If you feel like you’re at the bottom, you are perfectly positioned for your comeback.
In this episode, Sarah Curnoles walks you through exactly what she would do if she were broken up with today—step by step—to reclaim her power and create her ultimate comeback story. She breaks down how to stabilize your nervous system, depersonalize the breakup, assign empowering meaning, channel pain into creation, and design a future that excites you. This pep talk is a practical roadmap for turning heartbreak into the starting point of a life that feels aligned, intentional, and deeply yours.
Join the free masterclass: www.sarahcurnoles.com/masterclass
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 through 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 and I have got a special episode for you today because I'm going to tell you step by step exactly what I would do and why if I were broken up with today. So this is going out to any of you who are struggling of like, I just don't know how to move forward. I don't know how to do this on my own. I'm feeling really overwhelmed. Guess what? I got you. I'm going to give you step by step everything to do in order to take back my power in this moment to feel like ... And when I say take back my power, what I mean by power is the ability to influence. I want to feel like I can influence my life again and I'm going to make this my greatest comeback story. Right? Because nobody likes a story about someone where everything goes easy and happily all the time.
(01:42)
What do we love? We love an underdog. We love a person who is struggling. We want somebody we can root for. And the underdog starts at the bottom. So if you're feeling like I'm at the bottom right now, guess what? You are perfectly positioned for your comeback. All right, so here's exactly what I would do. Step one. I would stop blaming myself. Instead, I would focus on stabilizing myself. All right, we got to take care of your nervous system first. My nervous system has to become my top priority because my body has been so used to regulating with another person of turning to that person to help me feel better. And a lot of times I have outsourced probably more than I should when it comes to regulating. So I am going to prioritize, ooh, I got to figure out how to calm myself down and begin to feel safe even though I'm going through a major change now and I'm dealing with a lot of uncertainty, things that the human body does not like.
(02:46)
I need to let myself know that I'm going to be safe. Right? Also part of stabilizing, I'd schedule time to cry. This gives it a container so that it doesn't feel overwhelming. I'm not kidding. Schedule time to cry every single day, five minutes. That's all it's got to be. It doesn't have to be a lot. I would come up with a self-care plan that prioritizes me, including making sure I get really good sleep and good nutrition. So even for those of you, people tell me this all the time, "I don't feel like eating. I am too upset to eat. Soups and stews are going to be your friend right now because they're very gentle on your body, but you can still get a lot of nutrition." All right? So stabilizing the goal here, it's not go no contact or give it time or just love yourself more.
(03:35)
That's really crappy advice actually. Stabilizing is about creating a new baseline of safety within yourself. This is about showing yourself that you are your biggest priority right now and you got you. We can heal when we feel safe to let go. So we got to prioritize feeling safe right away. The second thing I would do is I would depersonalize the breakup. It's so common to fall in the trap of like, "What did I do wrong?" Or if only I hadn't said that one thing in that fight, I get it. I have so many examples I could probably rattle off the top of my head of like, "Oh, I did that one thing and it ended the relationship." But guess what? You can't say the wrong thing to the right person. If it was the right person, they probably would have talked it through with you.
(04:36)
They wouldn't let the best thing that ever happened to them go just because of one small misstep. This isn't about you.
(04:46)
As much as I'm sure that that hurts to hear, this is something bigger and it probably has very little to do with you and more to do about them, what they can handle in a relationship, what they're looking for, and whether they see you in that vision or not. And you're like, "But Sarah, you just said it's about me. " It's actually not. It's about what they see for a relationship. So this isn't going to be the thoughts running through head of, what did I do wrong or no one's ever going to love me again. Here's what I want you to pay attention to instead. If this were me, I would pay attention to, how often am I actually thinking about my ex and trying to understand him, right? Instead of that, I want to bring my attention back to myself. I'd be paying attention to how often am I really making myself wrong here?
(05:43)
And notice that the more I do that, the worse I feel. Bringing up that awareness. I'd be paying attention to how little am I really checking in on what I want. It's so tempting to just totally ignore yourself and be thinking, thinking, thinking. Nope. Bring your attention back to what do I want?
