Nancy: We are crafting a version of ourselves, a persona that will be palatable and digestible to those around us. We want to reclaim these lost pieces of ourselves so we have access to them instead of expending energy hiding them. Our self-worth will return when we can truly embrace the fullness of our wholeness.
Nancy: Welcome to the Nancy Levin show. I’m Nancy Levin, founder of Levin Life Coach Academy, best-selling author, master coach, and your host. I help overachieving people pleasers set boundaries that stick and own self-worth anchored in empowered action. So you can feel free.
Plus, if you’re an aspiring or current coach, you are in the right place. Join me each week for coaching and compelling conversations designed to support you in the spotlight as you take center stage of your own life. Let’s dive in.
Nancy: Welcome back to the Nancy Levin show. I’m happy you’re here. Since Levin Life Coach Academy is kicking off this month, I thought I might take you on a little behind-the-scenes journey as we move through the program.
Right now, we are in module one, which is reinvention coaching. In this module, I put the students in the program in the seat of the client, so I’m coaching everybody as a group through reinvention coaching, which is the first coaching model of mine that everyone in LLCA has the opportunity to be certified in. But because I come from the standpoint that we need to coach from the scar, not the wound, it’s essential to do our own healing work first, before we can guide others to theirs.
In module one, everyone who comes in is in the client’s seat first, and I’m guiding them through the eight dimensions of reinvention. We begin with vision, and I personally find it overwhelming to look at my vision as something big and blue sky. I feel better about accessing my vision when looking at particular areas of my life. So that’s what we do. We move through a process of being able to identify the ideal set of circumstances for different areas of life. From there, we have a pie, and then we have the holistic vision.
I’m also a big believer that our vision does not need to be created. Our vision exists within us. Our vision just needs to be dusted off. And our vision really is that gravitational pull that moves us toward what we most desire—one of the elements I bring into. The session around the vision is that as we bring our vision to fruition, as we’re taking action and making choices to bring our vision to fruition, we need to look at what we are willing to eliminate and what we want to integrate. So, it’s not always about what we need to add in order to have what we want. It’s equally as essential to look at what we are willing to release and let go of. And these can be beliefs, and these can be behaviors, but we want to be able to consistently look at what we need to eliminate and what we need to integrate to bring my vision to fruition.
Next, we move into calibration, and the session around calibration focuses on incompletions, which really are the unfinished business of our lives. It can be literal unfinished business. In work or in a relationship, it can be clutter internal or external. It can be the way that we sort of carry around old desires that are no longer alive, but we use them to beat ourselves up.
And so, as we calibrate and recalibrate to the vision that we’re holding now, we look at these incompletions and make conscious choices about what is no longer serving us, what desire, or what element of our vision from the past, we are dragging around, even though it’s really no longer something that we still want, it might be something we think we should do.
It might be a really old desire that we haven’t assessed carefully. Do I still want this? So, as we’re moving through incompletions, we’re looking at what is weighing us down, what we no longer feel attached to in terms of achieving or bringing to fruition. Once we let go of those, then we have the fuel to move forward around what it is that we do want the third dimension of reinvention to be.
Beliefs and in-beliefs: We look at the stories we tell ourselves. We’re looking at the shadow beliefs that we tend to create when we are young, under the age of 10, when we’re too young to process and digest what’s happening. So, we draw conclusions about ourselves. We make everything mean something about us and it.
These beliefs get embedded in us and drive the bus of our lives. We come by them honestly because we are meaning-making machines, especially when we’re young. So, We are adhering to beliefs that we unconsciously land on beliefs, like I’m unlovable, I’m too much, I’m not enough, there isn’t enough, and ultimately, all of these shadow beliefs.
Funnel into some version of I’m not worthy. I’m not worthy of love, happiness, money, joy, success, whatever it might be. So, we need to be able to shift these beliefs and back them up with action so that they can no longer run as conscious adults. And so a really simple thing that you can even do here is check in on the stories you tell yourself.
The story I tell myself is. The truth is. Because we constantly tell ourselves stories that sabotage us instead of serving us, the fourth dimension of reinvention is self-worth. Whenever we think we are looking outside of ourselves for something to determine our sense of worth and value, we need to come back and remember that self-worth is an inside job because our beliefs are magnetic.
We draw toward us. What reinforces what we believe. And so if we do not believe we’re worthy, that’s what we’re projecting out into the world. And we will essentially attract relationships, situations, and circumstances that corroborate. That belief and we will collect evidence around whatever we believe.
In terms of self-worth, when we put our worth and value in someone else’s wagon, when we let someone else or something else determine our sense of worth, we’re in a very precarious position. In the concept of self-worth, we’re looking at the parts of ourselves that we’ve disowned.
We’re looking at the qualities that we don’t want to be and don’t think we are, as well as the qualities that we do want to be but think we’re not. And all of those pieces that we stuff away. Into our shadow, into our unconscious craft, the version of ourselves we put forth into the world. We are crafting a version of ourselves, a persona that’s going to be palatable and digestible to those around us.
We people, please, we peace, keep, we don’t want to rock the boat. We want to avoid conflict, and the more external conflict we avoid, the more internal conflict we will create. So we want to be able to reclaim these lost pieces of ourselves so we have access to them instead of expending energy and hiding them.
So, our self-worth will return when we are able to truly embrace peace—the fullness of our wholeness, which means reclaiming all of these lost pieces of ourselves, no longer rejecting and projecting these pieces of ourselves out onto others in the world.
