This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - VI4P - Head Trash and Giving Grace on the Journey (Chapter 7)

Episode Date: January 22, 2024

Click here to get your FREE Confidence Building Workbook.  On this episode, I go through Chapter 7 of Validation Is For Parking: How Women Can Beat The Confidence Con), which focuses on Head Trash (which is what I call my negative thoughts) and giving yourself grace. You can dig deeper into Head Trash on pages 17-20, and Giving Yourself Grace on page 35 of our workbook! Here’s what you can expect: What we can all learn about our Head Trash from our actual trash Giving yourself grace - how to talk to yourself like someone you love A simple two-step process for practicing grace How ripples can become waves Like what you heard? Please rate and review

What do you call that voice in your head? You know the one, the voice that says that you're not enough, that you suck at everything that you do, that you'll never really amount to anything, that everyone is saying bad things about you behind your back. I am Nicole Kalil, and I call that voice head trash because I want what I call it to sound as dirty and disgusting as the things that it says. On this episode, we're going to talk all about this confidence derailer because your head trash is most certainly chipping away at it and doing damage to your confidence. And I'm going to share its antidote, the thing that works the best when your head trash kicks

into high gear and actually serves to build your confidence. For those of you who are listening to this VI4P episode for the first time, each Monday I'm releasing a chapter of my book, Validation is for Parking. So it's kind of like an audio book, but podcast style. We are on chapter seven, which you can absolutely listen to as a standalone topic, or you can go back and start from the beginning with our introduction. Each chapter has VI4P in the title, and we have a 40 plus page confidence building workbook that you can download for free in the

show notes. Speaking of that workbook, today's content correlates with pages 17 through 20 on head trash and page 35 on giving yourself grace. So you'll be able to dig deeper, explore in your own life, and most importantly, put into action the lessons you hear today. Before I dive in, I have to tell you a funny story. Well, hopefully funny for you, but super embarrassing for me. A few years ago, I was invited to be a guest on a podcast, and I was newer to the podcasting world at the time, and I was also in the process of developing my new keynote talk on confidence. So I thought I'd use it as an opportunity

to test out some of my new material and to practice saying it out loud and learn and grow and see what resonated and what didn't. So I do this guest spot and I'm feeling pretty good about it. The conversation was great. The host asked wonderful questions, engaged at a high level, and the energy was really good.

As I finished the recording, I felt like a lot of my new stories and the points that I made really landed. I talked about the confidence derailers and all of their antidotes, the confidence builders. At this point, you're wondering where the embarrassment comes in, right? Well, that would be a couple weeks later when I'm writing and practicing said keynote with a coach, and they point out to me that they think I mean to be using the word antidote, as in something that counteracts or cancels out a poison, not anecdote, which is the word I had been using and means a short and interesting story about someone or something. Thank God he pointed it out to me before I started saying it on stages, right? Except at that moment, I realized that I said the word anecdote at least 17 times on that podcast

recording when I meant to say antidote. To this day, I still second guess myself and occasionally Google search to make sure I'm using the right word. Trust me when I say I had a ton of head trash about it and I felt thoroughly embarrassed when that episode released. Guess what got me through it? Yep, the antidote to head trash, which is giving yourself grace. So here's the chapter that covers both of those and ironically includes an anecdote about my actual trash. We open up the chapter with a favorite quote that says, you spend most of your life inside your head. You might as well make it a nice place to be. I coach a lot of incredible women and it always surprises me to hear that their self-talk is just as nasty

in spite of everything they're accomplishing. An entrepreneur running her own six-figure business while raising two young children used to tell me, I need to get my shit together. This blew my mind. She hadn't gotten a full night's sleep in over eight months, was the primary breadwinner for her family at the time, and was also smack dab in the middle of building her own house. She managed a team, was engaged with her kid's life, cared about her community, and was increasing her revenue year over year. This woman had her shit and everyone else's shit together. Yet, that's what she believed about herself. I asked her, if someone you loved was working as hard as you are while raising two young kids

and building a house, would you tell them that they needed to get their shit together? No, never is what she answered. Then why do you feel like it's okay to say that to yourself? That is head trash. It's the things we say to ourselves about ourselves that are never kind and rarely true. It's a cruel internal dialogue that is also referred to as the inner critic, super ego, or even negative thoughts. I know we all know what it's like to hear it. I'm such an idiot. What the fuck is wrong with me? I'm so lazy. I'm ugly, fat. I have too much this and not enough of that. I'm not good enough. I'm a failure. What if someone notices? We say awful things in our own mind, things we would never say out loud to anyone we love. Would you ever say what you say to yourself, to your partner, your best friend, sister, or child? I think, and I hope

not. A lot of women tell me that they can't stop their head trash, but I know that's not true. They stop themselves from being unkind toward other people and people they love all the time. So we can't eliminate our negative thoughts altogether, but we can work to notice them faster and put a process in place that replaces them with kinder, gentler, more productive thoughts. I've seen my clients skyrocket their performance, revenue, and success thanks to this one impactful change in mindset. Frankly, you'd be hard-pressed to find a coach, expert, athlete, or successful professional that would tell you that mindset doesn't matter. I'd go as far as to say that everything in your life begins with your mindset. It's that important.

