EP146 What Stops With You: The Legacy Nobody Talks About

Right, so this one started as a thought I had while driving with the roof down, which, for the record, is when literally all my best ideas happen (well, that and the shower!)

I'd been thinking about legacy, and how we widely perceive it.

Because we talk about legacy like it's something you build and leave behind. Whether it’s the career, or the body of work (or even the thing people say at your funeral). And yeah, that stuff matters. Of course.

But the most powerful legacy I've ever witnessed in 20-plus years of watching people rebuild their lives? 

It's not always about what you add. Sometimes it's about what stops.

What stops with you.

In this episode I get personal; I was born Emma, adopted as a baby, moved across England, and became Sarah Elizabeth before I was old enough to have an opinion about it. Reinvention wasn't a concept I discovered in a self-help book; it was literally my origin story.

And somewhere in that early chapter, I made up a whole story about myself. A story that ran my life for bloody decades. It showed up in every relationship, every time I stayed too long, every time I held it all together and refused to ask for help. You'll probably recognise the shape of it, even if the details are different for you.

Because I'm also going to describe someone to you in this episode. She's in her 40s or 50s, and she's built something genuinely impressive. And she wakes up most mornings already running her to-do list before she's even had a wee. She does everything so damn well, nobody looking at her would ever know that she feels completely empty inside.

Maybe she cries in the car sometimes. Maybe she's googled burnout symptoms more times than she'd like to admit. Maybe she's done the therapy, the retreat, and bought umpteen journals she hasn't even opened. Yet she's still here, watching her own life from slightly outside of it.

That woman isn't broken, and she’s abso-f*cking-lutely NOT failing at being a functional adult.

She's just running an identity that was built for a completely different chapter, written by a completely different author.

In this episode. we go into the Four Selves framework, specifically the Inherited Self (the identity you absorbed before you had the words to question it) and the Designed Self (who you already are when you stop being who everyone else needed you to be). We talk about the EDIT Code. 

And I leave you with three questions that I genuinely think are more clarifying than any five-year plan.

But, the big one: what stops with you?

What pattern, what story, what survival behaviour are you done passing down? Because that question... that's where legacy actually lives.

If this episode hits a nerve, send it to the woman in your life who's been doing all the things and still feels flat. She needs this conversation.

Links mentioned:

Edit Your Life journal on Amazon

The Queen Edit, my VIP 1:1 programme 

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Transcript

Hello, hello, and welcome back to the Reinvention Era podcast. I'm Sarah Elizabeth, Queen of Reinvention. And if you're new here, welcome. You found us. Pull up a pew, love, and let's go into the juicy stuff, all the nitty gritty of remembering who the fuck we are, and also why we're here, which sounds kind of deep, I know, but bear with, we're stripping it back, not literally, no one needs to see that, but today's episode is one I've been sitting with for quite a bit, it started as a thought I had while I was driving. Yes, she's back driving after nearly a year of the Diva Arm. She's back, and because the weather has been gorgeous, the roof came down. Bloody love that feeling. Nothing quite like it. Anyway, I had this thought while I was driving, because actually that's where my best thinking happens. Another reason why I'm happy to be back behind the wheel, but anyway, the thought I had was about legacy, because we talk about legacy quite a lot, don't we? Like, we talk about it in a way of saying what we're building, what we're leaving behind, what we're known for, what people will say about us after we're gone, right? And I think actually we could look at legacy from another direction, because the most powerful legacy I've ever seen, and let's be honest, I've been watching people rebuild their lives for over 20 fucking years, professionally and personally. What I've seen is that the most bloody powerful legacies aren't always about what you add to the world, it's about what stops as well. So, today we're talking about exactly that, what stops with you. Okay, so I want to start with a question I got asked recently, and I get a version of this quite a lot. Someone said to me, Sarah, Sare, when did you first realise you were going to reinvent yourself? And I had sort of laughed, because the honest answer is, I didn't realise. There was no magic moment as such, you know. I didn't sit down one day and go, oh, today I'm going to be different, you know it kind of wasn't like that, and it wasn't even something I chose at first, it was something that happened to me, and then gradually eventually became something I chose, and it actually started for me from birth, the thing, and not that many people know about me is that I was born Emma, I was Emma in Plymouth, in Devon, on the third of August 1972 and within a few weeks of arriving in this cray cray world, I was moved across the other side of England to Kent and became Sarah Elizabeth, different name, different family, different life, you know, whole sliding doors concept. I was adopted as a baby, so reinvention wasn't exactly a self-help concept that I found out about in my 30s, you know, it was literally my first experience of being alive, so for me identity was never.. I don't know, something that was fixed. I suppose it never really felt like a given, like even as a kid I kind of understood that on some level who you are isn't necessarily who you were born as like the name on the label can change, and I suppose the thing about that is that as a kid I made up this whole story about why I was adopted, because kids do that, don't they? We fill in the gaps with whatever makes sense to our little brains and my story was that I'd been given away for adoption because I wasn't good enough, and fundamentally that was because of how I looked. I figured I couldn't have done anything else wrong as a baby, so it must have been because I was a really goddamn fat ugly baby, something about me was unchangeably wrong, right? That story, that one little story I told myself at what, five, six. Years old, it ran my life for fucking decades. It showed up in every relationship I chose, every time I stayed too long when I left, every time I proved my competence and held it all together and refused to ask for help, because asking for help might mean someone would think I wasn't quite enough, right?

