Dawn Damon: My guest today is a certified life coach. Who's passionate about working with high achievers to heal their relationships. Well, as a recovering perfectionist and a mother of five, she's going to tell us about her children. She can relate to the overwhelming thoughts of never being good enough.

Today her mission is to empower other high-performing adults to become the resilient self-leaders that they are meant to be bravehearted women, my guest today is Kamini Wood.

Hi there!

Kamini Wood: Hello, and thank you for having me.

Dawn Damon: Absolutely. I'm eager to hear all about you. I want to know your story because your story starts in a small town in Connecticut, where you say you grew up in an Indian family and predominantly a white family town. I can only imagine a town where you were the one with the dark skin and the dark eyes and the name that seemed odd. And that had to have done something to you, shaped you in some kind of way. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Kamini Wood: Absolutely. It shaped me in ways that I was not aware of, of course, until I was older, but as I entered elementary school, and recognized probably for the first time, really, that I was different than my peers. There was a part of me that went into problem-solving mode. ‘Cause here you are a little child, a little girl who just wants to be part of the group who wants to be accepted. And so the way that I worked through that as my five-year-old self was to, you know people, please, was to make sure everybody was okay with me. They were happy.

Then there was this internal idea that I'd be accepted. That was internalized because I was being rewarded for that. The more that I showed up that way, the more it felt like I was fitting in. So that shaped part of what was going on. And then, of course, also being a daughter of immigrant parents, they were working very hard. They worked pretty much from, you know, seven in the morning until six at night, I was there. Quote, unquote, the latchkey kid where they would drop me off at latch game the morning, and I stayed there before school. Then I was picked up after school and had after-school care. There are no complaints on my part. It did not bother me one bit. I look back on my childhood with only fond memories.

However, part of the internalization that happened was, wow, my parents are working really hard. I don't want them to worry about me. Part of that is my own personality. I am a caretaker by nature, totally own it. And yes, it was part of me when I was little too. So that part of me of not wanting to be a burden took on a lot of perfectionism as well because I needed to make sure that I wasn't burdening them with having to worry about. Anything that I needed or mistakes I was making. So the more that I could ensure that I was doing things the right way, the less my parents had to worry.

People think perfectionism took hold from a pretty early age. Again, they kind of shaped how I showed up, not just in relationships, but just, because I was an overachiever. I worked really hard. I strived to do the best I possibly could. Those are not bad things. The only reason why I bring them up as I say I had to bring them to the forefront though, is because as I became a mother, my children started emulating those people, pleasing perfectionism tendencies. I was starting to see how they were negatively affecting them because their anxiety was on the rise. I recognized that they were mirroring back to me, how I was showing up. And so that's when I really went through my own self-transformation through that process. I recognize that from a professional standpoint, I was a project manager. I was running project managers' offices. I was running a law practice, but in every role I had, I always found myself trying to help people figure out what they wanted, how they could grow, and how they could evolve in whatever position they had within the company. The self-transformation actually was the doorway to say, Oh, wow, what I really am meant to do from a professional standpoint is to serve people and to help them understand themselves better. And my journey gave me that wake-up call that, Hey, comedy, this is actually what you're meant to do. You were meant to go through this journey, not just for yourself to grow and not just so you could show up differently as a parent and help your children grow, but now you also can pay it forward and serve others who might not be able to see what's holding them back.

Dawn Damon: Yeah, that's really powerful. Very true. I couldn't help but think when you were talking about how, you know, so often our worldview is formulated by the time we're seven years old, right? It's established. And so you learned that, Hey, if I keep the peace and help people and please everybody and keep everybody happy, I can be a blessing and I can be appreciated and I can help lift the load. That's the beauty side, but there's always a shadow side, isn't there, to some of our drivers and our motivations and things. So, you know, I got to tell you, I talk to women all the time who are in midlife and beyond, and man, we still struggle with the shadow side of that motivation. People pleasing, don't want to rock the boat and like you said, you know, at the end of the day, I don't really know who I am now. I'm trying to make everybody else happy and I need to go on a transformational journey to figure this out. What do I keep? What do I refine? And what do I reframe and say, that does not serve me well at all. So you could see it in your kids. Tell us a little bit. You have five kids. You have a couple of kids that are high achieving performance-driven.

Kamini Wood: Yes. So my oldest at the time that we're recording, this is 22. She'll be 23 later this year. She's a professional ballerina and then my second oldest is 20 years old. He turns 21 this year. He is a Division One college athlete. Then I have an 18-year-old. He's headed off to college this fall. I have a 15-year-old. I have a lacrosse player wanting to play in college. So we'll see how that goes and I have a 10-year-old who's about to head off to middle school come the fall. So we've got the range of ages going on, but yeah, my two older ones really are high achievers. So I understand this world really well and that's the thing that I always say to people when we're working with high achievers, we're not saying don't be a high achiever, but to your point of these motivators. Any motivator, any strength, absolutely are those things. When we lean too far into them, they can then start to become a weakness or can then start to become something that folds us back, right? Like I say, one of my strengths is my empathy. If I lean too far into it, it becomes over-functioning people-pleasing.

