This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - 047 / Mindset, Resilience & Divorce with Susan Tripi

Episode Date: February 24, 2021

It’s easy to be grateful and optimistic when things are going great. But during times of transition, when facing the unknown, when life throws you a curveball...THOSE are the times it can be challenging to choose a positive mindset. And if it were easy, everyone would do it and we’d have nothing to talk about on this episode. I’m joined by Susan Tripi - Women’s Empowerment Coach, Blogger, Non-Profit Advisor and Advocate, to talk about positive mindset and gratitude in the midst of transition, hurt and stress. Her advice on how to support women going through divorce is some of the best I’ve ever heard! I say to anyone who’s standing in the unknown, in pain or in transition...we see you, and we honor you. I lovingly challenge you to put one foot in front of the other, ask for the support you need, and hold on with every bit of strength you have to the knowing that tomorrow is coming. The sun will rise, and there is every reason for hope. Even if you can’t see it yet. In spite of all of your fears and worries, there is another side and you WILL get there. This is Woman’s Work. To learn more about what we are up to outside of this podcast, visit us at NicoleKalil.com

Coming up on this episode of This Is Woman's Work. As women, I think we're taught and conditioned a lot to deflect our emotions and deny our emotions and to be less, quote, emotional. I think that's bullshit. And I think, you know, we need to recognize that there's power in emotions. Since I know none of you are living under a rock, I feel confident you've heard the message that your mindset is pretty important. In fact, I believe I said something to the effect of it being the most important factor of our lives in episode 30 on the topic of mindset. It's a bold statement, I know, but I stand by it. Your mindset is a contributing factor, note the contributing factor of everything in your life. But let's be real about how challenging

it can be to choose a positive, empowered, and productive mindset at times in our lives. It's easy to be grateful and optimistic when things are going great. But during times of transition, when facing the unknown, when life throws you a curve ball or somebody lets you down, that's when the real opportunity presents itself. And if it were easy, everyone would do it and we'd have nothing to talk about today. I am Nicole Khalil and on this episode of This Is Woman's Work, we're going to talk about mindset in the midst of transition, hurt, and stress. Shit's about to get real. And to help us navigate through this, I've invited Susan Trippi to join us. Susan is a woman's empowerment coach focused on guiding women to find what she calls their fierce so they can live purpose-driven lives.

She supports women through big transitions like divorce or even starting a business. She also advises nonprofits and is a huge advocate for education efforts related to human trafficking, the sexual exploitation of women and children, and refugee resettlement. Susan, thank you for being on our podcast, but way more importantly, thank you for the very important work that you do. Thank you so much, Nicole, for having me. I am so excited to be here. Yeah, it's my pleasure. So let's dive in. You shared that you've learned a lot about maintaining a positive mindset through your own personal experiences. Can you share a little bit about some of those experiences and also how you navigated the challenge of positive mindset and gratitude during those

experiences? Sure. So like many of your listeners, 2020 was a really challenging year, right? We all kind of got walloped in ways that we did not anticipate or expect. And my life certainly took many twists and turns over the last year and a half to year that I did not foresee coming. And so, for example, I journeyed through a separation and divorce. I moved cross-country to a new community. I lost a lot of my social circle as a result of that divorce at a time when I needed emotional support and assistance in my life. And then related to COVID, I immediately experienced job loss, which then led to food scarcity, chronic unemployment for about eight months, and then a health crisis that required surgery. So take any one of those in isolation and it's enough to throw your world upside down for a little period of time, right? But then add the cumulative effect of the challenges

of navigating through each of those while building or trying to build community and friendships and relationships during quarantine in a pandemic. And it led to this place of me recognizing, okay, I have choices here, right? I may not be able to control the external situations that are happening, but I can control my internal response to those situations. So for me, part of that, part of the intention of working through those challenges and keeping a positive mindset was to decide how I want to respond in each of those cases. Am I giving into fear? Am I giving into doubt? Am I giving into insecurity? Am I giving into the roller coaster of emotions that comes? Or am I choosing instead to focus on channeling those emotions into positive action forward, not deflecting or denying them? So that was my first step was making a commitment to honoring the emotions, validating the emotions, seeing what was underneath the layers of that, but then channeling it into

action to move forward, developing action steps and a plan. So the first was I had to make a choice. The second is I recognized self-care was going to be incredibly important to maintain mental well-being and emotional well-being and spiritual well-being during a time when every foundation in my life was being pulled apart, which can be destabilizing in many ways. And so given my history of going through burnout several years ago, which I'm sure we'll touch on later, and developing practices around self-care, I continued to focus on meaningful and relevant practices of self-care that enabled me to maintain a positive mindset. The practice of gratitude is one of those. And that also helped me to see the opportunities that are truly present around me in the midst of some challenging situations. Yeah, that might be the understatement of the century. Have you read Glennon Doyle's book, Untamed? Yes. I'm going through it a second time now. She is amazing and a wonderful mentor,

