When Everything Is NOT Fine

You know that meme. The dog sitting in a room that's completely on fire, saying "this is fine."

What do you do when that's actually your life?

In this video, I want to talk about the thing most of us do when something hard is sitting right in the middle of our path. We avoid it. We walk around it. We wait for it to move on its own.

But here's what I've learned. The obstacle is the way.

The conversation you've been dreading for months, maybe even years. The boundary you're scared to set. The thing you keep skipping because it's uncomfortable. That's usually the exact thing you need to do to grow.

I'll share the story of a hike that did not go as planned, the conversation with my sister I put off for 20 years, and the difference between having a hard conversation for personal gain versus relationship gain.

Because most of the time, the thing you're avoiding isn't the end of you. It's the start of the strength you didn't know you had.

So today, ask yourself: what's the hard thing you keep walking around?

Then go do it.

I'm Dr. Kimberly Beam Holmes. After a decade transforming marriages at Marriage Helper, I've realized that the greatest tragedy isn't a failed relationship; it's the person who stays stuck and never experiences the fullness of all God intended.

The Way You Show Up is for the high-achiever who is tired of "fine."

We're dismantling the average life to build an exceptional one—using the science of the PIES: Physical, Intellectual, Emotional, and Spiritual health.

If you want to save your marriage, go to Marriage Helper. If you want to master yourself and lead your legacy, stay here.

New episodes every Tuesday.

Don't just exist. Show up.

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Transcript

When Everything Is On Fire

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You know that meme of the dog sitting in the room and everything on is on fire and it says everything is fine. What do you do when that's what's going on in your life? When you're sitting there and everything around you is on fire and everything is clearly not fine. In this video today, I'm going to share with you what you need to do when that happens. My name is Dr. Kimbrelli Beam Holmes. I have my PhD in psychology. I run a company called Marriage Helper. And what I love to do is help people show up in better ways in their life to have more confidence, more self-esteem, and know what to do when life is kind of crappy. So last week, one of my friends called me and she said, Hey, let's get together. Let's let's find a time to do something. She wanted to find coffee or go to coffee, but I love to hike. And I said, What if we went for a hike? She said, Kimberly, that's great, but I have a phobia of snakes. So let's go somewhere, instead of hiking, find somewhere paved that we can go to. And I said, you know what? I know this place. There is a small little slice that we have to go through that's that's kind of more hiking like, but it's it's open. It's not crazy, it's not super overgrown, but everything else is paved. So why don't we go there? She said, Great, sounds good. I said, I've never once seen a snake. We'll be fine. We, in fact, were not fine. We were hiking up this hill, going back to our cars. And as we were walking along the path, you would never believe it. Never once have I seen a snake. Never freaking once on this trail. But as we get right here, my friend stops, she looks back at me, and she says, Oh my gosh, there's a snake. I said, You've got to be kidding me. I have

A Hike That Finds A Snake

SPEAKER_00 1:49

never seen a snake here. And sure enough, there was a snake right in the middle of the path. Y'all. As I stood here thinking, what in the world are we gonna do? My friend stood behind me and she said, Is there any other way that we can get back to our cars? Our cars are right over there. Everything is paved right over that hill. I said, There's no other way. There's no other way we can get there. We have to go through this trail. Sometimes, as Ryan Holiday, he's an author, he has a book. As he would say, sometimes the obstacle is the way. So, what did we start doing? Well, actually, my friend, she ended up picking up sticks and rocks, and she started throwing them at the snake. And just like that, we could never hit it. So I joined her picking up rocks, picking up things, throwing it, doing everything we could to try and get this snake to move. It kept not moving. We kept talking. At this point, we were laughing. She realized, man, I have more strength than I thought I did. The fact that I'm not hyperventilated, laid out on the floor, calling my husband for him to bring an ambulance to come and pick me up is huge growth in me. Eventually, I think the snake got just sick and tired of us being girls. And it slithered away. But the bottom line is the obstacle was the way. We had to go through what was my friend's fear of snakes. We couldn't go around it. We had to wait for the snake to move. We had to take action. We had to do something to get the snake to move in order for us to go back to where we needed to come from. In order for us to get where we needed to go, we had to do the thing that we didn't want to do. And I think that is so true in so many of our lives. So, what does that mean for you? And I keep thinking of how many times in my life the thing that I have been most scared to do or dreading to do the most has actually been the thing I needed to do for my own growth. I think of this on a very uh more inconsequential level of my life. So physically, I think about this in working out. And I've had trainers, people running classes that I would go to for exercises and things like that before they would say the thing you're avoiding doing, the burpees that you hate doing that you try and skip over in the workout, or the squats or the cardio going for a run. If you're avoiding doing it and you dread doing it, that's probably a sign that it's actually what you need to do the most. And that's so true. For so many years, I skipped doing cardio or running because I didn't think it was that important. And also I skipped it because it was hard for me and not quite enjoyable. And it wasn't until I leaned into that that I began really growing and taking my fitness to the next level. Now, again, that's a more inconsequential way to look at it when you think of every different part of life. I like to think of life in four different ways: physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. And really thinking about intellectually, what are the things that I might be avoiding doing because they're hard or because I'm dreading it. But that's actually the thing I need to do. And I think about that a lot

