186: Why I Do the Work I Do (Part 2)

Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Marie Murphy.  I’m a relationship coach, and I help people who are engaging in anything they think counts as infidelity to deal with their feelings, clarify what they want, and make decisions about what they’re going to do.  No shame, no blame, no judgments.  If you want my help resolving your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you, let’s work together.  There are two ways we can do this.  We can work together one-on-one via Zoom.  If you’re interested in this option, the first step is to schedule an introductory coaching session with me through my website, mariemurphyphd.com/services.  Or you can purchase my self-guided course You’re Not the Only One, which contains powerful teachings and assignments that you can access online, all the time.  That’s available through the services page of my website, too.  What happened to the third option that I’ve been talking about lately, you ask?  That group coaching program/secret society thing that I was promoting for a while?  I’m not offering it anymore.  I pulled the plug on that project.  And I’m actually going to tell you all about why in the next episode of my podcast, but today, we have other matters to attend to.  I have a lot of things to tell you today, and one of the things I have to tell you which might or might not be important to you I’m going to save for the very end of the episode.  So be aware that there’s an unusual detail coming at the very end.

But before we get to that, today I’m telling you part 2 of the story of how I came to do the work I do, and I’m going to pick up right where I left off last week, without any sort of recap. 

Last week we got to the point in my story where I’d discovered life coaching and I was finding certain resources from the world of life coaching were REALLY helping me and I was wondering if maybe just maybe I might want to be a life coach.  On the one hand, this sounded like a very exciting possibility to me.  It seemed like coaching might provide me with the opportunity to combine all of the parts of my professional history that I liked the most, and the opportunity to use my capacities and expertise in a way that I thought I would really enjoy.  And this sounded pretty great, and I felt hopeful about my professional future for the first time in a long time, which felt really good.  Recognizing, oh, hey, I think I know what I want to do with myself, I think I know what I want to allow myself to become felt a hell of a lot better than being miserable in my professional life and not knowing what to do about that.

BUT I was also very skeptical.  I didn’t think that life coaching was a “real job” by any stretch of the imagination.  And what I mean by that, I think, is that I didn’t think that life coaching was a job that any serious people would possibly take seriously.  I didn’t think anyone would take me seriously or respect me – not only as a professional, but as a HUMAN – if I labored under such a title.  On the one hand, I had gotten a lot of value from life coaching myself, but on the other hand, coaching was and is an unregulated profession, if you can even call it a profession at all.  Sociologists would probably say that it doesn’t qualify as a profession, by sociological definitions of what a profession is.  Now, you may be wondering, who the fuck cares what the sociological definition of a profession is, and whether your job counts as falling into one or not?  The answer is, I did.  I cared.  A lot.  And you may be wondering, who the fuck cares if a profession or a quasi-profession is regulated or not, so long as it helps people?  And the answer is, I used to.  I used to think that if I wasn’t a member of a “real profession,” so to speak, people weren’t going to take me seriously.  Because anyone could declare themselves a life coach!  There’s no formal gatekeeping system that controls who can and cannot be considered a coach.  And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but for a while, I was VERY uncomfortable with idea of declaring myself a member of what some people might consider a bunch of snake oil salespeople.

Now, allow me to emphasize that this was deeply ironic on multiple counts.  For one thing, even though I thought I had what sounded like a prestigious-enough job title, my job title was NOT all that prestigious in the scheme of things.  Sure, I had to get a PhD in order to get it, but did anyone really care about that?  Maybe like, four or five people did, but maybe not even that many.  Moreover, did anyone on planet earth other than myself care about my job title?  To the best of my knowledge, the answer to that question is no.  And on top of all of that, hanging onto my “prestigious” job that wasn’t actually all that prestigious was making me totally miserable.

From where I stand today, I find it absolutely HILARIOUS that I was so afraid of leaving this job that I hated and pursuing work that I was genuinely excited about, because I was so afraid of what people would think about my job title.  But I will tell you that I did NOT find any of this funny back then.  At the time, all of my fears about what people would think about me if I declared myself a life coach were very real to me, and they were a very big deal to me.

