Tell Yourself Hard Truths

Part of becoming the best version of yourself is first believing you deserve a life that is joyful, and then identifying what or who is blocking your happiness and wholeness. When I was going through my self-rediscovery phase in 2023, I used several tools that led me into deep root-cause analysis. We’ll explore those more later. But before we get into that, let’s quickly recap.

In How to Get a Life When You’ve Forgotten You Had One, I introduced the NMH Self-Work Breakdown Structure™, which breaks personal transformation into a series of commitments designed to help you stop hiding and begin living fully again. The first of those commitments is to get brave.

I shared how I had to first acknowledge that I deserved happiness and then gave myself permission to pursue it. That required accountability. Before you can redesign your life, you have to be brave enough to admit that something isn’t working and that you deserve more. Getting brave pulls your head out of the sand. It’s where you stop avoiding the hard questions and start seeking real answers even if the answers hurt. It is the moment you stop pretending everything is fine and give yourself permission to imagine a life that feels larger, fuller, and more authentic because this is the part where we stop blaming everything around us and start looking at ourselves honestly.

NMH Self-Work Breakdown Structure™ Phase 2 : Tell Yourself Hard Truths

Truth is where clarity lives.

The process of gaining clarity requires honest, sometimes uncomfortable reflection -- what I like to call root-cause analysis.

As you know, a large portion of my career has been spent planning, designing, building, and implementing technology solutions. And sometimes, those implementations failed. When they did, the team didn’t just move on, we had to stop, step back, and conduct a thorough root-cause analysis. We examined everything: defects, coding errors, network vulnerabilities, competing functionality, feature prioritization, redundancy, anything that could be blocking a successful implementation. Then we fixed it, tested again, and re-implemented. And let me tell you…failed implementations were costly. They frustrated clients, exhausted engineers, and cut into margins. That’s an oversimplification, but you get the point.

We couldn’t fix what we hadn’t identified. And the same is true in your life.

When your life falls short of happiness and wholeness, you cannot heal until you uncover the truth, your patterns, your blind spots, your tolerance of things that diminish you. Undiagnosed and unaddressed issues will cost you emotionally, financially, and physically. So, to heal, we have to disrupt our norms and get honest with ourselves.

For me, that process started with writing down everything I was unhappy about. No filtering. No softening. And then I asked myself harder questions:

• When did I stop believing I deserved happiness?

• When did I start accepting less than I needed?

• When did I begin shrinking to fit into someone else’s life?

• When did I start believing something about myself that simply wasn’t true?

• Who did I allow to write my life’s narrative?

That’s where the real work began. Because not every belief we carry came from our own thinking. Some of them were planted early at childhood and adolescence.

Through comments.

Through comparisons.

Through things said directly to us and things said in front of us that we were never meant to forget. And the truth is…

Some of those messages came from people we loved. People we trusted. People who may not have intended harm, but whose words stayed with us anyway.

That’s something we don’t talk about enough. Sometimes the beliefs that limit us weren’t chosen -- they were taught.

By family.

By culture.

By religion and traditions.

By environments where we were simply trying to belong.

When I started asking myself hard questions, I had to go deeper:

• Where did this belief come from?

• When did I start carrying it as truth?

• And more importantly…is this belief still serving me now?

Because here’s the hard truth most people don’t want to say out loud: Most of what is blocking your happiness and wholeness… is you.

Not all of it. But enough of it to negatively impact your happiness and wholeness.

Your choices.

Your patterns.

Your silence.

Your willingness to tolerate what should have been questioned.

And that’s not meant to shame you, it’s meant to empower you. Because if you are part of the problem, you are an even bigger part of the solution. So now the question becomes: What or who needs to change?

To answer that, you have to clearly identify what’s going right in your life and what’s not. There are simple ways to begin capturing this:

• Journaling honestly and consistently.

• Creating and revisiting a vision board (Side note: if you aren’t literally tripping over your vision board, it’s probably too far out of sight to be valuable.)

• Be still…alone…in the quiet of your own breathing…to reflect without distraction.

But however you choose to do it, the goal is the same: Tell yourself the truth so you can finally change your future.

Break Your Life Down

At some point in this process, I realized something that changed everything for me. In my professional life, I had been trained to break down complex problems, to identify root causes, uncover scope gaps, resolve issues with clarity…and document, document, document.

But in my personal life? No one had ever taught me how to do that. And as I’ve talked with women of all ages, I’ve seen the same thing.

We feel deeply.

We reflect emotionally.

We talk through our experiences.

But we are rarely taught how to break our lives down in a way that leads to real understanding and real lasting change, and real healing. So, I started doing something different. I began approaching my life the same way I approached the technology solutions I was trained to implement.

I decided to break my life down like a problem that deserved to be understood, solved, and maintained.

Not to judge myself.

Not to criticize every decision I had made.

But to finally see clearly.

Because when you can break something down, you can:

• Identify patterns

• Recognize what’s working and what isn’t

• Separate facts from assumptions

• And most importantly…determine what actually needs to change to implement a joyful life.

This is where clarity deepens, confusion starts to lift, and where many women begin to feel a sense of control over life again. Now, I won’t go into all of the methods I used to find joy again -- not just yet, but I will say this: When you learn how to look at your life with both honesty and structure, you stop feeling stuck and start seeing options. And once you can see clearly, you regain your power, and you’re finally in a position to choose differently.

