Sage Solutions
Advice and insight about personal growth, personal development, and becoming your best self.
Sage Solutions
Sage Scenarios 1: Real Solutions for Common Life Challenges
Ever wondered how to break through emotional barriers when you weren't raised to express feelings? Or how to push past gym insecurity when you're just starting your fitness journey? This episode tackles these common but challenging scenarios with practical, actionable advice that goes beyond surface-level solutions.
David Sage explores the profound connection between emotional awareness and confidence, revealing how vulnerability—when approached with social intelligence—actually demonstrates strength rather than weakness. Through a compelling analogy about body language, he illustrates how confident people naturally expose vulnerable areas while insecure people remain guarded and protected. This perspective shift alone could transform how you approach emotional openness in your relationships.
For those struggling with gym anxiety, David breaks down the "physics of action"—a framework for understanding how to build momentum in any challenging endeavor. His insight that "emotion causes motion, but motion also creates emotion" provides a powerful strategy for overcoming inertia and building lasting habits. Rather than waiting to feel motivated, taking even minimal action can generate the positive emotions needed to continue.
What makes this episode particularly valuable is how these principles apply universally across different life challenges. Whether you're working on emotional intelligence, fitness goals, career advancement, or relationship building, the same fundamental approaches to awareness, action, and momentum apply. The episode offers both immediate tactical solutions (like wearing baggy clothes to the gym if that reduces friction) and long-term strategic approaches for changing self-limiting beliefs.
Ready to transform how you approach personal challenges? Listen now, and discover why self-awareness, consistent small actions, and socially intelligent vulnerability might be the keys to unlocking your next level of growth. Then share your experience with us—we'd love to hear which strategies worked best for your unique situation!
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The Sage Solutions Podcast and content posted by David Sage is presented solely for general informational, educational, and entertainment purposes. No coaching client relationship is formed by listening to this podcast. No Legal, Medical or Financial advice is being given. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from this podcast or website is at the user's own risk. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice, diagnosis, or treatment of a psychotherapist, physician, professional coach, Lawyer or other qualified professional. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical or mental health condition they may have and should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions. The opinions of guests are their own and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of the podcast.
Welcome to the Sage Solutions Podcast, where we talk about all things personal growth, personal development and becoming your best self. My name is David Sage and I'm a self-worth and confidence coach with Sage Coaching Solutions. Today's episode should be pretty interesting. It's going to be unique because we haven't done one with quite this format. I actually have to give credit to my co-host for this episode, Anna Sage, who came up with the idea for what we should do this week.
Speaker 1:So, in preparation for this episode, Anna has prepared some questions that are commonly asked and things that people seek advice on, and I'm going to try and answer these questions as best as I can, using my experience as a coach and many of the different topics that we've talked about on this podcast in quasi-real-life situations. I also want to clarify that this is not a simulation of coaching. Coaching is a good chunk different than this. While there's some overlap, there is a lot, lot more question asking and personalization in the coaching process that can't really be shown in these generic questions like this. But before we get into it, our goal with this podcast is to share free, helpful tools with you and anyone you know who is looking to improve their life. So take action, subscribe and share this podcast with them.
Speaker 2:So, just to clarify, all of the questions that I'm about to be asking are not my own personal questions. Rather, they're questions that I did some research on as far as what are some of the most common situations that people seek advice for, and we'll go from there.
Speaker 1:Sounds good.
Speaker 2:So the first question is I've been trying to be more emotionally open, but I wasn't raised that way.
Speaker 1:How do I even start? So I know that this is a scenario and that this isn't a real person, but for the sake of example, I would naturally be asking some questions to get more information and clarify before I could give an answer. To get more information and clarify before I could give an answer. I do have some thoughts immediately, but I would want to understand this person first. So can we start with some of the broad information and categories that this person would fall into, so I have an understanding of like who I'm talking to?
Speaker 2:Sure, do you want me to just make up?
Speaker 1:like a backstory All right church.
Speaker 2:Do you want me to just make up a backstory? All right, let's say it is a woman who is in her late 50s and she was raised in a small rural community, very close knit in Texas. And let's see what else could I give you for context. Her parents were incredibly hardworking, but they modeled an attitude of buckle up and get the work done and save your tears for your pillow.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Does that work?
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally. In lieu of asking a bunch of questions and getting too too deep into this person's fake details, my follow-up questions are going to be what does this hypothetical person do for work? What is this person's relationship status? And, if they have a partner, do they have any kids?
