MMS_The Plan That Was Supposed to Help You_Audio
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Dr. Julia Bowlin: [00:00:00] Questioning a plan that came from love isn't betrayal, folks. It's actually the first honest act of knowing yourself
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Hi there. I'm Dr. Julia Bowlin, and you're listening to Mindset Medicine, your weekly dose of personal awareness medicine. So I want you to take one deep breath and let this episode meet you wherever you are right now, because today we're gonna talk about the plan that was supposed to help you, but what happens when other people's goals for us design our life and stop fitting who we actually are?
Dr. Julia Bowlin: At some point, most of us outgrow the version of ourselves that we once relied on. This month, we're exploring who we are when the labels fall away. Remember playing dress-up as a kid? You'd put on something maybe three sizes too big, a parent's coat, a pair of heels you could barely walk in, and [00:01:00] maybe for a little while you were completely somebody else, a doctor, a queen, a race car driver.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And it was perfect because you knew who you were playing and you could become that. It was a role Here's the interesting thing, though, is that some of us never fully stopped playing roles. We just started calling the costumes by different names, and those names, those are our labels. Labels are words that we use to describe who we are.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: A daughter, a son, a doctor, a parent, the responsible one, the strong one, or maybe even the one who holds everything together, the Rock of Gibraltar. And some of those labels we pick for ourselves. A lot of them, though, were picked for us by our parents, by our culture, by our religion, by the life we happened to [00:02:00] be born into.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And here's the thing about labels is we wear them long enough, guess what? They start to feel like they're just who we are. They're just us. Not something we're wearing, just who we are. And that, folks, is identity, the story we carry about ourselves, and the most of the time, we didn't even write the story.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Someone else did. So this month we're looking at the story, not to rip it apart, but just to see it clearly, to figure out what still fits and what we might have quietly overgrown. I'm calling this series in July Stripped Down and Still Powerful, and I don't mean stripped down naked. Well, I am when it comes to stripping down our labels, but not our clothing.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Well, that's optional when you're in your own house. But anyway, I'm calling this series in July Stripped Down and Still Powerful. [00:03:00] Five episodes, one question running through all of them is who are we without the labels? So let's find out. Here's what we're starting this month. We're not gonna go for a dramatic reinvention moment.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: We've done that in other episodes, but not this time. We're not gonna go with the big career change or even a life-altering decision. We're gonna go earlier than that because most identity stories don't actually begin with us. They begin with someone who loved us, a parent, a grandparent, a teacher, someone who looked at us when we were young and thought, "Hmm, I know exactly what this person needs.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I know what will make them safe," or, "I know what will make them successful." And then they built a plan, maybe even a good plan, maybe even a loving plan, and then we carried it. And for a lot of us, we carried [00:04:00] it for a long, long time before we ever stopped to ask, "Wait a minute. Is this mine? Did I choose this, or did I just show up inside of it one day?"
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And I just kept going because that's what we do. That's what this episode is about. Not blaming the people who handed us the plan, not even letting it go yet. That comes later this month. But I just want us to start naming it, seeing it for what it is, because here's what I've learned, both from my own life and the people I've worked with over many, many years.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The hardest plans to question aren't the ones that hurt us. They're the ones that came from love. Those are the ones we hold the longest. Those are the ones that we feel most like a betrayal to examine. I'm gonna say that one more time. The hardest plans to questions aren't the ones that [00:05:00] hurt us. They're the ones that came from the love of somebody else's agenda that we strapped on, and we dressed up in, and we carried it through.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And because it came from love, it feels like a betrayal when we take off the clothes. And those are the exact ones that we're gonna be looking at this month, and in this episode specifically. So I wanna tell you something that I don't talk about all that often. When I was 17 years old, my father told me where I was going to college.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: He said, "You can go anywhere you want, as long as it's Ohio State." And folks, this is one of the biggest university... Well, it was the biggest universe, and the biggest university for me. Tens of thousands of students, and it just wasn't a conversation. It just was. That's where I was going. I didn't even tour other campuses.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I didn't make lists of schools. I packed my bags and I went. And here's what I knew. Even then, even at [00:06:00] 17, I knew I wasn't ready, not for a school that size. I was not ready, not for that much noise or that much space, and that many people who all seemed to know exactly why they were there. You see, I was carrying a lot of mental chaos that I hadn't worked through yet, stuff that really needed attention, and stuff that didn't just quietly wait while you go to class and take notes, and then figure out where the dining hall is.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Not that stuff. We're talking big stuff. But I went anyway, because that's what I did. That's what we do. Because my dad said so. Because of somebody I loved or somebody we love says so, we do it, because the plan was already made. And what nobody tells you about being 18 and landing in a place that size, coming from a graduating class of mine less than 150 people, is how fast you can disappear Not dramatically, [00:07:00] not all at once, just slowly, like a voice that gets a little quieter every day until one morning you realize you can't even hear that voice anymore.