And I didn’t really know how to deal with those fears, so they slowed me down for quite a while!  Because I was so afraid of what people might think about me if I became a life coach, I HESITATATED to take any kind of action for a lot longer than I needed to.  I wanted to enroll in a life coach training program, but instead of just getting started doing this thing that I knew I wanted to do, I came up with all of these reasons why I couldn’t do it – and I let those reasons have their way with me for a while.  I didn’t stay completely stuck, thank goodness, but I did not move forward particularly boldly or efficiently.

In addition to being really afraid of what would happen if I gave up my “real job” and took on the less respectable role of life coach, I also had a lot of fears about being an entrepreneur.  I didn’t talk about this in last week’s episode, but before I finished my PhD, I had a stretch of trying to start up my own holistic health private practice, which included bodywork and yoga therapy and what I then called spiritual guidance, but now recognize was basically a version of coaching.  And there’s a lot I could say about the experience of starting up my practice, but for today’s purposes, the main point is that I’d had really unrealistic expectations about what it would take to get that practice to the point of creating full-time income for me, so when my unrealistic expectations weren’t met, I deemed the whole thing a failure and I convinced myself that I’d better just finish my PhD and get a salaried job and just give up on my dreams and be happy enough with an okay-enough job.  For years, I thought of this attempt at being an entrepreneur as an EPIC failure on my part, and a failure that was proof of my fundamental inability to make a living providing services of any kind.  And so when I started thinking about becoming a coach, I was really scared of not being taken seriously because coaching wasn’t a “real job” AND I was also terrified that I just wasn’t capable of being an entrepreneur, and all of this was very dramatic and very unpleasant.

If you’re wondering, why I didn’t just get myself a good coach to help me deal with all of this nonsense, the answer is, I did invest in getting myself coached back then, but not to the extent that I could have.  If there’s one thing I’d do differently, I would have invested in getting better support a whole lot sooner.  But I did avail myself of some coaching back then, and what I did get was helpful.

And despite all of my doubt and drama, I had just enough faith in my vision of what was possible to keep moving towards it.  Months after having the idea, I finally enrolled in my first life coach training program.  And once I started it, a) I loved it, and b) I realized that I kind of already was a coach.  What I was learning how to do in my first coach training was very similar to what I’d been doing under different auspices for years.  In some respects, coaching is very similar to talking to strangers about their sex lives.  In some respects, coaching is very similar to conducting a qualitative, in-depth, semi-structured sociological interview.  In some respects, coaching is like doing a really good intake before you do bodywork on someone, or give someone a private yoga lesson.  In some respects, coaching is like what I’d been doing during the million hours I’d spent helping my friends sort through their relationship challenges.  And I really do mean a million hours helping friends sort through relationship challenges.  Before I ever dreamed of becoming a coach, I was That Person who got a lot of calls for help with dealing with relationship stuff.  And in a way, I absolutely LOVED helping people sort out their relationship challenges.  And I thought I was pretty good at it.  And evidently my friends thought so too, because they kept calling me and asking for help.  And I was happy to provide it, but after some of those marathon phone calls that went on for hours and required multiple bathroom breaks, I would sometimes think to myself, “I should probably be getting paid for this.”

So after I started my first coach training program, I was like, oh.  Yeah.  I’ve actually been doing this for a long time.  Sure I can benefit from some more training.  But I’m HOME.

And on the one hand, these recognitions delighted me.  But on the other hand, I didn’t really believe that it okay for me to be a coach, and I didn’t really believe that it was possible for me to make a living as a coach. 

It took me a lot of time and effort and tears to believe that I really could free myself from the self-imposed prison of my many and various limiting beliefs about what I could and couldn’t do, work-wise.  It took A LOT of intentional shifting of my beliefs to get over the idea that it was better to have a “real job” than to be a coach.  And it took a LOT of work to give myself permission to believe that not only could I be a coach, I could be a coach in whatever ways I wanted to be.  And to believe that I could draw from all of my expertise and experience.  And to believe that I could put everything I had to offer into a new package, and put it forth into the world.

