SUCCESSFUL ON THE OUTSIDE; STUCK & OVERTHINKING ON THE INSIDE?
Here’s What I Actually Do About It
For 37 years, as a dentist, I looked into people’s mouths for a living. Nobody tells you their
secrets when your hands are in their mouth, but you learn to read people anyway. The ones
who looked the most put together were often the most tense. Clenched jaws. Worn-down
teeth. Shoulders up around their ears.
I knew that look because I had it too.
On paper, my life was great. A thriving practice in New York. A family. A life I’d built with my
own two hands. And still, there was a gap between the woman everyone saw and the
woman I felt like inside. I wasn’t burned out from working too hard. I was worn down by
something quieter: the pull between the life I had and the life that felt like mine…and like
me.
That gap is what I work on now.
WHO I Work With
Picture a woman I’ll call Claire. She’s a composite of many of the women who find me.
Smart, ambitious, kind to everyone but herself. She’s done everything right. Maybe she has
the title, the home, the polished life she dreamed of, and it still doesn’t fill the void. Or
maybe she isn’t sure which way to go at all.
Either way, she tells me the same few things. I feel stuck. I can’t turn my brain off. I don’t
quite fit in my own life.
Here’s what I tell Claire first: you are not broken. You’re out of alignment. And alignment is
something you can build.
I do this work online, one on one or with groups, through coaching and hypnotherapy. I call
this approach the 3R’s Method™: Regulate, Rewire, Reset.
The order matters, and I’ll tell you why.
Step ONE: Regulate
You can’t think your way out of a stressed-out body. I wish you could. It would save
everyone a lot of stress, suffering and money.
When your nervous system senses a threat and your brain can’t tell the difference between
a sabre tooth tiger and a regular day of work, it reacts. Some of us fight. Some of us run (flight). Some freeze. Some of us smile and say yes to everything…. people-pleasers (fawn). When you’re stuck in one (or two) of those modes, the thinking part of your brain gets harder to reach.
That’s why good advice bounces right off you.
So, we start with the body. We learn your patterns (or top two), we name it and we practice
calming it down. Breathing. Pausing. Noticing. Nothing fancy but it works and it makes
everything after it possible.
(Sign up @gigiarnaud.com to get your: Nervous System Response quiz. You’ll find out which one(s) you tend toward: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn).
Step TWO: Rewire
Once you’re calmer, you can finally look at stories running in the background. I have to earn
rest. If I say no, people will leave. I’m only worth what I produce.
You picked those up somewhere. Most of us did. The good news is that the brain keeps
learning at every age. New thoughts, repeated enough, build new neural pathways. This is where hypnotherapy can be helpful. It is simply a deeply relaxed, focused state. You’re not asleep and you’re not out of control. It’s just a quieter place to work on old beliefs because the part of you that argues with everything gets to take a break.
Step THREE: Reset
Here’s the step most people skip. Fixing symptoms isn’t the same as deciding who you
want to become.
Reset is identity work. Who are you without the overachiever armor? What do you want your
days and you, to feel like? What are you done carrying? We build new habits and choices
around that answer because, as I like to say, every repetition is a vote for who you’re
becoming.
Small votes add up. Eventually you win the election.
What Working With Me Looks Like
We meet virtually, so it doesn’t matter where you live. Most of my clients work with me over
three or six months (or twelve months) because real change takes repetition, not a single
epiphany. I’m warm and I’m also a New Yorker, so I’ll be straight with you. I’ve been
a mother, stepmother and now a grandmother (my grandkids call me Meme) and I’ve spent
decades learning that being honest and being kind belong together.
If you read this and thought that’s me, you don’t have to figure it out alone.
Book a free clarity call @gigiarnaud.com and let’s talk about where you are, and where you actually want to be.