Lessons I've Learned Since Being Evicted

0:00 Hello, hello and welcome back to Crappy to Happy. It has been a few weeks since I have been on the airways. There's a good reason for that, which I'm about to share with you. And interestingly, that makes for the topic of today's episode. Isn't it nice when I can share with you my lessons learned and my real life and we can all take something out of it, we can all learn something important and you don't have to go through the crappy thing yourself because I went through it for you. So this is a win-win win today. So let me first just give you a little bit of a background about what's been happening over here. Short version. Just before Christmas, we received an eviction notice. We have been renting the same house in Richmond where we live in London for coming up to three years and we had already pre-signed on for four so we'd signed a two-year lease. So we had 15 months or more left on our lease. We're very settled. We like where we live. So to get a notice to vacate two weeks out from Christmas when we had all of this time left was really a little surprising and quite a bit upsetting. The reason for the vacate notice is because the owner wants to sell the house and he is by the way within his rights to do that. So there's a break clause which means that at a certain point during the lease either party can break it with notice and so he was just

1:32 exercising his break clause and giving us notice to move out kind of the end of February. This was just before Christmas right so it was it's just a bit of a two months that we had. So that was quite devastating and so I immediately got to work. I put on my steely determination, my optimism and said well we have to move. I'm going to find somewhere that's even better and I'm going to really make sure that this is a really positive move and we started to look at some houses and short story. There was nothing and everything cost about a thousand pounds a month more than we are currently paying and would be further away from where we are and we just love our location. So it probably took us about 48 hours to decide that what we really would like to do is to buy the house that we are living in.

2:23 Which sounds extreme right that sounds like an extreme reaction to just not have to move but there's a lot more to it than that which is not a topic for this conversation but we have really established a community here where we live. The location's amazing but we have a really lovely group of neighbours if you've ever seen some of my posts on Instagram around Christmas. We all have Christmas together. We have parties in the street. We have a WhatsApp group. Everybody gets along really well and it's not common. It's actually not common in most big cities but particularly not big city like London as well. It is just a really handy location. Everything that we need is literally right on our doorstep. When we thought about the possibility of having to move away from this street and these neighbours we just were all so depressed at the thought of it. So that brings up a whole lot of stuff there right. So we were talking about then having to sell our house in Australia in order to buy a house here which was not my plan. That has never been my plan and there is something very reassuring about knowing that if things go pair shaped here in London we can just pack up and go home anytime we like. I mean we have a house on the Sunshine Coast in Australia and that's our home. So to let go of that and to really embed ourselves here financially like to put our money into a property here is it just feels like a much bigger commitment than what I had ever thought we

3:53 were making even as we have stayed here longer and as we have really enjoyed being here we love it here we know we're going to be here longer than we had first thought but just psychologically it's another step to actually buy a house here and to let go of our house at home. So that is not just emotionally a big shift but it is logistically a bloody nightmare let me tell you because then I'm dealing with real estate agents and conveyances and mortgage brokers like across two countries in different time zones and just to make things even more complicated the agent who was selling this house that we are living in. He went around holidays for three weeks and wasn't able to be contacted so we couldn't actually progress anything to do with buying this house but we had to make a decision whether we were going to sell ours and meanwhile we've got an eviction date looming so every day we're getting closer to having to be out and we actually couldn't do anything make any progress towards even having a conversation about buying which would then warrant us having to sell so there's all of this like dominoes these things that have to happen and there was nothing that we could do about it so we came back in January we managed to have a conversation we managed to agree on a purchase price for the place that we're in which meant that then we could start the process of selling and that has involved late nights early mornings talking to real estate agents property managers wasn't what we had planned we've got tenants in the house it's upsetting for everybody it's it's been a whole thing it's been a whole thing

5:25 let me tell you and then I guess in the background of all this it's not something that's right on the forefront of our minds but my father-in-law who is very old and he has been unwellies in aged care he has gone into palliative care and we were told he had perhaps you know just a few months to live and so while that is awful and it's sad and we're a long way away it's not so much emotionally upsetting because we've probably been coming to terms with that for quite a while but it is unsettling in terms of we don't know when that's going to happen we don't know when we're going to get a call and kind of have to upsticks and get a flight at short notice to go back to Australia so it's it's just this like another layer of uncertainty in the background you know we've got this uncertainty about the house we've had all that stress we've now been given a deadline to sell our house in Australia so that's an awful lot of pressure and it's not sold yet so if it doesn't I don't know where that leaves us but it's just a lot of uncertainty and sitting in uncertainty is a really really uncomfortable thing as we all know we're not very good at tolerating uncertainty and when you're whole like all of the structures and foundations of your life and where you live are all a little bit feeling a bit untethered then that is unsettling to say the very least all that aside though I have had big plans to launch my new version of my Beyond A Confident program which is about cultivating grounded self trust self belief getting over you know the second guessing the self

