#44 - Vulnerability & Humiliation
Hey, hey ladies. Hi, how are you today? I'm whispering, it is 4:00 AM on Monday morning. And yesterday I meant to sit down and record this podcast. And I want to talk to you guys a little bit about yesterday. I had a day, you guys ever get like, it started out really good, I made protein pancakes for my husband and I and after we had brunch, I just slipped into it. I felt like, exhaustion and just melancholy and I could not coach my way out of just wanting to stay in bed and take care of myself. So I did. I took a look at everything that was scheduled for yesterday and I took care of things that absolutely had to be done. I did them from bed. If you got a message from me yesterday, I was in bed. And I decided to set my alarm for her super early first thing today and get up. And record this podcast and do a couple of other things before we leave today. So we're here at 4:00 AM with my coffee. So I just got back from the Southern Gulf Islands, where I went with some girlfriends from high school. And we had the best time you guys. I took a little bit more work than I would have liked to have taken. We've got a huge amount of athletes preparing for our fall team Sculpt Calgary WNBF show and I let myself get a little overwhelmed by it. So I've done some work on coaching myself through that and I'm just so excited for these women. I am so stoked, as a coach I know it's going to be such an honor and such an emotional day, and it's going to be so much fun. And I think I'm experiencing some of those emotions already, which I need to, you know, talk to my brain about experiencing things ahead of time. So that is happening. And today in about two hours or so around 6:00 AM, we're hitting the road and we're driving for nine hours to a little tiny town in Southern BC called Creston, we've rented a really big log cabin right on the lake there. And some really good friends of ours are driving from Calgary. So Creston is about halfway. We're all meeting there for the week and they're bringing their girls. They're the most adorable little girls and they're bringing their dog Lily. And I'm excited for Dude to meet her. And it's just going to be a really good week. I'm excited to spend time with people. I feel like during COVID, I didn't get enough people, love in my life. And I need that. I'm learning that I need that it's part of what fills my cup and what makes my heart feel full. Right? When we talk about filling our cup, I think it's more so like making your heart feel full and just making you feel loved and connected. There's the good word I'm looking for, right. All right, you guys.
So this episode is called vulnerability and humiliation. We're on episode, I think we're on 43. I don't even know. What I'm going to talk about today. I didn't know whether to call it humiliation or not, I could have called it embarrassment. The main difference between the two is embarrassment is something that is more internal. You bring it upon yourself. And humiliation is something that is done to you. You can be humiliated by somebody else. And. I decided to stick with humiliation, but for example, I'm going to share with you guys about my personal experience today. I was embarrassed and mortified by my actions. And I think that my actions caused somebody else to be humiliated and that devastated me.
So we're going to get into that in just a sec, but I want to talk about the emotion of embarrassment and humiliation first because they are just emotions, which basically mean that we think a thought that creates not feeling in our body. And I think so many of us don't step into what's possible for us because we're afraid of being embarrassed or feeling humiliation. I see this a lot with competition prep athletes, where someone will say, I want to compete and either they'll start their prep and then decide to back out, or they never start their prep in the first place, because there's this fear of not being ready in time and embarrassing themselves or fear that what other people will think or say will humiliate them.
And I want to talk about being willing to feel any feeling. This is a barely new concept to me, I've only learned this in the last few years. But when we are open to experiencing any emotion, we are so much more open to trying new things and chasing life and going after what we want. And when we can push through the idea of being embarrassed by a failure, we can push through anything. And we're no longer afraid to fail. And we decided to show up and just do it the best we can and learn and figure it out and fail and then try it again and fail better. And then try it again and fail even better. When we can show up to life with that kind of drive and dedication, that's when big things happen.
