Most leaders go through a period where they take stock of the trappings of the life they believe they are “supposed” to live. They examine the assumptions they’ve made, the choices they’ve fallen into, and the circumstances that have shaped their stories.
And they realize—however painfully—that it all needs to be torn down. I’ve been there, too. Brick by brick, they dismantle the details of their lives so that they can carefully and intentionally rebuild.
It takes real courage to lead yourself through a season of dismantling.
And, no, not the Mel Gibson Braveheart courage. But the quiet courage that keeps you putting one foot in front of the other. The unseen courage that chooses a life of uncertainty versus maintaining the status quo of tolerating, doubt, and shame.
It’s not easy to reassess the choices that have gotten you to where you’re at. But without paying close attention to how you’ve ended up merely tolerating the status quo, you can’t ever lift the burdens that keep you from being the leader you want to be.
You have to go through it, not around it.
No matter how cliché, it’s the truth.
My guest today has been through the process of examining and dismantling the details of her life so she could really lead. If you don’t know Ally Fallon, you need to. Ally writes books, helps people write books, and believes a regular practice of writing can change your life. She is the author of 12 books (and counting), is a sought-after public speaker, and a coach to hundreds of authors from New York TimesBestsellers to total beginners. She has spent the last decade coaching hundreds of people to gain confidence, overcome writer’s block, and get their stories on paper.
Listen to the full episode to hear:
- How the dismantling of Ally’s marriage led to a deep season of questioning that moved her towards her unburdening and living an unburdened life
- How Ally took the time to become skilled at witnessing and honoring the wisdom of her own pain emotionally and physically
- Why writing, relationships, and the movement of yoga were anchors in the wilderness of her dismantling
Learn more about Ally Fallon:
- Findyourvoice.com
- Follow Ally on Instagram: @letsfindyourvoice & @allyfallon
- Follow Ally on Twitter
- Follow Ally on Facebook
Learn more about Rebecca:
Transcript:
Ally Fallon: When you’re in it, when you’re living it, you aren’t always sure that you’re moving in a positive direction. You just know you’re moving. You know things are changing, and as you’re dismantling the life that once was, it feels almost like backwards movement. You eventually do start to put pieces back together, but you always kind of wonder, “Is this closer to the real me or is it further away?” And it motivates me to keep doing the work that I’m doing because the work I’m doing is helping people do the work that I did when I was in that season.
[Inspirational Intro Music]
Rebecca Ching: When I was in my early and mid-twenties and working in Washington DC for a United States Senator, I was all about building out my CV with more experiences, titles, and accolades. I loved where I worked, where I lived, and I breathed it all in day in and day out. The only clothes I owned were 1990s power suits and workout clothes because my social time was predominantly networking at receptions or spent going to kickboxing classes at the gym.
I was working copious hours and thrived, or so I thought, on the early wake-up calls from my then boss and the late nights at the office when the Senate was debating a bill into the wee hours of the night. And then over a season of 18 months, I was mugged 3 times, twice at gunpoint. Once it landed me in the hospital after trying to protect my friend. All three times with my closest people in my life. All three times shaking my sense of safety, opening my eyes to my privilege, and facing the echoes from past traumas that were stirred up. It literally took the third mugging to let it sink in that there was more to life than my career.
The edge started to fall off my ambitions. The adrenaline of the DC scene started to turn on me and left me feeling less enthralled and more cynical, which is so not my true self. I started to question things more and what I really wanted to do with my life, what kind of impact I wanted to make.
2:05
DC and all of its trappings had become my religion, my belief system, and when I started to question it all, it ushered in a long season of dismantling, sifting out who I really was, who I wanted to continue to become, and who and what was worth my time and my energy.
I’m Rebecca Ching, and you’re listening to The Unburdened Leader, the show that goes deep with leaders whose burdens have inspired their life’s work. Our goal is to learn how they’ve addressed these burdens, how they rise from them and become better and more impactful leaders of themselves and others.
Around the time I started asking those questions, I remember hobbling into the office of my therapist at the time on crutches, an unintended gift from one of my muggings. She looked up at me as I was dripping with sweat and a bit out of breath and said, “I am so glad to see you lean on something other than yourself.” Whoa. That experience, that conversation, that moment is burned into my brain, and I realized my ambitions were really fueled by my own fears, my own burdens, my own drive to get away from the pain and the stuck I felt growing up. But when you have a gun to your head (like, literally) it changes you. It changed what I value, it changed how I saw myself in the world, and it changed how I valued life itself. It also pulled back the curtain and showed me I was on a precarious path that was both unsustainable and unfulfilling.
And so, began a several year dismantling and rebuilding that was slow and awkward but also bold and exciting. It was a dismantling of who I thought I should be to become who I am today. The dismantling of the shoulds and the supposed-to’s along with the old way of seeing, doing, believing was wrought with doubt, deep discomfort, but also with deepening of trust in my worth and my belief about myself and the work I choose to do.
4:12
Most leaders go through a period where they take stock of the trappings of the life they believe they’re supposed to live. They examine the assumptions they’ve made, the choices they’ve fallen into, and the circumstances that have shaped their stories. And they realize, however painfully, that it all needs to be torn down, brick by brick. They dismantle the details of their lives so they can carefully and intentionally rebuild.
It takes real courage to lead yourself through a season of dismantling, not just the Mel Gibson Braveheart courage, but the quiet courage that keeps you putting one foot in front of the other, the unseen courage that chooses a life of uncertainty versus maintaining the status quo of tolerating doubt and shame. It’s not easy to reassess the choices that have gotten you to where you’re at. But without paying close attention to how you’ve ended up merely tolerating the status quo, you can’t ever lift the burdens that keep you from being the leader you want to be.
We all know the cliché saying: “You have to go through it, not around it.” Now, of course this is easier said than done. While the saying makes a cool Instagram or Pinterest image to like and share, living through a season of dismantling is anything but easy. It can be downright terrifying looking forward into the abyss of the unknown when a dismantling threatens your discomfort, your known, even when your present life is not working, crushing your spirit, leaving you a shadow of yourself.
Yet when you see the pain of your life upending in front of you, your nervous system kicks into overdrive to protect you. It strives to find another way to engineer experiencing loss or another reason behind the truth of betrayal or another way to make the status quo work because it feels like the known is better than the unknown, and then your courage shows up, spurred on by the last straw of humiliation, or a wise voice of reason gets through to your soul where you’re reminded of your values and connect with the sense of hope and purpose that has been buried. So you show up for the dismantling because you know on a cellular level you have to go through this, not around it.
