Get unstuck now: Becky Vollmer

The Dareful Project

We all face moments where we feel stuck. Becky Vollmer sees you. Vollmer is a speaker, journalist, yoga teacher and author of You Are Not Stuck: How Soul-Guided Choices Transform Fear into Freedom. We talk about how we get stuck—in our job, relationships, health-related choices—and what we can do right now to move forward. She reminds us that intention without action is just wishful thinking.

How to find Becky:

You Are Not Stuck website

Facebook

Instagram

Threads

Transcript:

Debra Hotaling (00:04):

Hello and welcome to the Dareful Project, a podcast series where we explore with cultural disruptors, how to reimagine the second arc of our life. I'm your host, Debra Hotaling with a reminder: if you like this episode with please like, review and share with your Dareful tribe. Today's guest is Becky Vollmer. She's a speaker, writer, yoga teacher, and author of a wonderful new book called You Are Not Stuck, how Soul Guided Choices Transform Fear Into Freedom. Becky, welcome.

Becky Vollmer (00:41):

Oh my dear. Thank you so much for having me.

Debra (00:44):

So we got a lot to cover. So ground us here. What was going on with you that prompted you to write this terrific book?

Becky (00:54):

Oh, mercy, that I have to go back a little bit in history because the actual writing of the book was a, we'll call it a multi-year project, and I probably have to define multi as about seven. I think that was the time it took to live and feel and absorb and integrate everything that went into it until the actual writing part was months long. But the living that led up to it was years. I'll say the best way to describe it very succinctly was that in a period of about three years, there were some back to back to whammies. I left corporate America of my own volition after decades of dreaming and never doing. About a year later, I finally had a reckoning about my relationship with alcohol and decided it was time to give it up for good. And I'm proud to say that I, I'm now celebrating 10 years sober.

Becky (02:13):

And then the third thing that happened within that three year period was that my marriage of about 10 years absolutely imploded and disintegrated in a way that I did not see coming. And so it was one of those things that knock you flat and then take an awfully long time to kind of peel yourself back up off the ground and begin walking again. So the actual, the idea for the book and the beginnings of plotting and scheming and writing the book happened within the first six months of leaving the corporate world. And then as life intervened and life demanded to be lived, it got pushed a little farther away. But I will say, I think that not only is the book better for it, but I am better for it because I had more time to practice the tools that I knew had helped me and would help me again. And I think just the lived experience is richer and richer and richer because of it.

Debra (03:25):

Did you know the tools when you were writing the book or did writing the book present the tools?

Becky (03:31):

Absolutely, yes, both. The answer is both. I will say that the premise, one of the underlying premises of the book is based on finding freedom in what I would call with a yoga mindset. And that is something that I had been at the time, I had been practicing yoga for, oh my gosh, by then almost 10 years, more than 10 years teaching for almost 10 years. And so those philosophies, those underlying credos were already sort of baked into my consciousness. Things like impermanence and non-attachment, but nothing is a better teacher than lived experience. And so I'd had the ability to apply that to one area of my life, the professional area of my life, but hadn't yet been able to apply it in ending a marriage that was a decade old. And I think even more the bigger teacher than that was the choice to eliminate alcohol from my life because that's something that had plagued my family for generations. I feel like I'm kind of the first generation cycle breaker in that regard in my family. And that one choice has opened up so many others that I never could have seen around the corner. And so to get back to your question, I would say some of the tools were there. Some of them I was in process learning, and some of them, oh my gosh, Deborah, some of them are still being revealed.

Debra (05:32):

It's easy to talk about it and it sounds linear and you have these building blocks and not you, but we have these building blocks and we are just like, okay, I'm just going to turn this one on and that one on and I'm going to be better. But it's way messier than that. For whatever reason we're stuck, whether it's professionally in our personal life, an addiction, spiritual growth. Talk to us a little bit about how you get out of the messiness and figure it out.

Becky (06:07):

Oh boy. I could talk on that question alone for six days and fact, I just came off of leading a four day yoga based retreat. And really that's what we talk about. How do we recognize where we're stuck? How do we recognize how that makes us feel and what it makes us do? How do we, it's always very easy to recognize what's not working, but what is involved in taking stock of what we want instead. It's not as simple as, oh, when I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut, or if I could give it all up, I would be, I'd shave my head and become a monk in Nepal. Yes, NASA is an option, Nepal is an option, but for most of us more realistically, the question is how do we better become rooted in our emotional states and rooted in our values? And I guess a simpler way of saying that is how can we learn to answer the questions? How do I feel and what do I need? And then actually have the courage to bring those answers into reality. And I tell people a lot, people say, oh, I just have to be braver. I am so filled with fear. I just have to learn to be braver. And my perspective on that is it's just a little bit different. It's that the opposite of fear isn't just courage. The opposite of fear is choice.