Mindset and manifesting are all the rage right now. And just like confidence, I see a lot of misconceptions, misrepresentations, and general crap about what these words actually mean. Our mindset is the set of beliefs that shape the way we make sense of our world and ourselves. It creates our perception and interpretation of everything, which of course influences how we feel, think, and act. Manifestation is when you create or bring forth something through your beliefs and the laws of attraction that show up in a tangible way. I think of manifestation as if you believe it,

it will come. Okay, so why am I defining mindset and manifestation? Because those thoughts in your head create your reality. And if your thoughts are consumed by head trash, you're going to create patterns, themes, and results in your life that don't serve you and keep you from what you really want. In this chapter, we're going to talk about head trash and how giving ourselves grace along the journey enables us to rebuild our confidence. What my actual trash taught me. I have learned a lot about head trash from my actual trash. Seriously. My family moved from California to Massachusetts back in 2017 after Jay had been offered an amazing career opportunity on the East Coast. Being that I can do my work as a speaker and a coach from anywhere, the decision for him

to take that job was a no brainer. In the space of two and a half months, we sold our house in California, bought a house on the East Coast, packed up all of our stuff and a three-year-old at the time and moved. And because Jay needed to start his new role pretty quickly, I took on most of the logistics. So we didn't have a lot of time to research the town we were moving to and Jay hadn't even seen the house we bought until he did the final inspection. Let's just say this period of our lives was a little chaotic and a lot stressful. One of the surprises that we discovered after we'd arrived in our new town was that it didn't provide trash service. Residents

don't leave their bins out on the curb every week for somebody to come and collect them. Nobody comes to pick up your waste and dispose of it for you. So we had to take all of our trash, recycling, and compost, pack it in the trunk of my car, and take it to a place called the transfer station, which is a really nice way of saying the dump. Managing this task became my job. Please note, Jay and I divvy up chores and household responsibilities. So before you start feeling sorry for me or get all riled up that I'm expected to handle all the household responsibilities, please know that he does 100% of the grocery shopping and cooking in our house. So handling the trash every week was an easy yes for me. And in doing this, I learned three valuable insights into how head

trash is similar to real trash. Lesson number one, I'm not the only person who contributes to my trash. In the case of the waste I dropped off at the transfer station, many people were involved in adding to it. There were daily contributions from Jay and JJ, trash from our friends and family members when they would come to visit, and the random debris the wind blew in our yard. Dinner parties with friends, colleagues, or clients would quickly double the load. And the more people that were around, the higher the pile grew. Head trash works in the same way. Not all, in fact, probably not most of it is ours alone. Things your parents and family said to or around you, whether they had good

intentions for saying them or not, have contributed to your head trash. You've picked it up from friends, exes, bosses, coworkers, bullies, influencers, and strangers on the internet. Everywhere you turn, there's the possibility that someone might add to your load. When your head trash talks to you, it's not just your voice alone that you're hearing. So it's worth asking yourself where all those dirty rags and shards of glass are coming from. It's worth asking whose voice it is and whether or not it's worth listening to. Lesson number two, regardless of how much or how many other people contributed to my trash, it was still my job to sort, sift, and discard it.

During that time in my life, I had to separate the trash, recycling, and compost waste to make sure to take them to the right places at the transfer station. Sometimes after parties, I'd realize that guests threw cans in with the regular trash and I had to move them over to recycling or food waste would pile up in the garbage. So we bought a little can for the things that we could compost. This was my chore to get done, and no one was going to do it for me. To get everything in its proper place, I had to dig in, get my hands dirty, sort, sift, and discard appropriately, just like head trash. You can sort through your negative thoughts and decide what you want to do with them and where they belong. There are thoughts in your head that you might choose to recycle, meaning that they can be

reused in another way or brought back for another purpose. There are thoughts that should be composted because they can be used for your own growth and betterment. And there are definitely thoughts that are straight trash and should be tossed out for good, never to be seen or thought of again. It will always be your job to sort, sift, and discard your head trash, no matter how many people have added to it. It's your life, your mind, and your confidence, and therefore the buck stops with you. Since I know most of you haven't had to be your own trash collectors or disposers, let me give you some examples. People have often

directly told me or alluded to the idea that I am too driven and ambitious. I'm assuming for a woman. Over time, I began to recognize that I could recycle this thought in my head into something positive and motivating. Yes, I am driven and ambitious. Yes, I want to achieve my goals, make a difference, and create this life that I want. Thank you for recognizing and reminding me that I already have that inside me and that I can use it to create professional success. The people saying it to me might have thought these were bad traits, but I don't.