right? Yeah. Susan, you are a goddamn cheetah. Your courage is inspirational. Thank you for sharing that. And I wish this weren't true, but I think for a lot of women this year, especially your experience isn't as outside of the norm as we would hope. Right. And not to take anything away from your experience by any means, but there's just a lot of different moving parts that people are dealing with right now. I mean, it's such a great example and so impressive how you chose to stand in your power. That's what kept coming up in my head is when, yes, feel your feelings, experience your

experience. That's so important. I think a lot of us miss that step. I'll speak for myself, but the understanding belief holding onto that you have the choice of your response and you have the choice of staying in gratitude. And I'm sure at times that was very, very hard, but that to me is where I really deeply connect to my power. Share your experience, how you feel about yourself when you make these choices.

So for me, I connect with everything that you're saying. think we're taught and conditioned a lot to deflect our emotions and deny our emotions and to be less, quote, emotional. I think that's bullshit. And I think, you know, we need to recognize that there's power in emotions. We've been given this full range and breadth and scope of experience and emotions for a reason. And what I have learned over the past couple of years is that, one, emotions are a gateway to understanding deeper levels of ourselves in terms of self-awareness. And self-awareness is an incredibly important part of self-care. The deeper elements, what I call the work of the soul part of self-care. And so as I was making conscious choices to experience and honor and validate the emotions, I'm doing two things. One, if we deflect it and deny it, it still gets stored in our body

somewhere. It's not going away and it's going to manifest in other ways, whether that's back pain or migraines or tension or irritability. So honoring this and feeling it, sitting with it, feeling with it, not getting stuck in it, but identifying what's underneath it helps to one, release it from our body. We're no longer holding on to the toxic part of storing it. We're releasing it. But for me, I recognize that, for example, there's power in it when you learn how to channel your emotions. So when I was first going through separation and divorce and moving to a new community, and then five weeks later, this COVID thing hits and life shuts down, there was a lot of fear in my life at that time. And for several weeks, I just felt this sense of overwhelm and recognized, okay, I'm heading into a bad place. So let me, let's stop. Let's take a moment. Let's assess this. And so I started looking into,

okay, where is this fear coming from? What's really underneath this? And through the process of journaling, through the process of walking, I like to walk a lot and reflect and center and calm the chatter in my mind when I walk. And so through the process of doing both of those things, I recognized what's underneath this fear for me is concern about my financial security, concern about the ability to maintain and make a new life as a single woman who now has zero income, right? And very little assets to draw upon. And then there's fear around, can I do this? Can I make this happen? Am I good enough? You know, all of those conversations. And so then once I started identifying what's underneath the fear, then I was able to do two things. The first, I'm able to develop an action plan. Okay, if I'm concerned that I won't be able to generate the revenue I need to sustain

and maintain a new life for myself, what are three things I can do right now? To look for a job, to earn income, to resource, you know, so then I start building an action step for each one of those fears. And then I developed affirmations that countered the negative self-talk that was happening in relation to those fears. And then every morning, I would review that list of affirmations. That's such a positive response and so aligned with what I know to be true about confidence building. First, action builds confidence, right? So putting that action plan in place, it is super important. And then one of the big confidence derailers, one of the things that really chips away at our confidence is that head trash, right? The inner critic. And so on both sides, you put yourself in a position to sort of battle that

confidence derailer with the affirmations and focused on a confidence builder and getting yourself in action. I mean, yeah, again, kudos to you. So, okay. Susan, you've talked about self care a couple of times, and I know we talked about this briefly. I have a little bit of a pet peeve around self care right now. I feel like it's been reduced to go get your nails done or go get your hair done or go drink wine. And I'm all for all of those things, by the way, but I think it's so basic to what we're actually talking about when we talk about loving ourselves and caring for ourselves. So Surfacy, share with us what you mean when you say self-care. What are maybe more deeper practices of this work? Certainly. So when I work with clients and I weave self-care

into everything that I do. And so when I work with clients, there are three aspects to self-care in the framework that I teach. There's the aspect of self-care related to our passions, which to me is based on our interests. So things like going to the spa or going to a movie or going dancing that immediately fuel us and fill us with all the feels, all the good feels. It's an immediate win. We walk away happy. It's easy to schedule into our calendar, right? That's one aspect of self-care. So for me, that'd be reading a book and going dancing. Those are like passions and they fill me up. And so, okay. So I like that. There's part of self-care related to what you already love to do. Exactly. Okay, great. The second piece of the framework has to do with professional advancement. So self-care around those activities that we Maybe that's listening to wonderful podcasts like yours.

