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The Positive Voice
The Positive Voice, is a podcast dedicated to helping you live your best life. Our show is all about spreading positivity and inspiration, and we cover a variety of topics that are designed to help you cultivate a more positive mindset. From the neuroscience of positivity to the power of affirmations, we explore the many ways in which you can bring more positivity into your life. Our episodes are full of practical tips and strategies that you can apply to your own life, as well as inspiring stories from people who have overcome adversity to achieve their dreams. So if you're looking for a dose of positivity and inspiration, join us on The Positive Voice and start living life to the fullest!
The Positive Voice
E51: Ask CCK: If I didn't have childhood trauma, how is my lack of execution a trauma response?
Have you ever felt like you're running an endless race towards your goals, only to be held back by invisible chains? In a heart-to-heart on the Positive Voice Podcast, I, Coach Chef Kim, unveil the mysteries behind why seemingly small childhood adversities can cast long shadows over our adult ambitions. The newest Q&A segment, Ask CCK, peels back the layers of how experiences from being picked on in the playground to feeling like the odd one out at school can subconsciously steer our future selves. I even let you in on a slice of my personal narrative, where a trait once scolded has now become the bedrock of my career.
Shifting gears from introspection to action, we then tackle the challenge of setting attainable health and fitness goals that harmonize with your body's natural rhythms. This discussion isn't just about addressing queries; it's a call to arms for embracing self-compassion, understanding the deep-seated effects of the past on our self-worth, and questioning the heavy burdens of criticism we've carried for too long. Prepare to be inspired as we chart a course for self-belief and the courage to redefine our own measures of success. Join me on this transformative journey where your potential is waiting on the other side of doubt.
Welcome to The Positive Voice, a feel-good podcast designed to inspire and uplift through heartfelt conversations and the power of positivity! Hosted by transformational life coach and hope dealer, Kimberly Houston, where we delve into personal growth, wellness, and the beauty of overcoming life's challenges.
Join our creative and supportive community as we laugh, learn, and grow together on this life-changing journey. Subscribe to The Positive Voice and let's spread the joy, one conversation at a time!
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Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of the Positive Voice Podcast. I am your host, coach Chef Kim, and I'm super excited that you are tuning in today. So, listen, we're gonna start a new I don't know a series, I don't know what we're gonna call this, but we're gonna start a new moment called Ask CCK. So for those of you who may be new to the podcast or you are unfamiliar, I have a free mindset for entrepreneurs and creatives group on Facebook and it is always linked down in the show notes. But recently we changed the questions. Well, we added a question when people are coming into the group, so one. You can join my newsletter where I send out a Soulful Sunday newsletter. That's what we're going with for 2024. It used to be Mindset Monday, but I like Soulful Sunday a little better, so my newsletter now goes out on Sundays, but also in the group. We asked, like now in your questions, you can give me your email address to get on that, but now you can also ask me a question, and so my team diligently works to get me the questions so that I can answer them, and sometimes I answer them as Reels on Instagram or on TikTok, and then other times I may go live in our group to discuss it, and then some of them make it to the podcast, and so today this is an ask CCK moment.
Speaker 1:So one of the things that I was asked was, if you had a really wonderful childhood and you did not grow up with any childhood trauma, what is stopping you from accomplishing your goals as an adult? And my assumption is that we're basing this off the fact that people typically say you can't do something based on your childhood trauma, and I was like man. That is an incredible question and I would love to take you to the podcast to open this dialogue and have this conversation. So first things first. I think that a lot of us, if we grew up in a two parent household and you had the white picket fits and there was more than enough money to go around and you had a pony and you did all the things, then you assume that you grew up without any childhood trauma. And I know for a fact that there are some things in our lives that we don't consider traumatic, like when you're looking at the scale of what is trauma versus what is not. I think it's subjective and I think that that's open to interpretation based on the situation.
Speaker 1:So for some people, if you grew up without your parents or you were forcefully removed from a home, or if you lost a parent early in life, there's a little bit of trauma in there, not saying that people abused you or you were mistreated, but there was definitely a longing, there was definitely a piece of you that was lost inside of such a major loss of your life. Right, if you're the oldest sibling, particularly if you're the oldest girl and you have younger siblings that you were required to help out with, you may not have had to step into the role of a second mommy, but there may have been some things you weren't allowed to do. But your younger siblings were Right. That's super common that the first child is really sheltered and then the younger children just kind of like balls to the walls. They can do whatever they want to do. If you grew up as an only child, right, you may have had all the love and attention placed on you, but maybe you were lonely and maybe you wished for siblings and that's not something that you ever had.