I want to be really clear that all of this did not need to be as much of a struggle as it was.  The reason why it was such a struggle was because I made it so.  Because I allowed it to be so.  And that’s okay, in a sense – as our good friend Ram Dass tells us, “you have to go as fast as you can, but you can only go as fast as you can.”  I was just moving through my own evolution and growth at the only pace I could, and in a sense, that’s fine.  But does the process of change need to be as torturous and slow as I let it be?  No.  It does not. 

So how the hell did I get myself from not really believing I could be a coach to being where I am now?  One tiny little step at a time.  I held onto every scrap of desire, and hope, and faith that I could.  I knew that I WANTED to be a coach and make a living from coaching.  Even though there were a lot of moments when I didn’t really believe it was possible, I knew I WANTED it to be possible.  So I cultivated as much faith as I could, and I took one little tiny action step at a time.  I did all of the things one does to start up a coaching practice.  And as I was doing all of those things, I felt TONS of self-doubt.  I felt IMMENSE uncertainty.  It was really uncomfortable, and I didn’t like that, and I had a million dramatic pity parties for myself, but I didn’t quit.  I kept moving towards what I knew I wanted.

And gradually, my efforts started to get me what I wanted.  I found clients, and clients found me.  I loved working with them.  They loved working with me.  It wasn’t a glamorous story of instant success, but it was movement in the direction I wanted to be heading in.

At first, I was willing to coach people on anything and everything.  When you’re learning how to be a coach, and when you’re learning how to build a coaching practice, there are two schools of thought that you’re likely to encounter.  One is that there’s nothing wrong with being a general life coach, and that if you’re skilled at what you do, you can effectively coach people on pretty much anything, and it’s totally legitimate to market yourself as a general life coach.  The other school of thought is that it’s really important to have a niche, and to have as specific of a niche as possible. 

At first I was like, I don’t wanna choose a niche, I don’t want to limit myself in that way!  I’m interested in ALL aspects of the human experience, and besides, when you’re coaching someone, one thing usually leads to another, and you end up far from the subject you started on.  But that did make marketing my offerings as a coach a little more challenging.  When you’re trying to talk to everyone about the value of your work, it’s hard to talk to anyone about the value of your work.  Or at least it can be.  So finally some marketing teacher I was working with convinced me to narrow my focus, and I said, okay fine, I’ll narrow myself down to being a relationship coach.  And when this marketing teacher learned more about my professional background, she was like, um, why aren’t you a relationship coach ALREADY?  Why aren’t you already out there in the world broadcasting what you can offer people in this realm?  You have more expertise in the area of human sexuality and human relationships than most people who consider themselves experts in this department.  What are you waiting for? 

And I was like, oh, hey, that’s a pretty good point.  I DO have a lot of experience in this realm, and this subject matter has been deeply interesting to me.  Gee, that idea kind of makes sense. 

But I STILL felt all the fear.  All the timidity.  All the self-doubt.  All the hesitation.  I STILL thought I had to wait for some magical permission-giving fairy to come along and say, “Hey, it’s okay if you call yourself a relationship coach.  It’s legitimate for you to do that.”  I was terrified of coming off as some quack who appointed herself as an expert, but didn’t have anything to back it up with.

But, to echo a recurring theme of today’s episode, even though my confidence was shaky, I kept taking small steps forward.  I hung my shingle as a relationship coach, so to speak.  I put myself out there in that way, in whatever small ways I could.  And clients with what I considered pretty interesting relationship challenges started to find me.  It wasn’t just people who were like, “How can I be happier in my relationship?” kind of stuff.  And don’t get me wrong, that’s ALWAYS interesting subject matter to explore.  But I had folks coming to me who were like, “My partner has been accused of a sex crime and I don’t know how to deal with that” or “I’VE been accused of sex crime and I don’t know how to deal with that,” or “My partner wants to have an open relationship and I agreed to that even though I didn’t really want to and now I’m super jealous and depressed and I don’t know what to do.”  And this was the kind of stuff that I was and am DEEPLY interested in.  And, strangely or not, people who were cheating on their partners or engaging in some form of infidelity started to find me.  I was marketing to this audience a little bit, so there was certainly some effort on my part to advertise that I offered a non-judgmental perspective on infidelity, but I was also trying to offer a non-judgmental perspective on other relationship issues, too.