Dawn Damon: Yeah. Right. That is so insightful. I love that and so you stumbled on all of this, or is this part of your college profession? You are a life coach. How'd you figure all that out?

Kamini Wood: How did I figure all this out? Well, okay. So the truth is when I was seven years old, I used to sit there saying, I just want to talk to people and make them feel better. That's what my seven-year-old self said. Now I ended up avoiding, not avoiding it, but kind of distancing myself from that, because I felt like there were the shoulds, you know, go into the business world, right?

The business world is where it's at. So that's what I did. I, and I'm not faulting it at all, because guess what? I ended up finding out that even in the business world, I still migrated to helping people figure out what they needed. I was going to find a way to do it at some point. So actually it was the combination of the professional and then the personal stuff that was happening in terms of just. Doing my own work to be like, what is going on here? Wow. I've spent the majority of my life over-functioning. I'm over-functioning and now my kids are over-functioning. What do I need to change? Mm-hmm... So I had just from that point, dove headfirst into life coaching and understanding what that could be and then different modalities.

Understanding the cognitive behavioral side of coaching internal family systems is one that I love in terms of understanding the parts of us. 'cause I'm a true believer in it. Yes, self-esteem and self-confidence, but it's really about self-acceptance. And I love all parts of myself, right? So for me, it was just going back into learning and absorbing and training. People joke with me all the time. Why do you have a lot of certifications? Yes, because I'm a nerd at heart, first of all, but second of all, I love to learn this information and I do it in a way. The reason why I go and learn these different modalities is because each one of us is different. We are going to assimilate and understand information differently. So for one person that I'm working with, I could approach it with an IFS base. That's a great question. so much. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. I love you. so much. I appreciate it. Adios. Love you.

Dawn Damon: Yeah, I love that. That's really great.

Then I have to ask you, then how do you balance it all for you? You've got your personal life, you've got a thriving coaching practice, your work, children. How do you keep yourself in balance?

Kamini Wood: That's such a great question. ‘Cause I think at first I struggled. Especially cause the higher achieving part of me was really just like, go, go, go, go, go, right. I really hold myself accountable for taking time every single day, every single morning, there's an appointment with myself. And it's just for me, myself and I were that hour to an hour and a half is just for me. I'm not on, I'm not having to serve anybody. I'm within my own, whether it be working out, meditating, reading, just sitting and drinking coffee or just being, it can vary from day to day.

Dawn Damon: Yeah, fair. That's fair. I'm right with you. I teach the power of a morning routine for me, my rituals, my morning routine, and all the things that you just said. And when I have a routine, when I have guardrails, I know the path. That doesn't mean every now and then I don't drive off, you know, do a little tracking and metaphorically speaking, you know. But you get back on the path, you get back on the road.

So when we travel or, you know, I'm speaking, I'm going here and there, and I don't have that time, but you know, I'm up to like, I need like two hours in my morning only just because, you know, as a woman of faith, I want to spend that time with my creator. Then I want to spend that time with me. I want to journal my thoughts. I don't know if you find this to be true, but as a journalist, sometimes I figure out what's going on inside of me and what I'm feeling, what I'm thinking when I see my. I let myself start to write. Absolutely.

Kamini Wood: Absolutely. Because what happens when we start to write it out? Now our brain has the output channel and it's coming out. I let myself free flow, right? Meaning. There's no editing or, you know, is this okay? Or wait, maybe I should change. Nope. Just write. Just write and let it come out because there's so much truth that comes out in that way.

Dawn Damon: It's so true. I've got women, I encourage them to journal and then they'll say, but what if someone reads it? And so they're making these really nice journals and all these little sweet things that if somebody sees it, they look really and you know, like, Oh, I'm so in tune. Like, stop it. Don't do that. Let it flow. I love that.

So we're talking about some of those struggles that we have, and I wonder about self-sabotage. Do our habits, sometimes we say we want something or, you know, our careers contribute to our self-sabotaging habits. Can you talk to me a little bit about that?

Kamini Wood: Yeah, I view self-sabotage as a protective part. The reason why I say that is because a lot of times we will self-sabotage almost to control. What we perceive will be an inevitable fallout, right? Where we don't want to get blindsided or hurt. So if we end up doing the thing that stops progress or success in something, right, the self-sabotage, we then know it's coming. We can almost brace for it and no one's going to blindside us with it. This happens a lot of times I've noticed with clients, especially in relationships where a relationship is going really well.

