This is the abridged (tidied up) transcript of Episode 78 on the Coffee and Contemplation podcast. If you’d prefer to listen to the audio podcast, you will find the 5 minute, 50 seconds sound-bites OR the full 45 minute, 38 seconds audio episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or follow these links to my YouTube Podcast:
Susan Dunlop: Welcome to Coffee and Contemplation with Susan Dunlop, where we love talking with guests about all things personal and professional development. I’m Susan Dunlop, your host. Today, I’m delighted to introduce our guest Brinn Langdale from North Carolina. Brinn is a licensed wholistic psychotherapist and workshop facilitator, and soon to be published author in 2025.
Brinn guides individuals through healing and self-improvement, offering practical tools and techniques for overcoming mental barriers. Her work spans a variety of areas, from managing the inner critic, to utilising techniques like EFT tapping, and inner child work.
I’ve been in an audience of a podcast where Brinn was the guest with Empower Survivors in the US. I found that given that Brinn’s talk was on such a vulnerable and personal topic, sharing her lived experience, she was relatable, open to questions, and conscious of the experience for those in her audience, and I really appreciated that.
In my due diligence for today’s episode, I found her website shared plenty of feedback. It’s bright and light, showing her empowering approach to delivering her workshops. and how she leaves participants with actionable insights to enhance their lives and leadership capabilities.
In this episode, we’ll explore how Brinn’s experience and tools can assist in transforming personal trauma into growth, practical methods for self-development, and how these insights apply to leadership and mental wellness.
Let’s dive into this conversation and uncover how you can leverage Brinn’s expertise to make impactful changes in your personal and professional life. Welcome Brinn.
Brinn Langdale: Hi, Susan. Thank you so much for that beautiful introduction.
Susan Dunlop: I love having guests and really digging around to see everything that I can find because I don’t think I’ve ever had someone on that I haven’t totally appreciated yet. You are a light in the work that you do. I know that from having listened to you.
Brinn Langdale: Aw, thank you so much. I am so grateful to be here and I’m so grateful that our paths continue to cross throughout our work and thank you for all the work that you do in the world.
Susan Dunlop: Oh, thank you too. I’ve been thinking, and the flow of our conversation is going to be a gently winding river, and we’re going to begin with turning trauma into growth. Then, we move on to practical tools for self-development. And we’re going to go into imposter syndrome and self-doubt, which I find interesting having been a leader myself of an organisation. Also, the inner critic regarding leadership and its impact on mental well-being on leadership. But I thought first that I mentioned you’ve got lived experience and what I’ve listened to you speak about in the past. Would you be open to sharing some backstory, at a high level, about the trauma you experienced and have done work to heal from? Because that might help us move into those other themes more clearly.
Brinn Langdale: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, because the work I do now definitely stems from what I experienced in childhood.
And so, I grew up in a very loving home, a middle-class white suburban family; we went to church on Sundays, hugged, gave kisses when you left and came in the door and had a very loving, supportive family. And I think, like a lot of people, I had some really negative adverse experiences there also.
So, there was physical, emotional, and even sexual abuse happening in my household. And unfortunately that is all too common for a lot of people. And we always think trauma looks one way, but that’s not true. Trauma impacts so many people in so many different demographics. And so just having that awareness, I think is really important when we do talk about trauma is that it can impact anybody.
I coped as well as I could throughout my teenage years, which was not very well. And it’s this poster child for trauma. I dealt with a lot of eating disorders and self-harm, a lot of substances, unhealthy relationships, you name it, really. And In college, it really just came to a head and my long-term boyfriend was like ‘I don’t want to deal with this anymore.’
And I say now he had the courage to tell me, ‘Hey, this isn’t going to work for me unless you make some changes.’ And then I had the courage to listen to him, it takes a lot to be able to be on both ends of those conversations. And, we really loved and respected each other. And so I took it to heart and I actually went through a leadership training.
So it wasn’t a trauma training. It wasn’t let’s go do a bunch of therapy training. It was an eight-day leadership training called Leading from the Center. The idea here is that you move through whatever the blocks are from you leading from your center. So I had lots of blocks, I had lots of things blocking me from leading from my center.