Becky (08:00):

And so from that place, being able to recognize we do all have choices to make, we do all have choices to contemplate that present themselves. Where we have to get brave is in finding the courage to actually make them.

Debra (08:24):

Tell me more about that, because choice is fascinating to me. I once heard a TED talk about making difficult choices, and part of it is making the choice. And then the second part is just going, except having agency that you go, I made the choice, now I'm owning whatever this is. I don't know if it's bad or good yet, I'm just going to own it. What do you see folks, or what have you gone through? What have you seen folks that you've been coaching go through when they are going from I need to be brave to, I'm going to make a choice.

Becky (08:56):

To me, if taking the front end of your question, I think a lot of people are missing the agency piece. They're missing the permission piece, they're missing empowerment. So several years ago when I first left the PR world and people congratulated me, oh, you are so brave. You decided you left. You didn't have a net plan B, oh God, I wish I could do what you did. And I remember thinking, oh girl, I was not brave. I didn't feel brave at all. I felt, in fact, I felt a little bit like a failure. I felt like, oh, I didn't have the grit within me to have what it takes in a very stressful, chaotic world, which of course was, I mean, that's a mindset issue, right? Yes. There was part of me that took issue with the fact that the world was misted, right? Nobody's really able to function well and sustainably in that kind of an environment over time.

Becky (10:08):

But the issue was that I took it personally and I thought it was a personal deficiency, and so therefore I felt like I didn't have choices. I felt like I was just backed up against the wall and there was really no good way out. But once that really settled with me for a while, and I did begin to understand there was a lot of bravery that went into that choice because it was kind of, there's a little bit of thumbing my nose at status quo, why would you leave something that looks so good on paper?

Becky (10:51):

So that got me really curious, big picture, why we collectively tend to stay put in situations where we are miserable and we could ostensibly make another choice. And so I put some research out into the field, and of course, this isn't the kind of statistically valid peer reviewed appearing in a journal kind of research, but several hundred people over time, more than a thousand people have taken this survey. And some of the questions I was getting to revealed what I now call the empowerment gap. So just to put some numbers around that, about six out of 10 people felt like they were ready to make a change, but then the number of people who said they felt empowered to change, oh, Deborah, it broke my heart. It was about 14% of people. So you've got 60%, something's got to change. And then 14% saying, I feel empowered to do this. And so it's within that space where if we can close that gap, it becomes much more easy for us to claim the agency that is ours and make the choices that we need in order to have the lives we want. But it's in that sense of I don't feel like I have the permission to do what I want. I don't feel like I've got the agency to choose for myself. And that to me, that's where the big tension is.

Debra (12:33):

I wonder though that we'll never feel empowered until we actually do this thing. We're scared to death. And then looking back, we go, oh, I was empowered to do that. Not sure I would ever feel ready. I kind of do the thing. And then looking back, I'm like, oh, I did actually do that thing.

Becky (12:54):

Yeah, I think there's a lot of empowerment in momentum. There's a lot of empowerment in having proven to yourself that you can, what I find is a necessary precursor to that is always coming back to our why. And that's the piece that I believe a lot of us tend to skip over. We think it's an issue of just taking action for action's sake as opposed to taking the most aligned action we can. And notice I say aligned and not strategic. Nobody would have told me it's a strategic choice for you to walk away from a partner track job a month before they're about to announce the next round of partners. That was maybe not the most strategic choice I'd ever made, but it was the most aligned choice I could have made. And the reason I was able to do it, in addition to feeling backed up against the wall was because I sat with my values long enough to recognize that they had evolved while I wasn't paying attention.

Becky (14:13):

I write about this in the book, and I cannot tell you how important, I mean, this is such a light bulb moment when I talk about this in workshops and retreats, the idea that values really shift when we're not paying attention. And then all of a sudden we reach a point in our lives and we're like, wow, I've been living by one set of rules that I didn't write when really if I was writing my own set of rules, I'd be doing things much differently. And the way we can see how it's easy to get there is just to look back in time, you are a baby. You are born into your family of origin, the circumstances in which you grow up, and either in a spoken way or in an unspoken way, just by observing people, it becomes pretty clear, this is how we do things around here.

