Cecelia Baum Mandryk (00:01.324)
Hey, welcome. Last week we talked about survival strategies. So how patterns that look like self-sabotage are often intelligent protections that outlived their original context. Right, so the patterns that you’re in.
that seem really annoying and you’re like, why can’t I just stop doing this? I know everything I need to know. They are actually things that your brain is doing to protect you. We’re gonna dive a little bit more into that because I think it’s just so important to know and it really takes us, it takes me, I’ll own this. It took me when I learned this out of self blame and into self compassion, which is a really cool trick.
because it takes you out of resistance of something into acceptance. And that’s when we get to start changing it. That’s when we soften around it and we get to see it and we get to work with it. Okay, so this episode takes the idea further. What is the cost of continuing to live from those strategies that have the dangerous past? And I mean, I think we all know this, right? The things that we do that are no longer serving us are exhausting. They burn us out. They lead us into perfectionism. They lead us into people pleasing, right?
So often our exhaustion doesn’t come from doing too much, but from doing things in a really specific way and overthinking things and over preparing things and really worrying too much, right? So you already have a lot of competence. I know that you’re responsible. I know that you’re likely very reliable. You might have places in your life where you feel like, my gosh, that is so not true. And I get it, I’m there too.
But for the most part, you probably look like you have life together on the outside. Like most people, if you’re listening to this, probably if people are looking in, they think like, she’s mostly got it together or she’s got it together. And yet what we talked about last week was this sort of thing of like, okay, if I know so much and if I’ve got it together, why can’t I change this thing? Here it’s, okay, I can do this, but I’m sort of tired of doing this, right? Or the way I’m doing this doesn’t feel very good.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (02:23.214)
The interesting thing is some of the traits that we have that we are praised for or are like, societally or socially acceptable or rewarded are the ones that cost us the most energy and the ones that they’re the ones we learned as adaptations to stay safe, right? So I just want to remind you that your brain is really adaptive. It’s very intelligent, obviously.
And there two kind of different parts of it that we work with. This is not from like a physiological neuroscience perspective, right? Although there are like kind of different components of the brain. But there’s a part of the brain that is more involved moment to moment. That part of the brain is the one that jumps when you see a stick because you think it’s a snake, right? It’s like it needs to move fast. It’s supposed to keep you protected and safe and help you survive. It’s supposed to help you conserve some energy so you have it when you need it and seek out the dopamine hits.
there’s this other part of your brain that we spend a lot of more time with, which is like our more higher cognitive thinking goal oriented brain. And the interesting thing is the part of us that reads facial cues, that reads between the lines and emails, that kind of, it’s seeking for danger all the time, right? It’s trying to protect us. So it’s always kind of trying to read the room to see if we’re safe or
and it doesn’t always have that much context and it’s a little bit of a hoarder, right? So it holds onto things from a long time ago. Most people who are listening to this probably aren’t 20 years old and if you are, hi, you’re also welcome here. But even if you’re 20, it’s holding onto things that are 13 years old, right, or older. And if you’re in your 50s or if you’re in your 40s, and decades ago, these beliefs have gotten there and these behaviors have gotten there. And they’re not necessarily because their behaviors or ways of being that are
best for you and your ultimate growth, but because they were some sort of adaptive behavior that helped you in the moment. And then your brain said, this works. this works. And so I will keep doing it. Survival strategies and adaptation strategies, because a lot of people might hear this and think, well, I wasn’t trying to survive. I did a pretty normal life. It’s like adaptation strategies.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (04:50.606)
And they, our brain doesn’t like evaluate whether they’re still working that part of the brain. just, it keeps playing them out, but they start creating friction in our life. Like the exhaustion, like the burnout, people pleasing, all these different things. They start like causing problems and we start saying like, who I think I am and who this belief is making me be, or this behavior is showing up. There’s kind of some dissonance between them. There’s a gap between them. Okay. So,
within ourselves, within the, so really what we’re focusing on is behavior. the behavior that you’re exhibiting right now is not a verdict on you as a human being, it’s information about what’s happening within your brain. So it’s not a verdict. It’s not saying you’re bad, you’re wrong, you’re terrible at this, whatever.
