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(Upbeat Music)

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Singer
You mean to tell me it's been on backwards the whole time?

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(Audience Applauding)

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Catherine
I'm Catherine. I'm a 59 year old mother of seven and I'm a Chi Chi to three. My journey has been messy, meaningful and full of pivots. Everything changed when I shifted my perspective and turned my sweater around. Join me on this never ending journey of entertaining the what ifs, finding your voice and breaking free from limitations. It's time to live authentically with no itchy tag. This is where I'll spill the tea about me and I'll invite others to the room.

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Catherine
Welcome to Backward Sweater.

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Singer
Backward Sweater and it finally fits right I take a few steps forward Maybe I want to decide I've got a backwards sweater and it finally fits right

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Catherine
Revising the story. So on this podcast episode, if you could all see me and how we do this, you just sit here with a microphone in front of you and he just says whenever you're ready and I just have to pretend that there are people

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Catherine
here in this room wanting to listen to me. Actually, I'm gonna pretend that I'm in Madison Square Garden and it's sold out crowd and there's people in the seats and they're gonna listen to my story. So that's the story. That's the story I'm gonna tell myself. So this whole episode is about just revising a story. So some people will say to me, wow, you've done so much or you've done this or you've accomplished this and I was like, let me tell you how I got from point A to point Z and how it was not easy for me because the narrative that I was writing in my head was one of great lack, great religious constraint,

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Catherine
great shame and guilt and fear and doubt and negativity.

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Catherine
You're stuck here. You will never be able to get out of here. You will not be able to do it. You're so poor. How will you ever, ever be able to move out? You can't save money very well. Whenever you get money, it leaves you. Whenever you get extra, it's always gone. How come you can't control what you eat? How come you have to do 62 different diets in one day? Why can't you maintain this weight? Why do you always gain it back? What's wrong with you? Why can't you have a successful marriage? Why can't you have a successful relationship? Why is this a problem? What's wrong with you? Are you flawed? You must be flawed. This is all your problem. You are the issue, your issue with your dad. It's just because you're not a good enough daughter.

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Catherine
All of these things I told myself on a daily basis, not a very good Catholic. I don't really think of things when I'm praying the rosary. I don't really think of things when I'm doing this. I'm a great prayer warrior. I pray for people as my daughter, but I would tell myself a story

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Catherine
that nobody would wanna hear. The ticker tape, like the movie and the, you know, on the thing would go through my mind about how I was never gonna be able to get out of this. You will never be able to attain that.

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Catherine
So that's point A. All the stories, you're only good if you're skinny. You only get compliments from men or women if you are a certain weight. You only get compliments about your intelligence if you get straight As. You have to be an overachiever and do everything right and your kids have to be perfect and you have to be perfect. And constantly comparing yourself to other people was nothing short of exhausting. And always wondering why certain people kind of had things together and I didn't. There was that narrative as well. Like I shared in Mustaches, Orthotics and Diets, I was an anomaly from the get-go. We had 154 pounds straight out of the womb. There was nothing about me that was like the rest of the girls that I grew up with other than our hearts. We were really good people. So the way that I got from A to Z is kind of an evolution of sorts.

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Catherine
And I would not say I'm at Z because it seems to kind of imply that I've arrived because I'm always learning and growing. But the most powerful realization, and I'm gonna stay really far away from faith here because my faith is a fundamental piece of who I am. But when I changed the internal story and I shifted who I was in my head, that point in time catapulted me

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Catherine
to everything that I am today.

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Catherine
Instead of saying to myself,

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Catherine
you can never keep weight off.

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Catherine
Why are you so soft and jiggly? Why can you not fit into these genes and look good? My outside and my inside never measured up because how I viewed myself or how I wanted to be and how I was on the outside, I was always in opposition to each other. So I started telling myself I was an athlete. I started telling myself I was classy. I started telling myself I was beautiful. Instead of looking outside of myself for those compliments, from my dad, from my former spouse, from people, I started telling myself that. So I started with myself, you are absolutely beautiful. You are amazing. Anybody would be lucky to be in your presence, your energy and your beauty precedes you. Your smile is infectious. You're courageous and you're brave. I started telling myself all the things that I wanted to hear from other people. And a belief is just something that you keep telling yourself over and over again and you begin to believe it.

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Catherine
So I just switched the story about myself.

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Catherine
So now at six months to 60, I am an athlete. I can lift a lot of weight. I can hold my grandchildren on my back. I can lose weight and gain it on purpose. It's called a cut and it's called a build. I can do all those things now, like it's second nature. I changed the narrative. Have I arrived? No, the beauty's in the journey. The beauty is knowing what I want and where I wanna go.

