A Life That Gives You Energy Back

Podcast Transcript:

Victoria Werner (01:03)

Welcome to the Pattern Breaking podcast.

A past version of

have totally wanted to skip recording this episode.

I arrived back in Ohio

spending a month in

husband's family

travel yesterday was insane.

People talk about how

a toddler is hard.

I don't think that you can fully understand how hard that is until you have one of your own and you do it. I think that my cortisol was higher yesterday for an entire 24 hours than it's ever been in my entire life.

Even with all of the personal development work that I've done, even with the like removing the layer of shame that I've done so much work around to not feel ashamed of my parenting, to not feel ashamed of people watching me chase my daughter in circles in public, to not feel ashamed about her wiggling out of her seatbelt on the airplane like a worm.

Even without the shame of other people's eyes, of feeling other people's eyes on me,

it was a hard day. But the success, the win is, is that I'm recording this podcast today anyways. And honestly, this pull ties perfectly in to a story I want to tell you, to a breakthrough that I've had, to honestly what this podcast has become for me.

and how I think that it is a step into a new era, not just in terms of the conversations that I'm having on the

a new era in terms of

my creativity and the

complete removal of resistance to putting creative work out into the world and how

freeing that is and how much more alive I feel as a result.

So yeah, a past version of me absolutely

would have been like, my God, sitting in that airport with my toddler running in circles, being like, how in the world am I going to wake up tomorrow morning, jet lagged, and record this podcast episode? I would have, a past version of me would have

panicked, would have been like, I've got to email everybody.

I've gotta push the giveaway back, maybe I'll, because the timing of my, giveaway that we're gonna do on the episode today, I'm giving away a spot in my Confident Pattern Making and Grading course.

The timing of that

would, it coincides with the timing of the end of the open enrollment period that's happening right now for my Confident Pattern Making and Grading course. I would have spiraled, I would have been like.

if I can't do it tomorrow, then I guess I've got to extend the time that the open enrollment period is happening and then I got to push back the date for the new students starting. But I did none of that. I was just like, of course, I'll do it tomorrow. I'll find a way. And here I am, 9.30 a.m., after

crashing last night, after the world's longest stressful travel, which included missing our connection flight.

which included my husband being pulled into a back room at Customs at Immigration as we entered. Like, in the state of the world with ICE and immigration and people being instantly deported and all of this wild stuff. You can imagine my panic and how stressful yesterday was.

My husband in a back room with no explanation.

my daughter literally running in circles with all of these police officers around looking at me like, you know, it was hard. But throughout all of that, there was never any question that the podcast was going to happen today. And I did it. My husband's giving my daughter a bath. Like, I've got my pocket of time. You've got your pockets of time. It's just what are you using them for?

I told this story on

a live call that I did a few weeks ago,

but I want to tell it again here because

want it to live somewhere. I want it to live somewhere in perpetuity.

I have had the idea for this podcast

for

over a year and a half.

even had the name of it for all that time.

I knew that I wanted to do the pattern breaking podcast.

and for all of that time.

I put it off, put it off, put it off because it's true. I had plenty of other things that I was working on.

But all of that time there was that sense, and I know that you've experienced this in your life of it's just not the time yet. I'm just not ready.

I just don't have the time. I just don't have the energy.

but the mistake that I was making and the thing that I've had a complete breakthrough around.

is that it is actually more draining of your energy,

is actually more draining of my energy

for me to hold an idea and not act on it

it is for me to do the thing.

Outright.

When

decided, honestly, one random Friday, that today I was gonna record the freaking podcast.

I had such a rush of energy after doing that.

was like all of that energy that I'd held for a year and a half finally started to flow.

I felt more energy, more energetic having done the podcast than not having done it.

And when you're busy, when you're a mom like me, when you're a business owner, when you have a full-time job, like our lives are busy, right? It can feel like adding one more thing to our plate is going to drain us, is going to make our life harder or more complicated. It can feel like, ⁓ I don't wanna, I would love to do that, but I just don't have the time or energy to do that right now.

But when we do that, we're

saving energy by doing that. We're draining energy by doing that. Because holding that thing and not doing it...

is exhausting.