Nancy: Hi, it’s Nancy interrupting my own show. I’ve got a lot of exciting things coming up in 2024, including a brand-new book and a group coaching opportunity unlike anything else I have ever offered. To make sure you are in the know, pop on over to my website now and sign up for my free weekly newsletter at nancylevin.com/newsletter. So you don’t miss a thing. Okay. Back to the show
In the fifth dimension of reinvention, we dive into boundaries, which is a major turning point in the process because I work with boundaries in different ways. If your boundaries are being crossed, you are the one crossing them. So, it’s not up to anyone else to set your boundary or hold your boundary.
It’s up to you. So it’s not up to anyone else to honor or respect. Or adhere to your boundaries. It’s not up to anyone, but you, and that immediately puts you in the driver’s seat. It moves you out of victim and blame into responsibility and empowerment. And from there, you get to. Carefully choose and consciously curate the content of your own life based on what’s okay and not okay for you, what you will or will not do.
Boundaries are a real turning point in terms of acknowledgement. I can have the life I want as long as I’m willing to take a stand for what I need. Next, we move into the sixth dimension of reinvention, which is choice. The way I work with choice is by looking at our shadow commitments, looking at what the discrepancy is between whatever I say and what I want.
In opposition to what I’m experiencing instead. So whenever there’s a discrepancy between what I say I want and what I’m actually experiencing, an old, outdated shadow commitment is in the mix. Because here’s the deal. I firmly believe we are, each and every one of us, capable of creating whatever it is that we are most committed to.
However, most of us have no idea what we’re most committed to because we think we’re committed to what we say we want. When we don’t have what we say we want, there’s an old commitment—something from the past, a promise we made for and to ourselves—holding us back from having what we want.
So here’s the wild thing: The very thing that kept us safe as children becomes the seed of self-sabotage. As we become adults, we have to look at where we’re out of whack; we have to look at what we need to do to move our commitment consciously into alignment with what we want. So, we have to look at the survival strategy or coping mechanism we put in place when we were young, and that can look like a commitment to staying small. To staying silent, to staying invisible. And while those things may very well have kept us safe when we were young, when we are wanting to step out in our adult life, when we are wanting things that we do not have. It’s highly likely that an old, outdated commitment to one of those things, one of those promises, one of those survival strategies or coping mechanisms is exactly in the way.
We want to reroute our commitment to align with what we want: a commitment to being visible, big, loud, and taking up space. Instead of silence, smallness, and invisibility, we can be committed to all sorts of things we’re unaware of. We can be committed to the struggle.
We can be committed to comfort. We can be committed to procrastination when we don’t have what we want. The natural place to go is to beat ourselves up. I don’t have enough willpower. I don’t have enough discipline. It has nothing at all to do with discipline or willpower and everything to do with being out of alignment.
And so, we are bringing our commitment to the dimension of choice. It is in alignment with our desires and always backed up by action. Uh, the seventh dimension of reinvention is self-confidence, and I really look at self-confidence as the result of self-acceptance and self-trust. When those three elements are in harmony, self-forgiveness makes us feel confident.
So, we often imagine we need to feel confident before doing something. And in my experience, confidence comes once I take the risk. Confidence comes once I trust myself more than I trust everybody else around me. When I know that I’m the only thinker in my head, when I know what is best for me, instead of turning toward others and asking them what’s best for me, I remember that I am the expert on myself.
And so looking at the ways in which I show up, looking at the role I play, looking at the payoff of the role I play, looking at the ways that other people would describe me in contrast to the way that I tell myself, all of this is a way in which we can gauge our confidence. To actually move forward in the direction of our desire, but we have to forgive ourselves along the way we cannot keep beating ourselves up.
We cannot keep hijacking our own experience. And then, finally, the eighth dimension of reinvention is visibility. And just like looking at the qualities. We do in self-worth that we don’t want to be and don’t think we are. We look at the qualities we want to be but think we’re not. So these are the quote-unquote light qualities that we know will support us in illuminating and shining our light in the world.
And when I talk about visibility. What I’m really talking about is your willingness to tell yourself the truth first and foremost, because you need to make yourself visible to you completely visible, completely transparent before. You can allow yourself to be visible to others. So, I look at visibility as a way in which we draw attention to ourselves.
We crank up the illumination because once we have told the truth to ourselves, it’s much more impactful to share that truth with the world. And so, for those of us who are on a mission to be of service, to help others, to create lasting impact and lasting change, to guide others, to make those kinds of choices and take those kinds of actions, we need to be willing to tell ourselves the truth first.
Once we tell ourselves the truth, we can radiate our own visibility, which in turn gives other people permission to draw attention to themselves as well. So, visibility is not just about being seen or allowing ourselves to be seen; it’s about drawing attention to ourselves. So, this is just a little taste of what’s happening in the world.
LLCA module one. I thought it might be fun to just take you along for the ride. I’ll share more when we move into module two and let you know what we’re doing there. But for now, we are moving forward into these dimensions of reinvention. And it is, as always, my honor to witness the experience, the shifts, the changes, the insights, the realizations, and the wins in everyone moving through the process.
If this sounds interesting to you, I’ll let you know that you can learn more about the eight dimensions of reinvention in my guided journal, The Art of Change. So, you can grab a copy of The Art of Change and learn more about these dimensions of reinvention, and maybe by the time the doors to the Levin Life Coach Academy open up again, I’ll have the good fortune of guiding you through the process.
Nancy: Thanks so much for being here. I look forward to being with you again next week. Thanks so much for joining me today. I invite you to head on over to nancylevin.com to check out all the goodies I have there for you. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a rating and review.
I’ll meet you back here next week.