CORD OF CONNECTION WITH DANIELLE COBB: WHEN YOU STOP OVERRIDING YOURSELF

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Because our deepest wounds often reveal our greatest purpose.

Welcome to the Court of Connection. I am so excited about this episode.

It's all on nervous system regulation and capacity, which has been my whole world for the last couple of months.

I've been thinking a lot about it because I went to this workshop called Bridge and Extreme Leadership.

Shout out Preston and Alexi for creating such an incredible container you guys.

I'm talking this workshop. If you are looking for a breakthrough in your life, I am telling everybody in their mom.

Go, go, go. It is life changing.

So the thing I've noticed is that nervous system regulation is kind of something that's being talked about everywhere right now, which I love.

But I also think it gets a little misunderstood. And honestly, I was confused about it too.

The goal isn't to be perfectly regulated all the time. That's just not real. We're human.

We're meant to move through different states, stress, activation, calm, all of it.

The work isn't about not getting dysregulated ever. It's about how quickly you can notice how you respond.

And whether you're actually supporting your system or overriding, which is something I'm going to talk a lot about because you girls meant a lot of her life overriding her system.

So I think a lot of what we call regulation is, you know, another word for override is self soothing right is escapism is destruction.

We reach for things that make us feel better in the moment, but they're not actually settling our system.

It can look like robbing your phone the second you feel uncomfortable. I know I'm guilty of that.

I'm scrolling, dopamine hits, just trying to shift your state.

It can look like staying busy. I know a lot of people that are really good at staying busy. Oh my God, that was my life up until probably about a year, two years ago.

I always had my plate full. I always was going from one thing to the next to the next.

And it's like you get settled and you're fucking fried at the end of the night.

If you feel me nod your head, even though I can't see, I'm going to pretend you're with me here.

So yeah, it can look like being busy. You don't have to sit with yourself. It can look like food, nicotine, alcohol, cleaning.

Yep, I'm calling y'all out too. Even relationships, right? Like needing connection, attention to feel okay.

And none of these things are bad. So I just want to get clear none of these things are bad.

They're just distracting us and they're soothing your nervous system. And we've just gotten really good at calling it coping.

And what I didn't fully realize is that when I left my job was how many of my own ways of overriding were just built into my life.

I had structure. I had constant engagement. I was always thinking, solving, moving, doing on the phone, right?

And in a lot of ways that kept me from having to sit with myself, but it was also killing me quite literally.

I remember moments where I would just be like in total freeze burnout of overwhelm because my nervous system had been on overdrive for hours and hours and hours and hours at a time.

And I didn't really know how to successfully regulate it.

You know, I would, yes, I know breath, right? Go back to breath. Go back to breath. But I would do that for a second and go right back to what I was doing, right?

This mentality just like had me hijacked. So when that went away, there was just more space.

Now luckily I went straight from my last day of work into bridge and extreme.

And we literally two weekend straight for eight to nine hours a day worked on our nervous system and capacity.

So I feel really grateful that I had that experience.

But there are moments now having some space where I noticed the urge to reach for my phone.

I noticed the discomfort and stillness. It's not as loud, but it's definitely there.

I'm also in a three month coaching container where we were asked the, it's an invitation to give up our vices or things again the way of our next level selves while we're in this three month container.

So as one can imagine, the voice is even louder and more obvious.

And this is where I started to see something really clearly. All of this nervous system work, not overriding, sitting with myself.

It's actually about capacity. I had heard the word capacity thrown around a million times, but the way that they taught capacity made so much sense.

It's about your ability to be with what's happening in your life without needing to escape it.

And I think back I'm just using my job as an example because it was so fresh.

When I, when I stepped away from that job, I had to look at some, some stuff, some stuff came to the surface as it should.

I think anytime we have a transition life or grow, the hope is is that we really get to take a microscope into some of the ways that we showed up, some of the things that were effective were an ineffective and have an opportunity to grow.

And in that, I saw some parts of, you know, some parts of my life in that role when I was really, really, really just overwhelmed.

And my nervous system was just hijacked all the time. My stress level was so fucking high that my capacity to hold anything was very, very, very low.

And I'll give you a couple of examples of what that looks like.