It's exhausting, I feel like it's just exhausting for our soul. If you're feeling called to do something, if you're holding an idea to do something.

I want you to find the pocket of time to just start.

And I'm so excited for you to feel what it feels like to just start that thing instead of continuing to hold it.

Okay, so this is podcast episode seven. So I'm seven weeks into this new era, right? This era that I've unlocked by just starting.

And here I am able to

record the podcast without perfect circumstances, without a full night's sleep, without my circadian rhythm being on board with me because...

I know.

that I'm gonna have more energy today if I do the thing than if I don't.

Around the same time that I first had this idea for this podcast, I started working with a business coach named Stephanie Ann Hughson She's an incredible person.

One of the things that she would talk about

wanted to believe, but I couldn't feel, I couldn't experience

was how she talked about always doing what it takes in her business.

She talked about how she lost her dad, how early on when starting her business, her dad died. Her dad got really sick and died and through all of that, she still showed up.

She still created offers, she still had clients, and she still made money, right? She always did what it took in her business. And when I started working with

really wanted to start creating

having other conversations in my business, but also reaching more people with my pattern-making school.

And when I started working with her,

didn't go quite the way that I wanted in the sense that my life got harder. Literally, like, the week that I started working with her, our dog got sick and ended up dying. And it was so much harder than I ever would have imagined to lose that, to lose my pet, you know?

little animal that's a part of your day-to-day life and it really shakes you to your core when that changes.

And I found

really destabilizing and really, really hard to show up in the weeks following that.

then other hard things happened after

it's been a year

and a half or so of really,

know.

day to day things being really beautiful, but there have been heavy, hard things happening

punctuated throughout this period of time.

kind of haunt me,

As I worked with Steph in her mentorship, and it would kind of haunt me how I felt like I really wanted to live that. I really wanted to feel what it felt

always be able to do what it takes in your business, to always be able to find the energy to create the things that you're feeling called to create.

And yet it was feeling impossible.

what I realized is that

The reason it works is

that you do what it takes in the sense

you do what the world thinks you should do, that you show up and you do what you have to do in the sense that you show up and you do what any person that runs a business would do. You show up and you run your business.

That is not what we're talking about.

Can you feel the difference? Can you feel the difference between showing up and doing the thing that your heart is calling you to do and showing up and doing the thing that the world

making you feel like you should do, those are two very different things.

when I worked

Steph and

peeled back all the layers of all the shoulds, all the things that I felt like I needed to do in my life and in my

and I removed as much of that as I could see.

when I realized

I actually going all in

the things that I wanted to do even if they didn't make logical sense.

When I realized that that was the move,

started to understand what she had been talking about there from the beginning,

about what it meant to always do what it took.

Because when you're

always doing what it takes

means always doing the thing that lights your heart on fire. When those are the same thing,

you are unstoppable.

can have the most stressful gray hair inducing day of your life, 24 hours of, like I told my husband yesterday last night, I was like, thank goodness my Oura ring was dead, right? I have one of those like.

smart health tracker rings that I

I would tell them, thank goodness my Oura ring was dead yesterday, because I don't think I want to know what it would have told me. Think that like, you know, on the Oura ring that gives you this graph of like your stress level. And there's just like, it plots little points throughout the day of as it records your,

data. I have a feeling it was just like.

The stress dot was just probably all the way across the top of the graphic the entire day. Like, I don't think that there was any restorative time yesterday. And yet I'm doing this. I'm doing this because...

Because it's everything to me right now.

Because I know that it's not a net loss of my energy, but a net gain.

I used to feel like I needed rest, a lot of rest. That like as a mother that was

busy and

very involved in my daughter's life,

filled my life and took my energy and then I needed to rest from that. But what I've realized is

I actually need less rest than I think I

necessary when you're carrying a lot of things,

when you're carrying a lot of expectations, when you're carrying a lot of shoulds, when you're carrying around a lot of things that

heart and your soul is asking you to do, but that you're not doing.