6:37
My guest today has been through the process of examining and dismantling the details of her life so she could really lead. If you do not know Ally Fallon, you really need to. Ally writes books, helps people write books, and believes a regular practice of writing can change your life. She is the author of 12 books and counting, is a sought-after public speaker and a coach to hundreds of authors to New York Times Best Sellers to total beginners. She has spent the last decade coaching hundreds of people to gain confidence, overcome writer’s block, and get their stories on paper. Ally also spent the last several years rising from moving through her own dismantling.
In today’s episode, Ally shares how the dismantling of her marriage led to a deep season of questioning that moved her forward through it, not around it, towards living an unburdened life. Pay attention to how writing, relationships, and the movement of yoga were anchors in the wilderness of her dismantling. And notice how Ally took the time to become skilled at witnessing and honoring the wisdom of her own pain, emotionally and physically. Ally challenges us to increase our capacity to witness our own pain with important practices so we’ll less likely bypass our pain along with the pain of others.
8:10
And now I am so honored to welcome Ally Fallon to The Unburdened Leader podcast.
Welcome to The Unburdened Leader podcast with Ally Fallon. Thank you so, so much for joining me today!
Ally Fallon: Thanks for having me! It’s great to be here.
Rebecca Ching: Ah, I’m thrilled. Well, I want to jump right in and take you back to a time when I actually was first exposed to you and your work and your writing. There was a conference in my neighborhood, and you were speaking about, at the time, your newest book Packing Light.
Ally Fallon: Yes.
Rebecca Ching: And it was packed in with a whole bunch of other speakers kind of talking about looking at our life story, and I remember hearing about that story and reflecting on what it was like for me when I transitioned out of college. But what really stuck out to me or stood out to me was when I was at another conference in 2018, and there you were standing right before me, sharing your story and your latest book Indestructible, the story behind it, your rising story around Indestructible. And I hadn’t connected that you were the same person. One, your last name had changed.
Ally Fallon: Yes.
Rebecca Ching: And then as I listened to your story my brain was like, “Wait. This sounds familiar. Wait.”
Ally Fallon: [Laughs]
Rebecca Ching: And I was listening to you talk but then my brain was connecting the dots going, “Is this the same woman that I saw before me several years ago?” And I remember even sharing that with you after you spoke going, “Holy cow.” The power, the clarity, the strength, the conviction with which you stood before me a couple years ago, it’s not like it was drastically different, but it was markedly different.
10:02
And I’m wondering if you can tell me about the Ally that I first heard speak. Tell me what was going on in your life and tell me why I was seeing such a marketed shift when I saw you speak again several years later.
Ally Fallon: Yeah, well, I’ll start by saying you’re not the only person who has said something like that to me, and I feel it too. But it’s always affirming and a reminder when people who hear me speak now will make the connection that they’ve heard me speak before. I’ve had people say to me, “It’s almost like your physical appearance even changed,” in a different way than our physical appearances always change as we grow older. But, like, my countenance is different, the energy that I put into the world is different.
Rebecca Ching: Totally.
Ally Fallon: And again, I feel that, but to hear that reflected back to me over and over again is really affirming and helpful because so much has changed in the last five years for me. It’s been a journey, and I think it hasn’t always felt like, as I’ve been in it — when you’re in it, when you’re living it, you aren’t always sure that you’re moving in a positive direction. You just know you’re moving. [Laughs] You know, things are changing. And also too, and I’ll tell the more specifics of this story in a second, but as you’re dismantling the life that once was, it feels almost like backwards movement. And so, you eventually do start to put pieces back together, but you always kind of wonder is this closer to the real me or is it further away, and so, it’s very affirming to hear that reflected back.
And it also motivates me to keep doing the work that I’m doing because the work I’m doing is helping people do the work that I did when I was in that season.
Rebecca Ching: Absolutely.
12:00
Ally Fallon: So to answer your question specifically and directly, when you first heard me speak in — what was it, 2014?
Rebecca Ching: That sounds about right.
Ally Fallon: So in 2014 I was married. I was in a relationship that, I wouldn’t have categorized it this way at the time, but now with some distance and reflection, I would call it manipulative, controlling at best, abusive in many different ways. It took me a very long time to call the relationship abusive because you don’t see abuse as abuse when you’re in it, and because, in my mind, I pictured domestic violence and abuse as something that was even more violent than what I was experiencing. So although what I was experiencing was violence and it was very physical, I wasn’t showing up at the ER with a busted lip and a broken eye socket or something.
So, to me, I was like, “This isn’t abuse. It’s not domestic violence.” And it wasn’t until I had some space and distance from the situation that I could start to see it for what it really was. It was emotionally abusive. It was spiritually abusive. It was physically abusive. It was all around not a good situation for me to be in. And one of the complicated pieces of that part of the story is that there were reasons, obviously — I think before I was in that circumstance, I thought about women who were in “abusive” relationships and I’m like, “Why don’t they just leave?” And it’s just so much more complicated than that for so many reasons.
But one of the reasons that I lived and experienced was that there were also all of these really “positive qualities” that this relationship brought into my life that I felt I didn’t have access to without him or without the relationship.
14:02
One of them being that I was on a stage in front of you talking about a book I had written to an audience of people, which is something I had dreamed of doing my whole life and I didn’t feel confident enough to take those steps myself, and he really pushed me or encouraged me into it. And so, I felt like I wasn’t sure. I don’t think I had the confidence to know that I could have done this without him. I felt that I needed his support or his whatever it was that he was offering me.
In retrospect, a lot of it wasn’t like a supportive, loving kind of, “You can do this!” It was darker than that. And I started to realize that the deeper I got into the relationship, the more I saw how much he needed me to be on the stage and he needed me to play the role that I was playing. And so, what you got from me that day — all of that to say, what you saw from me that day on the stage was both a woman who was sort of trying to step into her power a little bit and use her voice and become the version of herself she knew was possible and also a woman who was deeply sad and didn’t know why, who was trapped and didn’t know she was trapped, who didn’t have a voice of her own, who was really voicing the voices that were being whispered into her ear and who didn’t know a way out.
So I was really, really conflicted, and it’s interesting. It’s just both/and. I think it’s important to think about that because I look back on that time, and it’s easy for me to think, “Well, that was all bad. I wish I could kind of just wipe it away.” It’s not true. Even the book I wrote, Packing Light, I have a really hard time going back to read it because so much of what’s written in there is from him, not from me.
Rebecca Ching: Wow.
