She Speaks: Women's Wisdom For Every Woman

S1-Ep 2.The Power of Choice: Navigating Trauma, Resilience, and Self-Love with Sandra Jarvis

• Charlotte Wilson

Share episode

Welcome to 'She Speaks,' your sanctuary for women's wisdom where we celebrate, connect, and uplift each other. In this episode, hosted by Char Wilson of Wilson Phoenix Wellness, we delve into a heartfelt conversation with Sandra Jarvis, a Trauma Recovery Coach. Sandra shares her powerful journey of overcoming significant life challenges, including a cancer diagnosis, a transgender child revelation, a husband's addiction, and a life-threatening accident. With thousands of hours of surgeries and physical therapy, Sandra’s story is a testament to resilience, self-love, and the power of choice. Join us as we explore how to navigate traumatic experiences, embrace our true selves, and transform from surviving to thriving. Tune in for empowering insights and practical steps to help you live an empowered life of balance, joy, and fulfillment.

IN THIS EPISODE: Three powerful lessons from Sandra's journey of healing and transformation:

  1. The Power of Choice in Shaping Your Life - While life's challenges are often beyond our control, our response to them isn't. Sandra reveals how intentionally choosing our actions and emotions—not necessarily the easiest or most positive ones—transforms victimhood into empowerment. This mindset shift enables forward movement, even amid overwhelming adversity.
  2. Trusting Yourself is Key to Healing - After trauma, reconnecting with our innate self-trust becomes crucial. Sandra shows how making conscious, intentional choices in everyday moments rebuilds this trust. Learn how aligning your actions with your true needs creates a foundation for deep healing and personal growth.
  3. Self-Acceptance Opens Doors to Growth - Embracing your inherent perfection isn't about staying static—it's about recognizing you already possess everything needed to create the life you desire. Discover how self-compassion and authentic self-worth can free you from societal pressures and self-imposed limitations.

FREE RESOURCE
Download the "5-4-3-2-1 MindBody Calm" guide – your go-to tool for turning stress into strength. This simple yet powerful technique helps you return to your center, navigate life challenges with more ease and resilience, and access your inner wisdom in minutes. Get it here: https://wilson-phoenix-wellness.kit.com/54321calm 

CONNECT WITH SANDRA
Want to dive deeper into Sandra's story? Her book "Severed: A Memoir of Hope and Healing" offers an intimate look at her journey, and you can follow her inspiring daily insights on Instagram @offhandinspiration.

00:00 Introduction to She Speaks
00:27 Meet Your Host, Char Wilson
01:05 Introducing Sandra Jarvis
02:00 Sandra's Life-Altering Challenges
04:23 Navigating Trauma and Recovery
05:32 The Power of Choice and Resilience
07:27 Understanding Trauma Responses
11:30 The Role of Belief in Healing
20:24 Self-Trust and Overcoming Burnout
34:59 Practical Steps for Intentional Living
41:36 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Disclaimer:

The information shared on this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. While we share advice and personal experiences, it’s not intended to replace professional medical, legal, or financial guidance. Please consult qualified professionals for advice tailored to your specific needs. The views shared here are those of our guests and host, and do not represent all women’s experiences. We encourage you to explore what resonates with you personally.

Char Wilson:

Welcome to She Speaks, Women's Wisdom for Every Woman, a space for us to feel seen, celebrated, connected, and inspired. Here, we come together to tell our stories, share our lessons, celebrate our unique strengths, and reconnect with the sacred feminine wisdom that exists in all of us and guides us towards a lit up life of peace, empowerment, purpose, and prosperity. I'm Char Wilson, your host and owner of Wilson Phoenix Wellness. a I'm a mind body wellness content creator and coach helping high performing professional women transform from burned out to lit up through a holistic wellness approach. Each week you're invited to join me and my special guests in heartfelt conversations on holistic health and wellbeing, resilience, and living authentically. Whether you're navigating life's big changes, seeking deeper purpose, or simply craving connection and inspiration, you'll walk away with bite sized brilliance. As we uncover empowering insights and practical steps to help you create a life of balance, joy, and fulfillment. And today I'm joined by my guest, Sandra Jarvis, who we met earlier this year through a business coaching community. And Sandra is a trauma recovery coach. She is passionate about helping women rediscover who they are and learn to love themselves unconditionally, working off of the belief that we are already perfect. As we are, and then when we learn to accept that fact, everything changes, which I think is so beautiful. Sandra, welcome, welcome to the show. It's my honor to have you here.

