You may not get to choose what happens to you, but you still get to choose who you will be in the middle of it.

Who are you underneath all the roles you play, the expectations you carry, the things you've accomplished, and the opinions of everyone around you? And when life gets hard, how do you want to show up?

Coach, consultant, and mediator Sarah Murphy Kangas joins Willow for a thoughtful conversation about what it means to come home to your true self—to reconnect with who you really are and become more intentional about how you respond to the circumstances around you.

Sarah shares a powerful question she uses in her own life and with others: “How do I want to show up here?” We may not get to choose what happens to us, but we can become more aware of how we're responding and take an active role in our own mental and emotional health.

Together, Sarah and Willow talk about finding your true essence underneath your roles and accomplishments, allowing yourself to actually feel grief, anger, anxiety, and disappointment, and recognizing the patterns that can keep you stuck. They also explore the difference between taking responsibility for your own healing and trying to control or fix everyone around you.

This isn't about pretending hard things don't hurt or forcing yourself to “get over” them. It's about learning to move through what hurts, becoming present to yourself again, and recognizing the choices that are still yours to make.

If you've been feeling stuck, disconnected from yourself, or caught in patterns you don't know how to change, this conversation will encourage you to slow down, become curious about what's happening within you, and ask a simple but powerful question: How do I want to show up?

Meet Sarah Murphy Kangas

Sarah Murphy Kangas is a coach, consultant, mediator, business owner, wife, and mom with an MA in Organizational Psychology. She specializes in organizational trauma and healing, Enneagram training, mediation and conflict management, and leadership coaching. Sarah helps organizations and individuals intentionally live out their mission and values while creating space to discuss what she calls “the undiscussables.”

Sarah is also the creative voice behind In Praise of Leftovers and is passionate about helping people become more present to themselves so they can show up more authentically for others.

Key Takeaways

• When life hasn't gone the way you wanted: Recognize the difference between what you cannot control and the choices that still belong to you.
• When you're hurting: Don't rush yourself to “get over it.” Give grief, anger, fear, and sadness the space they need so you can move through them.
• When you keep reacting in ways you regret: Catch yourself in the pattern and ask, How do I want to show up here?
• When you feel responsible for fixing everyone: Notice whether you've stepped into the “hero” role and remember that other people are responsible for their own choices.
• When anxiety takes over: Slow down, reconnect with your body, and give yourself space to choose your response rather than immediately reacting.
• When you feel stuck: Ask for help. Reaching out to a trusted friend, mentor, therapist, or coach can be one of the first steps toward moving forward.

How This Episode Will Encourage You

You don't have to deny what happened, minimize your pain, or force yourself to “move on” in order to become unstuck. You can acknowledge what hurts and recognize that you still have choices about how you participate in your life.

Sarah's encouragement is simple but powerful: become present to yourself, notice the patterns keeping you stuck, ask for help when you need it, and keep asking, “Who do I want to be here?”

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Think of someone who you really like and want to be around. That's someone who's figured this out... that how they show up matters. And it's not even about what you say, but it is really about are they present? Are they present to themselves?

And if so, then they can be present to you.

Welcome to the We Collide Podcast. We're a growing community of everyday chicks colliding with Jesus in our mess, our pain, our joy, and our stories.

We value showing up as we truly are.

So that's what you'll find here, walls and masks being torn down so that we can allow Jesus to meet us where we truly are and hear about other women doing the same. We can't wait to collide with you.

Welcome to the We Collide Podcast.

I'm Willow Weston, the founder and director of Collide, and I'm super excited about the conversation that I get to have with Sarah Murphy Kangas today. She's a coach, a consultant, and a mediator.

She's also a business owner, a wife, a mom, an amazing food blogger over at In Praise of Leftovers and trust me, you salivate for more of what she makes. I just drive around in circles sometimes wishing she was open.

Sarah gives her life and wisdom and kindness to her local schools, to the dispute center, to her church, to her neighbors, to her friends.

She's one of the most thoughtful friends that doesn't do Hallmark, but instead she hand paints cards and sends little personalized gifts to unexpectedly bless the people she loves, including me. And I love that. And Sarah got her MA in Organizational psychology.

She specializes in organizational trauma and healing, enneagram training, mediation and conflict management, and leadership coaching. Sarah's an avid reader, a podcast fan, she loves walks in the forest.

She's one of the most intentional people I know when it comes to the choices she makes and why she makes them. She's a guru, helping businesses and individuals intentionally live out their own mission and values.

Sarah helps people discuss what she calls the undiscussables. She invites collaboration and as her friend, she makes you think.

Sarah thinks for saying no to all the other things that you could have said yes to, to be here and have this amazing conversation with me.

