How to Make a Decision When You Feel Stuck: From Self-Abandonment to Self-Reclamation

The Journey to Self-Discovery Begins in the Mirror

 

The journey to self-discovery always begins with your willingness to take a look in the mirror. Sometimes it's acknowledging the truth of the moment that you're in, and sometimes it's acknowledging the truth of the past.

Sometimes it's just sitting in this moment and going, I demand more of myself, more from the people around me, and most importantly, from the world. Sometimes you're a part of the world, sometimes you're not. I don't know about you, but sometimes I look at my life and I think to myself, this whole damn journey is pretty crazy.

And that holds true certainly for my guest today, great friend Stephanie Ash. And we are gonna dive in and explore all of that. My friend, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you, it is such a pleasure.

I'm gonna jump in first and foremost for those who are listening. Why should anyone spend their time with us today?

It's a really important question. Thank you so much for asking. This is time that will change your life.

There are life-changing moments that we all have. Sometimes it's the straw that broke the camel's back, and sometimes it's that layer, that step along your journey.

So, this is another step along the journey of being able to seek that mind-expansive mind-body connection, other ways, other click type moments that you can really tap into this belief in yourself and this belief that it is possible to be more than your past, to be more than your circumstances, to be more than who you once were or what happened to you. And for us, both of us have had that experience. And so just getting to share and speak almost as friends opens up those doorways within.

 

Why Your Mindset is One Decision Away from Transformation

People who are listening and they're like, okay, cool, I hear all that stuff all the time. What's unique here? Because I want to start this off for the needless to say, the skeptics or have heard maybe parts of what they think our conversation is gonna be.

I don't want them to check out. I want you guys to ride this roller coaster with us. What's unique about your story where you're like, man, if you guys just listen to me for an hour, you're gonna change your life because of this?

What is unique about what I want to share is different ways of visualizing how you can perceive your mind-body connection. And my story has helped me get there because I've always been a very spiritual person and always been very high achieving.

So I danced between these two tightrope worlds of really wanting to embrace my full spiritual connection, but then feeling like I needed to earn it or achieve or have this external authority say, yes, here is the stamp of good enough. And it's really through study and hearing from people that's like, no, it's actually the decision that you make about yourself to go within.

And a decision marks the beginning of a journey, but it's not even a one-time decision, it's a daily decision. And when you do that, then everything changes.

But there's also a feeling of, well, how do I do that if I don't quite believe that I'm able to do it? Or how do I do it if I don't know what the map even looks like?

And I want to share principles that have been on the podcast before, but in another way, in a creative way, in my lens that I think will connect in really interesting ways that you can feel in your body.

I love that. I've always said and I've said it a thousand times on this show, you are one decision away from everything being different.

I look at all of these and of course you could even measure it and go, every single decision you've ever made in your entire life has led you to this moment. You did something in third grade that led you to here when I did something when I was thirty-six.

And so it's like you're always there. That's one of the things I think is so incredibly interesting about our human journey, we all have to decide. And indecision is a decision.

I think that one of the things people get caught in, they don't know how to make decisions. And so I think that would be the place I really want to dive in first, because people are like, yeah, but I have all of these things to factor.

They're in this fatigue of trying to analyze the world instead of just moving forward. I once had a mentor tell me, I'd rather have you go a hundred miles in the wrong direction than no direction at all.

And so I'm really curious, how do you make a decision? How do we actually in a practical sense get in alignment with our mind, our body, spirit, soul, energy, everything to make a decision?

 

The Science of Getting Unstuck: Inside Out vs. Outside In

Yes, so first, even before making a decision, if you're in that stuck point where there's nowhere to go forward, pulling back, almost like pulling back a bow and arrow, or like setting up, if you know you want to run forward and take a big jump, you step back first so that you can take that step forward. And the stepping back is questioning why do I believe what I believe?

And this is, so if you're stuck and you don't know how to make a decision and you think I have no choice or there's nothing I can do, then just one question of why do I really think that I'm stuck? Who is holding me back?

Why do I think that what happened to me defines who I am? Or that who I was, what decision I made before, defines my next step.

And just having that question, because we know from being in this questioning space that humanity has evolved in really beautiful ways, but there's so much that we don't know about the cosmos and our bodies and the universe. And just that there's most of our DNA that scientists term junk DNA because we don't know what it is.

Or that the placebo effect for generations, in the past ten, twenty years, the placebo effect has become more interesting to scientists wanting to incorporate it. But throughout the 1900s, the placebo effect was very inconvenient.

There were lots of scientific methodologies of how do we get around this annoyance of the placebo effect to really understand what external influence is able to make a change in a person. And so I think in the West, our thinking has been really outside in.

And we kind of naturally walk into that instead of thinking that it's inside out. So that's just one possible poke of, why do I think that what is outside of me, or what happened in the past, or the way things are set up, why do I think that it has the power over me that I can't take this next step?

So that's like that first wind up. And that can really help with clarity as well, because sometimes the decision that we want to make might be something that isn't quite the next step in our journeys, but it can be an avoidance tactic of, well, I know that really what I need to do is quit my job or get a divorce.