(06:02)
Where am I losing my focus and giving my attention and looking towards the person who hurt me to be the person who heals me? Do I think that that person is going to give me closure or clarity? No. They did their job. They hurt me. They do not get to be the person who heals me. I'd be paying attention to, where am I stirring up drama in my own mind? I see you if you're doing this because I do it all the time. And if I stir up some drama in my mind, start thinking these thoughts and gets me all worked up. I get to feel that drama. I get to feel that intensity. I get to push blame outward. And what I'm really doing is I'm avoiding feeling my feelings. Okay? So step two is I'm going to start making it not about me ending the relationship or all the things I did wrong and I'm going to restart paying attention to, oh, where am I taking my own attention off myself, which is really step one, right?
(07:07)
And I'm making it about the other person's more important than I am. Nope. I want to recenter you, babe.
(07:17)
I want you to be the most important part of this story. And every time that attention slips, bring it back to you. Not as I did something wrong or I was at fault here, but about how do I care for myself? How do I show up and love myself more? All right. I want you to assign ... Oh, sorry. Step three. I got it because I even got ahead of myself. Step three, you're going to assign a new meaning to the breakup. This is what I would do. The breakup is not proof that I'm broken. It's not evidence that I'm unlovable or that everybody always leaves me. Right? If you've got that meaning running in the back of your head, we're going to assign it a new meaning because those meanings create pain.
(08:08)
What else could be true? I already gave you an option at the beginning. Maybe the story that you give to this, the meaning that you give is that this is my opportunity to create my greatest comeback. Yes, this knocked me down, but I get to learn how to come back from this. And what that feels like to me, that feels empowering. That feels inspiring. That makes me want to get into action. Okay? Step four. I would commit to a project. This isn't about distracting yourself, right? Distraction means that I'm not capable of handling my feelings and my thoughts. That's not what we're doing here. We are giving a bigger focus because I know what happens in a breakup is I want to make it all about me, me, me, me, me. Poor me. Oh, woe is me. I'm having such a hard time pity me.
(09:04)
Oh, this is awful. If I commit to a project, I am committing to remembering that life is more than just me.
(09:15)
I'm not just here to be all me, me, me, me, me. Even though yes, there is a part of this where we recenter you, but you are a piece of a whole and life is so much bigger than you. And so what I want you to think about here, I want you to have a little visual on your mind. When we are in me mode, you're in consumption mode. You are consuming things. You are that person sitting on the couch, eating the bed and Jerry's, watching Friends for the Millionth Time and doomscrolling on TikTok, hoping just to escape the moment and be distracted. No, no, no. We are out of consumption mode. The opposite of consuming is creation. I want you to get into creation mode. This is how Taylor Swift took all of her heartbreak and turned it into an epic career. She became a creator.
(10:10)
She took her pain and put it into music and processed it through songwriting and look at what she created from that. So here's what could be a possible project. Maybe you mentor someone. Maybe you volunteer in your community. I have a friend who healed from a narcissistic ex by mentoring young people in a sport that she was really passionate about. She did it totally for free. She wanted to help young girls in that area. She wanted to help people to thrive. Another type of project, you could write a book or write a song or make a painting, like literally get into artistic mode. It doesn't have to be good. The point isn't to be good. It's to use this as fuel and channel your emotion into something creative. Okay? Step five is to focus on what I want. Decide, what is it that I really want here for my life?
(11:14)
Right? Because my whole future just got wiped out. So really, I got a blank canvas. So what do I want my life to look like? If this is my comeback story, how do I want this to end?
(11:28)
And I would recommend starting by focusing on one thing. Do you really want to focus on being in your own epic love story? Do you want to be the person who travels the world and has this well stamped passport and lovers all over the world? You could think about this as, what is life in the shape of me? If I could carve out a me shaped life, what does that look like? And it's you get to make it look exactly the way you want. Get the exact amount of time with your friends that you want, amount of time with your family, amount of time with your perfect partner. You get to work in a career that fulfills you. Paint the picture, but it can be really helpful when you just start out just to focus on one area of your life. So do you want to focus on your health?
(12:18)
Do you want to focus on your love life? Do you want to focus on your money? Those are kind of generally like the big categories, so I would pick one.
