Big Moves and Budgeting

Ep 10: I'm back! What a rollercoaster couple of weeks. Started my professional coaching program. Woo wee, it was quite a ride to get there, to pull the trigger on this big move, but I did it! I'll tell you how all that went down. Much of the rest of my time has been spent negotiating my budget, figuring out how I can lower my spending since -- aside from a catering gig, which I'm working with my daughter (weird), there's been no major developments in my job search.  Being the "cool" mom isn't all that cool.

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Welcome to Life-Changing with Dori Fern, a podcast about the messy middle between when you hit pause and what comes next. I'm your host Dori Fern.

Hello? Hello? Hello everyone. I've missed you. How is everyone doing?  So what's going on in my world. I just wanna start by saying I love summer in New York, so many free outdoor public parties and events, and so many fewer people on the streets.

So that's been lovely. But the big news for me is I did start my coach training though. It was touch and go up to the wire as to whether or not  I was going to commit to starting now or doing it later, but I'll, I'll get to that money-wise, job-wise, things are not much different. I do have a catering job up at the same cat skills in that I did the cooking trial at a month or so ago.

That'll put some money in my pocket. I also got my daughter, a job with her friend working that same event as servers, which is good, but I have mixed feelings about that. I'll get to that too. The anxiety about not having money comes in waves last week when I did the IPEC coach training, I was on a high, so that was great.

But this week has been harder. I'm trying to curb any unnecessary spending. So between that and the crazy heat, I've been spending way too much time alone with my air conditioning. So when I'm not applying for work, I'm spending a fair amount of time. They're probably not even enough looking at ways to lower my monthly expenditures.

It's interesting to look at what I assigned value to. I'm kind of like, this is untouchable and what is not. So for example, I've been really into meditating lately.  I feel goofy saying that I can't say I meditate every single day, so don't be jealous of my meditation practice, but it has gotten easier and I've grown to really look forward to it.

But then when I was looking at my subscriptions, my Headspace. Which is that's the app I use. Um, the Headspace subscription I have is coming due and it's not cheap. It's like, I don't know. It's about $65 a year. So I was like, all right, that has to go. I haven't done it yet, but it does seem like a lot of money right now.

And I'm thinking I could do without it, but I don't know, like, I guess there's other free options that I can look into for meditating. So I'll look into that, but.  I really do like the accountability of having the app. And I really, really love that guy. Andy, Andy, and his soothing British accent in calming words.

He's the guy on Headspace, by the way. He's a founder of, of Headspace and the voice of Headspace. So anyway, I love his soothing British accent and his common words that tell me just what I need to hear when I need to hear. And it's funny because I was just doing a quick check to confirm his nationality.

He is British and I got sucked into this Ted talk. He did about a decade ago about mindfulness and staying present. And now I actually feel calmer. So I don't know, maybe I don't wanna get rid of and Headspace. Another thing is the TV, cuz that's probably where most of my subscriptions are. I feel like for most of us, that's true.

And I am it the, the movie channels, I think I'm okay on that front, but it's Sling, which is that gives me access to network TV, and also like the food network, which you think, what do we need all that for? But I do often binge watch Beat Bobby Flay.  which I guess I could do without, but I also kind of hate to admit that I watch meet the press on Sundays.

I, I actually DVR meet the press and my whole Sunday routine is it's this whole thing I get up. I make coffee puts around a little bit. I video chat with my friend Rosie in Northern Ireland for, I don't know, half hour an hour or so then at 10 I do my zoom yoga class that's to like 1130 and then I will make lunch, brunch, whatever it is.

And I listen to meet the press. I watch it. I, I say I listen to it because actually I barely kind of pay attention to it, but I like having it on.   So anyway, this is all to say, do I need to spend. I think it's also $65, but that's a month headspace is a year. So I don't know. Do I really use it that much?

