You Didn’t Choose This. But You Choose What Happens Next.

Trust me, I'm not perfect. I didn't always make the right choice. I have had to learn plenty of things the hard way. But I kept trying to come back to what part of this belongs to me.

That's the difference between blame and responsibility. Welcome to the Unblocked Woman podcast. I'm Amy Sanders. For years, I believed the next level of my life and business would come from a better strategy, working harder, figuring out that perfect plan.

But eventually, I saw the real truth. The biggest ceiling in our lives is not strategy. It's identity. The patterns we don't see.

The subtle ways we play small. The version of ourselves that we keep defaulting back to even when we know we're capable of more. This podcast is where we bring those patterns into the light. We talk about identity, leadership, growth, and what it actually takes to become the woman who can truly hold the life and business she wants.

No fluff, no performance, just honest conversation about stepping fully into your power. So go ahead and subscribe and follow the show. And remember, the moment you see the pattern, you can finally break it. There are things that will happen in your life that you did not choose.

You didn't choose the betrayal or the divorce. You didn't choose the diagnosis. Maybe you didn't choose how somebody treated you. You didn't choose the family.

You were born into the loss you experienced or the moment when somebody else's decision completely changed your life. And I want to start there because I think conversations about personality or personal responsibility can go sideways really fast. Taking responsibility for your life does not mean taking responsibility for everything that has happened to you. Some things that happened to you were super unfair.

Some things really hurt you deeply and some things changed the trajectory of your life through absolutely no choice of your own. However, eventually there's another question that we have to ask ourselves. The question is, what am I going to do now? I'm not saying that what happened to you was okay or that you should be over it right now.

Or even that you caused it. But there is most always or almost always a piece of what happens next that still belongs to you. And that is what I want to talk to you about today. You don't get to choose every circumstance of your life, but you still get to choose who you become inside of it.

Welcome back to the Unblocked Woman podcast. I had a conversation with one of my oldest, dearest friends this past week, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. And so, of course, I'm creating an episode all around it. Anyway, I have this group of girlfriends that I have known since I was literally 12 years old.

And there are eight of us, which is crazy that we're now in our mid-40s and we still all love to hang out with each other. We have done basically our whole life together since we were 12. We have gone to the same schools. We have lived in similar communities.

We came from similar backgrounds. We grew up in Linden, Utah. And we were known as the Linden Girls because we grew up in Linden. We have had, at this point in time, a million memories together.

We have done, like I said, life. And when we started getting married, we would bring our husbands into the new group, essentially forced our husbands to become friends. And once we started having kids, we also forced our kids to be friends. And at this point, our kids really look at each other more like cousins.

But my whole point here is my friend and I were talking as we were driving in the car this past week about two specific women in our group. And I am going to keep identities private here because this isn't... This isn't about judging one or the other. And it's not about deciding, like, who did life right.

But it is about something that we noticed that I really haven't shook. I just found it fascinating ever since our conversation. So one of our friends have had... She's had a relatively stable, happy, joyful life.

She married a really good man, and they're still married today. They've raised... They've raised a beautiful family together. And she's absolutely had hard things happen.

I don't think that anyone that's in their 40s has not had something hard happen to them. But overall, her life has been pretty stable, and she has had a pretty happy life. And she's a very happy person to this day. Now, my other friend has had a much harder road.

She has gone through multiple divorces. She has had financial struggles, highs, lows, more lows than highs, I would say. She has had a lot of difficult relationships. She's experienced deep heartbreak.

And she has continually rebuilt her life and then found herself in another really difficult situation. It's like every time she would turn the corner, she'd be hit, bam. And initially, you can look at these two women, and you could say, well, one of them just got luckier in life. And honestly, there is truth in that.

Who you marry really matters. Other people's choices also really, really matter. Your health matters. Financial stability matters.

The opportunity that you get handed matters. All of these things matter. And I want to say clearly, we don't all get dealt the same cards. But as my friend and I kept talking, we realized that there was something else happening here.

It wasn't only like what happened to them, but it was how they had learned to respond to what happened to them. One of these friends, when something hard happens, she almost instinctively looks at what she can do with it. And she'll say things like, look at where my life choices got me, like exciting. Like we're doing something cool and my life choices got me here.

She'll also say stuff like, I am really proud of my younger self for making that decision because that decision has landed me here. She recognizes that, yes, some things have worked out in her favor. But she also recognizes that there are choices that she made along the way that have helped create the life that she has today. She sees herself as an active participant in her own life.

Our other friend has tended to respond to life very differently. And I say this with love. And I just want you to understand that. There's a difference here because I think it's important.

When more hard things happen, we hear, how am I here again? Why does this keep happening to me? Why is my life always so hard? I don't know that I'm going to show up tonight because it's going to be too heavy and I don't want you guys to have to fill that.

