Wendy Sterling – Breaking Through Resistance and Choosing Yourself

Episode Description

When Wendy Sterling suspected that her husband was cheating, she tried to talk herself out of confronting that reality.  As a lifelong people-pleaser, Wendy was inclined to deny what she already suspected in her heart to be true. When she finally listened to her intuition she confirmed her worst fears, but also started on a journey that led her through divorce to an amazing new life, with a new business and a new relationship.

Wendy now coaches other women through their own divorces, helping them to discover who they are now, and who they truly want to become. She then guides them through their resistance and helps them to heal from their divorce and to choose themselves so that they can create a life they truly love.

Show Notes

About Wendy
Wendy Sterling is an international best-selling author, leading Divorce Empowerment Coach & Healer, and the founder of The Divorce Rehab™. She helps women who are having trouble moving forward and are tired of feeling stuck in pain, fear, resentment, anger, and guilt to find joy, self-worth, and freedom.  Wendy is a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC), a Certified Divorce Specialist (CDS), an Advanced ThetaHealer®, and a Certified Sound Healer.  She hosts her own podcast, The Divorced Woman’s Guide, and has been featured on NBC, The List, Daily Blast Live, and Good Day LA.

Where to Connect with Wendy
You can find Wendy on Facebook at The Divorce Rehab With Wendy Sterling and Instagram at Divorce Rehab With Wendy.  You can listen to Wendy’s podcast The Divorced Woman’s Guide. And you can find free resources at her website Divorce Sucks Now What  and purchase Wendy's book titled  Divorce Sucks Now What.

Transcript

Breaking Through Resistance and Choosing Yourself

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

divorce, life, faith, lived, knew, marriage, happening, ultimately, people, coach, mom, learned, coaching, needed, clients, gave, kids, decision, thought, hear

SPEAKERS

Karen Covy, Wendy Sterling

Karen Covy  00:03

Hello and welcome to Off the Fence, a podcast where we deconstruct difficult decisions so that we can start to figure out what keeps us stuck. And more importantly, how do we get unstuck? I'm your host, Karen Covy, a former divorce lawyer turned divorce coach and entrepreneur. With me today is my guest, Wendy Sterling. Now, I'm going to read your bio because there's so much here.

Wendy Sterling is an international best-selling author, a leading divorce empowerment coach and healer, and the founder of The Divorce Rehab. She helps women who are having trouble moving forward and are tired of feeling stuck in pain, fear, resentment, anger and guilt to find joy, self-worth and freedom. And boy, doesn't that sound good? Wendy is a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach, a Certified Divorce Specialist, and an Advanced Theta Healer and a Certified Sound Healer. She hosts her own podcast, The Divorced Woman's Guide, and she's been featured on NBC, The List, Daily Blast Live and Good Day L.A. Wendy, welcome to the show.

Wendy Sterling  01:11

Thank you. It's such an honor to be here, Karen. Thank you for inviting me to share my wisdom with your audience.

Karen Covy  01:18

It is totally My pleasure. You do have a lot of wisdom to share, which is why I invited you here. So, I'd like to start though. Before we get into all of your nuggets of gold here, I'd like to start with a little bit of your backstory. Can you tell the listeners about your own journey with divorce and how that led to where you are today?

Wendy Sterling  01:40

Absolutely. So, I was the last person that anyone would have ever thought would have been divorced of all of our friends, that's really the God's honest truth. Yet at the same time, I am so grateful that I have gone through the experience that I have, because it has created this incredible life of mine. So, I will take your listeners back to this day that was gosh, almost seven years ago where my now ex-husband and I were driving home from a couple's night out. It was very late, and his cell phone rang not once but five times from a female colleague. It was in this moment that I got the hardest punch in my gut that essentially said, ‘Wake up to what is actually going on behind the scenes.’ Of course, I tried to talk myself out of what I knew the truth was, and of course, my ex-husband tried to talk me out of what I knew the truth was. I didn't waver and instead decided to trust it. And lo and behold did indeed confirm my worst suspicion, which was that he was having an affair.

