In this episode we discuss the value of having a coach after going through a breakup. Going through a breakup can leave people feeling lost and uncertain about their identity and future. Trying to quickly get over it by getting back into dating or numbing the pain often leads to repeating the same relationship patterns. A coach can provide an unbiased perspective, help manage emotions and thoughts, teach emotional maturity, and guide the process of evaluating past relationships to learn and grow. This allows you to move forward in a more intentional and empowered way. Coaching helps build self-trust and the ability to regulate one's own mind and emotions, making the person more attractive to healthier, more committed relationships in the future. The coach's role is to provide truth and direct feedback, even if it is difficult to hear, in order to help the client make progress and not stay stuck in negative patterns. A coach will see you with love and possibility and help you move towards hope, even when that seems far away.
If you're ready for more support and guidance to process your breakup and feel more free, I have a few open spots for private coaching clients. You can book a free consultation call: https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=13002720&appointmentType=2184073
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Have you gone through a breakup and you're tired of feeling low lonely or lost? I've got a pep talk for you. I'm Sarah Curnoles, your breakup bestie. I'm a certified life coach with years of coaching experience, helping people just like you turn your breakup into the best thing that ever happened to them. Each week, tune in to get a pep talk, to heal your heart. Let go of the past, reclaim your power and get back into your main character energy. Your breakup may have shattered your world as you know it, but together let's build a new better world. Let's go.
(00:44)
Hello, my friends, Sarah Curnoles here, your breakup bestie. And today I want to talk about why it matters having a coach after you go through a breakup, and especially why you should have one before you get back into dating again. So if you are somebody who, like a lot of people I've talked to, they think that time is going to heal all wounds and that in time it'll be okay. I want to invite you to think again because having a life coach work with you after a breakup isn't just helpful or nice to have, or like a luxury, like having a really great purse or great pair of shoes. No, it is life-changing and I will say necessary if you want to create lasting love in your life. So what I'm going to talk about in this episode, we're going to talk about why most people just repeat the same relationship patterns over and over and over again.
(01:53)
I know I did before I found this work of coaching. We're going to talk about the power of managing your thoughts and managing your emotions instead of those things managing you. And we're going to talk about how coaching can really make you more magnetic to better quality love relationships. Okay, so I'm really passionate about coaching people after a breakup because I find when you're going through that really hard time, it's a difficult transition because all of a sudden you don't know who you are anymore and your identity is a bit in, it's in the air. It's up for questioning because you knew yourself as that person's partner. I knew myself as my ex's girlfriend. I knew my role in the house. I knew where we were going with our future. If we were going to buy a house together, we had been renting, we were going to get married, and we had the whole vision of being old people on the front porch, holding hands, watching our grandkids play, right?
(03:08)
I saw that all for myself. And when I went through my breakup, all of a sudden I didn't know who I was. I didn't even know what my future was going to hold because I thought I had it all figured out. And so the transition period causes so much fear and anxiety for people that the natural response is to actually try to get out of that pain as fast as possible. And what that might look like in your life is you might try to go right back into dating, you might try to get back together with your ex. You might do a lot of numbing behavior like just laying in bed and watching Netflix all day or drinking or using drugs or eating your feelings. All of these are ways that these are behaviors that we do when we're trying to avoid actually looking at the problem and actually experiencing the pain and moving through it.
(04:15)
And I will say I'm guilty of this because I always thought that the thing that was going to make me feel better was another person. And if it wasn't going to be my ex, because I was the queen of getting back together with my ex and I thought that that would fix it, if I could prove I've changed, my eyes are opened and I see it your way, and as long as we get back together, then I'll be okay or moving on to somebody else. The old saying of you got to get under someone to get over someone. That's not actually how you get over anybody that's just trying to do something to escape the pain of what you're feeling. And I think some of the most harmful advice out there is time heals all wounds because it doesn't, for most of us, those wounds are probably a little infected and they're going to heal in really wonky ways that you're going to keep getting injured in the same way over and over and over again if you don't do the work to clean out the wound, get the gunk out of there and to do the work to allow it to heal cleanly, right?