But people who were cheating in some form or another kept finding me, and I found that I really liked working with them, and I found that had a rather uniquely useful approach to dealing with infidelity.  In part, I learned this through my clients’ responses to my work.  Additionally, when it started to become clear to me that I was officially playing in the infidelity sandbox, I took a broad look at the other kinds of resources that were out there for people engaging in infidelity and I was SHOCKED by what I found.  Shocked and SADDENED.  I was just like, okay, just about every single thing other people have to say about infidelity is at best, completely useless.  Let me be clear that I’m exaggerating a little here.  There are of course SOME perspectives on infidelity that are out there that are not completely useless.  I’m not trying to suggest that I am the only person who has any kind of a non-judgmental approach to infidelity, or any kind of a helpful approach to infidelity.  But, that said, my observation was and is that a lot of what’s out there in terms of resources for people who are actively cheating is pretty bad.  Not just not helpful, but actively detrimental.

And in a sense, this was just about all I needed to see that I had a contribution to make.  I was like, okay, here we have this VERY common human behavior – and by that I mean infidelity – and help that is actually helpful for people who are engaging in this behavior is practically non-existent.  How is this even possible?  How has this problem been allowed to persist for as long as it has?  This is not a good situation, and someone needs to do something about this.

So I said to myself, well, maybe I need to do something about this.  I am fully equipped to approach infidelity from a VERY different angle, I am fully equipped to actually HELP people who are engaging in infidelity make sense of their situations without scolding them for what they’re doing.  Oh, and I happen to enjoy coaching people who are engaging in infidelity.  Why NOT go all-in on this?  I am ready and willing to take this on, and this is an area in which I can make a helpful contribution.  Let’s get to work.  So that’s more or less what happened.      

Sometimes people ask me if I got into this work because of personal experiences I’ve had with infidelity, and the answer is no.  That’s not to say that I haven’t had personal experiences with infidelity.  I have.  I’ve cheated, and I’ve been cheated on, and I certainly learned a lot from those experiences.  But while my own experiences with infidelity were definitely a big deal when they were happening, I never chose to consider them life-defining experiences.  Were they an educational part of my relationship history?  Of course.  Did they and do they inform my capacity to understand other people’s experiences with infidelity?  Certainly.  But my experiences with infidelity don’t factor all that heavily into my sense of who I am personally, or my sense of what I’m doing professionally. 

And I think this is really important for everyone to consider.  Infidelity does not have to be a life-defining experience.  Now, your infidelity situation may sure as hell seem like a life-defining experience while you’re in the thick of it, and that’s fair enough!  But it doesn’t have to be a big deal forever.  You can deal with it, and digest all of the emotions associated with it, and decide how you want to move forward in your life, and then you can do exactly that.  You can learn from your experiences, and move on. 

I think it’s important to say this because there’s definitely an idea out there that infidelity DOES define us in inescapable ways.  If we cheat, we are a CHEATER.  If we’re cheated on, we are a VICTIM of infidelity.  But although it’s important to acknowledge that these ideas are out there, it’s also important to recognize that these ways of thinking are totally optional.  You do not have to subscribe to them.  You don’t have to have define yourself by your experiences with infidelity.   You don’t have to mark yourself with a Scarlett letter A forever.  You don’t have to define yourself as someone who has been a victim of infidelity forever.   

So while I do have experience with infidelity, and that certainly informs my approach to my work to some extent, it’s just one ingredient in the soup that is my work.  And I don’t think it’s a defining one.  When I was putting this episode together and thinking about how I was going to talk about my own experiences with infidelity, I remembered several experiences I’d had with infidelity that I hadn’t thought about in a REALLY long time.  And some of them were pretty gnarly when they were happening!  I have been on the receiving end of other people behaving in ways that I really did not like, and I’ve engaged in some behavior that could be considered pretty sordid.  And at the time it was all very significant and unpleasant but apparently I also forgot about a lot of it, until I started deliberately excavating my memory.  So, looking back, yes, there’s definitely an element of having been there and done that, but those experiences are not a huge driving force behind me doing the work I do.

