I am willing to bet that even the most confident person you can think of probably feels inadequate from time to time. Another way you might describe this feeling is by calling it self doubt, and that’s a struggle that I often hear from women in this community. Today I’m talking with fellow podcaster, Sara Dean. And even as a woman that radiates confidence she knows what to do when you feel inadequate because she has learned some tough personal lessons on the subject.
To start, we talk about why women specifically may deal with self doubt and inadequacy more often. Then, Sara has four ways to use the information that you already have about yourself to help you feel qualified, capable, and worthy of achieving the things you want for yourself. And if you listen to the end I issue a little “extra credit” challenge, based on her advice, that we can do together!
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TRANSCRIPT
Monica: Sara Dean, welcome back to About Progress.
Sara: Thank you for having me. Oh, I’m so honored to get to do this twice.
Monica: It’s honestly a privilege for me. I respect you so much. I love the work you do, and I just love you as a person too, which isn’t that
Sara: Same, same, same. Oh my gosh. I feel exactly the same.
Monica: It’s, it’s just so much cooler to see like you love what people do, but then you love even more who they are, and that’s you.
Sara: Mm-hmm.
Monica: One of the things I have admired in you is this, this thing you radiate, which is an inner confidence, a confidence in self, a confidence in your voice, and I’m sure that’s not always how it feels on your side. But I love, I love seeing it in you and how you use it, and that’s why I’m having you come today because so many women in my community struggle with feelings of inadequacy. And I think the bigger sister to this is imposter syndrome. And we’ve heard about this a lot, but what I hear that phrase, I kind of think of the big picture things like I am going after a huge goal or like a big professional commitment or something really big.
But I think it’s Little Sister is the one that we deal with a lot and on a more day to day basis. And that’s the inadequacy that we experience. So let’s just start with talking about inadequacy in general. How do you see it showing up in women?
Sara: I see it showing up in so many ways. I think that the way that women are socialized creates so much space for us to think poorly about ourselves and to think that other people have it all figured out, and to think that we’re always behind and to think that we. Like to think that we have permission to go after whatever we want, but we don’t, haven’t ever been given the skills, skills slash resources slash privileges of time that men have been allotted.
And so we’re kind of sold this bill of goods that’s like women can do whatever they want now. And then the reality is like, yeah, but when and how and like, unless you’re gonna give me an extra 37 hours every day on top of the 24, I already have like I, I don’t know when you expect me to go do all these things that like, yay, I’m now allowed to do.
And I think we’ve seen this over the course of the last few decades that there’s this, this illusion that women can do anything that men can do. And when we look at numbers, that’s, that’s not true. In terms of where women are actually being invited to show up and use their voice and serve. And so when we feel feelings of inadequacy, I think it’s really easy for us to be really hard on ourselves and not hold the system accountable. And the system was, has not been built in a way that’s allowed us to live our fullest selves and to really use to, to give us the resources that we need to really do all the things that we really wanna do. And so instead we just feel inadequate and we very much feel like everyone else always has it figured out, but we’re like three steps behind and we can’t figure out how to like make up those three.
Monica: So we are, we’re missing the fact that in many ways we are being set up to fail. And the messages we’re, we’re getting on a positive side, but like the reality is different also. How do you think comparison is, is at play here?
Sara: I think that we assume that everyone else has it figured out. And so we look at that other people’s lives and we’re like, Oh, they made it. Like how did they do that? And I think social media plays a huge role in this. We see people’s highlights, highlight reels. This happened with me recently. I had some really cool career opportunities in the last six weeks or so.
And so of course I posted them on social media. But what was not pictured is in order for those two things to happen, Th it was a year’s worth of work of having 1 million things not work out. But people saw that and it’s so been so interesting cause I’ve gotten so much feedback. Cause I was, I was on a trip to New York and then to London in really close proximity.
