Cecelia Baum Mandryk (00:01.184)
Hey, and welcome to Millennial Midlife. Today we’re gonna talk about something that shows up quietly for a lot of capable women, a lot of high achieving women, a lot of probably just women in general.
And I think maybe especially at this time of the year, it’s January. And maybe if you’re listening to this at a different time, and I’m using the air quotes here, Quitters Friday was last week, which is the day statistically that most people, it’s the second Friday in January, statistically most people will give up on their New Year’s resolutions by that day. And it’s this feeling of why can’t I get it together? And it’s not in a super dramatic way oftentimes, and a lot of times it’s not in a my life is falling apart or even across the board.
It’s a quieter way, it’s maybe heavier, and it’s when you’re doing fine on the outside, like things maybe even really look good, and if someone was describing your life, they’d think, she definitely has it together. But internally, it feels like things are taking more effort than they should, or maybe you just feel like you can’t make headway in some area of your life. Before I go into it,
I mean, obviously, like nothing, you haven’t done anything wrong if you’re feeling this. I just came off of a lesson in the Life Lab, which is something we do each week and where we cover concepts and we kind of talk about them more in depth and people get a chance to journal and reflect on their core beliefs. So it’s kind of like a different angle on coaching. And today we did a sort of review of some of the basic foundational premises and skills premises. I don’t know how you say that.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (02:00.704)
and skills. And I feel like something that came up in that session, but that is important to say here too, is that no matter what habit you’re in or what thoughts are coming up for you, you haven’t done anything wrong. Like these are just habits your brain are in these, whatever is showing up for you.
is where you get to start and how you get to work with things. And if you’re having the thought, can’t I get it together, which oftentimes is followed up with a thought of I shouldn’t be thinking this or who am I to think this because look at like how good I have it. We wanna actually dial that back a little bit and look at the part of you that’s saying, why can’t I get it together? Okay. Also like I hope all of you, this is my first podcast recording back since Christmas break or holiday break, whatever holiday you might celebrate.
We did a lot of solstice and Christmas celebrating around here. And I hope that you had a lovely time. We had a pretty quiet time and we made it through, which, you know, the disruption and schedule for young kids can be fairly significant and also for the adults in the room can be fairly significant. And we ended up having a lot of fun together, even though some external circumstances happened. And it was really lovely. So I hope that you had a lovely one too. no matter
what your unintentional story of the holidays, you might want to ask, how do I want to remember it? And what do I want to remember from it? Like, what are the key points? this is a cool, I’m kind of deviating here, but this is a cool thing you can do with your brain is you can actually preferentially pick out the parts that you want to remember so that you’re remembering the version you want to remember. It’s a nice little hack for your brain. Okay, Yesterday, last Friday was Quitters Friday. Culturally, when we look at something like this, oftentimes we think it’s a motivation problem. Sometimes we think it’s a time problem. But usually we think it’s like a motivation or a self-discipline problem. Like maybe people just didn’t want it badly enough and they didn’t commit to it. But that…
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (04:17.302)
I mean, I bought into that explanation for a long time. But there was a point where it didn’t really totally start to make sense for me because I had a lot of willpower and I had a fair bit of motivation. And yet there were certain things that felt like they were mountains. Like I just couldn’t, I just couldn’t get myself to do them for some reason. And the more I work with people, the less I think this is true. I mean, I’m like 100 % bought out now, but I want to just…
insert a question here and saying if you’re struggling with resolutions, with goals, and I know not everybody sets them this time of year, and sometimes we think it’s like cool not to set them. I think goal setting is like one of the most spiritual, kindest things you can do for yourself because oftentimes goals and intentions are about you growing into you, because we’re always growing into ourselves over and over and over again. And so I think when we’re like, they’re not for me,
we’re not actually, we rob ourselves of that opportunity. And I actually didn’t know how strongly I felt until right now in this moment when I’m saying this, but I feel very strongly about this. That like goals are actually not perhaps in their current cultural manifestation, but as a principle, setting goals for ourselves in life is a kindness. And it’s actually like an altruistic thing to do because when you
grow into a version of yourself, you actually inspire and give other people permission to grow into the next version of themselves. So if you didn’t set goals, I have a bone to pick with you. If you do not set goals, you might ask yourself, why didn’t I set goals, right? And if you did set goals and you’re thinking that I have a motivation problem, I want you to play with this and say, what if it’s not a motivation problem? What if there’s something else happening? Because most of the women
If you’re here and you’re listening, if you’re not a woman, you’re also allowed to be here. Hi. Listening to this, you don’t like discipline and you’re not flaky and you’re not afraid of hard things, right? So I don’t think it’s a motivation problem for you. And I actually don’t think I think that’s true across the board. I don’t think it’s a motivation problem. OK, so. I actually like I did not set goals for a long time because I kept getting to this point every year.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (06:39.98)
I feel like kind of motivated and then I would inevitably fail on the first day because I would have stayed out too late on January, on New Year’s Eve. so then January 1st was probably not some day that I wanted to start making enormous changes in my life. And then I think I needed to start over on the next Monday or the next first of the month or whatever. I noticed with different goals.
that like maybe I actually can’t do this. Maybe this is just how I am. Maybe this goal isn’t for me. Maybe it’s too hard. Maybe I should just stop trying before I disappoint myself again.
