Get unstuck now: Becky Vollmer

We all face moments where we feel stuck. Becky Vollmer sees you. Vollmer is a speaker, journalist, yoga teacher and author of You Are Not Stuck: How Soul-Guided Choices Transform Fear into Freedom. We talk about how we get stuck—in our job, relationships, health-related choices—and what we can do right now to move forward. She reminds us that intention without action is just wishful thinking. How to find Becky: You Are Not Stuck website Facebook Instagram Threads Transcript: Debra Hotaling (00:04): Hello and welcome to the Dareful Project, a podcast series where we explore with cultural disruptors, how to reimagine the second arc of our life. I'm your host, Debra Hotaling with a reminder: if you like this episode with please like, review and share with your Dareful tribe. Today's guest is Becky Vollmer. She's a speaker, writer, yoga teacher, and author of a wonderful new book called You Are Not Stuck, how Soul Guided Choices Transform Fear Into Freedom. Becky, welcome. Becky Vollmer (00:41): Oh my dear. Thank you so much for having me. Debra (00:44): So we got a lot to cover. So ground us here. What was going on with you that prompted you to write this terrific book? Becky (00:54): Oh, mercy, that I have to go back a little bit in history because the actual writing of the book was a, we'll call it a multi-year project, and I probably have to define multi as about seven. I think that was the time it took to live and feel and absorb and integrate everything that went into it until the actual writing part was months long. But the living that led up to it was years. I'll say the best way to describe it very succinctly was that in a period of about three years, there were some back to back to whammies. I left corporate America of my own volition after decades of dreaming and never doing. About a year later, I finally had a reckoning about my relationship with alcohol and decided it was time to give it up for good. And I'm proud to say that I, I'm now celebrating 10 years sober. Becky (02:13): And then the third thing that happened within that three year period was that my marriage of about 10 years absolutely imploded and disintegrated in a way that I did not see coming. And so it was one of those things that knock you flat and then take an awfully long time to kind of peel yourself back up off the ground and begin walking again. So the actual, the idea for the book and the beginnings of plotting and scheming and writing the book happened within the first six months of leaving the corporate world. And then as life intervened and life demanded to be lived, it got pushed a little farther away. But I will say, I think that not only is the book better for it, but I am better for it because I had more time to practice the tools that I knew had helped me and would help me again. And I think just the lived experience is richer and richer and richer because of it. Debra (03:25): Did you know the tools when you were writing the book or did writing the book present the tools? Becky (03:31): Absolutely, yes, both. The answer is both. I will say that the premise, one of the underlying premises of the book is based on finding freedom in what I would call with a yoga mindset. And that is something that I had been at the time, I had been practicing yoga for, oh my gosh, by then almost 10 years, more than 10 years teaching for almost 10 years. And so those philosophies, those underlying credos were already sort of baked into my consciousness. Things like impermanence and non-attachment, but nothing is a better teacher than lived experience. And so I'd had the ability to apply that to one area of my life, the professional area of my life, but hadn't yet been able to apply it in ending a marriage that was a decade old. And I think even more the bigger teacher than that was the choice to eliminate alcohol from my life because that's something that had plagued my family for generations. I feel like I'm kind of the first generation cycle breaker in that regard in my family. And that one choice has opened up so many others that I never could have seen around the corner. And so to get back to your question, I would say some of the tools were there. Some of them I was in process learning, and some of them, oh my gosh, Deborah, some of them are still being revealed. Debra (05:32): It's easy to talk about it and it sounds linear and you have these building blocks and not you, but we have these building blocks and we are just like, okay, I'm just going to turn this one on and that one on and I'm going to be better. But it's way messier than that. For whatever reason we're stuck, whether it's professionally in our personal life, an addiction, spiritual growth. Talk to us a little bit about how you get out of the messiness and figure it out. Becky (06:07): Oh boy. I could talk on that question alone for six days and fact, I just came off of leading a four day yoga based retreat. And really that's what we talk ...