The Obstacle Becomes The Path

SPEAKER_00 5:16

with social media now, with Instagram, how it's so much easier to just scroll and consume mindless content. But the thing that would actually help me grow is to get off social media completely and read, read more books, learn more, do things that engage my mind in different ways. Or emotionally, and I think this is the hardest one for most people because emotionally, there's a lot of things that we avoid doing because it hurts on the innermost level. It hurts in a way that doing burpees doesn't hurt. Burpees makes us tired, we hate doing them, but they're over after 10 or 20 or after a minute or whatever it might be. Running, it's over after an extended or a certain point. But emotionally, when there's someone in your life that you have to have a difficult conversation with, I don't know about you, but I can tend to avoid that conversation for weeks, months, sometimes even years. There was a really hard conversation that I had to have with my sister a couple of years ago that I had put off for 20 years.

Four Areas Where Avoidance Hides

SPEAKER_00 6:26

Twenty years. And it was for 20 years, I I dreaded it. I worried about it. I would, I would try and repress it and think, oh, we're gonna be fine. But y'all, after I actually shared with her the truth about a lot of things that were very hard and heavy for me to share with her, it unlocked a new level of relationship between us, of intimacy between sisters, between us. And I finally felt like I could be free with her. But I avoided that conversation for literally 20 years. Now that one ended up well, but the reason that we don't, I mean, the reason I didn't have that conversation with my sister, if I'm gonna be 100% honest with you, is because I thought she was never gonna talk to me again. I thought I was gonna lose my sister at the end of that time. Maybe you have felt this way too, and there's people in your life that you're saying, if I was actually honest with them and shared the way I felt and the things that I've been harboring and maybe the resentment that's been building up within me, it would be the end of our relationship.

The Conversation Delayed For Decades

SPEAKER_00 7:29

And you just know it within you. Well, what do you do in those circumstances? Do you just keep avoiding the hard conversation or do you lean in and find a way to have the conversation going through the mess and the muck? There's a guy out there, maybe maybe you've heard of him, maybe you haven't. His name is Alex Hormozy. He's really big in the business space. And one of the things I heard him say recently, now he's like maybe a billionaire. I don't know. But a lot of people listen to him because he is very smart, but also he has a lot of money. And people just tend to listen to other people who have a lot of money. I just like my own little soapbox to the side is I don't always know that that's the best metric to follow when deciding whether someone's wisdom is something you should listen to. But I do think that Alex Ramosi, specifically as a human, is has really good advice the majority of the time. I was listening to him talk about when he first started his company and how there was a guy, he was so he was in his young 20s, and there was one guy who was way older than him that was wanting to partner with him. And he was in his 50s, he had hundreds of millions of dollars, he had access to the customers that Alex needed access to in order for his business to grow. But Alex just knew within that he didn't want to be in business with this guy. And so he said the his quote was the day I became a man in business was the day I sat down with that, with that guy and told him, I don't want to be in business with you. Because he said there was a moment I realized either I'm going to end up splitting my company with this guy for the rest of my life because I was unwilling to have a hard conversation,

A Business Lesson On Hard Talks

SPEAKER_00 9:15

or I just need to have the hard conversation in order for me to feel positive, for me to feel good, for me to feel free in moving forward. So, how do we take that principle and then bring it back to really hard conversations? Maybe there's something that's happened with your mom or your dad or your husband or your wife or your best friend that you just know if you were to have that conversation, it's not gonna go well. How can you set yourself up to have that conversation in the best way possible? So, what do you do when you need to have this hard conversation, but you just don't know if it's gonna go well? The first thing that I would encourage you to do is get to the bottom of what is it that you need to communicate. In the example with Alex Hormosy, he needed to communicate, hey, I'm I've decided that I'm not gonna go into business with you. Great. Now that you understand the key message of what you need to communicate, that's what you can use to build and develop the rest of the conversation. And honestly, sometimes, especially in a scenario like that, the less you say, the better. Not because of legal issues or things like that, but because there's not really more explanation than you may necessarily need to give. But depending on the relationship, because that was a very business relationship, it wasn't the same as someone who's your best friend or your sister or your parent or your brother or someone that you've had a relationship with that deserves and warrants deeper conversation. So when I was approaching that situation with my sister, what was the number one goal of what I wanted to share with her? Honestly, there were just several things that had happened over the years that I hadn't told her the full truth about, that I hadn't told her my feelings about it. I hadn't, and I had really harbored that inside that had led to a lot of resentment, but also a big wall between me and my sister. So my end goal

