Challenging Your Inner Narratives for True Transformation
Have you been telling yourself a certain story about who you are and what you're capable of? We all have an inner narrative that can hinder our ability to transform. This inner voice is not necessarily ever going to go away, but breaking free from its assumptions is possible.
In a recent discussion, Paula and Mike Rataczak reflected on their latest episode, "#33: Trusting Your Instincts Through Transformations," and shared a powerful message. Mike urges listeners not to avoid confronting their inner voice, which can be both loud and limiting.
Paula offers her insights on tackling these internal narratives. So, if you're seeking inspiration to make significant changes in your life or simply to explore new skills or hobbies, tune in to gain the motivation to challenge yourself, regardless of what your inner voice may say about you.
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About Mike:
I took an indirect but happy path into my design career. I grew up in Minnesota and moved to New York City after college, where I earned an MBA from the Columbia Business School and then built a career in management consulting and corporate human resources. Throughout those years, I never lost my interest in design, and, in late 2018, I left my corporate career to study at Parsons School of Design and then open my own design studio. In 2023, I returned to the Twin Cities, and I’m grateful for the dual influences of business and art, as well as life in New York City and the Twin Cities, as major influences on my design business today.
Website: www.mikerataczakstudios.com
Instagram: @mikerataczakstudios
Facebook: mikerataczakstudios
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/michaelrataczak/
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Episode Transcript:
Challenging Your Inner Narratives for True Transformation
:: This transcript was generated automatically - please forgive typos. ::
[00:00:00] Welcome to today's episode of Beyond Neutral. So I hope that you caught last week's episode. I talked with Mike Radecek about career change and what it takes to really do that. So if you didn't. If you didn't listen to that episode, it's phenomenal. If that's something that you're thinking about and having a challenge with, Mike had been a head of human resources in the fashion [00:01:00] industry for a number of years.
[00:01:02] And I knew him in that capacity and had worked closely with him in that capacity. And he made a giant shift and left the corporate world and started his own interior design firm. Very successfully, but he talked about the challenge in making that kind of a change in your life and how you get stuck and where you get stuck.
[00:01:24] And career change is something that I talk with a lot of clients about. So it's a phenomenal episode to listen to and get insight from somebody who's gone through that. as is typical when I'm taping an episode, you know, we do a little prep and we then go through the episode and then I turn off the record.
[00:01:46] And then we kind of talk about how it went. And in this case, in this episode, When we finished taping and we started talking about our conversation, he said to me, you know, Paul, the one thing I [00:02:00] wish that I had touched on, and it was actually something I had tried to get him to touch on, and it got lost in, in a different direction was that the biggest challenge is the voice inside your head that stops you from going forward, that holds you back, that Are the things that you've used to really define, you know, your belief system, your value system, your expectations, and how the biggest challenge that he faced was changing that voice and listening, in a different way or overcoming that fear.
[00:02:36] and so we ended up in our conversation, I ended up saying, let me record this. And I clicked the, click the tape back on. And we had another little discussion about that, that I'd like to share with you and then come back. So this is a snippet, that came at the end of our conversation about the voice inside of all of our heads that we're That can be a [00:03:00] real challenge if we're trying to change or trying to transform.
[00:03:03] So let's have a listen.
[00:03:05] Paula: Mike, I know from dealing with, you know, a lot of people that one of the biggest challenges as we try to transition, we try to do something new is we have this voice in our head that stops us, tells us stories, does things like emotions that hold onto us. How did you experience that?
[00:03:21] Mike: I would say it was the defining characteristic of my life.
[00:03:25] so the voice inside my head, I think, you know, these voices I think are established when we're children, right? They're the children about who we are. What we need to do, what's right, what's wrong, coming from a variety of sources and they become the influences of primary influence in our adult lives.
[00:03:42] And that, you know, the voice inside the voice in my head as an adult was. you are supposed to work, nine to five job, white collar job, you know, you move up the corporate ladder, you [00:04:00] save your money, you achieve the next level of success. You very much follow this specific, you
[00:04:06] Paula: have the title.
[00:04:07] Different title every time. That's right. Wrapping up the title. Yeah.
[00:04:10] Mike: Moving up, if you move laterally, it's because it's going to get you up, and that, that is Mike Rataczak. That is the only right path for you. You are not an artist. You are not a designer. You are supposed to be the best little boy in the world doing these things.
[00:04:29] Good job. The corporate job. In fairness to my parents, they have been, they were very supportive of this career change. They sent me a dozen roses my last day of work.
[00:04:39] Paula: Oh, that's interesting. I started
[00:04:40] Mike: the design business. So I am not attributing this to my parents, okay? I want to be really clear, but that voice held me in its grip for most of my adult life.
[00:04:50] And like I said, I had a good life. I have had a lovely life, but. That voice held me back for a long time and [00:05:00] moving away, wrestling that voice down and recognizing that it did not speak truthfully about me was one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life. Making this career change, as you said, transformation, and I like that word a lot, is daunting enough as it is.
[00:05:17]
[00:05:17] Paula: Sure.
[00:05:19] Mike: The hardest thing I have ever done in my life. was wrestling with that voice these last several years and learning to see it for what it was and learning to put it in perspective so that I could hear my own voice more. And it is really, really hard. And even now, five years into this change, this transformation, that voice is still there.