Then it feels heavy. Then you're like, my God, I gotta rest. Like, I just, I don't know, I need to take it easy. Because you feel heavy. You feel like you're carrying the world. But when you release all of that, and you go and you just do the thing that energizes you.

You just, your heart's on fire. You just go. You're like, you feel more alive than ever.

It's like, I will go to sleep tonight feeling so satisfied. I will go to sleep tonight feeling so successful because I

used every waking moment of this glorious life to do the things that I wanna do. That's what I want for you. I want you to go to bed every night and have the sweetest sleep because you...

lived the fullest day. And that was one of the best things about farming that people don't talk about is how when you have a very busy, physical, demanding

life,

How when you get in bed at the end of the day, oh my God, the rest is delicious.

That, you just conk out at the end of the day

worked hard and you earned that sleep and your body just melts right into it.

And I didn't feel that for a long time. felt I would go to bed at end of the day and kind of like, I feel like, God, I wish I had done all these other things. And like, did I really spend my day the way that I wanted to? And, you know, kind of like go to bed with like this energy instead of just like, ⁓ release into sleep. Like we did it. We did this day and now we sleep,

I want the energy to feel that good for you.

And I feel like I found that feeling again that I had when I was farming of like living my fullest day and just collapsing into rest at night and not needing to punctuate my day with this heavy feeling of needed rest in the middle of a day.

because I get to spend my day the way that I want to, because I'm choosing not to spend my day doing things that are shoulds for me. Of course there are things that are still life admin. Of course there's still taxes and administrative work, right? Of course there's stuff that doesn't set my soul on fire, but my life is not full of that.

And that is something that I've deliberately created for myself. That's something that you can create for yourself, is a life that's not full of admin and shoulds.

I think that we overestimate how important it is for us to focus on keeping on top of things in our lives. And I think that we underestimate how important it is for us to prioritize

things that are actually gonna give us energy, actually gonna make us feel alive, actually gonna set our heart on fire.

I am in this era of wanting to feel as much as possible. And I realize that I've actually, that this has been a value of mine that I felt for a really long time, but that I haven't really put the words to and I haven't really articulated and said, this is something that I want to experience as much as possible in my life. I want to feel this feeling of wild abandon. I want to feel like the world is my oyster, like everything.

Like the world is conspiring in my favor. I am conspiring in my favor. I wanna feel, those are words from my mentor, Jaclyn Shaw, by the way. She's amazing. I wanna feel like the wind is in my hair, like the road is rising up to meet me, and like everything is glorious and perfect. On the airplane on the way over here, I watched the movie Wicked, okay?

I hadn't, I'd never seen Wicked the musical. never, I mean, I was familiar enough with it, but ⁓ I never actually watched it.

I watched that for the first time and you know, the visuals in it are so cool. It's so richly textured with beautiful, you know, computer generated graphics of the landscape and the cities and the.

the university where they both go to school and it's just gorgeous, the costuming.

And as I was watching that, I was thinking, you know what? We watch these movies where there are these gorgeous, beautiful fantasy landscapes.

and these gorgeous, beautiful fantasy cities. But if we just looked at our own actual world for how beautiful and gorgeous and glittering it actually is,

we can fantasize that and we can like want to live in fantasy worlds, but like we do live in a fantasy world. Like this world is gorgeous and beautiful. Like even if you live in suburban Ohio,

Even if the exact place that you live or in an urban place that's not clean or perfect or beautiful, you know that this earth is beautiful. You know that there are glorious beaches and mountains and prairies that this world we live in is absolutely epic. I want you to remember that. I want you to be able to experience that as much as you can in your life.

I want you to feel connected to that, feel a part of it, feel it like, wow, this reality is so...

Beautiful. We have everything. We have everything we could ever want.

And I think that for people when it doesn't feel that way, when it feels like everything around them is dirty and sad, and when it feels like the world is a terrible hard place, I just want to remind you that it really is about what you're focusing on. Because it's not that this earth isn't still alive.

It's that you need to seek out that aliveness.

So I'm on a quest of seeking out aliveness. I'm on a quest of demolishing the resistance that I feel to acting on the things that make me feel alive. I am on a quest to live my life with wild abandon, with wildly moving towards all of the things that excite me.

and holding responsibility, still being a responsible adult, but not prioritizing that over

things that I really feel that I'm here to experience.