You're welcome. I am really digging that intro of myself. Kind of want to blow it up, hang it up in my office to remind myself of how awesome I am when I forget.

I can blow it up for you. I can totally do that.

So thank you. We're off to a good start already.

It's totally true and fun to see.

You behind A microphone or a different kind of microphone, I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This one's kind of a funny, funny one. So a couple weeks ago, you and I had this really great conversation that helped me in a lot of ways in something that I was wrestling with.

And you quoted Victor Frankl. And I'm wondering if you. We can start just by you sharing that quote and explaining why that has become so meaningful to you. Sure.

Do you have the quote right there?

I do.

Because I might butcher it.

There you go. Okay. Awesome.

This is pretty close to what I had said, but just in case. Well, so first, I think it's helpful to know who he was.

So he was a Jewish psychiatrist that was imprisoned in the death camps during World War II, during the Holocaust. And he survived, even though most of his family did not.

And he ended up writing a book called Man's Search for Meaning, which I think I got my copy at Goodwill, like, 20 years ago, and it's under a hundred pages. I think you can find paperback copies lots of places.

That's my kind of book right there.

Yeah. And I think mine has, like, a picture of the ocean on the front. And one of the things that he's most famous for saying is the following.

Everything can be taken from a man or woman, but one thing, the last of the human freedoms. To choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. So, I mean, I think we spent 10 hours on this.

You know, here was someone who had every reason to be embittered, to be hateful, to be depressed, to give up on life, to disengage. And, you know, he was seeing people die around him. He was starving and tortured himself.

You know, we really can't imagine a worse situation than the Holocaust. But still, in spite of that, he says that we still all have the freedom to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances. So he's not saying.

He's not being Pollyanna like, that. The world doesn't have hard things.

Again, we really can't argue with someone who's survived what he survived, but that we still, if we're present and if we've kind of done our own work, even in the hardest of external circumstances, we can still ask ourselves, how do I want to show up here? And no one can take that away from us. And there's just a bazillion applications of this idea.

One of the ways I use it most frequently is that when I go in and consult to workplaces where there is discontent and unhappiness or maybe sometimes even trauma. There's always good reasons why things are as bad as they are. The organization ran out of money. They had a boss who was dishonest.

Their past CEO embezzled money. I mean, I've seen it all. And so I'll go in and work with a leadership team who is blaming everyone else for the place that they're in.

They're stuck, they're disgruntled, they're not collaborating with each other, the organization's not flourishing. And I often quote Viktor Frankl and say, all those things that have happened to you in this organization, they're all true.

And some of them are really horrible. But you guys right here, you can actually write a new story if you want to.

And I'm tearing up when I say that because I think that's good news for us. That again, it's not that hard, things don't happen. But it's that this last of human freedoms is something no one can take away from us.

And I think that's good news for us.

Yeah. You know, when you talk to me about this, I love that, that part of the quote where he says everything can be taken from a man.

And I think that's something that so many of us can resonate with. I think about our work here at Collide with Women. And I think in a lot of ways women feel like things have been taken from them.

I mean, I started to think like some of the women I know, their husbands are leaving them and the money and the house and you know, they've been stay at home moms for years and they have to re identify with what does it look like for me to have to go figure out who I am now and get a job and do all of the things, you know, women have had their sense of safety stripped from them because they were sexually assaulted. There's, you know, a lot of women who feel like their sense of respect was taken away because society has expected them to be something they're not.

Or women who feel like their innocence once stolen because they've been objectified sexually, or women who wanted to have babies and that that dream has been crushed because they're unable to have children.

And I just think about all these ways that women feel like everything has been taken away from them or the things that they desire, the things that they wish they still had. And this idea that Victor Frankel's reminding us, we still have this one thing. We have choice.

My question I wanted to ask you is how do you see women forgetting they still have a choice as to what attitude they'll bring in any circumstance they face. Like, how are you seeing that with women?

Well, and I don't work just with women, for sure, but, you know, I think when we have real suffering in our lives, whether it's personal or professional, we're not going to quote Viktor Frankl immediately on the heels of that, right?

Nope.

We're not going to come straight out of domestic abuse or straight out of a miscarriage or straight out of being fired from our job and say, well, at least I still have the last of my human freedom.

Right? Good old Victor said. Right.

I mean, there's real, you know, there's a developmental arc, there's a pathway that our suffering takes. And I think there's real wisdom in the negative emotions. Marian Greenspan wrote a book called Healing through the Negative Emotions.

It's kind of thick. Probably not all of you would want to read it, but it's my go to when it comes to how does anger help us, how does fear help us?

How does despair help us? We actually have to feel those things. They're serving a function in our life. The pain's there for a reason.

I don't think the things that happen to us are for a reason. I think that's just life. Suffering is part of life.

