Episode 10 transcript

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Hi, good peeps. Welcome to the flexible neurotic podcast. You know that friend that you can call to ask anything? That's me. Dr. Sarah Milken. I'm known to my friends as the flexible, neurotic. What does flexible, neurotic even mean? Let me be neurotic while I take out my golden shovel to dig deep for all the golden nuggets in the hottest topics, from parenting, to education, to neuroscience, and maybe even some beauty secrets. So we can all start living more flexibly. Come join us for edgy conversations with rad moms, innovative thought leaders and well being practitioners helping you find that sweet spot between chaotic and chill. If you're craving that sweet spot, grab your golden shovel with me. You will walk away with nuggets you can start using today. Hi, good peeps. This is Dr. Sarah Milken, the flexible, neurotic. And this is my first solo cast. I can't even believe I'm saying that because my husband's been asking me for months. Sarah, what are you going to do a solo cast? And I'm like, how am I going to do a solo cast? That's so hard? How am I going to talk to myself for 20 3040 minutes? I'm so used to talking to a guest asking questions, having a conversation. But how do I talk to myself actually sitting here in my bedroom with a pink microphone that you've all seen on Instagram? Trying to figure out how I'm going to do this. It's so much easier talking to another person. I guess the question I've been asking myself is why does this solo cast seem so scary? Why couldn't I get myself to do a solo cast? You guessed it self limiting beliefs. How could I do this? Who am I to do this? Will anyone even listen to this? And then I remembered how nervous I was when I first started the flexible neurotic podcasts in the summer. And I was interviewing real guests. I think just one day I said, Oh my god, Sarah, if you don't just record an episode to start the flexible, neurotic, you're not even going to get started. And I had no idea what I was doing. But I knew that I needed to find a friend who could help me. So I called my friend Angela Nazarian. As you guys know, if you've been listening to my podcast, she's the first episode of my podcast. She's a friend, a mentor, a friend tour. I think that's a word. And I just said, Angela, will you be my first guest? And she said, of course. And I thought,

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oh my god, amazing. She said, Yes.

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Oh my god, I actually like have to do it. And I have to figure it out myself. And I actually have to record it and put it out into the world. It felt liberating on a certain level, but it also felt like a total freak attack on another level. I have to be honest, I'm sitting here right now, my cortisol is pumping. I just yelled at my whole family downstairs to be quiet. And I didn't have sounds reverberating into my recording. My heart is racing. I'm wondering, is anyone even gonna listen to this, like, all these self limiting beliefs that are going through my head? I just have to talk to myself and say self, you've done hard things before and anything worth doing is hard. And I know all of you from all your DMS and amazing messages or have a lot of the same feelings I do. Who am I to do this? Who's going to listen? How do I take a small step out into the world and not be judged? I know that episode one and throughout some of my other episodes, I have tried to weave in my own story about myself my past, my academic trajectory, my husband, my kids, my parents the whole thing. I think my husband probably thinks that I overshare a little bit, but he's cool with it at the end of the day. Except the Sherry Ross episode, I think was like, I think maybe you overshare but I'm just going to pretend that that didn't happen. So thank God for that. Episode Four was pretty juicy. But I do have to say that getting into the solo episode is definitely hard. And I will be covering some of the things that I've covered throughout some of the other episodes. But I wanted to put it all together here in one how I started the flexible neurotic who I am bits and pieces of my story. So I want to start at the beginning. So before this podcast, I was 45 years old. I'm now turning 46 and a couple of weeks. I'm a Pisces. I grew up in Santa Monica. I lived with both of my parents, Barbara and David in Santa Monica. My parents still live in the same house that I grew up in. I probably think that it's mostly all the same furniture in my bedroom. And I went to public school named Franklin on Montana Avenue. Then I went to Lincoln Middle School, which was for me seventh and eighth grade. And then my brother and I applied to private school. I started private school ninth grade, my brother started private school in eighth grade. Both of my parents are doctors, my dad's a dentist, my mom has a PhD and runs the largest nonprofit in the country for special needs kids, I guess I'd say like my family structure was, you know, mom, dad, man, women equal both my parents were the breadwinners, they both helped pay for private school. It wasn't just one or the other. They invested money in a college account so that my brother would not my brother, and I wouldn't have to stress