Becky (15:11):

This is what's important to us. And then you get a little older and you go off to school. Maybe you go to a religious school. Maybe you go to a private boarding school in Switzerland. Maybe you're shipped off to military school. Maybe you're at the public school around the corner, no matter where the environment is, again, you sort of begin to observe and you get to absorb, this is how we do things around here. And you can play that forward in all these other scenarios. You go to work and again, said or unsaid, that company has a set of values. Maybe later you partner up with somebody. That person has a set of values that date back all the way to their family of origin, their faith community, their activities, their school, their professional experience. And when you partner up, some of us will have an honest conversation about, okay, how do we meld our values? How do we make sure that nobody's gets lost in the shuffle? But I think what happens so much more often, especially for women, is that we will find ourselves in our forties, fifties, sixties, and it's like we get hit upside the head with this frying pan of realization that is, oh my gosh, I've been living by everybody else's values than my own.

Debra (16:55):

I wrote down the evolving while not paying attention. The not paying attention feels. That is really an important point. So you talk with a lot of folks in your retreats through your book. What are some of the tools that you find are most helpful as folks are just coming to that, the frying pans just hit upside the head? What happened? What's next?

Becky (17:29):

What's next is that we tend to get really honest about the fears that have been holding people back, whether consciously or subconsciously by fears. It's not like, oh, I'm afraid of spiders, so I can't make any big choices. But when we can identify this whole universe of fears that are really common to a lot of us, I have fear of failure. I have fear of being judged harshly. I have fear of being criticized. I have fear of being under-resourced, whether financially, emotionally, in the daily necessary work of my life, I have a fear that I'm going to be ostracized. I have a fear that somebody's going to call me crazy. I have a fear that I might sacrifice the wrong thing at the wrong time. I have a fear that I don't know what the heck I'm doing. I have a fear that I dunno how to do it. Or the one that I think underpins a lot of us is if I make the wrong choice, I will somehow end up alone.

Becky (18:54):

I will somehow understand this lifelong narrative in my mind that I'm not worthy of choosing for myself. And that's not something, that's not something that usually emerges to the top of consciousness, right? That a sense of unworthiness. But when we start to examine and poke holes at things and reveal what's a little deeper, it's almost like picking up a rock. And you look at what's under there and it's all these nasty creepy crawleys. Our first instinct is just to slam that rock back down. Meet my friend Sadie Jane. Hey, Sadie. I think Sadie's announcing the presence of the Amazon ferry. So we want to slam that rock down, but really, if we can sit with the creepy crawlies, the thing that we least want to look at, we will and view it with some compassion. We begin to understand that there are some deep reasons why we are afraid of change and that they are universal.

Becky (20:13):

It's so powerful to sit in a room full of people where we bring these issues up and you just see the heads nodding and the hands kind of going up and just all of these ways that we reinforce. Yeah, me too. I'm scared too. But then after we sort of marinate in the fears for a while, to me the only, oh, I shouldn't say the only. To me a very powerful antidote to being mired in our fears is to recognize that, and this is where the yoga philosophy comes in, but that we are more than this meat suit packaging that we're wearing, right? I come back to this epic quote, and I wish I could tell you it was from Rumi or Heis or someone. It's not best as I can tell. It was from a dude on Twitter who went by the handle pork beard. But pork beards, very wise words were you're a meat coated skeleton made of stardust. What do you have to be scared of?

Becky (21:28):

And that really is, I mean, that is yoga philosophy translated for the modern age. You are a meat coated skeleton made of stardust. What do you have to be scared of? And so when I find that when people realize, wait, you're telling me I'm stardust. You're telling me I'm stardust and by stardust, for me, that really is shorthand for whatever you want to call that big energy out there, around there, up there, wherever it may live for you. But that's shorthand for I'm the universe. I am infinite, I am God. And so in the retreats that I do, I love it when people absorb the idea of stardust as new language that they can take with them back into their lives. And I get messages from people all the time with this, just the new found empowerment that comes from this new found confidence that they are stardust. And boy, don't you look at your choices a little bit differently when you think you are made with the stuff of God or the universe instead of those creepy crawly fears that you don't want to look at.

Speaker 3 (23:05):

Yes, yes.

Becky (23:09):

It restructures the whole conversation. It makes the choices so much different. I'll give you, this is going to be a very silly example of what impermanence looks like in our day and age, but it's illustrative. As you look at me, you'll notice I have a number of tattoos that I didn't have 10 years ago, even though I had always wanted to have lots of tattoos. But the society that I was in said, that's not cool.