But if we let ourselves feel despair, if we let ourselves feel fear or anxiety or all those other things, I actually think that's the first step to getting to a place where we can stand with Viktor Frankl and say, I still have the freedom to choose my way, but we can't take what I call and what lots of other people call the spiritual bypass and kind of want to end up there saying that side by side with Viktor Frankl before we have felt the other stuff. So there's real wisdom in giving that healing journey the time and attention that it takes.

Yeah, definitely.

I mean, we talk a lot about that at Kolide that all have these, you know, experiences with women in conversations where layers upon layers, years and decades of things that have added up that they've never dealt with. And. And here they are and they're sitting here and it's almost like it caught up to them.

But then when they began to explore it, they thought they just had to kind of sweep it under the rug, pull themselves up by the bootstraps, move on. And they never sat in the pain.

And I think the whole idea when we talk a lot about Jesus running into our lives is that he can handle the pain, he can handle the rage. He can handle the doubt. He can handle all the stuff.

But the thing is, sometimes we don't think he can, and we don't feel we can, and we certainly don't believe others can. So we don't allow ourselves to sit in that place and ask God to bring healing.

And then we wonder why we're still carrying the pain 20 years down the road.

Right, right. If we don't pay attention to it, it will just get more insistent,.

Which is so true. Physical pain. Yeah.

And so, you know, the crazy thing is, is that we can handle it and that. You know, I always talk about strong like rubber, not steel.

So if you think of like a alpine plant like up at Artist Point, Mount Baker, that's coming up through the snow, it's built to withstand feet and feet and feet of snow on top of it, over the winter, it doesn't die. In the spring, it starts springing up.

If we don't deal with our negative emotions, we become brittle like steel, where a wind can come along and crack us into. So strong, like rubber, not steel, is like that wind can come along and it will be painful and it will be hard.

We'll feel like we're uprooted, but in fact we're still standing.

And Joan Halifax, who is one of the founders of the hospice movement, she's a Buddhist monk, she talks about how then feeling our negative emotions, both for ourselves and for other people, compassion, when we really let ourselves feel someone else's pain, that that actually strengthens us instead of weakens us.

And so the metaphor that I always use is if you've ever, like, gone to the gym after a year of not going to the gym, and you're like, oh, yeah, I'm going to hit the weights. And you get in there and you overdo it and your say your biceps are really sore the next day.

The soreness actually comes from little micro tears in your muscles. And as those micro tears heal post workout, that's actually what builds your muscles. It's actually what makes you stronger.

So we don't get stronger without the micro tears. Right.

And so a really cheesy way of saying that is no pain, no gain, right? I guess maybe that's a shallow way. Sarah, leave it to me to help you out here. So wait, so you're.

You're laying out that this idea that Viktor Frankl is, is sharing is. It doesn't mean subsiding or acting like things aren't hard.

We actually have to sit in those places but still come out on the other end Knowing that we have the ability to choose our attitude to those circumstances. Yeah.

And, or maybe there's really no such thing as coming out the other end. It's more just like companioning that grief or that sadness or that loss.

I was with two clients recently who were working through a really hard thing in their work relationship. And one of them said to the other, you know, I want to just get past this.

And I interrupted and I said, I think that what happened was so hurtful that there is not such a thing as getting past this, but there is such a thing as getting through. They're different. And thankfully these two clients really became present to each other. And I think they will get through this.

But they were, they were kind of laboring under this idea that they would somehow be able to put, put it behind them. And I really don't think the human psyche allows for that. I, and I don't believe in forgive and forget, for instance.

I think we can forgive each other, but I mean, if someone really hurt you, are you going to totally forget it? I think instead there's not a way past, there's a way through.

We learn to companion that sense of grief or that sense of rejection, and that is what makes us stronger. Not saying, I don't want to talk about that, that's that brittleness and we'll snap if that's our orientation.

It's interesting as you're talking because I'm thinking about, and I have a few friends who are going through a divorce. And, and I was in conversation with one of them recently and she was sort of describing how she's doing.

And she has days where, you know, she's doing life, taking the kids to and fro, showing up to work.

But then she has days where, and she was almost surprised when she's talking to me that she's having days where she feels like she can't leave the house, she doesn't want to get out of bed, she can't stop crying. And my immediate response was, let's stop for a second and recognize what's happening here.

Yeah, like almost like I think I see sometimes that we think we should already be over something, like you said, on the other side of something that we should, that somehow, like, it's been months and I, I'm getting divorced, the papers are saying I should, I should be past this. And I almost had to pause her and say, you're talking about 20 years of your life like a complete upside down change for you.

You're talking about not having a companion on Saturdays. And who do you call when you're having a bad day? And who do you watch stupid TV shows with?