Sandra Jarvis:

Thank you. I'm excited to be here. Excited to have a conversation. Yes,

Char Wilson:

I love it. Now, just a little bit about Sandra for the listeners who are tuning in who may not know Sandra yet. You are one of the most resilient women. And I just know the tip of the iceberg of your story. So can I share a little bit about your story? And then we'll dive into some questions to help our list.

Sandra Jarvis:

Definitely.

Char Wilson:

Yep. Perfect. So Sandra has overcome some pretty significant challenges in life. In 2014, this was like the catalyst. This was. The breaking point for you and every wise woman that I know Including myself has gone through this juncture point in life, which I call sometimes we call it spiritual awakenings. I call it the cosmic course correction it's that forced moment in time where it feels like everything in our life is falling apart where it's burning down and we have the opportunity to either just stay and crumple in the ashes or we have the opportunity to like the phoenix rise from the ashes and create a new life and find our wings and spread them. And for you, that was in 2014. So Sandra had overcome a cancer diagnosis. She had learned that one of her children was identifying as transgender. You also come from, I believe it's a Mormon background. So very raised in, in the church.

Sandra Jarvis:

I was raised LDS. Yes. Which is very high demand, very conservative, strict religion. Yeah. So the transgender diagnosis was a sin it was a yeah. It was

Char Wilson:

more than just, my child is now identifying as a different gender. It was like, this is a threat to our way of being.

Sandra Jarvis:

Exactly.

Char Wilson:

And then other news comes out in your relationship, which could such crippling news that your husband was dealing with a pornography addiction, and then to top all of that off You go on a family trip and I remember you telling me earlier that you felt like this might be the last family trip that we had. Did I hear that correctly?

Sandra Jarvis:

Yeah, because we, my husband and I were literally on the verge of divorce. It was like, we were doing this for our son for his high school graduation. And I was like this will probably be the last time we do anything as a family. So yeah, it was a, it was a big deal. And

Char Wilson:

then you have an ATV rollover accident. And it severs your right hand. Yes.

Sandra Jarvis:

How can you get any worse than that?

Char Wilson:

Like it's just boom. One after the other, one after the other. And so I think what you bring to us today and in our conversation today is we're going to dive into how did you navigate that? How did you recover from that? And what were some key lessons that you learned to be able to embrace your true self through this just unconditional self love and resilience, which is what you're teaching your clients. So are you ready? Are you ready to dive in with a few questions? Absolutely. Yes. Hope our listeners learn a little bit more. All right. So sisters listening, get ready to learn from and be inspired by Sandra. Feel your feels. There's probably going to be a lot of them because her story is very powerful. And most importantly, we don't want to just give you more information. We want to. Send you away with actionable, practical steps that you can take in your own life so that you can shift from surviving to thriving, because that's what this podcast is about. We want to take all of this wisdom that we each hold as women and use it to reduce each other's suffering and to help each other thrive. So welcome to the show, Sandra. Welcome to the show sisters. Let's dive on in with our first question. Sandra, with all of that kind of happening in 2014 this big culmination of traumatic events that lead to severing your right hand. And if you're watching this on YouTube, then you're going to see right behind Sandra a book called Severed. And so if you want to learn more about Sandra's journey, then I recommend go buy her book. But what is one lesson from that kind of breaking point, that tipping point? in your life that you wish every woman knew?

Sandra Jarvis:

I think that for me, this was the lesson that changed my life. And it was, it's really simple, but it was something I didn't know. And it was that I could choose how I wanted my life to be. I had a choice in life. And to this point, I. had just lived as a miserable, angry woman. Like I had we talked about all of this that was going on in that it was a two year period that all of this happened. But I grew up in a very abusive home and dealt with childhood sexual abuse and all kinds of things in that. And my whole life, I just felt like I didn't want to be here. Like I, I didn't want to deal with the constant trauma that just seemed to come one after another. And I felt like a victim to life. I didn't feel like I had a choice in anything. And what I realized with this accident was that I did have a choice that I didn't have a choice necessarily about what was going to happen in my life, but I did have a choice about how I responded. And that made all of the difference.