And that's a really big step, where there's often baby steps that can happen before that, of I need to have a conversation with my boss that I don't enjoy this part of the work, or I need to speak up to my partner that I don't feel heard in this way.

And that's the next step, but we'll avoid it by saying, well, I can't make that big step because I got myself here and I have to pay the mortgage and I have to adhere to my vows, and we'll get ourselves caught up in these loops.

So it's really those two things of that initial pullback of questioning why do I think I'm stuck, and giving some space, not trying to get into self-blame or shame or anything like that, but just to open up some space and to wonder specifically, what is it that I think externally holds power over me where I actually do have an opening to make a move.

 

Metabolizing Trauma: Why We Get Stuck in Feedback Loops

Yeah, and I think that there's a couple of pieces I want to touch on just because I've gotten myself stuck and unstuck a multitude of times and I've figured out there is a decision-making process. And so much of it comes down to honestly the scientific method.

If you really look at life, so much of it is just tied to this idea of, I think that's the direction I go, let's go prove or disprove the hypothesis or thesis, and then we'll land where we land, and then we will do what we need in our post action events and we will see if we were right or wrong. And I think so many people get stuck because they're like, I'm not ready yet.

You talked about the stuckness and is it outside in versus inside out. I have a friend who's amazing and she does these transformations for women and dating over 50. Very specific niche.

Before they go through anything about let's go get a date, she's like, we need to go buy you new clothes. You've been wearing the same shit forever.

Her thing, which I love by the way, is you have to dress the part, because it's this weird parallel of the outside in versus the inside out, kind of simultaneously melding someone into their new version of self. It's like when you get a great new haircut, you're like, my God, I feel amazing.

But then also without the clarity, which you pointed to, you're gonna just end up somewhere. I think that's what happens to most people.

They just end up somewhere. They don't take the time to extrapolate all of the most important information about what it is that they actually want.

And so they're like, I didn't want this. I'm like, I know you didn't, but you didn't sit down to identify the direction. You just landed where you landed.

And unfortunately, I think a lot of people create blame around that. But I don't want to take that away from people.

I'm a homeless kid from the hood who grew up in Mormon church, who has drug addict, alcoholic parents, who has a learning disability. And I'm like, okay, cool.

Along this whole path, I have decisions to make. And I think so much of it is just this fucking mind game where you have to get out of your own way.

Whether it is the divorce or whether it is this idea of leaving the career and the safety, what I think it is at the most, because I would kindly add a third step to what you just laid out. It's the reality that the worst decision that you ever make, unless it leads to your death, is all just meaning that you apply to it.

I love that. And I have heard from some personal development experts talk about how failure is more learning. And I have been in a place when that is really annoying to hear because I have always had this disposition of wanting to be perfect immediately.

Trying a new thing like entrepreneurship is really difficult for my psyche of, I did the things that they told me to do and it didn't work. Where getting a PhD, I knew four months into my PhD program that it was not what I wanted to do, but I was in a really low place.

I had no self-confidence to do anything else and felt like, well, I kind of know what the steps are to be able to get this. So I'm just gonna go ahead and stick it out and do it.

And in that way, that might not have been the best thing for me, where there was a moment that I was like, I would be so proud of myself if I quit, because that would mean that I'm saying this isn't aligned with who I am or what I want to do. And yet I stuck it out, finished it, and there's a part of me that's very proud about that.

And there's a part that is very excited about the things that I learned. And so now I can look at it and see, well, I didn't make that decision, but I don't have to make the decision of being regretful about what I didn't do three years ago and can still take this with me.

Now that that's done, I don't have to keep staying in it. And there's certainly some chewing, some processing that has to happen, especially for trauma.

We don't want to gaslight ourselves and write off our trauma as, let me just decide to not let this affect me anymore. But there is a point at which we are over processing our trauma or telling ourselves stories about who we are and giving ourselves labels and kind of staying in a place of making an excuse for not coming out into the unknown, not trying something new, not taking a risk because, well, this thing happened to me and I'm broken.

I love the term unbroken. I know we're gonna get more into that. And so I sometimes think about cows, cows will chew, I'm sorry if this is gross to anyone who doesn't love to think about these things, but cows will chew their food and swallow it and kind of vomit it back up and then rechew it and swallow it.

It has something to do with the enzymes in their digestive system, that they have to do that a number of times before they're able to adequately process the nutrients. So maybe there are certain circumstances where we need to metabolize and experience an emotion in that manner to really be able to digest it and pull the nutrients from it and then eliminate the waste.

But then there are also times that that's really going to fuck up our esophagus if we overdo that. And we've probably both had experiences with that and have known people that may be working on the same trauma for 10, 20 years.

And that's too long to stay in that place of feeling like that is their identity and they can't move forward because of the trauma they've experienced or because of the regret or the decision that they made that wasn't who they were or hurt someone else. So there's always nuance, and it's very important to be tender and loving and compassionate with yourself.

Sometimes compassion is not tough love, but it's just an honesty of, this is actually not good for me to be over-processing, over-chewing an experience that would be okay for me to move on from at this point in my life.

