When you find yourself slipping into the role of a work machine, it's time to hit pause and reassess. I'm Julia Woods, and I've been there, struggling to balance work and personal life. This episode is an open heart surgery of sorts, where I lay bare the transitions that upended my world. From the loneliness of an empty nest to the upheaval of the global pandemic, I share how reclaiming my passion and embracing community became the cornerstone of my healing journey.
Let's talk about the transformative power that comes from being vulnerable. Sometimes, burying ourselves in work is how we shield ourselves from pain. But here's the twist: I found solace in joining a community in Franklin, Tennessee, and discovered the profound impact of weekly sisterhood and Chip Dodd's "The Voice of the Heart." These experiences didn't just pull me out of my shell; they sparked a revival, offering insights that promise to change how you approach life's challenges.
Wrapping up, I invite you to explore the vision of a marriage growth community. The idea is simple yet profound—just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to nurture a marriage. I'm excited to share resources to support this journey, all aimed at helping you live fully alive and grow in love and connection. Join me as we pursue a life that's not just about surviving but thriving in every commitment we make, especially in marriage.
The Marriage Growth Community will officially launch on April 16th 2024.
When you find yourself slipping into the role of a work machine, it's time to hit pause and reassess. I'm Julia Woods, and I've been there, struggling to balance work and personal life. This episode is an open heart surgery of sorts, where I lay bare the transitions that upended my world. From the loneliness of an empty nest to the upheaval of the global pandemic, I share how reclaiming my passion and embracing community became the cornerstone of my healing journey.
Let's talk about the transformative power that comes from being vulnerable. Sometimes, burying ourselves in work is how we shield ourselves from pain. But here's the twist: I found solace in joining a community in Franklin, Tennessee, and discovered the profound impact of weekly sisterhood and Chip Dodd's "The Voice of the Heart." These experiences didn't just pull me out of my shell; they sparked a revival, offering insights that promise to change how you approach life's challenges.
Wrapping up, I invite you to explore the vision of a marriage growth community. The idea is simple yet profound—just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to nurture a marriage. I'm excited to share resources to support this journey, all aimed at helping you live fully alive and grow in love and connection. Join me as we pursue a life that's not just about surviving but thriving in every commitment we make, especially in marriage.
The Marriage Growth Community will officially launch on April 16th 2024.
Welcome to hey Julia Woods podcast. I'm your host, Julia Woods, founder of Beautiful Outcome, a coaching company focused on helping couples learn to see and understand each other, even in the most difficult conversations. On my podcast, I will share with you the real and raw of the messiness and amazingness of marriage. I'll share with you aspects of my relationship and the couples I coach in a way that you can see yourself and find the tools that you need to build the marriage you long for.
Speaker 2:
Welcome to today's episode called Behind the Scenes A Birthing of Community. So I am going to try something different today, and that is just share with you some of my behind the scenes and what has been going on for me over the last, specifically last several months. If you follow me on Instagram and go watch my stories, you probably have heard me say a couple of different times over the last two months that there's a lot going on and I've been excited to share it with you, and yet it feels so layered and so multifaceted that I've been having a very hard time sharing it on stories in one minute sections. So I decided to create a podcast and share it with you here, and my hope in sharing it is that, for those of you who are walking in these transformational tools and you know really working to apply the things that I teach, my hope is that this will encourage you and inspire you that the lessons of this work or the practicality of this work. It never ends. Like the challenges of life, they're always going to be there, and it's powerful for me in this season to see how much I was doing the work and yet how much I was also avoiding the work, and so I just want to encourage you and maybe bring you some insight into what that's looked like in my life, and if you are brand new to this transformational work, then I'm excited for you to hear just some of the day-to-day of what it actually looks like in the real world to be doing the deeper work and doing the work in my backyard as I really explore and discover what it is that's going on behind the scenes in my life, because as humans, we are the biggest deceivers of ourself, and what I've come to realize over the last few months is my own self-deception was much higher than I had realized. So I'm going to jump in and just start with kind of where my self-deception began to crack, and that was this winter. I started feeling some feelings of depression, which is something that's very not normal for me. I am a very high energy person and I love feeling joyful and excited, and so when I started feeling depression, it really bothered me and it got my attention and I started asking myself what it was, what was going on, and I realized I was really exhausted and I had been um unbeknownst to me the deception that I was living in, I had, rather, I had just kind of turned myself into machine, into a machine.