Speaker 1:So I think that there are many, many ways that we can define what trauma is when it comes to something like this. Now here's my thought on why can't you do things as an adult. If you had a really solid childhood, I would question what happened to you in your formative years. One of the things that I think we often overlook are the bullies on the playground. Are the mean girls in middle school not making it on a sports team in high school? I think that we discredit what those moments in our life do to us and how they shape us. So, while your home life may have been wonderful and you knew that you were loved, you knew that you were safe while you were at home, my question would be what was school like? Were you integrated into places that people did not want you to be in? Did you have an uphill battle with teachers who did not understand that you were bored in school? Were you a people-pleasing child because you learned that if you were the teacher's pet, you could get more things than what were being offered right Now? While that is not trauma, it can be traumatic in some instances, but it also can shape and determine how you show up in the world as an adult. So let's kind of let's dig into this a little bit Now.
Speaker 1:If you are someone who, if you were like me and you got using conduct or you got needs improvement in conduct. I got a lot of use in conduct. It was very unsatisfactory. I got talks too much on my report cards all the time, year after year, year after year. Talks too much and that's funny because I get paid to talk for a living now. But there are times that we have to understand that in our formative years we may have encountered adults who were not emotionally mature enough to handle the developmentally appropriate behavior of children. I want you to stick with me while I walk you through this. So if you were told children are to be seen and not heard, that's quite literally incorrect.
Speaker 1:If we look at what psychologists and pediatricians state that children should be doing at certain ages, right, they're looking for things to show that they are developmentally where they're supposed to be, based on their age. Okay, if we look at those lists, y'all, kids are supposed to be loud. Kids are supposed to be full of activity and run and jump and play and scream and, you know, jump off. They should be daring. They they're supposed to venture and explore and have a wild imagination. Think about all the things they watch on TV. Right, it's always the imagination of another child, barney, bluey, stanley, like, just think about all the things. It's the imagination of something else that comes to life. Yeah, okay. So if the children's programming shows that, think Sesame Street. Right, children's programming is teaching children how to live in an imagined, an imaginative world. It's teaching them how to to expand that imagination and how to think differently and how to incorporate other people's cultures and beliefs into their own lives. That you know. It's giving them access to other things that adults aren't really paying attention to.
Speaker 1:If you are thinking about your childhood, I don't want you to think about your trauma being something that may have left physical scars, but I do want you to think back. And if there is a teacher who told you you weren't smart enough, if there is a teacher or coach or principal administrator, a pastor or youth leader, a small scout, troop leader, somebody that was in your life, that may not have been your parents, who told you you weren't enough, who told you you didn't try hard enough, who told you you would never be something, if they put their mistaken beliefs, or if they put their limiting beliefs on you and you intercept that limiting belief and now it's a mistaken belief that you have, because there is no validity to it, but you internalize that and you make it a limiting belief of your own, and now you are growing up trying to figure out. Where exactly did I adopt this level of thinking? I want to share something with you, and I hope my son is okay with me sharing it. So at one point a couple of years ago maybe four or five man, maybe five years ago, maybe a little more than that, maybe six An artistic director of a local theater here in Atlanta told my son that they would never be a leading man at their size and that they needed to lose weight and once they lost weight, then they could come back and have a conversation with her about starring in a show. Now, my son did not share this information with me at the time that it happened, because they know their mother is crazy and I would have given that woman to three, four, five and six cents and I really, really would have let her have it okay. But it was a while later by the time I learned that this is what my child was told. Okay. Now, the irony in all of this and I made an Instagram post about this a few months ago my son is now the leading character in a show called Fat Ham, and Fat Ham in the contract quite literally states that Ham, aka Hamlet, also known as in the show juicy is supposed to be a thick person. Okay, thick. Two cubes, all right, two seeds, however you wanna spell it. They need to be thick, all right, they gotta be juicy. They were intentionally looking for an African-American male with some meat on their body. Now, if my child had listened to this woman who said that they could not be a leading man because they weren't her idea of what a leading man looked like, I don't know that my son would have ever auditioned and ever focused on learning the text of Shakespeare and being able to be a 21-year-old Shakespearean actor. If my child had listened to this woman, I don't think the trajectory would be what it is.