Define The Message Before You Speak

SPEAKER_00 11:18

was I wanted the wall to come down. I didn't want there to be anything between my sister and I anymore. And the thing was, I was taking on the risk by doing this. And I had to ultimately get to a point where the pain of the current relationship with my sister was high enough. And it's not, and we didn't have a terrible relationship by any means. I just wanted it to be better. I wanted it to be more so much that I was willing to endure the possible pain of this conversation in order for there to be a weight lifted off of my shoulders. Again, not because I was just looking to lessen my own anxiety, but because there was a wall between the two of us. And I think that's a key here. Sometimes we want to approach conversations and have hard conversations with people in our lives because we just want to feel better. We just want to feel better. But it's not actually gonna help make the relationship better. So the way I think about it is this there is personal gain from different conversations you have, and there is relationship gain from different types of conversations that you have. The conversation with my sister, my main goal was a relationship gain, realizing that the bigger the reward, a lot of times it endures the larger amount of risk. That's true in investing and different things like that. But it's also true in these kinds of conversations that you might have with a loved one. You may have to share about a lie that you told or and come clean about it, or you may have to share about something that they did that really hurt you that you've never told them about. But thinking about it in the terms of am I doing this because of my own personal gain, because I just want to feel better. And if that is your main goal, then it doesn't mean that you shouldn't say it or shouldn't have that conversation. But if the personal gain is your only goal, then the next thing I want you to think about is how is it ultimately going to affect them? Because sometimes you may share things and you think, well, I am gonna get, I'm gonna feel a lot better, I'm gonna have less anxiety if I share this with this person, but maybe they don't have the capacity to handle what you're going to share with them. For example, and this is a little bit of a sillier example, but when a wife asks her husband, if I ask Rob and I put a new dress on and I say, How does this make me look? He may not, I mean, Rob probably would be totally honest, but he may not be totally honest. Actually, this did happen a couple years ago. I got my hair cut. I got it cut up to like here. I got home and I said, What do you think of my hair? And he said, Oh, I like it. It looks so good. And so I believed him. Years later, uh, like this year, I was talking about my hair and I said, Man, I really like my hair long. I can't believe I ever cut it so short. And he said, Oh, I know I couldn't stand it when it was that short. Oh, you told me you liked it. But in the moment, the personal gain, like what was he, how was that gonna affect me? It was cut. There was nothing I could do. What good was it gonna do for him to honestly tell me in that moment, I absolutely hate your hair. And I think it makes your face look chubby. Like he was never gonna say anything like that because how was it ultimately gonna end up affecting me? There was no good. There was no good to come from it. And so instead, he just said, you know what? I think it's fine because the personal gain for him to be able to just be completely honest about what he thought was not worth how it was gonna hurt me. Now, there's gonna be some people out there who say, well, you should always be 100% honest. I agree, honesty is the best policy. You should not lie.