Maybe that's what I should get rid of.  okay. And then there's the phone stuff. I am spending a boatload of money on my Verizon mobile because I also pay for my son's phone. And before I went to Europe, I got a new phone.

So now I'm in this catch 22 T-Mobile is looking really good. If anybody has any opinions on any of this stuff, please do reach out and let me know, but they have an over 55 plan. So it's like, I guess it's like the a R P of phone plans. And it would be so much cheaper than Verizon. And I, I think their service is now pretty good, you know, on par with Verizon, which is why everybody likes Verizon because they own all the phone lines.

But anyway, I think it's. I don't know, 70 bucks, 60 or 70 bucks a month for both lines for unlimited everything. Whereas now I pay that per line. And then when Lev goes back to London for school for a senior year with T-Mobile, I can turn his phone off indefinitely and not get charged. So he doesn't have to lose his phone number, but.

I don't have to be paying monthly. And with Verizon, you only get 90 days. I don't know if it's like 90 days. I already use the 90 days. So I don't even know if I can do this. So, but the, the issue here is that I have over a thousand dollars to pay off this phone on Verizon and. So that's what's, that's what kind of the sticking point in doing this now, but I have to figure it out before he goes back next month to school.

So, anyway,  this, this reminds me of every conversation that I have with my parents.  I come from a people who spend a lot of time focusing on the trials and tribulations of transactional details. Which I guess is easier sometimes to focus on over the bigger things in life. 

Speaking of which I need to move off this topic because it's stressing me out. So coach. I did it. Yeah. Haha. I finished the first of three all-day program modules as they call them, loved it and not to get too much back into the detail weeds, but getting to the point where I actually signed up for this course.

Painstaking  I signed up the day before the class started, which obviously was the latest I could do that. And I just, I kept over and over in my head, kept thinking about the loan and that it would be a lot of money on top of my already big credit card bill. And I still don't have a line on regular work.

And did I wanna be in a position where I'm potentially owing that much money? Could I just. , you know, that was an obvious choice. I could start in November, which is when the next first module of the program would start. And that made sense. But then I reached out to Carmen, my brilliant coach. She's so good.

She did iPEC as I've mentioned. And that's the program that I did. I don't know. Did I say that anyway?  she's so good because she never said to me, you really should do this program. But what she did do was she validated my concerns about the money. And she presented a few questions for me to answer for myself.

And that led me to decide that I could do that, this thing, because what I realized as I was looking at it is.  this loan it's from my family member. I'm not naming them because it's their business, but they're not gonna send this loan to collections if I don't pay it off in the three years that we discussed.

So once I realize that, sure, it's a risk, but it's a fairly safe risk. I just also sat with the fact that I really wanna do this thing.  I wanna do this thing because it feels so right to me. I know that I wanna help people. And it's funny. I was speaking to, I met this woman the other day. I don't even know how it came up, but when I told her this, that I, maybe it was like, what do I wanna do?

I, I don't know. Or the coach, I don't remember what brought it up, but she asked me why, why do I wanna, why do I wanna help people? What do I get outta that? And I thought what a great question that is. And I don't think I really ever asked myself that question, but I realize that being part of the process of helping people live better, it just, it fills me with such a sense of joy and accomplishment.

It just feels right. And so when people talk about doing work, that doesn't feel like work. I suspect that feeling needs to be present. That feeling of this is the thing that I need to have in my life, you know? Sure. I could have chosen different ways to do that. I thought about it. Thought about going back to school to become a therapist, looked into that.

In fact, that was I, that's what I thought I wanted to do. When I went to college, I was a psych major at the beginning. I became a religious studies major because. Told myself that I would learn more about human behavior from religious studies. But anyway, I decided at that point, I'm not gonna become a therapist because I thought if I did that, I wasn't gonna deal with my own issues because that had been a pattern of my younger years.