And, you know, culturally, we're horrible at giving people the time they need to grieve. We have all sorts of arbitrary markers. You should be over it in a year.

And actually, divorce is even worse, because if someone dies, that's almost the one time culturally, we let people just be completely incapacitated.

But if it's divorce or the loss of a friendship or all the other kinds of grief and loss we encounter in our lives, we even give less license for that. And I think the reason we don't. There's a few reasons why we don't want to see other people sad.

One is that it reminds us how fallible and precarious life actually is. We don't want to be reminded of that. It's too much reality.

Two, it kind of cramps our style a little bit if that's someone that we were used to going and having fun with, and all of a sudden they're really sad. Three, we don't actually know how to respond to each other when we're feeling that way. I think culturally we're getting better at that.

There's more good stuff out there about, what do you say to someone who's grieving? What do you say to someone who's in the midst of loss? But in general, we're pretty uncomfortable with the negative emotions. Instead, we numb out.

All of us. We all have ways of numbing out. We shop, we pick up our phones, we drink, we work too much. We all have ways.

Are you snapping out? No, I'm just kidding.

We're equalizing. We could all go down that list, you know. Yeah.

Do you have a drone?

Do you have my address?

Calm down. Everybody calm down. Okay. There's something you say a lot, just in friendship with you.

But I. I hear you say it when you're talking about your work with people and you say that this sentence. How do I want to show up here? Talk about that a little bit.

Yeah.

That we have that. We have that.

That power.

That power. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I mean, think of someone in your life who you really like and want to be around.

Like, kind of no matter what, you know, if you call them, you're going to enjoy being in their presence.

Me?

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

Gotcha. And to the listeners out there.

I got it.

That's someone who's figured this out,.

That.

How they show up matters. And it's not even about what you say. Certainly words are part of It. But it is really about, are they present? Are they present to themselves?

And if so, then they can be present to you. And that's really when I fight, when I feel like I'm having a hard time connecting with someone.

It's usually because they're not present to themselves and there's nothing there for me to latch onto. And I mean, the true self.

What do you mean? Break that down a little bit. This is new language for people. Present to yourself?

Yeah.

What does it look like to be present to yourself?

Well, there's lots of ways to put this kind of throughout different spiritual traditions and in psychological language, too, which I'm not a therapist, I'm not a psychologist, but, you know, Richard Rohr talks about the true self and the false self. The Franciscan friar, who's my favorite, my kids said we need an 8 by 10 of him blown up signed in our house because I quote him so much.

8 By 10 might be too small, actually.

But how would your husband feel about this?

Well, I don't know. It's kind of a sticking point.

Oh, geez. Okay, moving on.

But so he would call it the true self and the false self. In enneagram language, which is the psycho spiritual personality tool that I teach, they would call it essence versus personality.

Or another way to talk about it would be ego and the soul.

So it's this idea that when I say, when being present to ourselves or connecting with ourselves, what I'm talking about is connecting with our true self or with our essence or with our soul. Not personality, not ego, not false self.

So my way I always talk about this is like, if you think of a Russian nesting doll that has all those layers in it, and maybe the outside five or six dolls have that seam around the middle, and you can pull them apart. And those outside ones are the things that we think make us who we are. And those are things like our personality.

Like, I'm an enf, my parachute's color is red. Or I'm an enneagram 5 or whatever. So our personality is one of those layers, roles in our life. I'm a mother, I'm a sister, I'm a daughter.

Our education. I have an mba. I have a BA I have my gre, whatever that is our profession, you know, I'm a nurse, I'm a pastor, I'm a race car driver, whatever.

And all those things, we mistake those layers for our actual essence, and they're different. So in traditional Russian nesting dolls, in the middle is a little teeny doll that doesn't have a seam around the middle. It can't be divided.

You can't pull it apart. It's one carved piece. That's our essence. And our essence can't be harmed or lost. And Viktor Frankl had to have known that.

Otherwise no way could he have survived and said these things afterward. He had to have known in those darkest days of his life that his essence couldn't be harmed or lost.

And I think that that message is even harder to get as we become more superficially connected to each other through social media and all of those kinds of things. And sort of the horrible sin of comparison, it is so easy to forget that our essence can't be harmed or lost.

And until we come home to ourselves, until we understand that we're going to have a hard time showing up for other people. And what I talk with leaders about is that their primary job is to have a non anxious presence.

That even in the swirl, even when things are changing, even when they lost their market share, even when they fired the HR director, all the crazy things that can happen in life and in organizational life, that it's possible for us to show up with a non anxious presence.

And again, it doesn't mean, excuse me, that there aren't problems, but those problems aren't going to be any better, be made better by our reactivity.

