S.O.F.T. and Strong: Midlife Women On A Mission

Episode 29: Sparkle Power Can Transform You Into A Conflict Ninja.

March 29, 2021 Bernice McDonald Season 1 Episode 29
S.O.F.T. and Strong: Midlife Women On A Mission
Episode 29: Sparkle Power Can Transform You Into A Conflict Ninja.
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

You can stay in your anger and watch your heart slowing closing down forever...

Or you can choose the other Path - the Life Is Simple Path. And come out feeling really proud of who you are becoming...with a little Sparkle thrown in.

Sparkle Power means stepping into your S.O.F.T.

S   Strong on the Inside
O  Open to new solutions (in life, in love)
F  Feisty, fun and feeling
T  True to Yourself

Running into problems with people is a normal activity on the Path of Life. Opening to love again means you need to stop fearing it.

In this week's Podcast, we'll talk about facing conflict (even in love), bringing it down to size and managing your emotions so that you come out on the other side more as a leader than an angry hot mess.

Power Pillar #1: Know Your Why: Who do you want to be - always?

Power Pillar #2: The Truth Is... Are you applying the  "Life is Simple" principles?

Power Pillar #3: Hope-Filled Action: Are you taking Hope-Filled Action or Hurt-Filled Action?


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0 (0s):
And she drives me crazy. That's not on her. This is on me because we're just two of those people that don't connect, right? Where I end up is always in anger. And I just went through that again - a time of frustration and anger, where I was banging my head against the wall. And I'm thinking, this is not who I want to be. This is not the person I am. And here I am saying things and emailing things that I am definitely not proud of. So what is going on here?

0 (42s):
Life is simple. 1. It's about how you see yourself and 2. It's about how you see others.

1 (54s):
So you're a woman beyond 50. What is standing between you and the dreams that you have in your heart? I'll tell you, it's the Story that you're telling yourself. This podcast is about keeping our hearts awake and open to love because those Stories are what close your heart and keeps it locked up tightly. It takes courage every day to face those Stories about 15 minutes a day only. In fact, I'm Bernice McDonald, Courageous Happiness Coach. And that's the journey that I'm on in this life. I want you to find your heart again, to find the real use, the amazing courageous, loving, crazy, sexy woman that you were meant to be.

1 (1m 46s):
Yup. Even after 50. You ready? Okay. Come on in. Let's take those 15 minutes right now.

0 (1m 57s):
Hello, my ladies. Welcome back to the podcast. You know what I love, I love simplicity. When things get complicated, I get stressed. Can you identify? I just like things as simple as possible. It's part of my brain. It's just who I am. Don't give me complicated instructions. Write it out point by point by point. That's just who I am now. I know everybody's not like that. And I know the, maybe I'm kind of over the top in that regard.

1 (2m 35s):
However, that's why, when I began to read the book last summer called "The Courage To Be Disliked", that's what the title of it is, and I learned the philosophy that was contained in that book from Adler, it just made so much sense to me. Now, what he said, which I have latched onto completely is that life is simple. And that's what I want to talk about today is that if you make life simple, love become simple.

1 (3m 19s):
Healing your heart becomes simple. Relationships become simplified. I'm not saying it makes everything uncomplicated.

0 (3m 30s):
I'm just saying that it really helps to sort out where your feelings are because, and then why your feelings are the way they are and helps you to resolve those feelings and get to the bottom of what's underneath. Because that's what we have to do in life, right? We have to get underneath what we're feeling. Think of it like a chair. I've said this before, but in case you're new or haven't heard this it's I, I think of if it as a chair with a balloon tied to it. The balloon is our emotions.

0 (4m 13s):
And as female people in this life, many of us have a lot of emotions. We live in our emotions. So do men, but women have a tendency to feel more deeply about everything. And so emotions are right there on the surface all the time. So the balloon is the emotions and there's this string that goes down to the chair, right? And that chair becomes the underlying situation. The Story that you're often telling yourself about a situation that leads to the emotions. So if you sit yourself there in the chair and you really put yourself into the Story that you are telling yourself, you begin to understand why you're having the emotions you're having.

0 (5m 0s):
Now, I say all of this because I have just come through a situation in my job. Yes. I still work at a job and have for like 14 years. I'm an Admin Assistant in our health system and I actually work for Addiction and Mental Health. Anyways, every year we have these contracts that we have to fill forms out to renew annual payments or quarterly payments for them. There is a person that I have to deal with every year around this situation. And she drives me crazy. That's not on her.