And my belief about myself is what matters most. So I'm going to use that as fuel. Thank you very much. My drive and ambition have propelled me to accomplish a great deal professionally. I didn't need to throw that away. I just needed to repurpose or recycle it. I've also heard, mostly from bullies and ex-boyfriends, that I'm kind of loud and opinionated. That was obviously not meant as a compliment, but in the spirit of composting,

how do I turn that into valuable fertilizer that enriches and helps me grow? Well, I started a podcast like any loud and opinionated person does. And lastly, the amount of head trash that I've had about my own body could fill an entire transfer station on its own. But I've decided that every negative thought about my body is trash and needs to be tossed out completely. It doesn't belong in my home and I need to keep throwing it in the trash every time I come across it. Your specific head trash will be different, but you can handle it in the same way. You are the decider of where it belongs and what you want to do with it. Lesson three, the sorting, sifting, and discarding process becomes significantly more urgent

and important when it's hot out. During the humid summer months, our trash was disgusting. I'm talking mold, maggots, and a stench that would make a skunk gag. I would hold my breath while handling my trash, wearing full gloves, laying out towels on my trunk before reluctantly loading it into my car for my journey over to the transfer station. I had to do drop-offs more frequently than I did in the winter to keep the smell from becoming unbearable and so that my job didn't become even more revolting. The same goes for head trash.

When things get hot in our lives, like when you're stressed, overwhelmed, in pain, or feeling exhausted, that's when you need to sort, sift, and discard it more frequently to keep things from getting disgusting in your mind. Hashtag no more mind maggots. To put this more directly, you are not a trash can. It is not your job to store your head trash. You are a temple, a home, and a freaking miracle. The garbage wasn't there when you were born and you shouldn't allow it to continue to contaminate the sacred space of your mind. There's a quote that I love that says, we can't prevent a bird from flying over our heads, but we can prevent it from building a nest in our hair. Similarly, we can't prevent negative thoughts

from flying into our brains, but we can certainly stop them from taking up residence there and making themselves at home. This is challenging, but not as challenging as the alternative. Feeling like shit all the time because we're harsh towards ourselves is a cruel punishment. I wouldn't even wish on my enemies. Not that I really have enemies, but you get the idea. We're so quick to process those unkind words as incontrovertible truth, but poisonous words intended to hurt are almost always skewed exaggerations of reality. It's time to take out your trash. The antidote to head trash is giving yourself grace on your journey. To keep head trash from derailing our confidence, we have to learn the skill of giving ourselves

grace on the journey. That on the journey part is important because it reminds us that confidence building is a lifelong process. Like regular trash, head trash requires constant attention and cleanup. No one ever lands in a place of confidence, plants a flag, and gets to say, that's it, I'm done, I'm confident forever. There's no final destination for that inner work, and we get to embrace that. And because confidence building is a journey, it's imperative that we be kind to and encourage ourselves along the way. By acknowledging our growth, when it happens, we acknowledge how far our efforts have brought us. If we're to reach our full potential in spite of life's challenges, we must be somebody that we love first and foremost. Therefore, we must speak

to ourselves in the same way we would a loved one. We, as much as anyone in our lives, deserve our own kindness. What I'm ultimately talking about is replacing your head trash with gentler, more productive, more empowered messages that will inspire you to move through life with resilience. I have a two-part process that I use to help me do this. And just like everything, it gets easier with practice. Step number one, name your negative or disempowered thought. Listen to what you're telling yourself and ask whether or not you'd say that to a loved one. Would you say something like, you'll never achieve your goal and you aren't worthy of your dream life to your soulmate or your best friend?

Of course not. Therefore, it's not your inner knowing or fact or honest truth. Your inner knowing or the honest truth can absolutely be something that you don't want to hear. The distinction to keep in mind is how the message is being said. Head trash is mean. It's basically you bullying yourself. Your inner knowing or even the hard truth will speak to you from a place of love, caring, and wanting the best for you. As an example, your head trash may say, you can't do any better. Who do you think you are? If you leave him, you'll be lonely, sad,

and pathetic forever. Your inner knowing or your honest truth, on the other hand, might say, it's time to move on. You deserve better and you've put up with too much already. Yes, it will be painful, but you know what you need to do and you'll be okay. Naming it is so important. Calling it what it is because it helps you to distinguish head trash from inner knowing and helps you to identify it for what it is, you bullying yourself. Once you've recognized what it is, you can choose what you want to do with it. Rather than letting head trash camp out in your brain, you can opt to move forward. Step two, replace the thought with something you'd actually say to someone you love. This reframing process is the essence of giving grace, and there are a number of ways to do it.