Speaker 1:The second thing to that when my child was younger than that, so 12 or 13, so at this point we're talking eight, nine years ago, a different person that my child was working with was told that they did not need to learn Shakespeare because it wasn't written for them. And once again, my child did not tell me. Someone told them that because you know their mama wouldn't let them have it, but it's fine. It's fine, it's cool. This woman, a different woman, told my son that Shakespeare was not for black boys. And I need you all to go Google the intersectionality of black boys and Shakespeare and, lo and behold, you will see my child's face as the youngest to date TEDx Broadway speaker, where they delivered an incredibly eloquent speech on the intersectionality of a 17-year-old black boy and Shakespeare. And, just you know, a few years later now, my child leads as the starring role in the final bow of James Ims's Fat Ham.
Speaker 1:What you have to understand is that, while your parents may have created a safe space and I absolutely did that for my children when your parents create a safe space and they do everything they can to protect you from trauma inside of the home, they're her people outside of the home that we cannot control. And so these are people who were in community positions of leadership, who told my child what they could not do. And because my kid is my kid, if you tell me I can't do something, baby, I'm gonna fight tooth and nail to prove you wrong, and that's exactly what my child did. So to those two artistic directors who told my kid that, number one, shakespeare was not for them. And number two, they needed to be skinny in order to lead a show. They both were wrong. They were both incorrect. Their ideas of what my child should be were wrong.
Speaker 1:Now, the difference between my kid and my child, the difference between my kid and a lot of other kids, is this my child has a life coach for a mother. So when you tell me that somebody told you you can't do something, I have an opportunity to pour into you. I have an opportunity to pour so much goodness and so much light and so much love into you that it is going to overpower what somebody else, who does not matter, had to say. Now, if you are a kid who did not grow up with that, if you did not have someone pouring love and light into you, if you did not have someone speaking affirmations into you, if you don't know how to do that for yourself, then that means you might start to internalize some of those things that other people are saying. And so when you begin to internalize these things and you begin to accept these mistaken beliefs as limiting beliefs and now you think they're true that will stop you from doing the things that you wanna do. So what does that mean. It means that you have now allowed a belief that is inherently not true. It's not true that you can't succeed, right, there's no proof of that. But if you decide that it is true, then you won't do the things that you need to do in order to be successful. If you have the thought that, no matter what, I'm going to be successful, if you say this out loud, if you write it down, if you visualize yourself having the success, I can assure you that your brain is going to find evidence that you will be successful. If your brain finds evidence that you will be successful, it will be a lot easier for you to get up and do the things you want to do.
Speaker 1:Case in point I decided that this year I'm not trying to lose a whole lot of weight. I'm not trying to be a size two. I've never wanted to be one. I've never been that small. I think I might look a little crazy. I like having a little meat on my body, but I want to be in better shape. I want to be able. I live on the second floor. I want to be able to go up and down these stairs at my apartment and not be winded. I want to when the spring and the summer comes around, I want to be able to enjoy my community that I live in and all of these amenities that we have. I want to be able to enjoy them. I want to be able to take my dog down to the dog park without having to get in my car. I want to be able to walk down the hill and walk back up and be okay, right, like. There's just certain things I want to do. If I am going to catch a flight and we're running a little late, I want to be able to run through Harfield Jackson Airport. Like I want to have the stamina to be able to do the things that I want to do.
Speaker 1:And so I made a decision that the future version of me needed me to start incorporating more movement into my life. I need to incorporate more movement into my life. And so what does that movement look like? It may be yoga, it may be dancing to Beyonce, it may be walking on a treadmill. I made a point of saying I want to invite more movement into my life. I am someone who has a more active lifestyle. I did not say I'm going to go on a crash diet. I'm going to completely change the way I eat. I'm going to work out in the gym four or five times a week and I'm gonna be out here busting my butt. I did not say that. I said I want to incorporate more movement into my life. That I can do with ease and, depending on the day, I am moving every single day and some days I move more than others Right, but I had to make the decision that that was something that I wanted to do.
Speaker 1:Historically, if I had said I need to go work out four to five days a week and I'm going to have this really stressful and stringy was playing. I have not been successful with that in the past, and so I decided to do a little work, right. So I did a little research and I am basing my activity with my cycle. So I have tracked my cycle for months. I know how I feel. I know when I have more energy than others, and on the days that I have and I have it on the calendar on the days where I have more energy, we go harder. On the days where I have less energy, we take it easy and I don't beat myself up about it. If I can't meet it in the gym, then I'll meet it in the kitchen, right?