6:58 doubt the people pleasing the perfectionism all of those patterns of behavior and specifically pitching this and and targeting this program to small business owners solopreneurs self-employed service providers coaches therapists designers creatives anyway so that has been in the works I've been really working hard I'm really excited about that and I had set a start date for that program which I was so determined that I was going to meet I had people who were interested committed that padded deposit and I have been really determined that that program is going to go ahead as planned meanwhile up until midnight answering emails up at five taking calls spending my all of my days pulling together paperwork finances in different countries and doing five different tax returns in two different countries and I have been pushing through and telling myself it's fine it'll all get done not a problem just work a little bit harder just stay up a little bit later just to get up a little bit earlier I can make a work I can do anything this is this is fine and I really felt some pressure I mean not pressure I'm excited about that program I'm so excited about that program but I had committed to people I have made a commitment to people that this program is going to go ahead and I know people are really keen to join and so when I say pressure I mean I don't want to let people down I have had a wait list for that course for a year and a half and I have kept on pushing it out because the time wasn't right I spent last year doing a whole lot of background kind of work

8:31 in my business cleaning up systems and the platform that I was on which meant that this year I was ready to go like I am ready to go and I feel like I all I have done is post-pone and post-pone and post-pone this program and the last thing I want to do is post-pone it again and I came up with some work around so I thought I can open the community and people can engage in the community really like strategizing for how I can make this thing still go ahead as planned and then just this weekend just gone when I spent the whole weekend feeling unsettled, untethered like just on edge wound up about all of this just the whole lot of it and then I thought you know what here's what I had this little moment of realization better late than ever here is where I thought hmm there is some irony here isn't there probably irony is not the word probably hypocrisy is more the word when the program that I am teaching the whole premise of this program that I'm madly putting together so that I can teach it to my fellow business owners is how to create calm in your business how to create space and how to cultivate the capacity to make your decisions in your business from a place that is calm and grounded from a nervous system that is regulated so that everything that you do in your business is coming

10:01 from a place of groundedness as opposed to urgency or fear or reactivity and you know this is what happens when you have a disregulated nervous system and when you don't feel safe in your body or emotionally is you say yes to things when you should say no and you take opportunities when you probably shouldn't and you undercharge because you don't want to offend anybody or scare anybody off when you don't trust your worth and you spend hours perfecting because you don't think anything that you do is good enough and it creates this stress and angst and everything is based on fear and reactivity and not calm and safety and groundedness and here I was here I was insisting that this program would go ahead if it killed me and pushing myself to the absolute limits because I really was incomplete denial about the reality of my capacity and I was ignoring all the signals I've not been getting enough sleep I've been working from a sense of stress and obligation and not wanting to disappoint people and from this place of urgency as opposed to strategy and you know interestingly enough last week I was invited to be a guest on Dermot Willins podcast and I will drop the link to that when that episode is released but before I got on Dermot's podcast I Dermot's a radio guy from Ireland who's also a mindfulness meditation teacher and he was on my podcast just

11:33 last year you might remember and Dermot had me on his show and before we started a conversation he pulled the card and the card that he pulled was acceptance and so we had this whole conversation about acceptance and you know the value of being willing to accept the reality not as you want it to be not how you wish it was but how it actually is and the courage in that and I sat for an hour and talked all about acceptance and why that's so important and the benefits and how I use it in my own life and then I got off that podcast interview and immediately went back to try to work out how it's going to get my cause running starting this week so my goodness we are blind to ourselves a lot of the time and you know sometimes you can know something intellectually and you can even know something emotionally but you can still be unable to see how your own patterns are playing out in real time because when you're in it and when you're the one you're trying to make a decision that kind of goes against what your nervous system feels like it wants you to do it doesn't feel wise and evolved and grounded it feels like giving up it feels like making excuses it feels like disappointing people it feels like yeah letting people down being lazy being flaky making excuses these are all the stories and so it's the willingness to kind of recognize that that's what's running the show here and being willing to accept that actually this is your old conditioning showing up your conditioning to push through and