16:02
Ally Fallon: But there are pieces of myself that come through. There’s a thread, and when I can see that thread, it’s a reminder that this woman, the powerful woman who you encountered later was always there. She was always trying to rise up, and it just took some time.
Rebecca Ching: You hit on a lot of powerful things, one of which you talked about being in this (and I’ll use the word) abusive relationship. You’ve put it out there. But at the time and for a long time it didn’t fit the archetype or the stereotype of what you thought abuse was. Oh, my gosh. That is something I hear still on the regular, that partner abuse, emotional abuse, psychological abuse. And then the power over, often we think of it just as physical, and for you there was a sense of he was offering you success and access and opportunity, and it was hard to separate your ability to do that without him.
Ally Fallon: Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Ching: So, often, in those kinds of relationships, there’s that enmeshment fusion of, “I can’t do this without you, so I’m gonna keep the good and just tolerate the bad.” Those are my words on a very high level. [Laughs]
Ally Fallon: Yes. Yes, but it’s accurate to what I was experiencing at that time.
Rebecca Ching: And I also really appreciate what you said about just this deconstructing and dismantling of your life between kind of when I first saw you speak to the second time and how even in the muck of it all it almost felt like you were going backwards. What kept you hanging in there and continuing that process? Because often there’s nothing efficient about that process. There’s nothing tidy. It doesn’t feel — especially in the world — and I was just joking with you before we started the interview that often there’s a term PK for pastor’s kids, but you’re a TK, a therapist kid, and I’m raising TKs. And so, you’ve got language for this.
18:16
But often in the therapy world, there are these, you know, “What are the three steps,” and “Just think your way through it,” and we want to bail if it’s not quick. So what kept you hunkering down in your dismantling and deconstructing process?
Ally Fallon: Well, I’ll talk about the overarching thing that kept me there, and then I’ll talk about a few practical things because yeah, I think the main thing that kept me there was there was nowhere else to go.
Rebecca Ching: [Laughs] Huh.
Ally Fallon: And I think I’ve heard a lot of people talk about this as they talk about their deconstruction, whatever that looks like for them, is for me I kind of hit a rock bottom that launched me out of the life that I was living and into another life that was very unfamiliar to me. So the practicals around that were that I had been in this marriage for four years. I had been really committed to making it work. I remember so vividly having a conversation with a therapist where she was like asking us about — we were in the therapy session together, and she had asked us something about divorce, and I said that I didn’t believe in divorce. And she was like, “You don’t believe in it as in you don’t believe it exists?” And I was like, “No, I don’t believe in it as in it’s not an option for me. I’ve taken it off the table.”
So that’s where my head was at as far as divorce went, and then I stumbled across some information that made it hard, if not impossible, to choose to stay. In my mind, it shattered the image of the relationship that I had been in. It shocked me into the truth of what was really going on. It revealed to me how abusive the relationship had been all along.
20:01
And this wave of fury and rage and realization and power came over me, and I was like, “I have to get out.” And it was weird how it doesn’t happen this way for everybody, but for me it was a light switch moment, and after that it’s like squeezing the toothpaste out of the tube, there’s no way to get that to go back in.
So if my choices were to try to go back or to deconstruct, there was only one choice which was to deconstruct. So that kept me in it. I even remember saying to a friend — because people would ask me, “Do you think you guys could go to therapy, or could you go to a marriage retreat or something?” And I’m like, “The only way you could get me to go back to that marriage is if you killed me first. There’s no way. I’m not going back.”
So yeah, there was like a level of necessity that the only thing I could do was deconstruct, and that kept me there. But other things that made me — you know, I mean, the process wasn’t pleasant by any stretch of the imagination. It was like at least a year, if not two years of just total hell with barely glimpses of, “This will not last forever. This will get better. This is taking me somewhere.” But for the most part I would say 90% of it was total hell, and things like yoga, things like a regular writing practice, things like really good supportive friends, therapy, trauma therapy, EMDR, those things kept me moving through the process because they would, for a second at least, remind me that I wasn’t doing it for nothing and help me kind of like — it’s like you touch your true self for a second, and you’re like, “Oh, there I am. Okay, let’s keep going.” So those are the practical things that kept me going.
22:11
Rebecca Ching: The statement of, “You’d have to kill me to make me go back,” there was something in your knowing that your worldview, your being, it was so unsafe that your nervous system wouldn’t let you tolerate it anymore is what I’m hearing. It was beyond something you would think through or tolerate. It was, “No, I have to preserve my life. That’s what I’m hearing.” It’s that dangerous.
Ally Fallon: Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: And then to not stay in that fight or flight place, then you were continually showing up for yourself. You were committed to breathe again and got these glimpses of light and oxygen that helped you throughout that dismantling and deconstructing season. Thank you. I’ve been trained in EMDR and have seen many people supported by that, but I also think there is nothing more valuable and more healing on a broken heart than a good, good friend.
Ally Fallon: Yeah, it’s true.
Rebecca Ching: And it sounds like you have some pretty precious people in your life. Thank you for sharing that dismantling.
I want to shift into what you are doing, kind of your passion, your life’s work. I sent you some questions, and I said, “You’re an advocate of words.” I was thinking about that. You’re a words advocate. You read them. You write them. You speak them. You also help others. You are committed to helping other people get their words written and spoken. You’ve written several books. Am I right that you’re at 13 that you’ve published or are there more?
24:00
Ally Fallon: I think so. You know, I lost track somewhere after ten, but yeah, the three of them are mine and then the rest are all written for other people. So yeah, a bunch, a handful.
Rebecca Ching: And you’ve got another one in the works, which we’ll get to, and I love how you are so committed to this practice. It’s almost this parallel process of just it’s what you do, it’s what you know, but there’s something that feels so aligned personally too.
Ally Fallon: Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Ching: What burdens in your life inspired your life’s work of writing? What is it about writing and how did writing show up as something that became a passion? What are some of the pains or the burdens that inspired or drew you to words?
Ally Fallon: Yeah, I was drawn to words from the time I was very young, and the burden I think that called me there was I have a big trauma from my childhood that I’m happy to speak openly about but I also recognize sometimes people on a podcast aren’t looking to take on something that heavy. So you can just know that it was a big trauma that I kept a secret for most of my life and wasn’t honest about it until I first started going to therapy when I was 26 years old. I was deeply, deeply depressed, very anxious. I had to be heavily medicated for a long period of time and thank goodness there’s a lot of healing that’s come to me since then.