What I didn’t understand was that this wasn’t a personal failure. It wasn’t willpower. It wasn’t discipline. It wasn’t motivation. It was a pattern in my brain and in my nervous system. So the piece that changes everything once you see it is that your brain is not designed to help you grow. It’s designed to keep you safe. It’s designed to seek out simple pleasures, not simple pleasures in the like, the simple pleasures of life.
in like cheap dopamine. And conserve energy. The conserving energy is really important because if you think about goals, they require two things. You have to do new stuff, which inherently feels dangerous to your brain because like you’ve never done it before, but also it takes new energy, right? It takes energy to do something new. I don’t know if you’ve ever moved someplace new, but like when you live in a place, like if you go to a grocery store you go to all the time, it takes zero energy to like go, like you don’t have to look for things, you know where they are.
When you go into a new grocery store, you have to like suddenly look for things and it takes, there is a higher energetic output. So your brain is designed to keep you alive and help you conserve energy and those are inherently anti-goals. But one of the ways your brain does keep you safe is by collecting information from your past and using it to predict the future. I’m gonna say that again.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (08:39.886)
One of the ways your brain keeps you safe and conserves energy, gets both two goals with one stone, is we’re gonna stop the geese. We don’t need to kill them anymore. Your brain is, it collects information from your past, very imperfectly, right, things that it’s filtered from your reality, and it uses it to predict the future. The problem is that your brain doesn’t actually organize this information very well, and it doesn’t…
filter it very well. It’s not a really great curator, right? It’s not a really great gatekeeper, dormant bouncer. It’s not a really great bouncer. It just lets all these things in. So it doesn’t ask, this relevant? It doesn’t reevaluate beliefs. It doesn’t ask, has she grown since then? Is this still true? It just stores the experiences and continues to use them over and over and over again, especially very emotionally charged ones, and turns them into beliefs.
Emotionally charged ones thinking of like anything that happened in your childhood anytime there was an adult of importance around anything like that It is like it’s on those right and it doesn’t So like fourth grade examples right of like a parent saying something to you or a teacher saying something to you something a lot of my friends and people have worked with have something from like first grade which I think is because our brainwave shift around that time and so we remember things very
very poignantly, like a teacher told us we were too much, right? And so now we’re just like, too much, or I’m lazy. And so then we think we can’t carry out goals. So there are these little moments, these little early moments where we had a very little context in our brain, where we had very little power. And those beliefs don’t disappear just because we’re successful adults now, just because like we have lots of evidence to the contrary, because again, this part of our brain doesn’t filter things out. Once it’s in there, it’s in there, unless you intentionally take it out.
Okay, so this is why so many women and humans start to feel doubt before they even begin, right? You’re not failing. It’s you’re stopping yourselves at the starting line. So your brain wants to stop you before you even get started because it’s trying to keep you safe from the brain’s perspective. This makes total sense. Right? It’s trying. It feels like it could confirm an old story. If I’m not disciplined, I always mess things up. I’m not meant for this.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (11:07.63)
then hesitation becomes protection. So I said this in the lesson that we just had in the Life Lab 2, and I think it’s just so important to remember the beliefs you have about you are not truths. They are not true with a capital T. They are things that you have absorbed from the world around you, that you’ve inferred from interactions with people of power in your life. And because you still believe them,
they become true.
So they are not true, but because you believe them, they become true. Because you think they’re true, they become true. So for instance, if you believe it’s hard for you to get healthy, that will be true in your life. Not because it is hard to get healthy, but because you believe it’s hard for you to get healthy, it will be hard. And this mechanism of the brain isn’t sabotage. It’s what we call self-sabotage. looks like, from the outside, looks like self-sabotage. It looks like maybe a systems problem.