Then out of the blue, they do something that just. You know, breaks trust, maybe in the relationship. And then they'd even say to me, call me, I don't even know why I did that and really it's because the, the fear part, the part was where it was. I don't know that this will stand the test of time or that it will succeed or survive. That part got really activated. And then this self-sabotage protector part said, well, we don't want you to get wounded. We protecting you from the wound of being abandoned.

So we're just going to go ahead and do this thing. Then, you know, it's coming, you know, the, the breakups coming, you can protect yourself. The truth is it still hurts. Right. And you also, shut down any future potential that you had. Trying to control, right? Trying to control what was going to happen. And that's really what happens in self-sabotage too, is it's a control mechanism. Can I control what's going to happen? And we have to remind ourselves that we don't control all the things. What we do have control over is how we respond to a situation, but we don't have control over how the situation is going to evolve.

Dawn Damon: I hear you saying that it almost sounds like a trauma response to those who have some childhood trauma. I guess what, who of us doesn't have some sort of trauma, but I'm talking about, you know, like for me, I'm a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. So that trauma manifested itself in my relationship, in my first marriage. Which was 28 years long, but I could see early on before I really had gone through my healing journey. It is still an ongoing journey, but there was a bulk of the work that was done where I started to see my beliefs, my core lies, those things. Relationships can really take a hit. Can't they, when we sabotage, like you just mentioned, where else do you see the self-sabotage? We do it in our jobs, our relationships, our money.

Kamini Wood: Absolutely. I think it comes up in many aspects of our life. We might self-sabotage health-wise, right? Like we might want to take care of our health, but then overeat, or we find ourselves maybe imbibing too much alcohol, for instance. It's a self-sabotage mechanism in the workplace. Self-sabotage and keeping yourself from moving up in terms of your workplace, because there's this fear of, well, if I get that promotion, for instance, I don't know that I can do the work.

So let me go ahead and just almost destroy any opportunity I could have for that promotion, because I don't want to get hurt or have to deal with the idea that I'm not succeeding at this, or I might have to ask for help. Right. So again, it's a control mechanism. It's also this protection mechanism, but yeah, I think the one thing that I would say is that with self-sabotage, people will constantly say, I want to stop self-sabotaging if we want to stop something instead of just, we would have stopped it already if we could, right.

So the idea, it's a shift. Okay. I'm noticing the self-sabotage isn't. serving me. So if I got curious about the self-sabotage, what's behind it, right? What is the story, the narrative, the false belief that's driving that? Because once we become aware of that, we can take different actions. Um, and we can start to show up differently. We can take values-based actions. So for instance, in a relationship, if we have a self-sabotaging pattern, we get curious about it. Maybe we do realize, wow, there was this past trauma. There's a belief that I'm unlovable. So every time I'm in a relationship, I fall into this pattern of thinking. I'm just going to figure out a way to end it again subconsciously. We just bring this to the awareness though. We say, well, my value, my value is meaningful relationships. I have a value. So what committed action am I going to take? I'm going to be present and I'm going to communicate with my partner. What's going on for me? Right. I'm going to open up communication. That's my values-based action. Now we're working towards undoing that limiting belief of online lovable because we're actually engaging in an action. Not only love ourselves, but we're working towards creating that lovable connection with our partner.

Dawn Damon: Yes, and isn't that rerouting our brain too? I know with neuroscience and the plasticity of the brain and all the things that we're learning, we are healing our brain when we come up with those reframes, those more powerful affirmations, if you will, but then we start giving ourselves new evidence, new actions that says, okay, see, we can choose this. We can go this way. It's uncomfortable at first, but after we say, Oh, cool. Okay, I can make a choice based on my values. I'm not just a victim of impulse. I can interrupt that.

Kamini Wood: Exactly. Right?

Dawn Damon: Yeah. So those are great techniques. You help your clients do this all the time. You help them reduce stress and overcome their anxieties. You also work with imposter syndrome. Are these all the things that are in your wheelhouse? Obviously, what can you share with our listeners about some of the things you've learned about all of that?

Kamini Wood: First of all, one thing that I like to share with people and to have them really hear. is that it's normal, right? I think so often people will come to me and they'll say, there's something wrong with me or I'm broken or I need to, you know, this is just, I need to fix this. Those are all ways of shaming, right? That's shaming oneself. And so it's really important for people to recognize that things like imposter syndrome, things like feeling not good enough or not enough, for instance. Those are common things that as the human race, many of us, I'm not saying all of us, but many of us work with and work through. And so it's important to have that element of self-compassion where we're saying, Hey, this isn't abnormal. It's just, it's a growth zone for me and that's the very first thing that I would want to share about how we work through it.