It was a wake-up call that I did not see coming, I did not want it. And at the same time, it was so necessary because what I had come to realize was that I was a people pleaser. I was in a codependent marriage. I was also being a version of myself that he saw me to be. And through the course of the next year, we did separate and I vowed to really work on myself to figure out what it was that I wanted. Every bone in my body wanted to stay married. I didn't want my kids to be in a divorced home. My parents were married still 50 years. Divorce was not an option for me, literally, that's what I kept telling myself. And so, as I was doing work. I was in therapy, I was listening to podcasts, I was reading books, like doing what everybody does, right? But the needle wasn't moving. I wasn't getting unstuck. I just kept revisiting my past and how my childhood created behaviors, how I was manifesting all this in my life. And it wasn't until I saw a post from a friend who talked about life coaching. And the more curious I got about that, the more I understood that really what life coaching is all about, it's about looking at where it is that you want to go and how do you get there from where you are at this point. It wasn't focusing on my past. And so, I knew that that was what I needed.

I'm a go big or go home kind of gal. So, for me, it was I'm jumping in and I'm going to get certified as a life coach because working in corporate for 20 years, I was like, “Oh, this will be great for my leadership. It'll help me with my leadership skills of managing a team.” So, I thought it'll help me. I didn't really realize that it was going to be a massive career change until I got into a classroom and started not only learning how to be a coach, but being coached by my classmates, and allowing myself to be vulnerable and going there with my divorce.

So, in the course of two days, I had moved through more emotions around my divorce than I had the entire eight to nine months before. I knew that there was something here that I needed to bring out into the world. And so that literally was the moment that my life changed. What that woke me up to was that I deserve a partner who respected me, who wanted to be with me, who chose me. I ultimately wanted that person to be respectful of me choosing me. So, what choosing me looked like was asking for a divorce, and deciding to not only end my marriage, but to also leave my corporate career and to essentially create a program that I went through myself to bring out into the world. So, that's how Divorce Rehab was born. My life has been completely different ever since. While there have been some struggles, and there have been some hard times, what I always like to say is that, anytime I came up against an obstacle, I viewed it as a detour that I was supposed to, ‘Okay. Now, I'm supposed to shift directions and do something else.’ So, slowly but surely, I went from a very tumultuous relationship with my ex-husband to we are super, super close co-parents. Never thought that was ever going to happen. And as we were discussing, before we hit record, I'm in a committed relationship with my partner. He and I live together and our families are commingling. And that's ultimately, this vision that divorce can be the most empowering experience that you go through to design the life you love is possible for anyone because I'm doing it and I've walked hundreds of thousands of clients down this same path. That's ultimately the vision that I want for the world and for every woman out there to feel.

Karen Covy  06:53

First of all, that's beautiful. So, thank you for sharing your story. Second of all, there are so many things that I just want to dive into that that you've mentioned. Starting with winding you all the way back to that day in the car when the phone rang five times, and your intuition was just lighting you up, right? How did you decide to trust that intuition when on some level, none of us want to know that truth, right? So, you didn't want to know what the truth was. Your husband was, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no.” How did you get the courage or the wisdom or the whatever you want to call it, that led you to say, “No, I know this.”

Wendy Sterling  07:47

Yeah. So, it was really me leaning into the curiosity around what was coming up. So later, when we had gotten home, I requested to see his cell phone. And he said, “No.” So, it was a continuous like, boom, boom, boom, like he's not showing me the cell phone, he's leaving the room to go call her, making up excuses. Because she was actually in a relationship. One thing after another. Usually, I would believe his lies. And at that moment, I was like, I just kept hearing a voice and it's like, “It's a lie. It's not true. That's not true. That's not true.” I remember we went to bed and not getting along. I woke up the next morning, because habitually, I go--this happened on a Saturday night, Sunday morning, I woke up and I went to go work out. And while I was working out, I just like, “Man, I don't think I've ever worked out so hard in my life.” And I just kept hearing, like, “You've got to see the phone. You've gotten to see the phone, like, the phone is going to tell you everything you need.”

