Welcome
Welcome to Self Loyalty School. I am so excited to have you here. I am Nancy Jane Smith, and I will be your guide and teacher throughout these lessons. As I record this lesson, I envision you listening. Maybe you are listening while walking the dog, as I tend to do, driving to work, or throwing in a load of laundry. I am almost 100% sure you are most likely multi-tasking, precisely as I intended it.
I have TONS of half-started courses sitting on my computer and don’t get me started on the number of self-help books cluttering my shelves. I would decide I needed to make a change and purchase something, hoping that it would heal my life. But halfway through, I would lose interest because my Monger (my name for that nasty inner voice, the inner critic) would start talking about how change isn’t easy and that I will fail.
It is ironic; the same voice telling me change isn’t easy, and I am going to fail also tells me how broken I am and how much I need to change. I spent most of my life thinking there was something wrong with me because I just couldn’t change simply by reading a few chapters in a book. Because real change is slow and intentional, it involves getting uncomfortable, making mistakes, and then giving myself the grace to do it wrong and do it over. It isn’t as easy as just setting a boundary or stopping feeling anxious, or slowing down! Even though I REALLY want it to be. Nope, change is a series of trial and error. With that in mind, I have designed this course to make that messy, uncomfortable process as supportive as possible.
When you think of change, envision the spirals in an onion. Let’s take the idea of setting a boundary. In the first spiral, we notice that we need to set a boundary we start looking at HOW to set a boundary. In spiral two, we start experimenting with boundary setting and learn the messiness of boundaries, dealing with pushback, and disappointing people. And then, we enter spiral 3 we learn how to regroup and hold the boundary. In each spiral, we are visiting the same idea, learning how to set boundaries but on a deeper and deeper level.
I have designed this course in the same way.
We will visit four topics in 3 different spirals. We will visit the topics of Beliefs, Feelings, Body, and Self-loyalty 3 different times--going deeper and deeper each time.
You will receive new lessons for that week on the Self Loyalty School Podcast feed. You can listen daily or all at one time. The first two weeks of the topic will be a total of 10 lessons, five lessons each week no more than 10 minutes long, just like this one. Then the 3rd week is designed to allow you time to let the topics sink in, get messy with the ideas in real life, or also catch up on past lessons. During that 3rd week, You will receive 2-3 episodes of no more than 3 minutes which offer suggestions on how to get messy with the topic, journal prompts, worksheets, or things to pay attention to.
In the Student Portal on my website, you can access transcripts and worksheets and listen to these lessons.
So before I go, I want to set a couple of intentions:
Years ago, I took a two-year workshop on Gestalt Therapy. When the instructor was talking about working with clients, he would bellow All change is incremental All change is incremental All change is incremental. I often hear his voice bellowing in my head when I get discouraged by my messy changes. There are many things you will hear me say over and over throughout our time together—all change is incremental is one of those things.
I will not cure your anxiety—even if you do this course perfectly, do every journal prompt, and work every idea. You will still have anxiety from time to time, but the difference will be it won’t run the show anymore. This isn’t about fixing yourself. This is about changing your relationship with yourself from one of adversarial to one of kindness. My goal is that you will have built a stronger relationship with yourself so that you will know and recognize your go-to anxiety behaviors and be able to comfort yourself before you head too far down the anxiety rabbit hole.
As I mentioned at the start, I have many half-completed courses on marketing, meditation, and slowing down. Years ago, I was coping with my anxiety through alcohol—specifically, wine. What was a fun treat at the end of the day had turned into something I needed to wind down. And then I found a course called Stop Overdrinking—of course, because of my history, I was a little skeptical if I would complete it, but I decided to give it a try. The premise of the course was that overdrinking occurs because we get caught up in the moment, and we aren’t intentional about our drinking. So to avoid that, I had to plan 24 hours in advance if I was going to drink anything. I could drink as much as I wanted as long as I planned 24 hours in advance.
The intentionality and the 24-hour re-upping changed everything for me. Each day I intentionally re-committed to the idea of not overdrinking, and over the next year, I rebuilt my messy relationship with alcohol.
I have always been hesitant to write a course. Yet the number one thing people ask me for is a course. The ONLY course that I completed successfully was a course on Stopping Overdrinking.
So I kept that idea of intentionality and re-upping the commitment in mind as I designed Self Loyalty School. Each day I want you to recommit to yourself, to building a relationship with yourself, to showing up and getting to know your messy, flawed self. I spent most of my life looking outside of myself for the answer, listening to gurus, imagining when I got married or built a business or had taken enough adventures THAN I would be content. Once I met a certain goal or felt a certain way, then my anxiety would be gone. I kept looking outward when in reality, the gold mine was inside. Learning about myself and discovering my beliefs, feelings, and body helped me find self-loyalty and learn to quiet my anxiety. See what I did there beliefs, feelings, body, and self-loyalty are the four areas we will be covering. But first, we are going to learn some foundations.
Tomorrow I will be in your ears again to define High Functioning Anxiety and help you start identifying it in your own life.
See you tomorrow!