Speaker 2:So again, just come up with.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is a hypothetical.
Speaker 2:Gotcha Okay. So this person is a registered nurse, they are married and they do not have any kids, but they have pets.
Speaker 1:So, unlike real coaching, where this would be done over multiple sessions and I would get to know a lot more about the inner workings of the person, this is going to be a bit more generalized and blanket advice, but having some understanding of this person. There are multiple ways that we could start, but if you're looking to become more emotionally open, it starts with awareness. So I think the very first thing that we have to start looking at is self-awareness, which we would likely do by working on mindfulness for the sake of not re going back into some of the topics that we've talked about in their full depth, which is why we do these in-depth episodes on specific topics. This is going to be a conglomeration of a number of different things, and that is generally how real life works. So we've covered that.
Speaker 1:At your core, you're not all of the things that you ascribe to yourself, and you're not even truly the stories that you tell yourself about who you are. You are the consciousness that experiences your life, and we can use that understanding to help us have a base of being able to detach from the stories that we tell ourselves as the consciousness that's experiencing your life. One of our most powerful tools is mindfulness, just being aware of your thoughts, of your feelings, of your emotions, of your beliefs, of your values, where your needs are at. All of these things combine into self-awareness. So we're going to start with that base understanding and start utilizing mindfulness to increase our awareness of our thoughts and start doing things like metacognition, which is thinking about thinking, about thinking right.
Speaker 1:Once we've started to develop a self-awareness of who we are and how we think about things, we can move on to building emotional awareness. We build emotional awareness by once again using mindfulness to bring our awareness in the present moment to the emotions that we're feeling. And we can expand our emotional awareness by learning about all of the different emotions and the different words we can use to describe emotions, so that we don't only use words like happy, sad, mad. We can use much more nuanced language to shape our understanding of the feelings that we're feeling. This is the foundation, this is the starting place. By becoming more aware of our emotions and building this muscle of emotional awareness, it makes it that much easier to move on to becoming more emotionally open, which can then move on to share their emotions and be vulnerable when they likely have a foundational belief that has been built into them by their parents that you're not supposed to share or be open about your emotions because of I forget the exact verbiage, but I think you said something about.
Speaker 2:Like, essentially, tough it out and save your. It's supposed to be something you do in private, you know.
Speaker 1:Right, and I do want to be clear there are times for that. You don't necessarily want to, especially as a nurse, be having that emotional. So this might also be extra tough on this person because they are working with patients where they can't afford to have that emotional breakdown when that person is in a tough spot and that can be a very emotionally taxing job. But that's all the more reason for this person to develop emotional awareness, to give themselves space to feel when they have it, you know, and to then go on to develop skills like vulnerability, empathy and, eventually, emotional resilience, emotional regulation, and we would move on to some of the state change hacks of like your emotional state as well. I think another thing that we should touch on is a common misconception surrounding emotions being A form of weakness, or even people believing that they are logical and that they don't make decisions based on emotion.
Speaker 2:I just wanted to jump in here because once upon a time you told me an analogy of vulnerability being strength and flipping that dynamic of when you're vulnerable, you're being weak, and that visual has always stuck with me to this day and really helped me redefine my understanding of vulnerability as a strength. So I didn't know if that's where you were leading into, but I think that's super powerful and you should share it.
Speaker 1:It's not, but I do agree. Socially intelligent vulnerability is strength.
Speaker 2:Ah, keyword socially intelligent, which is true. You got to know when it's appropriate and when it's not.
Speaker 1:Because emotional dumping is not strength, if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:If that makes sense. Yes, anna is working on that.
Speaker 1:So what I'm getting at is actually that the mass majority of our motivations for doing things, if not almost all, are some form of feelings and emotions. Pain, pleasure, drive, enjoyment, motivation, even as a feeling, inspiration, anger, happiness, sadness, minor annoyance All of these emotions and feelings Drive our action Are the motivational drivers.
Speaker 1:You feel an emotional tug towards something that you value. You feel an emotional tug towards getting your needs met. All of these things are actually emotional. It is your emotional brain that drives the car. Your logical brain can figure things out and you can trick yourself into believing that your logical brain is driving the car and occasionally, with a lot of willpower, you can get yourself to have the logical brain drive the car for small little bouts of time. Brain drive the car for small little bouts of time, but most of the time what you're actually doing is having the emotional brain drive the car and your logical brain is rationalizing why you did it and saying, oh, because it just made the most sense to do it that way, because of this and this and this and this and this.