And it was about really looking at those different parts of ourselves, looking at the wounded inner child who had been hurt, looking at the angry teenager who was being ignored, looking at the judgmental inner critic who was beating me up all the time, and also this nurturing part that I had no idea even existed in me and really bringing that nurturing adult part of myself forward, because that’s the part we want to lead with.
That’s the part where we want to work from and lead our teams and go after the goals in our life. We don’t want our inner critic or inner child leading us. Try putting a kid in the driver’s seat, right? It probably doesn’t work out so well.
Susan Dunlop: We’ll cover that a lot more too, as we get into it, because I have questions about that, knowing that we all have an inner critic and an inner child.
I’d love to go into it from your perspective as a psychotherapist, just to talk a bit on that when we get to that section. Do you ditch them or do you keep them with you? How do they play a part in our lives? It’s an important thing we can cover today.
Wow, thank you for sharing that and it gave me goosebumps that your boyfriend then was that courageous and you were that courageous. And you gave yourself an eight day course in leadership. Not many survivors of what you experienced would have thought of that to be the first step. So again, also courageous to do that.
Brinn Langdale: Yeah, I unknowingly dove into the deep end. I didn’t quite know what was going on. But I said yes. It was actually a program that my older brother had done. And I had some family friends go through it, people that I looked up to were really encouraging me to do it. And that course changed my life. It entirely changed my life. I got a mentor at age 22, who is still my mentor today. And this is a program that I am now a part of the leadership team of, and it’s something that I’ve been volunteering with for a long time.
It’s an entirely volunteer-based organization in Sacramento, California. So yeah, this leadership training, it got me on my path to being a therapist and a coach and doing everything I do today.
Susan Dunlop: Wow, what a start. That blows me away that I didn’t know that part about you. So thank you for sharing that.
So I thought what we’ll do is we’re going to turn trauma into growth is our first theme of the day. What strategies or techniques have you found most effective in transforming personal trauma into a source of strength and growth?
Brinn Langdale: Yeah, first of all, when we talk about strength and skills we have, okay, we can talk about different techniques and we can talk specifics around that.
Also when we’re talking about leadership, I think just the resilience and the grit and the courage that does come from making the choice that you want to change things in your life. I think that is a great starting point because if somebody is just going through life and they never think, Oh, I want to better myself or I want to intentionally take this step, then it can be really challenging to give feedback and receive feedback if you don’t intentionally put yourself through that process. So whatever you choose to do, whatever those skills and techniques are, the very fact that you are learning them and the very fact that you’re choosing to go down that road to explore them, I think that’s a base level for growth.
Susan Dunlop: Those words, resilience, grit, and courage were inside you. You’re not looking for an external strategy or technique even just to begin with, you’re just going into that space.
Brinn Langdale: Yeah, and it’s not a conscious thing. I don’t think people are like, Oh, I’m going to go use my courage, right? Like we don’t think about that.
We make changes when we’re at our lowest point. We feel horrible about ourselves, and that’s when we decide to do something about it.
Susan Dunlop: It’s the acknowledgement of those gifts that are within you already.
Brinn Langdale: Yeah. So I think that’s really important.We are so much stronger than we think we are. We have so much more courage than we think we do.
Susan Dunlop: Given the context of what we’re talking about today, we’re going to keep bringing it back to leadership and workplace context. How could individuals use their own experience of overcoming challenges or trauma, even without having to speak about them out loud, but to turn that into better support for their teams and colleagues in their workforces?
Brinn Langdale: I think lived experience and pulling from your lived experience is one of the best things that you can do because that’s how you learn. We learn by going through things. So if you can think about your own life and the things that you’ve been through, everybody’s been through hard things. So using that as empathy, using that compassion with people, understanding things don’t always look how we think they look on the outside, right?
Like not judging books by their cover, not assuming that you know somebody’s story because you yourself probably have a story that people don’t know about in the workplace. And really being aware of, like, how can you have more awareness around your stuff so you can be aware about other people’s stuff?
Susan Dunlop: Yeah, that we’re all on this journey together and we’ve all got our own experiences that we bring to the table, don’t we? That we can draw from.
