Becoming Her: The Identity Work that No One Teaches Women

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (00:17.462)

Welcome back to Millennial Midlife. Today to… Welcome back to Millennial Midlife. I’m so excited to record this episode and this is the third in a series of episodes around goals and identity and they’re all wrapped up which is why I’ve been excited to record all of them because they’ve all been in my brain together and I’ve been kind of like untying them and putting them into different spaces.

But this episode really speaks to the heart of everything I teach and everything I believe about women, desire, identity, change. mean, humans too, right? But we’re speaking mostly to women here. We’re talking about what it really means to become the woman who can hold the life she wants, who can believe in the life that she wants, in the desires that she wants in becoming that human being. So not the Pinterest version, not the vision board, not the like thing the third grade teacher wanted you to be, not like what your therapist sees you as.

Not like who you think you need to be to get mob of the year, like employee of the year. Not the perfect routine, morning routine and zero flaws version, the real version. So the version of you who trusts herself, who believes in herself, who chooses herself, who can hold more love and more peace and more alignment and more desire without the fear that it will all collapse. Or the fear that she’s being selfish or the fear that she needs to be something else for somebody else more. In the first episode of this little series, I talked about the relief of

or the kind of like, don’t know part, right? Like, and actually owning your desires. And last week I talked about this third way of setting goals. And then today is all about expansion and living into you and what you do once you’ve recognized these desires and figured out how to move towards them. So this could actually be possible for me, right? I could actually do this.

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (02:28.78)

Okay, what becoming her really means? Becoming her, right? When I say becoming the woman who can hold the life she wants, what I’m talking about is not becoming a new person or not becoming some perfect version of you. I’m talking about deepening into the relationship you have with yourself. It means choosing what you believe about you, not because of what happened in the past and not because of who you told you.

you are too, okay, not because of what happened to you in the past, not of all the past versions that you’ve had of you, not because of all those people, not the who, who other people told you were too much or not enough, not because of your conditioning, but because of where you are going, right? Choosing the you of where you are going. It means holding a vision of yourself that’s rooted in trust and belief and possibility. It means,

Instead of letting past you dictate where you’re going, letting future you pull you in that direction from this place of compassion and love. It means understanding that the life you want does require you to expand, not to force, not to shrink, not to contort, but expand into a different version of yourself who can receive more, who can start to tolerate a different level of goodness.

in your life, different levels of emotions, different levels of different things for each specific person, but creating a nervous system that can actually shift into a different way of being that it feels safe doing that. Likely more joy, more clarity, more ease, more alignment, more you. So most of the identities that we carry were never yours. Most of the identities that you carry were never yours, right? They’re things that other people told you when you were younger and you

adopted and adapted them into your own brain as beliefs about you so that you could continue to be loved and accepted by the people who you needed to love and accept you so that you were taken care of. Right, so a lot of us have a long list of identities. I’m an introvert. I’m too old. I’m too loud. I’m too emotional. I’m too much. I’m not enough. I’m behind. I’m inconsistent. I’m lazy. I’m not the type of woman who I’m like on and on and on, right? I’m too this for this. I’m not enough this for that.

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (04:43.86)

all these conditional statements that we have, all these identities that other people have given us. I I am, I forget all the Myers-Briggs, the letters, right? But like, am this thing. I am this diagnosis. I am, this is the identity that I hold. These identities don’t often come from truth. They come from an assessment of you in the moment, oftentimes from another human being who has their own beliefs and junk in their head.

It comes from your childhood, from culture, from socialization, from workplaces, from relationships, from these personality tests that you are made to take from survival strategies. And all of these things helped you stay safe and helped you be acceptable and accepted in the moment. But right now they’re holding you back and holding you back. like, saying this, I’m saying this with a lot of compassion. They’re not, they’re holding you in an old version of you. Maybe it’s like more accurate than they’re holding you back. They’re holding you in

in and as the person you were previously. But you’re not the same person that you were even yesterday or a decade ago. You’re a new person. You’ve had new experiences. You’ve become. Oftentimes though, our vision of ourself and our view of ourself has not updated to see us as we are now. To save energy, our brains very often just want to see ourselves and other people as they were before because it takes energy to update that. And it’s

I’ll tell a little story. Maybe I’ll tell it right now. So these things, they save energy, but they keep us safe, right? They’re keeping us as the person we were previously. And our work is not to fight them, but to forgive them so we can release them with love. Because your identity can expand, right? It can actually shift and change very radically and very quickly if you want to.