Speaker 2:So how, then, does an understanding of, and self-awareness of, emotions fit into the concept of socially aware vulnerability being a strength and not a weakness, like how does emotions tie into vulnerability and how do they together become a strength and not a weakness?
Speaker 1:And how do they together become a strength and not a weakness? I don't know that it's always necessarily about vulnerability, but I I think where I'm going here is.
Speaker 2:can you just share that analogy? That you shared with me a long time ago. I found it super powerful. It's somewhat related time ago, I found it super powerful, it's somewhat related and it really helped me rethink and understand how the purpose of these things developed right.
Speaker 1:All right, let me lead into it then. So, now that we're looking at the fact that emotions and feelings drive our behavior right, our actions, our decisions generally I mean you make logical decisions too, but our behavior and our actions are motivated by emotions and feelings. Everyone is like that. You are not the exception. And feelings Everyone is like that. You are not the exception. Everyone works that way. And once we accept that, then why would having an understanding, an awareness, an intelligence, some control over your emotions be a weakness? If almost everything that you do is driven by emotions and feelings, then having some awareness and intelligence and ability to regulate those things gives you much more power over your ability to actually do the things that you want to do in your life. And everyone else is the same. We all have our feelings and emotions. So sharing, through being vulnerable or being open about your emotions in a socially intelligent manner is strength, because it connects you to other people. It's strength because it takes courage. If you think about body language, I want you to picture someone who's feeling insecure.
Speaker 2:In my mind I see someone who has their head down. They maybe have their arms crossed in front of their body. Their back is hunched over.
Speaker 1:They're looking at the ground. Sure, they are protecting all of their vulnerable spots with that body language. If somebody were to attack them, they are already protecting all of their vulnerable to attack regions of their body, meaning that when you're insecure, you subconsciously want to protect yourself and hide, and not be vulnerable. What does confident body language look like?
Speaker 2:I'm picturing somebody with their chest lifted, their shoulders down with ease, their chin and eyes lifted, kind of like strutting and very open.
Speaker 1:In this body language. Their heart is exposed, their organs are exposed. They're not blocking themselves with their arms. Their neck is exposed. They're not in a guarded position. They're actually in a very vulnerable position because they feel secure. Vulnerability in language, when done in a socially intelligent manner, is the same. Vulnerability is a powerful tool towards confidence because it requires courage. People who aren't confident and are insecure aren't going to be vulnerable because they're feeling guarded. They're feeling insecure. Being vulnerable in a socially intelligent manner actually shows confidence because it takes courage.
Speaker 2:So, essentially, if this person has a self-awareness of their emotions, develops an intelligence of what they're feeling, and then moves towards developing an understanding of when it's appropriate to share those feelings and how to communicate them, they would actually be more secure and more confident and more vulnerable, right.
Speaker 1:Right, and vulnerability is honesty connection, because we're all human and we're all vulnerable. So by being vulnerable, by sharing these things that we all have in common as humans sharing these things that we all have in common as humans you also connect to other people more. It might feel uncomfortable, but that's because you're making yourself vulnerable. It takes courage, but that's why confident people use vulnerability and it connects you to other people.
Speaker 1:The confident person doesn't have to pretend that they're cool. They don't have to pretend that everything is perfect. That's often the insecure person trying to convince everybody that everything is perfect and not willing to share any of their personal details. And then the last thing I would say is, once you get to that point where you're going to start trying to use some intelligent vulnerability, do it with people that you know you can trust not to stab you you know like. Do it with people that you know you can be open with Maybe some of your closest people. In this hypothetical example, for her to start with her husband might be a good place to start. It depends on the person. Obviously, he may not be open to it, but it's somebody that knows her intimately and it's the least risky to do it.
Speaker 2:Whereas maybe jumping right in with her parents, who have a very different mentality and maybe are older and kind of stuck in that mindset, may not be the best person to start this out with, would you agree?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think there are some people that it may not be a good idea to be vulnerable with.
Speaker 2:And that's okay.
Speaker 1:Remember, vulnerability is actually opening yourself up to attack, and if you know that that is the type of person that is going to attack that vulnerability, then it doesn't actually make a lot of sense to be vulnerable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree, that makes sense to me.
Speaker 1:With awareness, self-awareness, mindfulness, understanding our thoughts and our emotions, and then working on building emotional awareness. That is the starting point for becoming more emotionally open.