Sarah Elizabeth  5:30  

And I just, I just want to pause there for a second, because I'm willing to bet that somewhere in your history there's a story that something a bit like that, something that you decided about yourself a very long time ago that actually you've never fully examined as an adult, I guess, and it's running your life right now as subtly and consistently as a piece of software that you installed and forgot about, like, an app running on your phone that you downloaded, and it's almost like that, and that is what I call the inherited self. It's the identity that you absorbed long before you had the language or the cognitive ability to be able to question it, and we're going to come back to that. So, let me describe someone to you. She's in her 40s or 50s. She's built something incredible, something that is successful by all the metrics society throws at us. She's got a career, a reputation, a life that genuinely looks fucking impressive from the outside. She's the person that people call on when things go wrong. She's the one who holds it all together. She's the reliable one, the strong one, and she wakes up most mornings, and the very first thing she does is check her phone, not because she wants to, but because she's already running through the list of everything that needs to be done today, and who needs what from her, what she hasn't dealt with yet, what she's already fucking behind on, before she's even had a bloody way, right? And she gets dressed, and she goes to work, or she opens her laptop, or she does whatever version of showing up is required for that day, and she does it well, right? She does it really fucking well. She always does it well. Nobody would not look at her that she feels completely bloody empty inside. They wouldn't know that she doesn't sleep properly, probably because she can't, but because the minute things go quiet in the dark, something uncomfortable comes to the surface, you know, like that low-level anxiety that can't quite put her thing on. It's like a feeling that something's missing, but she can't quite figure out what it is, because she's got so much, right? She's got the career, she's got the house, she's got the people she loves, she's got what she was supposed to want, right. And yet, and yet, sometimes she cries in the car. She'll be driving home from work, or dropping someone off, or whatever, and a song comes on, she'll just cry, and it's not even because she's sad, it's like something in the music hit a nerve she didn't even know about, you know. She's probably googled burnout symptoms about 94 times in the past fucking year. She started and stopped a journal countless times. She's got a pile of them gathering dust in the bedroom. She's got a meditation app that she's never opened. She's done therapy, maybe even a cause or two, possibly a retreat, and yet she's still here, still feeling like she's watching her own life from slightly outside of it. Does she feel familiar? She is who I think about every single time I sit down to record this podcast. She is who this whole queen of reinvention world is built for, and do you know what I want her to understand today? More than anything else, she's not broken. There's nothing wrong with her. She's not ungrateful, you know. should be more grateful. You've got everything you want. She's not fucking up at life or mindset or being a functioning adult. None of that shit, right? She's just running an identity that was built for a completely different chapter, actually written by a completely different author, and that's it. That's the problem. She has been trying to live her next best era with an operating system for the fucking last one, you know. I spent over 20 years in social work, specifically in child protection, in safeguarding kind of work where you see human beings at their most vulnerable and their most extraordinary, actually. And one thing I became actually a little bit obsessed with was why do some people transform art crisis and others don't, because it wasn't about resources, it wasn't about intelligence, it wasn't about effort.