I just was so like, I needed evidence, right? Like, I had to prove myself, right? So, honestly, it was this feeling that I had to prove it in order to justify that my intuition was right. And of course, he wouldn't give me his phone. And that is when everything hit the fan and I kicked him out. And from that day forward, we haven't lived together. Now, I know what that voice sounds like. I know where it feels. I know where my intuition speaks to me in my body because I have a physical reaction when it's happening. It doesn't always necessarily mean that it's a negative thing, right? Like I get intuitive hits that are great all the time. But it really took me having to justify that, ‘Okay. My intuition, that's my intuition. It's right. I get to act on it.’ Getting that evidence instilled in me the belief that it was true.

Karen Covy  10:08

Here's the interesting part. So, you kicked him out, he's gone. But then you don't immediately file for divorce. I think I heard you said was you were living separate for around a year or so. And you were just mired in the divorce is not an option. I can't do this. Mired in all the negativity surrounding divorce, and that it was coaching that helped you break through. Can you speak to that? Because so many of both of our clients are in that space of being stuck and not being able to break through to make a decision? Can you talk about how coaching helped you to do that?

Wendy Sterling  10:51

Yeah, absolutely. This is really how I approach the women that I work with who are in this, should I stay or should I go phase, right? It's crossed their mind. The second that D word comes up, it's like, ‘Okay. I got to start paying attention to this.’ Really, what coaching helped me to understand was that I had become somebody different. Who I was now was not who I was the 15 years prior when he and I stood and said our vows and said I do. So, what coaching really helped me to do and what I lend to my clients who are in that phase is, what's important is figuring out who it is that you are now. Based on everything that you have been through in this given moment, what is it that you want with your life? Who is it that you are? Why is it that you are experiencing what the universe is handing to you as a very big lesson? So, how is it that I'm going to move forward through this? I was in resistance, because I was like, “I'm going to make him be who I want him to be. I am going to make this marriage work. I am not going to be a statistic of divorce. I am not going to have my kids be in a family where they're going to one house over the other.” I mean, he was my soulmate. We met in college, like we had grown up together, like I didn't know adult life without him. And so, my fear kept me wanting to make things work, when what coaching was showing me was that he was not what I wanted anymore. He was not the partner that I wanted to continue sharing my life with, that he was not on the same path as me anymore.

Ultimately, what I learned was that our values could not have been more different. So, what I learned and what I teach is really understanding who it is that you are, and from there, then deciding, is that person on that path with you? Are they part of that vision? Who it is that they are? Their values that that are showing up, is that the version of them that you want on this path?

Now, please, listeners, I have worked with women who have fixed their marriages with their husbands because it has been a co-creation process. I'm happy for them. I am not pro divorce. I am pro you. I am pro choosing you and whatever that gets to look like for you. I think that what the biggest turning point was for me was that moment where I realized that choosing me was actually an option, and that didn't have to be with him.

So, choosing me meant being alone, being single, and stepping into the possibility that my kids would be better off seeing me in a healthy marriage, even if it wasn't with their dad. So, I relied on my faith of, ‘Okay. I can do this, and I'm going to help my kids. I'm going to get my kids the support that they need, because I knew I couldn't help them. I had to put my oxygen mask on first.’ I hear so often, and Karen, I'm sure you do, too, where they're like, ‘Oh, but my kids, I'm going to stay for my kids. I'm going to stay for my kids.’ And I am a firm believer that your kids are better off being in two homes where the energy is positive, there's joy, there's happiness, and there's love versus one home, where there's bickering, there's fighting, there's negative energy and it wasn't healthy. And I knew that. So, really, it's about trusting the vision you want to create is possible, but it doesn't have to be with that same person.

Karen Covy  15:03

Absolutely. I want to zero in on something that you just said that you finally got the strength to choose yourself. Now, a lot of our clients see choosing themselves as being selfish, right? Is there a difference between that, between choosing you and being selfish and not caring about your family, your kids, your vows, your blah, blah, blah?