about money. And we went to private school from ninth to 12th grade. And that's where I met my husband, Jeremy. He couldn't believe that. I met my husband in ninth grade. I keep telling my kids that they should probably stop and take a look around because they're in 10th grade and eighth grade. And I'm like you guys, you might be meeting your future husband and wife or partner sitting next to you know, my husband used to poke me with a pencil from behind just to annoy me. And then I ended up marrying him. Anyway, so I went through high school, I actually went to UCLA. My first year of college, I got into Penn, the University of Pennsylvania from high school for freshman year. And then I think I had a last minute freak attack. And I was like, Oh, my God, I don't want to leave my parents. So I went to UCLA after the first quarter at UCLA, I thought, Oh, my gosh, why didn't I go to Penn? And I reapplied and I thought, okay, if I get it back in again, I'm gonna go and if I don't, then I'm just gonna stay where I am. And I got back and again, and my husband found out I was transferring to Penn. He has a very different story than I do. But of course, my story is the right story, because it's my story. And he went to Penn and he made sure I was a couple even before we got there. So we have been not including the one month in ninth grade that we quote, dated. We have been together 27 years 17 married if you can even believe that. We went to college together. We moved to London for a year I worked for an advertising agency, he worked for investment bank. And then we came back to LA I applied to grad school and I started at a master's program at USC, the University of Southern California. And I got my master's in PhD in educational psychology. And I worked through my whole Master's and PhD, it was four years and I worked full time for a foreign educational consultant in Woodland Hills, while Jeremy and I lived together in Brentwood. And as an educational consultant, I worked with a woman who specialized in finding appropriate school placement for kids based on their social and emotional and learning profiles. And late in the day, I would go I would drive from Woodland Hills to USC, and I would teach class go to graduate school. And I can't even believe it's been I don't know, a lot of years since that time. And now I have my own kids who are teenagers, which is even crazier. And while I was teaching at the Graduate School of Education at USC, I was pregnant with my son. And something strange happened. Although I had grown up in a house where both my parents were, and being an autonomous, independent money making well established woman was so important in my upbringing and to becoming who I am today, I had this very interesting poll to want to stay home with my first child, Jake. And it's weird because my whole life I thought, Oh, I'm just gonna work like my mom did, because that's what I knew. But then I had this weird thing where I felt really drawn to staying home. And what was weird about it is that I didn't stress about it, and I didn't really like go on and on about it in my head. I just said, You know what, I'm not gonna work. This is what I feel like doing. I want to be home. And I think my husband, my husband was okay with it. Because he that's who he married. He knew he married someone who had grown up in a house with a working mom. And, you know, I'd gone to school all these years, and that was my plan. But at the same time, he also knew that I am also the type of person that wants to do what I want to do. And if I'm happy, he says that everyone's happy, for better for worse, I don't know. But you know, we were also in a situation where we could afford as a couple and as a family to have one of us working and not the other, which is obviously a very fortunate situation. In terms of my parents. I think my parents were a little like, wait, what you're not working like you're gonna be a mom who, you know, stays home and goes out for lunch. And I looked at them, like, what are you even talking about? And I think that when they saw me become a mom and how invested I was in it, all of that disappeared. In the back of their minds, they were like, God, we hope that Sarah at some point, find something that's, you know, just for her that's not related to her family, kids, or any of us, because I think they knew that I always had this sort of burning desire to create and have something of my own. So as a mom, a stay at home mom at that time, I my kids are, like I said, are now 16 and 14. I wondered, you know, what would be for me down the line, and I had kids on the younger side, Jake was born when I was almost I'd say, 30. And I thought, Okay, well, I'm gonna go back to work. By the time I'm 35, I'm gonna go back to work by the time I'm 40. And then here, I was at 45. And I still hadn't gone back to work or develop something that was my own. I don't regret it. I think part of the reason why I didn't do anything while I was a mom, that was just for me is because I am a perfectionist and a performance driven person. And I feel that at the time, I thought, well, if I can't go full force and make it amazing and outstanding, whatever it is that I chose to do that I don't want to do it at all. But I think looking back on it, I probably could have done