So multiple people that like school drop off and different things I’ve been doing. They’re like, Oh, you’ve just been all over. And I’m like, Yeah, I’ve been all over. But that was after a year of everyone saying, No, we don’t want you . And so I think when we only see these highlight reels, it’s really easy to think like, Oh, it’s always working out for her.
She has it all figured out. She knows the answers. Everyone wants what that person, you know, she can attain whatever. And we’re not seeing like, Oh, she missed the mark 18 times before she got a yes. And so I think that we make all sorts of assumptions and because we have been socialized to doubt ourselves and feel less than and feel not worthy, it’s really easy to make those assumptions really quickly.
So there’s this insidiousness to how we see ourselves and then how we see ourselves related relative to other people, that it is incredibly damaging.
Monica: I wonder why it is we just go right to blaming ourselves then, instead of just being able to take a step back and be like, Oh no, it’s because I’m set up to fail, and I also have no idea what she had to go through to make that thing happen, or I don’t know what she’s really struggling with. I, I wanna hear more about why, why you think we do this.
Sara: That’s such a great question. And. I’m like thinking quickly in multiple directions because I think some of it is, I’m thinking for me personally, when I have doubt about myself, it’s often around an an assumption that I’m making about how someone else will react. And so an example would be, Okay, I wanna do this thing.
Like if I go tell my husband that he’s gonna be like, Wow, that’s kind of a lot. Or a friend might be like, Yeah, I don’t know if you should do that. Like there, like other people might have doubt because they either don’t understand it, they don’t have the same desires as me, they don’t have the same dreams.
So there’s that piece. I also think that women are highly competitive and sometimes in an unconscious way. So I think. Our people close to us might not be immediately supportive. And I think that we are often going after what we want in systems that were built for men. And so there’s men in our lives who are a little bit like, That’s cute.
Or maybe they’re rolling their eyes a better, like no, it’s kind of a lot, which is a little bit bossy. Those little tiny remarks that we’ve heard over the course of our lifetime. Which in many cases aren’t intended to be harmful, but they’re like paper cuts over time that I think create this sense of doubt so that when we go to do something, we hear those voices first.
We don’t see proof of the hard things we’ve already done. We instead are like, Ugh, that person is gonna think this is kind of goofy, or so and so might laugh, or I don’t, you know, even a partner. A sister or someone really close to you might just because they don’t get it, might be like, I don’t know about That seems a little weird.
Monica: It almost seems like internalized self doubt. You know, like we just take in our past experiences, we jumble them all, all together, and then we internalize them into just having it be almost the automatic. Reaction is, is doubting ourselves. Also, I feel like when you look at, you know, children and how, I mean they’re all different.
There are some that deal with more anxiety, and I have some in my own family too, where you just, you have a harder time believing yourself, but like by and large, majority of children don’t struggle as much. With this inadequacy, it seems more learned.
Sara: Yes. I think it’s total definitely learned. I actually, when you said doubt And you kind of reference that being a default. I did a whole episode on Don’t Let Doubt be your default, because I think that that can be our default, and I think that that’s where we quickly go. And so what I’ve had to do as an entrepreneur, which probably you can relate to, is that when you have a moment where you have to make a choice, You can, you can default to doubt because we’ve all done it.
And when you’ve lived through a lot of hard things, like it’s easy to go there really fast or you can default to, Wow, this is a hard moment and I’ve done a lot of hard things, that means I can do this too. And like you have to kind of pick one side or the other and pick which side or which one are you gonna let be your default moving forward when it comes to our kids.
The messaging that we’re par typically, and I’m assuming in your circle of moms and women, just like the circle of moms too, I work with in the Shameless Mom Academy. We’re raising our kids to be like, You can totally do it. You can do it. You can do it. So we are setting up systems that are like, No, go after whatever you want.
Depending on their age, they might not have been gotten a lot of social, social messaging yet around. Little cues and clues that might lead to doubt. Don’t worry, that’ll come though . But I think we, you know, when we’re, when we can keep our kids in a little protective bubble of like, you know, this amazing preschool that we picked out and our family who just loves our children so unconditionally.