Maybe that's going to a conference. Anything that's going to allow us to continue to grow our skills, hone our ability to continue learning and creating and impacting in our career. And that will lead to advancement opportunities. So that's the second piece. And then the third and what I feel is the most important piece to self-care is the work of the soul and understanding that we are the sum total of all of our life experiences. And we have this little thing called our ego and we have, you know, our psyche and our emotions and we have trauma and we have many different layers to who we are.

And we bring all of that to every experience. And so for me, the most important part of self-care is taking the time to understand our behaviors, our thoughts, our mindset, our triggers, our responses to things and situations so that we can, one, clean out the crap that's there, the lies that we've heard, the conditioning through culture that we've accepted, those pieces of information that we pick up from family and culture and community, those areas that we may have unresolved trauma in our life that continues to impact how we respond in certain situations. So uncovering all of that so we can continue to evolve and grow. And so we can continue to become more compassionate people by embracing others without judgment. So I said self-care was a little bit of a pet peeve. You just made me fall in love with it again. I love the way you framed it and explained

it. That's self-care and that's loving yourself. And I really like the three pieces of it. I've never heard it broken down that way. And that really resonates with me. And it resonates with my current experience too about ways that I am practicing self-care, but I didn't have that framework. So thank you. You mentioned divorce

and I don't know how this is still the case, but I feel like it's still a bit of a taboo subject or an embarrassing or shameful one for so many people, which is sort of strange if you think about what a large percentage of people who go through it. I don't know if the number is 50% or if it's higher or lower, maybe you know, but we hear about half of the people who get married get divorced. Do you have any updated stats on that? It's higher now.

The last I checked a couple of years ago, it was almost 70%. Oh God. So if you think about it, 70% of people have, have gone through or are going to go through this experience. And yet there's still the shame or, or, you know, taboo thing about it. 50% of the population is men or women. And we don't feel a lot of shame about that. Like the 70% is so crazy to me. Anyway, how do you help people, women specifically navigate through divorce? And what are some of the things that you're seeing that you may be able to help

any of our listeners who are going through it or have gone through it or might be thinking about going through it? So first I want to preface this by saying I'm not a lawyer, right? And so I cannot advise on the legal aspects. I just want to make that clear. So the work that I do, there are many other pieces that are incredibly important. The legal aspect is one of them. So the work that I do with women is largely based out of my own experience and my own journey and recognizing there are gaps in terms of caring for women specifically going through divorce. And if we look at the statistics to see the outcomes after divorce in terms of the equity gap that is present

and that many women experience lower financial income are often burdened with, coupled with that burden with the care for all of the children that continues to cut into what little financial reserve they have or capacity they have. When you look at the discrepancies in terms of wages earned between men and women, there is still significant gaps. Women are earning lower wages than men. I mean, this you know. So sorry, I want to dig into that capacity point because that's really important.

It's not even just that you can or can't go get a job or that you can and can't go get, make a certain level. And those are challenges for sure. But the capacity part, as it relates to you being the primary caregiver, most likely of your children and helping them to navigate through the emotional and, you know, possible physical move and all that stuff that goes along with it. What an incredibly challenging position that women are getting put in in these scenarios that I don't think is being given enough, certainly not enough support. The work that I do with women is primarily around capacity. It's around helping to create a team, a support team,

helping to build a tribe that will walk with them through this experience. Because going through the process, your social circle dwindles. It just does. That's a reality. And part of that is because there's judgment. There's also, I think as a culture, we don't always know how to walk with people through difficult situations or messy situations. So from an emotional support piece, it's difficult to, it can be challenging to find individuals who know how to love well and support well without judging. So anyway, and it just becomes uncomfortable when you have friends who have been friends together and then they feel this obligation to choose sides and it just brings up all these entanglements, right? So it's an isolating experience for women in particular. This I see and this I hear regularly. And then I experienced it directly myself. And so the capacity piece is one that I spend a lot of time working with women through to

develop, to identify what are the resources that you'll need for yourself, for your children, in creating not only this getting through this transition period, because divorce takes a long time. It takes like a minimum of a year to go through the process. And there's so many elements to work through. So we develop an immediate transition plan. And then also thinking future. Will the outcome of this be a move? Who will maintain the home? If there is a move, what will that look like for the woman and her children? Where will they go? Home, apartment, we explore all of those different options and set up a plan for figuring out how to make those goals achievable. And how to do so in a way that pulls in professional resources for her and her family.