Speaker 2:
I think, as my exposure has gotten bigger and more and more people are reaching out, I'm much more aware of the suffering that is in marriage and I want to be a resource and help people find healing. And so I have just kind of my approach to helping has been to create courses and I've really just been nonstop creating courses. So while I coach all day long, in the evenings I have been working to create courses and it's brought me to work you know, 6070 hour work weeks for quite some time and it was catching up with me and so I really sensed my heart just inviting me to take a season of rest and take a step away from creating and just take a bird's eye view as to what is really going on with marriages and what is my calling and what is my passion and what am I missing. Because you know, I could tell that I was out of alignment, I just wasn't sure where. So as I pulled back and I just said, okay, I'm not going to create anything, I'm just going to do coaching and the normal things that I do. And I need to know if I'm going to create something, it's because it's what my heart is calling me to. So as I began searching and just getting, taking time each morning to be quiet with my heart and wrestle with God about what, what was really going on inside of me, I started getting a lot more honest and realizing that a lot has really happened for me over the last four years, and you might be in the same boat, because I realized kind of what began to shift.
Speaker 2:
Some things for me was going through COVID and there was a lot of things that happened in COVID that really concerned me and brought some fears and so that happened. And then we had some really challenging things happen with a remodel and a selling of a house during that time. That really brought a lot of hurt and sadness. And then we were in the ending season of raising children and our my youngest daughter and I had some relationship challenges as she was leaving the home, leaving the nest, to go to college and then you know, just grieving, the sadness of recognizing our time of raising children in our home was coming to an end and my husband and I were entering into empty nest. And you know then the growing needs of the business.
Speaker 2:
I had tried several times to hire coaches and I was attracting people who just, we weren't aligned, or you know a lot of what I've discovered in myself I was getting in the way of, and you know a lot of what I've discovered in myself I was getting in the way of, and you know. Then we moved across the country and so in all of these things, what I didn't realize is that I wasn't really giving myself to feeling the hard feelings. I was feeling them on a surface level, but it was just easier to put my head down and busy myself with work and stay busy at work, so that I didn't need to really sit with the hard emotions that I didn't want to be with. And while I didn't really consciously recognize I was doing that, I look back now and it's really obvious that those were some really hard things. A lot of tears were shed between the years of 2000 and 2003.
Speaker 2:
And so what I recognized as we were getting ready we lived in California at the time and we, as we were leaving California, I was having a very hard time thinking about leaving my friends that I had developed over the eight years that we lived there, very close friendships, and I just started like getting this deep sense. I didn't really know why and it seemed odd, but I kept getting this deep sense that I needed community. My husband and I needed community more than we needed air and water. And we were looking, we were traveling in an airstream around the country trying to figure out where we wanted to live. And we were looking, we were traveling in an airstream around the country trying to figure out where we wanted to live and we were really wanting to just, you know, find a mountain town that we loved and, um, settle down and, you know, live somewhere that was beautiful and that the nature made our hearts come alive. But I just kept getting this deep sense that we strongly needed community. And so we wound up landing on coming to Franklin, tennessee, where I have some built in community here, with some sisters in the area and then some friends, and so community was at the heart of the decision that we made.
Speaker 2:
And yet I had been watching myself in the two years that we have been here in Tennessee and I had been observing myself with community and just really noticing my resistance to it, in that, you know, I friends would invite me to do things and and I said no more than I thought that I naturally would have, and you know, different um opportunities would come up and I would use I would, you know, choose to do work instead. And you know, I would say, you know I had these really steep deadlines at work, which I did, but when I got these big projects that were coming up with work, I would just push all community away, other than Jeff or my kids, my husband or my kids. But I just started observing myself and realizing, wow, there is something going on for me, that I am really choosing the comfort zone of my home and, you know, doing work, those things are really comfortable for me. And I was finding that community was really uncomfortable and I wasn't really sure why. And then in December, when I started feeling this depression, I started recognizing man, I've just got to get intentional with community.
Speaker 2:
And so I went to my two sisters that live locally and just said, hey, can we start talking once a week, just find a time once a week where all of us can connect and just share current reality. And current reality is like what is real for me in this moment. What am I feeling, what am I telling myself? What am I thinking? What am I struggling with? What am I excited about Whatever, and so we began to do that and, oh my goodness, it has been blowing my mind. We have walked through some really challenging times and needed to work through some hard things together and yet, in the four months we've been doing it, there is so much life coming out of it.