something on a smaller scale that just worked with my schedule, my kids schedules. And I hope that you know, by doing my self recreation journey now that I do teach my daughter that there is somewhere in the middle, I mean, I think my mom was on one extreme of having a full time career while raising children. I think I was probably the other extreme of being a stay at home mom. But I think there's different versions of it and variations in the middle and you can probably do something that is definitely kind of in the middle or strikes a balance. My mom was a very present mom, she was home by 530 every day, but she wasn't volunteering at school or working in the nurse's office or doing any of those things. But she was really fortunate because my dad was that person and being a dentist. My dad was able to work every other day in his practice. And then on the off days, he was the dad who was working in the nurse's office, picking us up. We would all go rollerblading to Venice. Yes, we did. rollerblade, I was actually really good at it, which is kind of like a weird thing to say in a weird sport. And Saturdays, my dad would work and my mom would take us to a YSL games. And then on Sundays, we would go to fedco, which is sort of like Target is today. And we would do all the family shopping and my brother and I would jump in the shopping cart. And we would try to like shove stuff in there. So our parents wouldn't see that we were trying to buy things that maybe they weren't going to allow us to buy. And I actually remember one time I bought this blue bathing suit with black polka dots, and I really wanted a bikini. And my mom was like, Sarah, you're not old enough to wear bikini? No way. So I got the bathing suit. And when we got home, I cut it into two pieces thinking that I had a lot smarter my mom and little that I realized that you needed the spandex and the elasticity to keep it together. So I ended up having to like tie the top tie the bottom, it was a little bit of a disaster. So how did I start this podcast? That's the question that a lot of people ask me like, how did you just wake wake up one day? How did you just wake up one day and be like, Sarah, you're gonna start a podcast? Well, it didn't 100% work that way. What happened was, I think I explained it in some of my other episodes. When I turned 45. Last February, my daughter gave me a gift and it was a gold box. And she had asked all my friends or many of my friends to write inscriptions on these little brown gift tags almost with pink ribbons and she said write three things that you love about my mom write three things that my mom reminds you of. And when I received this gift, obviously I was very moved because it was a very well thought out gift. And when I was reading the inscriptions, they sort of all said the same thing. It was like information friend, my friend who's the all knowing resource I call Sarah if I need to know about anything from a vaccine to a school to this or that. She's my pretty nerd friends, Sara's my honest friend who will give me the rundown and tell me what she honestly thinks. And as I read all of those inscriptions together, I was like wow, there there is a theme to that. Like I am an information source for so many. And I am neurotic and mental. My son actually said to me, like when I first started this podcast, and he knew I was calling it the flexible, neurotic, he said, Mom on a scale of one to two, like, how flexible Are you really, which actually made me laugh, because my kids think I'm inflexible. But I think at the deep, deep core of it, they know that I'm structured, but weirdly flexible at the same time, at least, I hope so I'm not really sure. I like to think that about myself, having been a very performance driven person, like I always wanted to get A's. I'm not saying I'm proud of that. But that's sort of how I judged myself getting through high school and going to an Ivy League college and getting graduate degrees. And then I had my kids. So I took that 16 year break, and then getting that gift from my daughter. I was like, Okay, well, what's next for me? What's next for you, Sarah, what are you going to do? And I had so many people say to me, Sarah, you should write a book, you have a funny voice, you're so dry and self deprecating. And I feel like your voice could like really come out if you wrote a book. And my husband was like, please don't write a book, you are going to be all alone in your room complaining that you're not seeing people or engaging with people. And I know you, Sarah, please don't write a book, do something else first and then do your book. So I thought, Okay, what am I going to do. And in the meantime, while I was thinking about that, after this amazing gift from my daughter, I went on a walk with my friend, Angela, as I said earlier, who's my mentor, and she's five years, five or six years ahead of me, in terms of age and herself recreation journey. And she had a similar situation where she was a stay at home mom with a master's degree in psychology. She was teaching one course in some women's groups when her kids were little. And she said to me, Sarah, you need to find a life coach. And I was like, wait, what are you talking about? What do you mean a life coach? And she said, No, I'm serious, you need to find a life