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: My grades suffered, my mental health suffered even worse, and then something happened that knocked the floor completely out from under me, and it's something I won't go into detail today. What I will say, though, is that me, the person who walked into that campus, was not the person who eventually left it.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I was not the same. So I took a year off, and in that year, in what I can only describe as one of the strangest plot twists in my life, I sold Kirby vacuum cleaners. I know. It's kinda funny. I opened up the newspaper, looked for jobs when I was in between school, and just found something that says, "No training needed.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: We will train you on the spot." And I'm like, "Okay, why not?" I was [00:08:00] terrified. I was knocking on strangers' doors, vacuum cleaner in hand, a- asking people to let me in. Today it just sounds so crazy and unsafe, you know? Anyway, four foot nine going into strangers' homes. Yep, probably not the safest thing. And every door felt like a verdict.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Every "no" felt like a personal attack at first. Any time a stranger said, "No, they are not interested. No, go away. No, you can't come in," felt like a personal attack. I wasn't good enough. But somewhere in the middle of all that rejection, which was really good to thicken my skin, folks, something started to shift.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I began to trust myself. I learned what to say, when to listen, how to read a room, or in this case, how to read a living room, because that's what I was gonna shampoo. And I started to actually connect with the person [00:09:00] standing in front of me. I started to appreciate other people's lives, the way they decorated their homes, the stories sitting on their shelves.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Each door I knocked on was a completely different world, and I was being let into all of them. And I remember one house in particular, an elderly woman who answered. Sweet doesn't even cover it. Her carpet was desperate for help, but she was adorable. Her place was dark, it was musty, and it was the kinda dingy that tells you it's been a while since it's been cleaned deeply.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: But she let me in, and I cleaned that carpet until it looked like something entirely different, and she watched the whole thing with a quiet appreciation that was so wide and so deep it almost caught me off guard. And she didn't buy the vacuum But I left feeling like I'd been given a gift somehow. That [00:10:00] summer taught me three things I didn't expect to learn from being a vacuum cleaner salesperson.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: One, how to accept rejection without making it mean that my worth was in question. Two, how to trust my own instincts in real time. What, when does this feel sketchy? When does it feel safe? And how to actually accommodate and communicate with people, not just talk at them, but meet them where they were and enjoy the connection.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And looking back, those three things, they became the foundation of everything that I do now. The plan my father built for me didn't work, but the year that fell out of it taught me more about who I actually was than four years of following somebody else's map, my father's, ever could have been So here's why I want to slow down for just a minute, because what happened to me at Ohio State and what happened in that year [00:11:00] off isn't really just my story.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: There's something underneath that that shows up in a lot of people's lives, maybe in different clothes, maybe in different circumstances, but the same basic pattern. Someone who loves us builds a plan, and we follow it, not because we're weak, not because we don't have our own ideas, but because the plan came from somebody we trusted, and trusting people who love us is something our brains are actually wired to do from the very beginning.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And here's where it gets interesting. Our brains have a deep preference for what's familiar, for what's known, for what's already been mapped out for us, not because our brains are lazy, but because familiarity feels safe, familiarity feels less risky, and familiar feels like solid ground, even when the ground isn't actually solid at [00:12:00] all.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: So when somebody we love and trust hands us a plan, our brains register that plan as familiar before we've even lived it. It came from our world. It came from our people, and so it feels like ours, even when it isn't, and that's not a character flaw. That is just how we're built, and the tricky part is that familiar and right aren't always the same thing, and sometimes the most loving plan someone can make for us is still the wrong map that we should follow.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And here's the part that took me a long time to work through. For years, questioning my father's plan felt disloyal, like I was saying he was wrong, like I was saying he didn't love me, and neither one of those things were true, not even close. He loved me. He wanted the best possible life for me. He just didn't know what that looked like from inside of his experience or mine.[00:13:00]
