Working Towards Our Purpose

Welcome to Working Towards Our Purpose, a podcast that

offers a different perspective on what a job can be. For everyone

out there that's heard that voice in the back of their head asking for something

more, it's time to listen to it. I'm your host, Gino,

and join me as I interview people who have decided to work in their own

purpose. Together, we will learn, become inspired,

and hopefully find our own path towards working in our purpose.

Joining me today on the podcast is Barb Nangle, who is a boundaries

coach, founder of Higher Power Coaching. She's also the host of the

podcast Fragmented to Whole, Life Lessons from 12 Step

Recovery. She's the community manager at known Coworking, and

she's also a speaker, writer, and connector. Barb, welcome. How are you

doing today? Thank you so much, Gino. I'm doing well.

Spring is actually here, so I'm really excited about that. And I'm

excited to have this conversation with you because we've talked a lot, but we've

never had a lengthy conversation. Mhmm. Yes. We've known

each other for, let's think, a little over a year, but never, like, had a

one to one sit down like this. So I'm excited as well. So

can you start by telling me a little bit about yourself, what you do, and

and that kind of thing? Sure. I I think it's important for me to give

a little bit of background. So I just turned 60 a

couple weeks ago, and right before I turned 52, I

hit a codependent bottom. And if you don't know what that is, welcome to the

club because I didn't know what it was either. So

dependency is in its broadest terms, a person who's

codependent is someone who really focuses on that which is

outside themselves. So often, we're looking to other people for validation,

or we're completely focused on what other people are thinking or

doing and like, rescue fix and save people.

And I had invited a homeless friend that I met through

church to stay at my home during a snowstorm one

time, which I now know is not normal behavior. And he did, and then he

stayed another time and another time. And then within a few weeks, he was practically

living with me. I felt trapped in my own home. He was an addict and

an alcoholic, probably also a narcissist. And

I was talking to my therapist about him one day, and I stopped in mid

sentence and went, oh my god. Do you think I need to go to Al

Anon? And she said yes. And for those who don't know what Al Anon

is, it's a 12 step recovery program for the loved ones of

alcoholics. And you may be thinking, why do the loved ones of alcoholics

need a recovery program? And it's because the things that we

do sort of naturally to either try to

help alcoholics or drug addicts or other kinds of

obsessive compulsive people either recover or stop or

get into treatment are actually counterproductive.

So we need to be able to figure out, like, what we're doing that

is is exacerbating the problem. And so I went

home from that therapy

Al Anon and I came across this word codependent. And I

was shocked because I started therapy when

I was 15. I didn't go continuously, but that's like almost

37 years of therapy. I read a gazillion self help books. I'm

a very introspective person. I have done all kinds of workshops and retreats

like you name it. And I had never heard this word. And I

was like, wait, how is this possible? So

I started in recovery for codependence and very

quickly got a sense of relief, I think partly from

finding out there's this concept that it describes me and

partly from seeing, like, there was a recovery program. There's other people

like me. It's possible to get past this pattern of behavior.

And I remember saying to somebody pretty quickly, I

think I need to be reparented, but I thought I made that

term up. I didn't know that was a thing. And then really

soon after that, I was visiting a friend in

Cape Cod who had been an Alcoholics Anonymous for a long time, and she

had always just raved about how fantastic it was. And

so I told her I've been going to Codependence Anonymous, and she was like, oh,

let's see if we can find a meeting for a CODA here and we'll go.

And she couldn't, but she found a meeting for ACA,

which is an abbreviation for adult children of alcoholics and

dysfunctional families, sometimes called the ACOA. And

I don't identify as the child of an alcoholic, and I never really had heard

the and dysfunctional families part of it. So I was like, I'll go

for you. And I walk in and they say, we

reparent ourselves. And I was like, what? And then

they read the 14 Traits of an Adult Child,

which is affectionately called the laundry list. And I was hooked And

I bought the literature. I came home to New Haven, Connecticut, started

going to meetings for that too. And

I have been deeply and profoundly changed

by the process of 12 step recoveries. So the way I like to

describe it is all those other self help things that I did and all the

therapy sort of scratched the surface of the iceberg for

me, whereas recovery melted the iceberg.