Speaker 2:All right, let's do another scenario. This time I'm a man who's in my early 20s, and here is my scenario. I just recently started working out, but I feel super self-conscious at the gym. How do people push through that phase?
Speaker 1:Just a couple quick questions about this hypothetical man in his 20s. What is his relationship status?
Speaker 2:I'm a single man. Okay, what is?
Speaker 1:his relationship status. I'm a single man, okay. Has this individual had relationships in the past?
Speaker 2:He has, but nothing very successful, and he really wants. He's seeking a relationship. Okay, okay, seeking a relationship Okay. Is the primary motivation for this man getting strong in the gym to attract women, yes, and to feel more confident about his body.
Speaker 1:Okay, also, I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that. To be clear, I'm not trying to shame anybody. Whatever motivates you to take care of your health, use it. Is this person in school or have they graduated from a college?
Speaker 2:They are in their going into their senior year of college and they're on summer break, so they decided to start a gym membership.
Speaker 1:Okay, and then what? What? Not to get too far down the rabbit hole. What is this person going into for schooling?
Speaker 2:He's looking to get into the finance business.
Speaker 1:So we're talking about a man in finance with a trust fund who's 6'5 and has blue eyes.
Speaker 2:No, If he was 6'5, he'd probably be more confident. To be honest with you.
Speaker 1:You know what? To be honest in their favor, doesn't you know? This guy is going to the gym. He might be 6'5". Like we don't actually have to be 6'5". But just for the sake of example, for a second here, if you're 6'5 and have no muscle, you're going to look like this gangly long you know.
Speaker 2:So actually that could actually be a good scenario. He's really tall, but he's nice and gangly, and so he's like I don't want that anymore.
Speaker 1:Like I don't want that anymore, All right? Well, I'm not going to go with the trust fund.
Speaker 2:Let's take that out of the equation. He's poor. He's got college debt.
Speaker 1:All right, okay, so this one is a little bit different, because I would normally be asking a lot more questions, because this is much closer to the realm of what I directly coach. But for the sake of general good advice, is the goal to not feel insecure or is the goal to be successful at the gym?
Speaker 2:Can the guy have two goals? I would think both my question is yes, that's not.
Speaker 1:What is the primary goal? If he had to pick one, what is more important to him?
Speaker 2:I think what's more important to him would be getting strong, accomplishing his goal. But I think the biggest barrier is the insecurity right. So he's like how do I overcome that?
Speaker 1:So there's a short-term answer and there's a long-term answer, right? The short-term answer is in order to achieve the goal of going to the gym, take steps to reduce the friction and to make yourself not feel as insecure. If you need to wear some baggy clothes like sweatpants and a sweatshirt so that you don't look at yourself in the mirror and you know body shame yourself, so that you don't do the work, then do it. If your primary goal is to get strong, it is literally building a muscle. I'm not going to go through like the sets and reps and stuff he should do, but it's the same ideology that we talk about in life is like a muscle. It's going to be consistency, it's going to be showing up. Life is like a muscle, so take action and build it. Optimize for action. It's not going to be pretty immediately. There aren't switch flips that are going to immediately make you not feel insecure in the gym. If you feel insecure about your body Now, in the meantime you can do a lot of things like give yourself some self-compassion when you have those thoughts, become aware of your self-talk and reframe it into things like I am getting stronger, not, I am not strong.
Speaker 1:You can start changing self-limiting beliefs. You know this is what we handle in the coaching, but it's a process. It takes time. You can't just switch all of your beliefs and your self-talk overnight. You can play music that makes you feel pumped up and more confident while you're there so that it helps distract you, so that you're more in the zone at the gym. There's nothing wrong with using tips and tricks and hacks if they get you to do it. You know Five-second rule, when you're thinking about not going to the gym and you're thinking, oh, I'm going to feel so small and insecure, stop thinking about that. Five, four, three, two, one, put your shoes on, go. A lot of action is really about activation, energy. What is the minimum viable action that you can get yourself to do? Because emotion creates motion. But motion creates emotion. What does that matter? It means if you take action, you tend to feel a swell of motivation to continue that action.
Speaker 2:Can you say that again? I got a little lost in all the motions. What?
Speaker 1:Emotion.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Causes motion Okay or action.
Speaker 2:How we feel drives what we do. Right, right, okay.
Speaker 1:What we do also has a major effect on how we feel.
Speaker 2:Yeah, makes sense.
Speaker 1:So if you can get yourself through a burst of willpower, through feeling inspired, through the five second rule or any other means to start the action, the minimum viable action, oftentimes the motivation and emotion causing the motivation will come with it.
