Life is messy. Yours, mine, everyone's. And somewhere along the way we decided that was the problem. Something to clean up before we're allowed to be happy.

It's not.

I'm Amanda Hess, certified life coach, and this episode is about a trap I watch women live in for years. The "I'll be happy when." When the house is calm. When the hard thing is over. When I finally have it together.

The messy and the hard don't come in a separate box from the beautiful and the fulfilling. Same box. Same life. It's 50/50, and that's not proof you're failing. That's just how it works.

So we stop waiting for the mess to clear. We lean in. And then we do the part that actually shifts things. We stop obsessing over what we're doing wrong and we start looking at what we want. Where we're going. Because that's the question that matters, and it's the one most of us never get to. We're too busy grading ourselves.

Takeaways:

1. The mess isn't blocking the good life. It's part of it. Stop waiting for a cleaner version that was never coming.
2. "Once I clean this up, then I'll thrive" is the trap. The hard and the beautiful come together. Same life, same day, both at once.
3. Life is 50/50. When you stop reading the hard half as proof you're behind, you can finally be where you actually are.
4. Drop the idea of "normal." Chasing it keeps you measuring your life against a standard that doesn't exist.
5. The move that changes everything: stop obsessing over what you're doing wrong and start building what feels right. What do you want? Where are you going? That matters more.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. amandahess.ca/bookacall

Hey, I'm Amanda Hess.

I'm a certified life coach.

But what you need to know is I'm a sensitive woman just like you, and I'm going to help you understand yourself better so that you can approach your life differently and feel really good about it.

Let's go.

Hey, my friend, let's talk about life being messy, shall we?

This is a constant theme of something that I coach on in my coaching practice, and it's an essential understanding for anyone that is navigating life.

I would like to paint a picture of the woman who is doing sort of the constant audit.

She's scanning her life for everything that's off.

The messy house, the hard conversation, the thing that fell apart again, the.

And the belief running underneath that once I clean this up, once I get past this hard thing, once I get past the hard part, then my life will improve.

Like the mess and the hard are the toll booth that she has to clear before she's allowed to arrive or to thrive.

And what I want you to know is, is that woman, she's waiting for a version of her life that doesn't exist.

And the waiting is costing her the life she's got right now.

The thing that most people don't understand is that when life is hard, and a lot of times, if you're listening to this podcast, you're living through something hard.

When life is hard, your brain is going to really focus on it.

Now, if you're in a really difficult scenario, a really difficult situation that you do need to get through, like, let's say you're in the middle of a war or you're fighting for your life, we want our brain to do this.

This is how we want it to show up.

But the reality is, for most of us, our day to day life isn't that even when our brain tries to convince us that it is.

I've had multiple conversations with clients this week about many of the hard things that are showing up in their life.

People dying, people possibly going to jail, people getting really sick, people's businesses having massive failure.

All of these things can seem like, oh, my goodness, you're right, your brain needs to focus on all of this for you to be okay.

But generally speaking, unless we're speaking about an immediate emergency, it's not an emergency and we don't need our brain to focus on this 24 7.

Regardless of what you're dealing with, there needs to be an understanding that an amazing life is a messy life.

Right now.

What a lot of people believe is the message their brain is sending them, which is that the amazing life and the messy hard life are two different lives and that she's stuck in the wrong one, trying to earn her way into the good one.

So the hard life feels like proof that she's behind.

And what I really think is the most important thing to understand is that life is 50 50.

We have to be able to lean into the understanding that life will always be and has always been 50.

It's not two lives.

The messy and the hard aren't in the way of the amazing and the fulfilling.

They come in the same package, the same day, the same relationships, the same beautiful life.

You don't get the deep love without the hard conversations.

You don't get the meaningful work without the parts that wreck you a little.

It's 50, 50.

And that's not a defect, that's not a problem.

That's the deal.

So when you can start leaning into the understanding that life is always going to be 50 50, and you can lean the whole way in, including the hard half, that's the pivot that actually changes things.

This is the part that saves your happiness.

Deciding that it's supposed to be messy will take the pressure off of you, but it's not the finish line.

The move is honestly where you point your attention next.

When you stop obsessing over how you're doing it wrong, you free up all that energy to look at what is actually good, what you do want.

And the biggest part of this, which is you have the energy to look at where you are going.

Because that question matters so much more than how am I measuring up right now?

That one keeps you stuck.

It keeps you grading the past and it blocks you from building your future versus where am I going Creates your future.

What I find is that the I'm doing it wrong loop is where we end up getting very stuck.

And in doing that, our whole life starts shrinking and disappearing.