I was the friend that everyone came to for advice on things.  things I had absolutely no knowledge or personal experience about . I, I have such a clear memory. I guess I was about 13. Um, I was sitting. Under my building. I, I grew up in co-op city, this big apartment complex, and we were just sitting under the building and my friend, Roberta, who I counseled often, she was always having some kind of guy drama.

And she asked me once after I gave her some pearls that she, you know, oohed and not over. How do you know all these things about something you really have absolutely no experience in, you know, at that point, I, I haven't, I don't even think I'd ever kissed a boy and I don't remember exactly what I said. I think I said something like, I don't know.

I just know. And of course I  didn't really know, but I felt that I could make someone feel better about their situation and it was empower. To me to be able to do that. So that stayed with me, but therapy, even now, when I looked into it, it's a lot of years, at least five years before I have an active practice.

And to be honest, I don't really think I wanna help people in that way necessarily, especially because to be able to do that kind of work after spending that kind of time and money, you know, it means I, I have to make choices about. What kind of practice I'm gonna have, how, you know, anyway, so I just, the thing I like about coaching in particular is that it's focused on future looking goals.

And in that way it's different than most therapy. It's not about mental health and, and going back, it's, what's similar though, at least in with this coaching program, is this idea that you're not telling people what to. You're leading people to their own conclusions about  how they can achieve their goals in their life.

So very much about moving forward, which, you know, I love , uh, yeah, your, your beliefs, your insecurities, they come into play, but the past is not the focus. And what I loved most about the training was learning how not to tell people what to do, because I think most of us helper types.  we just do that and, and it can be kind of frustrating, cuz it's frustrating to the Doller out of advice because people don't listen to you.

People need to come to these things on their own and it just felt really liberating in a funny way to be

and use these tactics to lead clients to their own answers. So of course I wasn't perfect at it. I didn't do it. Great all the time. Of course, but I did it well enough that I feel confident that this is the right thing for me to be doing. You know, I've only done ecstasy or Molly, a handful of times in my life, but at the end of this first part of the program, all of us did seem to be completely overtaken by.

Like that similar kind of love like frenzy, this, this, the kind that causes hyperbolic effusions about transformation and all sorts of stuff. So I've talked about this before, how hard it is to express personal growth and such. , you know, kind of sounding like a tool.  I go back to that conversation I had with Rosie.

I think I talked about it in my very first episode about the stereotypical cliched language that a lots of influencers and experts use to describe Life-Changing. And that she leaned into her laptop camera and whispered that despite being kind of repelled by it,  that she was afraid that they might be right.

And they are kind of right in a way, but just like, it's less effective to tell someone what they should do to change their life than leading them to the answers themselves.  there's this gap between saying something and knowing something and feeling something. And that's, that's what most of us who are in a transitional moment are trying to get to is what's on the other side of what you think is possible.

And to be honest, a lot of it, I think it's, it's a matter of poor communications. Overuse of adjectives. But enough pontificating on that. Oh, one other thing about the program is that I.

How much, how much I limit myself, like what I believe about myself, how I, I kind of don't really believe that I can have it all like that, that concept, which as I say it, I cringe just hearing this idea of, you know, being able to say that anything in my life could possibly be an 11 out of 10.  they would just mean that something else would have to get sacrificed or that it just was impossible.

It reminds me that when I grew up that my dad would always say, when I came home with a 99 on my test, I was a good student. He would say, why didn't you get a hundred? That was his way in his mind of encouraging me to be the best I could be. It was his way of telling me.  I know you're good, but you're not that good and you can be better.

And when I had a quasi reconciliation with him after not speaking with him for most of my adult life, I guess it was like three years ago or so he brought that up. How my mom, when they were married, how she used to get really angry with him for doing that and not giving me any positive reinforcement.