Speaker 2:
I'm just blown away by what is emerging out of this one hour intentional commitment to community is emerging out of this one hour intentional commitment to community, and one of the things that came out of it was a book that I'm going to talk to you about, um. But it's just been shocking to see what happens, what's been happening through vulnerability and honesty, and in that it, um has brought just continued observation, continued being with myself. As I mentioned this book. It's called Living. No, sorry, it's called the Voice of the Heart by Chip Dodd, and I'd like to share quite a bit of it with you. I think it's so valuable what it's been teaching me. I think it will help connect the dots as to some of what, where I'm coming alive, where that's coming from.
Speaker 2:
So these things were happening simultaneously. I was first, I was connecting with my sisters in community. I was also reading this book, and then another thing that emerged was my heart calling me to go to this three-day training with my coach or sorry, it's a four-day training called RebNet with my coach, dan. And if you follow me on stories, you probably saw me talk a little bit about it. But what happened in that room was mind-blowing and what it really called me to was an awareness that life is so much bigger than me to grow it deeply in my own self and to really recognize how much more growth is available in that character trait for me.
Speaker 2:
But to give you an idea, like there was some very powerful things, very powerful breakthroughs that happened for people in that room and what I saw is that it wasn't that the breakthroughs that happened for people. They didn't. It didn't happen through one person, like it was the whole room showing up and giving of themselves and investing and inviting and encouraging, and it was powerful for me to see that I was a tiny piece of a much bigger thing and it really began to help me see how I've been getting in my own way with Beautiful Outcome with my coaching company is that I've been resisting community. I've been resisting recognizing how much bigger this calling and this passion that I have, how much bigger the need for marriages and couples is than I am, and so while that was going on, I was also going through this book that I had mentioned, and in this book the author is really describing that.
Speaker 2:
You know, there are eight main emotions, and each emotion is designed to call us to life, to deliver gifts to us. When we let ourself really work with the emotion and let it do the deeper, uncomfortable work in us, it brings forth full living. It brings forth life. And when we do not, when we resist really letting the emotion work through us and move through us, then the emotion moves into an impaired state. It's like it gets stuck in us and it creates a lot of not great things. And so I just want to take you through the eight emotions because I think it will be really valuable for you, as it's been valuable for me, and just give you a glimpse into some of what has been bringing so much life for me over the last three months.
Speaker 2:
So Chip describes that hurt is the first of the main eight emotions, and hurt is designed to lead us to healing. Obviously, that makes a lot of sense. When our body is hurt, we go and get help and bring ourself to heal. But emotionally I didn't realize that there was a lot of hurt that had been happening for me over those four years that was getting stuck in its impaired state. And when hurt gets stuck in its impaired state it moves to resistance and I was resisting, I was going to self-protection, I was resisting letting other people in, and that was revealing so much to me as to what's been happening in community.
Speaker 2:
And then loneliness is the next emotion and the beauty of loneliness is it's designed to take us to intimacy. But when we don't let ourself acknowledge and be with and work through the loneliness, then it takes us to the impaired place of apathy. And oh, my goodness, that's what the depression was. I was starting to see the apathy was starting to catch up to me as I had a deep longing for connection. I had a. There was things in my marriage where I was feeling lonely and rather than pressing in and breaking through, I was feeling lonely and rather than pressing in and breaking through, I was letting them turn to apathy. And you know, learning how to be with my children in their adult phase and missing them, being in the home created a lot of loneliness for me and obviously COVID created loneliness and all these things that just felt so big. I was just touching the surface of them through those years but I wasn't doing the deeper work where I was letting them actually birth intimacy.
Speaker 2:
The third emotion he talks about is sad, being sad, and the value of sad is really beautiful in that it helps you see what you value of. Sad is really beautiful in that it helps you see what you value and I recognize that a lot of my hurt and suffering was I really value being with people. Covid blocked me from being with people and empty nest blocked 25 years of what I'd experienced of having more people in our home besides just my husband and I. And when we don't let ourselves work through the sadness and actually grieve, it moves into self-pity in its impaired state, and there was a lot of things that I had been sad about. And then the next emotion is anger, and anger is this beautiful emotion that's meant to lead us to hunger for life. It's like desires. We have these desires and these passions within us and when we move them to their impaired state, when we don't process through them, they turn into anxiety, which then leads to oh sorry, that wrong one one second. So anger leads us to depression and pride. So obviously that's what I was dealing with.