 

The Somatic Experience of Decision Making

I love the analogy and my brain just went to, because I'm very visual, I'm like, you're gonna eat puke off the floor again? How many times are you gonna play this fucking game?

It's really hard because I think the part people don't necessarily digest well, pun intended, is the part where it's like let go of it. You can only be that you so many times, and it can be difficult every single day.

I think about this a lot, especially when I'm coaching and working with entrepreneurs. I go, at some point, you got to let go of who you think you are to become who you want to be.

And I will say this, the entrepreneurs I've worked with over the course of my career tend to be the people who are very gung-ho, but also super gun shy. And I think it's like you mentioned having this perfectionism tendency, it's like at some point we gotta let go.

And that's true of me too. And I'm such a mess in business, which is crazy because I have friends who are like, how did you build multiple seven figure companies?

I'm like, because we just go a hundred miles an hour. It doesn't matter what happened yesterday. And we will clean it up as we go.

And most people take 10 years to do something that takes 10 minutes. And I think a lot of that is unraveling that part of you where you're like, I need to make this decision.

And that's that intuitiveness of trusting your physical body, that somatic experience of decision making. Because I go back to this memory I have of being very young and in this relationship and being like, this is the worst thing ever for my life, for her, for my friendships, for my career.

We didn't have the word toxic then, but it was that. And I remember breaking up with her in my head a hundred million times.

And knowing that on the backside of it was the right decision. And it still took me two years.

Very different in my life now, I'm like, yo, I make decisions so fast people don't understand it. But there's something about the reinforcement.

I don't know if this exists, I'm gonna call it this, it probably exists, I might be having an original thought, very unlikely, but I'm gonna call it reinforcement bias, wherein we do something and somehow it is reinforced, and thus we create a bias around it. And that becomes the way that we interact.

Positive thing, positive reinforcement, we keep moving that direction. Negative thing, negative reinforcement, we move away from it, even though the juxtaposition could be do the opposite of the thing, because just because you get paid every week doesn't mean you should sit at a job you fucking hate for your whole life.

So I think that's kind of that thing, it's like, how do you break that moment? You're like, I know it, but I don't have anything to prove that I can reinforce the positive outcome of the really hard decision.

So you talked about this thing about spirituality and being within your body and things like that. Well, how do you connect all those dots to effectively, I guess my question is, step into the unknown?

I love this question. I want to give a little bit of context, and I am going to come around and answer this question directly, but I want to give the context first.

When people talk about spirituality now in 2026, this spirituality is kind of associated with a woo-woo, it doesn't have to be religious. We think about mindfulness and meditation, and that is generally how I think about it too.

Yet 20 years ago, spirituality and religion were, in my experience, so tied together. And so for a lot of millennials and Gen Xers, our exposure to spirituality was through, for most of us, Western religion.

And Western religion really teaches us to dissociate from our bodies and from our egos because we want to move from being a single entity that could be selfish and could have an ego and move out to be giving and open to people. And this can be very difficult for empaths or for those who have already had trauma and dissociation from their bodies as a coping mechanism.

So spirituality was very separate from living in a physical body, where physical bodies then we associated with hedonism and with sloth and lust and pleasure. These were like our two concepts of who are we as earthly beings and who are we as spiritual beings, they didn't connect at all.

And that's so funny because we are in this very moment, spiritual and earthly at the same time. We are an incredible physical body, an earthly being that has consciousness and life breathed into it.

So when I really feel stuck and need to come into something greater than just the logic of I know this is what I need to do, but I don't know how to do it, then it might mean that it's only at the conscious level. And it's like, well, how do I get to the subconscious?

How do I get to my body to get my subconscious and my body on board with this new decision I wanna make? And for me, for those of us that are stuck at that conscious level, it's like, okay, well, I'm thinking logically, I'm thinking consciously, let that be the doorway and start to perceive the truth that we are earthly and spiritual beings at the same time.

And that if you think about biomedicine, which is maybe our main paradigm in the West of what is a physical body, a lot of biomedicine really wanted to be able to study a person in a way that breaks us into parts because it's too difficult to study the whole. So even studying anatomy as a healthcare provider, my anatomy is looking at cadavers who have already been dissected by medical students.

And then as an occupational therapy student, I go in and I'm looking at the muscle insertions and where the veins are and where the arteries are. And same thing if you want to study a butterfly, how do you study a butterfly that's alive?

It's really difficult. So we often think of the human body as, how does this work like a machine? That's the word I was looking for.

We've really thought that our bodies are machines, and we will sometimes kind of punish our bodies or treat our bodies in that way if we all of a sudden want to shift into being really fit or looking a certain way, or we want to have a good time and not sleep as much and not eat as well, but then expect our bodies to still function in a certain way, that we're even seeing our bodies as a machine and almost as a servant and really disconnecting, without even knowing it, our bodies from our conscious thought. So seeing how easy it is to reconnect them.

And it's not easy, or seeing how simple it is because it's been disconnected. So reconnecting it in first, just this logical conscious way of taking a moment, meditating, doing a body scan, and even just imagining what all is happening in my body in one breath.

And following whatever you can of the breath. And if you watch a four-minute YouTube video on how the lungs work, how breath works, it is so phenomenal.