Debra (23:44):

You’re not going to show at a client meeting with tattoos all over you…

Becky (23:47):

That's right. And even more than that, that I was afraid of what my mother would say. And so here I was, I 40 years old. I was a mother, I was a matriarch in my own hope. I counseled c-suite executives, and I was afraid of what my mother would say if I got a tattoo. And so for me to sit down in that chair and let an artist put some ink to adorn my vessel, to me, that was at the time, it felt like the ultimate rebellion because it was my nod to, it's all impermanent this, and by this I'm reflecting on my body. This all ends, right? This is going to end soon. Why not adorn it while I'm here? And so if you were to extrapolate the lesson from that and bump it up and bump it up to have a little bit bigger meaning, if I recognize that I made a stardust and this human experience that I'm having is a real reflection of our impermanence, it takes the pressure off and allows us to be a little more bold. Yes, we still have to pay taxes. Yes, we still have to pay the rent, right? It'd be great if we can put aside some money for retirement, but why not reframe the environment in which we're making choices?

Debra (25:20):

What happens to people when you work through that again, when you just got back from coaching some folks earlier this week?

Becky (25:30):

Yeah.

Debra (25:31):

What happens?

Becky (25:38):

Well, I'm smiling because I know in my email inbox right now, there's a group email and everybody I've just kind of been observing from the background is everybody is sharing their experiences. So we've now been three days since we were last together. And they're talking about the shift that they've had in their mindset, the courageous conversations they've gone home and had with their spouses, with their employers, with people in their lives with whom they have problematic relationships with substances in their lives and habits in their lives that have been holding them back. And it is so heartening to observe. People come to this place of, I am stardust. I have choices just because something hasn't, maybe it's worked up to now or up until a couple years, but if I recognize that I have not just the permission to make a different choice, but man, I have a mandate. I've got a mandate to make a different choice.

Becky (27:02):

It is incredible to watch this speed with which those choices get put into action. Because what I ask people to do is we're not going to Thelma and Louise this into existence. That's not always the healthiest way. Sometimes it's a necessity, but more often than not, I ask people to begin to think in their immediate choices, what they might do near term, what they might do a little bit longer term. And the question is not what do I want to do? The question that I've asked people to sit with is how do I want to feel? How do I want to feel when my head hits the pillow at night? How do I want to feel when I wake up in the morning? And if those things become the answer to that kind of becomes the why. What needs to change? That usually reveals itself pretty quickly. I want to feel a certain way based on my values that have evolved based on the person I am now based also on the idea that I am stardust. And so what needs to change? It kind of starts flashing. It's a little bit of a neon sign where people really get tripped up is the, okay, how am I going to do that? We spend a lot of time talking about three important things, trade-offs, consequences and boundaries.

Becky (28:45):

We can't just say, okay, I'm going to go do X, y, z. Well, here we do have to be strategic in thinking about, okay, well, I do this. If I step in this direction, that's likely going to have an impact over here. And then the question becomes, am I willing to live with that or not? And so it becomes, when we look at trade-offs, consequences, boundaries, it becomes that living, breathing exercise, trying to answer, what am I really willing to do to have this life that I've identified that I want? But it's also important to ask, what am I willing to not do? What am I willing to forego? What am I willing to defer? What am I willing to release? And so once we get the answers to those questions and folks have an understanding of, okay, here's why I want to feel differently. Here's how I want to feel. Here's what needs to change. And then I ask them just to identify what is, what's the one first thing you're going to do about it? And it's not usually I'm going to go home and blow shit up. It's not that. It is. I recognize that I need to do some work with my inner experience and my perceptions of my experience so that I can more comfortably go out and make the changes I want to make. I've got to remove some of these blocks and some of these obstacles. And they recognize it's not about the blowing up of the shit. It's about doing more inner work to open the path.

Debra (30:31):

And what's funny about it is that you feel the work and you feel completely different inside. Like, oh, if I don't come to this conversation with this preconceived notion of how it's going to go, it changes the way that that person reacts to me. And yet, on the outside, you look like exactly the same person that you were five seconds ago before you started behaving that way.

Becky (30:54):

But the light in your eyes is different.

Debra (30:56):

Yeah.

Becky (30:57):

Yeah. The peace in your heart is different. Meat suit might look exactly the same, but you can see that the stardust just dial up the brightness.

Debra (31:09):

I want to follow up though. You talked about trade-offs, consequences, and then boundaries. I get trade-offs in consequences. Tell me more about boundaries.