Brinn Langdale: And those skills, I know they used to be more referred to a soft skills, right? I don’t know if we’re saying that anymore, the idea of empathy, compassion, emotional awareness, emotional intelligence, these are so vital and this is what’s going to keep people staying, working with you.
If we don’t have empathy, compassion, or any sort of emotional intelligence, emotional awareness, then people aren’t going to want to be around you because you’re not going to feel like a safe person for them. And so the more you can work on those skills yourself, the better that’s going to play out for your work life too.
Susan Dunlop: I’ve been in the workforce for quite a few decades and gosh, it’s changed. It is more emotionally intelligent and people are more conscious of being able to be compassionate in the way they work with others or listen to others. And that’s what drew me to my work I do now is that I can see all the stuff that wasn’t there that I wished I had back in my early era, because I didn’t have that ability to look into my resilience, grit and courage.
I worked as a scared teenager, not knowing whether I would be good enough, not going to fit in all of that. And I carried that through probably into my twenties and thirties in the workplace. Gosh, it made it really hard to operate that way. As I moved into my own role of leadership and beyond that, out the other end, to understanding myself better, it gives me the feeling that it’s okay to practice the soft stuff, to be vulnerable, to have the conversations. That might have probably made me run and hide and never have come back in the old days!
So I’d love to hear about your practical tools. And maybe you could elaborate on some of the tools you use like the EFT tapping and inner child work. I haven’t had much to do with those. I probably did maybe 15, 20 years ago but I haven’t really had much to do with that myself recently.
Brinn Langdale: Yeah. I am all about tools and resources. Like I always say I don’t understand how people just get through life. I need so many tools in order for me to get through every day. So, one of the first and foremost tools that I’ve always used, always, even going back to childhood, is writing.
Whether that’s writing to do lists to keep myself organized so I don’t go crazy in my head or if it’s just writing to get to vent and get something out, writing to get perspective on a different situation, writing to understand my feelings because I don’t know what’s going on with me. So I’m going to write about it. And then by the end of it, I’ll have some clarity.
I think especially this day and age with so much technology, we don’t value pen to paper writing. And something can be said for opening a Word doc and busting out some pages, but taking the time to do that, I think, is so incredibly valuable, and it’s basic, it’s simple, and it can help illuminate so much that’s going on inside us that might not otherwise be illuminated.
And so hands down, journaling, to do lists, rant lists. I write letters to people that I never send because they don’t want to hear the thoughts that I have to say, but it allows me the space and the safety to do it. And so then I can go back and then I can have that conversation in a level-headed, mature, respectful way.
But having a safe place to allow myself to get everything out is a huge gift I give myself because otherwise, we’re bottling things up and telling and shaming ourselves ‘Oh, I shouldn’t think that about them. Or I should be nicer or things like that’. No, in the privacy of your own journal, say whatever you want to say.
And then. Bring your adult forward to go do something else.
Susan Dunlop: It makes you stop going in a spin cycle. Yes. Because the thoughts don’t go away, do they? If you keep on leaving them in your head rather than funnelling them out your hand with a pen onto paper. I feel that can make me not sleep. It can keep me in that worried zone that I’ve got something I need to still fix. You reminded me, I journaled for quite some time and it does, it always helps.
Brinn Langdale: Yeah. It always helps. And yeah, if you can’t sleep, turn on the light and start writing; write whatever is in your head. And that can be a great tool for sleep. I’ve done that so many times. And then once I’m done, I’m like, okay, turn off the light, go to bed. It’s totally fine. And then you mentioned. You mentioned a couple of things. You mentioned parts work and then you also mentioned EFT. So EFT emotional freedom techniques, it’s a technique that is similar to acupuncture.
So acupuncture is where you take needles, and you put them through different energy points throughout the body, and it helps release pent-up energy, release pent-up emotions, help with anxiety, depression, all sorts of issues: pain, like physical pain. And so EFT is very similar, but instead of using needles, you use your fingers to actually tap on specific parts of your body.