Char Wilson:

Yeah, it's so interesting because I've definitely studied trauma. I'm a trauma informed yoga and breathwork coach. It's not to the degree that you are educated in that way, but the thing that you're bringing up is what I've understood in my learning, my own trauma recovery. And what's the difference between post traumatic stress disorder and post traumatic growth and what separates people who have different responses to their trauma, big T, little T trauma. Yeah. And what trauma really is that it's that moment in time where we feel like our choice has been taken from us.

Sandra Jarvis:

Yeah. And we

Char Wilson:

really are a victim in that moment.

Sandra Jarvis:

Yeah, for sure. And I think that's a really important thing because sometimes in, especially in the coaching world, people are quick to dismiss the effects of trauma. It's you have a choice, so you can, right? And when I say that, I want to be really clear that, You do have a choice, but the choice doesn't, that doesn't mean that you need to choose to be positive. It doesn't mean that you need to choose to be happy. It means that you get to choose what is going to serve you best. And sometimes anger is going to serve you best. Sometimes feeling like a victim is going to serve you best. Because the truth is all of our emotions, are there to help us. All of our emotions are there to inform us of what's going on in our lives. And so choosing is more about being intentional than it is about being positive.

Char Wilson:

I love that. Will you say that one more time?

Sandra Jarvis:

Yeah, choosing what we want in our lives is more about being intentional than it is about being positive.

Char Wilson:

Yeah. Thank you for differentiating that because I know that just the subject of trauma is so sensitive. It's so nuanced and it can feel very tone deaf for us, for a listener that doesn't know your background, that doesn't know my background. To be able to just write it off and be I don't have a choice. I didn't have a choice. And the trauma took the choice away from me. Yes. They're just adding a little bit of nuance to that, but there, there is a choice, like when the trauma moments occurred, little T, big T trauma moments occurred. Yes. In that moment, you may not have had any power to choose because of the situation, but on the other side of that trauma from a nervous system perspective is. How your system your nervous system, your security system, how it interpreted that event,

Sandra Jarvis:

right,

Char Wilson:

how it experienced that. How did your body experience the traumatic event?

Sandra Jarvis:

Yeah,

Char Wilson:

and after the fact, and trauma work is always trying to get you back to the present moment instead of bringing those past events into the present moment, and that is the choice.

Sandra Jarvis:

Yeah, for sure. And I think I, I always tell my clients trauma is whenever you experience something that is too much, too little, or too late for your specific development. And so trauma can be it can be, you can have something that's traumatic and it won't be traumatic for me, right? So we all experience life differently based on the development of our nervous system and the development of our brain. And so we can experience something and it can feel really traumatic. And then we can if we are able to be cognizant with that, then we can look at it and say, Okay how do I deal with this? How do I move past this? And one of the things that I talk about a lot are the different levels of energy that we have, because our energy really comes from our emotions. And what happens to many of us who have experienced severe trauma is that we just decide to shut down our emotions. We just decide to say, I don't like that. I'm going to build a wall and the problem with that is that is what makes us makes our nervous system. shut down and go crazy. And then we don't have choices. Then we feel like we don't have choices. When we are constantly feeling like I got to run away from this or I am totally frozen. That's my favorite. Like I go to frozen, I just freeze. And when you're in those states, then you feel like you don't have a choice.

Char Wilson:

And then you feel like you're out of control again, like you're powerless in that but that free state has been. Like re perpetuating the situation. It's your nervous system is re architecting a situation that happened in the past. It's not right now in the present. This is the kind of stuff that I could just geek out about all day long. I don't need to talking and teaching about the nervous system. This is like where my work comes in. I feel like our work is very complimentary because I'm going to come in and give you the tools and the know how to understand what's happening in your nervous system. Is your typical response fight? Is it flight? Or is it freeze? And I know I lived in functional freeze for the majority of my adult life.