It’s really different than being out there in the world and having to experience people and naysayers and doubters and competitiveness of women and the doubt of men and all, you know, and everything in.
Monica: So one thing that is coming to mind for me right now, and we are definitely gonna move into a discussion of course, about like what to do about an adequacy, but let’s just level the plane. And say here that I think every woman deals with inadequacy in some way and at some level and likely often. So it’s not that we need to avoid it, it’s more that we need to work with it.
And I love the example you gave of being able to say, Yes, this is hard, and look at the things in the past I’ve done that. Show me I can move through this again. It’s more the allowance of it and making space, but not. Lead , lead the charge is what makes a difference. Love your thoughts on that. I’d also like to hear how this has played into your own life in adequacy in general.
Like, like I said, I admire you for what you radiate, but this is something you deal with too.
Sara: Yes, definitely . I think we have to look at where we’ve come from and own that in a certain way, and I can kind of talk through that in a little bit more of a framework way in a minute.
But I think that once we can own how much we let doubt be that default, then we can start to work with in a better framework and set ourselves up in a different way. In terms of how inadequacy has shown up for me, I had, it’s shown up in different ways. It’s funny, when I was thinking of examples before we started to record, I was thinking of everything from going through infertility, which the first time I did it, I did it really privately.
And then the second time I did it really publicly and had just massively different experiences. And so as I went through that experience the first time I. It was like, get up every morning and at the time I owned a gym and I would get up to teach bootcamp at 6:00 AM and the class was at 6:00 AM So I’d be in my kitchen at like 4 45 in the morning, like head on the dining room or on the kitchen table, like, how am I gonna do this?
Like, how am I gonna show up and teach this class knowing that like I just had another failed cycle. How am I gonna walk into that room and be bubbly and, and, and excited and optimistic when I just wanna sit here and cry and. I did that all privately, with the exception of like my part and my husband, and then a couple really close girlfriends.
When we went through that again a few years later trying to have a second child. I did it really publicly, which a lot of people judged like, Hmm, you’re doing like you shouldn’t be doing this while you’re in the middle of it. You should, Which was, that was kind of a lot to internalize. But what ended up happening though, is I had so many women walking beside me and it.
100% a different experience. And so while there were certain people who were like, like talking about going through IVF as you’re going through, IVF isn’t something, and these were like business coachy, like mentor kinds of people who were like, You should teach from the scab, the scab not the wound kind of a thing.
Monica: I’ve heard that.
Sara: In, as I was walking through it, I had people texting me and sending me Facebook messages and like literally showing up with flowers on my doorstep. And the day after we had this failed, our last failed attempt. Former client of mine, like left a bottle of champagne and roses on my doorstep and just with like the sweetest message.
And she knew I wasn’t celebrating, but she’s like, I just, I wanna honor you in this moment. All these really incredible things happen. And I didn’t have to be alone and I didn’t have to sit there feeling like, Oh, like this works out for everyone else. And anytime I’d go to social media, it was like another person was saying they were pregnant and another baby was being born.
And that was so gut wrenching the first time. And then the second time I was like, That’s hard to see. And also I know that I’m not alone in this. And it was a completely different experience. So it’s anything from that to like professional experiences like navigating running a business through the recession in 2008 or through the pandemic in 2020 where it can be so easy to be like, I wasn’t cut out for this.
And then looking at like, actually maybe I was, and maybe I’m gonna be one of the few people who are still standing at the end of this and I’m still standing and you are too. Like in 20, going into 2023 because we didn’t sit down in 2020. We might have taken a rest. We might have taken a nap or two, but like we’re still standing.
Monica: Yes. Thank you for sharing about those experiences and also just, you know, this is something that you’re still dealing with now. I, I’d love to hear more about your framework. Let’s talk about some tips on what they can do. For the women who are like, I’m ready to tackle inadequacy. Like, it is, it is controlling me, It’s making me stay on the sidelines.