What IS a huge driving force behind me doing this work is my deep desire to find ways of de-stigmatizing stigmatized topics.  I FIRMLY believe that we all, as individuals, deserve to be respected in the fullness of our humanity, and I firmly believe that we as a society have to find different ways of contending with the fullness of the human experience.  Another driving force behind the work I do is my deep curiosity about and respect for humans, especially in the realm of their love lives/sex lives/romantic lives.  And a deep desire to help us all find more freedom and ease in our lives by assuming the power that we do have to shape our experiences of living.  There are a lot of constraints we have to contend with, for sure.  But most of us are not using the full extent of the power we have to shape our lives in the ways we can.

Although infidelity in relationships hasn’t been a life-defining experience for me, being faithful to my desire to do a certain kind of work, and being tenacious enough to create this role for myself even though for a while I was totally convinced that I didn’t have it in me to be an entrepreneur HAS been a life-defining experience for me.   As this episode and last week’s episodes have probably made abundantly clear.  And this, in a similar but different way, is something I see a lot of my clients grappling with.  I see people saying, “How dare I allow myself to pursue what I really want, when it’s different from everything I’ve ever known, and is different from what I thought my life was going to go like, and is different from what people around me expect of me?  How dare I be this freak of my own creation?  How dare I choose to believe that I actually might be able to call the shots, and create the life that I want to live?  How dare I believe that if I go after what I really want, even if what I want seems totally weird, everything might turn out okay?”

And to that I say, how dare you not to?  How dare you NOT be brave enough to chart your own course?  How dare you not be an example to others of what is possible?  How dare you not be brave enough to color outside of the lines – and show people that the world won’t end when you do so? 

I don’t mean to say that too harshly.  When we’re terrified of making changes in our lives, it doesn’t help to have anyone intentionally speak to us harshly.  But I do want you to take these questions seriously.  And I want you to consider that we just might owe it to ourselves to show ourselves that life can be okay – and so much better than okay – if we dare to do things differently.  And I want you to consider that we also just might owe it to others to set the example that it’s okay to do things differently.  Or put differently, we might WANT to be helpful to others by being examples of what is possible.

Because sometimes in order to live the way we want to live we have to do stuff that scares the shit out of us to get there.  Sometimes the scary stuff gets a whole lot less scary pretty quickly.  And sometimes it doesn’t!  Sometimes the only way to get where we want to go is to be willing to do the scary stuff even though it’s scary.  Because we know that we really want to create a new version of ourselves, or of our lives.  Because we know we owe it to ourselves, on some cosmic level, to get to the place we get to by willing to do the scary things.  Because we want so badly to be faithful to becoming a fuller expression of who are we are.  And, sometimes, because we know that the only alternative to doing stuff we consider really scary is being MISERABLE.  And sometimes we get to the point where we just aren’t willing to be miserable anymore.

That’s basically what I had to do to get to the point where I am now, of making a living doing work that I love, and being totally at peace with not having a “real job.”  Am I afraid of people thinking that it’s cheesy that I’m a relationship coach at this point?  Absolutely not.  I couldn’t care LESS what people think about my job title and my qualifications.  I am TOTALLY okay with being part of an unregulated profession, or an unregulated profession that doesn’t even technically count as a profession. 

These shifts didn’t happen overnight.  I had to keep on being willing to do difficult, scary things for a long time.  I had to keep on being willing to wrestle with my limiting beliefs for a long time.  And this isn’t to say that I’ve reached this place in my professional life where I never have to do difficult or scary things anymore.  I certainly do, but it’s a whole different ballgame now.  Having successfully dealt with uniquely difficult challenges in my life really has put me in a different position – both in terms of the circumstances of my professional life, and in terms of my capacities to deal with challenges that arise.