You can deal with this specific thought directly, replacing something like, I'm never going to hit my goal with, I haven't achieved my goal yet, but I've come a long way and forward momentum will get me there. Or if there's a recurring negative thought that pops up for you often, you can decide on a phrase in advance to pull out as a mantra or affirmation whenever it's needed. You might say, I'm enough just as I am, or I am patient with myself and embrace any progress that I make, or I celebrate my uniqueness because it's what makes me special. When my head trash kicks up and I haven't prepared a well-crafted affirmation, I simply say to myself, gentle, gentle, gentle, as a reminder to be gentle with

myself as I would with anyone I love. If this feels difficult or forced in the beginning, that's totally normal, but keep at it. Our brains build habits quickly. And if you practice this simple strategy, you're going to trigger healthier thoughts when you begin to feel cracks in your confidence. Now, you might get stuck on a particular piece of head trash and think something like, it's the truth though. I am lazy. I am incompetent. I am a horrible business owner. How can I replace that? Denial won't help me move forward. Well, true. Denial is never helpful, but neither is putting ourselves down when we're trying to make progress. In cases like these, think back to the exercise we covered while talking about failure in the last chapter.

It can be just as useful here when we're feeling stubborn and dead set on vilifying ourselves. What are the facts? What are you making up about the facts? What's a different, more productive, more empowered way to see it? And what's next? Because most of the time, you're making it all up anyway. None of this, by the way, is meant to push you towards toxic positivity. Not everything needs to feel good or make us happy all the time. I'm not suggesting that we do any of this to put lipstick on a pig or avoid getting real with ourselves. A lot of the time, we feel like people can either choose to be kind or choose to be

honest, but there is always a way to do both at the same time. This is about being gentle with ourselves, keeping in mind that we are all works in progress. It's about challenging ourselves to resist the temptation to beat ourselves up so that we can move forward. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to disappoint yourself and others. Life is going to throw shit at you, whether you like it or not. So the best way to deal with this is to get into the practice of communicating, especially with yourself, from a place of love and grace. Something I hear truly confident people say often is, I'm not sure. They hit those moments, stages, or periods of uncertainty along their journey, and they settle into the gray area rather than

needing it to be black or white. They don't need to know it all or tell themselves that they know nothing. They trust themselves. They give themselves grace and simply admit, I don't have this figured out yet, while owning that there's nothing wrong with that. This type of vulnerability shows strength. It's a path to freedom. When we respect that we're not done yet and that we still have more to accomplish and always will, we're more likely to savor every step of our personal adventure rather than just those milestones. Ripples become waves.

For a lot of women I work with, it takes months or even years to build the skill of choosing more empowered and productive thoughts when they're talking to themselves. Practice makes progress, however, and it has allowed them to achieve big goals that seemed out of reach and feel better about themselves in the process. Their level of talent stayed the same. Their opportunities remained steady. The only thing that changed about their approach was how they saw themselves in it. Remember my amazing client that I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter? Mrs. I need to get my shit together. Flash forward to now. And as I'm writing this book, she's on the road to earning four times

the income she was making when we first met. She is crushing life. She was always crushing life, but the practice of giving herself grace was the single biggest factor of boosting her success. It helped her take risks and continue moving forward with the confidence the only person standing in her way was herself. When she begins to see herself the way I see her, the way anyone who has the privilege to interact with her sees her, she will tear the fucking roof off, break all the glass, and create the life her inner knowing believes is possible. It has been a great joy, an incredible honor to watch her grow, and she is just getting started. So I urge you to ask yourself, how is your self-talk holding you back from what you want? How can small ripples of confidence grow into tidal waves for you too? Think about those questions because the two confidence derailers that we've discussed so far often rely on help from the next one we're about to cover while doing their dirty work.

We're about to talk about overthinking. Okay, that closes out chapter seven with a little bit of a teaser for next week's episode on overthinking and its antidote, which is choosing confidence. As a reminder, you can download the Confidence Building Workbook by clicking the link in show notes if you want to work on quieting the noise in your own mind and practice talking to yourself like someone you love. And here's the big question I want to leave you with. What would be possible in your life, your career, and your relationships if you started talking to yourself like someone you love?

What would that invite in? What would that invite in? What would that filter out? Only you know the answers, but I know this is a huge opportunity for all of us to repair and build internal trust. And confidence is ultimately always about firm and bold trust in self. And validation, well, that's for parking.