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Catherine
So when I would tell myself those bad things, that was my focus and that was my goal. Everything I did helped me meet that goal of not being the weight I wanted to be. All those things, being on a diet all the time. Instead, I just flipped that narrative.

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Catherine
Now as someone who found her first wallet, my son found my first leather wallet as an adult in the garbage can of a bus stop. I always told myself I was poor. I always told myself I couldn't have those things. I always told myself I'm never gonna be able to travel. I always told myself I can't have that, it's too expensive. Or I can't believe that's so expensive. Or how do those people have that and I would judge them. Spiritual people don't have nice cars. I need to murder myself and not have luxurious nice things.

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Catherine
So as someone who's gone through bankruptcy, someone who raised children on very, very little money,

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Catherine
someone that had to use credit cards to make ends meet, I can tell you now the narrative is everything's always working out for me. My energy is my currency.

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Catherine
I expand constantly.

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Catherine
I can have whatever I want. I just need to take a line of action to get it. Some things come faster than others, but I can tell you this. The salary, my ability to make money, the ways that I am now are in total and complete opposition to that story before. If there's a bill that's coming in, I always say I am so grateful I can pay that bill. I love paying people. It excites me to pay the people that I owe because when I give them that money, I make the world go round. I get excited when I get something in the mail that's unexpected that I didn't know about. And I say to myself, someone needs this. I gotta pay it and I can pay it and I'm so excited. Everything is always working out for me. I think about that movie, Mr. Bean's Holiday, and he was walking off a building one day and this kind of two by four, or four by four big steel beam comes, I'm using my hands and nobody's watching me, comes in front of Mr. Bean just as he's getting ready to walk off the building and he walks onto this beam. And then another beam comes just when he's getting ready to fall off that beam. That is how it's worked for me because I've changed that narrative. I'm currently living the life that I called in and prayed for and asked for.

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Catherine
And when I organized my finances, when I got excited for paying bills, when I stopped saying I can't afford that and just saying I can't wait till I can have that. I make sure on my phone, all my apps are saying I can have everything I want and I can travel and go anywhere I want. And I've mentioned before, I travel anywhere I want now. I get to go everywhere like tonight. I get to go have pizza in LA. I can do anything I want to do. And that simple switch of that narrative has put me, like I said, in a phenomenal job that I absolutely love to wake up and go to. And it pays me an amazing wage. I get to teach students at a community college. It pays me an amazing wage for my intellectual capital, the exchange for it that I get to get in return is amazing. And then the unexpected ways that money can show up to me. The other day I opened up my mailbox and I got a $65 check. I had no idea where that check went. But again, I said, "Ooh, I love when this happens and I can't wait to spend it." I do. I get so excited. Who can I give this money to? Especially with all the things that are happening in the world right now, I think someone's gonna need something. Someone's gonna need diapers. Someone's gonna need food. And look at, I just expanded a little bit bigger so I can help somebody else and I can make impact.

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Catherine
That revision of that story has also changed my life.

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Catherine
The same with love.

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Catherine
I know I spoke a little bit about love, but now instead of saying, "No one's gonna love me. I've got seven children." I'm a statistical wreck. Why would anybody want to have a relationship with me? I have been through way too much. There's too much here. That same story flipped, makes me invincible, makes me the most valuable human that you would ever want in your life because of my loyalty and my generosity that makes me a profound gift to be to somebody. My children don't need a parent. They have me. And so in love,

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Catherine
my ability to love and my capacity to love and my concept of myself and the value that I bring to the table is no longer in question just because I chose

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Catherine
to change the story that I told myself every day. So when I think about love and I think about my worthiness

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Catherine
that's a really, really, really, really deep one because the continuing evolution of my ability to love and grow, you think you've hit it, you've hit the mark, you've hit the mark, but really truly this area can continue to grow and expand.

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Catherine
The more and more you meet people who challenge your ability to love. So this is one that's not ever done. This is one that's constantly growing. One thing that I've learned in my ability to revise the story in love is when I'm finding those trigger points in love, whether it's my relationship with my partner or with my children, I first just sit and ask myself,

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Catherine
is this part of the new story that you're telling yourself? Is this true or is this something that is tied to the old story?

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Catherine
Because many times we get stuck in these feedback loops and those feedback loops actually belong to the other story. So when you've chosen to revise the story, really anything that's happening outside of yourself really shouldn't impact that. I always tell my current partner, he's like, "Why don't you ever get mad?" Or, "Why don't you ever get upset?" And I was like, "I've learned in this lifetime

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Catherine
that the only things that should really, really upset me, are things that would make me want to walk away because they are things that wouldn't align with what I would want in a partner.