[00:05:43] I've managed to knock it down a lot. I've managed to put it in perspective and see it for what it is. But I still grapple with it. And I think for listeners who are considering big transformation in your lives, You're not alone that this is normal. [00:06:00] I think most of us have this, but remember that voice isn't necessarily who you are.
[00:06:06] it's a comfortable script. It's a comfortable pattern. Even if it doesn't suit you, it's still, it's what you know. It's what, you know, putting in perspective, putting it somewhat to rest is daunting. Work.
[00:06:18] Paula: It is daunting work.
[00:06:19] I call that, you know, I had asked you earlier about the assumptions that you had, and that voice is all about our assumptions, right? What we assume we're supposed to be, how we assume we're supposed to behave, what we assume our career progression, or life progression, or whatever it is. And it's really hard to break those patterns because they've been embedded with us and they've served us well along the way to your point.
[00:06:43] They served you well, well, as we grow and we get older, we realize that, you know, it's really the internal. Inputs that start to matter more than those external inputs, which is where a lot of those assumptions come from. [00:07:00] Our parents, our families, our, communities growing up and we start moving from those external.
[00:07:08] voices to the internal voices and really paying attention to these is what's hard. And that's really where the work is and trying to transition and trying to transform.
[00:07:17] Mike: Thank you for sharing
[00:07:18] Paula: that.
[00:07:18] Mike: I learned that like, you know, my needs, my fundamental core needs were changing and that inner voice was not.
[00:07:28] Right.
[00:07:28] Paula: So, but you, you found a way to change the inner voice.
[00:07:30] Mike: Yeah, and I it was a long arduous struggle. it's hard work.
[00:07:35] Paula: It is hard work
[00:07:36] Mike: It's worth it though in the end, but it is hard work, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. It just means knowledge up front that it's going to be hard work and hard work and get help from others to help you Get through it
[00:07:46] Paula: a hundred percent And the hard work is that we've lived with those things for so long and they've protected us for so long and guided us for so long that they keep pulling us back.
[00:07:56] Those emotions keep pulling us back to, Oh, what's [00:08:00] safe. And it's getting the courage to do what is really driving you here as opposed to what's safe on the outside. So thank you for that insight. I appreciate that.
[00:08:11] So I hope you found that, interesting or insightful. I really appreciated that aspect of, my conversation with Mike. And I think it's really important. It's a lot of what I've been talking about this season around. The things that get us stuck, the things that come up, a lot of them, emotion driven or expectation driven or value driven, right?
[00:08:34] Or assumptions that we have about ourselves and how those things can serve to really hold us in place instead of helping move us forward. And how very difficult it is to really, turn that voice off or lessen its impact that it's having on us. And you could hear from Mike's discussion about that, that that was the biggest challenge he had.
[00:08:59] And I find [00:09:00] that's the biggest challenge many of my clients have. And whether that be. Transitioning into a new kind of role and realizing that you have to use a different set of measure, a different set of expectations, or just the way you think of yourself or the way that you, that other people see you, or whether that's making a really significant change or going through a significant change, you know, a tremendous career shift.
[00:09:27] A change in your marital status, a change in your decision to have children. I mean, I can tell you that that voice inside my head when I went through my divorce, man, that voice was unbelievably powerful and it took me so long to get it. to shift what that voice was trying to tell me. So it's really about the exercise of kind of going through what it means to really transform ourselves, right?
[00:09:54] What it follows a very predictable pattern in a lot of ways, what it takes to do that. [00:10:00] And it starts with really re examining and understanding what our beliefs are, what our values are, What our assumptions are about ourselves, what our assumptions are about success, what our assumptions are about our value, about our happiness,and really reexamining them and then reframing the emotion around it.
[00:10:18] I've talked a lot about how those emotions that come up as you try to make change pulls us back. And that's a lot of what Mike's talking about, that emotion of fear. And then. You know, revitalizing or creating new belief systems or new value experiences for ourself or value propositions of what that means and disengaging from the ones that we held that are really no longer serving us.
[00:10:45] In Mike's case, it no longer served him to believe that success. Was a corporate role. He needed to reshift that assumption that he had. And it's that assumption that's basically embedded in our brains from [00:11:00] childhood. It's usually things that have been external to us. And as we grow and as we evolve, or as we go through significant challenges in our lives, our internal systems start becoming more important.
[00:11:15] And our self concept changes from what our internal drivers are, rather it changes to what our real internal drivers are and away from what some of those external drivers are. So I thought that was a really important snippet as did Mike and he was excited to be able to Add that into our discussion.
[00:11:36] but it's an important snippet as you're trying to transform yourself wherever that is, however that is. And we all go through different moments of transformation in our lives. The voice inside your head can be the most difficult part of that transformation process. So understanding the steps you [00:12:00] need to go through in order to facilitate a change around that, that's where the work is.
[00:12:05] That's where the hardest work is. So thank you again to Mike Rataczak for his honesty. and his vulnerability and being incredibly forthcoming in both of these episodes. So if you missed the one before this, please listen to it. It was a great discussion and he's a wonderful friend and a colleague that I had the pleasure of working with, professionally for a number of years and now may need to have to hire him to take a look at my, Interior space.
[00:12:34] So that's the discussion today from Beyond Neutral. I hope you're having a great day. Keep driving and think about what's getting you stuck. What do you need to rethink? And if you want to talk about it, reach out. Happy to do so. Take care. [00:13:00]
This podcast was produced by The Willoughby Co.