Let's talk a little bit about an experience that I had earlier this year. I've only talked about this with a few people. It was a life-changing experience for me. It rocked my world a little bit. It forced me to sit with myself and have many feelings. And extremely grateful that I had this experience and I'm extremely grateful that I was in a place that allowed me the space and the time to process this experience as slowly as I needed to. Soback in the spring, I went to a mastermind for my school down in Austin, Texas. And it was fantastic. We had two days of the most amazing speakers lined up to talk to us. And day one was incredible. I remember coming out of day one feeling really energized and motivated and captivated and, like I found my people, I was just so connected and so open I just remember feeling so grateful and so lucky to be there. On day two, the conference started with a couple of other coaches and the CEO of the life coach school, talking about their life path and their journey to how they got to where they're going and then there was a coach that came on that was a little bit Tony Robbins and got us all up on our feet and got us to shout and tell each other, we loved each other and it was very like opening and freeing. I just remember feeling again so connected and so open. I think it was about the third or fourth speaker that caught up that day. She was a coach, I was less familiar with, she was talking about bringing your truth into your business. And for those of you who are familiar with the kind of the work that I'm doing on myself right now, a lot of the work I'm doing is on speaking my truth. And we're going to talk about this in another episode in the vulnerability series, but she was talking about how getting to know you really deeply and learning what you are passionate about and learning where your hard no's are, so where your yes’s are and where your no’s are, as a person. And then taking those boundaries into your business and allowing yourself to work from a place of ethics and value and morals for you. And how important this was to building a business that you love and that you feel really good about, and you guys. I was a little mesmerized by her talk. I found her to be. So inline with the work that I'm doing in my life right now. And then she said something, you guys, she said for example, one of my heart knows is you will never see naked photos of me on Instagram. And now I said this completely out of context, nobody knew me. Nobody knew that this was an important value to me or why, but in that moment I felt so connected to this speaker that I put my hand up and shouted pretty much as loud as my voice would allow me to go, amen. And this is not a word that I am very familiar with, amen is not a word that I've shouted out a lot in my life, if ever, but at this moment, I felt like, I just wanted this woman to know that she was not alone in feeling that way. I will give you some context in just a minute. And after I shouted this, a number of people sitting around me, turned around and looked at me and there was a pause in the room. I was in a room with 1500 other life coaches and the speaker on stage took a beat and said in a different tone, easy back there. And it took me a second to realize she may have took my amen as if I was agreeing with her not putting naked photos on Instagram. And at that moment, I was mortified. I could feel her humiliation. And she held herself together so well. She continued with her beautiful talk. And I was sitting at the back of the room feeling like the biggest Jack. And the previous moment, it felt so much connection and love for this woman that I was literally feeling that connection and that love for her and now feeling her humiliation and her shame. And I don't know you guys, if that's actually how she was feeling, she may have let it roll off her back, but just the words that she used in response to what I said. I felt so heavy and hurt. And I just sat at the back of the room and I cried and I felt all the feelings and I wrote them down. And at the end of her talk, they opened the mics up for people to ask questions and I kind of pulled myself together and I got up and I got to the mic and I said, hey, I'm Lylas Leona and I just want you to know that I am the person at the back who yelled amen during your talk and I just want to put it into context that I was connected with you and I share your heart know. And I'm in the fitness industry and I think. In the fitness industry there's so much pressure to be over sexualized on social media that I feel the same way you do. With lots of retrospect after the fact I should have just got up and apologized. And that I felt connected to you. I didn't need to explain or give context in that moment, but I did. And again, her response on stage was don't worry about it, girl. All right. I know what I look like. And in that moment, it felt like her walls had gone up. She was protecting herself and I just said, girl, you look amazing. And I took my seat. I recognized what she was going through on stage that day, the emotions she was feeling and the interaction we were having, that was her journey. That was her work to do. I couldn't change the thoughts she was thinking or the way she was feeling at that moment. She needed to work on that. But what I could do was sit with my own feelings. And so I did, I sat at the back of the room with a bunch of people I had gone to school with. One of my besties was holding my hand and I cried. I probably cried for four or five hours, you guys. I watched the rest of the conference from a place of shame and