So I've been able to change deeply entrenched decades long patterns of

behavior, some of which I didn't even know were dysfunctional or that I had

even being a very, introspective person. And

so through a series of serendipitous events, I got laid

off from Yale University and found my way into the

world of entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation in New

Haven and at Yale and started my own

coaching and consulting business, as you mentioned, higher power coaching and consulting,

and then started my podcast. And

because recovery was so important

and such a game changer for me, I felt the need to get the wisdom

of recovery out into the world because I've been trying

my whole life and I got into recovery and I'm like, well, there's this

deep well of wisdom and tools and tricks and mindset

shifts and recovery that needs to make its way out to the world. So I

started my podcast, and eventually, I

decided as a life coach to hone in on becoming a

boundaries coach because one, you

know, you need a niche as a life coach. Life coach is pretty generalized, and

there's so many different areas of life. 2, every client I worked with

really needed help with boundaries. 3, boundaries

as a codependent are really the antidote to codependence, and they were

such an important part of my recovery. And

because of my lived experience of not having them and then having

them, I can articulate, like, the emotional experience

of what it's like to not have them and have them and the journey for

how to form them. And eventually created

a curriculum to really teach people and accelerate

their boundary building process. Because I learned to build boundaries

in this sort of meandering catches catch can way

through recovery over probably like a 2 to 3 year period of time.

And I have figured out, like, what were the specific things

that I did and created a curriculum around that. And now I have coaching

programs and I do speaking and all that sort of thing. And then the way

that that Gino and I know each other is through known coworking where I'm a

community manager. And that has to do with my, you know,

finding my way into the world of entrepreneurship.

Connector. And so that's what I do there. I would

say coaching and connecting people and carrying the

message of recovery are three things that are just the essence of who I

am. So that's my probably about as abbreviated

version of the background that I could give you. Well,

thank you for sharing all that. I did wanna ask you a little bit more

about, like, coaching and how you got into coaching. So you said you were

a life coach first, and then you kinda pivoted into a boundaries

coach. How did you start out as a life coach? And to me, it

seems like being a coach, and I'm kinda even trying to

become almost that in podcasting. And how do you get started in, like,

coaching people, especially when you don't have any clients at first? Yeah. So this

is a really interesting story. I have to give you a little bit more background

too. So what got me into the world of entrepreneurship is when I got laid

off from Yale, one of my colleagues had just gotten a grant

called Innovation to Impact, which is funded by NIDA, the

National Institute on Drug Abuse. And it was to teach entrepreneurship to

substance use researchers to get their ventures to market

much more quickly. And I had

actually given her some input when writing the grant. And then

the day before I got laid off, she and I had lunch. And she said,

you know, every time that I've gone somewhere as a grad student,

I've hopped onto a project that's already running and I've never started

something from the ground up. And I had. So she said, you know, I'd really

like your input. Can I do this with the positions we've written into

the grant? And I looked at it and I said, you know, if you can

get people who can hit the ground running, absolutely. But if you have to train

people up that don't know what they're doing, no. And I decided that I would

volunteer 4 hours a week for her. And that is what got me into the

world of entrepreneurship. And I volunteered at the Yale

Entrepreneurial Bazaar to staff a table for that

project. And I met Oni Obiocha,

who is now the executive director of CT Next. But at the

time, he was director of innovation at the Dwight

Hall at Yale, which is the student run center for social

justice at Yale. And I was like, wait. Why does I mean, that's amazing that

Dwight Hall has the director of innovation, but why does that happen? And I didn't

know this, but he was also a mentor in residence at

Tsai CITY, which is the Center For Innovative Thinking at Yale, which used

to be called the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute. I started volunteering for him

too. So this also got me into the world of entrepreneurship.

