3 Ways to Break Up with Confusion

Guess what… I am hosting a week of gratitude. This is going to be five days where I give you challenges on how you can get into the energy of gratitude because a woman who celebrates her life will find that life starts to celebrate her back. But this isn’t going to be one of those challenges where I’m going to tell you to write down five things that you’re grateful for every day, even though that’s a beautiful practice.

I want to give you tools to shift how you are feeling. I’m going to be sharing with you practices on how I create from a place of gratitude. I call it celebrating ahead of time. I’m going to be sharing a practice with you that I call 100 Thank-Yous that was inspired by Einstein. I’m also going to be sharing with you other ways that I get into a daily energetic state of gratitude and how it has changed my life.

If you’re someone that is tired of worrying and stressing and living in a state of lack and scarcity, I promise you that gratitude will change your life. So come and join us for a week of gratitude and you might just be the lucky lady who wins a box of blessings. This is a box that I am putting together filled with some of the things that I’m grateful for. So, head over to frenchkisslife.com/gratitude to join us.

Bonjour, and welcome to the French Kiss Life podcast, where personal development meets style. I’m Tonya Leigh, certified master life coach, and the hostess of this party where we explore how to live artfully and well. Each week, I’ll be sharing inspiring stories, practical tips, and timeless wisdom on how to elevate the quality of your everyday and celebrate along the way. Let’s dive into today’s episode.

Hello, beautiful people. Happy day. I’m having a great day. I’m so excited because I leave on Saturday to go to Denver to spend the week with my daughter. And I was thinking about it the other day. I think this is probably the longest time that I have ever gone without seeing her face. I mean, I do see it on FaceTime, but it’s not like seeing and touching and kissing her face.

She told me the other day, she was like, “Mom, I’m pretty sure I’m going to cry when I see you.” And I’m like, “Yep, me too.” But we’re so, so excited to spend the week together and just enjoy each other’s company. And then I’m bringing her home with me and then we fly back to the South to Charleston to spend Thanksgiving with my family. So lots of things to be grateful for, although I am trying to get sick, which I’m not happy about.

I just posted on Instagram, which by the way, are we connected on Instagram? Because, if not, what in the world? Come find me @tonyaleigh. But I was sharing gin my Instagram stories that I feel like this is an upper limit sickness. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of an upper limit. It’s a phrase coined by Gay Hendricks where he talks about it in his book called The Big Leap.

And it’s when you’re growing and expanding and creating at such a pace that your ego is so uncomfortable that it will do all kinds of crazy shenanigans to keep you where you are. Maybe you start noticing that you want to pick fights with people or you get sick or you fall and break a leg. There are all kinds of ways that we can create these things to keep us in the familiar. And I really feel like that’s what’s happening with me.

So I’ve been doing all kinds of things, like crazy amounts of supplements, breathing all the essential oils that I can breathe that is safe and doing the infrared sauna and all the things to try and not get super sick. But if my voice sounds a little raspy, this is why, my friends. So yeah, that is my personal update, and now let’s talk about someone in the community. It’s time for a community spotlight, the part of the show where I get to highlight one of you who has benefitted from the French Kiss Lifestyle.

And this message actually was sent to me on Instagram and it just made me so happy to read it. Here’s what was said, “Dear Tonya, I am a 20-year-old student from the Netherlands and I’ve been listening to your podcast for three months now and I’ve been French Kissing Life ever since. I even shared your podcast with my mom and now she’s totally obsessed as well. We listen to your podcasts every morning or whenever we are in the car on our way to work or university. Listening to your podcast truly feels like meditation and we really admire your beautiful and soothing voice. We’ve gained so much knowledge and inspiration from you, therefore we would like to thank you for inspiring us and so many women from around the world and helping us become better versions of ourselves and live our lives to the fullest. We really appreciate your hard work and we hope to see you become more and more successful every day. We wish you and your beautiful family all the best in life. With lots of love, Eugana [sp] and Carolene.”

I hope I said your name right. I think I’m saying it right. Anyway, it’s a beautiful name, but I probably just butchered it. But thank you so much for sending me that message. I can’t tell you all how much it means to be getting these messages. And what’s really fascinating is that as my energy shifts and expands even more, I’m getting more and more of these types of messages on Instagram, via email, on Facebook and I’m having this realization that, first of all, I’ve said this before, but energy is everything.

And as we expand and step more fully into who we are, it’s going to be reflected back to us. And I know, for a long time, you know, talking about upper limits, I probably energetically held a lot of these things away from me because it was too uncomfortable. They do say success can be just as, if not more so, uncomfortable as failure. And I totally, totally get that. But I’m trying to expand into all of it and be available to it.

