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Hey guys, welcome to episode three. Today, we’re going to talk all about drama because Kim is having lots of it. So, what better time to help me and help you? So, what we’re going to talk about is momma drama, dollar drama, daddy drama, all of that stuff.

So, drama is just the thing that your brain creates so that you don’t have to deal with the emotions that are trying to come up. We all have it. And I want to show you what to do about it and how to help yourself come back out of it and get back into doing the thing that you really want to do.

So, I’ll share a couple of stories with you that are actually going on in my own life right now.  It is Mardi Gras and I live in Southern Louisiana – actually, kind of Central Southern Louisiana. But if you have not heard about Mardi Gras, maybe you can go and look it up. I am in Mamou, so you can find it on Google, YouTube, even Netflix has information on Mamou Mardi Gras. Anthony Bourdain’s last video, or last episode aired, is actually called Parts Unknown. This will show you all about Mardi Gras.

Now, I want you to put yourself in my shoes, for those who are parents, and imagine your son being 24 years old and this is his favorite time of the year. And then, I want you to take a good look at the video and tell me what you would be thinking as a parent. It’s pretty scary. Anyway, that’s a big part of my drama. Every year, February and March I sit in this dilemma.  My brain comes up with the worst-case scenarios of everything that can go wrong when we are talking about kids, alcohol, partying.

There are no limits for Mardi Gras. It’s heaven for them and it’s hell for the parent. I’m just saying. I’ve grown up in these parts actually a block from where the festivities take place. I’ve followed. I’ve been a part of it. I’ve raised five children, but there is just something about the drama with this last one. I think it’s because he loves it so much.

But anyway, he is all over Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, this video. I won’t tell you which one he is, but if you just take a look at it, it’s pretty prominent. But anyway, that’s the personal drama that I’m sitting in.

Now, when we want to talk about dollar drama, that’s actually how it relates to body workers and health and wellness businesses, and I want to give you guys some help about moving forward in your own business and talking about the things that you usually get caught up in, or that I did in my own experience, and then why we have it, what can we do about it? So, the drama that I’m actually experiencing in this moment is podcast drama.

Shoot. This is so painful. I’ve had to redo this particular episode so many times that I’ve just chosen to go with the imperfection because, you know what, there is no perfect and everything is perfect. And so I was able to bring myself back into presence, get real about what was going on here, and recognize that it is just an old stinking story going crazy in my brain, spinning and looping, and telling me that I can’t do this, it’s too hard, I’m not organized enough, there’s no way I can pull this off, and all of that stuff, guys.

This is with everything in life. Not just my life, but I know, if you are a business owner, if you’re an entrepreneur, if you have a family, if you are a parent, if you have parents, all of that stuff, these stories that freak us out are drama. Because the honest truth is, if you are in presence and you’re not worried about being in regret and trying to fix what has already happened and you’re not worried about what is to come and you’re trying to control that and you’re truly in this moment in present right now, then you are in grace and everything is happening exactly as it’s meant to happen; for your good and for the good of everyone else.

You know, I have to keep reminding myself to come back to, life is just an experience. Life is what we make it, what we want to taste in it, what we want to feel in it, what we want to share, how we want to grow and evolve. And when we can truly come to that place of being free of thinking it needs to be in a particular way or it needs to be controlled or the people around us need to be acting or doing certain things, when we can truly let go of that and just be in the experience, that is living in natural essence and ease and flow. That is, for me, the gold.

So, I just wanted to share my own personal dilemma and how I was kind of caught up in this stuff for the last two or three days. You know, I had feedback on the last podcast, like, we’re totally going to ditch this one and start over. And my brain wanted to make up all kinds of crazy stories. And what I had to do is the solution that I’m going to share with you today. And for those who know me, or for those even who don’t know me and who will get to know me, everything I do is very simple, very practical, and it’s applicable in all areas of your life.

So, let’s just get right to it. What is drama? Drama is emotions or un-integrated emotions or triggers or things that come up in your body. You can feel it. It feels like fear. It feels like, oh my god, I’m going to die if I do this, I’m so ashamed, what could possibly happen? I could fail, they won’t like me, they may die, or I may die. What is the scariest thing that your brain can possibly think of to keep you safe, to keep you small, to protect you and stop you from doing the thing that it doesn’t understand, or maybe doesn’t understand just yet? Like, “Why would you possibly want to do that, crazy person? We need to stay really, really safe and secure here and you should not try anything that’s not familiar. That would be, like, the worst thing possible.”