And all this time, I was getting severance

from Yale. I was looking for jobs at Yale. And after several

months, my severance was gonna run out. And I went to both

Patricia and Oni and said, listen, I need to stop volunteering for both of you

because I need to, like, put the hammer down on getting the job. And Oni

said to me, Barb, tell me why you don't have your own coaching and

consulting business because that's what you do. Now here's why he

said that. Because in my journey, there was a job

posted from Tsai CITY, and it was something like the director

of, like, networking, mentoring, and

partnerships or something. And I was like, that is my

job. So I literally started acting as

if it was my job. I started doing the job and

making connections and pulling together

founders of Collab, which in New Haven is a boost program

for entrepreneurs. And I was like, I don't know how to

coach. And she said that she said one of the most important things

I learned and it was Barb, you don't get

better at something by not doing it. You just

start coaching. And I was like, okay, that seems patently

obvious when you say that. But okay. So

I just continued to do networking. I didn't know what I was gonna do

for, you know, coaching and all that stuff. And one of the things I was

doing was I was going to it was called we at Yale, which stands for

women entrepreneurs at Yale. And Jen, whose last name I

don't remember, she's one of the professors in the entrepreneurship

program at the Yale School of Management, challenged me within the next 2

weeks to build a website. And I was like, okay. I'm up for

it. I built a website and then

I ended up going on a 6 week solo road trip. And I did a

blog and I posted it on my website and I shared it with purpose. And

that's how I got my first client. It was somebody that I was in recovery

with. And she said, I hear that you are

a coach and I'd like to be coached by you. And I was like, oh

my god. This is amazing. So she said to me, what do you

charge? And I said, you know, I honestly don't know how to answer that

because for me this is a spiritual endeavor. So what I'm gonna

say to you is what does your conscience

tell you that you should pay me? And she said, well, you're

definitely worth more than this, but I'm gonna give you $40 an hour. I was

like, sold. And not long after,

she said to me, this is helping me so much. I'm gonna

increase it to $50 an hour. And then

I had a young person in the community that I had

coffee with pretty regularly, And she was sort of picking my brain.

And she finally said, you know, I'm realizing that I know you're a coach and

I should pay you. And I can't I'm really making a very low amount of

money, but I can pay you a $100 a month. And I feel

like it's not only helping you and giving you what you deserve. You

deserve more, but it's making me

realize I deserve to put money towards my personal

growth and my mental health and all that stuff. And then I

started talking with people. And one woman

who had her own business that had nothing to do with coaching said, I think

you should charge $85 an hour. And I was like, okay. So my next

client, which now I don't oh, that came from my podcast, which I was

shocked. And I charged her $85 an hour. And then my

next client, I was like, I need it to be a $100 an hour and

then it was a 150. And eventually I

created coaching programs. I mostly have people sign up

for like either a group program or my private coaching program

is a 12 week program and that sort of thing. So that's how I

got started coaching. Now in terms of becoming a

boundaries coach, what I was doing in the beginning was I

thought because my my people were people in recovery and people

in entrepreneurship that I wanted to coach people who were entrepreneurs in

recovery. And then I realized entrepreneurs often want like a business

coach. That's not what I am. And sometimes they don't want people to know they're

in recovery. So I was like, I don't know what I'm gonna do. But I

honed in on boundaries and it started

because I wanted to do a webinar, and I knew, like, I

can do a webinar on boundaries, like, easily. And just a

little tiny bit of backstory is, like, I learned how to

form boundaries through recovery. And after I had a pretty

solid handle on how to have healthy boundaries and how to set them and

what to do when people push back, I started reading about boundaries.

And I got a, like, a retroactive understanding of, oh,

this is what I did. This was the concept and this is the

skill and all that kind of stuff. But all the books I was reading were

a bunch of words, and I I guess I'm a pretty visual

person. So I started, like, drawing, like, depiction

of what that would look like visually with a boundary. And though those

drawings turned into handouts, which eventually turned into a

workbook, which turned into the backbone of my

boundaries coaching program. And then around that,

I built a curriculum which is composed of articles that I've

written and podcasts that I have. So, you know, one of the

things that those of us who are content creators talk about is the

way to maximize your effort and time is to

repurpose your content. So I repurposed some of

my podcast episodes into articles that meant I fleshed them out in much

more detail. And then I also repurpose the podcast as part

of my curriculum. And then I take some of the

the worksheets and the concepts from the curriculum and turn them into podcasts,

and there's like this circular thing going on there.

So that's the story of how I became a

boundaries coach. I think it's very interesting

because you are a solopreneur for the most part. Right?

Mhmm. Mhmm. So how do you man because it seems like you're always creating

content like you said, whether it's the podcast or Instagram

or, you know, I found out that you have a community and, like, how do

you manage all of it and how do you devote enough time to put

to each thing? Yeah. So I ask for help

and I hire people to help me. So, before having

healthy boundaries, I was incapable of asking both asking for help. And now I'm like,

oh, my God, help is awesome. So I have a virtual assistant.