I will tap on my forehead, on my cheeks, on my chest, on my ribs. And then I go through that as I am verbally releasing I have so much anxiety right now. I am so stressed out right now. Oh my gosh. I have so much anxiety and I will physically release these emotions. And I swear by the end of it, it’s Okay, I’m good. Moving on, moving forward. No issue here. It is like magic.
Susan Dunlop: Wow. So do you know where to tap on to do that?
Brinn Langdale: Yes, there are specific points that you want to tap on. Anybody can do a quick Google search and find this out. I have a really good friend and tapping mentor and she runs the Emotional Freedom Technique Academy and she has tonnes of free YouTube videos, tonnes!. It’s called Tapping with Steph. She has an app you can use. And so that’s who I’ve studied under for years. I do lots of work with her and I highly recommend checking it out because you can gain a lot of relief in all different areas by doing some tapping.
Susan Dunlop: Okay. And you referred to parts work in reference to me saying inner child work. So it’s now called parts work or has it always been called that?
Brinn Langdale: Yeah. So parts work is an umbrella term for any sort of coaching or therapy where you take these different parts of yourself and think of them as their own personalities.
So your inner child, think of this actual like little kid personality that is within you, or this inner critic. This inner critic has their own personality that is within you. This adult has its own personality within you. I specialize in parts work and this is what I learned when I went through that eight-day training 15 years ago.
It is my bread and butter. It is my number one healing technique, the thing that I absolutely love talking about and I love sharing with others. That is because when you look through your life, through the lens of parts work, everything makes sense. Everything makes sense. So say you have a goal of going to the gym but you find yourself sitting on the couch. You might be like, why am I so lazy? Why aren’t I motivated enough? What’s wrong with me? You probably have this part of yourself that doesn’t want to go and that’s okay. But now let’s explore why.
Is it because they’re scared? Are they embarrassed? Do they not know how to use the equipment at the gym? Are they afraid something bad is going to happen? What happened last time they got in shape? There’s all of these very logical things that are going on for that part. If we look at it only through your adult lens of, Oh, I want to get in shape and I want to be healthy then maybe, sure, it doesn’t make sense, but if we start looking at why this other part doesn’t want to go to the gym, it starts to make absolute perfect sense.
Susan Dunlop: I’ve known other authors or doctors of Ayurveda who have talked about inner child work and created frameworks even to use as tools to work through that. But I think a lot of us would not really think of doing inner child work outside of those who have had trauma. So people who don’t feel they’ve had trauma, will go, Oh, that’s just something people who’ve had trauma do. So it’s something that we can all do. Is that what you’re saying?
Brinn Langdale: 100%.
Susan Dunlop: Wow. 100%. Very cool.
Brinn Langdale: First of all, I think that everybody has a type of trauma. And second of all, you can use this even if you don’t think that you have trauma. I think that we all have different parts of ourselves and we hear them in our own head and we just think, Oh, these are competing voices.
But usually when we feel stuck, unmotivated, or something is holding us back, it’s because of these other parts. So, exploring those other parts, what they want, what their goals are, and how they feel all of that starts to come to light. It’s what’s actually going on in your own internal landscape.
And so when you really look at it, all the things you do, the way you feel, the way you think, your actions, your behaviors make absolute perfect sense when we just slow down and take the time to look at why.
Susan Dunlop: The relevance of this conversation right now is I keep talking about the fact we are post COVID times. So when we talk about, yes, everyone’s had trauma, there were many micro or macro traumas that people went through during that time of being told your business was closed down, that you couldn’t go to work, that you couldn’t be within one and a half meters of someone going to the supermarket.
It became stressful. It was like, make sure you’re navigating the aisle so you weren’t near someone. And I think we can downplay the effect of that. And I think some people will still be needing to work through some of that because I can see a lot of people experience anxiety and have gone into pretty much an isolated life that they are living in their house and not wanting to go out or be near other people still.
Brinn Langdale: Yeah. And we could explore, okay, what’s that fear part of you? And usually when there’s fear, there’s a scared little kid, right? That’s when we get more specific. Okay, in inner child work, how do children usually feel? Children are scared. Children can be really sad. They’re rebellious, they’re angry. And not to say that like your adult self can’t be those things either, but usually when we feel really strongly about a situation, that might not warrant the situation, right? If we wait a second, and think my reaction is way bigger than the situation calls for that’s when our inner child is being triggered.