0 (5m 40s):
This is on me because we're just two of those people that don't connect, right?. Where I end up is always in anger. And I just went through that again, a time of frustration and anger where I was banging my head against the wall. And I'm thinking, this is not who I want to be. This is not the person I am. And here I am saying things and emailing things that I am definitely not proud of. So what is going on here? Life is simple.

0 (6m 21s):
1. It's about how you see yourself. And 2. It's about how you see others.

1 (6m 26s):
So what was going on in this situation, because this applies to everything and you can apply it to everything and begin to learn to change your emotions as a result. Because your emotions are where you live. And according to, if you live in anger all the time, like what I have been experiencing, that's not a fun life. And you are not going to be a fun person nor an attractive person to anybody else. If you live in joy or you live in resilience or you live in happiness, whatever the positive things are, it's going to create an entirely different result, right?

1 (7m 6s):
You're going to have a completely different life.

0 (7m 10s):
So let's look at this situation and see if you could apply it to something that you're struggling with right now. There are two ways that this can go. One is - the one way is I can make choices on my Path. Remember, I am a heart on a Path. Simple, right? My life is determined by how I see myself and how I see others. I decide the Stories that I tell myself coming out of both of those scenarios. When I go, when a situation happens to me on my Path, I walk through a fog, a bolt you know, a storm hits, bolts of lightning, come down.

0 (7m 54s):
A bomb, goes off. It's up to me how I handle it right now. If I go this direction, all right, first of all, first scenario, this direction will lead me to where I put my heart to sleep. The second direction we're going to talk about is me keeping my heart awake where I am going to live a happy prosperous life. So in this first scenario here, I am dealing with this woman. How I see myself is I am seeing myself as blocked. I am seeing myself as having to deal with somebody that is driving me crazy and they will not change. They do not explain themselves while I am not getting what they're asking for.

0 (8m 39s):
They in my mind, the language I'm using it, it's a Story I'm telling is, "She is driving me crazy. And I am powerless to change this." She is making me very angry. I'm stuck. I just want to get through this project. But this wall come down on my Path and I am stuck behind that wall. I need to figure out what to do with that wall.

1 (9m 2s):
Now, how am I seeing her in this situation? I'm blaming her. I am saying, it's her fault. She's not hearing me. She's not, she's being purposely stubborn. She's kind of obtuse. These are the things I'm telling myself in my Story about this situation, right? Now, this leads to a place of suffering.

0 (9m 28s):
If I stay in this place, I begin to apply this to many, many other situations. And this is what we do, right? Suffering is when you feel as if your life is not turning out the way you want it to be and you think you're powerless to change it. It's one thing to be in a situation that you think isn't supposed to be that way. It's another thing to be there and think you are absolutely powerless to change it. You actually are never powerless in any situation because you always have options.

0 (10m 9s):
Because remember, it's about you - on your Path. Now here's me in this situation with another co-worker who was not getting what I was asking, was not giving me what I needed, was frustrating me by sending me things over and over again. I needed, I could say, this is never going to change and just create a lot of trouble over this. Or I could go to the other scenario. The other scenario is going to lead me to where the wall comes down. I'm going to be able to get around the wall, over the wall, through the wall, under the wall, or disintegrate the wall, whichever way it happens in this situation.

0 (10m 54s):
I am going to be able to get through the wall.

1 (10m 57s):
In that case, I need to take a deep breath and step back, right? This is where you're keeping your heart awake. This is where you go to your S.O.F.T. Remember the S.O.F.T. acronym. S is getting Stronger on the inside. So knowing yourself, understanding how you see yourself and how you're seeing others. The O stands for being Open -open to solutions, open to life open to seeing, and hearing and feeling things that maybe you wouldn't If you just stay there behind that wall and refuse to budge. Sit down in your mud puddle and not go anywhere.

0 (11m 39s):
The F is for Feminine which is using your intuition, which is knowing when you need to step back and take a break and just "be" for awhile. Understanding with compassion and empathy in that situation, being very intuitive. T is to be True to Yourself. So to protect your own boundaries, to understand who you are in the situation and what you need; not to let somebody roll over you but to be True to Yourself, to be that person in that particular situation that you need to be. And I did need to just understand who I was, and that's why I said, I'm the kind of person that needs things just simply put.

0 (12m 26s):
Just tell me what you need, and I will give it to you. So how I was seeing myself in the second scenario, which is going to keep my heart awake, I needed to understand that I was feeling angry. You know what, one of the best pieces of advice I've been given and I learned this in a meditation thing from Calm that I was listening to, is that when you step back and just let yourself "be", there's going to be all kinds of emotions there. There's going to be two or three balloons tied to your chair at that point. And that's okay, let the balloons be there. Let your emotions be there.