But that trauma combined with growing up in a very conservative Evangelical — fundamentalist is probably too strong of a word for the exact environment that I grew up in because I know what a true fundamentalist environment looks like. But you get it when I say Evangelical. It was very by the book, and there are certain things that you do and don’t do and ways that you live your life and certain beliefs that are held to be true, and if you question them then it’s not good.
26:07
So growing up in that environment, combined with this trauma that I experienced, really set me up for a deep confusion because the reality that I was experiencing was not the reality that everybody else around me was experiencing, or at least from my perspective, and especially as I became a teenager and started to come into my adulthood and my sexuality, I was really deeply conflicted and confused. And on the outside, I really wanted to please my parents and the church environment that I was a part of. I was really involved in youth group. I led worship from the front. I was leading Bible studies. I was at the church four days a week at least. I was just super involved, wanted to be a straight-A student, wanted to do all the things and check all the boxes, and inside I was hiding this secret that was like a cancer that was eating me alive, and I recognized enough at least the discord between the outside life I was living and the inside, what was going on with me inside, that I just felt like a liar and a fraud and like if anyone ever really knew me they would reject me.
And so, what I would do is write, and I would write poems. I think one of the reasons that we’re drawn to poetry is it’s a way to express something in kind of a veiled way that doesn’t have to be as direct as prose does. So I would write poems that were — a lot of my poetry from my middle school and high school days is really, really dark, and that makes sense knowing what I went through.
28:02
But also the other thing I would do is just journal, and I felt like writing was a place where I could say things and ask questions and talk about things that I couldn’t talk about anywhere else. It really felt, to me, like the only place in my life that I could be truly myself.
So I shared those writings with a very limited number of people. I had one really close friend in high school who read a lot of what I wrote, and he was also very troubled and later ended up taking his life. We both were like — I think we connected over how troubled we felt and how out of place we felt in the world that we lived in.
[Inspirational Music]
Rebecca Ching: Leaders are not meant to go it alone. It is not a sign of failure or weakness to figure everything out on your own. Leaders that run the marathon of leading through all the storms and the curveballs and the dismantling have trusted support and guides. Share this episode with someone you think may really benefit and go to www.rebeccaching.com. Type in your email address in the pop up and sign up for my weekly rumble email where you’ll have resources at your fingertips to help you on your path to becoming an unburdened leader
[Inspirational Music]
Rebecca Ching: Well, I wanted to know what it was about writing, because often our life’s work is inspired by our burdens, and I wanted to have you unpack how writing helped and what about the burdens in your life connected you to writing. And so, you so beautifully and respectfully connected that, and I just thought, “My gosh, it feels almost universal,” the feeling of my inside life and knowing does not match what I know other people are seeing and that feeling of, “I’m going to be found out, and I’m gonna be found out as a fraud.”
30:02
I harken back to what you were saying at the beginning of our conversation to there’s the public component of this. As a kid there’s just, “Here’s the facade I’m going to — I’m gonna people please. I’m gonna keep you guys happy. I’m gonna keep you safe. And I’m dealing with this confusion. I don’t have space to deal with it.” But then also, then, in your first marriage, the public kind of next level of it of having this unraveling internally. And sometimes we do everything we can, and I see this in my clinical work. I see this with leaders. “I have to keep up the facade, not only for my own safety but I don’t know if I can handle other people being disappointed in me or rejecting me or misunderstanding me.”
Ally Fallon: Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Ching: Can you talk a little bit more to that?
Ally Fallon: Yeah, well, I think you drew a connection that took me so long to draw because I remember, as I was walking away from the marriage, thinking to myself, “How did I end up here? Because I have a great family, and I had a great childhood, and my parents both really love me and they’re really wonderful, lovely people, and my dad’s a therapist.” And I thought that people ended up in abusive relationships who came from abusive homes and all these things, and it took me forever to finally start to draw the parallels between the childhood that I experienced — and that’s not to take away from what great parents my parents were, but the childhood I experienced and the choices I made as an adult. Those lines are always parallel. That’s one thing I’ve learned through this. There is never a time when we don’t recreate in adulthood what we lived in childhood so that we can heal it.
What happened for me is I remember so vividly having a conversation with a friend as I walked away from the marriage and I realized my last name was gonna change, I realized I was gonna have to email my whole email list.
32:02
I mean, that sounds silly now thinking about it but at the time it was like my livelihood. I had taken eight years to build this list of people. It was how I had sold my books, and I’m thinking, “I have to email these people, and I have to tell them what happened somehow?” My personal life and my professional life were so intertwined that it wasn’t like I could just ignore the fact that I was going through this divorce.
So I’m imagining all these things that are gonna happen and imagining how much is gonna change and then imagining I have to live in a world where my now ex-husband is also going to have some public visibility, and he’s gonna get to say whatever the heck he wants to say about why we split and what happened and whatever. And I just remember this friend looking at me and just saying, because I was so worried about my platform, “Platforms can be rebuilt. Platforms are rebuilt every single day.” And for me, the epiphany wasn’t even that. It was just like you know what? The platform means nothing. At the end of the day, I will walk away from this marriage with nothing but the shirt on my back, and I will be happier than I’ve ever been in my life because I will have the one thing which I want, which is myself.
And that was the healing moment for me. Like I just said a second ago, we recreate in adulthood what we lived in childhood so that we can heal it, and that was the healing moment for me where I was like, “I’m no longer trading the approval of you people out there for my soul. I want my soul.”
Rebecca Ching: Oh, my gosh. Can you pause there? I’m sorry. “I am no longer –.” Can you say that again? Say that again.
Ally Fallon: Yeah, I’m no longer trading your approval for my soul. I want my soul. That trade to me is not — the value of those two things is like $100 versus $100,000,000. There’s no comparison.
34:00
Rebecca Ching: No price tag. Yeah, not that it’s easy to say that. But it’s easier to say that than to live that because we get so many mixed messages on what success is and what we need to do. I think we’re in a full-on reckoning. I mean, we’re doing this interview during a global pandemic, and we’re in a shelter in, and we’re in a hard stop, and people are really like, “Whoa.” You can’t do business as usual. You can’t do leadership as usual. You can’t do adulting in the numbing way as usual, and I really value what you just said. I think the courage it takes to really live that is a lot, but man, the fruits of that.
So I want to move into this, but before I do, there was something you said in so many words in your last book, Indestructible, and I think I heard you say it in other places, but you said that there is a big difference between telling the truth about someone else and then telling the truth about yourself.
Ally Fallon: Mm, yeah.