So it's coming home to ourselves and finding that settled, grounded place, that true self, that essence, that soul, and operating from that place instead of what do people think about me, am I successful enough, am I spiritual enough, et cetera, all those other outer layers of the Russian nesting dollar that we can mistake.

For our true self, which happened to be a lot of the things we're trying to present to people. Right. I mean that's absolutely. I want you to think I'm amazing at this. I'm an amazing mom, I'm an amazing minister, I'm all these things.

And so we start to be, we're almost kind of trading those things. Like here, let me hand you Russian doll Michelle. Right, right. Yeah.

And so, and I actually think there's a chronological component component to this too. And in Richard Rohr's book Falling Upward, he talks about the first and second half of life.

And he would say roughly until age 40, we're in our first half of life and afterwards second half of life chronologically, and that is it. There's tons of exceptions, but that's almost when the other shifts start to happen. Is that. Did anyone ever tell you before you turned 40?

Oh, once I turned 40, I stopped caring what other people think about me. Some people told me that, yes.

They also told me, your greatest sex life is in your 30s. Crap. Has it come yet? You're 38. We're really on.

But so I actually.

So it wasn't 40 on the dot, but I have actually found that the chronology of my life does have something to do with it, is that we spend birth to 40 being attached to our personality. And in the second half of life we have the opportunity to let that go. But obviously it does not automatically happen.

We've all met people in their 70s who are very attached to their personality and their ego and the image they have in the world. And those are the people I don't want to be around. They aren't in the process of letting go.

They aren't in the process of operating from their essence. Certainly it can happen earlier in life, especially for people who've experienced great suffering. I've noticed.

But that's the invitation to us as we get older is like, am I going to keep operating with like this? Keep playing with the same set of cards? Because I'm not winning with them. Right.

So. Or I can't keep up.

I can't keep up. And so what else is out there? Yeah, what other engines can I run on?

Yeah.

So tell me a little bit about when people, you're talking about people and the choice and the attitude that they bring to the table that they get to choose, you know, who they. I love, I love the example of the non anxious leader.

I'm over here taking notes, but I, but I all of a sudden started picturing like, what if every parent said that to themselves and they went home tonight and they said, I'm gonna bring a non anxious mom or dad to this.

Wouldn't that be amazing?

Or whatever it is. Because even though we're anxious, it doesn't help anything. You know, I love, I love that you said that.

Why do you think even though we know that we keep bringing a different person to the table than we want to be?

Well, I think it's because, you know, when we're stressed, which modern life, we're basically operating at a stress level that's unsustainable every day when we're stressed, we reach for unilateral control. We like do things the way we've always done them because we don't have the space to be more creative than that.

And so we might have a moment on our meditation cushion or at church on a Sunday morning where we feel non anxious. That's wonderful.

But we are very unpracticed about how to take that out into the rest of our lives so we can have all the, you know, peaceful prayer times we want, but they don't, they're not really doing their job.

If it also doesn't come out in how we are with our kids, if it also doesn't come out in how we are with that co worker that bugs the crap out of us, it doesn't matter. If it doesn't come out in how we are with our spouse when they disappoint us.

And so we've got to learn how to take those moments out into the rest of our life. And so what I talk with to myself about and with my clients about is like catching ourselves in the actual.

So I had a client yesterday that would just describe herself as a really anxious person imagining worst case scenarios. And so what we were talking about is, is there a way she can catch herself in the act and say I'm doing that thing again.

I'm kind of spinning, I'm imagining the worst case scenario. I'm operating from that place.

Instead of like getting on the slide and going all the way down the chute and kind of ending up at that know you're going to end up at and you're tired of ending up at. So it's like it's not that she's going to all of a sudden become a non anxious person. That's like her disability in life.

Just like my disability in life is always wanting to be right, you know, like we all have something. So it's not that that's going to be eradicated, it's that we can lovingly manage it.

And she can say to herself, I'm about to do that thing where I don't let my kid go outside and play because I'm imagining the worst case scenario. What choice do I want to make right now?

Self talk.

Yes.

I'm always talking to myself. Self.

Well, you kind of, you take yourself aside lovingly. You take yourself aside, you have a little talk with yourself and you say you kind of know how this is going to go if that's how you choose to react.

So what else do you want to do? We learn so slowly though. That's the bitch of it. That's the bummer of it. You know, I'm 44 and you know, this is not something I have down pat.

Yeah, we really learn the hard way.

We're going to be 85 and be.

Like, show up to the table as.

The person you want to be. You know, I. I kind of want to hear you.

Your thoughts on this and break this down a bit, but I want to lead into it a little bit because we talk around here, obviously collide. We. We look at collisions with Jesus in the New Testament, and there's this collision that happens where Jesus collides with this man.