Speaker 2:
I was angry about a lot of things that I longed for, a lot of things that I wanted, and it was really powerful for me to look at it more big, like. As I was processing the anger over the last few months, I actually went back like way further some things in my childhood and I began to see how everything that I was angry about through the years had been despair the despair in humans. Like Richard Rohr says that we whatever doesn't transform us, we transmit. So when painful things happen in our life, we either let those things transform us or we begin to transmit it onto other people. And that has been the biggest things I've been angry about in my life is how other people hurt other people. And you know, at the same time, the biggest place that I tended to get angry was in marriage, as I watched my parents, the despair in my parents' marriage and the despair in my own marriage. It calls me to anger and that's because that's my passion and that's my calling, revealing itself through what I'm getting angry about.
Speaker 2:
And then he moves into fear and the gift of fear is. Fear is designed to call us to wisdom, and fear brings us to recognize that we need help and we need. When we recognize we need help, we can reach out and ask for help, and that brings wisdom through other people and other resources. And yet, when we don't step into wisdom, or when we don't let the fear take us to wisdom, it turns to first to anxiety, and then that anxiety moves us to want to control, and then that control turns into rage us to want to control, and then that control turns into rage. And this was so powerful because I could see that my resistance to community has been bringing me to feel this sense of emptiness and this sense of a lack of capabilities, because I wasn't moving into the wisdom, to gaining the wisdom that I needed.
Speaker 2:
The next of the eight emotions he talks about is shame, and shame is this beautiful gift that is designed to bring us to the awareness that we have a calling and we have a purpose, and it's big. And that calling and purpose is put into a human body that is flawed, that misses it, that fails, that doesn't have what it takes in our wholeness, because we're humans. And so the beauty of shame, when it takes us to humility, it brings us to value other people. It brings us to want to let other people in and ask for help and get the people that make up for where we don't have the capacity that we need to bring about our calling and our purpose. And it is designed to be this beautiful thing that helps us keep being aware of our need for others and valuing our shortcomings, that help us reach out and need other people. And the next emotion he talks about is guilt, and guilt is designed to lead us to forgiveness, but in its impaired state it takes us to toxic shame and pride, and again it just keeps blowing my mind.
Speaker 2:
The last emotion he talks through is the emotion of glad, and glad leads us to the hope of the desires of our heart being true, that what we long for, it is possible. And while it may take, you know, challenging things to get us there and we may need to face some hard emotions to get there, what we long for is possible. And yet the impaired state of gladness is us choosing to numb empty pleasures of, you know, sensuous and sensual pleasures that wind up bringing us to feel empty, when in reality we're wanting to find the joy in the meaning of life through connecting with others and through community, and so this book has just been opening my heart and has been calling me to life in such a real way. I felt as though I really needed to make some space to do some deeper work on some of these emotions, like the loneliness and the sadness and the anger. And so I had said as I also realized through the four day training that I really wasn't very clear on my vision. I knew what I was passionate about, but I didn't really have a vision as to how to bring that about, and so I sensed that I needed to actually merge those two things together.
Speaker 2:
I booked this two day trip to go away and step into Vivid Vision, which is a book. It's called Vivid Vision and it's designed to like help you vision your life in three year capsules of time, so it's really written for business owners. But then he also in the book goes into how to make a personal vision and a vision for your family and a vision for your marriage and things like that. So I was taking two days away to go work on that and at the same time I felt, since my heart was saying like okay, and go through the sadness and the anger and I'm like those feel like they're going to be at war with each other. Like how can I really let myself be in the sadness and the grief and the loss and the anger, and then also vision? But oh my goodness, what I had no idea is how perfectly they were designed to go together, because as I worked through the sadness, as I talked a little earlier, the sadness and the anger brought me so much clarity as to what my true vision really is and how passionate I am about helping people heal and create the lives that they long for, especially the marriages, and so being willing to face some of the hard emotions brought so much clarity in my vision.
Speaker 2:
And what came out of those two days was a powerful vision that is really called me to so much life, and at the heart of it is community. That was the biggest thing that came out of it, and I actually kind of drew this visual that I saw in my mind as I went through my vision, and it was a heart, a very big heart, and it was a layered heart. So at the core of the heart was the first community, and the first community is, in essence, how I commune with myself and when I am in community with myself I'm honest, I'm present, I'm vulnerable, I'm real. And you know, for me, community with myself involves God, because I need his help to see what I can't see, and I need his help to help me love myself and grace myself. As I'm looking at some really ugly things that are hard for me to look at, that I'm tempted to go to shame. He helps me find the grace to look at those things.