Becky (31:19):

Well, let's just take an example and sort of play it through. I want to focus on myself, and let's just say a person wants to go get some help releasing some long held trauma that's going to require some work that's going to require some time, some energy, some attention. And so where the boundaries may come into play is in what does that person need? What kind of framework and structure do they need to establish in order to prioritize this thing that they want to heal within themselves? And so that may mean, honey, I'm sorry. I am not going to be able to take you to soccer practice on Tuesday night because I have a therapy appointment. Can you please arrange for a friend to take you? And then an hour before practice, mom, I forgot to ask my friend to take me. And now they're not answering their texts. Can you just take me to practice? Oh, babe, I'm sorry. I've told you 10 times. Tuesday night is my therapy night and I can't miss it at this point, which is a really hard thing for a mom to do, right? Yeah.

Debra (33:01):

My heart is seizing up right now just as you're saying that. Yes.

Becky (33:05):

Right, right. And that's just one example of creating a boundary. It's not a brick wall that somebody can't, that somebody can't knock through. But it is this gentle but powerful. One of my mentors, a woman named Heather Plett, she talks of boundaries as like this membrane that stands between you and a thing that threatens to undo you. Right now, the membrane, again, it's not a brick wall, but it's also not so porous that it's ineffective. It's still a gentle, it's got some fluidity to it. You're not going to bounce. You're not going to just completely crash and crumble into ash when you run into it, you might bounce off. But so ways to protect your own energy, your own sense of how you have planned to spend the currency of your life, right? Your energy, your attention, your time, your money, and to be able to place some gentle boundaries around those that you can be spending that currency. You can be prioritizing your activities in a way that supports your values.

Debra (34:37):

Becky, what do you do when you lapse on attention or you get unfocused? How do you get yourself back on the path?

Becky (34:51):

The shortest answer to that is that I come back to my breath because that moment of recognition, I am out of alignment. There sometimes needs to be a pretty significant step back onto the path. But we don't even get to that. If we can't first come to our breath, remember our why. Remember our stardust calm, the nervous system. We can't make those confident, purposeful strides back on track until we feel it in the deeper place within us. So

Debra (35:45):

We've covered a lot today. Tell us the one thing. It could be micro, it could be start us size. What is the one thing we could do today to begin?

Becky (36:01):

I think it's to pay attention. I think in many ways it's learning to pay attention to your nervous system. In yoga, the progression from being standing here in our meat suit all the way to finding bliss with the divine, the work that happens in between there is we learn to control our body so that we can control the breath, and we learn to control the breath so that we can control the mind. And so if we start with body sensations, what is my nervous system feeling right now? What's my heart rate like? Is my head hurting?

Becky (36:50):

I, how's my digestion and elimination systems working? Do I feel short of breath? Am I sweating? Do I have a lump in my throat? And so to be able to translate that body awareness into a sense of what does that mean for my emotional state? How am I feeling? Am I feeling nervous? Am I feeling afraid? Am I feeling anger? Am I feeling resentment, hopelessness, confusion, you name it. All of those emotions have a corresponding body sensation that if we can learn to speak that language, we become so much more intelligent about ourselves and our experience. And so if we could learn to begin that process, and then from there, learn what we need to do to regulate the nervous system. So we start with the self-awareness, and then we move into this place of self-regulation because we can't make any smart, strategic, thoughtful choices when we are in a state of fight or flight or freeze or desperation or shutdown. We just can't. So we've got to, if we can begin with the body and learn how to just sort of bring everything to center. You see the way you took a breath when I said that, it's like your body inherently knows how to calm itself. Your body told you to take that breath and didn't it feel good?

Debra (38:35):

Great.

Becky (38:36):

Yeah. We come back to the breath

Debra (38:39):

And paying attention. Well, Becky, this has been so lovely and I want to make sure everybody knows to buy your book. We'll make sure that there are links. They can find you on LinkedIn and where else can folks find you? Becky?

Becky (38:57):

Everything is around the name. You are not stuck. So the website, you are not stuck.com. Facebook, Instagram threads. It's all the handle at you are not stuck.

Debra (39:07):

Wonderful. Becky, thank you so much.

Becky (39:11):

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it so much.

Debra (39:15):

Thanks for listening to the Dareful Project. Please follow, like and leave a review. It really helps. We're on all your favorite platforms, Spotify, apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio, audible. Tune in Amazon Music, Stitcher, SoundCloud, and YouTube. And to connect, you can email me at [e-mail]. That's Debra, D-E-B-R-A at Dareful one. That's what the number one.com. Thanks for listening.