I create the vast majority of my social

media posts, though I have at times hired

professionals to create a bank of things for me.

And I still use some of those things and I use some of those as

inspiration. But my virtual assistant has been with me for a

long time. The the bulk of what she does is

everything to do with my podcast that has to do with social media.

So I create, like, the the

podcast cover and the cover for headliner, which is the audio

gram that you can post online. And then she takes the

quotes that my podcast manager pulls out from each episode,

creates a graphic for that, and then she sets all that stuff up in

later dot com. That's the scheduling program that I

use for my social media. And then she also takes

my newsletter that I create and send out via Mailchimp

and turns it into a blog post on my website and

then posts it on Facebook and LinkedIn

for me. And now what she's doing right now, another

thing I just had her do is she's taking articles that I wrote and posted

on medium.com, and we're turning them into that I wrote and posted on medium.com, and

we're turning them into blog posts on my website, which I've wanted to do

forever. And it's just like the time is just right for that.

I've had her do so many other things for me. I work with

Chantel Garcia Garcia of Innovative Consulting and

Services, who I met through known Coworking. She is

my CFO for hire. I think of her as my financial

thought partner, so her firm takes care of my bookkeeping and

accounting. I work with Rick Callahan of

Creative, which is a branding and marketing

agency. Also, I didn't actually meet him from NONE. I met him

because he was the entrepreneur in residence at the library, but I

really got to know him through known because I invited him

when we started known. I was like, that guy needs to come here and needs

to check this place out. And then I really got to know him. And in

fact, I saw him do a workshop with somebody to help

them take the 50,000,000 things they were doing and figure out how do I pull

that into a brand. And I was like, that's the guy that I need to

work with. I have hired a variety of coaches

for other things. I also am very good

at time management. I I block my time, and I

work using the Pomodoro technique where you work in

a 25 minute chunk of time and then you take a break for 5 minutes.

And as a recovering multitasker

and someone who has attention issues, I don't have attention

deficit disorder, but I've learned how to be super

focused in those 25 minute chunks of time, and it's, like,

really freeing for me. And so I'm super productive.

So it's about, like, delegating. I try to

do the things that are within my zone of genius and

delegate especially repetitive tasks to other

people. And then I think just like therapists

need therapists, coaches need

coaches. And, you know, I need coaches because they

know things I don't, but I also need accountability. I'm really good at self

accountability, but there's nothing like having you know, someone that you meet

with weekly and having tasks and and wanting to make sure that you

get them done. So I have been in a variety of coaching

programs right now. I'm in something called selling with soul with

Tiffany Carter, which is really, really helpful in changing

things for me because she works with people

like me who are very mission oriented. And,

like, I'm never gonna violate my values in my business.

I don't want to push something on someone that

they don't want. I want people to understand what their issues

are and that I can help them. Because if you had told me years ago,

your issue is boundaries. I wouldn't have known what the fuck you were talking

about. You know, so she's helping me speak in

language that my ideal clients can hear. And

it's my job to let people know

there's a solution to your issue. The pain that you're

going through, the anxiety, the the fear, the

guilt, the shame, like all of that can

be cleaned up with boundaries. And here's the thing about boundaries, Gino.

They permeate every single area of your

life. So it kind of doesn't matter what your issue is.

I can probably help you as a boundary

coach. So, I did see on your website, I was reading through some of your

bios and stuff, and it says that you empower people to live their

lives on purpose. And you've already spoken a bit about that. But can you

go into that a little bit more and and talk about why you think it

is important to live in your purpose and not to just Yeah. You know,

kinda chug along the day. Yeah. So I'm glad you

asked that. So I did not know that I wasn't

living on purpose before I got into recovery. So

that's really interesting. And the reason I

say that boundaries help you live on purpose is

that through the process of forming boundaries, which by the way, is

an experimental process. Because if you are someone with

poor boundaries, chances are you don't really know what you like

and want and need to prefer because you've been so focused on what other people

want and like and need prefer. And especially what other people think of you

that you don't really know what your preferences are. So the process of setting

boundaries is like, wait, do I actually like this or do

I actually want to do that? And so you have to experiment and you start

to figure out, okay, this is okay with me. And that is

not okay with me. And the way that I coach my clients, I

take them through a process to help them figure out their top five values.