Rebecca Ching: Noting the latter is harder. I’ll be honest with you, I kind of had to go over that a couple times. It took a breath out of me, my breath away when I read that, and it sent me into my own rabbit trail of some things I’m rumbling with in my own life and how sometimes those two can get conflated.
Ally Fallon: Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: There’s this, “I’m gonna be honest,” but we’re really talking about the other, especially in this culture of critics where we critique for sport, like blood sport right now. So much offloading of pain. But there’s this element of telling the truth about yourself in the context though — I want to make sure it’s not just pouring it out to the world and being faux-vulnerable. It’s about between you and your pen and your notebook or your computer.
Ally Fallon: Yeah. Yeah.
36:04
Rebecca Ching: It’s that space between you and what you’re downloading and God or whatever your view of higher power is. That took my breath away because there’s freedom there.
Ally Fallon: So much freedom.
Rebecca Ching: But it’s searing too. So, yeah, go ahead.
Ally Fallon: Yeah, well, I’ll tell you how it happened for me. I decided I was gonna write out the whole story of my marriage and divorce. This was, like, the divorce was final. I had a little bit of space and breathing room. I was finally coming to stand in some of my power, and I was like, “Oh, my gosh. That was horrible. I was treated terribly.” Some of these truths were starting to become really real to me, and I just really, really wanted to write it down.
So I booked a cabin at the beach, my favorite spot in Florida. 30A is what it’s called. Anyway, I booked a cabin at the beach for eight days and I decided I was gonna go down there, and this is what I did for a living anyways, so I was like, “I’m just gonna go. I’m gonna go write the whole book. We’ll see what happens with this.” But I just remember driving down there with this fire inside of me that I was like, “I’ve been keeping secrets for so long. I kept his secrets. I kept quiet about this, and I kept quiet about that. Now I’m finally gonna tell the whole truth.” And I think there’s some righteousness to that fire that was rising up in me.
But I’ll tell you what happened is when I sat down to actually write the story, I realized I was writing mostly about him and not about me. And the story, just from a writing perspective, was falling really flat. Like, when I would go back and read it, I’d be like, “This is boring. I would never want to publish this. Nobody’s gonna want to publish this. And also, I don’t even like this girl. She sounds whiney and like a teenager and just like she needs to grow up and get over it.”
38:03
Anyway, then I started thinking about how one of the things I know from helping authors write books is that the thing that drives great stories is great questions. So I was like, “What’s the question that’s driving this story?” And right now the question that was driving the story right in the moment was why would he do this to me? And I realized that’s the biggest question on my mind. How could he do this to me? How could anyone do this to somebody? It’s the biggest question on my mind. It’s the question that’s keeping me up at night. It’s the question that’s driving all the choices that I make, and it’s turning me into this person who’s really kind of bitter and vindictive. I was like, “Wow, I don’t really think that’s a very interesting question, and it’s only gonna take me so far.”
So then I was like, “What other question could I ask?” And it came to me like a flash of lightning. I was like, “Why would a woman marry a man she does not love?” And I’m like that’s an interesting question. Not only an interesting question for a book, it’s an interesting question for my life, and if I answer that question, I feel like it will be my freedom. It’s gonna be the key that gets me out of this cage that I’ve been locked in for as long as I can remember.
So I started writing this story from that perspective, and as I started telling that part of the story, this flood of grief and compassion for this younger version of myself and just all these memories, everything kept flooding back to me, and it was so hard to write. It was so much harder than the first version of the story. I just remember being alone in this tiny little cottage by the ocean and just sobbing and sobbing and sobbing for days on end, and it was terrible, and it was also the most healing thing I’ve ever done for myself.
It’s important to say that when I was finished with that, I didn’t post it on Instagram. I didn’t run home right away and call an agent and see if they could publish it for me. I didn’t want to. It was so vulnerable, I was like, “I’m gonna keep this to myself for a while,” and maybe six months later I was like, “You know who I really want to share this with? I want to share this with my friend Betsey who’s been with me through so much of this. I just want her to read what it’s been like for me and what I’ve discovered about myself.” So I sent it to Betsey, and then I was like, “You know who else I want to read this? My sister.” So I sent it to my sister.
40:23
And I started sharing it with a handful of people like that, and it wasn’t until 14 months later that I finally was like, “I wonder if this could serve some other women who have walked through what I’ve walked through. And I think I finally feel enough privacy and stability and strength in my own sphere, in my own world that I feel ready that I could share this with a total stranger who may or may not, by the way, come back to me with some vitriol, and I can take it because I’m not depending on their response to my story in order to feel okay about myself. And you know what? My ex-husband could — who knows what the heck he could do. He could hate it. He could sue me. He could — there are any number of choices he could make,” and I felt kind of ready for that.
When I talk about writing as a way of healing, I say some people don’t ever get to the place where they want to share publicly, and that is 100% appropriate and even to be expected. I think we do, all of us, get to the place where we feel compelled to share with one person who we know can be a safe receiver of our story and there’s a lot of healing that happens in the space with that one safe person. But it starts with being that safe person for our self and being willing to disclose to ourselves the answers to our own questions that we’re asking.
Rebecca Ching: I love that, and I really value you sharing this process because I think it’s so important in our fast-paced, gotcha world. And what you shared so vividly painted a picture for me of you at the beach giving witness to the burdens that you’re carrying in your story, your system first.
42:13
That was just so powerful and intimate and necessary. And then you held that space for a while. You didn’t go to the usual, “I’m gonna get external validation. I’m going to get metrics on this.” You kind of stayed there, and sometimes we hotwire the healing process and jumpstart to that action, but you were really going, and this was so intuitive in that place, and that the absolute essential nature of needing to be witnessed as in our humanity is part of being alive and being human.
And you write a lot about love and kind of unpacking love in Indestructible. Just thinking that, what a loving gesture. It was the love that was beyond the love that you thought that love was. You gave that to yourself first and then knowing that you could hold this story no matter what anyone else pushed back, that was such a cool metric for you — a good boundary, I should say, for you to say, “Okay, I’m gonna put this out there, and I’ll be able to hold whatever comes my way.” So many times we white-knuckle that or intellectually push through that saying, “I’ve got it. I’ve got it.” and there’s such a sacred practice that you modeled here, so I’m very, very grateful for you sharing.