Very, very different, right? And here's what really struck me. Some of the original hard things were absolutely not her choice. Absolutely not her choice.

However, over time, there were places where she kept choosing versions of the same hard thing. She would enter another unhealthy relationship that ended up in divorce. And before the divorce, she would be very mistreated. She would, not listen to her own internal knowing and she would ignore what she already knew.

She would have a moment where life seemed to be happening to her rather than her stopping to ask, wait, what power do I actually have here? How do I want to show up here? And I don't say that without compassion. It might sound like it and that's not what I want you to get.

That is not the vibe. What I'm saying is that I've watched her go through things that I really, really would not wish on anyone and I am keeping them somewhat private because there's too many people that know us and so I want to keep those private and I'm not listing them here she really truly has had some real doozies what I am saying is that compassion doesn't require us to pretend that we don't have choices sometimes the most compassionate thing that we can do for ourself is recognize I may not have chosen how I got here but I am here and I don't have to keep choosing what keeps me here as we were talking about these two women we just did a deep dive on our friendship and our relationships and how differently a lot of our lives look even though we still love each other and still hang out with each other and still love each other and still love each other and today. And then my friend started talking about my life. And that made me look at this completely different.

If I'm looking at our group objectively, the friend with hardships that we're talking about, and I, we both have had more hard things happen to us than any of the others. And if you asked any of the others, they would agree. And I'm not discounting anyone else's pain because they for sure have had pain. They for sure have gone through hard things.

Pain isn't a competition. And of course, they've experienced hardships as our years have unfolded before us. They've had difficult things in their lives too. But what we talked about is that, yes, I've had plenty of things happen in my life that I did not choose either, like divorce, betrayal, abuse, financial devastation, going through single motherhood.

And deep grief, losing people I love. There have been plenty of moments where I also could have looked at my life and said, this isn't fair. And honestly, it would have been right. It wasn't fair.

A lot of things happened to me that I did not choose. But being right about unfairness wasn't something that was going to build the life that I wanted. And at some point I had to ask myself, okay, Amy, like, what are you going to do now? We can't undo what somebody else has done.

We can't go backward and choose a different childhood or, in my case, a different marriage, a different way that I grew up. We can't make someone treat us differently. We can't erase betrayal. We can't put money magically back into our accounts.

That would be amazing, right? But we can't do that. But what we can do is decide what happens next. And trust me, I'm not perfect.

I didn't always make the right choice. I have had to learn plenty of things. The hard way. But I kept trying to come back to what part of this belongs to me.

That's the difference between blame and responsibility. Blame asks, whose fault is this? Whose? Where can I point my finger?

And sometimes the answer genuinely is, it's someone else's fault. They lied to you. They betrayed you. They hurt you.

They made a decision that affected you deeply. But responsibility asks a completely different question. What's mine now? Maybe what's yours is a boundary that it's time to start keeping.

Maybe it's leaving a relationship that you know is not right for you anymore, but it's scary. But it is what's yours now. Maybe it's staying in a relationship, but it's doing something differently. Instead of being a victim in the relationship, you put some ground rules down, in place, and you start working from those.

Maybe it's getting the help you need. You need extra support, and it's time to raise your hand and say, yes, I'm ready. Sometimes it's telling the truth. Not just to someone else, but also to yourself.

It's seeing the truth and speaking truth and telling the truth. It might be looking at a pattern that you really don't want to look at because you are used to being inside that pattern. It might be that it's finally admitting that you keep participating in something that hurts you. This doesn't make what happened your fault, but it means you're taking your power back over what can happen next.

As my friend and I were talking, we talked about a lot of things. There's one thing, probably the biggest thing, that I took away from that conversation, and it was that two people can experience something hard and tell themselves totally different stories about what it means. And I mean this when it came to my life, and I mean this when it came to both of their lives. One story might say, look at what I've survived, look at what I've learned, and look at the decisions that I can make from here.

However, another one might be, of course this happened to me, why does this always happen to me? Why am I despite the fact this happened to me? am I here again? And as I say this, think about the energy behind both.

The victim energy just feels icky. It doesn't set you up for success. But when you look at it objectively and also through a curious lens, like look at what I've survived. I am amazing.

I am resilient and I have learned a lot. They're very different. If you repeat either story long enough, it starts influencing your next choice. And that's where the pattern comes in.

The pattern comes in when you choose the emotionally unavailable person. And after that relationship is over, you choose another version of that same person. And then another. And eventually it becomes relationships that are different.

And then another. These things just don't work out for me. I'm just like not good at picking relationships. You don't set the boundary.

And then you don't set it again and again and again. And eventually you start to identify with people always just take advantage of me. Maybe it's that you don't ask for help and you handle everything yourself. And you are so freaking tired because you're doing everything.