And the reasons that is important is because the way to know when and

where to set your boundaries is by what's important to you. In other words, what

you value. So when they keep those as guideposts

in their mind, they're figuring out, oh, that's right. You know,

family is important to me or health is important to me or

dignity is important to me. And what are the boundaries I need to

put in place to uphold my value of family and health and

dignity, for example? And when you

start living in alignment with your values, it brings you to

integrity. And integrity is another word for wholeness. So

back to the name of my podcast, Fragmented to Whole Life

Lessons from 12 Step Recovery, it's named that because I had this

notion before recovery that I was a bunch of fragmented

pieces floating around in space and the process of recovery and

especially the process of forming healthy boundaries helped me integrate those

fragments into one coherent whole. So

now I can be rocked by things that happened to me, but I can't be

shattered by them the way that I used to because I am whole.

And there were many things I was doing before recovery that contributed to

my fragmentation. So one is I had a bunch of facades

up, and I faked the funk about who I said yes to things I didn't

want to. Some of it was that I was dishonest. And, you know,

I lied about cigarettes and drugs and alcohol and all kinds of things like that,

but I mostly lied in the people pleasing department and said that I

was happy to do things that I wasn't. And then I got resentful of people

and I pitched about them behind their back. And that's not an integrity.

So when you are doing things that are not in alignment with your values,

you're chipping away at your integrity, and it's a lot

easier to hold on to your boundaries when you know this is

what I value. And so a lot of people in our society

nowadays talk about living a purpose driven life. And so many people are like, what's

my purpose? What's my purpose? I don't know what my purpose is. How do I

find my purpose? I'll tell you what your purpose is. Your purpose is to

live in alignment with your values because your particular

constellation of values is never gonna be the same as someone

else's. Even if someone else had the same top five values as

you, it doesn't mean that they think of them the same way. So I'll give

you an example. If someone says family

is really important to me, it's a high value for me. 1 person

to them what that might mean is when I say family is

important to me, it means I wanna be home having dinner with my family every

night of the week, and I wanna have leisure time on the weekends with my

family. So I'm never gonna take a job where I have to work 50,

60, 70 hours a week, take calls and emails on weekends, etcetera.

Another person might say family is really important

to me, and I wanna give my family the things I never

had as a child. So I want to earn

a really hefty living. And so I'm going to take a

job where I'm going to work 50, 60, 70 hours a

week, and I'm going to take, you know, calls and messages

on weekends. However, we're gonna live in a really

nice home and we're going to go on amazing vacations and we're going to have

a swimming pool. So even if those two people have family

as the same, you know, they both say family is their value, it's

not going to look the same. So your particular constellation of values

are going to be unique to you and

you living in alignment with those values. That's your

purpose. Just be whole, you know, have integrity.

And so the way that you are going

to thrive in your life is if you're on

your purpose, in alignment with your values. And

so to me, learning how to have healthy boundaries

is about really taking control of your

life so you can thrive. Yeah. I really

like the way that you described that. It makes a lot of sense to me

personally and even kinda makes me think about, like, how when people work

with coaches, like, some people you'll work well with and then some

people won't work well because of the language that you speak and the values that

you hold and stuff like that, because everybody is different. Right. So, yeah, I I

like the way that you, articulated that. So I wanted to ask

a boundary specific question. So I know a lot of times

I am and I'm sure with a lot of people are the same that they're

their own worst critic and hardest on themselves. Does

that have to do with setting boundaries? Like, do you set boundaries with yourself?

Absolutely. Hands down, the most important boundaries that I set are with

myself. So many of those boundaries fall under

the category of what I call boundaries of self containment. So these

are things that we need to either contain or stop doing. And let me tell

you something, Gina. I would say that when

I really got good at the boundaries of self containment, that cleaned up like 85%

of the drama in my life. And it meant that I

stopped doing things that were either creating chaos or dysfunction around

me. And I stopped doing things that exacerbated the chaos

So the first kind of boundary of self containment is something that I need to

contain or stop doing that really only affects me. It doesn't affect other

people. And so negative self talk is one of them.