A lot of what I’ve just said applies to a lot of people’s infidelity situations.  Specifically, although your infidelity situation doesn’t need to be TERRIBLY difficult to deal with, it may be difficult to deal with!  And the only way to get through that difficulty may be to be willing to do difficult, scary things – and you may have to keep on doing difficult, scary things for longer than you’d like to. 

That’s one of the fundamental tensions within the human experience that I don’t think there’s a way to escape.  Things usually never have to be AS hard as we sometimes make them, but sometimes things are indeed pretty hard!  And if we want things to be different for us, the only way to make that happen is to be willing to keep going.

And when we’re willing to keep going, we really can create big changes for ourselves. 

Okay.  In last week’s episode, I told you that I became attuned to the stigma associated with sexuality and related things at a pretty young age, and I told you that on the one hand, there might not be any neat explanation for that, and there might not need to be.  And I also told you last week that there might be another answer to the question of why I picked up on all of the things related to sexuality and relationships that I did when I was as little as I was, and now I’ll tell you what that is.  Astrology.  Or rather, the specifics of my astrological placements.  I’m not here to sell you on astrology, but I will tell you that I have found insights from astrology rather useful in understanding aspects of myself that I’ve had a hard time making sense of or figuring out what to do with.  For example, when I learned about what a rising sign is, and what a moon sign is, and when I found out what my rising sign and my moon sign were, I was like, oh, well that explains an awful lot.  Many people know what their sun sign is, and that’s important information, but it’s not the only important aspect of your astrological makeup.  Anyway, if you are curious, I will tell you that my rising sign is Scorpio, and my moon sign is Scorpio too, and if you know what that means. 

Anyway, some years ago, at the very beginning of my professional meltdown midlife crisis thing that I described in last week’s episode, I had a reading done by an astrologer who gave a me a piece of insight that proved pretty useful.  I’m not going to tell you exactly what the placement is, but I apparently have a planet in a house and in a sign that suggests that I’m inclined to work with things that are secretive, or hidden, or cut off from the rest of society.  She basically said that in order to find the most amount of professional satisfaction, I had to fight for something that isn’t usually fought for, or help fight for something that’s usually kept secret. 

When I had this reading with this astrologer I wasn’t sure what to make of this.  At the time, I had that full-time sociological job that I hated, and I was doing a little bit of holistic health work on the side, and I was considering teaching yoga in prisons, because that seemed vaguely interesting and important to me, and seemed like it could provide SOME professional satisfaction to me.  And I told the astrologer this, and she was like, yeah, that could be a way of making use of this particular astrological placement.  Maybe that’s a way to satisfy that for you.  But I quickly lost interest in teaching yoga in prisons.  Not because it isn’t a worthy thing to do, but it just wasn’t that compelling to ME.  And for a long time I puzzled over how to make use of this astrological insight.  If I was going to work in the realm of things that are usually kept hidden, what did that mean exactly?  What specifically was I supposed to be doing?

Years later it hit me – I was doing it.  I had figured out how to work with this piece of my astrology.  I work in the realm of secrets.  I fight for something that isn’t usually fought for.  I deal with matters that people often attempt to shun or shame.  How ‘bout that?  Maybe I have figured out how to use this part of me in a way that I find satisfying and others find helpful.  Solving this puzzle, to the extent that I’ve solved it, felt like the accomplishment of a major piece of karmic business.  In Paul Beatty’s amazing novel The Sellout, there’s a character who sometimes has the occasion to say to people, “Who am I?  And how may I become myself?”  And I think these are questions that we all might want to ask ourselves.  And in going through the torturous process of giving myself permission to leave a so-called real job and make the work I do my work, I have answered those questions for myself, to some extent.  And that’s really important karmic business for me to attend to in this lifetime.  Who the hell am I?  And how may I become myself?  Those might be questions that you consider it important to answer for yourself, too.

