? Because they have responded differently. They have used their individual ability to respond in a way that works for them, not against them or not, or going back to the way that society treated women, the reason I talked about that is because there's this generational outcome that women can see themselves as incomplete, not good enough without a bloke dependent on blokes, dependent on men, dependent on other people, rather than taking responsibility for a different life. And look, reinvention isn't about pretending nothing's happened. It's about choosing to rebuild with intention, with clarity, with power. Because you love you're not here to survive this life. You're here to lead it. So it's about owning your shit. You get to choose power. It's all up to you. So with all that said, That's nearly all for today, but I'd really love for you to think about where and how you can take responsibility for reinventing what's not working for you. Who would you be? What would you think? What would you be doing if you'd never been hurt? What is it costing you to stay in victim land? It's fucking expensive place to live. No premium there. Love.Is it the actual thing or experience that happened to you that you're thinking about, or is it about what you're thinking about, it what you've chosen to make it mean about you? That's a tough one, because we all have the ability to change what we think about any given thing or person, and when we choose to change those thoughts, we get to choose how we feel as a result, which influences how we act and what we do, which ultimately decides the outcome, all from A thought. So we can sit and blame external shit, or we can choose to respond and think differently about it, right?

24:30

If this episode is landing for you in any way, I'd love for you to let me know like I'd love for you to share the episode as well, maybe with someone that soaking up residents in victim land, or share on Instagram and tag me at the underscore re mentioned era. I'd love, love, love to hear your views on this, taking responsibility and choosing our response and how that can change your life for the god, I'm better fucking here for that. Personally, now I've entered version 5.3 really, I'm taking the responsibility to be badass as fuck. I'm inviting you to do the same. Your next version is already stand low. That version of you is not some far off future fantasy. She's already in you. She's been just a bit buried under survival mode, under people pleasing bullshit expectations, and every time you choose response over reactivity, truth over performance, taking the masks off, you take centre stage in your own life. Again, reinvention isn't changing who you are, it's reclaiming who you've always been before the world handed you a script. It's where you say no to that friend that only calls when she needs something, where you say no to saying it's fine when it fucking isn't. It's stopping doing emotional admin for people who never ask how you are. It's no longer tolerating being the most understanding woman in the room when no one understands you. It's not putting up with working through lunch, through grief, through the damn trauma, just to prove you fucking can. Do you remember that version of you that used to sing in the car like you were fucking Celine Dion with the windows down and all Do you remember the you that loved old movies or hated office politics and dreamed the you that dreamed bigger than the fucking job title ever allowed you for you're badass now. You don't wait for permission. You ask for what you want, not because you're entitled, but because you're done being freaking invisible. You get to become the woman who knows what she wants and isn't scared of who she becomes when she gets it, life will keep handing you autopilot scripts until you decide to direct the scene yourself, and the more you delay, The heavier it gets. This isn't about urgency, it's about ownership. Own your shit, because no one's coming to save you from a life you never chose. So choose for you. Okay, love you. Bitch slap done. Thank you again. So very, very, very much for being here. I will be back in your beautiful badass earbuds again next week. So until then, have a fucking amazing week. Loads of love. Bye. Yo