PODCAST EPISODE 147: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Pushing Through with Gutsy Boss, Becky Mollenkamp

On her website, Becky Mollenkamp says, "Your thoughts aren't trash. Your feelings aren't toxic. Failing to get rich isn't because you don't push enough or believe enough... You can't just think yourself happy. Stress, fear, and overwhelm aren't mind trash or trolls. Your struggles aren't a personality defect. Your challenges aren't character flaws. Your problems aren't mental or moral shortcomings."

This fresh approach is what made me want to interview Becky. She's an ICF-certified life coach with hundreds of hours of experience who helps people believe in and love themselves, let go of "shoulds" and feel more confident and worthy. She's the host of the Gutsy Boss podcast and has a coaching community by the same name. 

In our interview, we covered "hitting the wall" in running and life, and she suggested a new way to look at the wall. We talked about changing jobs, self care, and about how women and girls are conditioned to believe their needs come second.

From our interview:

"For me, it's really about helping women dismantle their own internalized patriarchal conditioning because we all live in a patriarchy, which this is nothing about individual men or even men as a whole, but it's about living in a culture and in a society that where men - currently white men - hold most of the power when you look at government, money, all of those things.

And because of that, from our very youngest ages, we are indoctrinated with all of these patriarchal beliefs that have to do, not just about men being stronger, but down to things like performance and achievement, and that achievement needs to be our biggest aim and that we have to go out and be the best.

And if you're not the best, then you're basically the worst. And so there's just all of these messages that we get from a very young age around achievement and performance and work...that work needs to be hard, right? It's hard. If it's not hard, it doesn't count...that  we don't deserve self care, that we need to put everyone else first... and that taking care of yourself is selfish.

All of those kinds of things are these things that we internalize for a really young age that they're reinforced constantly, not to mention all the ones around how we're supposed to look and, as we age, how that's all bad and wrong. And so all of that adds up to us really believing a lot of awful things about ourselves.

My work is all about helping women rebuild, or build for the first time: self compassion, learning how to love themselves so that they can rebuild self-trust, and then with that, with self-compassionate self trust, I think you're unstoppable. That's what confidence comes from. And so I like helping women come from that place of, instead of constantly judging ourselves, how can we just get curious with ourselves instead of always beating ourselves up?

How can we lovingly help ourselves in any situation instead of "pushing through?" And it's interesting with running, there are times we need to push through, but how can we do that in a way that's loving, right?

How can we do it in a way that feels good and safe? Which I think is interesting. When I was a runner, when I would have to push through that mile in the marathon that was just like, 'I can't do this,' beating myself up and saying, 'you'll never get through this' and 'you suck' didn't work.

What worked was for me to say 'I got this, you can do this, come on. We can do this one foot in front of the other.' It's when we become loving, but we don't do that in so many areas of our life. And the things that hold women back are endless for a lot of women."

Listen to the full interview via the player above, or subscribe to Power Up Your Performance--free--anywhere you listen to podcasts.