So I need to contain that. I need to stop doing the negative self

talk. So the first step in that is to notice that you're doing it

and then to stop, which isn't entirely easy. I know that

because I've been through this process. And in fact, when I was in my late

twenties, I went through a process where I did a lot of

work to clean up the negative self talk, and it really made a huge difference

in my life. But when I got into recovery, I realized there was so much

more. Many of the negative self talk things were actually below the

level of language. It was beliefs that were so deeply entrenched

that I didn't even know that I believed them. And

then when I was able to finally put words on them, then

I could negate them. So I'll give you an example. I often had

this feeling in my life that I needed to sort of, like, shrink down

and get smaller and back off. And when I

finally realized the words that go with that

are I'm too much, I was able

to turn that around and create my own affirmation, which

was I'm just the right amount of everything.

And that really helped me that every time I started to have this

this impulse to shrink, I would say I'm just the right

amount of everything. But putting a boundary of self

containment around the self talk is really

important because the way I think of it is you are poisoning

the the reservoir of your mind and you've been doing it for

decades. And I did a calculation one time

that if you had 10 negative thoughts a day, which is

very low number for most purpose. And

I can't remember what the time period was, but it was like 20,000 thoughts over

some period of time. And it's like you're dropping

poison into the reservoir of your mind every single day. And that

if you stop it, that will purify the reservoir of your mind. But it'll

take a while. But if you put medicine in, it will

purify it much more quickly. And the medicine is affirmations. And what's

interesting is if you beat yourself up for 20 years with

poison 10 times a day, it's not gonna take you anywhere near

that amount of time with the medicine to turn it around. I mean, we're

talking, like, less than a year if you're consistent about it.

And the other thing, like, one really important notion that I learned

in recovery that really helped me is that when you learn something

about yourself or you observe something about yourself that's negative, think of

it as info, not ammo. In other words, it's information for you

to learn, integrate, and grow from. It is not

ammunition for you to beat yourself up. And even though I've

always been the eternal optimist, very positive motivational

person, I realized in recovery, it was almost like I was always

scanning the horizon for reasons to beat the crap out of myself.

So I was like, oh, this is info, not ammo. So that info,

not ammo combined with stopping the negative self talk,

really, really powerful. So that's one example of a boundary of

self containment that only affects you. But then there are

boundaries of self containment that affect you and other people. And I'm gonna

tell you one of my worst ones, which I was shocked to learn this, which

was that I gossiped. So I did not know that

me bitching about my boss of the 19 years behind her back was gossip,

which is hilarious because that's sort of the definition of gossip. But, you know,

I mentioned I'm in ACA. And what happened for me was I grew up in

a dysfunctional family where we engaged in indirect

communication. So we didn't talk to the person we had difficulty with. We

talked to everybody around them. This was a communication pattern laid down

before I was born. I couldn't help but grow up in this family and

learn that. And what that resulted in was me gossiping. So when I realized

I gossiped, I had to stop that. And what happened at work

when I stopped gossiping about that boss behind her back was my resentment

went down by, like, 80, you know, 90, 95%. And I was

like, woah. So it's not that she wasn't doing anything, but

I was magnifying the difficulty so much. And what happened was because I was there

for so long,

expectation that we talk about problems, we don't address them. We talk about

her. We don't go to her and say, hey, this isn't really working for us.

We need to talk as a team about what we can do to adjust. No,

we didn't do that. And so when I stopped my part,

it had a dramatic effect on the team and the culture of the

organization. So as you can see, when I institute that

boundary of self containment, it doesn't just affect me. It

affects all the people around me. So I would say, you know,

and I I think that, you know, those were hands down the most important

boundaries that I learned to institute was boundaries of self containment. What

most people think about when they think about boundaries, they

think about boundaries of self protection, which are the things we need to protect

ourselves from. And I'm here to tell you people, if you have

poor boundaries, you're probably pretty clear purpose are walking all over

me. But what you probably are unaware of

is you are probably walking all over other people through, like,

things like gossiping and giving unsolicited advice and that sort of

thing. Thank you for explaining that. I definitely resonated with some of the stuff that

you were talking about as far as doing things that you don't even realize that

you're doing that are detrimental to yourself and making things worse than they than they

really are. Can you also talk to the recovery programs

that you were in a little bit more? Because I think, at least for myself,

if I think of recovery, I more so think of, like, Alcoholics Anonymous

Mhmm. Or, you know, problems with drugs. But there

are programs for the the things that we're talking about. Right? And and how do

you go about finding or being aware of Yeah. Of these sorts of

groups? So I wanna start with Alcoholics Anonymous, which was the

first 12 step recovery program founded in 1939.