(05:38)
And I'm using that analogy I want you to really picture. When you were a kid and you fell and scraped your knee and you got some gravel on it, you had to clean out the gravel because if you just let the gravel stay there, it's going to get infected and it's going to be gross and you don't want that. But that's what of us do when we're saying time heals all wounds. We're not taking the time to clean out the gravel so that it can have a clean healing period.
(06:08)
And the truth is without taking the time, so I just use the gravel analogy, right? So what does that actually mean in our life? That actually means taking the time to manage your emotions so that you feel through them so that they don't get clogged up in your system. That's what happens when we repress and ignore our feelings that they clog up our systems. So we clean up our emotions, we clean up our thoughts, and we clean up our habits so that you can approach this new chapter in your life with a lot more self-awareness and a lot more intentionality having grown from your past instead of letting it weigh you down like baggage. Okay, so what is the value of having a coach during this process? Why would you even want to have one with you? I really think when you get a coach after your breakup, you're not just moving on, you're moving up.
(07:17)
So when you are talking about your ex to your coach, what you're doing is you are getting an outside unbiased opinion and a person who has a lot more perspective and a lot less judgment than you have about what's currently going on in your own life. So having that person who is completely dedicated to you, to listening to you, to hearing you, and holding for you the hope of what's possible once you get through this, because I'm not going to lie, it can feel really hopeless for a while after a breakup, it can feel really hard to think about ever feeling good again, and a coach will hold that for you as it's absolutely possible. I know that it's possible for you, and I will believe that for you until you can believe it for yourself, they're going to hold that and help you move towards that.
(08:23)
With an outside perspective, this is so much more valuable than just talking to a friend because when you talk to a friend, as wonderful as they are and as loving as they are, they only see your side of things and they are only going to reinforce to you what you tell them rather than approaching it from somebody who has a lot of tools and a lot of wisdom and a lot of training to be very neutral about a situation so that you can move through it without distraction. And having somebody who has your true best interest at heart means that that person's sometimes going to say the hard thing, but that's exactly what you need to hear in order to move on. They're going to tell you the truth even if it might hurt your feelings because what they see is something bigger than this immediate moment.
(09:20)
They see the whole path in front of you when all you can see is the very immediate future. And this is hard as a coach, this is something I've had to do a lot of work on because I have my own patterns as a people pleaser. I don't want to make you mad, I don't want to piss you off. Of course I don't, but I know how valuable the truth is because when my coach has told me the truth of it sounds like, so for me what I was doing and what I kept bringing to my coach was it was kind of like the same situation over and over and over again, and eventually she called me out of what you're doing essentially is you are sitting in a dirty diaper like a baby and you're refusing to change it. You are just sitting in that dirty diaper over and over and over again instead of being open to changing it to letting somebody help you change it.
(10:13)
And that's what I was doing and that's what we tend to do. We sit in all of our own negative thoughts and our inner critic gets louder and louder, and that's the same as sitting in a dirty diaper and not being open to having somebody say, Hey, would you like some help changing that? Can I guide you to a different way? Are you open to that? So that's what a coach can offer, and as much as I didn't want to hear it at the time because those negative thoughts at a certain point become like a safety blanket, they become really comfortable because it didn't challenge me to look at it and take any responsibility for my own situation, which it's a little bit harder than I thought it was going to be to really take responsibility for my own life. Stepping into that and I didn't want to hear it.
(11:09)
I almost wanted to keep the security of my negative thoughts because at least it was familiar and it was a little scary to look at the potential for changing, but having a coach say, this is the way out. This is the way to start feeling more freedom. I had to get over the sting of being called out and choose to see that I wanted to feel free more than I wanted to feel the comfortable in my dirty diaper thoughts. So the coach is really there to cut through emotional drama and to keep it simple, straightforward and simple and straightforward, and what's the opposite of drama? It's just plain right? If what we tend to do is over ize our lives and maybe we playing that role of victim of like poor me, poor me, poor me, because it gets us some attention, it gets us some love from our friends.
(12:29)
A coach is going to show you, you don't have to play victim in your own life in order to get love. A coach is going to love you and come from a place of love and show you how to get through the drama and to see your life in a more straightforward way so that you can actually start making progress instead of just rehashing the same thing over and over and over again. A coach is also going to teach you how to have emotional maturity, which I think is something that we never learn. Emotional maturity is when you take responsibility for your own feelings and that you are the person who is in charge of feeling your feelings and creating the way that you want to feel, and they're going to teach you how to do all that because you'd think that's something that we learn in school, emotional regulation, but it's not.