But you also feel like you're wearing some sort of armor on top of you. You're wearing some sort of armor on top of you. And you're wearing some sort of armor on top of you. because you don't ask for help.

But eventually, you start to believe and your identity starts to lock in with being the person that always has to do everything. Choice becomes repetition, and repetition becomes pattern. Patterns, when repeated long enough, start to become your identity. And eventually, we stop realizing that we're choosing any of it at all.

We feel like we're not choosing it, and you just accept it like, this is my life. But what if it isn't your life? What if some of what you're calling your life is actually a pattern that you've just practiced? And you've practiced long enough that you think it's your life, or you think that that's just how it is, but it doesn't have to be.

That is why awareness is so powerful and why I talk about it all the time. Because the second you can see that pattern, you have reopened the possibility of choice. Being able to choose something different for you. Now, I also want to be careful here because choosing your power doesn't mean you have to turn every devastating experience that has happened to you into some inspirational comeback story.

I am not saying that. That can happen with certain stories, but not all of them. There are some things that have happened in my life. I am still not happy that they've happened in my life.

Yes, I've grown. Yes, I've learned from them. But I still wish that they had happened in my life. I'm still not happy that they've happened in my life.

That maybe they wouldn't have happened. It might be that sometimes you're on the bathroom floor and you're thinking, how in the hell am I going to get through today? And maybe that is all you can do and that is okay, is just getting through the day. Maybe that is the choice and that is the choice of doing something different.

Sometimes taking back your power or standing in your power is tiny. It's not even anything big, but you see it and you're saying, yes, I'm doing this. I've done this. I've did this.

Maybe it's just telling someone that you're not okay. Maybe it's admitting to yourself that you're not okay. Maybe it's time to go to therapy or ask for help. Maybe it's admitting that you're finally going to set a boundary and you admit it to yourself and to the person.

Maybe it's, I'm not going to send that text tonight because I know that if I do, I am going to write a regret it in the morning. And so standing in my power looks like not pressing send, even though I want to press send so bad because I'm so mad. Maybe it's sleeping on it before you make the next decision. It can even be, I have no freaking idea what I'm doing, but I know that I can't keep doing this.

That's agency too. Your power doesn't have to be measured by the size of your choice, something big and grandiose. It doesn't have to be measured by that. All it is, is recognizing that, there is still a choice and it is available to you.

So there's some questions that I think are helpful. They've been helpful in my life and in my coaching clients that I've had. And so I want to deliver them here. And they are, they go like this.

So when something in your life is hard, I want you to slow down long enough to ask yourself a few questions. And asking yourself these questions are going to help you move from choice and stand in your power. The first question is what actually happened? Not the story that you've built around it, but what actually happened?

Looking at it objectively and then asking yourself, what am I feeling about it? Are you feeling angry? It's admitting like, are you angry? Do you feel rejected?

Are you scared? Are you embarrassed or disappointed? It's naming how you feel. And then asking yourself, what am I feeling about it?

What do you feel? And then asking yourself the next question, which is, what pattern wants to respond here? Essentially, what is the default identity that we talk about that wants to respond right here? Am I wanting to over-explain things?

Am I wanting to withdraw people please? Am I wanting to attack or prove or control or run? And then you ask the big one, what is actually mine? Not their reaction.

Their reaction is not yours. Their opinion of you is not yours. Making sure that they understand everything that you say is also not yours. But the boundary is.

The words that you choose to use in the conversation and also in your head when you leave the conversation and also the words that you use to talk about it later to the people in your world. Those are yours. Your behavior of how you show up, also yours. The standards that you decide to hold, those are yours.

And the big one, your next decision, that is also yours. And when you decide that, what's actually yours? The final question is, what choice will I respect later, even in five years from now? I love this question because it helps you look outside of yourself in the moment.

There are things that have happened in my life where I was devastated, completely heartbroken, feeling the depth of pain that I didn't even know existed inside my body. It was the first time there was a specific thing that happened to me. And it was the first time I've, I'd experienced heartbreak multiple times in my life, but this one flatlined me like nothing else did. And it was the first time that I felt like I was going to die.

I had felt emotional pain and physical pain all at the same time. Like overwhelming, like knives in my stomach and in my heart. The question, what choice will I respect later, even in five years from now, that question saved how I showed up in those moments. I can look back for the person who had hurt me so deeply in those moments.

And I love how I showed up in those moments, even though I was cracked wide open. That's how you want to feel. You want to feel like you stand in your power, even in the hard moments, the moments you're not proud of. But the choice, like, will I respect what I do in five years from now, or even a year from now, or even a month from now?