And then all of the other groups have sort of come from that,

They all use the same 12 steps, but the way they go about them is

different. So Codependence Anonymous, which is the

the group that I started in, is really for

people who, like me, are codependent and super focused

on other people. Often, they're people who are loved

ones of of alcoholics and other kinds of addicts, whether it's

a drug addict, a gambling addict, a food addict, a

sex and love addict, a technology addict, you know,

whatever that is. So what we talk about

in recovery is there are actually physical

additions and process addictions. So a process addiction would be

like sucks and love addicts anonymous or codependence where where

it's almost like we're addicted to people. And then

the ACA program that I am in is a 12 step

recovery program. That's also a trauma recovery program

where we reparent ourselves. So the idea

there is that when we grow up in dysfunction,

it results in what's called a relational trauma. So most people when they

think of trauma, they think of what we call big t trauma. So you were

in a car accident. You were in a hurricane. You got raped. That sort

of thing. Relational trauma is sometimes referred to as small

t trauma, and that is it's sort of like the continual

drip, drip, drip of emotional invalidation. That was the case for

me and the gaslighting. So I grew up in a

family where, like, feelings were not really a thing. Like, it was

like, you're not, like, don't feel that, you know. And

feelings are energy that is naturally created in our body. And what

happens as little people is we learn to stuff that. And it's,

like, trapped in our body, and it results in trauma. And a a phrase that

I learned in yoga for 12 step recovery is the

issues are in our tissues. So many times purpose

that are in recovery for trauma need to do some kind of

somatic healing to release that energy from their bodies.

But what happens in ACA is we both use the 12 steps

of recovery and we re parent ourselves. And re parenting

yourself can mean a wide variety of things. So it can mean

as simply as I am now being good and kind

to myself, and it can be as complex as

you cultivate this entire cast of characters internally, an

inner loving parent, an inner critical parent, an inner child, an inner teenager,

maybe multiple inner children. And then those characters

go about the process of reparenting you and

giving you the things that you didn't get as a child. And it

is astonishing to me the changes that can happen.

And I will say that for the bulk of my time in recovery,

I've mostly done the part where I'm just good and kind to

myself. But in the last year and a half and especially the last handful

of months, I have really been actively working on

reparenting myself and really working with

this cast of characters and getting familiarized with this inner

teenager. Like, I was aware ahead in your child, but that was as far as

it went. And I've done a lot of work to kind

of flesh that out, and I am

astonished at the level of healing I'm

experiencing. I feel like my DNA is changing. I

think that that is really that reparenting is really important, but the

12 steps is also really important in ACA because,

you know, the step that if most people have heard of recovery, the step

that most people have heard about is step 4, where we take a searching and

fearless moral inventory of our lives. In most

programs, what that means is you look at all the shitty things that

you've been doing and you clean that up. You stop doing it.

And if necessary, you make amends to the people and

places that you've, you know, that you've done those things. And

in ACA, we say we take

a look at our environment and what happened to us. Like in in

AA, for example, the mother program, you're not allowed to look at other

people, your environment or what happened. You're only allowed to look at yourself and what

you did because that's all you have control over. In ACA,

we say, well, I'm my environment. I must look at the

family system. We do a genogram of our family and say, like, where was the

alcoholism? Where was the codependence? You know, where was the cheating and

the lying and the gambling and and all that stuff? And we see

that family dysfunction is intergenerational and it's passed down.

And then in step 4, we look at what happened to us,

not just what we did. We sort of get at what we did by way

of what happened to us. So I gave a perfect example earlier. What happened to

me was I grew up in a family that engaged in indirect communication,

and what I did was gossip. I I have to stop regardless of whether I

know where it came from or not. But I feel personally

really grateful that I learned about being a gossip

in ACA rather than in my other recovery program, which I didn't

mention. I'm also in Overeaters Anonymous, which is a 12

step recovery program for people that have problems with food.

So I'm down over a £100 from my top weight. Next

week actually is my 8 year anniversary in ACA and my 7 year anniversary

of being what we call abstinent in, Overeaters Anonymous.