But it would take a lot to really understand what's happening with one blood cell. Can we follow it throughout the body? It's absolutely incredible.

And so then you can go into, what am I curious about? Am I curious about the breath?

Am I curious about my heartbeat? Can I tune into my heartbeat and follow the flow of my blood from my heart to my hands?

And then kind of perceive how my body is integrated and what I'm feeling and what signals it's giving me, and start to form this relationship of seeing our bodies as just absolutely incredible creations that are giving us information all the time that we might see as inconvenient or that we want to control or that we want to treat as a machine. But changing that relationship with your body, that's a decision, and that is an absolutely expansive step in being able to start enjoying your life in a different way.

Because now you can be on the same page with your body, you can get information, you can just naturally have more compassion for yourself. It's incredible what can happen.

And I love mindfulness meditation. I know that doesn't work for everybody. I think even going into two minutes of perceiving your heartbeat, just following your heartbeat, following what's happening with the blood flow, really incredible things can happen.

And then you get away from mindfulness meditation as this idea that you need to empty your mind and not have thoughts and be still and transcend your body. And instead, it's like, I'm getting still in order to tap into the vibrance and the flow and the life that is within my body every second.

I agree with a lot of that. I'm like, my here's how I look at it, because I'm taking notes as we go through because there's pieces of the puzzle I want to touch on. The body is a machine.

If you really break it down and you look at it, you look at the form and function of it, to whatever capacity it is a machine. It has input in and input out, but it's all programmable.

It doesn't operate without the spirit, the psyche, the mind, the soul, however it is that you want to label it. Thus, for the most part, it doesn't mean sometimes the machine doesn't break down, like I've been through some shit, I've almost died a couple of times.

Sometimes the machine's like, bruh, fuck off. Right, so that's real. But for the most part, the machine only does based on the input that you, as the spiritual being, gives it.

And the thing that I have discovered that's really difficult is that means you have to harness your own power and your own mind to make yourself literally do stuff. And that's what's so crazy about it.

Everything we're talking about, this decision, we had no idea we were going here, by the way. I love this conversation. So much about it is I look at this and I go, force yourself to do the thing that you know that you need to do to make your life be the life that you want it to be.

There's no rules. This is what's so fascinating to me. Because the same neighborhood that I grew up in, I can promise you, I've got family in prison for life.

I've got homies that have been murdered. I got friends who have been in prison for fucking 25 years since we were kids.

And I'm here and you're here. And the people listening are here. And the people with the opportunity, just this weekend, I was at a conference and there was a guy who just got out of 12 years of prison.

He's been out for a month and started two businesses. The entire time he was in prison, he has been working to that moment.

I told him, I was like, first, that's unbelievable, you should be super proud. And secondly, you already accomplished this goal, make sure you start focusing on the next one.

Because generally, we operate either in fear of future pain or current pain. And if you escape pain, I think that's how you kind of end up in this place of purgatory.

The relationship's not bad enough, I'm gonna leave it, but it's not good enough, I wanna stay. Because you're like, I'm tied into this moment.

And then that moment comes eventually. And I want to talk about your book and the things that you're working on here too.

I wonder if this is true for you in that really hard moment of being like, I gotta have a conversation. For me, and this applies across the board to any wildly difficult conversation I've ever had, more so now it's easier because I understand my decision-making process, but it's always been when the pain of staying the same overweighs the pain of the change, I act.

And the thing that I've learned to do is just act before the pain comes. My fear of future pain far outweighs my fear of current pain.

I'm like, I gotta do something different now. I don't even think about it. Because I felt this happen within me.

I realized because I used to have five panic attacks a day. It was brutal. Pretty much twenty-five, six, seven.

It was like bang, bang, bang every day. It was crippling. And then I realized that's because that's my fucking spirit being like, let me out of this cage, you pussy, no harm intended, obviously.

But I'm like, go and do the fucking thing. That's where it landed for me. And so everybody's different, and everyone, for instance, you need that compassion and that kindness and that self-love.

But sometimes that's like a foot in your own ass to be like, go and do it, or suffer the consequences of the lack of your decision, which is also a decision. And if the body follows the mind, which I believe it does until somebody proves me otherwise, the body is only ever going to act upon the decisions that you make.

But I find that the place that people get most stuck is, they have not yet explored what that future looks like deeply enough to want to warrant the change. So when you've been in those really hard moments, because I want to know for you, since it's different for everyone, obviously, maybe it was different for you, but when you've had to make those really difficult decisions factoring in the trauma and the loss and whatever kind of weird shit we grow up in as humans that creates your identity, how do you, there's no better way for me to phrase this word, how do you force yourself into the decision that you know you need to make?

 

Breaking the Cycle of Self-Abandonment

Well, now that I'm on the other side of a handful of decisions that have been really aligned, I can see that the decisions I made that weren't aligned were a lot more difficult and a lot more painful. And I'll give an example that might be relatable for some people.

I did Peace Corps and had some, went a little too far with partying and with exploring my sexuality in ways that I felt good about, but then like you get in a situation where, maybe there's consent, but then it's like, no, this actually isn't what I wanted to do. But it's a really gray area.