Sarah Elizabeth  11:04  

I watched incredibly fucking capable, actually quite self-aware people sometimes make the same choices over and over and over again, even when they really, that's what you wanted to do something different, right, and I watched people with far less on paper on the metrics completely rewrite their lives, and the difference almost every single time was identity wasn't mindset, it wasn't their habits, it wasn't routine, it was their identity, because we all have what I call the survival self, and she is the version of you that developed in response to your life, in response to your inherited self, to that self that you absorbed as a younger child, she learned the survival self, learned what kept you safe, she learned what earned approval, what avoided conflict, what made people stay, what made people leave, what made people be disappointed in you, what made people stop being disappointed in you, she's one fucking resourceful version of you, right? And likely the reason you're still standing, and because two things can be true at once, she is also the reason you're stuck and feeling like you are, because the survival self is absolutely bloody brilliant at surviving, but terrible at thriving. She was built for safety, not sovereignty. She was built to manage risk, not to take audacious leaps. I mean, she was built to be needed, to be indispensable, to be competent, not to rest, not to be seen, not to want things loudly and out loud. How dare you, little girls should be seen and not heard? Don't you know? You know, so when you try and change your life from inside the survival self, she's gonna resist every fucking time, and that's just because she's doing her job perfectly. That's all. She genuinely believes she is protecting you. So when you decided to finally put yourself first, and she filled you with some kind of guilt, like, what do I do that for, kind of vibes, that's the survival self in action. When you get excited about a new direction, and then two days later found 117 reasons why it couldn't possibly work. That's the survival self. When you said you were going to stop saying yes to everything, and then said yes to three more things by the next day, that's a survival self doing exactly what she was built to do. She's not your enemy, but also, and also she can't lead the next chapter either, and this is where I think a lot of personal development gets it wrong, because most of it tries to convince the survival self to change, to be braver, to think differently, to visualise harder, just decide to be different, and I see that as a bit like it's a bit like trying to get a smoke alarm to stop going off, but explain to it that there's no actual fire. There is no fire, it's just the toast burning. The alarm doesn't give a shit about your rationale, it responds to the smoke, and the survival self in you responds to threat and to hurt. Change looks like a fucking threat every single time, so the work, the real work, isn't about convincing her, it's about going underneath her entirely and designing a new identity and installing it at the level where identity is actually formed. That's what the Queen edit is, that's why it works when other things happen, not because it's magic, it just works at the right level. Okay, so here's where I want to bring this back to the question I started with, like legacy, legacy, I've got five grandchildren, five, yeah. So, before you do the maths, I was a teenage mum, and at the time every assumption people made about what my life was going to look like seemed like it had just been fucking confirmed, and I'd like to tell you that I was completely unbothered by that. Who gives a shit what others think, but I wasn't. I cared hugely what other people thought, so I joined Mensa at 19. Obviously, that's what you do, and it didn't do anything for me.

Sarah Elizabeth  16:14  

It wasn't because I needed a hobby, but because I needed to prove something to myself, mostly that I wasn't going to be the stereotype, that being a young teenage mum wasn't going to be the ceiling on my life, that I was still clever, that I still knew what I was doing, and that drive that fierce, almost furious need to prove that circumstances don't define you has followed me ever freaking sense. It's one of the things I'm most grateful for, in a weird way, and because two things can be true, it's also one of the patterns that I've had to really go in and look at the most, because there is a version of I'll prove them wrong, I'll show them that is absolutely pure fuel, and because two things can't be true, there's a version of it that keeps you performing for an audience that actually stopped watching fucking years ago. I lost everything at 40 right? The marriage ended in the shit show, the home went to bankruptcy, along with the financial security I thought I had. Turn that the whole freaking thing was built on sand. But anyway, I came out the other side with Crohn's disease, a lot of therapy debt, for good measure, and a very clear question in my head after it all landed and settled. Who is the woman I'm actually choosing to be now not who I was told to be, not who I had to be to survive that marriage, or to prove something to my dad, or be taken seriously in the child protection team. Who am I choosing right now consciously on purpose? I and I think the question underneath that, the one that changed everything, was actually, what do I want to stop passing down, because I looked at my kids, and I thought about my grandchildren, and I thought about the things that I'd inherited or survived absorbed the messages, like the belief that love is conditional, particularly on what you look like, the certainty that asking for help is a weakness. The way I'd learned to make myself small to keep the peace, the way I'd learned to be competent and capable and fine at all times, even when I was falling the fuck apart. None of those patterns were handed to me deliberately. Nobody sat me down and said, right there, here's how to abandon yourself in slow motion throughout your life. Love just absorbed through watching, through experiencing, through the invisible curriculum of being someone's daughter and someone's wife and someone's employee, and someone's friend, and someone's mum, and I thought this has to stop with me, not through shame, not through blaming anyone, just through conscious choice. These patterns have to end here. My granddaughters, and my grandson, for that matter, they're growing up watching a woman who left when leaving was fucking hard, who built something from scratch in her 50s, who has Crohn's disease, and a business, and a book being written, and a podcast, and a life that she consciously designed, not perfect life by any means. A chosen one, my legacy. I hope is that they may never know the patterns that ended with me. I hope that they won't say what I decided to stop. They'll just experience the difference, and that to me is legacy. It's not what I built, it's what I've stopped. So, if you're listening to this, you know, maybe you're recognising yourself in bits of it as well, maybe you're feeling that slightly uncomfortable, tingle of oh god she's describing me again, which is, by the way, exactly right. And also, welcome to the club, we've got snacks. Let me give you something to actually do with this. The concept I work with in the Queen Edit is what I call the designed self. Some people call it the alter ego, which I think is actually a perfect description, because it really, it captures something really important, actually, because it's not a fake version of you, it's not who you wish you were. It is the version of you that already exists underneath all the conditioning and all the survival patterns, and all the shit, and all the inherited stories.