There’s always a risk. Being a human is being a risk, is taking a risk. So we have these different parts of ourselves trying to protect us for our own survival. And that’s also where the inner critic comes in. So your inner child is trying to protect you from being hurt.
Then your inner critic is really trying to protect you and help you survive. And so, let me unpack that for a second because you spoke about imposter syndrome. Do we have a green light to go there? Do we want to finish what we’re talking about?
Susan Dunlop: I think we’re probably going to go there now anyway.
I was just looking at what else I was thinking to ask you, but I feel like we’ve covered that whole aspect there of the inner child. And then I was going to talk about inner critic and leadership and the imposter syndrome. You tell me what you want to talk about there, straight up.
Brinn Langdale: I believe that like most things that go on in ourselves, the imposter syndrome is a combination of our inner critic and our inner child. And what happens is the inner critic part says, who do you think you are? You think that you’re qualified for this job? You think you’re qualified to manage these people? Really? What is this? This is ridiculous. You’re just a kid, right? Or you’re just a punk kid. Or you’re, whatever it is. So this critic part is actually trying to protect you from looking like a fool. It doesn’t want you to go out and fall on your face. It doesn’t want you to go out and be humiliated.
And so it’s trying to protect you by getting you to not put yourself out there in the first place. But that’s not the only thing that’s going on because you have this critic who is saying you aren’t qualified for this. It’s directly talking to your inner child. So then it sounds like in your head: I’m not qualified for this. I’m not good enough. I can’t do this. Why am I even trying? So then it turns into I, I’m not good enough. I shouldn’t be doing this. Why am I even here? Because it’s a conversation between the two, the critic saying you are not qualified for this and the child is saying, I’m not qualified for that.
So it’s two parts happening. And what that means is the adult is nowhere to be found.
Susan Dunlop: No, how interesting. I know the inner critic and those types of words very well, but I hadn’t connected it to be in conversation with my inner child at the time. I hadn’t seen that as being the inner child. I felt it was trying to be brave adult me, receiving that badgering by the inner critic.
Brinn Langdale: Yeah. Because if we listen to one of them and ignore the other one, they will get louder. The little kid’s Hey mom, hey mom, hey mom. I’m not a parent, but I’ve seen it.
Susan Dunlop: I feel it. I feel that in my bones that one.
Brinn Langdale: Yeah, they’re going to get louder instead of trying to just push this kid away. Ignore it. Pretend it’s not there. We need this adult to come in and say, Hey, I got you. It’s not your job to go to work. It’s not your job to manage these people. It’s my job. I am fully qualified because I got this position in the first place. Thank you, critic. I’m good. I have experience with this. And if I’m new at this, I get to learn and I get to ask people for help.
And that will make me a good leader because if I lead only from my critic, my critic doesn’t want me to ask for help. My critic wants me to do it all on my own and not delegate to anybody else because we can’t trust anyone else to do the work. And the critic is going to have you isolated and alone working overtime by yourself on holidays.
But your adult is the one that can see, Hey, I need to ask someone for some advice on this. Or, hey, let’s do a group call where we can get everybody’s input on this because I want to collaborate. Or, hey, you know what? This is the second night in a row that I’ve worked overtime. Tomorrow, I’m making sure to leave at the appropriate time because of my mental health and because my family is important to me too.
So having the bigger picture in mind for how you want to live your life is really the adult’s job. They’re the mature decision maker. Whereas the critic is going to have your nose to the grindstone 24 seven. Is that the actual way that you want to live your life? Maybe for a little bit. Maybe if you’re really working on a project and you have a deadline, that is a really great part of you to have. But on just a regular Tuesday afternoon, that’s probably not the one we want driving the bus.
Susan Dunlop: No, it makes it so relevant then to the workplace, to leadership, and you’ve got me thinking in terms of that inner critic. Sometimes I think the words inner critic, we change them around. I know people call them all sorts of different terms. To me, I have pictured that part as being some sort of uptight secretary with legs crossed, taking shorthand, making sure she’s not missing anything so she could remind me everything I might have missed.
