What’s up everybody? I am recording this from home, but I’m getting up in the morning and going to Disneyland and I am so excited. I’m taking just my big girls and no little kids. It’ll be my first time at Disneyland without the littles. I hope that you are doing something to finish out the summer.

That’s fun. And I wanted to tell you about something that is really, really fun. It’s coaching. There is no better time than now to sign up for coaching. Right where you are is a perfect time to start. Do you know what so many people say after learning how to manage their mind and going through my coaching program, they say, I wish I knew this earlier.

This would’ve saved me a whole lot of heartache. So don’t wait in, wait any longer to change your life. It truly is life changing. I wouldn’t say that if I didn’t mean it. It doesn’t matter if your baby died yesterday or 20 years ago. I have got you. Go to the link in the show notes. Send me an email or sign up for a free consult call.

Let’s get started this fall with our schedules a little bit more organized and. Start helping you feel better and get the things that you want in your life. All right. Today we are still talking about reentry, and I want you to think about the space shuttle. There is so much work and preparation to get it up and into space safely.

Then the astronauts complete their mission, but it’s not over. They have to get home, and that means getting through a lot of heat and pressure. It’s really the final test before splashing down or landing safely. I always thought this part of the mission was pretty incredible. You see the ring of fire blowing back, the heat is intense.

Any crack in the shuttle will be. Catastrophic. As we have seen, the astronauts have to trust completely in all their training and in all the engineers who built their ship to get them back to their families. Now I’m gonna talk a little bit about birth, and I hope you know if you’ve been listening for a while.

I really don’t give trigger warnings. I talk about living kids, I talk about birth, I talk about babies. I talk about pregnancy after loss. If any of those things are difficult for you, I want you to go back and listen to my episode called Trigger Proof. This. Episode teaches you how to not be triggered by things.

And so I’m gonna use a little analogy from birth because another place you hear the term ring of fire is during delivery of a baby. It’s that moment in the movies where they’re yelling, I can’t do this, and everything’s going crazy. After getting through all of pregnancy and early labor, it’s the most intense and painful time.

And just like with the astronauts, it is a time when you have to trust. Trust your body, trust your birth team, trust yourself, trust that you prepared for this and that you’re almost there. Similar to these examples, we’ll all have to go through the ring of fire. When we’re working towards big goals, what we all want is for things to go smoothly, and we feel like if we do it right, it will.

It should go something like we decide to do something, do some research, work hard, and boom, we hit our goal. But it actually happens like that for pretty much no one. It’s okay if you think that way. We’ve all sort of been taught that this is how it should go. If you are a good person, you’ll be rewarded.

If you study, you’ll get an A. If you practice, you’ll become a star. If you just follow this plan, you’ll make lots of money. And we want the process to be a nice, smooth sloping hill. And once we reach the top, we just coast the rest of the way. But the truth is, moving towards a goal often feels terrible and is full of failure, even for grief.

We just want the process to be smooth and we don’t want any other bad things to happen because that just wouldn’t be fair. And we think that grief should be linear. But it’s not. It’s up and down and all over the place, and sometimes so many tough things happen at the same time, and it drops us literally to our knees and takes our breath away.

But if you truly want your goal, whether it’s true full healing and acceptance, or any other goal you have in your life, You have to expect that at some point you’ll enter this challenge point, and I called this episode Surviving the Ring of Fire. But we don’t just have to survive it. You can move into and through it with courage.

I’m gonna give you three tips to help you do this because it will come. But just like the astronauts or the person in labor, if you have prepared, you don’t need to be afraid. First, expect that anything we want will come with a lot of uncomfortable emotions. What emotions do you avoid the most? These are probably the ones you need to feel to reach your goals.

What would be different if you embrace those emotions? When we actually invite them and allow them and use them, we get the power back in our lives. A great example of this is exercising when we work out. And the next day we are sore. We congratulate ourselves. It means our muscles are breaking down and rebuilding the physical discomfort isn’t a problem.

We just know it’s a part of the process and we keep going knowing that it will get better. This is how I always felt when I would go skiing. My dad used to take us skiing every Christmas, and we always knew that after the first day we were gonna be so sore that we could barely go back the second day.

But then the second day, it was a little bit better, and by the end of the week we were just flying down the slopes and everything was loosened up just like it had been from the year before. But when we feel painful emotions, we often think that this is a cue, that something is going wrong. Remember, we want smooth and easy, so we stop.

And that’s my next tip. Know that the negative emotions mean you are on the right track. If your goal is not making you uncomfortable, it’s probably not big enough. You’re not stretching, you’re not growing, and you aren’t becoming a new version of you. Again, this goes against a lot of what we see. Even stories of triumph often skip the part which I call the messy middle.

Think of any inspirational story or video or speaker, like any TED Talk, which I love Ted Talks, but we start with, life was pretty good. Then something bad happened and now I’m better and here are all the lessons I learned. But rarely do we talk about being so scared that you wanna throw up crying in the shower, being so embarrassed when someone says no or rejects you, or how much courage it takes to get up when you’ve fallen down.

So we get the idea that. Quote unquote. Those people just have something that we don’t have. It’s just natural. They are special, and we can’t be like that. But that’s not true. The only difference between someone who is achieving their dream or not is their ability to handle uncomfortable emotions and keep going.

Serena Williams said, I am lucky that whatever fear I have inside of me, my desire to win is always stronger. She also said, I just never give up. I fight to the end. You can’t go out and say, I want a bag of never say die spirit. It’s not for sale. It has to be innate, and I love that. So that’s Serena Williams, the amazing tennis player.

But innate doesn’t mean you’re born with it. It means that it comes from within you, and that attitude is a hundred percent in your power. I just wanna touch on one other thing before I wrap up. We talked about the astronauts and the intense time of reentry. What would the experience for them be like if the entire time they were afraid of reentry?

They were overthinking it and imagining the worst. Would all that worrying actually change the outcome? Would the astronaut perform better because they worried the entire rest of the mission? I actually think if you had someone terrified of that portion of a mission, they might be told that they need to stay on earth, but this is what we do when we doubt and we fear.

We set big goals and then we are terrified that they’ll actually come true. We make those ring of fire moments seem worse than they are. It’s just not a good use of our energy. We know the moment will come, so why not believe that we can handle it and believe that it’s just part of the deal. Then we’ll just expect it and we’ll walk through it.

And we’ll make it, and then you can cheer for yourself. I want you to think Apollo 13, mission, control room, excitement, celebrate. Be proud of yourself. Look at what you accomplished, and when you’re ready, make another goal that makes you wanna throw up. Why? Because it’s fun. Because we only have this one life because you want to.

And because the person you become after walking through the ring of fire is someone who is one step closer to reaching her dreams. She’s amazing. So I wanna leave you with a challenge for this week. Make a big scary goal that you know will test you and start believing it’s as good as done because you’re not afraid of that ring of fire.

You’re looking forward to it. All right. That’s all I’ve got for you this week. I’m so proud of you guys and for everything you’re doing. I know sometimes that just getting through the day is like getting through the ring of fire, and I also know that you’re doing a great job, so hang in there. If you need a little help and support, definitely talk to me.

Come find me on Instagram at Amy dot Smooth Zones Coaching. That’s where I hang out most of the time, and I’ll see you next week.