but the identities that expand aren’t necessarily loud. They’re quiet, they’re soft, they’re curious. So I could be her, it’s possible. They’re latter thoughts, right? I could hold this. If I am allowed to want more, and if I could want more, this is what I would want. I can listen to myself again. So these small identity shifts, opening them up, having less I ams from the past and more I ams pulling you forward starts to shift things. So I wanna, I just wanna tell you, this is like, I just think this is super,

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (07:07.714)

This really helps illustrate like our brains, right? So I am, I’m an American. I grew up in the U.S. I lived in Denmark for a number of years. And when I first moved to Denmark, I did not speak Danish. Not that surprising. Danish isn’t like a taught language in the U.S. for the most part. And my parents are not of Danish descent. And so we did not learn, I did not learn Danish. When I arrived in Denmark, I did not speak Danish. While I was there, I learned how to speak Danish. Not perfectly.

Right, but to the point where people thought that I was from an island in the Baltic, which I thought was a pretty good success. But the really interesting thing is how this relates to this episode is that people who met me, for the most part, and this wasn’t everybody, but for the most part, whenever they met me along that language learning journey, when they met me again in the future, assumed that my language skills were still…

where they were when they met me. So if somebody met me when I first arrived in Denmark and I didn’t have any skills, assumed even if they met me years later, that my skills were still that, even if they heard me speak Danish. Same thing, people who met me later when I had more skills, they assumed I had more and they never, most people did not, their brain did not update to account for the fact that I learned a new skill, even though they could hear me speak Danish. And this was wild to experience, right? I’d be with somebody.

and they would assume I couldn’t speak Danish, and then they would hear me speak Danish to somebody else, and then they would switch back to English with me or interpret things into English for me. And this is not because they’re being rude or non-observant or whatever. They just have a human brain and their brain was trying to conserve energy. So your brain sees other people as they were before. It sees you as you were before. And if you want to turn into a different person and have a different experience of life, you have to update those identities.

You have to release the old ones and forgive them and be willing to step into something different. You can’t walk around saying, I am and have this list that’s 60 years long. Right? You have to figure out how to let that go. That’s what I do with people. So I, like you, did not become her, her in a single moment. Right? It wasn’t, there wasn’t like a turn. There’s very often not like this turning point, right? It’s a series of small moments that becomes.

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (09:27.574)

Right, so there was this one time where I almost became an accountant and I said no to the degree that and this path in life that looked good on on paper, right? I was driving home from Kripalu and the rain from Massachusetts to Virginia. I was crying, knowing it wasn’t meant for the path I was on, not because I couldn’t do it because it wasn’t what I wanted to do. It wasn’t mine or different mornings where I was on my yoga mat in a silent room with no teacher, just me and my thoughts. And I heard every old identity and noticed it as just thoughts, right?

So we have to hear these old identities and recognize what they are. And then we have to intentionally and consciously stop engaging with them. We have to forgive them and set them down. So I remember this one morning on a yoga mat, I recognized the thoughts of thoughts and said, maybe I could stop listening. Maybe I could stop listening to this. Maybe I could listen to something different and things started to shift. Not because I suddenly believed I was worthy or powerful or destined for something big, but because I stopped treating my thoughts and my old identities as the truth.

and from there the door starts to open. So I didn’t know what the next step was. We often don’t know what the exact next step is, but I knew the old identity couldn’t be the one driving anymore. And that’s becoming. That’s letting your future pull you forward instead of your past keep you in place. It’s not a single decision very often, but it’s a consistent partnership with yourself. So I’m still doing this work.

Right now, today, I’m still doing it, right? I’m still working with my brain. I’m expanding my impact. I’m naming my desires. I’m receiving more support. I’m believing bigger, and I’m stepping into a larger version of myself this year, right? I am doing this work very actively, not because I’m chasing anything, but because I’m ready to hold more. I’ve seen this with clients too. There’s often this moment, a threshold moment where something clicks, right? When the shoulders drop, the voice softens.

You can feel them move back into regulation and safety. This happens like so frequently in group coaching calls when somebody starts coaching towards where they end, they’re in a totally different energetic space, their truth comes out. They stop identifying or believing in their story so much or whatever they came with and they start shifting into something else, right? There’s this ability, this capacity to start to identify with a different future version of you. So.

