Ep. 2 Shred the Self Doubt… You Weren’t Born With It

{Music begins with Intro}

HOLA CHICAS!    

 I am Consuelo Crosby –  born with both sides of my brain fighting for attention.. structural engineer & creative, mother & mentor, center of any spontaneous fiesta if I’ve had my morning latte… I give it all to being a 1st generation Peruvian badass chica!

So grateful you’re here today, wanting to shed that armor, relax into your truth, your value… pick up your salsa step, tune out what’s getting to you and be lifted from goddesses in generations past that taught us to live life large and out loud… cuz we’re not blending in… 

LIFE LNXX… knowledge you didn’t even know you had TO BE THE BADASS CHICA YOU WERE BORN TO BE!

{Episode 1}

Hola chicas!

Hitting the midweek mark, the Wine Down Wednesday, the Hump Day to your work stretch… Hoping your past weekend is still vibing in your head and keeping you relaxed and smiling or the temptations of this next one has you excited and eager to join the sisterhood and celebrate the wins from the week. 

But, maybe, this week has already got you slammed and you spent the last weekend just worrying about what was coming for you this week. That is so valid because we have so much going on at work, at home, in relationship… we tend to be in charge of everything; of creating the social life for our family or our partner, of nurturing it and keeping it going. Woof! Am I just making you more exhausted than you started out? 

I am sorry. I apologize. 

Let’s back it up… let’s reaffirm that by the weekend and especially everyday when you literally should stop work, and I emphasize should, you need to be on “you” time, when the focus of your brain is turned off and your sense of self and caring takes over.  Because the brain, your head, will keep ticking off the To-do’s or the Should Have’s all day long and it’s probably kept you up on more than one night worrying because it’s thinking for you when you don’t need to be thinking at all. But, the sense of self, your soul, knows exactly what should be happening for you, that is you go-to when you don’t know what to do.

So, how did we get to the point of relying on the brain for everything, when in fact, and I mean literal fact, it is not your go-to for answers to the unknown, for things you have never done before. Anything the brain has in it, was taught, and not taught just once, but over and over again until it stuck. It takes your brain 30 days to learn something new into a habit… so for 30 straight days, you’ve done something repeatedly so that you have a tendency to want to do it again. And, it also reverses… if you want to kick a habit, it will take 30 days of NOT doing it, for you to not make it the immediate action.

Have you ever tried that dry January after the holidays? And that has 31 days. I guess they threw one in just to be safe. That is hard. That is hard to get off that habit,.

But, now you have a habit… a tendency to do something everyday… and we all know this could be a good thing or a not so good thing… and if we tend to do it everyday, then this starts to spill towards 45 days, then 60 days… well, by  the time 90 days go by, this habit has now become a piece of you… again, this could be a great thing or an uh oh thing because at this point, trying to alter it is going to take some major doing. 

Think of all the amazing things that you could teach yourself in 90 days that would become a part of you until you unwound it. You could teach yourself a new language, – a language of music, or coding or conversation. And, you could teach yourself self care by detaching from your technology everyday, reveling in the outdoors or reminding yourself how blessed you are …. Every day… for 90 days.. … anything that frames your brain towards you so that it can carry out the wishes of your soul, that is a powerful tool.

If on day 91 you use your brain and say no, today I am not going to do it, guaranteed you’re going to feel off…. It would be like not breathing, or blinking or any of the other actions that have become a natural state of being for you. 

This is great when you are caring for yourself, nurturing your soul, becoming a more powerful version of yourself! Your soul is yelling, “Don’t stop! We are amazing! I want to be even more of this”.

But, when the habit is harmful, like the stress of self- doubt, of having your identity challenged, and you decide to stop this on day 91, your brain kicks in because this self-doubt is a taught construct and that brain is in a panic: “Wait, why aren’t you worrying? What are we going to do if you don’t worry? We won’t know what to do.”

It’s like Modern Family, when Mitch and Cam are in a panic because their baby is arriving 2 weeks early and they aren’t ready? But then it didn’t really matter, did it? They naturally knew what to do because it was coming from within, with love and caring. 