Then I needed to take a pause and be like, why am I doing this to myself. Let me take a pause. And then a few months after that, my ex-husband came with a cohort of volunteers to Peace Corps.

And he was like a very safe, kind of very safe person. And because of that pendulum swing into more adventure, the safety was like, I almost need to punish myself for being too adventurous and having too much fun.

I obviously can't trust myself. I need to be in this safe relationship where I feel like my vibrance is kind of cut off. And then, because of that, subconsciously, I made a series of decisions to stay with him and to get married, even though my intuition was screaming at me, through depression, through a passive death wish, for two years, through regretting moving to Pittsburgh every day, through all sorts of signs that were like, this is not it.

And to every sign, I would be like, yeah, but I have to do this because this is the only way that I will stay safe, because I am too irresponsible, I am too wild otherwise. I need to be in this cage of sorts.

And then once I had, it really took me admitting out loud, like, I hate everything about my life. And then I kind of knew it for a while and had it on the tip of my tongue for a while, I want to get a divorce.

Even before we got married, I had visions of tearing my wedding dress off and being this like disgusting, primal woman just standing there looking at all our guests naked. It was a sign.

It was my psyche trying to speak to me in images, because I've always loved fantasy, being like, you don't want this. Don't do it.

The day of the wedding, I just got so drunk. It was the only way that I could get through it. And I still, and it was a beautiful wedding, it was gorgeous, and I still married him.

I kind of tried to tell him, but he was very surprised when I ended up speaking up. But there were just a few years, so it was four years of us being together and then four before marriage and then four years of marriage, which is kind of a long time when I knew about six months in that it wasn't what was bringing me life, but it was what I thought I deserved and what I thought I needed.

And now, I'll finish the story, that I had a series of awakenings that were like, okay, I'm admitting to myself, I'm admitting out loud that this isn't what I want, but I am also admitting I don't feel like I can change it because I said these vows.

So I can't go back on that. My word is really important. He needs me.

He will kill himself if I leave him. All of these reasons of why I couldn't leave. Yes, yes, the story I'm telling myself. And it wasn't the truth.

And then I got to a point of admitting it enough and then complaining enough that I was like, okay, enough complaining, this is, I'm tired of hearing myself complain. And so I started looking for other ways to heal.

And I started exercising, to get to that antidepressant-like heart rate at a certain level where I can get a little bit more energy in my body. And then I did a future self-meditation.

I was in the middle of my PhD. And so that was another way to ignore the deeper thing because I had something in front of me that was also a problem in my life. So I could complain about that and just ignore that I needed to make a change in my marriage.

I did a future self meditation because I was wanting to go inward. So I was really exploring with meditations and really exploring with some feminine spirituality principles, or spiritual principles from a feminine perspective, because I felt like all this spirituality was telling me to disconnect more from my body and to give more.

And I was like, how do I give to myself? I don't feel like I can. But I started finding those people who were speaking that way and was just doing more meditation, more exercise, more dance, more creative singing, journaling, candles.

And then I had this moment of, I have to speak up. And I specifically have to address my marriage.

So this was, I went into a future self meditation thinking I needed to figure out should I quit the PhD after all. And it was a really strong inner voice that was like, you're asking the wrong question.

So that was the moment that I could not ignore anymore, that it was my marriage that I needed to address. And then from that point, it took me two months to say, hey, I'm not happy, we need to go to therapy.

I had been suggesting, do you think we need therapy, for a couple of years. And he was always like, no, we're good. But I didn't push it.

So by this point, it was just a little bit more direct of, we need to do this. And you know what? He did not react well.

It confirmed my worst fear, where once I told him, he kind of crumpled to the floor and started sobbing. It was awful. And I was like, my God, I'm hurting him. I don't want to hurt him.

This is so painful for me. What am I gonna do? I have to choose him.

But it helped me continue to make those baby steps. That was a first victory, even though it was really hard.

From that point, that I have to speak up, that was maybe the hardest action. And then everything else after that was downhill because there was this momentum and energy that I gained around being honest with myself.

It was giving me life and giving me excitement. So it became easier.

And maybe to your point about the reinforcement bias, whatever mechanism kicked in to reinforce this is giving me energy, as opposed to this is depleting my energy, it helped to keep going in that direction.

 

The 6 Categories of Human Truth

Yeah. My mind went to this idea. Also, by the way, because I had to, I did not come up with reinforcement bias, I almost had a real one.

There's a paper that was released not that long ago. So I wish I would have had the idea first.

So I've been there, right, I think most people have, because if you grow up and you're expected to live life this certain way, and then you go do the things and your life is telling you, hey, this is who you're supposed to be, you're being that, and then you're what everyone says you're supposed to be. Well, it's only a matter of time before you're like, I hate my life, I'm gonna kill myself.

That's just true. And I've seen it too many times. And I've helped coach thousands of people through that, by the way.

The very first thing I tell every single one of my clients, day one, you sign on the dotted line, you come in on this journey with me, I tell you, you're not allowed to lie ever again. That's where it all starts.