And so, that’s to say thank you, thank you, thank you so much for those kind words. And I had this beautiful image as I was reading it of you and your mom in the car on this journey, not only of life, but of growing together. And it’s only going to enhance your relationship as a mom and a daughter, but also to be a witness to each other’s journeys, I think, is such a beautiful thing.

So if you’re a mom listening to this, share this with your daughters and vice versa. If you’re a daughter listening to this, share it with your mom and commit to growing together.

So hey, if you want to share with me how French Kiss Life and this podcast is impacting your life, I would love, love, love to hear from you. You can message me on Instagram, or even better, send me a five-star review on iTunes. I read all of the reviews, and every review that you submit just allows me to get this work in front of the eyes and ears of more women like yourself, so thank you in advance.

Let me see if you can relate to this. You sit down to work on a project or to create something or to finish a task or to maybe even do some deep reflection. And then, all of a sudden, you start spinning in confusion. Yeah, you too? Because it just happened to me this morning, which is why I’m recording this episode. I actually had a different episode in mind for today, but I experience what so many of my clients experience.

And it’s something I don’t experience as often, but I can see, when I’m in it, what my mind is trying to do. So I want to give you an example of what happened to me this morning and how I dealt with it because I hear from you all so often, you say things like, “I don’t know what I want,” or, “I don’t know what to do,” or, “I don’t know, I’m confused as to what step to take. I’m confused about what choice to make. I’m confused, I’m confused, I’m confused.”

I hear it all of the time and I want us to become women who refuse to be confused. What if we committed to never being confused ever again? Imagine the momentum that we would get in our life. Imagine what we would be able to create. Imagine the action that we would take if we were not spinning in confusion.

So here’s what happened to me this morning. Me and my team are working on a big project and I sat down to write a bunch of copy for this project. And about two pieces of copy into it, I started being confused. And for two hours, I sat here and wasted an entire morning all because I was confused. I was going back and forth in my mind. I was thinking, “Oh it should be this way, no it should be that way.”

And all of the time, I was not creating anything. I was spinning in confusion and I was really curious with my own brain. I was like, what is happening right now? And I looked inside my own mind and I found thoughts like, “You’re going to do this wrong, there’s a better way to do this. You don’t know the technical part of this.” All of these thoughts that really had me in a state of anxiety and analysis paralysis, you could say.

And I did one thing that cleared all of it up. What I did is I made a decision. And the moment I made the decision, I wrote out to my team – I was on Slack and I said, “Here’s what we’re doing,” and I laid it our verbatim, we’re going to do this on this day, this on this day, this is how we’re going to do it, this is going to be the flow.

The moment I decided, all of our energy can now get behind that decision. So what I’ve realized, when it comes to confusion, there are some ways that we can all deal with it. The first thing is maybe you do need more information. So an example of that would be, let’s say, you want to build a house, and you’ve never built a house before.

You may be confused about how to build a house, so your work is to go out and gather the information that you need so that you’re no longer confused, so that is option number one. Option number two is to make a decision. That’s what I needed to do today. I needed to make a decision so that my energy wasn’t being wasted on confusion and I could then spend that energy in producing and creating the outcome that I wanted to create.

And then option number three is to go take action. Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know because you’re not out there participating in what it is that you want. And I see this a lot with my clients. They’ll come to me and they’ll say things like, “I don’t know what I want.” And so they sit at home with the same brain that’s telling them that they don’t know what they want trying to figure out what they want.

It’s literally impossible. So I tell them, I’m like, go out there and experiment. Because at the end of the day, this thing called life that we’re all doing together, it’s one big experiment, and you have to go out there and participate in life to gain clarity about what you do and what you don’t want.

So an example of this is a good friend of mine has started a clothing line. And she called me up the other day and she was telling me how confused she was about how to market her new clothing line. And what I suggested to her was the way that you’re going to figure out how to market it is to go out there and start marketing it. You’re going to have to try a lot of different things to see what works and what doesn’t work. That is how you’ll end the confusion, is by participating in your dream, by trying things, by experimenting. And through action, you will gain clarity.

I’ve had these same conversations with my daughter. She’s at that age where she’s trying to figure out what she’s going to do with her life. And as I was telling her, I’m like, you know what, don’t feel bad because there are those of us in our 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond who are still trying to figure out what we’re doing with our life.

But what I told her is the best way to figure out what to do with your life is to live your life and live it fully. Go and try lots of things. Try different jobs. Do an internship. Study different things and notice what lights you up. Notice what brings you joy. Notice what you love doing and do more of that. But that’s how we figure things out.