Sarah Elizabeth  21:12  

Most women, in fact, I'd say probably every woman I've ever worked with has at least glimpsed her, just you know, on a day when everything just felt right, walking into a room and feeling even just for a second that the full version of her is there before the voice in her head then start going, but she was there, that feeling of, oh, here she is. That's not a fantasy, that's that's you. The designed self isn't who you become. She's who you already are when you stop being who everyone else needed you to be. And the work, the work is designing her consciously, naming her, knowing exactly how she carries herself, what her standards are, how she speaks, what she says no to, what she prioritises, how she feels in her own body, and then conditioning yourself to operate from that identity, now, now, not when you've lost the way, not when the kids have left home, not when the job is sorted, or the relationship's better, or anything else, or the anxiety is gone, whatever. Now be her now, that's the whole thing, that's the entire methodology in three words. There's this daily practice that I use with everyone I work with, called the Edit Code Energy Rehab, which is getting your energy right first, because the designed self can't be accessed from depletion of D, do the damn thing, taking expansive action as her, not waiting until you feel ready, because you'll wait forever, FYI, I identity alchemy rehearsing and anchoring the design self in the ordinary moments every day, not just the big ones, and T is thought detox, managing the limiting beliefs on an ongoing basis, because sadly those old stories don't just disappear, they just get quieter as we make the new identity louder, you know. Reformed designed identity is not a one done transformation, it's practice, right? It compounds, and every time you up level, you do it again and again and again. We can get a little bit deeper and a little bit freer and a little bit more yourself. It's kind of decoding who you've been conditioned to be, and then recoding the identity that you're choosing now, that you're designing intentionally now, and then being her now. So I want to leave you with three questions, right? And it's not homework, we're not school, it's not school love, just some questions to think about and sit with this week. Maybe write them in the back of your journal, or maybe just let them rattle around and have a riff in your own head. The first one, what one pattern you're carrying that you didn't consciously choose might be something small, like the way you apologise reflexively. It might be the way you make yourself small in certain rooms. It could be the way you say yes before you've even checked whether you actually want to check it in with yourself. Do I want to do this when I say yes? Just notice one pattern that you didn't consciously choose. Don't have to fix it, just see it. And the second question I want you to sit with is Who is the version of you that you keep almost being, you know, her, you've seen her. like I say, she shows up in the moments when you're most yourself, when everything goes a little bit quiet, then it's not quite so loud, and every something just clicks, and her describe her. What does she do differently? How does she feel in her own skin? What does she say yes to? What she can say no to? What shit doesn't she tolerate anymore? What's her standards? Write it all down. She's more real than you think she really is, and the third question, the big one is, what stops with you? What stops with you? What's your legacy? What are you done passing down through generations? What inherited pattern? What survival behaviour? What story about who you are and what you deserve, what you're allowed to want ends with you. Because I promise you that question is way more clarifying than any five year plan, 10 year plan. I'm telling you, you don't have to have the whole answer right now, but just start asking yourself what stops with you. All right, that's your episode. Love, I'm out of notes.

Sarah Elizabeth  26:34  

If this one hit a nerve, screenshot it, share it, send it to a friend who you know needs to hear this. The woman who's been doing all the things and yet still feels flat, she needs this conversation, and you might just be the person who puts it in front of her. And if you want to go deep on any of this, there are a few ways to do it. My journal, Edit Your Life, no bullshit reinvention journal is on Amazon, and it's the beginning and the conditioning, the ongoing of this whole process in a format that you can work through at your own pace, and the link for that is in the show notes. If you really want to go deep on the real work, the Queen Edit is my VIP one to one programme, and it is - I'll be straight with you - fucking transformative. Oh, let me tell you, you can find out more by having a convo with me in my DMs or an email, whatever you like. All the links are in the show notes, as always. And if you're not ready for those yet, come and find me on Instagram at Queen of Reinvention. I'm there most days talking about exactly this stuff, and I'd love to see that. So, thank you for being here. Genuinely, this podcast is one of my favourite things I actually do, and it's because of the women who listen to it. So, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Right, go and do something audacious this week, Queen. Even if it's a bit small, just be her now, and I will be back in your beauts badass earbuds again next week, sending you so much love. Bye.