coach. The one that I spoke with and who is my mentor really helped me develop my own path. And they don't tell you what to do. They just help you take out all the information from inside of you and distill it in front of you. So you can actually see it because sometimes we, as I'm sure you've all experiences, you feel like you have all these things doing inside of your heart in your brain. But you can't articulate exactly what it is, or you can't really make that list of strengths that you've always wanted to make. Because you're in it, and you're in the thick of it, she gave me the number of a life coach. And then I also started asking around, I made these appointments with these two women who had very different approaches. And then COVID head and we, my husband and my kids and I we moved to Park City for two and a half months. And I think that being quiet and alone a lot of the time because my kids were in zoom school, and I couldn't go anywhere. It gave me a lot of time to think think about what my vessel would be. And I started meeting with these two life coaches who are very different. You know, one person was very sort of spiritual, yet very step driven, like okay, well, what would your next step be? Sarah, what would your next step be? And the other person was very, very spiritual as well. We talked about hypnosis, we talked about my self limiting beliefs in a different way than the other life coach. And I was able to work with both of these women simultaneously, in all this time that I had in the two and a half months in Park City. And I thought, you know what, I'm not gonna write a book. I'm gonna do a podcast. But like, how do you even do a podcast? I don't know. I went online, and how do you make a podcast? How do you record a podcast? And it all seems so overwhelming that I thought there's no way I could do this? Like, where do I even start? So of course, being the nerd that I am, well, I call myself the pretty nerd, which means I wear tons of glitter eye makeup and I wear leopard leggings. But I have a pile of nonfiction books next to my bed on my nightstand, to the point where my husband's like, Sarah, do you need a Dewey Decimal System for all of your books? The worst part is he's totally OCD and he can't handle messes, and I am like a walking organized mess, sort of like the flexible neurotic, and I stack shit and he hates it, but you know, it's okay. I guess he learned a deal. It's been 27 years. So I thought, Okay, I'm going to do a podcast and like I said, I started Googling it. What does that look like? What should I even do and there just seemed like so much information out there. But then I started thinking well How would I even ask people to be on a podcast when I don't even have a business? So I have to create a website? How do you even create a website from thin air? So I started doing a little research, I found a website designer, online. And I was like, Hi, I'm Sarah. And I want to start a podcast. And I want my my website to look a certain way. And I sort of wanted to be black and white and hot pink. And I really wanted to reflect my style. So he really tried to do that it didn't turn out exactly how I wanted it, and I scrapped it. And I really was like, kind of bombed and thought, Oh, I can't do this. This is too hard. Nobody's like understanding what I'm seeing in my head. My husband actually found someone else that he had used in the past. And I connected with her and showed her a bunch of inspirational photos that I had collected online. And we work together over the summer and creating a website that really reflected who I thought I was and who I am. And of course, I had all these self limiting beliefs like yeah, so what you have a PhD? Yeah, so what you have two teenagers. Yeah, so what you love your parents, and you live in Santa Monica. But as I started to put all of the information together, and like the whole package, and who is Sarah, and who is a flexible, neurotic, I was like, You know what, I'm a relatable 45 year old woman in a self recreation journey. And there have to be so many more women like me going through the same experience. And I'm just going to express that, and I'm going to express it to the best of my ability. And those women who find me and resonate with me, will be my people. It's just like how we find our friends in life. And whether it's five people who resonate or 500, or 5000, I have to get away from that very performance driven mindset that I had had my whole life get A's, do this get this degree, it was like, I needed to make it less linear and more curvy. And it was going to have different bombs and different people and different limiting beliefs. And that's really what I worked on with these two women as life coaches is, how do I take all of my self limiting beliefs of like, what if only three people listen, and just my mom? Well, is that enough for me? Is that okay? At the beginning, I was so focused on what the outcome would be. And I really needed to take a step back and say, Okay, let's forget about the outcome, or how many listeners or download them and to get, but is this project resonating with me right now? Do I want to wake up and do this every day? am I excited about it? And I really had to retrain myself to think through the steps, rather than just what would it