(13:22)
And when you're going through a really difficult time like a breakup, emotions are high and you want to be the person who regulates your own emotions, not the person who is controlled by her emotions. See the difference? So if you are the one who is managing your own emotions and you're not letting them manage your life for you, you can still have your sadness, you can still have your anger and move through it and process it and get to the other side. This kind of ties in with a whole lot less drama in your life because we think of a dramatic person, it's so big and so over the top with their feelings, it's almost performative. But if you are willing to learn how to feel your feelings and then learn how to manage them, you could rule the world with that. I swear that tool alone has changed my life that I no longer sit in wallowing.
(14:26)
I can wallow if I want, but I do it as a choice of this is the feeling I'm moving through, and once I'm through it, I can do something else. I am free to go about my life because the secret is feelings only last about less than two minutes. They don't even last two minutes. If you let yourself just feel through it, it's a lot of times our patterns and our thoughts and our habits that keep us stuck in the same feeling over and over and over again. There's also a real value in talking out loud to somebody who's truly listening to you, but you also get to hear yourself as you're talking. How often do you really take the time to speak through something out loud so that you hear yourself and then you start becoming more self aware of where are you getting yourself stuck?
(15:27)
And this is also a way to build more. It's interesting that by partnering with the right coach, with a person who truly has your best and highest good in mind at the forefront, what you end up doing as you're listening to yourself talk, as you're getting this outside perspective, you are learning to build self-trust because you're gaining these skills to listen and pay attention to yourself more and more and more so that you can learn how to regulate yourself and lead yourself in your own life. There's this saying that, and I believe it's usually in reference to meditation, that the mind is a wonderful servant and a terrible master, right? When we don't take the time to examine our mind and to look at the thoughts that are happening unconsciously, they're running the show and they are managing you. And it's sort of like letting monkeys be the ones who run the circus. Instead, you want to take responsibility for your monkeys and you want to be the one that gives them order, direction and leadership, right? You want to bring that leadership to your own mind so that you choose thoughts on a regular basis that are serving your highest and best good. And a coach is going to teach you how to do that very directly because that's what they're helping you to do, and they're going to teach you skills on how you can manage that on a regular basis.
(17:01)
And one of the other big benefits is that when you work with a coach, or at least me if you work with me, I can't speak for every coach here. I have an evaluation process that I actually apply to dating because that's how we extract value from relationships that didn't work out. They aren't failures, and you are not a failure because the relationship ended, which is a big narrative people have of like, I'm a failure because my relationship ended. You're not. It's just that relationship came to its completion and it has nothing to do with you or your worth or your value as a human being. But we can use the completion of that relationship whether it's just a date and that's all that it was, or years and years and years together, we can evaluate it and learn the good and the bad. What do we want to keep from this experience?
(17:58)
What do we never want to experience again? And who do I want to evolve to become because of everything I've learned? We don't learn by accident. We learn by taking the time to evaluate what went well and what didn't go well. And I guide people through a distinct process for that so that even a single bad date doesn't get wasted. It's an opportunity that you can learn about yourself, about what you want in relationship, about what you want in a partner, and you get to shape that if you take the time to process it. So I also really do help my clients shift out of focusing on the past, and we focus more on the future because it's so easy to keep looking back at the past or keep repeating those patterns because that's what we know. I did this for years. I kept dating the same unavailable men over and over and over again because I knew what that felt like.
(19:04)
I knew what it felt like to be in a relationship with somebody who wasn't all in. There was something, even though I wasn't really happy, it was something really familiar of me having to do all the work to keep the relationship going, even though I knew I wanted more, but I just didn't know how to get it. I didn't know how to create a relationship of equals. And it really took me working with my coach to stop looking at the people from my past as the end all be all, and to start focusing more on the future of where am I going and what do I want?
(19:48)
I have so many clients who have created so much progress for themselves in this area. And the one that really came to me that I wanted to share with you, it's one client in particular that we were coaching on something totally different, and occasionally her relationship would come up and we would talk about a relationship, of course. And we had been working on her business and our time together, our coaching container came to an end. And it was interesting. Her relationship was pretty rocky, and she was also pretty sure she was going to be ending that relationship as well, just coincidentally kind of worked out with the end of our coaching package. She was going great in her business and decided, I don't think that's a relationship I want to continue doing. And I heard from her months and months and months later, she reached out because her, well, her and her man had some sex and she was pregnant and wanted to decide how do I want to handle this situation?