13:07 to prove yourself and to not be seen as unprofessional or uncommitted and making those decisions from that place is in nobody's best interests and like I said just a little bit contradictory for me to be teaching that meanwhile doing that myself but I did think this is a classic example even though it's me and that's a tough thing to admit I did think it was a really useful example to talk about how your nervous system does drive your decisions a lot of the time now whether you are in your own business of employed like I am and like the people that I'm proposing to work with in my program whether it's in your your normal work whether it's in your family your friendships all of the stuff that you just have to manage in your own life it is really interesting to have a sense of how these nervous system patterns play out and how they impact your behavior and what that looks like and how the things that you do which you know you may even well recognize some of them you you you might put both hands up and say oh yeah I'm a people pleaser when you really start to understand how these are nervous system reactions these are safety behaviors all designed to help your nervous system feel safe they are safety strategies but they're not that helpful or sustainable in the long term it's useful to start looking at your behaviors and your patterns through this lens because then it helps you to know what to do about them and to have some strategies and tools for managing those

14:39 patterns and those reactions instead of just trying to talk yourself out of it or think yourself out of it which doesn't work so your nervous system's job is to make you feel safe that's it number one nothing else it's primary objective is to make sure you are safe it is automatic the autonomic nervous system it happens without your conscious input it is just running like your operating system in the background all the time it is constantly scanning your environment for threat doesn't have to be real threat it's constantly scanning for the perception of threat what it perceives to be threatening and this is not just physical danger it's social threat it's rejection emotional threat relational threat somebody being mad at you somebody being let down by you people being disappointed thinking you're unreliable having a bad opinion about you thinking that you said the wrong thing and that you don't actually know what you're talking about people losing respect people not needing you anymore I could have been concerned that if I took too long with my course somebody's going to go and buy a different course and I would lose that income and I'm about to buy a house so this is this is the stuff that drives us and these threats are as real to your nervous system as any physical threat these social threats these emotional threats are just as real as any physical danger because throughout human history if there was a chance that you were going to be cast out from the tribe rejected and left alone you would die and even in your own family as a baby you're born you rely on the people around you

16:13 to keep you safe you learn very quickly it's not just your your primitive like your genetic coding your biological coding that has your nervous system operating like this then you are born into a family where all of the people around you that care for you and that shape you feed you lots of messages either directly or indirectly through their behaviors about what you need to do and how you need to behave and what is acceptable and what gets you approval and what gets you acceptance so there's layers and layers here then you go to school and you learn more and then you go onto the workforce and you learn more and then you look out into the world and you learn what's acceptable for whether your male or female or your race or ethnicity or gender sexuality like all of these things like you look out into the world and you learn what is safe and what is not safe and how you need to be and who you need to be in order to be safe your nervous system is scanning all the time and when it is unsafe when it detects that you are unsafe the four predominant responses which I know you have heard of our fight or flight or freeze or form fight and flight most people are familiar with now look in business just while we're talking about it I was probably you know kind of in fight keep going push through be determined it's this mobilization to action and just like keep on pushing that's kind of the fight response now flight is avoidance it's the busyness but it's a bit distracted like I'm I'm going to get really busy changing the fonts on my website when I know I

17:45 have to make a really hard phone call or make a sale or do something that feels a bit scary or post on social media and that feels frightening to me so flight is this escape sort of behavior this escape avoidance like I'm still busy doing all the things but I'm just avoiding doing the thing that I know that I need to do freeze is when you stall like when you shut down you stare at the screen you might just go into a complete collapse but it's when you are kind of stuck on the spot it can look like procrastination it can look like avoidance it can look like having no energy motivation to get up and to do anything it can be numb disconnected like we talked about the functional freeze in a earlier episode but it can sometimes look like I've just got so much to do and I don't know where to start and it all feels a bit overwhelming and scary and therefore I'm just I'm just sitting here and I'm not doing any of it and I think everybody has experienced that at times but the four one is the one that we have not talked so much about it's being talked about a lot more now but certainly when I was learning in my psychology degree this was not something that anybody ever was really talking about. Fawn or a piece is the safety strategy the nervous system response which involves being agreeable being helpful putting other people's needs ahead of your own making sure that everybody around you is happy never causing conflict being the reliable one being the one who never says no never letting other people down always the one who delivers always the one who goes over and above at your own expense and this response just like all the other responses