Wendy Sterling  15:30

Yeah, I was guilty of that. I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I'm being so selfish.” My whole life I was a people pleaser. I was all about wanting to do for others and receive that external validation that what I was doing was, “Oh, okay. I'm doing this right,” check the box, or like, ‘Oh, they're going to still be friends with me, or they're going to like me.’ And ultimately, what that only ended up doing was distancing me more from who I was. I never took time out for myself. I waited for my husband to be like, “Go take a day,” or like Mother's Day or my birthday. It was like two days a year, I got to do my own thing if I wanted to or a couple of hours here and there. But I was always look at him and be like, “Why aren’t you giving me a break?” It's like, “Oh, yeah, I have to use my voice and actually ask for what it is that I need.”

So, ultimately, what choosing you is all about is understanding what your voice sounds like, how to use it in a way where you feel heard, but also in a way where you're taking care of yourself. Using your voice to ask for what it is that you need is not selfish. It is called living your life and creating an environment around you where everybody is thriving, right? When I wasn't having my needs being met by myself, I kept relying on him to meet my needs. Whereas it was like, ‘Well, of course, I was looking to him because I didn't even know how to meet my own needs.’ And so, the self-care process taught me what my needs were, how it was that I could go about asking for what it was that I needed. And understanding that when my needs were met, like, I was a great, happy person. I mean, I remember my kids, they're like, “You're so happy. You're not angry all the time.” I mean, I'm closer to my children now than I ever was when he and I were still married. It's funny because there's moments where I'm like, “Wow, I never used to be like this.” I was very intense. I was on eggshells all the time, I felt and I had this need to control all the time.

So, what I realized was that control, it's a false sense. Having control is a false sense of anything. Ultimately, I knew that when I was in control of myself, my needs, my desires, my wants, that my entire world around me shifted. And so, it's really about flipping the script around what you think self-care is really all about. It's not selfish, it's a necessity. And it's not a luxury, it is a necessity, right? So, it took me a bit of time to understand that, but then afterwards, all my relationships changed, every single one.

Karen Covy  18:42

What's so beautiful about that story, and what I really hope people hear and take away is that your relationship with your kids changed, what you were teaching them about relationships changed, their level of joy and happiness in the household changed because you changed. So, I hear so many people, especially women, but also men, saying, “Hey, I don't want to leave because of the kids.” What I'm hearing you say is that sometimes, if you do it properly, leaving can actually be beneficial for the kids.

Wendy Sterling  19:22

Absolutely. I mean, my kids are amazing human beings. They were 7 and 10 when we separated and they're now almost 17 and 13 and a half and yeah, it was a little bit of a thunderstorm for about two years. There were other extenuating circumstances that happened. My ex-husband has also remarried. He has a three-year-old daughter like my kids have a half-sister, and there was a lot of stuff but one of the things that I do say and I don't even know if I say this enough or how often I've said this, but I do believe that children of divorce are really kind of thrust into having these life experiences faster than kids of marriage. Again, I'm not pro divorce in any way. But my kids have learned a lot of life skills and how to adapt, and how to see that they can really overcome anything. The best gift that I gave my children by getting divorced from their dad, or I should say, the two best gifts I gave them was them seeing how their dad and I get to be happy, even if it means that we're not together. I've also gifted them with the ability to help communicate in a healthy way, with me. And as a result, to be able to communicate with their dad, and to stand in the power of their own voices instead of feeling scared or having all these emotions. It's always been like this open communication. You get to have your feelings and I don't have to like them, and that's okay. Like, I want you to express yourself. I know that they wouldn't be the amazing, amazing young adults, teens, I don't even know what to call them, because it goes so fast these days.

Karen Covy  21:16

I know. It’s true.

Wendy Sterling  21:19

They are amazing. And I know that it's because yeah, they kind of got forced to grow up pretty fast and they're better off for it. I don't see it as a negative that they experienced. They had their own experience about it.

Karen Covy  21:35

Yeah. I think too many people, I mean, there's a whole discussion out in the world right now about how we're so busy protecting our children from life, that when it's time for them to go engage in life, they don't know how. So, I think that what you're saying makes a lot of sense.