be? Could I be successful? Well, what if I'm not Bernie Brown? Well, chances are Sarah, you're not going to be Bernie Brown. And even if you are, it might be 20 years from now. And that was another thing is that we A lot of us struggle with is, a lot of times we're comparing our right now to someone else's 10 years from now, where they've been doing a podcast for 10 years, and you've been doing it for 10 minutes. So where do you even start? How could I loosen the grip on everything where in the past I wanted everything to be perfectly worded before I turned it in totally scripted, knowing what it was going to grow into? Could I be okay, with ambiguity and a little bit of the unknown. And that has been one of the major tests for me in this self recreation journey. So after I called Angela recorded my first episode, I was like, Oh my god, I need an Instagram for this podcast. I don't even have Instagram. How like, what do I even do? So I hired a college student because I thought asking my teenage children to make an Instagram for me would be so cringy for them. They already loved my podcast, but we're sort of like cringed out by it. Because obviously, I bring in personal information, which is like a teenager's worst nightmare. But then to do an A a public Instagram with like, pictures of me and pictures of my dog and my husband in them. No way. So I hired this college student, I was like, I need to start an Instagram account. Here's the picture. This is the name of my podcast. And can you like help me put it all together and show me how to write a bio? Like, this is how basic it was. I had the podcast Instagram and there were zero followers on it. Like I didn't even have my own personal Instagram to transfer to. So I texted like 20 of my friends and I said, Hey, you guys, I know I haven't really talked about this much. But you know that podcast I said, I thought I'd be starting Well, I've recorded the first one. It's coming out in two weeks. I just started an Instagram. Can you please follow it? And it was so funny because everyone was so excited but they were like Sarah started Instagram and a podcast. And what was crazy about it is that 20 people turned into 30 people turn into 40 people and day by day, then it was like 100. And then it was 150. And I didn't even know what was happening. I thought, how I don't even know 150 people well enough, like I didn't tell 150 people, but people kept spreading the word. And then the first episode came out with Angela. And Angela has a pretty active following and a lot of friends and colleagues and an author of four books. So she put the episode up on her Instagram. And people were going crazy writing me DMS messages, how much they loved it and I thought, holy shit, I just put out a podcast episode having no idea what I'm doing, creating an Instagram account with zero followers. And people are actually really listening and really resonating and what the fuck is happening? And that's how the flexible neurotic podcast started. In terms of editing my podcast, I know people have questions about that. I am the least technological person on the planet. I can barely attach an attachment to an email like literally I'm 100% inapt. So this podcast has stretched my heart stretch my brain to the point where at night, my brain is like, Sarah, you need a break what's happening. But it has been such an incredible experience. And I figured out that I didn't need to edit the podcast myself. So I did a Google search in the summer. And I found a podcast editor in Colorado, and I called this woman off of the internet, I had no references, nothing. And I said, Hey, I really want to start a podcast, I have no idea what I'm doing, can you help me? And she said, Yes. And I spent the next month and I tortured my husband, because I would make him sit on some of the calls with me. Because to be quite honest, the technology just felt so hard for me and out of range, that I knew that if I didn't have his help, that I would have probably given up. So I think that's another takeaway in this whole process is like, knowing what you're good at and what you're not great at, and bringing in other people who couldn't do the parts that you're not amazing at. And sometimes it's hiring a podcast editor sometimes is dragging your husband and having him be like, Sarah, like, I feel like I've sort of turned into your assistant. But I think at the same time, he knows that, you know, he's an entrepreneur, and I've been supporting him, like psychologically for 27 years, lots of ups downs, sideways, roller coasters. And this is my time, and I think he could feel it. Because he said to me, Sarah, I haven't seen you work this hard and so long. And I said, Yeah, because I've been a mom. And that's what I've been working hard at. But if I'm going to do something, right now, I really want to see if I can create a viable project that has legs that people can resonate with, and that at the end of the day, I'm so happy with that I want to wake up and be like, Oh my god, I'm so fucking excited for today. And that's what this podcast is done for me. And it's not just about the self recreation for me, but it's about the resonating with other women and normalizing how cluster fucky the second half of life feels. That's another thing I do want to define his