But I remember speaking to someone once and she said, you know what, be careful not to separate that inner critic as if it’s some other being, some other entity. It is a part of you. And to try and turn it around and say, what’s her skill set? What’s she got? What’s she doing for me? Because she’s doing something for me.
She’s not doing stuff always against me. But she is doing something for me. And it made me really stop and appreciate her a lot more in me. I think, okay, she’s really just wanting me not to fail. She wants good for me. And she doesn’t want me to get hurt. I found that was a really lovely exercise just to bring her in a little bit closer and say, Hey, you’ve got a job and I respect that you have a job.
Do you see it that way or do you see it as something to work against or with?
Brinn Langdale: I want a hundred percent to see it that way. All of these parts have their own parts to them, right? We have the critic part that can be I am super mean and judgmental, but I have found that the more I let my critic talk to me, the more I let it a part of my life, the more I bring it in close, like you said, My critic has turned into a helpful cheerleader and a coach and like somebody that can rally me when I need to rally or remind me that I can do X, Y, and Z.
And it also is there with a cautious eye and making sure everything’s copacetic and making me have discernment of what my choices are and how I want to spend my time. And the same thing goes with the inner child. The inner child is not just some whiny little kid either. The inner child is this beautiful, creative, curious, in awe, in wonder. We need these parts of ourselves to also exist. The more we can listen to the inner child and hear them and let them know that they’re okay and that they’re valid and that their feelings are valid, then we will get the other side of that child.
We will let that curiosity come out and let their creativity come out. It’s all about feeling safe. That’s really what it comes down to. Does your inner child feel safe? Great. They’re going to feel good. They’re going to be the dancing little kid in the middle of the living room. Dance like no one’s watching.
And then, the same goes for the critic. If the critic feels safe, the critic’s going to let you do whatever you want to do, and they’re going to sit back and watch and make sure everything’s okay, but the way you gain safety is by strengthening that adult, because the kid is not going to feel safe if there’s no adult, right?
And the critic is not going to feel safe if there’s no adult, because they feel like it’s all on them. The critic is usually exhausted, feeling like, if it wasn’t for me, this ship would be sinking. And so we need the adult to come in to say, Hey, I got this. I am the adult. I have the bigger picture for how I want to live my life.
And thank you for the hard work that you do, Critic. Kid, thank you so much for talking to me and letting me know how you feel. I am here for both of you and let’s do this together.
Susan Dunlop: And it’s funny, those words that you said, the inner child’s qualities and gifts and all of that, you can see how when there’s been a lack of safety, through trauma or of any type, that the trust falls away.
But then I’ve seen it come back out again when people have done the processing and done the healing or recovery work. And those words are now being spoken, the curiosity, that awe, being interested in the wonder around us. It’s such a lovely thing to give back to yourself if you’ve been able to do that. After having kept that hidden because you haven’t known how to process it. That work that you’re doing will be so valuable across leadership teams and into learning and development to fit that in.
We are weaving our way through all of this. And so whether you’re leading or being led, where do you start if ‘I feel like an imposter’, are the words that greet you internally when you wake up, it’s not kind to yourself. What can you do to move beyond that? Because a lot of people would be in that space. I think I can energetically feel it in some people.
Brinn Langdale: Yeah. Yeah. And unfortunately I feel like that is the world that we live in sometimes.
And I think there are a lot of factors. I think, especially parents of young kids, like there’s so much stress and because there’s not a lot of free time or caretaking time or self-care time or, things like that or finances, stressful, jobs, stressful, there are so many factors.
So the first thing that comes to mind is, I want to share with you some wisdom I learned, because I think it’s really important to keep giving yourself that time and space to take care of yourself.
The number one way that I say is the best way to strengthen this adult self is to start caring for yourself, because a lot of times, our critic or our child are the one driving the bus, because that safety isn’t there. That care isn’t there. And so whether it’s doing five minutes of quiet time to yourself or doing that journaling to yourself, or having the courage to ask somebody for help and going and having a 50 minute session with a therapist once a week, these things matter.
