Welcome, welcome. I am so glad you’re here. I appreciate each and every one of you who listens and who shares with your friends and who leaves reviews, and it means so much to me.

I can’t even explain it, and I want to help you. So I’ve got a couple things going. First is the Creating Light Retreat, which is a retreat I created, especially for you. This year has been kind of dark and heavy for a lot of people, and I just decided, you know what? We need to get together with some other humans, some other angel moms who understand and we are going to create light.

We are going to feel lighter emotionally, and. Just take a weight off your shoulders. We’re gonna go to Park City, Utah. It’s April 14th to 17th, and we are just gonna spend a few days getting away from everything, breathing the clean mountain air, and learning and growing together. My friend Catherine Purser has decided to come and teach you about how to love, honor, and trust your body, and she is amazing.

She’s one of the most. Kind souls I’ve ever met and you’re gonna love her. We’re gonna have lots of time to relax. We’re gonna have morning movement if you wanna do that. If you don’t, you can totally sleep in. Uh, we’re gonna get to go eat in Park City. And if you have not been to Park City, it’s amazing.

There are some crazy, fancy restaurants. There’s also just, you know, down home, good food, there’s art galleries. There’s so much beauty there. You totally need to come, come and hang out with me. We’re gonna coach, we’re gonna learn, we’re gonna relax. We are going to leave all this weight behind us, and you’re gonna go home feeling amazing.

So I will put a link in the show notes so that you can get your ticket, pick your bed, bring a friend. Tell your other angel mom friends, there’s only room for 10 people and I know it’s gonna fill up, so if you wanna come, go and come. There’s actually a coupon code right now. It is. Heck yes. All one word, all lowercase.

And if you use the code, heck yes, you’re gonna save $80 off the price of coming to the retreat. So that’s an amazing deal. It only lasts for a couple more weeks. That’s the early bird I. Coupon code. Go ahead and do that. If you have any questions, you can find me on Instagram, Amy Smooth Stones Coaching and dmm me there.

Um, or I’ll have all the information and the link will be there. You can also go to my website. If you go and work with me, there’s a form where you can email me anytime. I would love to answer any questions. I also have a frequently asked question page on my website, so that’s outta the way. Also, I do have some spots opening up.

I just had some clients finish, and so I have a few spots open for new coaching clients to come in my three month program. Where we learn all the skills we need to create a beautiful life after loss. It’s amazing. I can’t recommend it myself enough. If you have any questions, again, just contact me or go in the show notes.

You can sign up for a consult call and I can answer all your questions there On Zoom or on the phone, we’ll just chat. So good. You will feel better just from doing the consult call because it’s that first step to choosing yourself and choosing to prioritize your mental health. It’s so good. All right, let’s jump into today’s topic.

I remember when we bought our first house, my husband and I met when I was in university, and we first lived in this teeny tiny apartment that was part of a house. Someone had cut into six places for young married students. So on the downside, my husband is super tall and we had like this stairway that came down, um, halfway through the apartment.

So we had to duck under it to get into this little tiny kitchen and the bedroom that literally only fit our queen size bed. On the upside, our little chunk of the house actually had an original bathroom, so it was. Huge compared to what a lot of other people had. It was just kind of the funniest place to live, but we loved it.

Then we went to live in California on a military base while my husband learned Chinese for the Army, packing up our truck with everything we owned, and me being about four months pregnant. With my first baby was for sure an adventure. We didn’t know what it was like. We’d only been out to this part of California once and we were leaving our friends and family behind.

But when you’re young, you just do all the things you’ve never done before and it seems pretty fun and you usually trust that it will work out. Well, when we moved back from California, we decided to buy our first house. We figured out our budget and where we wanted to be. We looked at so many places and finally found the perfect little starter home for us, but the owner was selling it herself.

There were no agents to help us make sure we were covering all the steps. But again, we kind of just figured that it couldn’t be that hard. I mean, lots of people buy houses, so we went through the whole process of inspections, home warranties, signing all the paperwork, figuring out a closing date and all of that.

I. But if you’ve ever bought a house, you know that the day comes when you have to sign a mountain of paper, and there are some big numbers and dates on a 30 year mortgage, and it takes a long time, and the title company sits there and explains everything that you are signing. I remember being excited, but so nervous to sign so many things and tie ourselves in financially to such a huge sum of money.

Well, it seemed really, really big at the time to us, but if we wanted a place of our own, we had to do it and we wanted to do it. We learned so much from that process, especially doing it ourselves and going back and forth with the owner. Some lessons we learned was you need to read things really carefully.

We need to be clear on what we want. We need to shop around and ask friends for recommendations. We needed to trust when it was necessary and to also cover all our bases when that’s necessary too. We learned that part of being adult is keeping your finances in order, and we learned that when you’ve spent your whole life paying cash for everything, you might not have a credit score.

So many great lessons came from that experience of buying our first house. After that, we moved and we built a house, so that was a new process to learn again, but I was able to use what I knew. From before to help us get the best result we could. And if you’ve ever built a house, you know that that is also a crazy process that teaches you a lot of lessons.