Rediscover What Makes You Feel Alive

After you’ve told yourself the truth, and mentally digested it, something interesting happens.

There’s space. (Not always comfortable space, but space nonetheless.)

Because once you’ve taken the time to understand your patterns, the reasoning behind your choices, and what (or who) has been shaping your life, there’s space for you to begin figuring out what actually brings you joy now that you’re a little older, a little wiser, and moving a little slower.

When you stop pretending. When you stop avoiding. When you stop hiding and carrying responsibilities that were never meant for you—you create space for something new. (I talk more about this kind of overextension in Loving Too Long: When Motherhood Doesn’t RecognizeWhen to Take a Step Back.)

This is where many women get stuck. We stop short of filling that space by exploring new hobbies, meeting new people, and trying new experiences. Not because we aren’t capable, but because somewhere along the way, we lost touch with who we are. And, in midlife, that realization can feel unsettling. But let's be honest. Women wear so many hats. We're "mommy" in the morning, and somewhere between traffic jams on the commute to the office, we transition into CEO. We're counselors, volunteers, caregivers, wives, and "wifeys" showing up for everyone else while quietly drifting further away from ourselves.

So let me ask you something real: How do you maintain a sense of self when you no longer recognize who you are or remember what you enjoy? At some point, we have to stop skimming the surface and ask the hard question: Am I really happy or have I simply learned how to tolerate a life that no longer fits me because I too scared or too tired to explore the idea of rediscovering myself.

Responsibilities.
Relationships. Situationships.
Careers.
Motherhood.
Survival.

Somewhere along the way, you stopped asking yourself, "What do I enjoy? Does this align with who I am?" and started doing what was expected, required, or necessary.

So when it’s time to rediscover yourself, the questions become: Who am I now? What makes me happy? What does “future me” even look like? And, if those questions feel hard to answer, no worries, you're not alone.

And, that's exactly why I created the "NMH Hobby Sampler™" series. Because rediscovery doesn’t always begin with a big, life-changing decision. Sometimes…it starts small.

With curiosity.
With movement.
With giving yourself permission to explore again.

What Rediscovery Actually Looks Like

Rediscovery is not a grand, life-altering moment. It’s small. It’s curious. Sometimes...a little awkward. Redisoery could sound something like:

• “Let me try this and see how it feels.”

• “I used to enjoy this…do I still? What the heck, I'm gonna try it.”

• “I’ve never done this before, but I’m open.”

• “I don’t see well for night driving, but maybe I can park halfway there where it’s safe and take a taxi the rest of the way.”

It’s giving yourself permission to:

• Explore without pressure

• Try without committing

• Enjoy without explaining

• Measure your fears

Start Where You Are

You don’t need a passion. You don’t need a plan. You just need a little curiosity and a tad of courage. Pay attention to:

• What feels light

• What holds your attention

• What makes you lose track of time even briefly

And just as important…pay attention to what doesn’t. Because rediscovery is as much about elimination as it is exploration.

A Gentle Truth

You may not recognize yourself right away. What you enjoyed at 25 may not fit who you are at 45, 55, or beyond. And that’s not loss. That’s evolution. You are not trying to go back. You are learning who you are now.

Or the opposite could be true. That was my story.

I’ve never (and I mean never) had an athletic bone in my body. Nowhere. Not even in my pinky toe. Because I’ve always been on the heavy side, I believed I couldn’t participate in sports activities. Throughout my adolescence and adult life, I resigned to being a bookworm, techy geek, legal mind. But get this. As I rediscovered myself at age 53, I discovered that regardless of the 300 pounds I was carrying, I actually enjoyed sports like golf, hiking, running, and bowling. And, as I enjoyed what held my attention and made me lose track of time, the mental and physical weight came off. I started this journey as a size 24/26W and am now I’m rocking a size 14/16W. So, I encourage you, as you go through this phase, do yourself a big favor and gently test your fears and let go of doubt. If only for a little while. Silence those voices that told you, you couldn’t do something and just try it anyway.

I remember participating in my first group golf lesson. I was so nervous. First, there were no other plus size women in the class. No women of color. And, because of my size, I could only find golf-suitable clothes in menswear. So…I’m a 300 pound African American women dressed like a man at my first golf lesson. That may seem minor to you, but to me not fitting in because of my size and race…was at the forefront of my mind especially in a sport where you don’t see many plus size, African American female golfers.

I’ve been golfing three years this golf season. And, I must say, I’m playing well (not great, still inconsistent), but well. And I’m grateful I was brave enough to quiet the negative voices of my past and step into this beautiful full and colorful life I now occupy.

Your only job in this phase is NOT to get it right. NOT to figure it all out. NOT to impress anyone. Your only job is this: Try. Notice. Learn. Repeat.

So if you find yourself in this space—uncertain, curious, maybe even a little disconnected from who you used to be—give yourself permission to begin again. Not with pressure. Not with perfection. But with openness.

This is not the season to have all the answers.

This is the season to explore.

To try.

To notice.

To learn.

And to repeat.

Because the life you’re meant to live isn’t something you figure out all at once…it’s something you rediscover, one honest, intentional step at a time.

Live Whole. Live Seen. Live Free.

Renetta