Speaker 2:That makes sense. Say the whole thing one more time, because that's actually really powerful. What was it again? The phrase.
Speaker 1:Emotion causes motion or action, and taking action or making a motion also drives your emotions.
Speaker 2:That totally makes sense, because when I think about when I'm stuck in a rut, not going and taking care of myself either physically, not eating, right, that kind of a thing and then I start taking the right actions, I start feeling better about myself, and then feeling better about myself makes me want to keep taking that action. Is that kind of the idea?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, not to get way into this concept of the physics of action where we talk about inertia, momentum, friction. The idea is, I mean, I guess we can touch on those, reduce the friction and all of the things that would prevent it, make it as easy as possible to go to the gym, the things that would prevent it, make it as easy as possible to go to the gym, right? Second would be inertia. Inertia is the day-to-day. An object at rest tends to stay at rest. An object in motion tends to stay in motion. Once you have started, once you've done the activation energy, the ignition of the car, you tend to stay in motion. When you're at rest and you haven't started, you're much more likely to stay at rest. If you've even started the smallest piece of what you can do, whether it's writing a book, and you write one word, you're much more likely to write the rest of the sentence. Once you start, once you take that minimum viable action, you are much more likely to stay in motion, because the emotion then comes and then momentum is really like inertia. When it comes to action, you are accumulating mass through multiple days of inertia, hence inertia over time. So if inertia is whether you're in motion or at rest during the day of or hour of or whatever. In the moment, momentum is like, hey, I did the thing yesterday. That makes it easier to do it today because I've started a momentum. There's some weight behind what I'm doing and the more days in a row that you start that you keep doing it, you build momentum and then eventually you build the habit and once the force of habit kicks in, it becomes automatic. And while you're there, you might as well start using some of the strategies for intrinsic motivation while you're doing it, so that you start building this sense of motivation towards wanting to do it in and of itself. And while you're doing it, you're building skills like grit and discipline and willpower.
Speaker 1:So, to summarize because this one is literally about building muscles and I'm not going to give specific workout advice, just the general ideology of how you build a muscle you utilize things like the compound effect and you do it over and over and over over time. So do whatever you need to to optimize the scenario so that you don't feel those things like wearing baggier clothes until you feel more comfortable listening to music that's going to pump you up. Start doing work on your own separately so that over time you can make progress on your self-talk, on your beliefs, maybe on giving your body some love at home instead of at the gym where all the super muscly guys are. Do it in private.
Speaker 1:I think sometimes there's pressure that you must accept your body right now, you know, and that you're like doing yourself a disservice if you can't. But what if you can't? In that moment it's okay. Give yourself compassion for feeling those feelings and do what you need to do to still accomplish your goals, using all of the things behind building this part of your life like a muscle and taking action and utilizing all of the understanding of the physics reducing the friction, using inertia, using intrinsic motivation. Inertia using intrinsic motivation. Building momentum over time and then building a habit or even a routine or a string of habits so that this just becomes automatic.
Speaker 2:I'm just kind of sitting here in awe a little bit, if I can be totally honest, because you're really good at giving actionable advice in a way that is easy to understand and I really like this format that we're doing. I'm hoping that people listening to it will get a lot of value from it, find ways that it can relate to their own situations and get some actionable steps to help them or apply it to their slightly different situation. You know, and let us know what you guys think. If you think this is super helpful, if you want to hear more of these scenario type episodes, reach out, let us know. We were trying different things and just seeing what what works. But, David, I just wanted to give you a quick moment of praise and be like wow it's, this is really cool. I like it a lot.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you, and I'm hoping that what we talked about during this episode is helpful and applicable to a lot of people in a lot of different scenarios. Yes, I had us make the person more specific, but that doesn't mean that there isn't still a ton of crossover and parts of it that are applicable in many other scenarios. While this is all generally helpful and beneficial information, it isn't personalized. If you're looking for individualized advice and are interested in receiving coaching, you can reach out to me at sagecoachingsolutions at gmailcom. Sagecoachingsolutions at gmailcom. And remember you are enough and you deserve to fill up your inner cup with happiness, true confidence and resilience.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Sage Solutions Podcast. Your time is valuable and I'm so glad that you choose to learn and grow here with me. If you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on more sage advice. One last thing the legal language. This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. No coaching client relationship is formed. It is not intended as a substitute for the personalized advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist or other qualified professional.