Sandra Jarvis:

Me too. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the thing, but it's and people, I say this all the time because my clients will say, yeah, but if I tap into those emotions. And I'm never going to stop crying. I'm never going to stop being angry. I'm never going to stop, and it's no, the truth is that when you tap into those emotions, when you choose to allow those emotions. Then you move through them and you get to the other side and that's the beauty of it, right? It's like that's when you're actually choosing choose to be angry. Of course, you're gonna be angry something bad happened to you So choose anger and let it run its course and so the yeah Whenever I say you get to choose like that includes everything you get to choose All the things. And the truth is that when you choose all of those emotions, your life becomes so much richer, so much better.

Char Wilson:

Yeah. So tell me about that for you. What is the choice, the different choice that you made? You went through thousands of hours over the course of multiple years, multiple surgeries, physical therapy, Tell me again about this. There was like a turning point conversation that you had with your surgeon and that played a big role in the choice that you made.

Sandra Jarvis:

Yeah my recovery from that accident, which I always say it's the accident that saved my life because I really feel like it did. But I was in ICU for two weeks, and I had, in that two weeks, I had close to 40 hours of surgery, and so it was a really intense time, and then my recovery went on for five years. I did 20 surgeries, thousands of hours of physical therapy, multiple 400 treatments to help me because I have a hand. It's a little bit misshapen, but I do have it. But my surgeon, whenever I was released from ICU, he came to my room and he said, I've done what I can do. And now going forward, the results that you get are going to be what you do. And he was like you get to decide how much you want to put into your recovery and you're going to have to advocate for yourself. And you're going to have to do what what you want and what you need in order to get the results that you're going to have. And for me, But what that meant to me was that if I worked hard enough, I could have my hand back to normal. And that was not what he said, but that was what my brain interpreted. And so I went into my recovery believing that I just had to do everything that I could do. I had to follow the instructions of all the healthcare professionals who were helping me, and I was gonna, I was gonna be back to normal. So that was the attitude I went in with. And honestly, so later, when I wrote my book, I interviewed my surgeon to find out some things that that I didn't really know were going on behind the scene. And one of the questions I asked him was, what did you learn from me specifically? What was, what did you take away from my case? And he said there were two things. One of them was a medical thing that he had tried on me that had never been done before. And was viable. And so I'm in medical books now.

Char Wilson:

But

Sandra Jarvis:

the second thing, and this was the one that was really powerful for me, was he said I learned from you that whenever you have a positive outlook and you believe in your results, then you can get whatever you want. And then he proceeded to tell me that whenever I was in the hospital, he did not believe that I would come out of it with my hand intact. And in fact, he said, you shouldn't have your hand. He said I ended up having multiple staph infections and all kinds of complications. And he was like, okay. anyone else would have lost it. They, anyone else would not have their hand at this point. But he said, you have your hand because of you. And he said, usually he figures that what he does on the operating table is about 50 percent and what the patient puts in is about 50%. And he was like, for you, that was, completely skewed. He said, I think what I did on the operating table may have been about 25 percent and the rest of it was your efforts.

Char Wilson:

Wow. And so in belief system.

Sandra Jarvis:

Yeah. And that's the thing. I think I look at that because I'll just tell you that before the accident I was so miserable. I was so depressed. I was so bitter. I was so angry. I don't know. I don't know why I was able to suddenly adopt this attitude of I'm gonna fight this and I'm gonna win, but I am, I'm blown away, honestly, by what I was able to accomplish, because it was really about What I chose and I didn't choose to be happy all the time. So I'm just gonna say that again, right? Cuz it was hard. I mean it was painful. It was crazy I would have surgeries and they would I would get out of the hospital and they would send me straight to physical therapy where they would be, you know manipulating my hand and it was Excruciating and so it was not about choosing to be happy It was about choosing what I wanted for my life. Yeah,

Char Wilson:

and being willing to face the discomfort that was involved in getting what you want.

Sandra Jarvis:

Absolutely.

Char Wilson:

I love that. So one of the other questions I want to ask you, and I love so much that you talked about this belief component on your healing journey, because you're one of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of what would be called medical miracles where there's really no explanation for you having the success that you've had. On the recovery side of the surgery, other than your belief system driving you, keeping you in hope. And this piece, like such a core piece of trauma recovery is res, is resilience and hope. The belief that there is another future available to you. Yeah. So what is, if you could change one belief or mindset in women that you see that holds them back, what would it be?