We absolutely loved that house and lived there for a long time, but we needed to transfer later to a new area, so we had to sell it. We again, used what we knew from buying, selling, learning. Watching lots of house hunters on H G T V to help us through that process. We ended up having a really hard time with this move.

It took way longer than we wanted to sell the house. We had buyers fall through and some other craziness I won’t go into, but it was a really, really tough time. The house we were buying was also for sale by owner, but I ended up somewhat taking the lead on all of. That because I had been through this paperwork before yet again.

We took the lessons we’d learned about real estate transactions and used all of them to help us through every challenge we were faced with. During this time, we also found an amazing mortgage broker who helped us every step of the way, and we came out okay a few months ago. We saw how low mortgage rates were and we decided to refinance.

We again contacted our amazing mortgage broker, who we trust implicitly. He gave us a great deal, and we started the process of all that paperwork. Again, sending in your license, your social security number, your bank statements, your W twos, your pay stubs, all this stuff. But I already knew exactly what we needed and how to send it in because I have done it multiple times before.

Then we started signing declarations and addendums and rate lock forms and everything that we needed to do to get the ball rolling. Been there, done that, know what to check for. Then we’ve waited because our broker told us things were super busy because the rates were so good, but he’s gonna take care of us no matter what.

And we believed him. No worries, because we’d already worked with him before, and then this week we signed all the paperwork because of Covid. A lot of it was online with eSigning, and that was okay too. That was something new. But it was actually nice to just sit at home and sign all those documents and not have to be at the title company for an hour.

We went in and signed a few pages. That we needed to in person and boom, it was all done. We knocked more than a decade off our mortgage and we are saving money on our payment each month. The reason we could do it is because we knew what to do, what to expect, and how to roll with anything that came up.

Everything that brought us here gave us confidence that we were making a great choice. Those young kids from years ago totally stressed about every step of buying their first house. Couldn’t have seen where they would be 17 years later, but they did the thing. They took the next step and trusted that they would figure it out.

They say that growth happens outside your comfort zone, and I agree. Anything that is new makes our brain freak out. Oh, how it loves certainty and knowing what’s going to happen next. But we can’t always know, and that’s when we have to manage our brain. We can thank it for trying to protect us, but we don’t have to listen to it.

Doing new things can actually be really exciting. The sensations we get in our body of butterflies in our stomach, shaky hands, maybe a little cold. Sweat happen with excitement and anticipation as well as anxiety. We just prefer to feel excited and we hate feeling nervous, but once you realize that they kind of feel the same in your body.

You know you can handle it. Doing new things forces us to create new neural pathways in our brain. When we start, we require a lot of courage because it all seems so scary. But as we go along, we start to gain some skills. We can see that we are making some progress. If we keep going, the thing doesn’t seem as hard anymore, and we don’t have to think about it so much.

Just like I didn’t have to think about it that hard when I had to submit all the paperwork. In the end, we gain a new skill and we are confident in our abilities. So how can you apply this in your life? I’m guessing there’s something you want to do right now that you are scared to do. It might be picking out a headstone or having another baby.

It might be sharing your story or changing jobs. It might be deciding to get support and hiring a coach, which I know can seem scary at first because you don’t know what to expect and you’re not sure you’ll be able to get the results you want, and you’ve never spent money on a coach. Sometimes even healing and letting go of pain can seem new and scary when it’s become our comfort zone, that security blanket that feels so safe and cozy.

My coach often says that we’d rather be right than be happy. We’d rather stay stuck than do the new thing. It might even be coming to the Creating Light retreat, meeting new people, traveling after a year of being home, taking time for yourself, leaving your kids for the first time. It’s all scary, but I promise if you just take one step forward and then keep going, before you know it, you’ll be able to look back on the path you’ve taken and see how far you have come.

Just like when a child is learning to brush his teeth, it takes a lot of work and concentration and they need extra help, but eventually it becomes easy. You don’t even have to think about it. In fact, you can think about all sorts of other things while you are brushing your teeth because you have gained the skills you need and you are confident that you are a great toothbrusher.

And that can happen for anything in your life. So if you wanna start a side biz or go back to school, if you wanna make grief your friend instead of your enemy, or maybe you just wanna join Clubhouse, this new social app I keep hearing about, go into it, knowing there will be all kinds of emotions. And there will be a learning curve, but that’s what we’re here for.

Although our brain loves to freak out over new things, we also have within us a desire for growth and a desire to try new things and to learn. This year, I’m committed to bringing light and inspiration. So if you are listening to this and feeling that little tingle to do something, here’s your push to go for it.

Nothing is too big or too small. Tap into those desires and let yourself take the first step. I can’t wait to see who you become. That’s what I’ve got for you this week. Come on over and follow me on Instagram. I’d love to talk to you, Amy Dot Smooth Zone’s Coaching. I have to, again, personally invite you from me to you.

This is gonna be a small, intimate retreat. There are gonna be 10 participants and me and Catherine, we’re all gonna stay in this amazing condo in Park City. It’s going to be so much fun. I promise you will not regret taking that step to go and register and let me know that you’re coming. I am so excited to meet you.

I’ll talk to you next time.