“Mom, do you want to get on a dating site?”
What I told her. Plus, 3 SH!FT Sessions for one week only.
Aloha,
Almost 12 years ago, I gave birth to a little human who, this past week, asked me:
“Hey Mom, Dad and Liza met on an online dating site… I know you are okay being alone, but… have you thought about getting on a dating site to maybe meet someone?”
I’ll tell you what I said. First, you should meet the girl who asked.
She just joined the Q Club at school, which supports LGBTQ+ kids, because she wants to be an ally.
She’ll stare into the distance, turn back to you, and ask, “Are you feeling this?”
She feels your emotions before you’ve named them. She finishes sentences you haven’t started. She’s tuned to a frequency most people walk right past.
A gift like that has a cost. When you feel everything, you can drown in everyone else’s feelings.
So I’ve taught her three things:
How to tell what’s her energy and what belongs to someone else
That in every moment, she’s choosing what to focus on
To trust herself, especially when the world is slow to catch up
Then yesterday, the hormones won. Because, as I often tell clients, life… life’s. My daughter needed to let out her energy in a safe space, so she shouted at me:
“I’m never going to speak to you again!”
I didn’t chase her. I gave her space, took the dog for a walk, and held a boundary.
When we came back together, I told her the thing I want her to carry for the rest of her life:
There are words you can say in the heat of the moment that the other person will never un-hear.
Some words don’t bruise. They scar. It didn’t wound me, but it was a valuable moment for me to show her to start differentiating between her primal brain and the part of her that gets to choose.
Here’s what was happening inside her — and what happens inside you, too.
Under stress, the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that weighs consequences and chooses words with care, goes partially offline. Yale neuroscientist Amy Arnsten has spent decades documenting it.
Older, faster survival circuits grab the wheel.
At eleven, her prefrontal cortex is still under construction.
Yours is finished, but…
It still walks out the door the second you feel threatened.
And those words can land hard for a reason. Your brain gives one painful moment far more weight than a pleasant one. Relationship researcher John Gottman found stable couples need five positive interactions to balance every negative one.
Five to one. That’s how long survival wiring holds a grudge. Which is exactly why you can’t think your way into change.
Your conscious mind is brilliant. It’s also narrow. It holds about four things at once, and it’s the first thing to leave the room when pressure hits.
When the conscious mind leaves, who’s in charge then?
Everything that’s become automatic. In other words, your unconscious mind.
Joe Dispenza says that by midlife, about 95% of who we are runs on autopilot. The hard data points the same way. Wendy Wood at USC found around 43% of what we do each day is habit. Under stress, that pull gets stronger.
That autopilot is your unconscious. It’s running the protection strategies you learned when you were small.
And when the stakes are highest, it’s the one making your decisions.
You know this pattern if:
You say “I’ve got it” before anyone asks
You answer the late-night call, lie awake resenting it, then do the 6am drop-off anyway
You can read a room in three seconds but can’t tell what you actually want
You’re the calm one in every crisis at work, then snap at your kid over one eye roll
Here’s where it gets tricky for high achievers. We’ve monetized our wounds.
The pattern that kept us safe became the thing we get paid for.
Over-responsibility becomes “reliable.”
Emotional suppression becomes “calm under pressure.”
Hyper-independence becomes “self-made.”
So we protect it. We think harder. We optimize. Because thinking feels safe.
But the pattern doesn’t shrink as you grow. It scales with you. More companies. More people. More weight on the same shoulders.
This month, I coached a founder to set that weight down.
When he first came to me, he was running multiple companies and carrying everyone in them.
“I’m pulled in a million different ways,” he told me, “and I get lost in that.”
He has this sound he makes. Eh.
When we started, eh meant I’m drowning.
After our release work, almost offhand, he said:
“Why would I want to go back to being responsible for someone else’s choices?”
No effort. No guilt. It was just obvious to him.
And that eh? Now it means nothing’s that serious.
He used to talk only about getting away from things. Away from pain, away from chaos, away from the people draining him. Now his goal is “protecting my peace.”
In Neuro Linguistic Programming, we call that a shift from away-from to toward motivation. His unconscious reorganized, and his language followed.
His previous ceiling is now his new floor.
That’s the tell. Real change doesn’t feel like a breakthrough. It feels like obviously.
He and my daughter are learning the same lesson: what’s mine, and what’s yours.
Some of us learn it at eleven. Some of us learn it after building a whole career on the opposite belief.
Either way, you can’t think your way there. You have to change what’s running underneath.
For one week only, Oct 5-9, I’m opening 3 SH!FT Sessions.
These are for the people who keep writing to me. You see yourself in these letters. And some part of you has been wondering what it would feel like to actually work together.
This is how you find out.
When you book, you’ll take the Inner Blueprint Assessment, and I’ll build your personalized report. Then we spend 90 minutes doing the work together.
You’ll walk away with:
Your pattern, named. The protection strategy that no longer needs to run, in language so precise you’ll feel it land.
A live shift. Designed for you in session, so you feel the change in your body, not just your head.
Your integration roadmap. How to carry the shift into your leadership, your home, and every moment pressure hits.
Seven days of voice memo support. When the old pattern shows up that week, and it will, I’m one voice memo away.
This is for you if you’re successful on paper, tired underneath, and done trying to think your way out.
This is not for you if you want a pep talk.
$1,497, Inner Blueprint included. Three spots. When they’re gone, they’re gone.
Oh, and the dating site? Let’s just say I’m currently ogling a certain star on a certain show, and that’s enough for me.
So let me ask you:
What are you still carrying that was never yours to hold?
Mahalo,
Judy
P.S. If your session shows you there’s more running underneath, your full $1,497 becomes a credit toward a deeper coaching container when you enroll within 14 days. The only real cost is waiting another year to stop monetizing your wounds.