My leadership was super poor at moments, right, where I'm, you know, I have a sharp attitude towards people on my team that I'm supposed to be leading, right.

And, you know, this doesn't come from a place of judgment. It just comes, it just showed me how much capacity means something.

It matters because without it, I'm snapping at people. I'm showing up in shitty poor ways. I'm, I'm just not available as the leader and the person in the woman in the world that I want to be, right.

So that's one example. Another example was everything, like being, I was in a relationship at one point in that, in that job.

And I just remember feeling like I would, it was like crash and burn all the time. I would get so overwhelmed and I just didn't know how to say a thing and just say, hey, this is what I need.

It was like, all I had the capacity for was just like shut down, right, or avoidance. And so it's not, it's, it's, it's how much you can hold emotionally, mentally, energetically, without shutting down or reaching for something to change how you feel.

And so many of us do that and we're programmed to do that. We're a lot of us are asleep to it.

Or maybe we have moments where we wake up to it and we're like, oh shit, man, I've been scrolling for hours and you're like, why do I do that, right.

My system is needing some way to soothe itself. And it's learned that when I do that, it settles a bit, but not really, right.

And so I've actually seen it show up in real time for me in conversations I've had lately conversations that in the past, I would have handled it very, very differently.

These conversations were tough, you know, looking back on the last month even, right, where I've been faced with these really, really uncomfortable conversations where, you know, the old version of me would have seen that as like this big scary confrontation.

Or, you know, just something bigger than it actually was because I didn't have the capacity.

And therefore, I would have shrunk, I would have erased parts of myself, I would have felt guilt for how the other person was feeling and tried to fix it.

And I would have softened my truth just enough to keep the connection even if it meant leaving myself.

And for any of you listening, I think one of the most painful things is erasing yourself or abandoning yourself in relationship, relationship in friendships, jobs, romantic partnerships, like it is the ultimate self betrayal is to abandon yourself.

And I did it all the time. I lived in a constant state of abandonment. And guess what? I constantly feared abandonment.

But see, what I know now is that as an adult woman, nobody can actually abandon me. When somebody said that to me, I was like, what do you mean?

What it means is I'm an adult woman. Nobody can abandon me. I can be abandoned as a child. I can't be an abandoned as an adult woman.

But I sure as hell can abandon myself. And that my friends, that's more painful than anything.

So painful.

And so in these recent experiences, I didn't do that. I didn't erase myself. I didn't shrink.

Now, I didn't look perfect. And in some of these conversations, they were pretty heated.

And I remember thinking to myself, like, I just kept saying, like, you can be with us. You can be with us.

And one particular conversation, it was, it was like, we had gone up and down the energy rose. And then we would come back down and we would meet in the middle. And then we would, the energy would spike.

And we would get, one of us would get activated and the other one. And we would come back to center.

And I remember thinking, like, oh, my God, my whole life, I've thought conflict was this scary thing that was bad.

And here I am with total capacity to hold myself in this discomfort and have this really, really uncomfortable confronting conversation with this person, where I'm hearing things that I don't necessarily love hearing.

They're hearing things for me that they don't. I'm sure they didn't love hearing. I know they didn't.

But it was all, it was what was true for us at the time in that moment.

And I got to stay. And I got to hold the truth. And I got to stand in my sovereignty and in my dignity.

And I let the other person have their experience without trying to manage it.

Now, did I have feelings coming up? Did I feel myself like slipping into wanting to fix at moments or to soften the blow or, you know, I have this tendency. This is something that I'm currently working on.

Where I'm working on, where in Virginia, they call it landing the plane. And, you know, I have noticed that about myself that when I want to get really uncomfortable or maybe there's, you know, yeah, it's a conversation that's not super comfortable.

I can see a lot of words before I say the word, you know what I'm saying where it's like, la, la, la, la, so that's something that I have been really working on these past couple of months is just saying the thing.

And so, you know, none of this has looked perfect, but the important part is that I stayed. I stayed with myself. I told the truth. I let the other person have their experience, like I said, and let me tell you something about what that does for your self esteem.

I remember being with myself after one of those conversations, specifically actually both. And being like, wow, like you are fucking badass.

Like you, I love you.

