Is This The Woman I Want To Be?

One of the most important questions I ask myself, especially in times of anxiety and stress, is this – Is THIS the woman I want to be? Let me know what you think of this question – do you think it could be helpful to you?

You can find this episode on Spotify or wherever you listen to your favourite podcasts. I’ve also posted it to YouTube so you can check it out there aswell 🙂

Transcript –

Hi guys, welcome back to This Quote Changed My Life – a podcast about inspired action.

We are diving straight into this episodes quote, which is – Is this the woman I want to be?

This quote has been so important to me for a little while now. I’ve talked about the struggles I’ve had with my own anxiety disorder in past episodes and I’m so grateful to be at the point in my life where I am spotting my anxiety and my bad habits I’ve built to accommodate my anxiety – I’m spotting them straight away and I’m able to use this quote – Is this the woman I want to be – to make me come back to the present and make better decisions for myself.

I had the opportunity to share this quote with a small group of women recently and at first I thought it would just be a quirky thing I say to myself – but as I shared it, they responded so kindly and so positively that I knew I wanted to make this one of the quotes for the podcast.

Mindfulness has become a big part of changing my life with an anxiety disorder. It took me a little while to recognise my anxiety, and an even longer time to put into practice the things I’ve been learning along the way. As I’ve said with the quotes in this podcast before, sure we can hear a quote once and it never really stick in our minds – but sometimes, the timing is right or the planets are aligned, and things just click and that’s when we can start making meaningful and positive changes.

When it comes to this quote – is this the woman I want to be? – it forces me to focus on the present moment – in whatever task I’m doing. It redirects my negative thought pattern and maybe not so healthy habit, and asks me to make a decision right now on what I’m going to do next, based on my overall goal.

We make hundreds of decisions every day – and most of them will be out of habit. So when you have anxiety and you are just so used to doing things a certain way, because it brought you some comfort or satisfied one of your anxious thoughts – it can be REALLY hard to break out of it with just a simple question. This is why I’m always going to say to you – please please reach out and see a professional mental health worker – a doctor, a psychologist, a therapist – especially in this time where we’re going through so so much and without end in sight – it’s so important that you don’t go through this alone and you find support that is personalised to you.

This quote – this question – is this the woman I want to be? Is this the man I want to be? Ultimately asks us to be responsible for our success. And success will mean a different thing to everyone – whether it is battling your mental health, or if you wanted to improve a skill or even a relationship.

It’s not about making yourself feel guilty – I see it more as a strength, it’s ownership and recognition of the work you’re doing towards a goal.

So if you find yourself picking up a bar of chocolate and then thinking ‘is this the woman I want to be? Eating another bar of chocolate today?’ and your gut instinct is YES, I am happy to be eating this chocolate because it makes me happy and I want to eat this chocolate right now – then I’m all for that. Or if you find yourself sitting down infront of the tv, when you could have been finishing off a project – and you asked yourself ‘is this the person I want to be?’ and you answered YES because you are freaking tired and you deserve to sit down, then I love that too! If you answered NO because you feel like you could work on your stuff for an hour – then awesome go get it.

For me, I want to be a woman that has a better relationship with food. I know I’ve had barriers because of my gluten and lactose issues – but that doesn’t mean I can’t still explore food. I also want to be a woman who steps out of her comfort zone and shows people her creative side – which is why I’m starting my YouTube channel and putting more products into my Etsy store. I tend to hide away the things I create – and being on YouTube is highly visible and very scary but I want to be a woman who does things scared and shares and asks people to connect with me if they like what I’m doing.

Making mindful choices about where we are at that moment is what matters. No guilt trips, no punishment for your choice either way. We need to feel free to make the best choice for ourselves, in order to develop the person we want to be. We need to know that we are capable of pushing forward AND we are also allowed to sit back a little – any choice we make is our responsibility.