(21:00)
And she knew that the way best way to do it was to work with me as her coach. And I applauded her so much from saying, how do I want to approach this situation? Because I hadn't wanted a relationship with this person and my patterns kept me going back to him. So what do I do now in this situation? And so what we did was we got really honest and really clear about what does she want her life to look like? And we processed through that and we talked about all the possibilities without judgment and any emotions that came up. I held space for that so that she could move through those in a safe way because you can imagine this is pretty emotional.
(21:46)
So we worked for a couple of months so that she could create clarity around what's the decision I want to make here? What do I want my life to look like? What role do I want this man to play in my life? And she was able to make those decisions from a place of power and not a place of fear so that she could move into becoming a mother in the most open, the most loving way that she possibly could. And that's what she chose. She chose, I'm going to be a single mom, and she's set boundaries around the involvement that she wanted from her ex, and she made the decision that was right for her at that time and what that was going to mean for her life. And I applaud her so much because we can all relate to this where we go through a breakup and the ties are still there and we feel pulled back to them.
(22:48)
And we make choices in our life that maybe in hindsight we kind of wish we hadn't made. But here we are, we handed our life right now in this moment. How do I want to handle my situation and how do I best make this decision for me from what is best for me? And without the muddiness of fear or worry or guilt or any of that stuff, how do I approach my life from a place of internal power and responsibility for my own life and choosing thoughts that are best going to serve me going forward? And you know what? The thoughts that don't serve you are those inner critic voice, which can get really loud. I think we all know what that's like when our inner critic is getting really loud. So I don't want you to feel alone. I don't want you to feel overwhelmed or like your emotions are running you.
(23:58)
I want you to feel freedom. I want you to feel confident. I want you to feel clarity. I want you to feel peace, and that is totally possible for you. And the fastest way to get there is to work with a coach. I hope that it's me. Obviously, I would love to work with you if you're listening to this, if you're looking for some personal attention. That's exactly what I do. I create a one-on-one plan so that you have something tailored specifically to you and your situation. We create goals and an action plan so that you know what it looks like moving forward, and then we meet together and we go through that process. And you never have to do that alone. You don't need more time to get over your ex, right? It's not about the time. It's about approaching it in a smart way that is best guided with an expert.
(25:00)
And coaching is going to give you tools that not just serve you right now and moving into dating these tools that you learn of taking responsibility for your thoughts and your emotions that's going to serve you for the entirety of your life. And once you start learning how to become more self-aware, how to be in control of these things for your life, you actually become magnetic to the people who want to date that version of you. It's unstoppable, right? You can't stop a magnet from being magnetic, and right now your thoughts and your patterns are probably magnetizing people just like the ones that you've already dated, just like I did of the unavailable guys. I kept attracting those over and over and over again, and I kept dating those. But now I attract relationship minded men who are ready to commit, who want something serious.
(26:00)
It's very funny because that's not where I'm at at all in my life right now. I'm actually not interested in a long-term relationship. But it's funny, those are the ones that keep coming to me because the quality of my thoughts and the way that I handle myself is so different from how it used to be. So I have a lot more control over my dating life, and I feel much more confident than I ever have. So if this is something that really resonates with you and you are looking for that one-on-one attention and some help with getting over your ex and getting back into dating, that's what I do. And I want to help you. I actually have availability for a few more one-on-one clients, and I would love to do a free consultation with you to let you experience what it's like to work with me so that you have all the information that you need to make a decision.
(26:58)
So if you want to book a consultation, it's absolutely free. It is probably going to be the most useful 60 minutes of your life. Go ahead and use the link that I'm going to drop in the show notes here so that you can book that for yourself and get a spot on my calendar and we can get started right away. I can't wait to help you. I can't wait to hear what's going to change and shift in your life once you start picking up these tools and start putting down the heavyweight of your past relationships. Let's do that together, and I am wishing you a beautiful rest of your day. I hope you take very good care of yourself. All right, my friends. Take care.