When did stress become a habit… when did you decide to take on this self-doubt as something to do everyday? You probably didn’t. If anything, society was the master in teaching you this tendency without you ever wanting to create it.  

So take yourself off the hook and let’s hand this stress over to where it truly belongs. We are going to peel back the layers and jettison this piece of you that was grown in the petri dish of the patriarchy and attached into your frontal lobe of reason by the time you were a teenager. 

Remember back to being a young one in school… I bet you can remember the first few incidents that you were told you weren’t good enough or smart enough  for something merely because you were born a girl.  And though, being a badass chica, you probably shrugged it off, the brain has a tendency to hold onto these words as “knowledge”… something you might need later on… a base for building like knowing how to put on your shoes so one day you can kick up your salsa heels. 

But this is more like a bacteria, a mold. It’s only going to fester in your brain and begin some major self doubt if you don’t get rid of it. If you stay in your head with this idea, suddenly you are no longer the innocent, adventurous self. suddenly you don’t want to try something new because you won’t now how to do it right (that’s why it’s new, right?), or you don’t want to position yourself for a title promotion and salary, or you won’t go out by yourself because there’s an opinion about that, too. It’s not you. It’s all about the powers that be that don’t want to be challenged so that they stay in charge and control their success. 

We know this isn’t about you not being smart enough, not being good enough, not being worth it where you’re feeling like an imposter. 

 We are so determined to kick down the ‘No girls allowed door”, it puts us in hyper drive to excel. Okay. Right there. That is the beginning of the problem. 

Our first reaction is to go prove it wrong to go into this hyper drive to excel. Hence, the stress starter. So by college, we’re at full tilt. We’re trying to push our way to the top. We’re trying to get that upper level job, make an attempt for equal pay, which we know doesn’t happen. Again, not your fault. We can’t even ratify it in our constitution. All the while being socially engaged and getting sizzled by the pressures of fashion and FOMO feels.

Oh gurrrrl! Woof! Again, repeat after me, IT IS NOT YOU! There is a continuous undercurrent, regardless of the strive towards unity and equality, an undercurrent that keeps trying to pull you under, one ripple at a time. 

Let me give you an example. In my family, I was the only girl. My older brothers are from the 50’s kids, so very much the patriarchal thinking. This was definitely good training for the decades to come in engineering and for me to be talking to you about it today. There were plenty of ‘No Girls Allowed Signs’, challenges to beat them at sports, assumptions that I was there to cater to them, a concept that isn’t playing out well for them in the 21st Century. 

So by the time I was in college, in the Structural Engineering degree, where almost always, I was the only woman, I had a pretty thick skin towards any challenges to my value based on my identity. I had done really well in the areas that I loved… If anything, being told I couldn’t do something because of my identity only fueled me into high gear, had me out performing myself and out to prove a point, which is kind of undermining. It’s not sustainable but at the moment it was somewhere between adrenaline ‘this feels good, I’m going to show them’ and a stress factor, like if I don’t show them, they’re right. Here starts the quagmire. 

Still, I was  totally caught off guard by one of my professor’s who was almost 60 at the time, basically the same age as my dad. And I knew where he was coming from. He was a great teacher. He had this trove of passions beyond engineering that was just mesmerizing and it made him really intriguing with this wealth of information. He taught my Steel class, an obscurity that only a decimal percentage of the population has to experience, and being obscure, it took some mind- bending to get my head wrapped around it.

But again, the challenge. I was going to shatter the stereotype that was rippling around me and truly understand this subject. And I nailed it! Totally, to the point that I got back my midterm exam… 

Now, I have to add in some detail here. First off, this is a Steel class. This isn’t a fill in the blank test or a bubble test answer sheet,  but graph paper, basically looking like a math test where you show your work and then do the drawings to show how that math actually gets built. You have to actually draw these pieces. Because, in our industry, if you get it wrong, things fall down and people die. No pressure. 

So, this is a lot but I was soooo ready for it. So I get this test back, and there at the top circled in red pencil is 100%! 100%! Holy hell! I did it! 