What it’s actually doing is it’s helping you understand the underlying beliefs and nervous system states that you have that you may not have addressed yet. So looking at those adaptations that again might be decades old and it’s helping you, we’re gonna help you see them. That’s kind of what we’re doing. I think, so here’s.
We all have behaviors that we probably love that we do and behaviors that we don’t love that we do. And you might think of for yourself, you might think of one of those behaviors right now. I don’t like that I do this. And so for instance, for somebody it might be, I don’t like that I scroll instead of go to sleep. I don’t like that. I don’t like that I sit down and eat instead of go to the gym when I’m done at work.
or I don’t like that I don’t speak up in meetings, or I don’t like that I’m really quiet, really quiet, really quiet, and then all of sudden I’m very loud because I feel like nobody listens to me. These behaviors that we learned that we would say, this is like really maladaptive, it’s so maladaptive for me to be, and you probably won’t call it maladaptive, it’s so annoying, it’s so frustrating that I can’t just go to bed when I’m tired. Why am I scrolling? And so we get really angry at the behavior and we try and use force to change the behavior.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (07:09.538)
Right? So we talked about using knowledge to change the behavior last week. Sometimes we also use force to change the behavior. And really what I want to key in on here is that the behavior that you are doing, whatever it is that’s frustrating or annoying you, was an adaptation thing. Right? So if we go back to the title of this episode, it’s what helped you survive is now wearing you out. Right? So for instance,
If somebody is frustrated that they don’t speak up in meetings, they have all these great ideas, but they feel like they don’t have a voice at the table and they have this story that nobody listens to me. And so what they see is this behavior of I don’t speak up and they’re so annoyed with it and they’re over it and they’re done with it. This behavior, and this is the moment of compassion and grace we can have for ourselves, this behavior was once really helpful.
This behavior helped us survive at some point, helped us fit in at some point, helped us be acceptable at some point. And so now we can look at it and call it self-sabotage, or we could look at it and say, this is an old outdated behavior that has run its course, that has done its job. So the places where we feel friction or dissonance is actually are in congruence.
Those are actually the places where we get to get really curious and compassionate. So instead of getting angry at ourselves and saying, I wish I didn’t do this, which leads to judgment and it leads to resistance and whatever you resist persists. And we know that that’s true because it’s rhymes and it has to be true because it often is, right? Whatever we resist is very hard to change. When you resist something, we usually get really tight. We usually kind of like we lock down on it. We get very tight within ourselves.
And so it’s very hard to shift and change it. And we keep pushing against it, right? When oftentimes you don’t need to push, we need to flow with it. And so a different approach to this, and again, this is kind of building a little bit on last week, is saying, okay, I have this behavior. I have this behavior, and I can see it. This is what we teach people to do in the Life Lab. And we do this through coaching, we do this through lessons, is we actually look at it and we say, this is the behavior, this is what’s showing up.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (09:25.548)
I’m not speaking up in meetings, and I’m also really annoyed at myself for not speaking up in meetings. Okay, we can just name the thing of not speaking up in meetings. We can recognize with some compassion, and we can even say it out loud. It’s very helpful, in fact, to say some of these things. This is an old behavior. This behavior at some point was adaptive and helpful for me. And in fact, I can be very thankful for my brain for helping me survive by introducing this behavior.
And now I’m just in the habit of doing it because this part of my brain isn’t the best at changing behavior. It doesn’t adapt and change unless I help it do it, unless I go hold its hand, unless I remind it that it’s safe to let this go and it’s okay to move on to something new. Now, oftentimes to get this part of your brain to let go of it, you have to actually understand why it’s there. You have to let it speak a little bit. So why, we might ask, why do I think
or how has it served me to stay quiet, not necessarily in meetings, because remember this is pretty old, so it might be something like, why did this serve me to stay quiet in class? And you might find like, right, I have this memory from seventh grade, and this memory from seventh grade is all about people making fun of me for being the smart kid. Hmm, interesting. That memory stings a little bit. It feels pretty hurtful.