Because what I realized is that it is the lie that we tell to ourselves about who we are that ends up ruining everything around us. And you see that a lot, especially in relationships and around sexuality.

I've had conversations with people who are, you name it, they live in that world, whether they're therapists and PhDs like you, or their coaches, or I've had porn stars on this show, even though people have been like, why would you have a porn star? Because it's like, that's who the fuck they are.

Everything about this show from the beginning, everything I build, everything I create has been about this one idea. Stop fucking lying to yourself. That's it.

Then life gets better. I'm not saying life's gonna be easier, you got to walk the path you have to walk.

My mentor, Tom Bilyeu, I have this amazing quote framed on my wall that I read every single day. The struggle is guaranteed, the success is not.

Most people think that just being a good person is enough to have a happy life. And it's not.

And I think that we've all been lied to. I think being an honest person is what leads to a happy life.

And that's why when we see people in the world, think about this, Steph, like you're around people and you know they're full of shit, your body reacts to that. What do you think your body does when you look in the mirror?

That's where people get stuck. And that's where I was stuck forever, about the career, about the relationships, about the friendships, about the way I look, the clothes I wear, the way I talk.

And then you go, okay, how much of that is tied to survival? How much of that is tied to seven-year-old you and nine-year-old and 15-year-old you?

And the time that you told that person you were intimate with that you had this thing you were into and they rejected you, and then you hide it. And then how many times do you have this story of, you went to the boss with the presentation, they said it wasn't good enough.

So now you lose sleep at night because you're not who you think you are, because someone else told you you're not. And it's like all of it, I swear to God, I'm ready to just fucking end this show, not this, you and I, but in general, because I'm like, stop lying and your life will be better.

But the hard part is what happens next. And I have said this countless times on this show over the years.

I made this decision at 26 heading into 27, I was going to start doing the work. And I did.

And it was super, super hard. But those four years between 26 and 30 were the four hardest years of my life.

If you told me what I was going to experience before I did it, I don't think I would have done it because it was fucking brutal. Every day of it was just unbelievably hard.

Because when you stop lying, you have to unravel the identity mask that you've put on about the person you pretend you are. There are six categories that I believe that people exist in. Mental, emotional, physical, spiritual, sexual, financial.

If there's another one, I haven't figured it out yet. Maybe you can help me.

But I think there's six, physical, spiritual, sexual, mental, emotional, physical. Very simple. If you're lying in one of those, you are fucking doomed.

There's just no way around it. And so I think to myself, okay, what happens next? You unravel your identity, you go, okay, I'm gonna be Steph, what now? What is that like?

Well, you're right, it was brutal for me as well. And yet, so I'll give you the visuals.

Once I said I want to go to therapy, then it was only really a matter of months before we got to the point of, we're gonna get a divorce. And then after that, there was some instant freedom, not freedom in a way of, you were holding me back or something like that, but just freedom in, I am now telling the truth to myself and those around me.

And yet there's a really serious cocktail of emotions. And I just dove in for the few months following that to really feeling my emotions.

I feel very lucky that, on one hand, I don't have children and I grieve that regularly. And then I also celebrate it regularly.

But there's a part of me that always thought I would have children. And it's possible that it will happen, but it's unlikely.

There's also this feeling of, that could have been my only chance to have children, and I said no to it. So there is that pain of what could have been and the pain of regret.

And then also the pain of guilt of really hurting another person and questioning, did I do the right thing? And so there's kind of this loop of crazy emotions for a couple of months.

Then obvious shame that comes with any sort of identity change, even if it's a positive one, because people around you are used to you being a certain way. So it's like, I thought you guys were happy, or I thought that you liked doing your seven-figure business, you seemed like you were crushing it, I didn't know that you were really drunk all the time.

Or maybe someone knew but thought you liked it. And so there's the shock of what other people around you think.

At the same time, they don't really care, where we think that people care and we think that it matters, but no one really cares to the extent that we think they do. And there's a Brian Tracy quote that's like, if you realized how much people didn't think about you, you would be offended.

I really like that because I am a sensitive, empathic person and concerned, I have identified, like, my gosh, I'm making this decision because I don't want my boss to think about me in this way. And it's kind of crazy because it's not that I'm gonna get fired, but it's that I wanna be perceived a certain way.

So there is that pain of that shame of what do people think about me and the guilt and the regret and all of this unwinding. But for me, even though there was that painful few months, and I guess the point of saying I don't have children was that I had this time.

This was 2022, so we were coming out of the total work from home thing, but there was still a precedent of people doing a lot of work from home. So I kind of had time and space to really feel, and I didn't have the obligation of needing to take care of children or needing to show up to work every day at a physical location.

I took advantage of that. And it was very messy, sobbing on the floor, also dance, lots of ecstatic dance, lots of body movements, vocalizations, really getting into my body in ways that were intuitive and in ways that just kind of let all of the emotion through.

That felt like cleaning out a hose that hasn't been used and has some debris built up, and just turning the water on and it just comes bursting out and all of that grime comes with it. So I got to do that in a very condensed, rapid period, which I would do again.

I also got to realize in that time that I had a lot of people around me who loved me. And I didn't really know that because I had been playing the role of peacemaker.