Financial resources for her and providing practical, tangible, hands-on kind of support, bringing in aspects of self-care, because this is a highly emotionally charged time. And when there are children involved, depending on their age, they're experiencing trauma through this as well. teaching how to have conversations with children and how to create space for children to communicate what they're feeling and to develop healthy self-care practices for themselves to age appropriate. I know I'm not saying anything you don't already know, but the work you do is so important and so valuable. So thank you for doing it. You mentioned something that really like kind of hit my heart. And I don't know if I speak for all people, but I certainly speak for myself when I say this, I would hope I would aspire to be a friend who will walk with the people I love through messy situations. How do we do that? How do we, any tips to help us be better at that gift?

That's a great question. Thank you so much for asking that because I think there are, there are many friends who want to do something. They just don't know how to do something, right? So the first step or the first tip would be just commit to show up, period. Just commit to show up and love. Check your judgment at the door. Check your projections at the door. Check your opinions out the door because this is not about you. Their situation, their divorce is not about how it impacts you or how it affects you. could look like, some really practical ways that you can support someone going through a separation, send them texts, text messages, couple times a week, thinking of you, you got this, you can do this, anything I can do, I'm here. Send them encouraging quotes, send them encouraging affirmations. Other things you can do, you can send them, purchase takeout for them, have it delivered to their home, right? Hire somebody to do some cleaning and let them clean the house. Maybe you arrange childcare once a week so that that mama can just catch a break, can take a bath, can go read a book, can go for a walk, something.

Think of the practical. Listen in the context of your conversations. Come without judgment and be intentional about creating space for them to process, for them to reflect, for them to think through what their next steps are, and then be supportive in helping them achieve those steps. And then I think there's times when people are hesitant to show up because they don't know what to say. They don't know what to do. They feel like they have to fix it. Take that pressure off. You don't have to fix a thing. You don't have to know what to say. You don't have to know what to do. Just your presence in that person's life that says, I love you. I care about you. I'm here for

you. And I'm here with you. And I don't know what that looks like journeying with you. And I'm probably going to mess up and say the wrong things at the wrong time. And I apologize, but I love you. And I'm here for you. That's the greatest gift that you can give someone who's good because the self-esteem for both parties going through the divorce drops to zero, right? And all the foundations of your life that you have built on are crumbling. So there's lots of self-doubt that's happening. And so just to hear somebody say, I love you, I'm with you. I'm committed to journeying this with you is incredibly powerful. And then be consistent. Don't ghost. Don't drop it in the other person's lap and say,

when you need me, call. No, you take the initiative to call them, to text them, to write them a note, to show up and be consistent. Because when you're going through the process of divorce, your world shrinks. Your world shrinks because you're in crisis. And all you can do is just focus on one day at a time. The thought of even reaching out to other people half the time doesn't exist because in those early stages, you don't even know what you need. You're just responding to emotional preservation and preservation of the family with children, right? So as a friend, take the initiative to reach out and show up and be consistent. That might be some of the best advice I've ever heard. Thank you for being so thorough and thoughtful in that. And I mean, it seems like just good, solid advice

whenever a friend is going through anything messy, certainly divorce, but as you mentioned, this year has thrown us a lot of doozies. And so whatever the messiness that somebody might be going through, I think that's exceptional advice across the board. Susan, thank you so much for your wisdom, for your heart, for your passion. For our listeners, if you want to learn more about Susan and her work, you can visit her website, www.susantrippi.com. So S-U-S-A-N-T-R-I-P-I. Or you can follow her on Instagram at Susan Trippi Coaching. And if you or anybody you love is going through separation or divorce, Susan does offer individual coaching for women going

through that process, as she mentioned, not as a lawyer, but for all the other amazing gifts that she offers. She also has a blog on this topic called it's surviving divorce, correct? Yes. Awesome. Okay. Susan, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Nicole, for creating space for this conversation. I so appreciate you and I appreciate your intention to share information with your audience that will not only demystify divorce, but take, as you were saying, take the shame that's associated with it and create space to have honest conversations. Yeah. We started about mindset, but that felt like such an important topic.

And I appreciate your willingness to dive into it with me. So, all right. There's an expression that it's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters. And it feels a little bit like tough love to say that to somebody when they're in a challenging time, but it doesn't make it any less true. My heart hurts for the things we've witnessed that women have had to face and overcome. I believe we are strong. Nobody can convince me that we are the weaker sex.

I've witnessed over and over examples that wildly and emphatically contradict that. So I say to anyone who's going through the ringer right now, anyone who's standing in the unknown, uncertainty, in pain, in transition, we see you and we honor you. And I lovingly challenge you to lift that chin up, ask for the support you need, put one foot in front of the other, and hold on with every bit of strength you have to the knowing that tomorrow is coming. The sun will rise and there is every reason for hope, even if you can't see it yet. And in spite of all of your fears and worries, there is another side and you will get there.

And this is woman's work.