Like I just love you. And I'm so proud of you. And I'm so grateful that you didn't abandon us this time.

You know, like, wow, what a feeling. I remember tearing up and just being like, yeah, you're that fucking bitch, you know, like you're her.

God. And, you know, I'll do another episode at some point about some of the ways that without giving any details.

But like the ways that my capacity was stretched out these workshops and one thing I will tell you, having now stepped into the arena, having now been more direct, having, you know, really worked on these things and stood in my dig, stood in my dignity and power and sovereignty is that everything that we think we're afraid of that's on the other side of the thing.

It's never there. I am here to tell you it is the boogeyman in the motherfucking closet. It's not real. Like it is not real.

What we're really avoiding is the emotion that we think is going to come after or that will come after. Right. And this is where capacity is important because if I have capacity, then I can hold myself in the emotion.

What a concept. It seems so simple when you're saying it, but when your nervous system is activated in moments like that, it's a big-ass deal. For those of you that understand, you know what I'm saying.

Okay. In fact, don't play me. Everybody listening to me right now is relating. And maybe you're better at this. Maybe you're more evolved in your life in this area. But at some point in your life, this has been a massive struggle for you. And maybe it currently is.

And so that's why I'm recording this. So in those moments, like I just did not recognize myself, not in a bad way, but in a way that showed me how much I had grown.

And being able to hold myself like that, it's not about holding more success or more opportunity though when you stretch your capacity, those things come.

It's about holding yourself in moments that used to take you out. It's being able to feel discomfort and not abandon yourself inside of it.

And once you start doing that, once you start showing up with honesty and alignment like that, you can't go backwards. You really can't.

Because you felt what it's like to stay with yourself. And anything less than that feels off. Anything less than that is not something that you can accept anymore.

It doesn't look perfect and it doesn't happen overnight. But I promise you the more that you step into that, the more that you hold yourself and stand in that and stand in your power in these moments, the little or big,

that just gets easier. It just gets easier. It doesn't.

I don't think that it'll ever be this like easy thing, right? I don't think that hard conversations are ever going to just be a breeze, right?

We're human. I'm human, like, but my ability to my capacity to abandon myself absolutely shrinks.

And I do believe that that piece does go away. I do believe that the more that you stop abandoning yourself, the less that that happens and eventually you just won't because it's not a fucking option.

So nervous system is directly tied to this because your nervous system is always trying to keep you in what feels familiar. This is where it gets good.

This is where a lot of you are going to relate. I know I certainly had my share of this over and over and over again.

So when something bigger comes in your life, right, more love or the partner you've wanted or more attention, more visibility, more responsibility, a promotion, right, opportunity.

If your system is not used to holding that more, that moreness, that biggerness, that's not word, but it's fine.

It will try to bring you back to what it knows. That is why so many people will sabotage something that they worked really hard for or wanted or desired, right?

They got the person they got the thing and then they're sabotaging it. That's why it's not because you're crazy. It's not because you suck.

It's not because any of these things. It's because you don't have the capacity to hold that thing.

You want the healthy relationship, but if you're used to chaos, stability can feel boring and unsafe. So you start to pull away, you start to create problems.

You can want more success, but when these things start working, your system gets overwhelmed and you procrastinate or you shut down, who's with me?

Literally, who is with me? Because I cannot be the only one here.

You want more visibility, but when attention comes, it feels like too much. So you shrink. I have done that so many times.

I have this platform and I have social media and I feel like at this point, that piece is easier for me, but it happens still.

You shrink back into this smallness. And it's not because you don't want these things. It's because your system isn't used to holding it yet.

I'm going to say this over and over and over again. In my humble opinion, nervous system work is the most important work that we have.

It just is.

And now I can see the season of my life, this space, this stillness, the discomfort, this is actually me stretching my capacity.

This is me learning how to be with myself without immediately reaching for something, without reaching for my phone, without needing to go for a walk, without needing put music on music. It's a huge one for me.

It's about learning to be with myself. And it really looks like sitting on my couch and not grabbing my phone right away.

It looks like letting a feeling come up and not trying to fix it. I have an over analyzer brain. I'm going to say up until now I did.

But that's constantly trying to figure something out right fix it.