Speaker 1:You have to understand that being kind to yourself is going to be the catalyst for your healing. Your parents may not have been the ones who traumatized you as a child, but that doesn't mean you haven't encountered mean girls. That doesn't mean you haven't encountered boys who told you you had big lips. It doesn't mean that you haven't encountered people who really, really hurt your feelings at certain phases of life. And I, as I'm speaking, y'all I can see the faces of the boys on the fifth grade playground who told me I had the biggest lips and nobody would ever want to be with me. I can stand here and say this at the age of 43, that my lips are probably the first thing you notice about me. They're the first thing that people notice and it's the thing that brings the people to me. Okay, um, you have to understand that when we internalize other people's meanness, other people's lack of regard for our feelings, when you begin to internalize it and you make it true, that will show up in other ways in your life, right? So if I believed that I wasn't beautiful because my lips were large, that could really show. That could exponentially change how I show up in the world.
Speaker 1:I don't know that I would be agreeing to do keynote speeches. I don't know that I would agree to be standing in front of thousands of people and encouraging them. I don't know that my face would be all over my social media. I don't know that I would do photo shoots in a miniskirt, in the halter top, standing inside of a bookstore that's also a cafe. I don't know that I would have had the confidence to be able to do the things that I do. But the reason I have the confidence to do the things that I do is because your opinion of me doesn't make it a fact. It's just you talking shit, but it's not actually a fact. I know that I'm beautiful and I can stand on that Right, and so when you're thinking about your life and you're thinking about why you can't make a decision or why you can't do something, I want you to ask the question who told you you couldn't do it?
Speaker 1:When was the first time you encountered the doubt? When was the first time you encountered the idea that maybe, just maybe, you can't do this? I would love for you to explore that right In order for us to be able to figure out why you are not being successful. We need to first figure out who told you you weren't worthy. Who told you that you weren't going to be successful. Who told you that all of the odds were stacked against you? And then at what point did you start to believe it? That's what's important.
Speaker 1:Things being a trauma response, it doesn't necessarily mean that you know this was extreme levels of trauma. It could quite literally just be that some kid bullied you on the playground. It could be that an older cousin bullied you. It could be that you are the black sheep of the family and no one understands you. It could be that you wrote a tell-all book about the bullshit that people did to you and instead of people owning up to the fact that they should have treated you better, they now blame you for airing out dirty laundry. I mean, I don't know what it is. Only you can figure that part out. But for whoever it is that submitted this question, it doesn't necessarily have to be that your childhood was horrible. It doesn't have to be that. But I would encourage you to explore.
Speaker 1:At what point did you encounter doubt? At what point did you start believing that you could not do something? At what point did you realize you were uninspired. I'm not going to even say you lack motivation. I think you're uninspired when you can't get things done. And if you've lost the inspiration, my next question would be is this something you actually want to be doing? Is this something you actually want to pursue, or are you doing it because other people said you should? Are you doing it because other people think that that's something you should be doing frequently, at least weekly Now? It used to be daily, but now we're probably down to weekly.
Speaker 1:Somebody says, hey, I want you to make my kids' cake. Oh, I think you would be a really great instructor. I think you should do this, that and a third. And every single time I say I've already lived that life, I've already had that career and I'm retired, and they still said, oh, but I think you would be so great. I was great, I was at the top of my game and I did that already. And now I've moved on to something else and I've transitioned, because no is a complete sentence. I don't need to explain myself to you. Thank you for telling me that I'm wonderful and you love what I do. I know because I'm excellent at everything that I do, but just because you want me to do it doesn't mean I have to. That's not my calling, that's not the trajectory of my life anymore, and so I would encourage you to really stop and think about.
Speaker 1:How did you get there? What did this thought process come from? Your trauma may not be super, super crazy, super super deep. However, what is it that you've encountered that has changed who you are as an adult and has altered how you show up in life? Because my guess is that you are now trying to fight through, not wanting to do things, and I would question why Is this something you actually want to do? Or are you doing it because somebody else said it was a good idea? Why do you lack inspiration when you are inspired to do things? Come hell or high water, you're going to do it. So my question would be don't focus so much on what trauma are you responding to. Well, what childhood trauma are you responding to? I would actually say what stimuli have you encountered that has caused you to second guess the things that you should be doing? And that's pretty much my thought on that.
Speaker 1:So, to whoever it was who submitted this question, thank you so much. If you guys have questions you want to submit. Make sure you come. Hop over in the Facebook group. If you're new to the group, as soon as you click the button it's going to ask you some questions. Go ahead and submit your question at that point. If you would like to join our email list, we would be more than happy to add you and bring you on in to the thousands of people who are tuning in with us on the Positive Voice podcast and who interact with Coach Chef Kim on a daily, weekly or monthly basis on all of our social media platforms. Until next time, thank you so much for listening and I'll talk to you soon.