Another way to describe drama in a really simple practical way that most people can understand is food drama. So, if you’ve ever gone on a diet or tried to eliminate something from your diet or restrict it – another reason to talk about Mardi Gras because, you know, Mardi Gras is like the day before Lent, when Catholics are going to go six weeks withholding something so they can strengthen their spiritual life. And so we’ll see a lot of – I’m in the fitness business, so we’ll see a lot of people start to exercise or clean up their diet or restrict sugar or some kind of thing like that so they can improve their lifestyle in a healthier way.

So, the drama that comes up is, “Oh my god, you won’t believe this, they brought a bundt cake in the office…” or, “I took a left and before I knew it I was down the Easter candy aisle, oh my god, I cannot resist…” or, “I’ve been craving king cake and this is the only time of the year that I can have it. I just have to have it. I can’t do without it.”

And that’s all drama. It’s all BS because, you know what, the honest truth is, you can have anything at any time you want it. Everything is available. You can get it on Amazon. Our seasons are all meshed into each other, right? So tell me, think about something that you honestly cannot have. It’s very little things. I mean, unless you travel to certain parts of the world and that’s the only place that they make it in that particular way – and even that, you know, you can substitute a lot of things and have it pretty close. It’s just a story. It’s just something your brain’s like – it goes into this FOMO or this stress about not having something that you need, that this is not available for me, feeling like you’re punished or going to be deprived in some way, like oh my gosh, this is so hard, I feel like I am suffering and I don’t know if I can do it, if I can pull it off, it’s so tempting, like I just have to have it.

All of that stuff, it’s kind of like resisting, I don’t know, even trying not to judge or not to gossip or say anything about anyone, like, all of those things, your brain just makes it so enticing. It, like, knocks on the back of your shoulder, like, hey, remember when we used to hang out, watch Grace and Frankie and eat Cheetos? Or do you remember when we would go sit at the Mexican restaurant and have all that chips and salsa and margarita and the world would just melt away and all of your problems would be gone, let’s go do that. Come, let’s go back to that. And it’s like your brain just keeps tempting and keeps telling you these enticing things, and then you get an emotional charge, trigger, or reaction until you kind of start to get the craving for it, right? it’s like, just me saying this, has it not made you think of it?

You know you hear people say, “Oh, why did you even talk about that? I hadn’t thought about that in years, now I have to have it.” So all of that is drama, drama, drama, drama. It’s just things that your brain comes up with to keep your brain’s attention so that you don’t go off and do the thing that is uncomfortable or unfamiliar. I hope that makes sense because I really want to tie this into the business. But at the same time, like, get an understanding and an idea, life if you are a human and you have a brain, you have experienced drama.

Now, what happens is, we come into presence and recognize that it’s drama. We recognize that it’s a story. And then we can switch things up because we become aware of it. Some are just so addicted to it. They can’t really give up the drama because then they’re going to have to deal with the real stuff. They’re going to have to deal with the real story and come to terms with recognizing that they’re the ones being irresponsible, they don’t have the ability to respond to the thing that they truly need to be doing. That’s because the fear is so prominent.

Let’s see if I can find a story just to give one clear example of someone who has a lot of drama. They’re always gossiping and they’re always, you know, just throwing out sarcastic remarks and they could be, like, the life of the party kind of thing. They’re the ones who just kind of tell you like it is and they have no filter.

And so, what happens is, if they stop – and I’m not calling out anyone in particular, but I want you just to recognize this in your own life when you’ve been that person, because we go in and out of playing different characters in our life. What’s happening is if that person stops and gets quiet, then they may feel these unresolved feelings coming up in their own body or their own life, and they’ll have to take a look at it and be responsible for it. And instead, it’s way easier just to create the drama.

I recognize this, like eating out or camping or being out with friends, the drama is the entertainment. It’s the thing that’s funny. It’s the thing that everybody can relate to and talk about. The drama may be food, the thing that you keep eating and the thing you keep carrying on, and, like, you’ve got to get through the whole bag of chips to hear that crunch, crunch, crunch. That’s like the drama. It’s the buffer that keeps you from feeling the real things that are trying to come up or what you don’t want to hear.

It’s repressed emotion. It’s an unconscious story. Anyway, I don’t want to get too deep in that, I just want to talk about what drama is, where does it come from, and what you can do with it. So, first of all, just recognizing that we all have it, very normal. The thing is, do you have the addiction to it? Are you willing to give it up in order to move forward and grow in your life, in your business, in your relationships, whatever it is that it’s holding you back from?