Letting things build instead of controlling them or what about a phone call or a text message. Can you be okay with stepping back and allowing there to be some space.

Do you need to respond right away? And I understand sometimes we need to, but my system was so used to being available and in that everybody had too much fucking access to me all the time.

It doesn't mean you're not important to me, but dude.

Why are you giving someone so much access immediate access all the time? I know so many people that I highly respect that are not that available.

And so that's been a huge practice for me is when somebody calls or texts like I really check in with myself like what's your capacity.

Do you want to take this call right now? Are you available and I'll refrain that because do I always we're not always going to want to take the calls that we need to take.

But am I available right because this is something that I've been totally guilty of and I know a lot of people in my life to where you feel this obligation to answer the phone right.

Save your callplex and then you show up on the phone call shitty or just not available or distracted or just not as well as you could if you what guys had capacity for it right.

So that's something that's that I've really really been practicing and it's so small but it's so big. I want you to ask yourself.

Where in my life am I quick to grab my phone do I answer my phone quickly do I need to be and I am I quick to text one back am I showing up in conversations unavailable but pretending to be available.

Like these are the questions you have to ask yourself because capacity is not built in big moments it's built in the small ones right it's built in the ones where you choose to stay with yourself and whatever you're feeling.

So this is something I also want to touch on before you know we wrap up here is I get I get a lot of calls and I've been the caller so many times but I get calls often where you know someone's like I'm I'm so anxious right like full of fear and it's like not going away.

And that was the biggest misconception for me too was that these things were bad or they weren't meant to be here like if they were here it meant something bad right when when what's simply happening is I'm a human being and I sometimes experience anxiety I sometimes experience fear I sometimes experience joy right.

And part of capacity is also being able to hold more of that right holding it and also learning when to move it right another another really cool tool to is move the energy right our bodies sometimes just having anxiety because it's built up energy that's just stuck in our system.

So how does it want to move right go on a walk go to the gym dance jump yell like move the energy sometimes that's all that needs to happen but I'm here to tell you like we're here to have the full human experience and so these things are not bad.

And I get to learn how to be with them more successfully rather than needing this this urgency to change how I feel right so if you feel like things come into your life and then fall apart or you can't quite hold on to what you want it might not be that you're doing something wrong.

It just might be that your system is still learning how to hold it.

So this season for me is not about rushing into what's next that's what's been so beautiful it's been about coming becoming someone who can actually hold what's next because what's next for me is big it's big stuff you know.

I will drop this because this feels a little bit exciting or it's very exciting but I am about to rebrand the podcast to match my business name and i'm super excited about that I have a tiktok series that i'm about to start that i'm really excited about to it's going to be a lot of fun and it's it's so in line with what I'm.

doing next what I do in my life and i'm just kind of bringing it out into the world so i'm really excited about that too i won't give away too much yet but that is coming so stay tuned if you're if you follow me on tiktok or want to follow me on tiktok it's at court of connection.

that's also my instagram and then my facebook is Danielle Cobb and so i'm really really really excited about that but what's been so cool is that i'm i'm not rushing into anything like i'm really like in this season of life of just flow and allowing and learning how to move slowly you know like i catch myself sometimes.

putting lotion on my body and i'm like you know like rushing through that process or i'm doing my skincare where i'm just like.

it's funny one of my best friends we live together for a long time and she can attest to this and also my other best friend that i face times sometimes when i'm putting on makeup.

who laughs at me because the way i do it is it's so fast right it's so fast and so i'm just really learning how to slow down my my life and my system and allow and you know be in the juiciness of presence and aliveness and.

the little micro pleasures of life and just being available for life so.

yeah so that's the super exciting stuff i'm and just learning how to be with myself without escaping which is the ultimate gift i mean really really truly.

so more is not the goal guys i don't want to move into the chapter of my life and be rushing and doing all this shit and building and.

um all of that gets to be there.

but as i stretch my capacity.

things just flow things just start to show up in your life.

it's an amazing concept so.

thank you guys so much for tuning in i need to be doing more of these solo episodes i will make that a priority i love.

doing this and sharing my experience and um and so until next time.

made the cord that binds us to one another and to source remind you that you are never alone always guided and always home.

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