Honesty Versus Unnecessary Hurt

SPEAKER_00 15:07

But I would argue that my husband was not lying to me. He was putting my greater good above his personal gain. And that's the difference. Now, I don't think that means that we should be people pleasers and we should just sugarcoat everything in order for other people to always be happy with us. That's not what I'm saying here. But I'm saying think about how you say things, how what you say is gonna come across to someone else. And if your main goal is for you to just say whatever you want to say and be able to have no filter, to have, you know, to lessen your own anxiety, then maybe you shouldn't say it. Or maybe you should just think of the second part, which is the relationship gain. What's more important in the moment is it for me to be completely honest in order to for the relationship to ultimately be better. And if that's the goal, then that's the way it should be done. Now, actually, when my husband was telling me about my hair a couple of years ago, he was like, you know what? I like it. He liked it, he thought it was cute. He didn't love it. And even in that moment, he said, I love your hair long, but you know what? I think you pull, I think, I think you can pull it off. I think it's fine. He never said my face was chubby. I said that in hindsight. So he was thinking about the relationship gain. It's not gonna do any good for me to tell her I hate her hair like this. When I think about that conversation with my sister, I was thinking more about the relationship. I was not, yes, I was, I was torn up about some of the things that hadn't been explicitly talked about between the two of us. But the bigger key for me was what could this do for the relationship? Now, when there's people in your life, because I have friends, and they said if I was that honest with my dad, with my brother, or with my sister about things that have happened in our past, it would not go well. It all depends on how you approach it. For me with my sister, it was I love you, I miss you, I want us to be even closer. That was the whole thing. It wasn't, I can't believe all these things happened in our past. I can't, you know, it wasn't me attacking her in any way, shape, or form. Uh, there was also nothing to attack her for in our specific scenario, but I think about how many times people have difficult relationships with their parents. And when they go to their parents to talk about them, their parents are just very defensive. And so one of the ways you can approach this conversation is hey, there's been a couple of things that have really been heavy on my heart that I would love to talk to you about. And I would ask you in advance for you to be really open, open-minded, open-hearted, and to not get defensive, because these are things that I have really been thinking and struggling with, even if I should even share with you. But I care more about us being close. I care more about our relationship. And so if you are willing, I would love for us to have a conversation about it. Even just opening it like that, instead of I can't believe how defensive you've been as a parent over the years, or when I was younger, I really felt like you neglected me, or whatever that might be. That probably isn't the best way to open because the defensiveness is going to be there. And guess what? Even if you frame it and open it the way that I just recommended, your parent or whoever you are talking to still may end up being defensive. Their reaction is ultimately not your in your control, and it's not your fault. The way that you handle their reaction is in your control. And so when you are, when they are getting defensive, you can either shut down the conversation and say, you know what, I've shared the biggest part of what I wanted to share. I just

How To Open Without Triggering Defense

SPEAKER_00 18:55

want to end this by saying, I love you. I just wanted to share this with you, and maybe we can pick this up at a later time when when both of us can be, you know, don't say more mature, but when both of us can handle, can can just talk about this with some sleep and with some processing and and with fresh eyes and fresh hearts. Now, all of this is to say that sometimes there's going to be some of those difficult conversations in your life. There's gonna be difficult circumstances in your life. There's gonna be things that you want to avoid, like the snake that's in the middle of the trail. But what I want to tell you is the obstacle is the way. The thing that you are trying to avoid is actually the thing you need to do in order for you to grow to have the strength that you never knew you had. So many people, especially in the work I do with marriages, they they just try and be the nicest they can to their spouse. And you should be nice and you should work on becoming your best self, physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. We call that working on the pies. You should do those things. But the part that sometimes they struggle with is the boundaries, is being able to hold the hard stances to say, I'm not gonna be treated that way, or I'm not agreeing to those terms. Instead, they just say, Well, I'm gonna go forward with it because I'm gonna go forward with the divorce. I'm gonna let them do what they want because I'm scared of pushing them away. But that's what's going to end up pushing them away. The obstacle is the way. It's the thing you're scared to do that you actually need to do. It's the thing you actually need to learn how to do in order for you to realize the strength that you never thought you had. Because here's what ended up happening with me and my friend. We saw that snake. It finally moved out of the way. We locked arms

Boundaries In Marriage And Closing Challenge

SPEAKER_00 20:42

with each other, and I said, girl, here's what we're gonna do on the count of three. We're gonna just start sprinting up the hill. I'm gonna be with you every step. We locked arms, sprinted. When we finally got to the end of the trail, she said, I am so proud of myself. I can't believe how much I've grown. I can't believe I just did that. Two years ago, I would have fainted and fallen out. It would have been terrible. That's a very southern term, faint and fall out. I would have been beside myself, but I just faced that. And I didn't lose my mind and I wasn't panicking, and I didn't realize how much I had grown. That's how you're gonna feel. After every difficult conversation that I've had, every difficult circumstance that I've had to face where I did something that I dreaded doing, that I many times dragged my feet, kicking and screaming, didn't want to do this thing because I was so scared of how it was gonna turn out. It didn't always turn out great. Ultimately. Ultimately, there's been times, many times, where the conversation still didn't go as well as I hoped. But even in those moments, I got to the end of it and realized I had grown. I had become a person that I didn't know I was before. I was better now than I was before. And it's better set me up to handle the difficult conversations and the difficult circumstances and the difficult situations in my life that have come even from that point forward. All of this impacts the way that you show up. And so, my key takeaway for you today is do the hard thing. In order for you to realize the strength that you didn't know you had, that conversation that you're avoiding, I want you to go have it. That maybe it's even just that exercise that you feel like, oh, that's the worst one. I hate doing that. Go do it. Sometimes we just need to physically do something in order to mentally get our headspace to realize we can do it emotionally as well. That's what I want you to go do today. Share this with someone who needs it, subscribe to the channel, and leave a comment below what's the hard thing you need to do. I reply to the comments. I would love to hear what you need to do, how you handle it, and how it ends up going for you. Until next time, stay strong.