But the truth is in terms of while working through it, one thing that I usually say is I'm somewhat different and I don't say we're going to stop these things. I just mentioned it a couple of minutes ago. Instead, I say, okay, there's a part of us that is doing that. Let's again, get curious about it. Let's recognize that this is just a part of ourselves and we can take the stance that this part's not serving anymore. Maybe it served us for a point. Like I will freely admit my perfectionist part. Absolutely served me, served me really well until it stopped. Right. Until it was actually holding me back.

Yeah. There are moments where my perfectionist part still will come online and it actually is in service of me right now when I don't lean too far into it, but you learn to calibrate it. So it's not always about getting rid of things. It's about how you learn to either live with it or find that relationship with those things. ‘Cause like, for instance, anxiety is not going to go away and truth be told some anxiety keeps us safe. You know, the anxiety over traffic. filled streets will keep us from crossing the street and getting run over. Right. So if we said like, oh, we need to get rid of all my anxiety, we're actually doing away with something that could be of service to us as well.

Dawn Damon: Yes. So all those things, I want to shift just for a moment because, at the top of the time, we talked about you and your beautiful brown eyes and your dark skin, all things that I wished that I had as, you know, a very white-skinned redheaded freckle face little girl growing up. But diversity is one of the passions of my life. What did you discover then? How did you get back to your authentic you? What did you discover about your beautiful Indian parents and your Indian heritage? You had to have made peace with all that as well.

Kamini Wood: Yeah. Such a great question. And I really appreciate you bringing that into the conversation because I do think that it was a struggle growing up. So I'm American-born, right? So I'm in this town. We're one of two Indian families. So even culturally things were different, you know, cause my parents are raising my sister and me with the traditional Indian culture and heritage.

There was definitely a part of me that wanted to tap it down and let's keep that secret Mom and Dad, because people are going to think we're weird. It wasn't until I hit emerging adulthood that I started to notice that I have an identity where I get to almost be both where I am American, absolutely. But I have this beautiful Indian culture as well. Then truth be told, becoming a mother allowed me to recognize that there is so much depth in the Indian culture that I wanted these children to also be able to experience and they happen to be children of mixed backgrounds.

So for me, it was, Oh no, I want them to be able to continue this because. This is part of the uniqueness of who I was and who they are. And if we look at just the human race, yes, we're all human beings, but we all have a unique quality. There's one message that I'd love for people to hear it's, Hey, your uniqueness is actually the gift that this world needs. ‘Cause that's the lesson I was, was that uniqueness allowed me to be my own person and allowed me to be yes, different, but not different in a bad way, different in a, Hey, this is me. And you're you and both of us together can coexist. And what a beautiful thing for that to be possible.

Dawn Damon: It is beautiful. You know, that is something that pleases the heart of God.

For me, I love seeing all the diversity that is in this creation. And I'm so thankful for you and for your messaging. What would you say to, and you've said it a lot, but as our time is pretty much gone, people don't listen to podcasts as long as they used to. What I'm hearing today is that there is a way to live this life without anxiety and stress. There is a way to make peace with ourselves and that people-pleasing part and that perfectionistic part. What would you say to the woman who isn't there yet? She's still living maybe behind a mask of people pleasing, you know, I gotta be something that you expect me to be. I can't be what, how God really created me to be or what's authentic for me. Any thoughts?

Kamini Wood: Yeah, I would resonate with that woman because I think that that was me for many years it's not okay. It's not safe for me to be what you just said is a beautiful way to look at it through God's creation, right? Like God's creation. What is it that I really need? What is it that I really feel called to maybe put out into the world as God created me, ask those really important questions. And then as those answers come to you, then ask yourself, okay, what's one step that I can take towards that?

Dawn Damon: Love it. Thank you for being with us today. And where can somebody reach you? They say, Hey, I really dig what you're saying. And I want to talk with you. Where can they find you?

Kamini Wood: I am on the web at kaminiwood.com, and on Facebook and Instagram with the handle: @itsauthenticme.

Dawn Damon: All right. I love that. Authentic me. And you put that as all one word, right? Authentic me.

Kamini Wood: I do. Yes.

Dawn Damon: Yes. Love it. And of course, we'll always have that in the show notes for you. Thank you, Kamini, for being with us today on the Bravehearted Woman.

You are a bravehearted woman. You show up with courage and you radiate. I love your smile and your sass. We'll make you an honorary member.

Kamini Wood: Thank you so much.

Dawn Damon: Yeah.

Hey, all you brave hearts listening again, check out braveheartedwoman.com. My FREE gift for you there as always, if you are lacking confidence, get your FREE gift, Ignite Your Confidence and Soar With Self-esteem. My ebook it's there for you. I'm gonna leave you like I always do. This is Dawn Damon, your brave heart mentor saying, it's time for you to find your brave and live your dreams!