19:19 is not conscious it's not something you necessarily choose. For a lot of people the chronic people pleases like the lifelong people pleases they will tell you this is just who I am this is just my personality this is just it's in my nature it's not it's a learned behavior it's a learned response and it is just like all of the others it is designed to keep you safe so when you were growing up you might have learned that you needed to be the good girl and you needed to be the helpful one and you needed to not cause problems and that is how you got praise and that's how you got attention and that's how you got approval you might have learned that your value was in how much you could do for other people how helpful you could be I mean there's loads of conditioning there's loads of messaging around that but this self sacrificing this putting other people's needs ahead of your own and feeling like that is the right thing to do the only thing to do the only option that's very much a foreign response and so whatever your your early experiences where whatever your family environment was however you learnt this and for some people this is created by some really traumatic experiences like if you lived in a in a household or an environment where there was danger then a lot of people from those environments have a very strong foreign response just keep the piece just do whatever you have to do to just keep things calm and keep things safe be agreeable be quiet just do it do as you told you know so some of that is pretty deep conditioning and it was

20:53 adaptive this is the thing about all of these responses right this is the thing to understand all of these responses were adaptive at the time they served a really useful purpose at the time and when people get down on themselves for these patterns of behaviour and oh why do I still do this and why can't I stop doing this and there's something wrong with me or it's weak or I should know better I should be stronger I should blah blah no no you did what you needed to do you learned what you needed to do when it was all you had and it was genius and you survived go you compassion for yourself compassion for the younger version of you who learned that and who got you through that and then as an adult oh well now I know I can choose to unlearn that and it feels difficult and challenging goes against everything that I have always done but I can choose now to unlearn that and choose a different response because otherwise what happens is whatever that was programmed into all those years ago even now as an adult all these years later as soon as your nervous system detects any kind of threat it's going to default back to whatever your learned behaviour was whatever your pattern was that's how these things play out but it is really interesting to look at some of those patterns that we talked about the perfectionism the pleasing and the procrastination and the overworking like looking at them through this lands of is it fight or is it flight or is it freeze or

22:23 is it foreign just recognizing these behaviors as all strategies nervous system strategies for staying safe and it doesn't have to make logical sense it doesn't make logical sense but that's what's happening they're fear driven behaviors if you are perfecting and performing and editing and correcting something for hours that is a fear driven behavior can tell yourself all you like but like me with the acceptance the denial right you can tell yourself all you like or no I just hold myself to high standards I just like to do really good work mmm yes and also it terrifies me that I would put out work that is subpar and that somebody might judge me for it is probably more likely the truth and so getting back to my story I decided on the weekend I realized I came to some acceptance that this was ridiculous and that I was pushing myself really to the edge and remembering too that at any day I could get a call and have to pack up and go to Australia I'm still dealing with the house stuff and it's just the reality is that this course was not going to start on the date that I wanted it to start but the truth of it is the reason why it took me so long was not just because I'm really excited about that course and I wanted to start 100% there was a fear of or concern about disappointing people about people thinking that I'm just making excuses like that was all there and I had to

23:57 accept that that was that was part of what the thinking process was but if I panned into that like if I let myself believe all those stories and I let myself continue just pushing I was just going to push myself right over the edge and that is the exact opposite of what I'm trying to teach people and encourage people to do and so this is what I see this is what I see other people doing I see people running themselves into the ground running their nervous systems into the ground trying to be productive and reliable and be the person who never lets anybody down and feeling really uncomfortable with saying no and setting boundaries and adjusting their own expectations of themselves and and that's what is so important that we all learn how to do so if you relate to that if you if any of this you can relate to and you have a pattern of overworking and overgiving and over delivering and maybe feeling exhausted but telling yourself I've just got to get through this is the the classic burnout I've just got to get through this busy period I've just got to get through this deadline then I can relax and meanwhile there's no sleep happening there's no exercise happening not eating properly that is the exhaustion funnel that's how burnout happens and that is how it happens and this is a nervous system response that was programmed into you probably before you even had words to understand what was happening and the key thing here is you can't think your way out of a nervous system response you can't positive think your way out you can't talk yourself out you

25:27 can't decide your way out of a nervous system response you what you have to do is the deeper work of self compassion for a start you have to do the work of cultivating safety from the inside cultivating safety from the inside means even if I let people down I'm okay even if I disappoint people I'm enough I cultivate my own safety on the inside my own self trust my own alignment with what is true for me what what my capacity is I create my safety from the inside so that I am not contorting myself to feel safe by pleasing somebody else by accommodating some external factor or metric or standard which is probably not even real you've made it up in your own head what other people's expectations are but if you get your safety from pleasing if you get your safety from assuming what you're doing is going to get other people's approval you'll get your sense of safety from never feeling like you've let somebody down or never feeling like you've done a bad job or never opening yourself up to criticism or judgment then you are driving yourself to a breakdown you are driven by fear and chaos and inconsistency and nothing is aligned nothing feels true and easy and spacious for you because you're in a constant state of monitoring and reacting monitoring looking for the threat and reacting in ways that you think are going to keep yourself safe even if it means