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (11:40.034)

There’s this different energy, right? This different space. I think that I could be somebody different. I think I could become something else in this moment. I think I could believe something else about me. I think I could feel something different. And this doesn’t come from hustle or from pressure, from doing more. It comes from coming back to your self, from partnering with yourself again and again. So becoming is less about a list of goals and it’s more about asking who am I moving towards, right? What is the lifestyle that I want? What is the

What are the identity markers that I am moving into if I want to move into them? And we don’t get there from necessarily a set of actions, but it’s from a set of beliefs. To expand into a larger life, here’s an essential skill for you that we work on so often, is you need the ability to feel, right? Because oftentimes the thing that’s keeping you identified with the old instead of moving towards the new is the capacity to feel. So not to bypass yourself or suppress yourself or push past, but to actually feel.

So, so many of us were taught to avoid discomfort, to stay pleasant, composed, agreeable, quiet, keep the peace, right? But the life you want lives on the other side of a few uncomfortable feelings. So, moments of expansion, willingness, courage, compassion, self-regard, they’re available to you right now, but they don’t come from perfection, they come from honesty. Okay, so, if you wanna practice today, so I just ran this workshop about becoming, yeah, it’s a becoming workshop, it’s a goals workshop, it’s in the future right now, so.

as you’re listening to this, will have run it. But it’s a little trippy now to talk about having run it. And this whole workshop is about finding your own purpose, finding and tapping into the woman that you are becoming over the next year, the next five years, or the next decade, or even shorter, six months, six weeks, and naming that, naming those desires, making it safe to feel those desires, and deciding to make your way towards that using not hustle, but using

a kind of aligned movement in that direction. And so this becoming is really this process that you will be part of over the next year, should you choose to do it, right? Whether you’re just listening here or whether you come join me in classes or in coaching is to actually say, I want to become somebody different, right? And I think a cool thing you can start to do now on your own is when you find yourself doing something,

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (14:03.608)

You might ask yourself, what’s the thought or identity that’s holding you in place, that’s keeping you stuck being who you have been, right? I can’t do this, I’m not consistent, I’m behind. And see if you can forgive whatever that thought or identity is in the moment, right? I forgive you. I know that you were trying to protect me. I know that you’re here for a reason and I’m willing to let you go now. And see if you can choose again, what would the woman I’m becoming choose right now? What would she believe? What would she say in this moment?

And these little moments of shifts are huge, right? These little moments of pausing, noticing misalignment, naming it, forgiving it, moving back into alignment, are where we start to do this work. And the work of becoming starts to become this daily practice, this daily partnership, instead of this thing that you just do once. Because it’s not about being perfect. I know I said that, but it’s not about being perfect. So here’s what I want you to walk away with today. Becoming isn’t about becoming someone else. It’s about returning to yourself, a truer, cleaner, calmer version of you.

and letting that version lead. And this you that isn’t hindered by all these old beliefs and identities that you have. It’s the courage to believe that the life you want is not naive or unrealistic, and it’s not too late for it either. But it is a willingness to choose yourself and choose this future life over and over again. When we start to understand what’s holding us back, the beliefs we have and the emotions, and we start to process that not through force or pressure, but through compassion and honesty and love, that’s when things start to change.

If this episode resonated with you and you feel the spark of recognition, you feel yourself wanting to step into this different path, doing this identity work, moving into becoming the next version of you, follow it. If you’re meant to do this, if you’re not, you are not meant to do this work passively, right? You’re not meant to just like absorb this and not do anything with it. So you have to do something too, right? You can know these things, you can absorb these things, but you also have to shift into actually implementing them.

So allow yourself, vote for future you, right? Even if it feels a little scary. If you’re ready to go deeper and to actually practice this, come into my world a little deeper, right? Take the goals course. You can go through it in your own time. We have a call coming up where you can come and get coaching live and ask questions. You can also join me for courses this year for coaching or for both so that you can start to do this work more in real time. We’re going through, in the courses, we’re going through all the different areas of your life.

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (16:23.374)

and kind of processing thoughts, processing identities, creating new ones intentionally. So whether it’s this workshop or something else or the Life Lab for coaching, come do it. Do it for you. Do it for future you because it’s never too late and you’re not meant to do this alone. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for listening. It was lovely to have you as always. I love you and I will see you next time.