Ally Fallon: Thanks. Sometimes we white-knuckle our way through that, and then the other thing I think we sometimes do is because we don’t know how to be a witness to our own pain, we grasp for somebody else to be a witness to our pain. And I think this is where — you know, there are appropriate ways to do that. A therapist, for example, is a really appropriate way to ask someone to be a witness to your pain, but one of the ways I think we do that, that we call vulnerability and authenticity that’s not that, is oversharing on Instagram is just one example. And that’s not meant to be a judgmental comment. It’s just like the feeling that you have where you’re like, “I’m gonna offload this onto a total stranger, somebody that I don’t know, and I’m gonna really hope that they come back to me with the kind of healing, space-holding strength that I’m looking for,” is not fair to the listeners.
44:32
It’s not of service to them, and it’s not of service to ourselves. The only way that we can healthily share our stories with others is when we have learned to be a witness to our own story first, and that’s why the private part of the writing process is so important to start with.
I tell people, even people who are in full-time therapy, I was in full-time therapy when I first started writing this story and thank god. I needed that extra support. And I also really wanted to take some of the burden off of my friends who I knew were really concerned for my stability and mental health and all of that. So I had good people in my support system, and I had a therapist, and I was doing yoga, and I’m writing this story all at the same time. But there’s something about becoming your own best witness, even if a therapist does it for you really well, a great therapist should say to you, “Someday you do this for yourself and you don’t need me anymore.”
Rebecca Ching: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Ally Fallon: So a bad therapist is gonna say to you, “I hope you stay like this forever so that you have to pay me $180 a week for the rest of your life,” you know? [Laughs] But a great therapist should be like, “Eventually, my voice becomes your internal voice, and you don’t need me anymore.”
Rebecca Ching: Amen to that. I wholeheartedly agree, and I love also just that distinction of the overshare. Brené Brown’s groundbreaking research on vulnerability has been and continues to be misunderstood, she continually writes and is trying to clarify this. But I love how she says vulnerability ceases to be vulnerability without permission and boundaries.
46:11
Ally Fallon: Yes. Yes.
Rebecca Ching: So without permission and boundaries, and for me, too, if our worthiness is externalized in any way when we’re sharing our story, we’re in danger.
Ally Fallon: Agreed.
Rebecca Ching: And that’s my YOU-turn check in on myself. When I work with both my clinical and leadership clients, we work on that. So I think there’s something powerful in sharing our story, but the timing of it is so essential, and our relationship with it. So I’m just so immensely grateful for what you just shared.
I want to just do a little dip back in time. Before Indestructible was in the works, you were still in your marriage, so there’s something really profound where you were trying to write a marriage book while you were in this marriage, and I don’t find it ironic or dark or anything. I just think there was this knowing in you. The story you wrote, you still wrote a book about relationships.
Ally Fallon: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: But I loved this statement. You said, “It is impossible to not be stuck in your writing and not stuck in your life.”
Ally Fallon: Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: And you were talking about how stuck you were with this book at the time and then obviously what was going on around you. And I’d love for you to talk a little bit more about that because so many people, especially thinking of the leaders I work with when they get these creative blocks or they just feel shut down and they are so hard on themselves, especially if they’ve been efficient and been highly productive but then all of a sudden hit this wall.
And so, I’d love for you to unpack that a little bit more because I think this statement, again, it’s impossible to not be stuck in your writing and also not stuck in your life —
Ally Fallon: Sure.
Rebecca Ching: — is so true.
Ally Fallon: Yeah, well, it’s one of the reasons why writing is such a powerful tool for us because it’s diagnostic.
48:01
When you’re writing about marriage, for example (like I was), and you’re staring at a blinking cursor and nothing is coming out, what I tell people is, “Writer’s block is not writer’s block. It’s life block.” And what it means when you’re staring at the page and you can’t figure out what to say next, it means that there’s something you want to say or do in your life that you feel you cannot say or do.
So you lay that over my circumstances, and it makes everything clear. There were so many things I wanted to say I felt I couldn’t say. There were so many things I wanted to do, number one being leave. I had wanted to do that for a long time, and I felt I couldn’t even admit to myself that I wanted to leave because it would make me a bad Christian and a bad wife.
And so, here’s the beauty of that. You talked about leaders bumping up against a wall, hitting their limit, and how frustrating that can be. The same is true for writing. The same is true for anything we try to do in our life when we want to achieve this thing and we feel we can’t achieve it. But I want to reframe that a tiny bit for anybody who’s stuck in their writing or stuck in their leadership or stuck in their finances or stuck in their relationship or whatever. When you start to bump up against an edge, the beauty of it is you’ve got something to push off against.
So think of this like a pushup. You need the ground, the solid ground, to push against in order to grow in strength, and when you don’t have that, when we just are sort of floating through life and everything’s going great and we’re not bumping up against any of our edges, then we’re not growing. It’s pleasant, but you’re not growing. And when you bump up against an edge, think of it like you’re in the dark and you’re feeling around in the dark, and at least you can feel the edge. So you know the edge is there. And then you use the edge as something to push against as a way to grow in strength so that you can move beyond the edge. It’s not so that now you don’t have an edge, it’s so that your edge becomes further out. Now there’s more space for you to move around in, and then your edge becomes further out, and you push off against that edge.
50:02
So don’t think of this like, “I’m doing these ten pushups today, so I never have to do pushups again.”
Rebecca Ching: [Laughs]
Ally Fallon: Think of it like, “I’m doing ten today so I can do eleven tomorrow so I can do twelve the next day so I can do a hundred in a year from now, and a hundred will feel like no big deal to me, and then I’m gonna try to do five hundred.”
So if we start to think about these things like that, then we get less discouraged when you reach a place where you’re feeling stuck because you realize that the fact that you’re stuck doesn’t mean — I say this to writers all the time. The fact that you’re stuck doesn’t mean you’re doing this wrong. It means you’re doing it right. There’s no way to be in the creative process and not get stuck. Creativity is about moving from chaos, out of chaos, into clarity. And so, that means you start in the chaos. You start in the stuckness, and you move to clarity.
So if you’re in the chaos, guess what? You’re in the creative process. Hello, welcome! You’ve been initiated to the club, you know? I think sometimes we make up a story in our own minds that, “Well, because this isn’t easy for me, then I must not be made to do it. It must not be in the cards for me.” We all have different ways of saying this but, “It must not be my gifting.” None of it’s true.
Rebecca Ching: Well, I think the myth of ease combined with untreated trauma and difficult life experiences kind of leads folks to tap out when difficult shows up, for whatever reason. Seeing that, “Oh, it’s hard. I need to must go a different path,” versus going through it, which is so cliché, yet so freakin’ true.
Ally Fallon: Totally.