He's been paralyzed for 38 years, and he's waiting at these. These healing waters that he thought promised him healing.

And Jesus kind of shows up on a scene, and he asked him this very, I think, poignant question, and I think it gets glossed over a lot,.

But he says, do you want to be healed?

Yeah. Do you want to get well?

And the word want, I've done some study on it, and it's the word thilo, which means to not only will something, but it's to press on to action.

And Jesus, when he asked this question, it's almost like he's asking all these other questions, like, if you want to get well, why aren't you acting like it? Or if you want to get well, what are you doing to walk towards health? Like, I've thought about all these things that it brings up in me when I hear.

When I allow Jesus to ask me that question, about areas that I don't feel like are as healthy as I want them to be. And I love this passage, I think, because it challenges our learned helplessness.

And for those that are listening, I'm going to read the definition of learned helplessness. A conditioned behavior in which an individual gives up trying to escape a painful situation after repeatedly failing to escape.

So learned helplessness is kind of like, I've been hurt. I'll always get hurt. I've never been able to move. I'll never be able to move. I keep getting disappointed. I'll be disappointed again.

And I'm wondering, because we're kind of talking about choice.

But a lot of what keeps us stuck is this inability to see that we actually have choice or that we could walk towards health or what are we doing to participate in the life that God's given us.

And I think a lot of people who are pursuing God are just waiting for God to, like, come down and give us the miracle or the change we're looking for. And Jesus shows up to this guy, and he says, do you want to get well? So I'm just wondering what you.

What you think about this idea that sometimes we just act like we have no choice in our circumstances, and that's what keeps us stuck.

Yeah, well. And I think learned helplessness takes different forms. So you, you know, the victim is the one you mentioned. Right. It's got apathy, giving up.

Everything is done to me. I'm not the actor in my own life. And there are at least two other ways that we go into habituated patterns. One is the villain.

So this is somebody else's fault, and I'm going to get back at them. Sometimes with women, this can take some more subtle forms. They're just as harmful. So that's one way.

Another way that we can react with learned helplessness. And another way is to be the hero. I have to get in and fix this. If I don't do it, nobody will. All three.

That's so interesting. Hero, villain.

The drama triangle is what it's called.

Yeah, the drama triangle.

Yeah.

Wow. Take notes, people.

And so actually, all three of those places, all three of those responses to the suffering and hardship and frustrations of our life. I don't. I don't think that when. When Jesus said to the man waiting by the healing waters, do you want to be healed?

I think what Jesus was saying is, and I'm tearing up, but do you want a way out of that?

Do you want to wait out of that drama triangle where you can't do anything, or it's always somebody else's fault, or it has to be you that saves the day? I don't think any three of those places are faithful positions from which to live our life. They all get us into trouble.

And I especially see a lot of Christian women in the hero place that gets us into trouble just like the other ones. And so I think what Jesus is saying is, you want a way out of that, and if you do, I'm your guy. But see, a lot of us don't want a way out.

We think we don't. We're totally addicted to how it feels to be in that drama triangle because it lets us off the hook. We don't have to take responsibility.

We don't have to take that next scary step. We don't have to be vulnerable. We just say we play the victim, we play the villain, we play the hero, and it's somebody else's fault.

And that's what I think true life in Christ offers us a way out of. And it's a lifetime journey. It's not something you can just, like, put on your calendar for Monday morning.

Bummer.

But, you know, I don't want to come to the end of my life and be in that triangle. I want to come to the end of my life having Put myself in a position to feel and soak up the rays of God's love.

And I think we really block those with getting stuck in that triangle. And so instead, I want to just be present to whatever is there, not try to manipulate it, not try to manage it, and show up with openness.

And if I have anxiety to recognize it's there, instead of act like I don't have it, or put it in the driver's seat and take a breath. Right.

So I haven't talked about embodiment very much, but that's been a big part of my spiritual journey, is that we actually have three centers of intelligence. We have our head, which Western culture really prefers and speaks to kind of our executive functioning. That where we make decisions.

And it's also the place where we go into flight or fight. Like the amygdala tells us, get away from here or fight for your life or freeze. So our brain is one center of intelligence.

So we have our heart, which is how we're connected to other people. And I increasingly see, culturally, we are talking about that more. We still haven't got to the body part. So taking a breath.

And if you have a mindfulness practice, you more quickly connect with what I'm talking about. But that. Actually, there's all kinds of research that shows that if you take a deep breath in and out for about nine seconds total.

So if we time ourselves right now, that would be. You want to time me, Willow for nine?

Hey, I have a timer right in front of me.

Okay. Awesome. So tell me when that's over.

Okay.

How many seconds was that?

That was now. It's fine.