And I said to him, That was a huge thing that made me feel terrible about myself. It didn't work. And now that I'm a parent and I'm an adult, I can tell you that not only does that tactic not work, but that when you do something that your kids, it doesn't work for your kids that harms your kids in some way.

and they tell you so, or, or really if it's anyone that you have to hear that , and that it's not just your intentions that matter, but how they were received and that we all, as humans have a responsibility to take, uh, to, to, we, we have a responsibility to, for our actions, even when our intentions are good and he responded by telling.

He was not going to apologize to me when his intentions were good. That is what he heard. And I gotta tell you at that moment, I was just like, all right, I guess that's just what that is. And in a way, it was kind of liberating in the sense that I knew I wasn't going to ever expect anything from my dad ever again.

And.  if I was gonna have a relationship with him in this last phase of his life, that I was just gonna have to let go of any expectations that he was gonna change, that I was going to feel any other sort of way about him than I do. And then it was kind of freeing to accept that. But what I realize now that I'm thinking about it is that I have not yet liberated myself from that particular limiting belief.

That there's always another point that can be had on the test. And that what I do is never enough. So I've been sitting on that. I will continue sitting on. But I wanna go back to another thing that I experienced this week, such an odd week.  this catering event, the wedding. I mentioned that my daughter and I will be working upstate it's happening tomorrow.

I have to admit, I feel weird working a job with my kid. Just like, it feels very regressive or something. I don't know.  and also there's been this strange uptick in the past week, uh, in nighttime socializing. I've done with my kids present two different, two different friends had birthday parties.

One was my yoga teacher who is a good friend of mine. And my kids know, and my daughter was at the restaurant that her party was.  because her friend was bartending and the other was a DJ acquaintance friend who had a more posh Manhattan roof deck type party and Lev and his friends were there and it was the first time he and I had socialized together and it was good to have him there.

And it was good to have heard there at the party Amira, but I must say that I was a little surprised.  that I also kind of felt like. I don't really need to party with my kids.  there was a lot of talk with Lev and my friends about what a cool mom I am. I was just sitting there listening to it. It's just the kind of thing you hear when you're the mom who goes out dancing at 56 years old and likes house music and us other.

Kinds of things like that and that a lot of moms don't and I guess I'm also the cool mom, because I have cool friends and a diversity of cool friends of all different types. So I know that both my kids think this of me and at the same time, I don't know how much any of us really want that in our parent-children relationship.

And I know my daughter is definitely conflicted over it because she has told me.  She said I wasn't enough of a momish kind of mom. I don't remember the word she used, but you know, the mom who dotes endlessly on their kids and always has the wipes and the snacks when you want them. I don't, I don't know that the cool mom and the momish mom have to be mutually exclusive.

I, I was actually the mom who would make a tray of fried chicken at the school events because most other parents only bought tubs of hummus or ordered pizza. , but I wasn't some people's stereotype of a mom in that I wasn't the mom who focused all of her attention on her kids and not herself. I've always been.

And I do feel a little guilty saying this, but I've always been pretty clear about the time I need to do things for myself and not just for my kids. And then when I got divorced and had 50% time with my kids and without I used that time, pretty liberally.  

I do feel guilty about certain things that I did not do well as a mom, my temper, Ugh, so bad. And I have worked so hard to address and fix that at this point in my life. Unlike my father, I do take responsibility for how my actions affect people, even if I meant.  but I can't go back and I hope she can grow to like being around me as the person I am now.

I, I think it's starting to happen even if it's not partying with me and my friends. That's fine. Anyway, I, I really don't. I don't know why I went down that rabbit hole. Okay. Looking at my notes. And the very last thing I wrote is probably a good place to stop for this week. I wrote

I am living in a place of abundance, not scarcity. I need to work on that.  all right off. I go to look for work and meditate while I still have my head space subscription. 

This is Life-Changing with Dori Fern, and I. Dori for, if you enjoyed this episode, please tell a friend, rate it, write a few words to review it, especially on apple and Spotify and to the places where you can write those kinds of reviews. It really does mean a lot. It helps me grow my listenership. So until next time, thank you for listening.