And I've been at my goal weight for over 5 years. And so

I think if I had learned that I was a gossip when I did the

12 steps in O. A, I would have been completely riddled with

guilt and shame. Like, oh my God, I'm a horrible person. But because I learned

it in ACA, I learned this came from

somewhere. It takes the sting away of like, I'm not a crappy

person. I'm a product of my environment. I still have to change it.

But, you know, that's the gist of that. I would say I think I've heard

there's something like over 200 12 step

programs, but, like, the one that is the most prolific is Alcoholics

Anonymous. There's also No Products Anonymous, Al Anon, Quota,

Overeaters Anonymous, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. There

are several ones for eating in addition to Overeaters Anonymous.

There's, an Internet and Technology

Addicts Anonymous, which is relatively new. There's Debtors

Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, you know, a whole bunch

more. So I think, you know, if you feel like you

have an addiction, a compulsion, or an obsession,

just Google that in 12 Step Recovery and, you know,

maybe there's a fellowship for you. And now that we're post pandemic

world where everybody meets on Zoom, even if there's not a meeting in

your physical geographical area, you can hop on

a Zoom call with people who are just like you and find out

not only are you not alone, but there's a

solution and a recovery program. There's other people just like you. Like, I

remember my first Oreaders anonymous meeting. I went with

a friend, and I thought I was going to a regular

weekly OA support meeting, but it was a workshop. And the first

speaker said, I'm down over a £185 for over 30

years. And I was like, I'm listening because I'd never heard anything

like that. And then he proceeded to do a presentation on the cycle

of addiction as it applies to food. And I went,

oh, my god. I'm a compulsive overeater. I didn't even know that was a

thing. Never mind that I was it. And then when I started being

in the room with people and hearing, like, the way that they think about and

behave with food and the games they play in their heads about

food, like I do that. I had no idea that I wasn't

alone. And to hear people

talking out loud about things that I would never have told other

people and then we'd laugh about it is just

incredible. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing all that

and and being so transparent in it because I think now what you're doing is

you are talking about the things that you've struggled with and passing it down to

purpose, and I think that that's amazing and that's, that's really

awesome. I definitely, really appreciate that about you. And we

are kinda coming toward the end of our time here, and I feel like you've

given us, almost a free boundaries lesson here. But what can

people do if they really resonated with what you spoke with and and want to

work with you? Okay. So my favorite place on social media

hangout is on Instagram. So I'm at Higher Power Coaching.

Of course, I would love it if you would listen to my podcast. So whatever

app you're listening to this podcast and you look up fragmented to

whole or if you wanna find it online, go to fragment it to whole dot

com. I have right now 27 episodes

specifically about boundaries, and there's a page on my website that has

a playlist of just those episodes.

So if you go to my website and it says my issue is and

then you go to boundaries, that will take you to the page where I also

have a whole bunch of free resources on boundaries, including that playlist.

I have a 12 week private coaching program for people who

really wanna, like, get shit done and get over this boundaries

thing. So you can also find that on my website, which is

higher power cc.com. I'm probably gonna be launching a

group, not probably. I'm gonna be launching a group coaching program in the

next couple of months. Something like it's gonna be called something like

build boundaries accelerator program or something like that. I'm not exactly sure of the name,

but it's gonna be an 8 week program. And that is for people

who either just don't wanna pay the kind of money that I charge for private

coaching and or really prefer to work in a group setting. But they don't

they don't get any one on one time with me, but they get lots of

support and lots of, you you know, curriculum and materials and

feedback and stuff. Awesome. Awesome. I will link all that stuff in the

show notes so people can find it. And thank you again for your time here.

And I also do wanna say that the whole reason that we even connected I'm

I'm not sure if you remember or not, but I was working at known co

working kind of by myself, and I was not really participating in,

any of the things that known had to offer. And you basically, like, pulled me

aside one day and said, like, hey. What are you what are you doing in

an hour? We have a networking. And you, you know, told me to go to

that network. And then ever since then, I've met tons of amazing purpose,

and, I'm very appreciative of it. So I'm glad that you did that. That's my

job. Can't help it. I mean, I can't stop myself. It's my job, but also

it's my nature. So So thank you so much for everything and and all your

wisdom today. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. I appreciate it.

Thanks for tuning in and listening to Working Towards Our Purpose.

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