27:00 destroying yourself so it is okay to disappoint people it is okay to prioritize your own needs and to be truthful about your capacity it is okay to adjust your plans and having your circumstances change it's okay to charge more money it's okay to set a boundary to say I can't do that level of work anymore for that fee that doesn't work for me it's okay to not always be agreeable what is not okay is sacrificing yourself for this illusion of safety and this is emotional healing work this is nervous system work this is somatic work and it is about building that internal safety and self trust that internal capacity because until you can go head to head come face to face with that old programming those old stories see them for what they are and have strategies basically to to not be driven by those stories and those reactions anymore to come back to yourself and your center and make your decisions from a place that is calm and grounded where you are your own safety until you can do that you're just going to keep on reacting keep on playing out these patterns nothing will ever change you will keep pushing through when you're depleted you'll keep saying yes when you mean no you'll keep on compromising your standards you'll keep on giving more when you're not paid for it you'll keep on over delivering running yourself ragged sacrificing your own well-being because there is some part of you that believes that that's what is necessary for you to be worthy and

28:34 safe and accepted so I put off the start date of my program only for a few weeks and as soon as I told the people who had committed to studying my course that's what I needed to do and that this was the reason why of course nobody was mad at me nobody was disappointed and said give me back my money I'm going somewhere else in fact most people's response was great I could use the extra few weeks and that's what happens usually that's what happens when you're honest about where you're at people appreciate the authenticity and people appreciate the breathing space themselves so that's just probably just another thing to consider you know when you are sacrificing yourself because you think that you're pleasing somebody else maybe somebody else could really use the break as well and I'm not going to say that I didn't feel awfully guilty for having to send that email to push the start date out but I feel so much lighter since I did I feel so much more energized again for knowing that I have more space to create the program how I really want it to be because I want it to be great and doing that and having that positive experience and getting that positive feedback I just want to say this too that is an example of what needs to happen for you to start reprogramming if you keep on doing things the way that your voice done you never give yourself the opportunity to have a different experience to actually let somebody down and have them say you know what that's completely fine you need to tolerate the discomfort of doing something different that that feels uncomfortable feels like you're letting people down that feels like people are going to judge you you have to

30:06 tolerate the discomfort of doing that and allow yourself to have the positive experience just start to reprogram those old stories the other thing is if you do get a negative response if somebody does judge you or criticize you for sticking to your boundaries well that's really important lesson too because that is your golden opportunity to practice your safety from within to practice knowing that you are enough that you're okay that you are worthy even without that person's approval that you can tolerate that discomfort as well because that discomfort is nowhere near the discomfort of continuing to please that person and sacrificing yourself so I hope that there is something in there that you can take away from my experience hasn't been fun granted but I hope we can all learn a little lesson from that and that is the stuff that we will be doing in the new Beyond Confident course so if you are interested to hear more about it I'm happy to tell you more about it I'll put a link in the show notes you've now got another few weeks and there is still the founding member price because it's a whole brand new program I am I didn't by the way tell you all that story so I could give you a sales pitch it just happens to be what is most present and on my mind at the moment so it seemed irrelevant but because it's a whole new program even though it's sort of got the same name it is a founding member price because it is very different this program includes one-on-one calls with me it is a six-month container but you as a founding member can stay for 12 months in the community so that's a bonus as well weekly calls and all of the inner work the safety

31:42 the emotional psychological, somatic work that is so important but mapped onto your business so mapped onto how are these patterns playing out in your business where are you selling yourself short and look I may still open it up again for people who are not small business owners but right now I just would really like to create a community of those of us who are self-employed and who experience some kind of unique challenges because self-employment is its own beast you know the uncertainty the inconsistency of income they're having to sell yourself not somebody else's product but you being the commodity and the thing that you're selling like there's a whole lot of personal development work involved in that no matter how good you are at what you do and that's the reason why for this particular round of the program which will be open ongoing there's no kind of you've got to sign up by a certain date it will be open next month again if you can't join this month but that founding member price will be for a limited time so details are in the show notes we'd love to have you and I'll keep you posted about my living situation hopefully I will not end up homeless at the end of all of this you'll be the first to know if I do so that is it for me today thank you for your patience I may have to drop these podcasts back to fortnightly again in the interest of creating my own space in my life while I am focused on getting this program up and running and I think it's probably better to do that intentionally than just have these weeks go by when I haven't had

33:13 the space to put out an episode thank you for being here I appreciate you so much can't wait to catch you on the next episode of Crabbit Happy [Music]