So, think about the thing that you do. What’s the drama that you create in your own life? For me, it’s, I guess, my brain saying I need to stay small, not put myself out there, not take this risk. I may fail. People may reject me. I may say something that steps on someone’s toes, or anything like that. And so what my brain does is comes up with a story that scares me or brings up an older incident or experience that proves it to me that this could go very wrong. Like, it’s best just to stay small and not put yourself out there, not go public, not take this work beyond the scope of where it is right now because it could be unsafe territory for you.

Now, understand, this is our brain’s job. Your brain’s job is to create drama, okay, so we want to let it know, great job, you’re doing awesome. Thank you so much for trying to protect me, but just so you know, the thing that I really want to do right now is grow and evolve and I want to offer value and I want to support other people, especially in that thing that you want to take forward into the world, right?

So reminding yourself – so for me, in particular, what I had to do is recognize I had all of this drama going on. I could feel it in my body. I could hear it in my head and I knew it was very familiar. I’ve heard it many times before and it has stopped me many times before.

Then I remembered, no, no, no, I chose that this time would be different. I chose that. Like, I said, I choose today, I am going to do this. I’m going to get this podcast out there. And then I committed to that and I said, no matter how hard it is, no matter how much drama comes up, no matter how many times I have to get back up, no matter how much work it takes, I’m willing to do the hard thing.

So I was able to calm down, come into presence, and then unveil that’s story and ask myself, is that true? Is that true that I can’t do that, that I can’t be organized? That I can’t pull this together and offer value? Is it true that I am not cut out for this, that that’s maybe for other people but there’s no way possible that I could be successful or that this could be available for me? Is that true?

This is taken from Byron Katie’s Work, you know, like really questioning everything, everything that other people tell you, but even the things that you tell yourself. So, once you ask the question, is it true, and you’re in a calm state, you’ll start to recognize the cycle, “This is not available for me. this is okay for others, or maybe they can do that, but I’m not good enough. I’m not worthy enough. I don’t know enough. Who am I, you know? They’re authorities and I am not.”

Whatever the story is, you’ll recognize, it’s going to be the same story that has themed your entire life every time you were going to take the next risk or the next step. And this sometimes is in relationship as well as in business because you have to be super vulnerable to be open, to be willing to love or willing to be hurt, to be willing to put yourself out there and risk because you have to trust; so whether it’s trusting yourself and your ability or trusting someone else.

And then, the other thing is, who would you be without that thought? So, what I like to do in this case – so it’s a simple three-step process. The first one was to calm down and to get present. The second one was to unveil the story, and the third one was to navigate. And so I call this like an interruption. Like, “That’s not true, that’s not me. This is who I am, this is what I’m doing, and this is what I want.”

And for me in particular with this podcast, which is why it’s available to you today, is because I recognized, oh wait, I’m doing this because I want to create an impact. I want to offer value. I want to offer support for more health and wellness leaders to step up there and do this work, to introduce coaching and mindset to more people, to help humans, just humanity in general, to process emotion.

We were not taught how to do this. And so, when emotion comes up and it gets super uncomfortable, that’s when we create the drama because our brain says, “You’ve got to stop doing that. You can’t cry. You better close it up. Zip it up, little girl. Zip it up, little boy. Go in your room if you want to do that.” We were not taught that we could express emotion, that we could express how we were feeling, that we would get support if we were vulnerable and shared that. Instead, we were taught to zip it up, close it off.

Now, we know better. Now we know that this is the stuff that’s stopping us from evolving and stopping us from growing, right? So what it takes is fortitude and grit and resilience to really take yourself back to why are you doing the thing you are doing. What’s happening in that moment is just trying to block you, just trying to stop you. So if ever you’ve heard people say, like, “You have a block…” it is an unconscious block.

Logically, you will deny it or you will say that’s not true or I’m very aware, I know what I’m doing, or I’ve tried this 100 times, I’ve done that already. Like, you’ll hear this go over and over and over. The way I like to share it is there’s two bridges. The old bridge is that logical thinking. And that will take you so far, but then eventually there will become some cracks in the foundation or the nuts and bolts will start to rust, things will start to fall apart as you step into this new way of being and doing.

So we spend, you know, a big part of our life doing things that – I like to say – the hard way – because I do find the newer bridge is a lot easier when you’re in that mindful presence. But the old bridge is doing the way you were taught to do it or your environment showed you to do it or the examples that you were given of how other people were doing it, right? So that’s the old bridge.

But then there comes that turning point in your life once you’ve acquired enough experience and you begin to question, going back to this, is that true? Like, did I adopt that belief or do I truly believe that belief? Is that something that was handed down to me? Is that something that was shoved down to me? You know, whatever it is, however you want to see it and whatever your experience was for you.