I’ve tried things and doing things, but more on the sidelines of my life, like actually being a real person, like who I wanna be. What can they do.
Sara: So I love this concept, which I, I mentioned that I used to own a gym. So way back when, when I owned my gym, I talked about this concept data collection where when you’re in the fitness industry, there’s a lot of pressure on people, how their bodies are gonna look, and everyone’s trying to make their body look a certain way, which is typically means they want it to be smaller and leaner and skinnier and all these ridiculous things around diet culture that I do not buy into and I don’t promote.
And that’s why I had to get out of the industry. But I would talk a lot about data collection and what does it look like to collect data from an objective point of view. And so when we, when I talked about this in that, in my gym, I would say like, When you’re talking about data collection, at the end of every given day, you’re like, Okay, here’s what I ate today. Here’s how it made me feel. Here’s the exercise I did today or didn’t do, and here’s how I felt about that, or here’s how that did or didn’t make me feel. And you’re just noting things. You’re not like, Oh, I ate the Oreos. I am the worst person. I’m lazy. I don’t have any impulse control. Like how, How dare I, We just objectively collect the data.
When we can do that, then we can look at, okay, I did a and. What was the outcome? And then do I wanna do it again? Yes or no? It’s really clear and simple and it’s not about like, am I good or bad and did I make a bad choice? And how do other people do in comparison? It’s just this really simple, clean process that allows us to step away from, I think the doubt and the inadequacy and all of the, like the social conditioning around.
Anything from Oreos to doing a workout to making business decisions. So when I look at this in terms of how I work with clients now, When I’m working in the Shameless Mom Academy, or when I’m working with my business coaching clients, or when I’m working with corporate training clients, I want people to first look for past proof.
So where is your past proof that you are very adequate and you are very capable and you are very qualified and very worthy, And that past proof can come through multiple things. And so the next step is you might be able to think like, Oh, well past proof. Last week I had a hard conversation with someone and it, and I was able to figure some things out and mend the relationship.
So that’s past proof when we look at step number two is owning and honoring the past proof via looking at your education. So whatever education you have, I don’t care if it is education through the seventh grade or education through like a doctoral degree, but what is that education? What did you get out of that that was valuable to you?
So my education was through Catholic schooling, which lots of pros and cons to that many, many. A lot of feelings about it on both sides, but what I can own is I am a really good critical thinker because I had to go through a ridiculous amount of philosophy classes over the course of 16 years, and so I can own certain things about my education no matter how long I did it.
Any of those things that, there’s certain things that it came out of that that had been really valuable to me. This, the next part of that is owning your professional experience, so looking. Whether your professional experience has been in hospitality and waiting tables, or it’s been in data entry or in a service industry of another kind, or it’s been in corporate world, or you’re in executive leadership owning any level of professional experience and then noting.
So when I did this, I gained certain skills, talents, and strengths that make that are unique to me. And so like my first career was in a psychiatric hospital working with kids, you better believe that there are things I do with 50 year old women that I did with five year old children in a psychiatric hospital.
Those skills transfer. And so when you’re looking back, you’re like, Yeah, the things that you do, waiting tables can actually transfer into whatever you’re doing today. But sometimes we don’t give ourselves permission to think about it in that way and. Third piece of owning and honoring in this step is owning and honoring your lived experience.
And this is where we really don’t give ourselves enough credit. We look at our education and our professional experience, and then we get into the comparison trap of, Oh, well I only have X amount of years of X, Y, Z, and we negate. A whole bunch of other things. So for me it would be negating that I have managed anxiety since I was eight years old.
That has given me a tremendous skill. It’s been difficult, yes, but it’s given me a tremendous skill that other people don’t have. That’s extremely valuable. For other people, it might be working through some sort of, or having worked through some sort of childhood trauma that allows them to be compassionate and empathetic.
For moms, it is having to manage and navigate motherhood every single day. In your case, Monica, it would be like being a homeschool mom or having children with special needs and navigating. So when we look at lived experience, the value around those experiences and how they make us more worthy and more capable and more qualified is exponential.