Okay. Okay. Let's try it one more time.

Okay. For those listening, you can try it.

You can try it, too. Okay.

Ready, set, breathe. Okay, we made it through the tunnel.

Wasn't that long. Now, compare that to how we normally breathe. Short, shallow breaths, which actually induce anxiety.

So one thing I'm learning in my 40s is to stop and take a breath. I used to hate it when people said that. I used to be like, that's not going to help. I just thought that's a stupid thing to say, you know?

And what I'm figuring out is that it connects me to my body. It helps me not rush in to save the day. I'm usually the hero in that triangle.

It helps me not rush in to save the day, helps me trust what's happening in the moment. And I'm reminded that every moment is a gift.

And my breath, which is an involuntary function of my body is actually sustaining me without me telling it to imagine that something happening without me telling it to.

Right. An involuntary response.

Yes.

God given.

Yes.

Yeah.

And so that's what helps me sometimes kind of know I'm in the drama triangle and decide if I want to make a shift or not and get back up to that place of presence.

Yeah. I mean, I just. It's interesting to.

To listen to you, but also to see you emotional about the drama triangle and really interesting to hear about it, because I do. When I think about myself and I think about others, it is so easy. You can. You can obviously migrate to be one or the other.

But it's interesting to see you see seem so emotional about it. Do you think that has to do with your life work? Really? Seems like you're helping organizations get unstuck, individuals get unstuck.

Yeah, I'm in a helping profession.

Yeah. To help people fully realize their potential. So tell me a little bit about why you feel so emotional about that.

Well, for those of you who are familiar with the Enneagram, I'm a type one, but you don't need to. I'll tell you what that is. You don't know anything about it. But a one is the reformer.

That's one of the names for a type one, the idealist, the reformer, the teacher. So ones are driven by. Our primary motivation is to be good. So. Or to be right.

And so it just makes perfect sense to me when I look back over my life that I got into work.

That.

Was helping people live a more righteous, aligned life. Right. I mean, it makes perfect sense, and that's not bad.

But my journey has been one of relaxing into the okay Ness of life instead of trying to reform everything and everyone. And when I'm in that reforming place, the person I'm hardest on is myself. So I'm hard on myself so that I'm hard on other people.

So even something that's said that the words aren't actually judgmental, I can still give a flavor of judgment when I say it if I'm not in that place of being relaxed into the flow of life and into the goodness of God. And so when I find myself in the drama triangle playing the hero, I'm not helpful to other people. I'm really just, like, trying to muscle it out.

So one of my growing edges as a coach and consultant and mediator is to really let my clients take responsibility for where they want to land.

To not push them, to not push for a happy ending, to not try to wrap things up just So I can feel like I was doing my job the way I was supposed to, but to give them that last of human freedoms, to choose.

I was just gonna say that's so empowering, the idea that God gives us, in a sense, a choice. That a God with, you know, an Adam's apple in elbows who weeps and eats bread and serves wine like that God would say, do you want to get well?

That he actually gives us a choice in how we participate in our own life and health. That we also. That's empowering. That's love. But also like that we get to allow other people to decide.

Yeah.

How they're gonna show up to the table and that it's not our responsibility. Every day when we drop our kids off at this at school, we don't have to take responsibility for who they're choosing to be.

Obviously we can engage them as parents, but they're going to ultimately decide who they want to be. The same as our spouse and what our spouse chooses to bring to the table. And our employees and our co workers.

And our kids as teachers. And we just get so moralistic about the way we think people should do things.

Yeah.

And that's where I have continued. I've had just more and more vistas of freedom in my life is just certainly there are things. I have many social justice streams in my life.

There are many things I feel like we are called to take a stand for, and I personally am called to take a stand for. But all the things I used to think were so important in that batch of things, they've starting to fall away. I just.

I feel like what I'm learning as I get older is that there's a wide range of normal. And just because someone is doing something differently than I would do, it doesn't mean I have to make it my business.

Boy, it gives me a lot more time to hear my own voice and to do things that are life giving when I'm not poking my nose into everybody else's.

Right. You actually have time to lean into the things you want to do.

Yeah.

So as you think about. Because we could talk forever, but as you think about people listening to this today who feel stuck, like, who feel like.

And maybe can even recognize that. That they're keeping themselves there.

Yeah.

Like how. How do you want to encourage them?

Yeah.

Well, I always joke that the people who call me for help, whether it's a executive or a life coaching client or a team that's in trouble, they're halfway there because they asked for help. So I always joke that the people who really need my services, I don't ever hear from. So I just want to make a plug for asking for help.

If you find yourself in that place of stuckness, we can feel really embarrassed about that. Like, I shouldn't be stuck. I have this going for me. I have that going for me. There are kids starving in Africa.