But the willingness to question it and to ask and to be inquisitive about this drama will tell you so much information and it will reveal to you why you’ve been, like, banging your head or, like, trying to get further than that old bridge can take you. Because when you get to the bottom of the bridge, it’s like it only goes so far because it’s in the old area of town. It’s where the old mall and the old businesses are. It’s just kind of that place that hasn’t really grown. Does that make sense?

Like, whenever you’re looking at – I think of Baton Rouge because that’s where I live and the old bridge goes to downtown, to the old mall. And then the new bridge, you can see right over LSU, right? You can look down and you can look over to the left and you have the Capitol and Tsunami’s. And if you go to the right, it takes you to the beach. And so it’s more the land of prosperity. It’s more the land of the future. It’s got way more to offer than the old left bridge.

And so the right bridge is built on inner knowing. It’s built on the willingness to question all of this drama and to make the decision if you want to hold onto it or if you want to release it and let it go so that you can go further, so that you can source and expand and step into prosperity and abundance in your life, you know. Do you want to bring in more love, more business, more money, more value and service?

I like to relate this to health and wellness because that’s my arena, that’s my world, that’s my life, is helping people step into a state of health, of wealth, of love and freedom and joy, wholeness, bringing back the parts of themselves that were left behind when it was painful and they abandoned or rejected the emotion that was coming up, which is what do we do now, right? The drama. It keeps coming back to this drama.

Drama is the thing that we create when we are afraid to change, when we are afraid to transition, when we are afraid to take the next big step. And you have a choice. You don’t have to hold onto it. You can choose to let go of the drama, to process the emotion that’s coming up. Even though it’s scary, uncomfortable, and unfamiliar, the more time you spend in the experience of allowing that emotion, recognizing that it’s just a feeling that’s being triggered by a thought, once you spend more time in there then you become more comfortable at being uncomfortable. And then you’re just getting stronger and stronger in the process until you begin to shift.

So it’s not easy, no, absolutely not. But in my opinion, it’s way easier now that I’m willing to feel anything and recognize that this is just drama. I mean, I was able to clean it up in a few hours and go ahead and do this. Now, did it take me more time than some things? Yeah, absolutely, but there was an experience that I needed to learn in this process. And I believe everything happens for me, and so it’s like, okay, fine.

So, I’ll take the lesson from it. I’ll go ahead and go through the process because I do have the fortitude and I do have the commitment to do this work and I am highly invested, not in myself, but also in helping humanity. You know, we have a health problem. We have a wellness problem. We have an emotional problem. And I want to help show people how to process this and how to move through it.

So it’s kind of like being in the trenches of this emotional evolvement, I’ll call it for lack of a better word, or this emotional integration. The only thing that’s stopping you is the emotion. It’s a feeling. A fickly feeling is getting in the way, creating all of this drama in your life so that it can distract you so that you don’t move on and do the thing that you want to become.

Like, when you really look at it that way, it’s kind of silly, right? So that’s what I want to help you do. So I’m just going to go through these one more time so that you have the solution. The first thing is to just calm down. So I teach this method, just called Stability First. And that’s just coming into presence and being aware, oh this is drama. And then, the second step is to unveil the story, which is to dismantle or unravel or just looking into it and inquisitively, like questioning, is this true that I am not capable, that I am not equipped for this, that this is not available for me? is that true? Like, really sitting down with that, maybe doing some journaling or talking with a friend.

My absolute favorite thing is coaching, so I tell everyone, hire a coach. I’ve had all kinds of other things I’ve tried in my life, but nothing has helped me the way that this coaching has helped me. And then the third one is the interruption; who would I be without the thought? And then doing it a different way. That’s not me, this is what I want to create, and then moving on with that. So, I hope that was helpful and you were able to take away a few tidbits or nuggets that can help to improve your life today, maybe reduce a little drama and help you get a few more things done. Especially in your business, in your life, in your relationships, you know, just kind of notice exactly where that drama is taking you and what it’s keeping you from.

If you enjoyed listening, I’d love your feedback. If you could give us a rating and review on iTunes, that would really help us to reach more people just like you and it keeps the show going and growing, so we can help expose more people to the mind body connection, creating a greater impact, and sharing the message that a happy healthy life is available for everyone. So I would love to have your support, your feedback, sharing with friends and family, letting others know that this show is available and just help us spread the word. I’d surely appreciate that.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Integrative Life Coach Training for Health and Wellness Practitioners! If you’re feeling stuck on your journey to mind body integration, head over to KimGuillory.com to download your Stability First Meditation today!