But when we think about our qualifications in quotes, we think about like the resume stuff. We don’t think about. Like for me, like I learned how to ski when I was 42. Oh my gosh. It was a huge, huge life experience. But like nowhere on a resume, is there a place to be like, did you learn to ski at 42 while you were terrified that you were going to die every single time?
But that was a life changing experience and I’ve talked about it at length of my podcast, like I
Monica: I love hearing about it every time, just so you know. I love it. I do that with swimming. For me, I like learning to really swim as an adult. Yeah. I, I get you.
Sara: I mean, those kinds of things are just such a big deal. So that, number one, looking for past proof. Number two, owning and honoring your education, professional experience, and lived experience.
Number three is recognizing that that messy stuff, which is the stuff that we usually hide and cover up and dismiss, that’s actually the rich and juicy stuff that allows us to be uniquely positioned for growth that builds our skills, our talents and our strengths that make us better than everyone else at whatever it is we want to go do.
And then the fourth piece is to collect better evidence moving forward. So once you can look for that past proof, own an honor and embrace those, the rich and juicy pieces of that messy stuff that we typically hide. Then when we start to move forward, we start collecting that evidence.
So now I can tell you, and I did this during skiing cause I knew that I, I knew enough to do this. At that time, I was like, Oh, this skiing situation is gonna be a hot mess. I’m going to cry. I’m gonna scream, I’m gonna swear I might die. But you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna have a story that comes out of every single ski lesson that is gonna be a really highly coachable moment because I was, I knew that I was collecting evidence within every single ski lesson.
Monica: Yeah.
Sara: I could learn something really scary at age 42, that I could do something physical with my body that I’d never done before, that I could overcome my fear of heights and getting on a freaking chairlift over and over again. So collecting better evidence moving forward means that we’re looking for those things.
When you do anything in any given day, being like, Oh, I did that. See, that’s proof. And we’re collecting that as we go. So then that becomes the default instead of the default of the, of the doubt, and then the inadequacy.
Monica: And it becomes like a cycle, right? The next, It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when, that you have this inadequacy and being able to say, Oh, nope, I, I remembered this evidence now because I’ve been paying. And better to, it seems like to me that really being able to better face inadequacy.
It’s just like anything else skill set. And it means you have to get messy with it. and, and, give it time. And I’m thinking about this contrast I experienced, like when my kids were really young and they were special needs and I didn’t know yet. Like I assumed I was trying to get them diagnosed but wasn’t getting help.
I felt very inadequate. Consumed by inadequacy. But then years later, when it was even worse, the special needs were even heightened. And we did finally have the diagnoses. I felt, again, incredibly inadequate. And that was right during the time that the year of the homeschooling year that, that we did right, The dungeon homeschooling year.
Cuz we’re living on my parents’ basement, which we’re so grateful for just so people know. Anyway, but the contrast to me is by then I now had five more years. Of lived experience of all these things you just shared. And being able to, to just objectively say to myself, of course this is hard and these are the factors that are at play, and here’s the past proof I have that I can do this.
I can be the mom for this kid. And I know I’m giving a parenting example, but there’s many other examples, right? And. Focusing on what I could, you know, the bringing my strengths to the table and then collecting evidence, and then it, it was completely different. Not to say, it was like, Oh boy, I got this.
Like, I’m gonna be the no questions asked. I’m the right parent for this kid. Like, we’re gonna get through this. I know exactly what to do. It was not that. It was more. Coming back to the root of all of this, it’s less about what the women are not doing, it’s about who they’re not becoming. And that was the missing piece to me.
I still felt inadequacy, but I had me to face it, the A real person.
Sara: Right.
Monica: I loved your example, it’s about skiing, but do you have another recent example of this, like a time where you felt inadequacy in any area of your life and, and how you navigated that with that whole sense of self.