But let’s return to the matter of my astrological chart for a moment.  You can take this with as many grains of salt as you want to, but maybe, just maybe, I’m just doing the work that I came here to do.  Maybe my professional interests and inclinations aren’t really mine at all.  Or maybe they were mine before I even existed.  Or maybe I’m not the one who came up with them.  Maybe this is just my mission from god.  I mean that lightly – I don’t subscribe to any particular concept of god.  Put differently, maybe I’m just doing the mission the stars laid out for me.  Who knows. 

My point isn’t that astrology explains everything or that you should become an astrological determinist.  But I am saying that maybe the question of why we’re interested in doing the work we’re doing could potentially have a lot of different answers – and maybe we can never fully know the answers.

That said, I’ve just given you my best attempt at telling the story of how I got to doing the work I do.  As the emotion in my voice has no doubt indicated, it’s been hard for me to tell this tale.  I told you that I was out of the habit of talking about myself, and I meant it!  I hope that these two episodes provided interesting insights into how I came to do this relatively unusual thing that I do, but more than that, I hope I’ve provided some indication that you too can recreate your life in whatever ways you want to.  Doing so may be scary.  Doing so may be hard.  There may not be any road map for you to follow.  You may not have a cheering squad as you step forth into the great unknown.

But you can still take steps into uncharted territory.  You can have faith in yourself and what is possible.  You can create a version of your life that doesn’t yet exist.  You can do it one step at a time.  Because really, that’s the only way to do it.  And you can do it even if you’re scared!  There’s a saying that holds that you can speak your truth even if your voice shakes, and clearly I’ve taken that to heart today, but I would extend that idea a little further.  You can take steps towards creating the life you want to live even if you’re scared. 

And you can have my help as you do so.  You do not have to deal with your fear all by yourself.  You do not have to resolve your infidelity situation all by yourself.  I can help you do all the things.  You’ll still have to do all the things, but oh my god, having the right help as you do all the things makes SUCH a difference.  As I said earlier in today’s episode, I had varying degrees of help as I went through the journey I’ve told you about in this episode and last week’s, and although some of the help I got wasn’t amazing, any help is helpful, and good help is life-changing.  And at this point in my life, I don’t fuck around anymore.  I pay a lot of money for good coaching now because I never want to deal with a life challenge as inefficiently as I dealt with the one I told you about today and last week.  I want to get my nonsense in check as quickly as possible.  I don’t want to be beholden to my own limiting ideas of what’s possible for any longer than I absolutely have to be.  I want to make wise use of my time on earth.

So when you’re ready to resolve your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you, let’s work together.  If you just need a little nudge, you can purchase my self-guided course, You’re Not the Only One, which contains teachings that are based on the wisdom I’ve gained from helping hundreds of clients deal with their infidelity situations.  When you purchase that course, you get instant access to video teachings and assignments that you can access online, all the time.  You can find You’re Not the Only One on my website, mariemurphyphd.com/services.

And we can work together one-on-one.  If you want intensive, personalized assistance, this is the way to go.  When we work together one-on-one, our collaboration is intimate, consistent, and rigorous.  If you’re serious about changing your life, let’s get to work.  When we work together one-on-one, we meet via Zoom, which means we can collaborate no matter where you’re located.  You can schedule an introductory coaching session with me through my website, mariemurphyphd.com.  I can’t wait to meet you.

Okay, one last thing before we wrap up today.  The next episode of this podcast will not come out next week.  It will come out in two weeks.  And the next one will come out two weeks after that.  I am switching to a biweekly format!  And by the way, I’ve always been uncertain about the use of the word “biweekly.”  Does it mean every other week, or does it mean twice a week?  I just Googled it – for like, the millionth time – to check, and Merriam-Webster says, “Yes, ‘biweekly’ can mean both ‘every two weeks’ and ‘twice a week.’  And no, there’s nothing we can do about it.”  For whatever reasons, I found this both delightful and reassuring.  Anyway, to be clear, this podcast will now be coming out once every two weeks.  Not once a week.  Not twice a week.  Once every two weeks.

So with that, I’ll talk to you in two weeks!  Thank you all so much for listening.  Bye for now.