like a motivation problem, it looks like a time problem, and those are so easy to latch on to and everyone’s like, yeah, time, like I don’t have any time either, like I have, my gosh, three kids, like how do you do anything? Like the number of times people tell me how I must not have any time because I have three kids, like I should not have any time. I should not have any, everybody, if you have three children and you’re out in the world, people will tell you how busy you are. You don’t have to think it yourself, they will confirm it for you. And so,
That’s exactly what I’m talking about. People say stuff. We believe in it. We’re all right, I don’t have any time. We’re like, I don’t have any time to work out. And then we will not find time. It will become true in our life that we will not make time to work out. It’s not self-sabotage. It’s not a systems problem. It’s not an approach problem. It’s not a lack of hacks. It’s self-protection and using outdated information. And that’s so liberating, you guys, because you don’t need a new system. don’t have to, you don’t need, you don’t have a self-discipline problem or a willpower problem.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (13:02.898)
you have a thought update problem. You have a software brain update problem. It’s not even a problem. It’s just like an update that you have to run in your brain. And then all this stuff kind of like filters out, right? Another layer is, and this is like an angle that I’m kind of like looking at my own life too, is that sometimes we see like our worth is quietly on trial, like our…
our goodness as a person or like our worth is always there. And so every effort feels like a little bit of evidence and every setback feels like confirmation. And so change doesn’t feel like experimentation or growth. It feels like a verdict. It can feel like a verdict, right? And so every piece of information that confirms this core negative belief you have becomes a verdict like, that must be true.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (13:56.498)
Which is kind of big, right? But, and when your worth feels like it’s on trial, your nervous system is exactly what it’s supposed to do, which is to minimize risk and keep you safe and keep you stressed. Keep the cortisol high, right? Keep it high. Okay, so the solution is not more discipline. It’s not more willpower, it’s not wanting it more, it’s not pushing through, it’s definitely not like finding a million hacks to do it.
looking outside of yourself for more information, for the right way to do it. What actually helps is changing the context you’re operating in, right? So when you decide that, oh, okay, my worth is not on trial, and also this is just a habit my brain is in, there are old thoughts that need updating, I can create some safety, we can actually come into regulation again. And that’s when curiosity becomes possible, that’s when shifting your own beliefs become possible. That’s also when you become the expert in your own.
life where you start to know the path forward for you, not somebody outside of you. Because, mean, like honestly, there’s so many experts in everything. And I realize the irony of this that I’m sitting here like saying that I’m an expert in something. But you are the expert in you and you don’t need somebody outside of you to tell you what to do. You might need some guidance and it can be helpful to have support in the form of like a personal trainer or a coach or a therapist or like, I don’t know, a flower arranging teacher.
But you know the answers for how you want to arrange your flowers. They can give you tips and guidance, but you want to ask yourself how you want to arrange them. I intentionally went to kind of a place that was a little bit maybe weird or surprising. Okay, so if this resonates, I want you to hear this. You don’t need to defeat your doubt. You don’t need to go to war with your old self. You don’t need to eliminate old beliefs. You don’t need to fight yourself. You don’t need to punish yourself. You don’t need to shame yourself. In fact, what you need to start to do is to start
seeing yourself. To start seeing yourself, to start recognizing those thoughts, to start bringing awareness to the patterns you’re in and asking, wonder why or why not I’m doing or not doing the thing that I want to be doing right now. I wonder what the old version of me is protecting me from. Can I ask them? Can I get curious here? Can I figure this out? Because when you figure this out, when you start to work with yourself,
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (16:17.742)
all of a sudden it unlocks the thing. Then you get to grow, right? Then you are actually moving into this next version of yourself. So you don’t need to fix anything right now. And in fact, quick fixes aren’t the way. I mean, feel like we all know that, but we don’t know that, right? We still want that. We still want that. I still want to be healthy today. I worked out once. Don’t I look stronger? We actually, this is the conversation we return to over and over again in the Life Lab, primarily what all of my work is about, which is actually anything
that you see on the outside is a symptom. Your behavior is in fact a symptom of beliefs you have and nervous system states you have. And when you treat it like that and you don’t think of yourself as a problem that needs to be fixed or there’s something inherently wrong with you, then you get a lot of leeway to maybe think of yourself more of like a fun puzzle that you get to work on. Knowing that there are these different components, your beliefs, your nervous system state, your emotions, your actions. And when we work all of them together,
and we start to get to know ourselves with a heavy dose of compassion and self-love and understanding, then all of a sudden, your goals are not something to be avoided or something you don’t want to set. They actually become, again, like the self-fulfilling thing. This is my way to grow and go forward. If this is resonating, listen to more of these podcasts. Follow along. Come find me on social media. And if you’re ready to go deeper with this work, come find a workshop that I have. There’s probably a free one that you can grab to watch to get a taste of this work. You can also come join me in the Life Lab.
where we do this work a couple times every week, right? We have a lesson, we have live coaching, we have somatic sessions. The somatic sessions are actually free for anyone, so you can come have those whenever you’d like to. So that you can start to make these changes for you, so that you start to really see and understand that it’s not a self-discipline problem, it’s not a motivation problem, it’s a old belief programming thing that we need to update.
Thank you so much for being here. It was lovely to see you. Happy 2026. I can’t wait to see what you do and create this year if you start doing this work. And come say hi. Send me an email. Let me know what you’d like me to talk about if you like this show. And I will see you the next time I see you.