Sandra Jarvis:

So you mentioned this actually when you were introducing me, but my the thing that I see in women that holds them back so much is the belief that they are somehow flawed, that there is something wrong with them, that they are not enough in myriads of ways. My belief has become that we are all perfect. We are perfect exactly as we are. And that doesn't mean that we can't change. It doesn't mean that we can't grow, but it means that you have everything that you need in order to create the life that you want right now. Yes. And if you can believe that, then it opens up a world of possibilities, right? Because if you're perfect I had a client one time say to me, I don't want to believe I'm perfect because that means that I'm just stuck is who I am. I was like, no, that means that you can do anything. anything you want to do. If you're perfect, then the world is completely open to you. And when you start to believe that about yourself, then the possibilities are endless. Your life can be whatever you want it to be. Yeah.

Char Wilson:

So I want to make a connection here with this belief of Not enoughness because that exists across the board in all of my clients, my, the corporate career women, including myself, who find themselves in this chronic cycle of burnout. Yeah. How have you seen that belief of I'm not good enough, or I'm only lovable if or when I do this, when I achieve this, when someone validates me. How has that not enoughness or not perfect. belief played a role in, because I know we've talked about this. Both of us have struggled with burnout, even just in this past year in our own business. So how has that played a role in your burnout and what did you do to catch and release that to, to reconnect to your perfectness?

Sandra Jarvis:

Yeah. So I think I as you mentioned I have experienced a lot of burnout this past year. And the thing, honestly, the thing that saved me was this belief, because what it came back to was when I realized that I was really struggling in my business, trying to figure out what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go. I am so passionate about helping women, but I know that I can't do it at the expense of myself, right? And when I realized that I was burning out, what I recognized was that I was relying on other people to tell me What I needed in my business and in my life. Same. Yeah. And the truth is that whenever I remembered that I'm already perfect, that I don't need anyone else to tell me what to do, then. I was able to take a step back and reevaluate everything. And then it was like, Oh yeah, all of the things that were causing me the stress and causing me the burnout, I was able to just let go to release those things. And Trust myself to keep the things in my life that were helping me and that we're gonna get me where I wanted to go. And so I think the answer to your question really is trust. It's self trust. When you're burned out, to look at what are you relying on? What are you doing that is not aligned with who you are and sometimes those are sometimes the answers to those types of questions are really hard. Sometimes you don't want to actually answer those questions, right? Because sometimes that can mean, you know what, my career is not aligned to me. And then you have a tough decision. Do I stay in this career that keeps me burned out and try and find tools that maybe can help me process things daily, or do I switch my career, which, is a huge life decision, right? And sometimes I think that those kinds of questions can be scary. And so we avoid them until we're so miserable that we don't know what else to do. We're forced

Char Wilson:

into making a different choice. Exactly. And sometimes those things also, and I'll just be really honest here because I have five children.

Sandra Jarvis:

I was a stay at home mom. And that was, When I was growing up, I was going to be a lawyer. I was going to be a women's rights lawyer. I was going to take care of all of the all of the women who had been wronged in the world. They were all going to be my clients. Let's save them. Go on a crusade to save the women. And it was going to be like, I was like, I might get married someday. And maybe I'll have a child, but it's gonna be like I'm having a career. And then at the age of 19, I met my husband, I got married, and I had my first child. I was 20 when I had my child. Literally in a year's time. I went from being in a pre law program to being a stay at home mom, and that was not ever my plan. It was not what I ever really wanted, but it was what my church encouraged, and so I did it. And I continued, and in a 10 year time period, I had five children, and I was a stay at home mom. My husband was able to provide for us very well, so I never had to work. And I was miserable. And I if I had to, if I had stopped and asked myself what is it that is keeping me so out of alignment? There were a lot of things. I'll just go ahead and say that. But motherhood was one of them. And guess what? Whenever you have a child, it's a permanent deal, right? You can't just change that. I guess you could, but that wouldn't have been in alignment with who I am either, right? And just, I know when I say that you have to trust yourself. It's I understand that there are difficult decisions and that sometimes, Those decisions aren't even things that you can do. Like I couldn't walk away from my family. That wouldn't have made me happy. But I did, because of this accident, I did recognize that I had, I spent a lot of years just, Trying to shut down those emotions because I was ashamed that here I was a mother of five children and I didn't like it. I didn't want to be. And so I just shut it all down and it was miserable. I was angry. I wasn't nice to my kids. My kids are all like, why don't you cut off your hands sooner? No, because I changed. But the thing is that there were things I could have done, like I didn't have to be a stay at home mom, right? There you actually can put your children into daycare. And you can have a career as a mother. And there were things like I said with my church and my religious beliefs that, I would have had, that would have been conflicting, but they were choices I could have made. And eventually I ended up leaving that church anyway. So you know, maybe I should have done that a few decades ago, but we could go into all of that. But my point is, when you are willing to ask yourself the hard questions and then trust yourself to figure out the answers, then you do have everything you need.