I'd like to segue now into your book, because you wrote a book that's called Divorce Sucks. Now what? And shameless little plug for your book, it is available on Amazon, and we will link to that in the show notes for anyone who wants to follow up and learn more. In your book, you also talk about a lot of things in your story. And you mentioned a couple minutes ago here today that when you got a divorce, not only did you get a divorce, but you also totally changed careers and you took a big leap of faith. This podcast is all about making big decisions, and those are two very, very big life decisions. How did you, while you're going through a divorce, decide to change careers?

Wendy Sterling  22:46

Yeah, and actually, there was a third doozy in there too, which is that the same day that I asked for a divorce, my mom was diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. I talked about that in my book as well and I bring that to the surface too, because my mom was a very instrumental part of my own work. I'm getting like full body chills right now talking about this. But she was instrumental in my process, and I in hers.

So, it was that moment where I realized that I had been living my life for somebody else and I had been in a career that while I was so good at it, I was miserable. I lived with anxiety. I lived with stress. I lived with resentment. And I didn't want to live like that anymore. Now, I will also let everybody know who's listening that at the time, I did not know the financial circumstances of my marriage until after I quit my job, and came to discover that our finances were not where I thought that they were.

So, I took a very big leap of faith, and trusted myself to be able to create a new business. Now, also understand that my corporate job, I worked in ad sales. I was the person that they brought in to build regions from nothing. So, essentially, I was an entrepreneur within the corporate structure doing sales. So, I had the skill set, and I knew how to build something from nothing. And I knew how to do it in a very short period of time, because that's what I was continuously tasked to do. So, I had the skill set to be able to translate myself into this entrepreneurship.

I also was able to recognize that the best coaches have coaches. That is how this works, you guys. And I knew that I had to invest in myself. I had to invest in people who were doing what I needed to learn how to do so that they could teach me how to go out into the world. I knew my methodology. I knew my five-step program, I knew exactly what I needed to coach around. But I was like, “How do I launch my own business? How do I do marketing? How do I do branding? What is my brand?” So, I was really smart and invested in myself by hiring many coaches. There's never been a day that I have not had a coach since I launched my business. I've always had at least one coach. Business, marketing, spirituality, whatever it was, that's what I needed.

So, for the transactional side, I invested in myself. I was in debt. I was in debt, and invested in myself, regardless, because I knew if I didn't, I wasn't going to get over this hump of my divorce. So, I put my faith in those coaches that I hired, God bless them all. And I love them all. And I still have really good relationships with them. I also knew that there was a part of me, that was the spiritual piece, and this is where my mom comes into play. And so, my mom was navigating ultimate death, I was navigating divorce, which is a death. And so, my mom and I were walking this parallel path. It was interesting, because we were both contributing to each other's pity party, like, “Why me? Why is this happening to me?” And ultimately, my mom and I, our mindsets started shifting simultaneously where it was like, “Okay. What is happening is happening for us. There's something that we're both supposed to be learning.” A lot of what I continued to educate myself around from a spiritual lens landed itself to my mom. So, as you read in my bio, I'm an Advanced Theta healer. And Theta Healing is a methodology of energy healing that allows me to go into a deep meditation. It's the theta brainwave, dream sleep state, where I'm able to connect with creator and impact people's beliefs and feelings and things like that through creator. It's not me doing it, it's creator, universe, call it whatever you want.

So, not only was I seeing how the energy healing was helping me because I still felt like a really deep spiritual energetic connection to my ex-husband, which I needed help breaking. I tried Reiki, it didn't work. Theta broke him from me energetically. And then ultimately, I started doing Theta on my mom. Understand that when my mom was diagnosed, she shouldn't have lived longer than a year, year and a half. And my mom lived for four and a half years after her diagnosis. I believe that our spiritual connection to one another, my ability to do energy work on her simultaneously while she's doing chemo and doing the medical piece that she needed to do too, but it opened the door for her spiritually to receive energy work, and I opened my doors to receive energy work.

What I ended up learning from my mom was life is now, and nothing should be placed on hold. And you only have today. None of us know how long we have. I don't say life is short. I say life is now. Literally now is the only time that matters. What I know to be true is that without my mom's support, I wouldn't be where I am today. And even though she passed away last January, she's still with me. I know that she's with me. And I know that where she is now is so much more valuable to me than if she was still physically in this world. So, ultimately, I trusted and I surrendered to a higher power. I surrendered and trusted in the path that was being laid for me because it's like the same day, the two rocks of my life were gone. That's why I knew that I that I was on my path of really like you've got to get really grounded in what you are, like exactly who it is that you are and I haven't stopped on that path since that day.