And they do add up, even if it doesn’t feel like it. It’s hard to care about yourself when you don’t feel good about yourself, but that is such an important place to start. And then second is take inventory of those thoughts, write down what you are actually saying to yourself.
Because if you can look at it in black and white, on paper, what you’re actually saying to yourself, I have people, they start crying if they just look at that. They cannot believe how mean they are to themselves. And they would never say that to somebody else. But they are saying that to themselves subconsciously. Like people do not realize it, I didn’t realize how much my inner critic beat me up all the time constantly and I was a good achieving person, like good at sports and good at school and things like that and my critic was beating me up all the time and of course you’re going to feel bad if you have this part of you that is just constantly telling you how terrible you are.
So take inventory, see if you can care for yourself, and take inventory. Notice what you are saying to yourself, start to catch it, and shift it. Then, look at the reality of the situation. I say that all the time. What is the reality of the situation? Is it a reality that you’re an idiot? Is it, but like truly 100 percent is this a 100 percent fact? I don’t think anybody can say they’re 100 percent fact an idiot, right? No, we all have gifts. We all have achievements. We’ve all done things in our lives that prove that’s not true 100 percent of the time. Sure, maybe you made a mistake. Okay. You made a mistake. But is it 24 seven? Probably not.
Susan Dunlop: Yeah. It’s just bringing it back out and taking that break, even by putting it out in writing, you’re giving yourself that pause to look at it from a different perspective, to come out and helicopter over it a little.
You made me think too, there’s a Jacqueline Brooker who I’ve been working with. She runs masterclasses on public speaking here in Australia, and she talked to quite a large audience as part of this program I was in recently. She said we all have the dialogue going on, there’s so many of these thoughts that can be flooding you and you may tune into one, but in between that, there’s a whole bunch of other little ones, going on.
What she recommended we do was get a sheet of paper out of a notebook and draw a line down the middle and just dump every mean thought that is coming to you about yourself right now. Someone doesn’t love me, or I’m really bad with money, I can’t speak, I can’t do, I can’t, I’m not, I am, I’m all these things.
And then she said, opposite on the other side of the line, write the opposite to that. And then fold the page down the middle and keep that page of the positive words in sight. And I remember we did it as part of that program and I had it sitting here and some of them can actually make you feel a bit teary because you’re thinking, it’s okay. Ah, so it’s probably the little me going, it’s okay. I am okay with doing this. It’s about writing, isn’t it? It comes back to journaling a lot or to writing the words; as they say, your mind connects to your heart through your hand. Quite an interesting message coming out of what you’ve been sharing. I think it’s important that we need to go back to that. Because otherwise we’re scrolling.
Brinn Langdale: Yes. It’s not great.
Susan Dunlop: Yes. Imagine journaling for 10 minutes versus scrolling for 10 minutes.
Brinn Langdale: Yes. And if you start to get curious about what your different parts of self think about scrolling, you’ll probably have some pretty good clarity about what’s going on for you.
Susan Dunlop: That’d be good. Are you going to do a workshop on that?
Brinn Langdale: That’s a good idea. Yeah.
Susan Dunlop: I think you need to put that up somewhere, because that would be really helpful for a lot of people right now. Any advice you have for leaders struggling with self-doubt or imposter syndrome beyond that, the journaling idea? If someone’s unsure about coming to see you with these types of struggles, what guidance would you give them to make that informed decision and to make that call. Because I think a lot of us go, I will get help. No, I won’t.
Brinn Langdale: My eloquent advice is just do it.
Susan Dunlop: The Nike method. I love that.
Brinn Langdale: Yeah. It’s important to be able to get curious about yourself, to want to know about yourself. And if you want to lead people, you have to know them. And if you want to know them, you’ve got to know you. And there’s no better way of getting to know you than having somebody reflect back what you’re saying, what you’re doing, what your actions are.