people ask me what the second half of life mean, and how did you come up with that? I think that, for me, the second half of life really is not about an age. It's not like you're 30 or 40 or 60. It's about a time where obviously you're not in your 20s probably the lowest you'd be in your 30s where you want to find what's next for you. What's your next move? What's your next personal transition? That will be self defining. It's not about getting a new car, a new house? It's about how are you finding your next stage for you or your next self identity. It's not as much about chronological age as it is about psychological transitions and points in our lives. We're looking for the next big thing because I've had women DM me who are 30 years old saying oh my god, I'm so happy I found your podcast. I've been to such and such for this many years and I'm so unhappy with it and I really want to find something else that's more me. And then I've had women DM me who are 70 and they're like, Am I too old to self recreate? And I realized that the chronological age wasn't as important as it is coming to terms and realizing the fact that you want to self recreate that you want to find Something else that's just for you. And I felt like creating a podcast where I bring listeners along with me who are also in the second half of life, whatever that ages, who want to self recreate that I could interview experts that related to a million different topics. And I could dig with these experts and find these golden nuggets that we could start using today. There are actual things where it's like, yes, you can drink celery juice, yes, you can use coconut oil in your vagina. And they may all seem like small things. But when you add them all together, you come up with a new formula for self reinvention, a new formula for self care, a new formula for a mindset reset. So this podcast really is about inspiring women to come along with me while I self recreate and they do too. And let's interview the best experts in these various fields. Like I said, plastic surgery, facial rejuvenation, vagina, health, menopause, all of these things, and figure out what our next steps are. So this is where I'm at right now. I started this podcast in September, I started this Instagram in September, I started this website in September, they're all called the flexible, neurotic. It's sort of like having three children, the website, the Instagram and the podcast, but they all work together in creating the brand, the flexible, neurotic, where we are inspiring women to join together in the self recreation process. People ask me what my goals are for this podcast all the time. And my goal is to get as many people as possible excited about self recreating for themselves. In the second half of life. My goal is to get as many listeners as possible, just so that I can help women in the second half of life, normalize that we feel clusterfuck II sometimes, and we feel overwhelmed, and we don't know where to start. And we don't know why our vaginas burning when we have sex or we don't know why we feel hot and sweaty, or we don't know why our face feels sometimes like it's falling down. And all of these things are normal and that we all feel them. And we live in this world where Instagram and social media show this level of perfection. But behind closed doors we all have so many questions like with the Sherry Ross episode, the revamping the vagina after 40 I can't tell you how many women DM me and said, Sarah, thank you so much for asking those questions. They're all questions that I have. But I'm too embarrassed to ask my gynecologist. Look, I never thought I would ever put myself on Instagram. I didn't even have it. But then when I realized what an impact, just a normal relatable 45 year old woman going through the self recreation journey herself, like how much I could help people by normalizing it. It was game on for me. And that's where I'm at right now with this podcast with you listening right now is I'm so happy you have joined in. I'm so happy you're here. And I really want to sell free create together. And I hope you tell your friends about it. I hope we can continue to build this community. I want people to DM me I want people to communicate with me. I want you guys to tell me other things that you want to listen to other experts that you want to hear. And I'm so appreciative of your time, your energy your messages, it means the absolute world to me. Please go to my website, the flexible neurotic.com subscribe to the podcast and sign up for the sweetspot newsletter. It will give you exclusive updates about my podcast and secret golden nuggets that are not mentioned in the episodes. Very cool stuff. Also follow my Instagram at the flexible neurotic talk soon. Good peeps. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed finding our sweet spot today, and digging through layers of shit with your golden shovel, subscribe, subscribe. Subscribe. DM me on Instagram at the flexible neurotic. Tell me which golden nuggets resonated with you. The ones that you're going to start using today to start getting your shit together to find our sweet spots. screenshot it, send it to a friend. This is Dr. Sarah Milken, the flexible neurotic, inspiring you to gather, curate, incorporate, maybe even meditate