So I don't want you to ask yourself, what will make this feeling disappear right now? Lashing out, acting out, silent treatment, whatever it is. Or what will make this feeling disappear right now? I don't want you to make everybody else happy but me, or happy with me even.

What guarantees this works out exactly how I want? Those questions are not going to help you. But the question that will is, what choice will I respect when I look back at how I showed up in this moment? That right there is where your power lives.

That right there will serve you in your life. So I actually want you to do something with this episode. Instead of just tuning in and then turning it off, I want you to think about a situation in your life that's taking up the most space in your head. Usually there's one, and you know the one.

Might be a conversation that you keep replaying, or someone that you keep thinking about, a person that you're totally irritated with. Maybe there's something that you're really scared about, or a decision you keep avoiding. And as I'm listing these off, I'm like, I have one of each of these in my head right now. And what I want you to do, so clearly I need to do this exercise with you, and I will, is I want you to take out a piece of paper and make two columns.

And if you're listening to this driving in the car, obviously not, don't do it now. But when you get home, I want you to do this, because it is a very, it's a great exercise. So on one side, I want you to write, what isn't mine to control? And on the other side, I want you to write, what is mine to choose?

You can't control what somebody says about you, but you can choose whether or not you engage. You can't control whether someone understands you, but you can choose that whether you're going, like how you're going to show up, and whether you're going to write a dissertation to try to make them understand you. You can't change what happened five years ago, it's in the past, there's nothing you can do about it. But you can notice what you're letting happen in your life right now, because of what happened five years ago.

You can't control what somebody says about you, but you can choose whether or not you engage. You can't control someone else's behavior ever, wouldn't that be amazing if we could, but you can decide what behavior you're available for, and what behavior you choose as well for yourself. Now underneath those columns, ask yourself, what pattern wants to choose for me here? The thing that's happening on autopilot?

And then also ask yourself, what am I choosing that keeps creating more of what I say that I don't want? And the last question is, what choice will I receive? I'm not asking you to solve your entire life today, that is not the goal. But I do want you to find the choice that's actually available to you today.

Those are different things. So as you've been tuning in, maybe in the middle of this, something came up for you that you absolutely did not choose. Maybe your marriage isn't working, and maybe your business isn't working. Maybe your stuck in a situation you don't like maybe one of your kids is hurting and it's really affecting you maybe someone has betrayed you and you are hurt so deeply and you're not past it maybe you're in the middle of grief and you've lost someone and you're still wondering why am i still feeling this way maybe someone that you love is sick and it's also affecting like it's affecting you deeply it could be that life just doesn't even look like what you thought that it would i'm not going to tell you that you chose it and that all of this is your fault and i'm also not going to tell you that you've manifested it but i will tell you this there is something here in your life that belongs to you your response your standards your boundary your next decision whether or not you ask for help whether or not you decide to look at your own patterns and do something about it you're not going to be able to do that something differently, or whether you choose what's always familiar to you and you end up back in the same spot.

Find the piece that belongs to you and then choose there. Your life is not only the sum of what has happened to you, it's also the sum of what you've chosen in response to what has happened to you. And to me, that's not heavy, it's hopeful. It means that your story isn't finished.

It means that after everything that you wouldn't have chosen, there's something available to you. You have the power in your hands. You can choose to heal. You can choose to stop explaining everything.

You can choose to try again and get back up on your feet. You can choose differently than you've chosen before. Sometimes the choice is freaking small and sometimes it's really big, but don't underestimate it because it's still a choice. Remember that every time you choose a different choice, it's still a choice.

It's still a choice. And you repeat it enough times, that's when it becomes a pattern. We want you to create patterns that serve you. New patterns start creating different identities.

And as you upgrade your identity, you can create a very, very different life for yourself. You may not get to choose every circumstance that has happened to you in your life. I know that I haven't. But you still get to choose who you become inside of it and who you become inside of it.

And that's when you respond to it. And sometimes one different choice is really where an entire, an entirely different life starts. And that's what I want for you. So choose your power.

Choosing gives you power. So take back the power in your own life where you feel like you have lost it. And with that, take care. I am going to sign off now.

I hope you liked this episode. If you did, make sure you like and comment. Subscribe. Do all the things so that you don't miss another episode.

And we will be back here next week. We will see you then. Bye. Okay, before you go, don't let this become another episode that you listened to, loved, and then did nothing with.

Take what came up for you today and bring it into the mirror. Bring it the decision that you're overthinking, the conversation you're avoiding, the pattern that you keep repeating, or simply say, here's what's happening. Help me see what I can't see. The mirror knows your patterns, your Enneagram, your human design, and it remembers the work you've already done.

So the reflection is personal to you. Find the mirror in the show notes or at amysanders. co forward slash mirror. And until next time, see it, shift it, and become magnetic.