And a lot of times the best leaders out there right now have coaches. Hands down. And they have for the last decade at least, but talk to anybody. They will have a mentor. They will have a coach. They will have a therapist. They will have somebody that they talk to that is in a different perspective than they are and that’s the important part. So whether it’s this work or other work it doesn’t matter but getting that perspective from somebody else is so vital to your own growth and success
Susan Dunlop: Oh for sure, and you can hear yourself when you start to speak to a mentor or a coach You actually start to listen to yourself saying the words and knowing that they’re not going to judge you and I think that’s where your mind opens up to different possibilities and you can see things from that different point of view about yourself and how you were thinking and how you can shift that thinking.
Brinn Langdale: Yeah, 100%. And I think your mentioning the nonjudgment piece is so important because we’re humans; we’re so terrified of how people think of us. And that’s a very evolutionary thing. Like we would not survive if we got kicked out of the clan back in the day. Okay. And it’s very evolutionarily structured that we care about what other people think. But if it’s holding you back in your life, then that’s not worth it.
Susan Dunlop: No. Hey, we’re going to move on to our final little segment or our final theme. It’s on leadership and mental wellness. Do you have any advice for a listener if they’re seeing their leader is struggling in any way?
Brinn Langdale: I would just be vulnerable and have a conversation even if it’s hard.
One of the most powerful things you can do is to get comfortable being uncomfortable. And so if you are stepping on eggshells or you’re not quite sure you’re hesitating, those are signs of uncomfortability. And so being comfortable, being uncomfortable will allow you to really open up and allow other people to see you and then in return, you’re able to see them. And so if you’re seeing something, commenting something like, Oh, I’m noticing this, I’m noticing that and then getting curious about what’s going on. It’s not blaming, it’s not judging, it’s just saying, hey, I’m noticing this and I’m curious about that.
Susan Dunlop: That’s perfect. That’s what I was going to ask you. If there’s even just a simple two-line script leading into it, I think people would appreciate that because it’s such a risky thing for people to step into someone else’s personal space and address it for fear of saying the wrong thing and making something worse.
So thank you for that. That will be helpful to people.
Brinn Langdale: Yeah. Good. I’m glad.
Susan Dunlop: Hey, we’re going to wrap up. So that has been a lovely conversation and it’s a bit like a winding river. And I think we covered everything that we thought about beforehand that we would like to cover.
Is there anything else you would like to share?
Brinn Langdale: Yeah, I just really want to say thank you for this opportunity and thank you for your dedication to this work. And so much of our lives is spent working and in relationship with other people, right? With our coworkers, with managers, with, clients, all sorts of people, and so having these skills is vital to the work that we do in the world.
Susan Dunlop: Is there anything that you’ve got coming up that would resonate with people? I think you mentioned that you’ve got a YouTube channel and you’re doing something to do with parts work. Was that a program?
Brinn Langdale: Yeah, absolutely.
So everything is under my name: Brinn Langdale. You can find that on YouTube, on Instagram, also my website, brinnlangdale.com. And I have a blog and a newsletter. I’m doing four free workshops over the next four months. I will be doing parts work workshops. And so they’re all going to be different. And the idea is just to get parts work education out there as much as possible because if you can’t tell I’m a little passionate about it.
And I would just love to have as many people exposed to it as possible. And you can definitely get more information on that from my website and social media. And then the YouTube channel has different videos all relating to parts work as well.
Susan Dunlop: Okay. All right. Thank you so much Brinn for sharing your insights and practical advice and your perspective on transforming trauma and managing the inner critic.
You gave me new information and I really appreciate that for myself today. I was feeling it from the inside as I was listening to you. Just contemplating how to enhance leadership through mental wellness is such an incredibly valuable gift that you’re bringing to the world too.
So thank you for doing the work that you do. And I know you do work in other realms in relation to the healing from trauma based on your lived experience. I honour you for the fact that you have chosen to commit your life to do the work that you’re doing. So thank you for that.
Brinn Langdale: Thank you, Susan. I really appreciate that.
Susan Dunlop: Listeners, was there any key takeaway you jotted down? Maybe it was to get yourself a journal or pull the journal back out and start to drop some of these thoughts down onto paper and see how they resonate with you. If there’s anything that I can help you with, please send me an email to [email protected].
You can also message me on LinkedIn. Thank you for being here with us. Trust that you are blessed even when you forget that you are blessed. Take care of yourself and I look forward to being back soon. Bye for now.