Sara: Yeah. Yeah, I felt it a lot in the last year. I knew going into 2022 that I really wanted to increase my speaking visibility. And prior to 2022, I had had a decent amount of speaking stuff just land in my lap where people would reach out and like, Hey, we know that you do this. Could you come talk to our company? And like places like Amazon, like I went and did workshops for Amazon, so I was.
It was, I mean, it was amazing. So I was like, I’m kind of good at this. Like I was feeling myself, I’m like, I’m kind of good at this. Like this just accidentally happens to me, so I’m gonna really go after it in 2022 and make it what I want it to be and make it be like this really big, significant piece of my business and.
It has been so incredibly humbling, so as I learned how to do things in a more professional way, like, Hey, I wanna go after this certain speaking gig and create this really high level proposal. And in my mind I was doing like all the right things in the right way, in the right order, with the right words and all the stuff.
I got a ton of no’s. And I was like, How in the world am I getting more nos now? Even though I’ve upped my game exponentially than I got in the past, and it happened over and over again, and I had this moment sitting on the phone with my speaking coach. Like I hired a speaking coach who’s amazing by the way.
And so I’m talking to my speaking coach and I’m just like, nothing’s, like I’m crying. I’m like, nothing’s working. And I tried so hard, blah, blah, blah. And so, and she kept telling me, she’s like, There’s gonna be a tipping point, Sarah. I know Monica, your audience in mind. Like we wanna like go and execute and just have that immediate, like, I did it and here’s the reward.
And when that wasn’t happening, she said, Sarah, there’s gonna be this tipping point. You have to keep going and then things will start to click. But she’s like this life cycle for speaking, especially the way, kind of the level of stuff you’re going after. It takes a while and I had no patience for it, but I did keep going, kept trying things kept sending out all these proposals and things.
Shortly after that one call where I like was in tears and I hate crying in front of coaches cause I’m like, Oh, they’re getting what they want outta me. Like they’re trying to make me cry and break me down. But right after that I had two people reach out and they were like, Hey, we thought of you for this event.
And it was actually the thing in New York and the thing in London, we thought of you for these two totally separate events. And. In both cases, they said, We have seen what you’ve been doing over the last year or so, and we know that you’re the perfect person to come and do this for our group and.
It was this moment of like, Oh my gosh, it works if you keep going and it is so hard to keep going, and that doesn’t mean that you need to compromise your whole life to keep going. I do think that there is absolutely a time to quit things and give things up and to do that in a very unapologetic and, you know way that’s aligned with your values, but it was also.
Me recognizing like you have to pay your dues a little bit . So that has been a huge lesson for me in 2022, is having to work through that and stick with it when I was getting, just no after, no, after, no when I’m someone who doesn’t typically get a lot of no’s and and then having that really delayed gratification of having things starting to come through and being in, you know, conversations that I think have really strong legs under them moving into 2023.
And it’s, it’s been incredibly challenging. And that’s not what you don’t see on Facebook, you know, so. Those are the pieces where you’re like sitting in inadequacy and you’re like, Okay, but I know I really want this and I know that I’m really good at this and this is what I kept saying to my coach.
I’m like, I know I’m really good at this. She’s like, Yeah, you are really good at this, and so you can’t stop doing it. Like you can’t let these nos get to you. And so yeah, that’s.
Monica: Thank you for parting the curtain on that, especially. I like hearing that the nose, like, I like hearing about it from my perspective. I don’t like that you went through it. I don’t like going through it, but yeah, that is part of it. It’s and it’s…
Sara: I call it the black hole of no, like, and when you’re in the black hole of, no, it’s literally like all you, You can only see down, like the walls are dark around you. You can only see down and you have to conscientiously look up to see like, Oh, there’s still other options around me. There’s still things I haven’t explored.
There’s still like, there’s op, there’s opportunities and I have to choose like am I gonna keep looking down the black hole of no? Or am I gonna look up and see like, Oh, I could take a little left over here, or maybe me under, off to the right a bit.
