Ep 66: Getting Accurate

In this episode, we're going to be getting accurate with what is actually happening in your life and career. This is going to be so useful to end the year strong, to start the year fresh, and to be aware of when you're being an asshole to yourself. All right. You ready? Let's do it. 

Hello. You are listening to the Love Your Life as a Performer podcast. I'm Kelli Youngman and I am The Life Coach for Performers. I help actors, singers, and dancers love themselves and their lives way more. So keep listening to learn how you can love your life. Both on and off the stage.

Hello, and welcome back to episode 66 of the Love Your Life as a Performer podcast. I am excited for a few reasons. One, if you're not in MOMENTUM yet, what are you waiting for? Also, what is this cheesy voice that I'm doing? Um, no, but really, truly, I'm so excited because the energy of the group is picking up. There's a lot of super cool things that we're doing which is one this month, we're doing Money Makeover. So we're looking at The MONEY Module and working through it in real time so if you've wanted to start feeling like you have your shit together with money and that you feel excited and safe and aligned, just know that's available to you.

We're doing it literally right now. So if you join today, you get to jump right on into the Money Makeover, um challenge the month of December. We're gearing up to just make money and love our money and have a totally new relationship to it so that you're not freaking constantly stressed all of the time and that you get to love the work you're doing and the ways you're making money now. You don't have to kind of grin and bear it until, you know, you land your next performing gig and you know, create all of these stories that don't feel good. You can just truly love it. 

So again, if you wanna join us inside of MOMENTUM now, freaking gift yourself a Lifetime membership, you can go to kellIyoungmanwellness.com/gift and get into Momentum for life. But also have fun joining in with us in this December challenge of our Money Makeover. Okay, what else? 

I feel like, I shared this on my stories last week. I've been super conscious and aware of the fact that sometimes things feel like shit. Okay. And so I shared in my story last week that I was having a week of needing to tend to my health and prioritize medical concerns and just really giving myself permission to love and support myself through it all.

Coincidentally, I don't know if you are a human with a uterus, I feel like I've been very consciously starting to tap into and tune into my cycle and my hormones and I'm just, I'm mentioning this because it's going to tie into this episode, but I noticed that I was in a part of my cycle last week where I was a little low energy, a little bit higher emotions. And we know that when emotions are high, intelligence is low. And so that's what I wanted to talk about this week on the podcast, because I really noticed that there was a couple of days that my brain wanted to spin in despair and just feel like nothing was working and wanting to go back and regret decisions or just like entertain, did I do the right thing? Maybe I should have not invested so heavily in myself, right? All of the thoughts. 

And the interesting thing about this, and I keep saying this to, to new people that I talk to and to my current clients, right, it's not good, bad, right or wrong. These thoughts will come up and how we do one thing is how we do everything, right? So if we make a decision and we love it in the moment, and then the minute something doesn't go well, we kind of start entertaining all of the thoughts of coulda, woulda, shoulda, right? It just has us; one, in straddling energy. There's a whole podcast about that. It has us also not having our own back in our decisions and we spend more time entertaining the judgment of the past versus really being available to the present and what we want to create next. 

And so something that really, really helped me snap out of the sort of funk I was in. And again, like some of it was physical. Like I really had to rest last week and up my Rest Plan and make sure I was drinking enough water and make sure I was walking and doing all the things, moving my body. Right? And I noticed that when I finally sat down to do an evaluation of my month, because I do think I tend to have a habit of having a little bit of an awareness when it's like the middle of the month and also having a, a very acute awareness of when it's the end of the month. And I've noticed that it's so interesting, right? Because I feel like this episode is about getting accurate, but it's really interesting how it also ties into money. 

I know for me, towards the middle of the month, I start worrying, or I've noticed my brain want to worry about whether I'm good for the month or if I've hit my goals. And then, again, sort of by the end of the month, then having to navigate the circumstance of whether or not the goals that I set for myself were achieved, and how far I was off from them, right? And so again, I don't think it's good, bad, right or wrong, but it's just so magical to give yourself the gift of getting accurate and really looking at things neutrally. 