0 (13m 7s):
I needed to understand that the anger - it's okay for the anger to be there. What was not okay is for me to react out of the anger and do things that are not in line with my own values or with my own principles. So I needed to just let the emotions be. And then I needed to really understand how I was seeing her. Now, when then I thought about it, and this was during a sleepless night. I woke up about four in the morning, and this was going round around in my head. I thought, she's just trying to do her job the same way I am.

0 (13m 50s):
Other people are just trying to walk their Paths in the best way that they can. She may have been afraid that she was going to do something wrong. She's a different kind of personality. And maybe she doesn't have a real big gift of communication. I don't know what's going on in her life but all I know is that she needed this task done the same way I did. So we needed to find a solution. We needed to not be stuck in the whole emotional tug of war that we were in. We needed to find a solution. And it finally clicked with me that we just need a base document which is what she was actually asking for that tells us and gives us both the information we need So that doing this process is less painful.

1 (14m 44s):
That was the ticket right there. Bringing it back to a logical place where we realized what the solution could be. And we could work toward the solution rather than staying in the tug of war really helped to begin to resolve that situation. Thank goodness.

0 (15m 8s):
So here is our Power Pillars to help us when we get into situations that we think we're stuck in. When we get to a place that wasn't supposed to turn out this way, a place that is frustrating and creating a lot of negative emotions like anger and frustration or depression, those sorts of things. we need to think about what the steps are and use our Power Pillars to help us begin to move forward.

1 (15m 39s):
Because our first Power Pillar is that we want to be the person that we're proud of. We want to be the person that is not all hung up on everything and so filled with negative emotion that we're blind to seeing the gifts in life or the adventure in life. And we close everything down and put our hearts to sleep. So our Power Pillar #1 is the "Why". That's what you need to decide. What is your "Why"?

0 (16m 10s):
Who do you want to be? That always helps me to determine what my next steps are and how I'm going to think this through that then leads to the second Power Pillar, which is, "The Truth Is... Now The Truth Is... That I want to be open to love, always, in any situation. I want to be proud of who I am, in this case. The Truth Is... that I was seeing myself as being stuck and she was in my way, which, by the way, is where anger always comes from. It's when somebody is blocking your goal and preventing you from getting where you want to go.

0 (16m 58s):
I was allowing that to be the thing that bothered me the most rather than looking beyond the wall to where I wanted, where we both wanted to go, and finding us solution.

1 (17m 9s):
So that's the truth. You need to tell yourself what is really going on here? How am I seeing myself? How am I seeing her? And what Story am I telling myself about this? The true Story is I'm a pretty resourceful person. Just like you are. The Truth Is we have so much that we have learned in our lives that we can draw from in any situation. Once we stop allowing the red of the anger, to prevent us from seeing what we need to do, we can look in our Treasure Chest and see that we have a ton of experience and resources that we can pull out of there.

0 (17m 60s):
Wisdom. Love. Understanding. Intuition. Compassion. We can go to all those things, pull them out of our Treasure Chest. Logic. Intelligence. All those things. There are things in there that we can use to always come up with a solution.

1 (18m 16s):
And then that leads us to Power Pillar #3 Hope-Filled Action. You need to ask yourself... What am I going to do about this? Am I going to stay stuck in my anger? Am I going to be stubborn and refuse to take responsibility for my part in this situation?

0 (18m 35s):
Now this applies to everything. It applies to family situations, to love situations, romantic love situations, to friendships, all of this. First, what's your, why? Who do you want to be in this situation? And if that's the truth, if that's what you want really want out of this situation, what's the Truth? How are you seeing yourself? How are you seeing the other person and what really could you do to find a solution here? And that's the third thing then... are you willing to take Hope-Filled Action - not Hurt-Filled Action, Hope-Filled Action towards drawing that to conclusion.

0 (19m 21s):
You know what? This is all about getting Sparkle Power. That means you have that soft to go to your S.O.F.T. where, you're Soft on the outside, Open on the outside, because you're STRONG on the inside. And you know who you are. That's Sparkle Power. That helps you to really become the person that you want to be. To relax into life and whatever comes up on your Path. You stop blaming. You just find the way through. Okay, my lovely ladies, go out there and Sparkle.

0 (20m 1s):
You have a light to shine. You have a love to give, you have a song to sing. I will talk to you in the next podcast.

Keep Life "Simple"
How would you respond to conflict like this?
You can take the "heart closing" Path or you can go the "heart opening" Path
Power Pillar #1: Start with your Why.
Power Pillar #2: The Truth Is...
Power Pillar #3: Hope-Filled Action or Hurt-Filled Action?