Dr. Julia Bowlin: He only knew what it looked like from outside of his. That's the thing about plans that come from love. They're built from someone else's vantage point, someone else's fears, someone else's definition of safe and successful and good. And when we carry those plans without ever examining them, them, we end up living someone else's answer to a question they were asking about their own life, not ours.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Questioning a plan that came from love isn't betrayal, folks. It's actually the first honest act of knowing yourself. It's the moment you stop asking, "What was I supposed to do?" And start asking, "What's actually true for me?" That shift is small, and it is not easy, but it is everything. Because here's what I know now that I didn't know at 17: the people who love us most can [00:14:00] only give us the map that they have.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's up to us to figure out where we have grown or outgrown it, and outgrowing someone else's map doesn't mean we're not grateful for the journey that they pushed us on. It just means that we're ready to start drawing our own map, our own journey. Serious stuff here, I know, and I wanna slow down here for a moment because there's a reason this stuck the way it did.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: What I'm describing, this pull towards the familiar, this tendency to follow a plan that was handed to us, that's not a personality trait. That's not weakness. That's not even habit, really. It's something that happens at a much deeper level than any of that. Our brains are constantly scanning the environment for what is safe, and one of the fastest ways that our brain decides that something is safe [00:15:00] is whether it recognizes it, whether it's been here before, whether it knows this territory, and psychologists and neuroscientists call this familiarity bias.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I'll say that again. Maybe I can say it twice. Familiarity bias, and it basically means this: the brain has a built-in preference for what it already knows. I've already said that. Not because the known thing is better, not because it's the right fit, just because it's known. Familiar feels like less risk.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Familiar feels like solid ground, even when the ground is actually shifting underneath us. Think about what that means for identity, for the plans and the roles and the labels that we inherit early in our lives. We don't just follow them because someone told them to us. We follow them because our brain registers them as [00:16:00] safe, as home, as the version of reality that has already been vetted by the people we trust most.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: A doctor's daughter goes into medicine. An electrician's son becomes an electrician. Make sense? I
Dr. Julia Bowlin: think about that elderly woman's door, standing on her porch with a vacuum cleaner I wasn't sure anyone would ever let me use. Every single door on that street was unfamiliar. Every knock was a risk my brain was actively arguing against. My chest was pounding, and yet something in me kept knocking. Not because it was comfortable, I guarantee you that, but because something deeper than comfort was starting to wake up inside me.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: That's the moment that familiarity bias starts to loosen. Not when we force it, not when we shame ourselves out [00:17:00] of it, but when we get curious enough or desperate enough or brave enough to knock on a door that isn't on the map that we were given. And here's what I want you to sit with The pull towards the familiar plan, the inherited role, or the life that was designed for you before you had a say in it, that isn't a flaw either.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's just wiring. It's our brains doing exactly what it's built to do, keep you close to what it knows. But wiring isn't destiny, and what I mean by this is that is this. Just because your brain learned to feel safe inside of a particular story doesn't mean that story is the only one available to you, and that's important.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The brain is remarkably good at learning. It learned the [00:18:00] familiar path in the first place, and given the right conditions, it can learn a new one. Not overnight, not without some discomfort for sure, but it can. And a map isn't a life. A map is someone's best attempt to describe a territory. It's drawn from where they stood at the time they stood there with the information that they had.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It can be incredibly useful. It can get us started, but it was never meant to replace our own experience of actually walking the ground. You see, the map that my father drew for me wasn't wrong because he drew it. It was just incomplete because it was his, and the moment I started walking my own ground, even with a vacuum cleaner, even fricking terrified, even knocking on strangers' doors, I started [00:19:00] drawing something that was mine.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And once we can start seeing that pattern, it starts to loosen. Not all at once, just a little. It's a little scary sometimes. Our heart will panic a little bit, and sometimes a little is exactly enough to take the next step. Here's where I wanna get honest with you about something, and maybe it's a little bit ridiculous because that's where the real stuff usually lives anyway.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: When I was standing on the stranger's porch that summer with the vacuum cleaner, I had a thought that I'm not proud of, but again, I'm gonna share it with you anyway because I think it might sound familiar. I thought, "If I can't even sell a vacuum cleaner, how am I ever going to make money at doing anything?"
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I want to just let that sit there for a second. That was in my head. A woman who could not move a single Kirby vacuum cleaner an entire summer [00:20:00] eventually became a physician, a coach, a hypnotherapist, someone who built a whole career out of walking into people's pain and helping them find their way through it.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The belief was wrong, spectacularly, almost comically wrong. Because here's the thing about the beliefs we carry when we're young and when we're lost and we're living inside somebody else's plan. They feel like facts. Those beliefs that we have in our heads feel like facts. They feel like conclusions that we've arrived at through careful observation of evidence.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: You see, I walked into Ohio State, one of the biggest universities in the country, coming from a graduating class of less than 150 people with teachers who knew my name, who believed in me, who showed up for me every single day. And when I got to that enormous campus and I struggled, I didn't think, [00:21:00] "Huh, this environment just isn't right for me."