embarrassment and mortified because not only had I been taken out of context by this beautiful speaker. But there were 1500 other women in that room. And I recognized what I said, because it was so out of context, could have been taken as body shaming, it could have been taken as anti-feminist, it could have been taken in so many different ways. And for me, the idea of feeling strongly about not posting nude photos on social media is a very personal boundary. I have lots and lots of friends and women that I follow that post beautiful nude photos on Instagram and they do it from a place of empowermen and pro feminism and love of their bodies. And I respect that so much and I celebrate that. But for me, back in my twenties, when I first got into the fitness scene, Instagram was new and social media was new. There was a lot of pressure to post over-sexualized photos on social media. And I remember I did a few photo shoots that felt over sexualized to me. And I didn't like the way that felt,It didn't feel good to me, It didn't feel authentic or honest. I felt ashamed. After the photo shoots, some of the photos got posted publicly and some of them didn't. And when I left the fitness industry back in 2015, I stepped back. I retired from competing and I stepped back from coaching and a big part of it was because I didn't like the way the fitness influencer market was going. I didn't like the way that we were having to show up to get attention and sponsorships. And so I stepped back when I came out of retirement. When I stepped back onto the scene as an online coach and created Lady Sculpt and the business I have now. I made a decision to come back as an educator and not an influencer. And part of that was that I didn't want my body to be at the forefront of my marketing system. I wanted to go deeper than that. And I still celebrate my body and I still celebrate the female shape that's what I do. You guys, I created the female shape. But I don't feel pressure to post over-sexualized photos of myself on social media. That is a personal choice for me. And I want young women out there who want to be involved in the fitness industry or young competitors out there to know that you put online, whatever makes you most comfortable. Whatever feels good for you. Don't allow the pressure of needing likes or the pressure of the people around you or getting that sponsorship to make you feel like you need to post things you're not comfortable with or change your body in ways you're not comfortable with. You do you babe? Just you, that's all that matters. You show up exactly as how feels best for you. All right. So coming out of that conference, I walked home and I grabbed a big bottle of water and I went and sat in my hotel room and looked out at this beautiful river view and watched people, paddle boarding and kayaking and it was very warm that day. And there was a lot of action on the river and I just watched, and I let my brain spin and whoa, you guys did my brain ever spin. I wrote down everything I was thinking, everything I wanted to say, everything I wanted to tell that speaker. I wrote probably 14 or 15 pages of words. And then I called a friend who I know is very familiar with being aware of how people feel incorporate. And she's someone that I thought might have some advice for me and she did. And she told me to, you know, not beat myself up so hard. And she told me to sleep on it and she gave me some really good advice because I really wanted to reach out to the speaker via email or social media. I had found her on Instagram and I wanted to give her context. My friend suggested that rather than give her context, I just simply apologize. Let her know that I, you know, shouldn't have spoken out of context and that I recognize that what I said could have landed wrong. And so the next morning when I woke up, I took a nice big walk. And sat under a tree along the edge of the river. And I sent a message to the speaker that said that I was sorry and she sent me a beautiful message back. Saying that she had nothing but love for me and that I needed to stop worrying about it. And I had so much respect for a speaker because I could tell that, you know, she either let it roll off her back, like nothing, or she had done her work on it. And she was in a good place. And I replied to her email with an email with a little bit more context in which she did not respond back to. And that's okay, I think that that experience in my life helped me learn to feel my feelings. It has forced me to sit in shame and embarrassment and devastation. And it taught me that I can get through those feelings. I can get through those feelings when they are so hard. And if I can do that, I can do anything. Right. It also taught me that my voice is powerful, one word, you guys, one word brought up a full day of work that I had to do on myself. And I recognize that, the privilege that I have to podcast for you guys every day and that you guys are listening to my words and learning from them and taking from them. And thinking about them in ways that, you know, your brain is processing them. And it made me recognize that I need to be more thoughtful with my words and I need to remember that my words have power. And that is both incredibly scary and exciting.
I promise you guys that I will do my best to use my words for good. And I will try my best to give you context and I will be thoughtful with what I choose to say. But, know that I am human and I will make mistakes. And I'm just doing the best I can over here you guys. Alright, have a fantastic week. And I will see you guys next week. Bye for now.