I feel afraid that people are gonna make fun of me and shame me again. I might know intellectually that that is not going to be the case now that I’m like a manager or like a director at a company. I might know that that’s not the case and yet this story from a similar situation, because this part of your brain is like, okay, this looks pretty similar to a classroom. There are people around, we’re talking. This is like cue the classroom module.
within my brain, right? And so then it kicks in saying, okay, you’re not actually, you’re not safe. You need to be quiet. Don’t speak up. Speaking up is not safe. You might feel embarrassed, you might feel shame, you might feel othered, and that means you’re feeling unsafe. And then we actually create some safety within our bodies, right? So when we start to understand what’s happening here, we stop shaming the behavior.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (11:48.354)
we start to understand why it’s happening, where it’s coming from, because all of your behavior comes from somewhere. It might not be logical. Oftentimes it is not.
You might feel ready to let it go now, but you have to kind of work with it before you can do that. And I love this work because it is so rooted in self-partnership and compassion. And it helps you understand that my behavior isn’t wrong. My behavior is just coming from outdated coding. It’s coming from old information. And so I am not bad or wrong.
I just simply need to do some software updates. I just simply need to do some brain updates. I just simply need to do some nervous system care. And once I take care of that piece, the rest starts to take care of itself. And so don’t have to force myself. I don’t have to make like, I don’t know, some sort of like intricate reward system where I like reward myself every time I speak up in a meeting. Because again, then you’re also doing it from a place of fear. You’re doing it from a place of insufficiency, from incompleteness. And then just think about
how those kind of comments land when you hear them from somebody else versus somebody who speaks from authority, from confidence within themselves, from being grounded. Obviously, there’s a work to do to get there, right? But forcing yourself ultimately doesn’t usually lead to the result you want it to because you still have the underlying beliefs. And so the…
all the behaviors that helped us get to where we are, we can thank them, and we can also say, which ones am I ready to let go of now? Which ones can I like say, thank you so much, I’m so grateful, and I am so ready for you to be done, I am so ready for you to let go of. That actually is probably the first step from this episode, if you’re doing this work at home, is really naming what are the behaviors in my life that I’m ready to let go of, that I’m ready to shed.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (13:48.376)
that are no longer serving me, that are maybe making me exhausted. These things that weren’t, and like recognize this, right, say it in this way, these were once adaptive behaviors. These once helped me and now I’m ready to let them go. Maybe something like I’m ready to stop criticizing myself when I look in the mirror. I’m ready to stop staying quiet in meetings. I’m ready to start, it’s kind of helpful to do it in the start, but you can also name the stops. Okay, so this is…
This whole taking your actions not as a verdict about you and your state of being and your goodness or worthiness and instead taking them just as information was so powerful for me and it’s still so powerful for me. When I want to start to get into the shame and blame game, it’s like, I’m so bad, I can’t believe I did that. It’s actually just pausing and saying, okay, I did that.
I did that. I can own it. I can take responsibility for it. And then I can get curious and say, like, this isn’t the end. This is just information about what my brain is working on. It’s ultimately telling you the lines of code that are running in your brain. And once you know those and once you know the state of your nervous system, then you also get to start to shift them.
This is like so fundamental to why I do this work. And I think that it is just so powerful because if we all start doing this work, we all start moving in this direction. If we all start like shifting this and stop like self blaming and self criticizing, we get to spend so much more brain energy and like emotional energy on the things we actually want to spend them on. Right. And we stop passing down the self criticism to younger generations. We just kind of step out of it and we say like, OK.
I’m a whole person, I’m totally imperfect, but I can work with myself. I can figure this out. I can understand this behavior and have compassion, and I can figure out how to work with my brain and nervous system to get there. And you can do that using all the tools you’ve learned here. You can do that in the Life Lab, you can do that with another coach or some kind of other practitioner, but do the work, right? If you’re ready to change, kind of like we were talking about in the last episode, it’s not just knowing more. It’s actually taking these things and moving them out into your life.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (16:03.906)
getting curious the next time a behavior doesn’t feel like it’s in alignment within you anymore, doesn’t feel like it’s yours. And then asking like, why, where did this come from? What are the thoughts driving it? What if I could let go of them? If it was safe to do something else, what would I do? Ask some questions, get curious, love on yourself, or at least neutrally absorb yourself. You can’t quite get there yet. Come join me in the Life Lab or come talk about the Life Lab if you’re curious. And I will see you next week.