So like I said, I had a night where I was just like losing my shit, feeling like my life was upside down, feeling like everything was not working. Again, this is just part of the gig when you sign up to have a human experience. Because the contrast, when you make friends with it, when you make peace with it, even though it's uncomfortable, there's literally always, always golden magic. And anytime my clients come to a call and they're really honest and transparent with me and with themselves, it just is so freaking valuable.

I love when people bring their shit to the surface so we can look at it. And I know how valuable it is, because I do it for myself all day, every day. Right. 

And so, like I said, part of what I did the other day to really help me anchor in, which I think is just so freaking good and so valuable for everyone is to really get accurate. So let's talk about what does it mean to get accurate? This means like being so factual and neutral and actually evaluating what happened. Because our brain will sort of distort the reality based on how our emotions are feeling and so what I literally did was I sat down and I did an entire evaluation of November, from top to bottom. And inside of MOMENTUM I teach an evaluation process that's super simple that I learned from one of my coaches and we look at what worked, what didn't work and what we want to do differently. And I cannot freaking tell you how much I realized the patterns of my thinking and habits and actions through taking the time. It took me about 90 minutes to really look at what happened in November. And how do I want to feel about it? 

Because again, how we feel is always going to be determined by the thoughts that we're choosing to think. Right? And if you're new here, Welcome. This is a part of the world, this is a paradigm, part of my belief system that I teach to my clients is that what we think creates. What we are being, we attract. Right? So we get to intentionally choose where we put our focus, what thoughts we give our energy to, and we get to then intentionally choose them to support, align, and again, decide how we want to feel, right? 

So I started by looking at my entire calendar and just going through what happened. Because... and, you know, going back to what I said earlier about my cycle and, you know, getting to know my body and just being more aligned with and aware of when my emotions or hormones might be changing, right, then I can start using that information to support me.

So this is why evaluating is so freaking valuable. Whether it's evaluating your schedule, your week, your month, an audition. It's what gives you the awareness to make a change. 

So, I looked at my entire calendar and I literally wrote, day by day, the things that I remember that made me feel a certain way, days that I had auditions, days that I had client calls, and there was so much shit that happened in November that I was so delighted by right. I hosted a class, a workshop about how to love auditions and created an amazing resource that now lives inside of Momentum. You can access the replay in the worksheets there. I had auditions. I got invited to things I you know, had emailed certain casting directors to reach out about projects that I was interested in. I also, like, created a lot of time for family and friends and went to different events almost every weekend, including Thanksgiving. And, you know, I just got to really be available for those celebrations and family time and prioritizing my sister's Bridal Shower. Like there was just so many things. 

And when I slowed down and zoomed out, I also saw all the ways that I was loved by my partner, by my friends, by my family and by myself. Because also I, I saw the exact trajectory of, again, when I maybe had difficult conversations, when I didn't get the call back, when I didn't get the outcomes that I thought I was going to get, there was a lot of navigating that. And it was just so interesting to then look at how did that align with my cycle. What were my thoughts? What were my predominant feelings? Again, not to create judgment, but to create awareness of how can I use this information to create a different result in December, right? 

I also met like some amazing humans in November that ended up joining Momentum and now I'm supporting them as my clients, right? And so like, there's always going to be life happening, right? There's always, always, always going to be life happening and our perspective of it, our view of it is going to come from the thoughts that we choose to think. 

I was actually thinking about this the other night about how it's almost like you're living your life. And one, we all know that we are the author, right? Maybe you've heard the idea of like, if you're writing your life and it's a book, what is the title of your next chapter, right? You get to decide what comes next and how you want to feel about this part of your journey. 

And another way of saying the same thing is like, you know, when you're watching TV shows that have narrators,.And I'm thinking of like Jane the Virgin is coming to mind. And, you know, like, there's the narrator telling the story, and then there's you having the experience. And again, there's always going to be circumstances happening. But the voice of the narrator, the voice of how you choose to look at life, whether it's positive or more negative, whether you're approaching the scenario with humor or with frustration. The tone of the narrator is going to change the way we receive the story. 