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Catherine
The other things are just teachers for me in ways that I can mirror to you something or I can actually do some more reflection on my own growth. Because I've learned that I'm never gonna change anybody, that I have to have complete acceptance and that agape love which transcends the rest of my life reciprocity love that we look for in a partner. But if I can stay in the agape lane and I can love without expecting anything in return and I can expand my ability to love and reflect on my own shortcomings or reflect on myself, there in lies the beauty of partnership for me.

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Catherine
I had asked my partner the other day too about hurt if I had caused any hurt because I was thinking about how in my policing era or in different parts of my story that I've hurt people. And I think about when I've been hurt, if people haven't make reparation for that or they haven't fully taken accountability for something, the residual pain can still be there. So in that revision of that story of fully freeing somebody from something that they've done to me, my former spouse or my father or different people friendships or relationships in my past to really free them in my own mind's eye because their capability of amending that was at their own capacity that they were able to do it to the point where they could do it to a certain point and that I had to do the rest of the work. And then we have those choices of whether we keep people in our lives or not. But revising that story to really focus more on my own reflections of how I can be better and not constantly looking outside of myself. I wish they would do this more. I wish they would do that more. So I would just say to myself, how can you give that to yourself more rather than expecting someone else to do it? Expressing your needs is different. That's not what I'm talking about, but constantly looking to someone outside of you to provide all of that that you're looking for inside. That internal narrative with all these big buckets in our life is critical. I try to share that with my children and hopefully that they'll understand that many times we are our own problem, right? The feedback loops that we have in our own head are based on something that's not true.

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Catherine
When I have chosen to rewrite my story, I realize how powerful it is to know that you really truly are the creator of your own narrative. You really can write your own rules and not let societal expectations define you. Whether it's about finances,

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Catherine
if I was put on a meter for finances, how much I have put away, how much my credit score was impacted by my bankruptcy, how much I have in retirement, I would be on a meter that would probably be vacillating so much that it might blow up. I do not tie that to my worthiness or my self-concept anymore. I look at that as a challenge for me to see the miracles in my life, to see how I'm doing so much aligned action to align with my joy and my calling that it's all working out for me. And I love seeing that, and that will take me to my next episode when I talk about the miracles, but I love looking for those miracles and seeing how it will work out. But if I allowed society to dictate my worth through what they say is the best way, I would be miserable. For instance, you have to eat 150 grams of protein, you have to sleep eight hours a night, you have to go to college and have these degrees, you have to have this much money in retirement, you have to have a house by the time here, you have to be debt-free. All of those things, society tells us, are meritus. They make you good, they make you better. They're wonderful. But if you don't have those things, because society tells you, and you're only sleeping four to five hours a night, but you feel great, you're eating 100 grams of protein and you have energy, you can write your own rules. Many people would say that's irresponsible, but I say, what's the other choice? Your bank account, and you know your balance on your bank account, you know where you stand, you know the money, you know how far it's gonna go. Time is a currency you do not know the balance of. So I'm gonna choose to revise my story in a way that I can experience more joy, that I can experience life in a way that is fueled by profound knowing and faith, that everything's always working out for me. Faith is believing in things that you don't see, and I can't see the end. I don't know my exit date. I don't know my retirement balance. I don't know all these things. But as a woman who is revising the story, I'm gonna live in the story that says,

[00:18:44:17 - 00:18:50:23]
Catherine
everything, everything is working out for me. And I choose to write the story

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Catherine
so that the ending is beautiful, peppered with life's mountains, maybe, always. That's the only thing that we're really sure of is that they're gonna come, and that it's powerful when you choose to rewrite your narrative.

[00:19:06:19 - 00:19:38:07]
Catherine
So as you think about your own narrative, your own story, your own book that you're writing with your life, what narratives do you need to change in your own mind? What are you telling yourself on a daily basis that you could gently change a few words to change your belief, to make it one where you'll thrive, not just survive? I see people that are caught in these feedback loops, and they're their own worst enemy. But with the change of a narrative, something that you tell yourself on a daily basis,

[00:19:39:10 - 00:19:55:18]
Catherine
whether it's right when you get out of bed, in the middle of your day, in a pause, before you go to bed at night, what kind of reflection do you need to make on the story of your life, when you did change a few words, where you need to revise it to meet a better you?

[00:19:56:19 - 00:20:14:00]
Catherine
Can't wait to talk to you about "Mining for Miracles." It's the next point in the process that I've used to change my life. Make sure your tag is in the back, and if it isn't, just enjoy the itch. But most of all, don't forget who you are.

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Singer
There's still time now
I take a few steps forward Maybe I want to turn up at a backwards sweater And if I need this right I take a few steps forward Maybe I want to turn up at a backwards sweater And if I need this right