I always felt a little bit safer over-giving in relationships and not really needing anything. And I didn't have anything to give in this time. And I needed a lot.

There were enough people who were there for me that that was a really wonderful experience, a silver lining experience of being like, my gosh, there are people in the world that actually care about me. It was huge.

It also contrasted with this feeling of my ex telling me, why are you doing this? Why are you sabotaging this relationship?

No man is ever gonna love you like I love you. You're never gonna find this.

And that fear of like, maybe he's right, that no one will love me in whatever way he is calling love, which maybe I would just call presence, a commitment to staying in the same place. But that experience was brutal, but was something that I can't say that I enjoyed, but that it was worth it.

My mind went to this idea, also, necessary. And look, I get it too, because it's like, we make these commitments, and if you're a person of your word and your bond, you're like, I feel shame or guilt about this.

But I don't think if you're in alignment, I like that you use that word, it's a fucking completely overblown word, it makes me want to vomit half the time I hear it, but it's the only thing that leads you where you're supposed to go, referenced against clarity.

That's why. So it's not something I talk about a lot, but in dating, I created this list of 60 questions, which is so overkill, but I'm super fucking type A, I'm an entrepreneur, that's who I am.

It was like, okay, I'm gonna create this list of 60 questions after my last relationship did not work. I learned a lot.

One of the things I learned was, I'm asking the wrong fucking questions. And so in those six categories, mental, emotional, physical, spiritual, sexual, financial, I was like, what are the 10 most important clarity questions I can ask someone to get to the crux of understanding who they are in conjunction with who I am?

Is the parallel there? And it's not about perfect, because there's no way, I wouldn't want to date me, I'm so fucking annoying, really, truly, I'm stubborn, I'm egotistic, I'm annoying, I spend too much time working.

I can't date me. I need to date 74.3% of me. And so that's why I created this questionnaire.

The reason that I'm prefacing with this is because I think about so much of our own internal dialogue is, are we asking ourselves the right question? Most of the time we aren't.

So we're getting these answers that leave room for way too much interpretation, way too many variables, variables that are indistinguishable from the other. So you don't know which is actually correct and leads you down the right path and which is the one that's keeping you stuck.

Because you're like, man, I feel like all of these things are in alignment with the things that I think I'm supposed to have, but you've never stopped and asked yourself, is this what I want?

And then on the harder side of it, which to your point is this honoring, you're like, okay, this is who I am. Mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, sexually, financially. That's true.

The truisms are the thing that set you free. The truth sets you free is a fucking adage for a reason, it's one of the oldest quotes in the world. Why? Because it's true.

It is the very thing that people are like, I want to have freedom. I'm like, from what? Maybe start with from your fucking self.

And that's hard because you're sitting in it and you're like, all I know is me for 48 years or 37 years or 26 years or 18 years or 90 years. All I know is me.

Cool. Well, then you know yourself enough to go do something different. Because if you, and again, I know this is gonna land different for everyone, this is where I tend to lose people, because if you know you to this point, but the you that you are sucks, but you love you enough to go and make your life not suck anymore, it's like a moral obligation you have to yourself.

It's sitting there on the floor bawling, which I have been there, being like, God damn it, I cannot believe I'm here again. It's sitting in the therapist's office, another Wednesday, I cannot believe I'm here again.

It's another exploration into all of the things of self-discovery. And then sitting in that moment still and going, nope, that's not right.

I learned to discover, it's like if you walked into a room every single day, this is a great scientific experiment, but no one would do it. But here's what you do.

You go, how long does behavior change actually take when negatively reinforced? That's the question.

They do it on mice all the time, but we really need to move more to human trials for a lot of things, in my perspective. Let's imagine for a moment, Steph, you walked into a room, and every single time you walked into that room, I punched you in the face.

The first time you'd be like, what the fuck just happened? But tomorrow I need you to walk back into that room and you get punched in the face again.

And you're like, okay, hold on. How many times are you walking in that room and getting punched in the face before you stand in the doorway and you go, I'm not gonna do this today?

Is it five? Is it seven? Is it fifty-five? Is it 160? Is it an entire year? Is it eight years? Is it a decade?

And so the thing that I'm always trying to get to is, how do I mitigate the risk of getting punched in the face by honoring the truth of who I am in the moment?

And that's the thing that I think separates people's lives. And so I guess for you and the people you work with and that you're around and what you're building and creating, how true does it feel that we just gotta walk through that moment of being like, I'm not gonna walk in that door today?

 

Seasonal Living: Understanding Your Earthly Cycles

Well, what I would love to add to this analogy is how I think of my experience of being an earthly being has opened. If you look at anything in nature, I'm looking at trees outside my window, trees go through these seasons every year where, when it's winter, they, well, they change their leaves in fall.

In winter, the leaves fall off. In spring, they come back, and in summer they're fully green and vibrant.

This is something that we know about trees, and that trees in certain environments where there are all four seasons will go through that process. And we don't really know who we are as earthly beings, what are my cycles and patterns.