You know, I have clients come to me and they’ll say things like, “I want to have a hobby but I don’t know what my hobby is, I’m confused.” And so they sit at home and do nothing. And I say to them, “Go try a lot of different things. Go take an art class. Join a dance class. Go for hikes with people. It doesn’t matter, go try lots of things because, through action comes that clarity.” But trying to sit at home and think your way out of confusion never works.  It never works.

So to become a woman who refuses to be confused, you have three options. The first option is to get the information that you need in order to not be confused. Option number two, and this is the option that most of us need to make, is to just decide. And let me speak a little bit more about that option because a lot of times, it’s easier to be confused than to feel the discomfort of making a decision and getting behind it 100%.

I tell my clients all of the time, I’m like, “As long as you say to yourself you don’t know and you’re confused, you don’t have to do anything.” You get to stay exactly where you are, which, it’s very familiar. But the moment you decide, now it’s up to you to get behind that decision. But the beauty of that is now you’re no longer living in this split energy; the energy of wanting things to be different but not doing anything about it, the energy of wanting clarity but choosing confusion.

The moment you decide, you are clear, and now you can put all of your energy behind that decision to make it work. So that’s option number two; decide.

Option number three is to go out there and take action, experiment, see what you love and what you don’t love, see what works and what doesn’t work, see what lights you up and see what just constricts you. Those are the ways that we can get out of this state of confusion. And what it all boils down to, if you think about it, is giving yourself the grace to be messy.

The creative process is so messy and yet we want to do it perfectly. We want to make the right perfect choice all of the time. We don’t want to mess it up. And because of that, we spin in confusion because we don’t have the courage to be messy. But when you have the courage to be messy, you’re never confused because you’re willing to try new things. You’re willing to learn new things and you’re willing to just decide.

So I want you to think about, for your life right now, what are you confused about? And I want you to name it. And then I want you to look at your three options and then I want you to take action on one of the three. So maybe what you’re confused about right now requires more information. Well go out there and get it, learn it.

Maybe what you’re confused about simply requires a decision. Decide and get your energy behind that decision. And then maybe your confusion is asking for you to get out there and try more things, experiment more so that you can gain the clarity. Maybe it’s asking you to take action.

So I’m going to give you a really simple way to think about this the next time you’re confused. I want you to ask yourself, do I need to learn? Do I need to decide? Or do I need to live? Those are your three options that you can use to break up with confusion.

It is time for J’adore, the part of the show where I get to share something that I love with you. And you all know I love this one thing; lipstick. And I have to tell you about my new favorite one because my friend introduced me to it many months ago and I have been obsessed ever since. In fact, when I was in London, I went to Selfridges and picked up a new color and I cannot say enough good things about Pat McGrath lipsticks and her entire makeup line.

Now, I’ll be honest to tell you, I didn’t even know who this woman was. And when I discovered her brand, I fell down the rabbit hole of learning about her life and her career. In fact, Anna Wintour claims that she is the most influential makeup artist in the world and Queen Elizabeth even made her a member of the Order of the British Empire for services to the fashion and beauty industry.

And I don’t know if this is true or not, but I was working with a makeup artist in New York and she said that Pat McGrath, her company is even more successful than Kylie Jenner, which, Kylie Jenner is a billionaire because of her makeup line. And I just love this woman’s story.

You know, when I’m thinking about products I love, oftentimes it’s because of the story, but also paired with quality products. So the lipstick that I bought from Pat McGrath, it’s called Venus in Furs. And then I recently bought the Christy. And then I went and bought her liquid liner, which is divine. But I will link the lipstick in the show notes so you can see which one I bought, again, Venus in Furs and the Christy.

I tend to like mauve pinks when it comes to lipstick, but it really depends on your taste and your skin tone because maybe you are one of those classic red kind of gals. But what I can tell you is that the lipstick itself is so creamy and so luxurious. And what I really like about it is that it’s matte and it’s highly, highly pigmented, so you get really good color when you apply the lipstick.

And then she has other types of lipstick that don’t have so much pigmentation, but this particular line is called – I think it’s called Matt Trance. And again, I’ll link it in the show notes, but if you’re looking for a new lipstick, this definitely is a luxury purchase, but it’s been such a good one for me. And the packaging – wait until you see the packaging.

I’m wondering if Pat may be a secret member of French Kiss Life because I feel like she designed this lipstick just for us. The tube has a little pair of gold lips on it. It is so cute. So go check it out at frenchkisslife.com/lipstick and I hope you all have a gorgeous, gorgeous week and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.

If you enjoyed this episode and you want to dive even deeper into the French Kiss lifestyle, let’s start with a makeover; a mindset makeover. You can download my free training, The 3 Mindset Makeovers Every Woman Needs by visiting www.FrenchKissLife.com/mindset – because after all, mindset is the new black.