Building Resilience with Bree Stedman

Inside Knowledge

Show Notes – Bree Stedman

Personal definition of resilience – being able to bounce back from adversity.

Even from childhood she could always get past things that might pull her down. She doesn’t like to feel disempowered.

In 2012 she was at the end of a long journey of personal development but things came to a head when her head talk and the lack of control she felt in the role of being a mother was really starting to show up in the way she treated her kids. Had two masks that she wore. Behind closed doors feeling like a very different person from the professional face. Her relationship with her youngest child was violent. She felt like walking out. Both of her children have challenges ADHD, and severe learning difficulties.

The turning point was when she walked up behind her son and he flinched. That was like a slap in the face for her. Her son, who is only 4 years old, was clearly very scared of her. She decided to stop blaming him and his challenges but instead focused on how she handled the situation.

What helped was being better at understanding herself as a woman. Even though she was practicing self-help she had not taken into consideration that she was both female and hormonal. She began to understood what it means to have a hormone cycle.

Very few studies are based on the female brain. Only just starting to validate that the male and female brain are different.

Key differences – women link emotions to events 25% more than men – we have a large limbic system. We get caught up in reanalysing that situation and the emotion connected to it becomes reinforced each time we revisit the scenario.

Regardless of whether you have a period – women from the age of 6 months old until the day they die –will have hormonal fluctuations every single day of their life. This will affect how you are able to deal with life situations. This gives you the ability to be kinder to yourself. Bree calls them tender periods. On those days when you realise you are tender you can ask yourself “what can I do right now to make myself feel better than I do at present?” There is always something we can physically do to move beyond feeling not in control.

We as women often expect the men in our lives to know what it is we need or want. We need to tell them what we need from them in that moment. Most of the time men just want to help. They take on the responsibility of having to solve the problem for us.

Lyn talks about the incident of the mouse. Bree worked through the balloon exercise to help lower her emotional reaction to the event. Events become charged by emotions and memories. Recognise that an event has triggered a whole string of stories that cause you as a woman to tie emotion to the whole event.

We can’t always control what happens in life but we can control how long we stay connected to an event emotionally.

Epigenetics. Inherited genes that get switched on and off based on events in life. Bruce Lipton has written many books on the subject.

Own Your BS – The No Nonsense Guide to Addressing Female Head Talk is the name of Bree’s best selling book.

The balloon exercise: Identify what it is you are telling yourself. Don’t analyse it simply acknowledge. How are you feeling? Where does it live in the body? What does it look like? Then blow it into a balloon and pop it.