Karen Covy  29:31

Wow, that is a really powerful story. Thank you so much for sharing it. Based on all of your experience, it sounds like you had your ups and downs, of course you had two of. Yes, now, you're on the other side of it, which is beautiful because you can then show people there is another side and there absolutely is but you have to get through all that muckin’, yuckin, what have you. And a big piece of that was your faith, your faith in yourself, faith in the universe or spirit or faith in your relationship with your mom, faith in so many things. When a client comes to you, who's in the beginning of that journey, what advice could you give to them when their faith is flagging or they're questioning whether they even have it? How could the universe do this to me? Oh, my gosh, everything I ever thought of must be wrong, and their faith is gone. It abandons them, what would you tell them?

Wendy Sterling  30:42

Yeah, that's a great question, Karen. Ultimately, what I say to those women, and really, what I had to say to myself was, we were living in an illusion of what we thought our partner and our life looked like. What ends up happening when divorce happens is the veil gets taken off. And all of a sudden, we're being shown things and we don't want to see it. And so, a lot of times, our fear is what blinds our ability to have faith in why this is happening. So, the process through which I've walked myself through, I've walked clients through around this is really changing their story, because we have a version of who we think they were. We have a version of what we think our marriage looks like, because we kept fighting for it. But ultimately, it wasn't the reality. Right? So, there's a mourning process that has to come with this. The faith can't come until you move through the mourning of the version of the life and the person that you thought existed. It's not that they changed. It's that you've changed. You are the one who is starting to see clearly. Reality is starting to now appear to you. So, it is a step. It's a baby step process. This isn't something that happens overnight. I always tell people, like, “How many years were you married? Do you honestly think that a six-week course is going to cure you of decades of behavior?” That’s not how this works.

But when you hear that in a year, you can have a totally different perspective on life and be living that perspective, that is to me, I'd be like, “Where do I sign up?” At the time, I was like, “That's not fast enough.” So much of this is also an education process to understand that it is a step-by-step process. I think that what gets in the way so many times is that people are like, “I want to go from A to Z, now.” It’s like, ‘Okay. Well, think about the Alphabet. There's a lot of letters in between. So, let's start with A to B, and that's going to get you one step closer to Z. Okay. We're at B now, let's go to C.” And so, it's really about understanding from a bird's eye level of the version of the life that you thought you have. I mean, I had all these preconceived. I was like, ‘Oh, he's this, I'm going to change him. And he's bad, he can change. I'm going to change him. I'm going to fix him. I'm going to do this. I'm going to that.’ And it was like, “Wait, no, I'm the one that has to change.’ So, changing decade's worth of ingrained stories takes time. It is 100% possible, but you've got to be willing to put in the work. And it's going to take you some time to be able to do that. What I have found is those baby steps are what build your faith in the process and in the healing and in the recovery.

Karen Covy  34:00

Yeah. What you're saying is so critical for people to hear. And that is when you're in a difficult situation, when you're in pain, you don't want to stay there. You want to be out, like you said in a second, but life doesn't work that way. Having conversations with so many people about coaching, about investing in themselves, they're like, ‘Oh, I'm not going to be able to do this in one session.’ No, no. And it's exactly to your point what you said that you've spent years sometimes decades in a particular marriage, in a particular situation that is now not serving you to think that you're just going to get over it in an hour is unrealistic. That's not the way life works.

The sad part is that once people when they're thinking that way, they want to go faster, faster, faster, and when you tell them the truth, that you can only go a certain speed, it's not going to be instant gratification like we're so used to in our society, that they're going to have to work at it and wait, then they don't start at all because it's not fast enough. But the irony is, then they never get to where they want to be.