The same is true for our brains. The way that we are narrating the story of our life is going to inform our body, our physical selves, how we should feel about the things that are happening in our outer experience. So I just want you to think about the power of really evaluating and looking at your month and getting accurate or even your day and getting accurate and deciding how you want to feel, choosing how you want to narrate your own life, and how wildly different your experience could be when the story that you're telling is in favor of your character, of you the heroine in the book, right? Or in the movie or the series, whatever we're talking about. 

So I want to encourage you to get accurate. What is the fact, the neutral fact, the neutral circumstance compared to the story that you're telling yourself, right? Are you looking at the fact that maybe you had no auditions last week and thinking zero auditions means my career is slowly dying. Or No one is calling me and my agents suck. Are you making the neutral circumstance of, you know, upcoming auditions mean, my life is going to be really busy and I'm going to put in a lot of effort and I might not get a return? Or are you looking at it and saying, Wow, my momentum is building and this is fucking cool, right? 

I want you to just be in the practice of using, again, everything that's happening as information to create the experience you want to have and starting to evaluate and use the skill and the tool of evaluating to serve you, to create what comes next, not based on the past. Based on the information, the value, the lessons, the experience, the challenge that came from whatever came before, right? We don't want to start creating and projecting into the future that, you know, well, November was, I don't know, kind of slow for auditions based on October, right, like I'm even just thinking about myself.

In October I had like 20 auditions on my calendar and in November I had like 5 or 6. And it's not good, bad, right, or wrong, but it makes sense that my brain wanted to look the disparity of the amount of auditions that I have and make it a problem because it was less than half, right? It was like literally a quarter of the auditions I did in October. So no wonder that my career, my performing career felt a little less present in my life in November. And again, it's not good, bad, right or wrong because I had other things going on that were magical and valuable and important to me and to my life, right? 

So this is where we get to start just deciding intentionally how we want to interpret the information that we're seeing, how we want to track and assess the trends and the sort of patterns that we're experiencing so that we can gain awareness and make changes. That's quite literally the only way you can start getting new results. And the thoughts that you're choosing to think are going to allow you to align with and intentionally choose how you want to feel while you're creating it.

Okay. So again, this episode, the takeaway that I hope you get from this is that you can use the process of evaluating to get really clear and accurate with what's going on in your life. So that we're not over dramatizing and choosing a narrator for your story that is very pessimistic, hopeless, you know, frustrated, bitter. All of the things.

I keep telling my clients, like this, if you're listening to this in real time, we're in December, we're in this end of the year holiday season, we can use that as fuel to inspire, to motivate, to create joy and to quite literally build momentum. And the career that you want doesn't have to feel like it's slowly diminishing or the idea of something happening right here right now is like no longer possible because we're in December and the year's already over and so it's a wash, right? 

Like again, just notice what voice you're narrating your journey with and intentionally decide. Look at your last month. Look at what's going on. And ask yourself, how can you create something different? And if you're not quite sure how to go about that, again, coaching is a space, a container for you to do exactly that. Okay? And so before we close out this episode, the last thing I want to remind you is that right now we are doing Money Makeover in Momentum. You can come and join us right now. You can be looking at your thoughts and how you're relating to your money and your spending and your career. All of it is quite literally the same, right? How we do one thing is how we do everything. And if we're moving with fear without seeing something yet, it's not good, bad, right or wrong, but we can move with faith. You can build trust. You can build belief one day at a time. And when you're building the belief before the result, it quite literally must come.

Okay. That's what I got for you this week. I look forward to seeing you inside of Momentum. and I'll meet you back here for another episode. 

Hey, I wanna invite you to get started because if this is blowing your mind, imagine the impact of when we actually work together. If you're committed to loving your life as an actor, singer, or dancer, come join us inside of The Performers Plan. You get lifetime access to the program, the community and high quality coaching for the rest of your career. Go to kelliyoungmanwellness.com/theperformersplan to join us now. I'll see you inside.