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I thought, "I am not smart enough. I am too small. I don't belong here." That was the belief underneath the plan. Not just that Ohio State was the wrong school, but maybe I was the wrong person, and I carried that belief around for longer than I'd like to admit. Until one day at Earlham College, my small liberal arts school in Richmond, Indiana, where people actually knew my name again, I started a support group.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I just showed up and I started talking, and people came, and something shifted in that room that I hadn't expected. My voice changed things for other people. Not a big voice, not a polished voice, not a voice that figured it all out, that's for darn sure. Just mine. And it turned out that that was exactly enough The [00:22:00] most important thing mindset medicine has taught me, and the thing I want to leave right here in the middle of this episode, is this: the beliefs we form about ourselves during the seasons when we are most lost are almost never accurate.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: They feel true, they feel like evidence, but they're actually just our brain trying to make sense of a situation it was never equipped to handle in the first place. We are not the conclusions we drew about ourselves when we're 18 and terrified and living someone else's plan. Not even close. And I wanna pause here for just a second.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Is there a plan, a path, a role, or an expectation that you've been carrying so long it's started to feel like yours? Maybe it came from a parent. Maybe it came from a community or a version of yourself you built [00:23:00] a long time ago. Maybe it came from someone you loved, and you never once considered that their map might not fit your feet.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Just let that sit for a moment and see what comes up when you give that a little room. Before we go into the Unicity Moment, I wanna tell you what it is, because I've recently started adding this into every episode, and I wanna make sure it doesn't catch you off guard. You see, I created the Unicity Moment as a guided inner experience that combines some elements of clinical hypnotherapy, some elements of a nervous system reset, and something I simply call space saving.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It isn't therapy. It isn't meditation exactly. It's more like just a deliberate pause, a chance to let what we've been talking about move from your head down [00:24:00] into the rest of you. It's gentle, it's optional, and it works best when you are not operating heavy machinery or driving a car or you need your eyeballs to focus.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Which brings me to the part where I have to say, if you are driving now, please do not close your eyes. You can listen. You can still let the words land. Just keep your eyes on the road and save the deeper experience for when you're somewhere you can actually settle in a little bit. And for everyone else, find a comfortable position if you can.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And when you're ready, let your eyes close and take just one breath in
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Ah, let it go And just notice where you are right now. Not where you think you should be and not where you were an hour ago, just here, this moment, and in this breath. And another one in [00:25:00] And out at your own pace
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And I want you to imagine you're standing somewhere outside, somewhere open, maybe a field, maybe it's a hillside. Maybe it's somewhere you've been before that always made you feel like you could breathe just a little deeper and easier The sky is wide above you and the ground beneath your feet is solid and real And maybe you've been carrying something.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Maybe today's conversation brought something up that you didn't expect. Maybe a past plan or a path you've been on, or an expectation that was placed in your hands or in your heart or in your head before you were old enough to know whether you wanted to hold it[00:26:00]
Dr. Julia Bowlin: If something is there, just notice the weight of it for a moment Not to judge it, not even to decide anything about it Just feel how long it may have been with you
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And now, in whatever way feels right for you, imagine setting it down You're not throwing it away, you're not destroying it, just placing it gently on the ground in front of you
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Some listeners feel and find that this feels like relief. Some find that it feels just very strange, like putting down something you didn't realize had really gotten [00:27:00] so heavy
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Some find it brings up something unexpected. Whatever comes up for you is the right thing, and just breathe into it. In And out
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And now notice what's still there after the plan is sat down, after the expectation is resting on the ground instead of in your arms You're still standing. The ground is still solid, and the sky is still wide And what is left is you Not a label, not the plan, not the version someone else imagined. [00:28:00] Just you standing on your own ground in your own open sky
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And take one more breath here, and let it be slow, and let it be yours
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And when you're ready, gently bring yourself back Wiggle your fingers. Feel the weight of your body wherever you're sitting And when it feels right, let your eyes open
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Welcome back. This episode was really about something simpler than it might have seemed at first. It was just about noticing. Noticing that some of our stories that we carry about who we are [00:29:00] were written before we had a pen in our hand. And that noticing, just that, is where everything starts to shift.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: That, folks, is not a small thing. That's actually everything. And next week we're gonna go somewhere a little different. We're talking about what happens when something inside you already knows the answer before your brain is caught up. That moment when the quiet inner voice shows up completely uninvited, no appointment, no warning, no regard for whatever your current plans are, and says something you absolutely cannot ever un-hear.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: For me, it happened on a college campus oval on a crisp November day. I was walking, minding my own business, carrying my backpack, and my gut decided that was the perfect moment to completely rearrange my life. We'll [00:30:00] talk about that next week, and I have a feeling it might sound a little familiar. Thank you so much for spending this time with me.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Until next time, may you be happy, be healthy, and be fulfilled.
Outro: Thank you for listening to Mindset Medicine with your host, Dr. Julia Bowlin. To learn more about Mindset Medicine, go to www.juliabowlinmd.com and connect with Dr. Julia to find out how our team can help you today. Join us again next week for more expert tips, tools, and strategies to become healthier, wealthier, and wiser in your personal and professional life.