But then, outside the circle, in the same writing, was this “Minus 5, and a sum total of 95% …. WITH THE FEMALE SIGN NEXT TO IT… YES, THAT FEMALE SIGN! 

And I’m thinking fuuuuuuudge. What the heck is this?! Did I get a 100% on the test and he thought that couldn’t be possible so he docked me five for being a woman?? 

OR, did I get a 95% on the test and he was insinuating that it would have been 100% if I were a guy?? 

You know there wasn’t another person in that class who had their score messed with or their identity targeted. But, I was supposed to laugh it off, right, it was just a joke. And yet, he never told me the real reason he did it. I just had to sit in it and keep going into that class knowing that regardless of how well I did, he and all the other 35 guys in class were going to view me as not good enough. 

So, are you leaning back yet? Fuzzy slippers on and feet up on the sofa, bevvie in hand? It is not up to you to change the thinking of what’s left behind from the archaic past. This is not where you put your energy, your intelligence and creativity. This isn’t even a topic to dwell over more than once.

Let’s make a plan to unwind from this instilled pollution of self doubt… this part of you that you were not born with  but was encrypted in you all the years prior to  going after that first big job, wanting that bigger apartment, wanting to travel abroad. All the times you said you couldn’t. 

It’s going to take some doing.. remember, 30 days to make a habit, 90 days to make it permanent but still needing nurturing.  But think about it… How glorious to wake up every day and start your mantra about how awesome you are, a badass chica meant to go after whatever you want in life in the style that makes you happy. 

Let’s start today, thinking about what you love doing, what brings you joy and disregard any sense that someone is judging you on it. Start unraveling the constrict that is binding you within self-doubt. If you love doing art, create something that has no end goal, that no one else will see and let all of your creativity spill out day after day. 

Or maybe being outside soothes your sense of self, gives you joy, fills you up. Just walk out the door, no plan, no commitment but to get outside and look around and wander. So often we won’t because we feel the need to run, run 2 miles, 5 miles, sweat, we have to work out. And then we completely talk ourselves out of even going outside.

Whatever it is you settle on, do it for  30 days because at that point, you will want to put on your badass chica boots and reassess where you are at in your life without the self-doubt and echos of “I told you so” that are lingering from the past. Your soul has been reignited, your brain has been put in the back seat and you will be making decisions from within you, for you, and disregarding the noise that blocked out the inner voice saying, “I’m a badass chica and I am going to …”  this part is up to you… 

But this isn’t the end of it. It’s only the beginning to getting back on track to seeing all the possibilities that you can start, not just for yourself… this isn’t a single track kind of life of self-reward … but for the greater good. So while you are on fire on a daily habit of renewal, and viewing that 90 day horizon as a whole new world, (are you breaking out in the Atlanta and theme song right now?) use the extra confidence and energy to collaborate with each other towards a mutual want because the true goal is to rise in power, en masse, to fill the opportunities that are only now open in earnest for women to own.

But that’s later, so for now, let’s go back to the fuzzy slipper concept and start laying out your destress plan. How are you going to start and what will you try first?

What time of day is best to commit to caring for yourself in order to rise in confidence and shred that self doubt that was never yours to begin with? 

Taking a fresh look back at moments in your life will give a ton of new perspective and lighten the load that you might’ve been carrying with you all this time. You might discover layers and layers that have been accumulating on you for decades, but no worries! Let’s take all of it, shred it, make it into the confetti for your parade, because you’re going to come strutting down that street, a whole new person, and there are going to be people waiting for you and cheering you on, sister.

I would love to hear your stories on what worked, what didn’t and all the humorous in “betweens” that got tossed along the way.  Reach out to me at The LNXX – that’s LN double X dot com and let’s trash whatever got put upon us so that together we are free to create the world as we see it, for all of us. 

{Music begins with Outro}

I really appreciate the time you take to rate and review the podcast. Get the backstory and what you’ve heard here today, and reach out to us at TheLnxx.com. That’s L N double X, because it’s about time, it’’s about us. Stay in the groove on our social media at  LifeLinks  and get ready to make your move, ladies. 

Viva! 

{Music ends}