Speaker 2:
And so when that first, when the core of the community is aligned, when the core of the community is deeply connected, then I'm ready for the next layer of community, which is my marriage. And I believe that marriage is the greatest opportunity for community that exists on this earth right. It is the greatest opportunity to really give of ourself and learn and grow and support each other and encourage each other. And so when that community is in a line, then we're ready for the next piece of the community, which is our family and our friends. And when we can give ourselves there in beautiful ways, then that community comes alive. And then, when that community comes alive, then I'm ready for the next piece of the community, which for me is the people in Beautiful Outcome that want to come around me and carry the same passion and the same calling to really help couples grow through marriage, then I align with them and together we work together and we make up for each other's weaknesses and we support each other where each of us needs the support and then we're ready for the biggest piece of the heart, which is the community of what I'm passionate about, where when I am present and connected to myself, then I can be present and connected with my husband and then our children and our friends and our partners and our coaches, and we create this beautiful community that is now massively ready to expand to a much bigger community where people like you and couples can come and find community and find a place where there is encouragement and support and calling each other up and iron, sharpening iron. And the beauty of what all of us need is community, and what's not working in our marriage is exposing to us where our community with ourself is out of alignment. And when we can get that in alignment then we can heal the community in our marriage, which then heals our family, which then heals, you know, the layers that move out from there and you can be connected with like-minded couples who are all in this journey of doing this together. So that really became the vision. I saw that all roads point to the community.
Speaker 2:
In what I'm wanting to do at Beautiful Outcome Like if you're in one-on-one coaching with me or going through my course or, you know, coming to breakthrough that a part of what you get in that is the community during that season and hopefully ongoing, because you find so much value in it and it gives you a place to be growing and connected while you're, you know, in a great season in your marriage and then when you hit a challenging season, boom, you have everything that you need right there. And so within the community is the community piece itself. There is communication labs, which is so exciting because that is what. When people come to my breakthrough workshop, that is their favorite part and they're blown away by how valuable that is, because when I am working with one couple, that couple is getting a breakthrough. But all the other couples who are a part of that moment, they are getting almost bigger breakthroughs than the couple I'm working with, because it's so much easier to see what we can't see in ourself that's blocking us from getting what we want. It's so much easier to see it in other people than it is to see it in ourself, and so the monthly communication labs is a part of the community, and then another piece of it is you will get the teaching. You will get the tools. So in it is 10 to 15 minute lessons on the different tools. You need to create the character and the development in yourself to be a life-giving communicator, no matter how challenging the conversation with your spouse is. So all of that is going to be available to you in the community, and then there will also be aspects of couples, connections and the habits that I know create thriving lifetime marriages. So this is what's been happening.
Speaker 2:
I have been coming alive. I've been pressing in with my husband and he and I's community is going to a whole nother level, pressing in with my children and my friends. What I've done is I've committed to community every day and it is. It is bringing so much life and so much value and so much excitement to the challenges of the day, and this is what I'm committed to and this is what I want to invite you as my community into, because we need each other and this thing called marriage, this thing called life, it is very, very hard and I know I need help with community. Community has been a challenge for me, and so, in this awareness, you know that what I need is I need other people to help me, and so I've invited some very powerful couples to come in and be a part of the community. Some of you know many of these people, and you get to be in community with them if you want to be, and together, as I commit to growing my ability to lead a community and to be a part of a community, it's bigger than I am. I can't do it on my own, and so a lot of people are coming alongside of me to help me to make this a win-win and something extremely valuable for all of us, and so I hope that this episode has been helpful for you.
Speaker 2:
I would love to hear what you're taking out of it. If you found it valuable, yeah, just send me a DM or let me know, and, as always, thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. I am excited to create a place where, no matter what you're going through, you have others walking in it with you, and so, yeah, if you're interested, I have put some links in the show notes for you to get access to this marriage growth community. I am pricing it extremely reasonable because I want everyone to be able to access this and experience the joy of living fully alive and experiencing the beauty of love. And what love does? I think you know I've heard the statement that it takes a village to raise a child. I think it takes a village to develop love and develop our ability to love, and at the heart of it, that's what this is is us working together to grow in our greatest commitment to love, which is in our marriage. And so, thank you, and I hope you will join me and thank you so much, thank you.