I should be able just to, you know, give myself a little pep talk and get back at it. And if you could, you would. Right. So if you're stuck, you're stuck.

So just the vulnerability to reach out and say to a friend or to a mentor or to a therapist or to a coach, I feel really stuck. Can you help me sort that out? You are really. If you can do that, you're 50% of the way there.

That's encouraging.

And again, if you knew exactly why you were stuck, you wouldn't be. That's the definition of stuck. So. And I think the measure of unstuckness is that we have more joy in our life, even despite hard circumstances.

And so if your life is joyless, it's probably a little clue to you that you're stuck in some way and you need some unclogging.

Right? Yeah.

Or you keep being that anxious leader, that anxious parent, that person where you're bringing to the table what you know you don't want to, what you know.

You don't want to, but it's just, like, the only tool you have, and you keep pulling it out.

It's amazing to me how God gives us each other. I think God's given you to the world to help people get unstuck so they can figure out their potential.

And I think about the gift that's been to me, but I also think about other people. I mean, I just had a meeting this last week with a leadership coach. It's not a leadership coach. Like, oh, I pay you and you.

It's just someone who's taken an investment into me, and I felt like my head was spinning in circles of this crazy Growing Pains of the Collide story. And. And I'm holding the bag going, okay, we're. We're like, moving to another. Like, another land almost. And.

And I'm a leader, and I have to figure out how to take us there and stay healthy and stay organic and true to our values, not lose hard on why, you know, all these things. And all it really took was that. Exactly what you said.

Going and sitting with someone for an hour and just processing, like, how I'm feeling stuck and just seeing it with new eyes, fresh perspective, someone's wisdom because they've been there, you know, 10 years.

We're not hardwired to go it alone. So I really think when people say, God doesn't give us more than we can bear.

Nadia Bolz Weber, the Lutheran pastor from Denver, she interprets that as, God doesn't give us more than we can bear. We collective. That is not aimed at individuals.

It's because there are things we can't bear in life, and that's when we need to huddle together and bear them together. And that's what asking for help does. It says, you know what? I'm not up to this. I need some help.

And chances are there are many people in your life who are waiting to be asked. Maybe they have no idea you're struggling.

Yeah.

Because you haven't said so, and it doesn't seem like you are.

Yeah. And it's really simple to just pick up the phone and say, I need to process. I need to talk. I need someone to pray over me. I'm not doing well.

Can you go on a walk? But also to call someone like you and say, my organization's drowning a bit and I need. I need.

I don't know what to do. Yeah, I feel like I should know what to do, but I don't. Now we say to my clients, I can work with. I don't know what to do. I can't work with.

I'm calling you because I want these other people in my organization to get their act together. And I said, well, then I'm not the right person for you.

That's like, so many marriages, right. They go into a counseling office and they're like, yes.

No, I'm here because I need you, the counselor, to tell my husband everything that needs to change about his life. Right.

Yeah. Or pick your relationship. Right.

Totally. Totally. Well, and I love that this. This idea of we don't go it alone.

Speaking of the collision we talked about today, like, the idea that we have a God who's standing right there and saying, do you want this? Because you're just relying on yourself to get to a place that you can't even walk to.

And I'm standing right here, and I'm offering you my help, and you need to take it. Like, extend, reach your hand out and take my help. Right.

So we had a lady who came in the office, our new space, last week, and I shared a little bit about it on another podcast. But one interesting thing she said to me was she walked in and she Said, this is my last hope.

And literally was weeping and really meant that, like, she's not well. Could barely drive to our office.

As we started talk, I just said, I'm so proud of you that you were so brave to come here and we will get you the help you need. And she started weeping and she said, I don't know if I believe in act. I don't know if I believe in faith, but I believe in acts of kindness.

And I said, all the acts of kindness you're experiencing are your God.

He's looking around and out for you and at every corner he's trying to remind you that you matter and that you're loved and that he wants to care for you. And so I guess I share that just because I think it's. It's not easy to face the things we face.

I mean, like ending with the Viktor Frankl quote, right? It's not easy what he faced, but he's saying we have a choice.

Yeah, we still have that. We still have that. Yeah, that's our essence. That, no, that can't be lost or harmed is still in there.

And our job isn't to, like, make that, it's just to uncover it.

Thank you for hanging out. Yeah, it was awesome. Sarah, how can people connect with you?

I have a website, just my name, saramurphykangas.com and you can find my email there. And In Praise of Leftovers is like my food artsy kind of Instagram feed.

I don't have one for my consulting practice, but yeah, I would love for anyone to reach out, whether it's because you or someone you know might benefit from working with me or just to drop a line would be wonderful.

We'll catch you next week on the podcast. Thanks for hanging out.