Rebecca Ching: And yeah, so I love that normalizing, and we are creative beings. By being human, we are creative. It is just whatever that expression is, and I love the fact that you are stuck means that you are doing it right. That is such a powerful reframe, and I think a lot of great breakthroughs will happen if people stay in that space.
52:02
I also was really appreciative and struck by this statement that you wrote after having a conversation with your yoga instructor about how our bodies hold onto truths our minds cannot completely yet understand because so often we try and think through and think through and think through, and we lose touch with our bodies. But you had talked about how numb you were with your body, how just you weren’t connecting, and there was such a wisdom that you weren’t hearing that you just started to get an inkling to that was coming from what your body was holding onto, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit more about that.
Ally Fallon: Yeah, well, the biggest way that it presented itself for me during that time — well, the scene that I’m talking about with Sarah, the yoga instructor in the book is actually I had so much right shoulder pain that she was digging into. She was helping me move some of the energy that was stuck in my right shoulder. And when she would press into the space that, to me, felt mostly numb and locked up, she would press into it, and it would be like this searing, shooting pain that was coming out of my armpit.
So that’s a really basic — sometimes when we have chronic pain in our bodies, we can start to ask our body, “What are you trying to tell me?” And our body will give us a lot of wisdom and insight that our brains won’t compute that insight yet. There was a therapist at one point who said, “What would happen if you wrote yourself a letter from your right shoulder?” And I sat down and wrote the letter, and the letter felt otherworldly. I was like, “Am I possessed by a demon or something that wrote this weird letter to me?”
Rebecca Ching: [Laughs]
Ally Fallon: But then over time, it started to make more sense as I began to make connections in the prefrontal part of my brain. But it was from a place of trauma that was buried really, really deep and super subconscious.
Now, another way that this has become clear to me over time, and a much more drastic example, is when I was married before, my ex-husband and I did try to get pregnant for over two years, and I just decided through that process that, like so many women, I guess I’m infertile.
54:16
It’s funny, I’d had an appointment set up to go see a fertility specialist. I canceled the appointment because everything unraveled right before the appointment happened, and I realized that I wasn’t gonna need it.
So I moved forward in my life as I was having this conversation with Sarah about how much grief I had over letting go of the idea of being a wife and a mother and having a family of my own. I was having to grieve the loss of that during that season, and I walked away from the marriage just deciding, “Okay, well, I have to make peace with the fact that that may never happen for me, and I have to just kind of be okay with that.” And I was in a process of making peace with it, but I was being really honest with Sarah that I was really sad. It was something that felt like the hardest thing of all for me to let go of.
And then I am remarried now to a really wonderful man. We got married just not even a year ago. So we’re just barely newlyweds, and I remember stepping into the marriage, we’d talked about having kids right away because both of us have really wanted to be parents, and neither of us are 20 years old anymore, so we’re like, “We might as well just kick this thing off right away,” and in the beginning I was kind of like, “I don’t know. This could take a while because I’m not sure what my body’s gonna do.” And then as we got closer and closer to the wedding, I was like, “I don’t know why, I can’t explain it, but I just kind of feel like this is gonna happen quickly for us.” And sure enough, we got pregnant so fast – either on our wedding night or closely thereafter because I’m 23 weeks pregnant now. We’ve been married almost exactly that amount of time.
So yeah, it just shows you that your body — it’s not to say that every woman — I’m careful with this because not every woman who’s coping with infertility — there are a lot of women who are dealing with that, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that every woman who’s dealing with that doesn’t want to be a mother or doesn’t want to be with their partner or whatever.
56:13
There are a hundred reasons why our bodies can react in the way that they react. But for me, when I look at the story I’m like, “Oh, my body was like, ‘No, thank you! I am not safe. I am shut down. I do not want to be connected with this person for the rest of my life. I do not want to raise a child with him.’” And then when I met my now husband, my body was like, “And we’re open for business!” [Laughs]
So it’s just interesting how our bodies can communicate those truths that maybe we don’t have the words to communicate at the time that they’re happening.
Rebecca Ching: So true, and often we try and overpower our bodies and go, “No, no, no. That’s not what we’re gonna do.” We’re going left and our body wants to go right.
Ally Fallon: Yes.
Rebecca Ching: And that can often make us feel worse in the process but thank you for unpacking that so delicately and personally. I appreciate that.
I do want to talk a bit more today, but before we move from your memoir Indestructible, I think what stands out to me, or many things stand out to me, but it’s such a testimony to so many that they’re not alone. When people read your story, and that their lives and stories are worth fighting for versus just settling or just taking what is happening to them.
And so, you touched on this a little bit, but what are the results of you sharing your story so publicly? You’ve shared personally this unburdening process that really went deep, especially at the beach. But I’m wondering if you could share a little bit more about what some of those other results you’ve seen of sharing this book with the world beyond your inner circle?
Ally Fallon: Yeah, there’s a feeling of solidarity and humanity that comes when you share a story that’s that vulnerable. This is not to praise myself, but so a few of us ever really do that in a public way, and I actually feel like in a weird way like I was wired for it or built for it. It feels really right to me to do it. But yeah, so few of us ever share such a vulnerable story in such a public way that there’s a kind of I get to experience this solidarity with this group of women and men but a lot of women and men who have read the book who have reached out to me and said, “I’ve never had someone articulate my experience with such clarity as you did,” or “I decided to leave this relationship because of you,” or a man who reached out to me and said, “I read your book, and I was wrecked by it, and it made me realize how I haven’t been treating my wife in the way that she deserves, and it’s made me rethink everything.”
58:43
So you have these moments where I just feel like I see you. I’ve got you. We’re in this together, and there’s a healing for me that comes through that and hopefully a healing that moves outside of me and beyond me that’s not just about me. I think that’s the real gift of sharing publicly is that now the healing work that I’ve done is not just about me, but it’s got this radiating effect throughout the world, and I can touch people with my story who live in a different country than me or who don’t share the same background that I experienced.
I wrote the story originally thinking that a lot of women who had come out of the Evangelical world, who were married to pastors, I figured those women would for sure resonate with the story. And then I’ve connected with these women who don’t share any of those details of their background, who maybe the abusive relationship for them was with a parent or someone else entirely, and it’s still been freeing for them to have someone else put words to their experience.
So this is the beauty of sharing publicly, your writing, is there’s a connectedness that you get to experience, and I’ll say, too — and I’m stealing this from another author friend of mine, but it doesn’t need to be thousands and thousands of people that you share with.
