It’s Taken 14 Years to Have the Courage to Do This FTH: 095 - a podcast by Kim Doyal

Courage shows up in many ways.

There is nothing like sharing something publicly that makes it feel that much more REAL.

I’ve known for a long time that accountability works for me, but instead of making myself accountable to other people (meaning someone specific), I share things as a way of being accountable to myself.

Being accountable to myself means putting it out into the world.

Most of the time the things I publicly share get done (although not always in the time frame I hoped), but sometimes they don’t.

No one is knocking at my door asking me where the “thing” is that I said I was going to do.

I let go of what that looked like a long time ago. The truth is that most people are too busy thinking about themselves to worry about what you said you were going to do.

And the bottom line is, it’s your life.

This episode is going to be another ‘processing’ episode in that writing and recording this is helping me get clearer on what I’m doing and where I’m going.

My intention is that there’s value for you as I share this process. As much as I need it, I know someone else out there needs to hear this too.

This is Who I’ve Always Been

I’ve always had an optimistic, and positive disposition.

My Mom used to tell me that even as a little kid I treated everything as an adventure.

I was naturally drawn to the things that made me feel good and intentionally chose not to engage with things that felt heavy or dark. I didn’t know it at the time, but this is what I was doing (it didn’t take many horror movies for me to realize “why the HELL would I watch something that scares the bejeezus out of me?”).

I know this might sound obvious and I believe that a lot of kids are hard-wired to be optimistic – then the longer we’re in school our optimistic, cheerful, and dreamer attitude is taught “out of” us (and I’m not negating that there are plenty of children that have hard childhoods and deal with trauma, that’s not what I’m talking about here).

When I look back I realize how many times I made decisions based on the approval of other people (mainly my parents, who, as much as they always believed in me and supported me, brought their own “stuff” to the table).

The more I stepped into things that made me feel good, the more I was criticized (not at home). The criticism went two ways: it was either “you can’t do that” or “who does she think she is.”

I did a great visualization with my therapist last week and I had two very distinct memories show up: both were times when I was feeling really good about myself and someone (an authority figure /adult) felt the need to “put me in my place.”

The thought that comes to mind with this is “jealousy is an ugly emotion.”

We’ve all had those moments where we get a sideways comment from someone that has nothing to do with us and is completely about their own shit.

Here are a couple of examples (and I’m going to bullet list them here but there’s a story attached to each that I will share in more depth in the podcast):

• Answering the phone too happily at a business I owned (my business partner leaned towards the negative side)
• Having a boss say “can someone else besides Kim answer”… at a work meeting (my boss wasn’t being negative, but everyone else was sitting there like a bump on a log)
• Collaborating with a woman online years ago who made a snide comment that “everyone wants to talk to the WP Chick”
• Internet

  Further episodes of The Kim Doyal Show

  Further podcasts by Kim Doyal

  Website of Kim Doyal