So to add to the analogy, is are there four seasons of what could happen, in your example, that sometimes it's a punch and sometimes it's something else, but there's a correlation of what might go with that punch versus what goes with the handshake versus what goes with the high five, where there might be a cue or there might just be a rotation through the four.

And that's only saying if we also have four seasons in the same way that trees in the Midwest go through their four seasons. And the reason that is really important is because we do find ourselves in the same situation, but we're different.

It doesn't mean I'm back at square one where I'm expecting my life to have this linear growth progression and look like a graph. Which is a great point, by the way.

Yeah, thank you. So being able to spend enough time with ourselves and have the self-awareness of what season am I in can help with that clarity of, am I in a winter where I could berate myself of, why is it winter again, and why can't I just be abundant and be in this season of growth and vibrance all the time?

And it's like, well, because it's winter, and that's, you have to, you're an earthly being. We are creations of the earth.

We have spirit breathed into us, but we're still in this earthly body. So we too will have our cycles and patterns and rhythms that we go through. And our hormones can be really interesting as a starting point to understand what is my general rhythm and what timing do I seem to go through.

For some people, a day, they go through the same thing in a day. For some people, it's a week.

And that's why even with certain foods, the idea that we should eat relatively the same thing every day is really strange to me. It's like maybe there's two or three days that I eat lighter and then two or three days that I eat heavier.

So it's like just getting to feel into what is that rhythm of the way my body works and the way my person works. So who am I in this season?

Do I need to respond with patience or do I need to respond with action? And those are the two questions that when we have that self-awareness, we can have a lot more clarity in knowing which direction to go.

I love that. And that also introduces those variables that, like I was mentioning, without you being able to mindfully name them, it doesn't matter what season you're in, you're gonna end up right back where you were.

Because seasons are cyclical. So it's like, cool, why am I back where I was? Cool, name the variables.

You said you're in the Midwest, I grew up in the Midwest, I grew up in Indianapolis, I grew up in a city called Haville, it's a fucking nightmare. I hate snow.

I hate snow so much. I want to go the rest of my life and never see snow again. I mean that, genuinely.

And so I only live in hot places. I think in the last 11 years, I've been in snow three times, and all three times are like, I hate this.

Here's my point. The seasons are gonna change. You're gonna wake up one day, you're gonna look out your window, and for years you have said, I hate snow, and it's gonna be snowing.

You're gonna need to ask yourself, why am I here again? Steph, this has been an absolutely amazing conversation, super fun.

It's funny when you emailed me and you're like, hey, let's chat about possibly having this conversation, I think it can go in an unexpected direction. Well, I think that you delivered.

So that was super fun for me, especially. But before I ask you my last question, you have an amazing new book coming out.

I want people to engage with you, meet you, learn more about you, connect with you. Where can people find you and learn more?

My book is called The D Word, How Divorce Ended Self-Abandonment and Led to Self-Reclamation. So it's really divorce as a portal to self-reclamation.

I would say for anyone that has gone through a breakup, it's really interesting, but even more so, anyone who has engaged in self-abandonment, there's quite a few threads on there that I would love, I would love for you to read it and I would love to hear what you think. And my business is Paradigm Expansions.

And you can find me on Instagram, Facebook, website, paradigmexpansions.com. And I'm really excited about continuing to expand my perception of reality and to engaging.

So feel free to DM me and we can chat, we can nerd out on the science stuff, we can nerd out on the woo-woo. And I just thank you so much and your listeners for sticking with us and thank you for creating this whole movement and giving me this opportunity to be on.

Yeah, my pleasure, it's an honor. And I know that everyone, if you go to thinkunbrokenpodcast.com, you look up this episode, you will find all that information and more in the show notes.

And obviously go buy a copy of the book. If anything, to support someone who's doing something difficult.

 

Defining What it Means to be Unbroken

My last question for you, my friend. What does it mean to you to be unbroken?

Ooh, I have two answers for you. And the first one is a nod to you, because Unbroken, I had not heard this word before you.

So listening to your podcast and seeing Michael Unbroken on emails and on the podcast site, I associate unbroken with you. So I feel this sense of commitment from you to not let your past and not let what happened to you define who you are.

So I would almost think about it as a door that you are giving other people a doorway, you have this structure that then they can go within. So that is the first one, commitment.

And then when I go into the door of Unbroken and think about what it is for me, it really is wholeness. And it is removing this fear that I had, especially from having some religious trauma around being told that I was sinful and broken and needed saved and needed external authority to make me whole somehow.

Kind of like zipping up whatever cut is down the middle, unbroken is like zipping that up to have this wholeness and light from within.

Thank you very much for the acknowledgement, I very much appreciate that. And I agree.

I think best to that and all of the above. That said, thank you so much for being here, my friend, Unbroken Nation.

Thank you guys for listening, for taking the time, for being a part of this amazing journey that we are on. And as I always say, if you know someone in your life who could use a little bit of this, who needs to make some decisions or divorces, you might want to share this episode with them.

Sometimes people might need to divorce themselves from themselves so that they can go do some really cool shit and enjoy their lives. Share this with them.

Have a listen. That said, take care of yourselves.

Take care of each other. And until next time, my friends, be unbroken. I'll see ya.