1:00:04
In fact, I feel like there’s kind of a threshold where you stop getting the benefit from it, like if you share with ten people and ten people say to you, “Oh, my gosh. That part where you talked about laying on the floor and sobbing, I’ve done that before too, and I so felt that in my whole body, and it reminded me of this one time,” and they tell you their story. If ten people do that for you, you feel like, “Ah, I’m healed,” you know? “We’re the same. We’re in this together.” You don’t need 40,000 people to do that for you. There comes a point where it almost stops. You feel full.
Rebecca Ching: Yeah, and if you need 40,000 people, you’re not healed.
Ally Fallon: [Laughs]
Rebecca Ching: What I’m hearing is just it continues your healing that you walked alone and did this and followed this unique path that was just yours, and because of your passion for writing, this became something that actually had echoes beyond you, which is beautiful.
So you reference this. You are now remarried. You are pregnant.
Ally Fallon: Yes. Yes.
Rebecca Ching: Congratulations!
Ally Fallon: Thank you!
Rebecca Ching: You are growing a thriving business called Find Your Voice with new offerings that I want you to talk about. So what are you working on right now?
Ally Fallon: Well, the most current thing that I’ve been working on is a 90-day writing program that we call Grow Write, and I really developed Grow Write out of — you mentioned earlier in this episode that we’re living in the midst of this global pandemic. It’s an unprecedented situation, different than anything any of us have ever lived through. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my work over the past 12 years with writers and writers who swear to me that they’re not “real” writers, [Laughs] it’s that writing, the act of putting words down on the page, is one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal to create positive transformation in our own lives, in our families, in our small communities, and then also in the wider world.
1:02:08
So it’s a way to process and metabolize the events that are happening to us so that they don’t get lodged as trauma in our bodies and we don’t have to deal with them, in that sense, later. It is a way to connect with the people who are closest to us, and it’s a way to transmit a message to the wider world that the world needs to hear so that they can also transform.
So I believe it’s one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal, and so few of us are using it because we count ourselves out. We don’t consider ourselves real writers. And to be honest, it’s super, super simple. It takes five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes a day of putting the pen to the paper, recording what’s happening to you. It doesn’t have to be deep and profound. It doesn’t have to be grammatically correct. It doesn’t even have to be sentences or paragraphs. It can be bullet points. But putting the pen to the paper every single day and slowly, over time, this is — the work that I’ve been talking about for the last hour is the work that we’re doing inside of ourselves, and then that emanates and transmits to the people around us and to the world around us.
So, with my team, we created this program called Grow Write because we really wanted to give people everywhere who are living through this collective trauma — I’ll call it that right now. It’s big-T trauma for some of us and small-t trauma for others.
Rebecca Ching: Yes.
Ally Fallon: But it’s a collective trauma that we’re living through. I wanted to give people access to that tool and to remind them that it doesn’t take a lot. The program involves two writing prompts being sent to your email inbox every single day. One of them is more deep and introspective and one of them is lighter hearted. So you can pick the one that kind of fits your mood for the day, and it gives you a place to start when you sit down and put the pen to paper.
And the hope is, over time — and it’s more than a hope because this is backed by research and by my 12 years of experience and by my own personal experience, that over time what seems like a trauma actually becomes all of your leverage for the greatest change in the world. So if we want to leverage — we can either sort of lay down during this time and be sad, and all those things are perfectly appropriate, to be sad and grieve what’s going on in this time, but we can also accept, receive, and take what’s being offered to us in this time and use it as leverage for our greatest change, and that’s why we created this program called Grow Write, because it’s what I hope for everybody who participates in it.
1:04:32
So far, we’ve gotten some great feedback. We’ve had hundreds of people go through the program, and they’re really loving it. So that’s the thing that I’m most excited about right now. It’s also only $40 for 180 prompts.
Rebecca Ching: [Laughs] That’s amazing. Where can people find you, Ally?
Ally Fallon: Www.findyourvoice.com is the best place to find us, and you can find me on Instagram @allyfallon.
Rebecca Ching: Wonderful! Ally, this has been a treat, and your life and your gifts just keep on giving, and the echoes of healing and courage that you’ve created, I don’t even think you’ve seen the beginning of it. So I am very, very grateful for your life and for you showing up and, most importantly, that you took the time to talk today. So thank you so much!
Ally Fallon: Thanks, Rebecca. I appreciate that.
Rebecca Ching: It takes real courage to lead yourself through a season of dismantling. Dismantling what we once knew to be true requires us to ask big questions that we don’t have the answers to. Not knowing makes us feel out of control, which if we get really honest with ourselves, we worship at control’s altar on a regular basis. We’re shaking up the status quo of our day to day. We’re disrupting the lies we took on about ourselves and the world we live in, the known and the comfort come to a hard stop.
1:06:00
Amidst it all, we often need to keep showing up in life and work when things fall apart. You have clients, family, community involvements, parent responsibilities, and the history of social media posts that reflect your life pre-dismantling that shows only a snippet of what you’ve been really living. If you dare to show up in your life, you will have falls, and some of these falls usher in a complete dismantling of what was.
The ending of a relationship is one of the quickest ways to usher in a season of dismantling, especially when that relationship involves abuse, betrayal, and power over. A season of dismantling in your life calls you in to become skilled at witnessing your own pain. This is how you move through it instead of trying to avoid the pain of moving around it. The more you increase your capacity to witness your own pain, the less likely you will bypass your pain and the pain of others.
Ally shared how she was intentional about building her capacity to move through her season of dismantling when her abusive marriage ended. She sat with immense grief, betrayal, and loneliness and moved towards a deeper sense of knowing herself, reconnecting with her truth. She took the time to do this work privately before slowly sharing her dismantling story with those who have earned the right to hear it. And now, her story is the whisper and the roar to many others who are in the midst of their own dismantling.
When you do this work, your courage is indeed contagious to someone else resisting the unknown for status quo. Where are you bypassing pain in your life? Where do you need to lean into the unknown of dismantling so you can move towards a life filled with the deeper sense of belonging and alignment? The unseen trauma of leaders can often complicate the moving-through process and the healing process, but let’s face it: we’re complex, and things are certainly complex right now. In a time where there’s a lot of pain, the call to witness your pain and the pain of others instead of trying to move around it, is needed now more than ever.
1:08:31
[Inspirational Outro Music]
Thank you so much for joining this episode of The Unburdened Leader! I have listed ways to connect with Ally and buy her latest book, Indestructible, in my show notes along with the important information for the hotline, the National Domestic Violence Hotline. You can find this episode, show notes, and free Unburdened Leader resources, along with ways to work with me at www.rebeccaching.com!
[Inspirational Outro Music]
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