(12:27)
So the reason why I say this is that we have a reason to let go when we have something that we are looking forward to more than what we are looking back at. So I want you to be more excited about what's coming up in your future than you were excited about what you had in the past. Can you see that? How it's so much easier to let go if you're like, "Well, what I had is nothing compared to what I'm going to get. " Okay? So this is truly about coming into alignment with yourself, not living your life on someone else's terms, which is never going to get you all that excited or motivated. If you're just living the way that you think you need to or the way that somebody expected you to, you're not going to be that excited.
(13:19)
This is focusing on what are you gaining, not what you lost. Okay. And here's a bonus step. Get support because you are going to heal so much faster if you are working alongside someone who is there with you side by side going, "Let go. I got you. It's okay to fall apart because I got you. " You don't have to carry all of this alone. You're actually going to go faster, further with your healing. You're going to go further, faster. There we go. You're going to go further, faster with your healing when you have somebody who is guiding you, who's helping you to avoid the common pitfalls when you might get stuck in depressed mode, or when you might get stuck in focusing too much on needing closure. If you have somebody that goes, "Nope, that's actually not important. Here's what's important and let me help you through this.
(14:18)
Let me be your guide." This is how you let go of the past. You start to move on and you create a life that looks like exactly what you want it to. And then someday you're like, "I have the best comeback story for you ever." All right. So if I was somebody that was just really done with having these blah relationships that I've actually been twisting myself into a pretzel and I realize in hindsight, oh God, I didn't really get to be myself and it just ended in a broken heart anyway and I really wanted to create a life in the shape of me, I would stop listening to these kinds of podcasts over and over and over again and stop listening to the TikTokers and the YouTubers and all the books with all the advice because that's in consumption mode. If you take nothing away from this, I hope I help you get into creator mode, into the mode where you start taking control of your life, where you say, "I have more say in this and I want to make a change and I don't have to do this alone because it is a little overwhelming to do alone." Right?
(15:36)
You definitely can. It does take longer, but if you really wanted this to be your comeback story and you don't want to do it alone, let's talk. I have availability for one-on-one clients right now. So what I would love to encourage you to do is to book a one-on-one consultation call with me on that call. I mean, really I should be calling it a breakthrough call because what I'm going to deliver for you on that call is I am going to help identify the one thing keeping you stuck on your ex, and then I'm going to help you design a path forward so it gets you out of this misery and into healing and into the life that you would design to look exactly the way that you want it to. And I'm going to help you to create that vision for your dream life because sometimes people are like, "I don't even know what I want.
(16:30)
I'm going to help you get clarity on that. " So you don't even have to come into the call knowing what that is. I'm going to help you get that. You'll leave feeling inspired, clear, and grounded, and then we can decide if private coaching is the next right step for you. And that call's completely free, by the way. I want to talk to you. If this is nudging you forward, I want to talk to you. You're my people.
(16:59)
I'm going to put the link to book this breakthrough call with me. I'm going to put the link in the show notes below, or you can just head over to my Instagram @sarakrnoles and DM me the word coach, and I'll send you the link that way, if that's even easier. All right, my friend, I want you to know that healing is possible for you. The life you want deep down, maybe you haven't even admitted to yourself that it's the life you want. That's possible for you, and we can do that together. I can help you get there. All right, my friends, those are the steps. If you're not quite ready to book the consultation call, come on over to Instagram and tell me, what did you think about this? Let me know. And if you would be so kind as to give me a five star rating, I would greatly appreciate it.
(17:46)
It's going to help other people going through the same situation as you find this podcast and get the help that they need. As always, my friends, I want you to know I am thinking about you. I deeply care about you and your journey and I want you to take really good care of yourself. All right. Have a good week. If you enjoyed this pep talk, I want to invite you to come check out one of my free masterclasses. These are designed specifically to help you understand where you are in the process of a breakup so that you can reach for the tools that are specifically meant to help you where you are. I'm going to teach you all about my five pillars of healing through a breakup and how they can change the way that you relate to yourself through this process. And in doing so, you get to change your life.
(18:39)
Your breakup is the most potent time for you to transform your life. Don't miss this opportunity. Learn how to make the most of this time so that you use the right tools for the right part of the healing so that you can move through this with as much ease as possible during a really uncomfortable time. Come on over to the free masterclass. You can sign up online on my website, which is just sarahcurnoles.com/masterclass. I hope to see you soon.