Every time we ask ourselves, why don't I have what I want from the standpoint of what's wrong with me and why can't I create it?

What did I do wrong in the past?

How did I choose the wrong relationship?

How did I choose the wrong job?

How did I, People, please.

Instead of standing up for myself, how did I do X, Y, Z right?

How did I basically essentially fuck this up and create this?

Because I need to fix that so that I don't make a mistake next time?

When we lean into that particular dynamic, what we do is we shrink and get small.

We experience shame, we experience guilt, we experience Frustration we experience overwhelm.

What do we do?

We do less.

What happens to our confidence, it shrinks.

What happens to our self esteem?

It starts to disappear.

People say to me all the time, amanda, I want to be more confident.

Yes.

The way you get more confident is not by not screwing up.

That's not how.

I have screwed up so many times in my life.

And the most successful people, the most successful people I've ever met have screwed up in ways that you probably couldn't even imagine.

We're talking massive bankruptcies.

We're talking massive messy divorces.

We're talking really hard shit.

Right?

The difference between them and you is not that they are better than you or that they figured it out more than you or that they somehow have some special quality that you don't have.

That is not true.

What has happened is they have embraced the fact that, hey, I'm not always going to know what to do.

I'm not always going to get it right.

The pursuit of perfection is poison.

Instead, I am going to learn how to release and forgive what I didn't know how to do, what I didn't know how to handle.

I'm going to understand that life essentially is extremely messy.

Too often when I'm talking to somebody, they will say to me, Amanda, what is the normal response here?

How would a normal person do this?

And I'm always going to respond the same way, which is what is normal?

Who decides what normal is?

Is that the mean?

The median?

The average?

Like, how do we look?

What if there's no such thing as normal?

And I'm going to tell you there's no such thing as normal.

There's not a normal way to be in a marriage.

There's not a normal way to be single.

There's not a normal way to be employed.

There's not a normal way to be an entrepreneur.

There's not a normal way to be a mother.

There's not a normal way to be a stepmother.

There's not a normal way to be a daughter.

There's no such thing as normal.

There's not a normal way to handle anger.

There's not a normal way to handle grief.

Normal is bullshit.

And normal is keeping you stuck and small.

We need to stop pursuing normal.

This is not what you need.

You do not need to judge yourself based on everybody else to be able to create success.

I know that it sounds like that's what we should be doing.

We have been really programmed into being the perfect students and getting things right in today's society and in Today's culture.

But at the end of the day, it's what's making us stuck and small.

It's not sexy to spend time and energy and money on growing forgiveness and self worth and self love and self esteem, but it works.

I just did a class about forgiveness, personal forgiveness, with my coaching clients and it was such a powerful class.

It was an opportunity to teach how to truly, personally forgive yourself.

It is something that is a practice, something that we must learn how to do.

It is something we do again and again and again.

It is in the putting down of what we hold.

The shame, the guilt, the frustration, the self loathing.

Putting that down is what enables us to look ahead and go, okay, what do I want more of?

More connection, more love, more self worth, more enjoyment.

Not from a hedonistic point of view, from a personal fulfillment point of view.

When you are fulfilled, when you are not loaded down with shame and guilt, you can be confident.

You can be yourself.

You can move forward with love and abundance.

Then you can give that to other people.

You give that to yourself.

It seeps out of you.

Other people feel it and respond to it.

Your life improves.

Self loathing, shame, guilt, shrinks you.

Your life devolves.

Life is messy.

People are messy.

It's meant to be messy.

We're meant to fuck it up.

Nothing has gone wrong.

If you want help untangling this for yourself, Book a discovery Call amandahest ca bookacall we can walk through how coaching could really help you untangle all of what is going on here.

Learning how to release the idea that you should be perfect, better than average, on top of the pile, not at the bottom.

Releasing the idea that there's any kind of ranking system at all.

Releasing the idea that if you are mad at me, that means that's something I have to fix.

Releasing the idea that I have to believe that I should have known something I clearly didn't know.

Releasing that will set you free, but not just set you free from the standpoint of, oh, I can finally relax.

You deserve to be able to move your life forward and the people around you deserve that too.

You all deserve it.

Everybody wins when you do this work.

Okay, my friends, this is what I've got.

I hope it hits your heart.

Book that call if it speaks to you.

And otherwise.

I'll see you here next time.

Bye for now.

Thanks so much for listening today.

If this podcast is helping you, please follow wherever you listen and consider leaving a review.

It truly helps this community grow and allows me to support more women like you.

I'm excited to see you back here next week with a brand new episode.

Until then, take care, friend.