It's funny, this morning I happened to open an email from another one of my mentors, Laura Belgray.

The very first big business mastermind investment I made was with her in her shrimp club writing mastermind, copywriting mastermind.

she's an incredible person.

She teaches a course with Marie Forleo called The Copy Cure.

⁓ that if you're interested in business writing and copywriting, I couldn't recommend more. I hope that that course is still available. in any case, can also learn Laura has courses of her own. But I just happened to read this email from her this morning

ties perfectly into this conversation today. So I want to include this. She was talking about how her friend Susie, who I think I know who she's talking about, Susie's also.

a business coach. I feel like once you get into the coaching world, everybody's a coach. It just seems like you can't turn around without talking about another coach friend. ⁓ So Laura is talking about this friend of hers, Susie, who's a coach, and how Susie says,

She is always so far ahead in her own work that she never feels behind. She feels ahead in terms of all the things that she wants to create and get out into the world. And she says that the way that she's able to do that is by having no resistance to it. About

removing the blocks.

that would stop you, slow you down from just sitting down recording the podcast, from just sitting down and doing another lesson in the pattern making course, from just cracking open the book and figuring it out on your own, from just

setting up the sewing machine and starting the project, from just whatever it is, whatever it is, just remove the shoulds, remove the resistance and just do it.

Because again, I think this is exactly what I have learned is when you stop carrying all of the shoulds and you just do, life flows and your energy increases as a result. And you actually get back more time when you have more energy.

And then Laura says in this email that apparently Susie once Googled, what to do when you have too much time. And Susie says, would you believe there were zero search results? And Laura says, yes, yes I would.

And that's just it. It's like, I want you to know that there is a different reality of your life, of your existence that's possible. I want you to surround yourself. I want you to connect with and find examples to calibrate yourself to. Examples of people who feel like they have more time than they need in their day.

and not the other way around. Examples of people who

will do what it takes when doing what it takes means that they get to live their life exactly how they want to.

I want to be surrounded by people who

don't let feelings of heaviness and imposter syndrome

drive their life.

but move on and keep going and

like, relieve, reduce the resistance, reduce the friction to the point where they just fly.

Victoria Werner (24:35)

All right, it's that time. I know a lot of you are listening to this episode today to find out if you have won a spot in the Confident Pattern Making and Grading course. I'm so excited to find out who's going to win this time in the course with us. We have two days left of this current open enrollment period, which right now, today is Friday, April 3rd of 2026, and...

Enrollment is still open for two more days, so you can join us between now and the end of the day on Sunday, April 5th.

We are going to spend four months together

giving you a complete foundational education in size inclusive and made to measure pattern drafting and grading. And we are gonna work together for those four months to help you to bring to life the exact patterns.

that you want to create. So whoever wins this, I'm so excited for you. But if you are not the winner, I would love for you to join us anyways. I would love for you to seize this opportunity to go all in on what you love and double down on your creativity and your ability to design things and bring to life the vision that you have. All right.

I had 38 giveaway entries. I'm putting them into a random number generator here on Google. One to 38, here we go.

Okay, the winner is entry number 36. And the 36th entry that I have here in my spreadsheet is, drum roll, is at @viri.vs. So V-I-R-I dot V-S. Amazing. I don't know you, but I'm so excited to get to know you. Congratulations. This is amazing.

Thank you all for listening. If you ever have any questions for me about the programs that I teach or about the content of what we're covering on the podcast, if you're loving what these conversations, please let me know. Even if you don't want to share about this publicly, it means so much to me to connect to you and to know how this podcast is and the messages that I'm sharing here, how they are landing in your real life.

how they're shifting things for you, like, please connect with me. I would love to hear from you. So you can find me on Instagram at Confident Pattern Making. And I actually also have another account that I may be using more in the future that was created specifically for the pattern breaking kind of branch off of things. And that's at the.victoria.ashley.

on Instagram. So either place, I would love to hear from you. Thank you for listening.