Wendy Sterling  35:16

Exactly. Well, because what ends up happening is they end up beating themselves up. Why isn't this working? Never mind, I'm going to throw in the towel. We beat ourselves up when it's not happening fast enough. I was even just talking to a client yesterday and it's like, we're constantly in transformation. So, it's like, once we nail down something, we're like, “Oh, I've got this. Okay, great.” And then we feel like we get smacked upside the head again. It's not that you never learned it, it's that it's hitting you differently because you're in this evolved place and so now, you have to learn something new, right? So, we don't give ourselves enough grace or compassion to just see that we're human. We're souls having a human experience. We're here to learn. We're here to evolve. And so, instead of seeing things as knocking you down and just being like, never mind, I'm like, “Okay, universe, bring it on. What am I supposed to learn now?” Don't get me wrong. I'm in resistance. It's like, “Oh, God, here we go again.” But at the same time, I'm like, but I know what's on the other side is going to be so worth it. So, I just would invite everyone to just have some faith that this is a process and to not let the resistance or your fear of failure stop you because failure is just a way to not do something like great, information. Okay. Never going to do that again.

Karen Covy  36:49

Yeah. 100%. If you look at failure, what we perceive is failure, if we look at it as something like, ‘Okay, that didn't work, that's information,’ instead of internalizing and saying, ‘Well, because this thing that I did didn't work, I am a failure.’ Those are two entirely different concepts. Right?

Wendy Sterling  37:12

Absolutely. Yup. 100%.

Karen Covy  37:15

This has been a fascinating conversation. But now, I want to throw you a curveball. I love to ask other people, because this podcast is all about decision making and how you've made decisions, what you teach people about how they can make decisions. So, now I want to ask you, what is the best decision you've ever made?

Wendy Sterling  37:39

That's easy. Ending my marriage. I mean, my God, best decision I ever made in my life. I said to my ex-husband, I'm like, “Man, best gift I ever gave myself was ending our marriage, like the best decision I ever made.” And it was the hardest one I have ever, ever tackled. I'm the type of person where it's like, you know, and this kind of speaks to something we talked about earlier, which is that, like, I'm the type of person that I don't want to live my life with regret. And so, for me, you mentioned how we were separated for an entire year, I needed that year to know that I wasn't ever going to have regret. I wasn't ever going to wonder what if. I didn't want to live my life like that. And so, I knew that I had given everything. There was nothing left for me to try to do at that point. And so, that decision to end my marriage was the best thing I ever gave myself. Because I gave myself me. I gave me back. I was done giving myself to the world. And my life has been exponentially more joyful, happier. I love my life. I'm the happiest I've ever been. And so, what I can say to your listeners is sometimes our best decisions are the hardest ones that we ever have to make for ourselves.

Karen Covy  39:20

That is so critical. I don't know where we got this idea from, but we all have this idea that well, if it was the best decision, it must have been easy, right? But those two words, easy and best, aren't necessarily linked. I mean, it can be, but they can also be the hardest decisions that turned out to be the best. So, Wendy, thank you so much for sharing so many golden nuggets of wisdom. I knew you would. I'm so thrilled to have you on the show. I'd love to have you back again. We'll have to do a round two because I have a whole list of questions that I didn't even get to. We’ll have to dive in a little bit more later. But before we close and wrap this up, can you tell people where they could find you?

Wendy Sterling  40:07

Yeah, of course. Well, the easiest way honestly, is my podcast. So, I too have one. It's called the Divorce Woman's Guide. And then across social media, I am Divorce Rehab with Wendy. So, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and then you can also find me on LinkedIn. And then my website, wendysterling.net. I also have amazing resources. I have a website for my book, which is divorcesucksnowwhat.com. And there's a ton of free resources on there that are tied back to a lot of the lessons that I learned. It also ties back to my five-step program. So, there's great, great downloadables and actionable steps that you guys can take wherever it is that you are. So, thank you, Karen, for having me today. It was such an honor. And of course, I'm happy to come back if you would like.

Karen Covy  40:57

Awesome. That's wonderful. Thank you so much for being here. And for those of you out there who are watching or listening, please if you like what you've heard, subscribe to the podcast, subscribe to the YouTube channel, give us a thumbs up and I look forward to talking with you again next time.