Char Wilson:

And I think there's a component here of. It takes a lot of courage to ask those hard questions. And you won't ask them of yourself until you're most likely backed into a corner and forced to ask them. Unfortunately, that's just how we work as humans. Most people don't proactively ask themselves these hard questions unless you've been doing this work for years. Like you and I now are asking ourselves proactively these hard reflection questions because we have the tools and the practice. that allow us to do that without kind of like our nervous system shutting down and freezing up. Early on in the healing journey or when you are forced into making different choices because life made that choice for you. It really is hard, like trust is something that is cultivated and built over time. This is not something that is necessarily, we're born with learning how to trust ourselves. Yeah. But when we continue to take this one little courageous act at a time, one hard question at a time, one new choice at a time, and maybe that new choice is just approaching yourself with a little bit more self compassion. Maybe it is being able to look back on your choices that you made, especially the ones that you feel shame or regret about. Especially the ones that created more pain and suffering unnecessarily. And you look at those choices from the lens of, I did the best I could with what I had in the moment, the choices that you made were made on the conditioning and the programming and the situation that you were in. Those were the best choices that you knew to make in that moment. And when you knew to make a better choice. You made a better choice. Yeah. Absolutely.

Sandra Jarvis:

Yeah. And I think that's that is why I'm so passionate about this work because there are so many women who are out there suffering and they don't know that they have a choice. They don't know that they can trust themselves. They literally have been programmed to believe that the answers are all out there somewhere.

Char Wilson:

Outside of them. Someone else's authority knows better.

Sandra Jarvis:

Right.

Char Wilson:

Yeah.

Sandra Jarvis:

And I think I'm just going to contradict you for just one minute. Please. Okay. Because. Let's go. Because you said we're not born trusting ourselves and I don't believe that. I believe we are born trusting ourselves. I believe it's programmed out of us. Because if you look at a baby, look at a child, they are, they're not afraid to take, to get their needs met, right? Like a baby will, they're hungry, they're gonna let you know, and they're gonna let you know until you do something about it. If they have a dirty diaper, they're going to let you know, like the baby knows they're like, no, this is what I need. And I'm going to make my needs known until someone helps me get it taken care of. Period.

Char Wilson:

I like this analogy because it's also like babies aren't afraid to, when they're working, learning to walk, they're not afraid to just keep falling. They're not focused on the fall. They're focused on the rise. Okay. I love this perspective. Transcribed

Sandra Jarvis:

And so I think that the truth is that our self trust is programmed out of us as children and that is not I've done a lot of study on conditioning and programming and all kinds of things. And I want to be clear because, Our parents are the ones who condition us. That's just the truth. But they were conditioned by their parents and they were conditioned by their parents and society conditions. And so it's this isn't a blaming thing, right? It's not, we're not blaming our parents for teaching us that we couldn't trust ourselves. But the thing that's really important to recognize is that our parents did the best they could. As a parent, I did the best that I could, but now. I get to take responsibility for my life and my beliefs, and I get to choose what I am going to put back into my life, right? And I can look at the programming and the conditioning that my parents passed on to me, and now, as an adult, I can say, you know what? That isn't working for me. Maybe that worked for my mother. And that was okay for her. And that's, then that's good. She did her best, but it's not working for me and I don't want to carry it anymore.

Char Wilson:

So to wrap it up, I've loved this conversation. I can talk to you all day long, but what is one small actionable step just in this focal point of the topics of choice. You have a choice. You do not have to be the victim of your life choice and trusting yourself to make the next right choice. What is one actionable step that are our sisters who are listening to this episode that they can take today to improve their lives?