Monica: Yeah. Okay. I love that, especially cuz it applies to any area of life that the women are facing repeated no’s, whether it’s like directly said to them or it’s just keeps being delivered. Not, Nope, not you. Can’t get there, but stick with it, as you said, and I I was curious if there was one small way you would advise women who are kind of in that black hole of no’s, one small way for them to get started on all the advice you’ve given us today.
What would that be?
Sara: I’m gonna give like a, a really small, like, mini way, and then I’m gonna give a little bit of a more expanded version of it for, you know, depending on how much time someone has. So the first thing that you can do is think of just one piece of evidence, one piece of proof, one bit of data that you can collect that prove that you are worthy, capable, and qualified.
To go after whatever it is that you wanna go after. So that, again, I, that might be something that happened last night in a parenting moment when you were doing something with your children. It might be a conversation that you had with someone at work. It might be an interaction that you had with your partner or a close relative where you just got some sort of validation that like, Yeah, I’m good at this thing, or, Yeah, I love that about me.
Or This is how I, where I, where I know I shine in my, in my best. So that one thing, and just holding onto that and letting and practicing, letting that become your default. And so that might be like on your drive home today, or while you’re taking a shower or while you’re walking or driving to school, pickup, giving yourself five minutes to just think of what is that one, one example that you can think of.
If you wanna make that a little bit of a bigger task or a little bit of a deeper dive, make a list and make the list be inclusive of your education. So it’s step two, owning your, owning and honoring your education, your professional experience, and your lived experience. And I call it, you can either call it a lifetime resume or sometimes I’ve done it as an exercise where I call, where I call it building your self trust resume, where you’re making this list of all of these things that make you uniquely qualified to do whatever it is you wanna do.
And in the process of making that list, you’re like really, really grounding yourself. Trust around, I’m really good at certain things, or I shine in certain ways because of all of these things.
Monica: Those could not be better. I’m gonna definitely do both of them. Never thought of a life resume, but that’s brilliant.
Sara: so fun. It’s really fun. Having these experiences that are stories in our back pocket allow us to connect to people in so many different.
Monica: And I want this so badly for women. And like we said, it’s not even so much about what you do. It’s who you are. And a big part of that, I think is sharing of that like you did with your first story about facing infertility, that in the sharing of your inadequacy, you felt stronger because I think you were making it more about this.
Bigger life story of who you really are in the moment of inadequacy and hardship and struggle and strife, and that’s something I think we all have the power to step into. Sarah, this has been phenomenal. I wanna direct people to your podcast, Shameless Mom Academy. Where else should they go? Where do you want them to come and see you?
Sara: So thank you for having me. This has been so fun. So people can go to shameless mom.com if they wanna see any more of anything related to the podcast and, and other opportunities to work with me or within our community. The podcast can be listened to wherever you’re listening to this podcast. You can listen to the Shameless Mom Academy, just do a search.
And if you put in Shameless mom, it pops up to sometimes if you just put in Shameless, it just pops right up.
Monica: That’s so fun. Yeah.
Sara: Yeah, so fun, so easy. And then if people want. A framework for starting their day off with just having like little mental prompts to really dig into being feeling capable and qualified. Every morning I have a 15 minute manifest, which is like a little morning routine that you can do in like five to 15 minutes, even less if you want.
That lets you dig into just. Picking out one or two things that allow you to move your day forward in a positive way, where you’re starting off in a really proactive way, feeling like a sense of purpose and power instead of feeling like you’re just reacting to the chaos of the world around you. And so people can get that if they go to shameless mom.com/one five M for 15 minute manifest.
So shameless mom.com/fifteen.
Monica: We will make sure to link that in the show notes. And for those who are listening and wanting to take notes, remember that we have progress pointers too. So I will take your framework and I’ll just write it up in notes for them. So because that alone was just so, so helpful. Sarah, this was all beautiful.
I am so appreciative of your time, but also to know you. Thank you very much for being on the show.
Sara: Oh my gosh. Thank you, Monica.