Sandra Jarvis:

I the thing that just popped into my head is something that I actually did. And. I think that so many of us get stuck in ruts, in autopilot, in whatever you want to call it, that we aren't able to actually very conscious of any of our choices. Like we go throughout our days doing things based on habit and based on just whatever has driven us. And we don't actually think about what we're choosing every day. And so the thing that I would say is to decide to be really conscious of your choices. So wake up in the morning and. Consciously choose what you want to eat for breakfast do I want, do I really want this bowl of lucky charms because that's the easy thing that I can throw in a bowl and eat in five minutes, but maybe I don't, maybe that's not what my body actually wants what do I want and make those choices based on what feels good. Instead of based on what you've always done maybe there's relationships in your life that are there because they're just there, but maybe they're not the best relationships for you. So start looking at those choices of who do I want to choose to spend my time with? What do I want to put into my body? How do I want to spend my free time? What am I doing that, so just, I think we make. Thousands of choices every day and 35,

Char Wilson:

000 choices

Sandra Jarvis:

a

day.

Sandra Jarvis:

And most of them we do unconsciously. We do it through our subconscious because we're just, that's what we just always do. And a great exercise to start really waking up your brain and to start showing yourself that you can trust yourself is to consciously and intentionally. Consciously. Start making those 35, 000 choices and obviously you're not going to make all of them with intention, but it's just those little tiny things that start to make a difference that start to add up and Honestly, I think you know when I think about self care, I don't think about pedicures, I don't think about going to a spa or whatever. Those are not the things I think about. I think about how do I intentionally create a life I love every day. And that to me is ultimate self care. Yeah.

Char Wilson:

I'm going to repeat what I heard you say earlier, making the conscious choice based on what feels good and true and right for you, instead of the choice that you've just always. Made. Habitually. And probably the choices where our listeners can start are the ones that are causing them the most pain and frustration right now.

Sandra Jarvis:

Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Char Wilson:

So start there and just get really curious of does this, is this working for me? Yeah.

Sandra Jarvis:

Yeah.

Char Wilson:

And if not, is there a better choice that I would like to make for myself?

Sandra Jarvis:

Yeah. And I think to just recognize that maybe you're not going to make the best choice every time. And this isn't a reason to beat yourself up.

Char Wilson:

That's where the self compassion piece comes

Sandra Jarvis:

back in. Exactly. Celebrate the fact that you're trying to do it intentionally. And don't beat yourself up for not making the right the best choice. It's really about improvement. It's about how can I make it 1 percent better today.

Char Wilson:

And that is a whole other podcast episode for all the fellow. High performing, high functioning, burned out women out there who just struggle with making the next best choice instead of the perfect choice. Yes. So maybe I'll have you back on for an episode on that. The next best choice consciously. Yes. On what is good and true and right for you. Not the one that you've just always made.

Sandra Jarvis:

Yeah. Yeah. And trusting yourself that is. That you can do that. I love that.

Char Wilson:

This was a great episode. I had so much fun talking to you. Thank you for sharing your story and your wisdom with us. So if there are sisters who want to get to know you a little bit more, or maybe are in need of your services, where and how can they find you?

Sandra Jarvis:

Honestly, I'm changing my entire business right now. And so my website is down, everything's down. However, you can come follow me on Instagram at offhandinspiration. And that is where I'm going to be doing all of my announcements about what I'm going to be doing and links as I get my website going again and things like that. So Instagram offhandinspiration.

Char Wilson:

Love that. That's the notes. How about your book? Where can they get that?

Sandra Jarvis:

My book? You can get on Amazon. It's just severed a memoir of hope and healing by Sandra Jarvis. That memoir of hope and healing part. It's important if you just type in severed on Amazon.

Char Wilson:

All right. A little scary. A memoir of hope and healing. Please remember the tagline.

Sandra Jarvis:

Exactly. Authored by

Char Wilson:

Sandra Jarvis. J A R V I S. All right. Beautiful. We will include the Amazon link to your book and a link to your Instagram and the show notes so people can find you, follow you, and yeah. Other than that, we are just so glad, sisters, that you joined us today on She Speaks. I hope that you leave feeling seen, inspired, connected, and ready to take one step closer to living as your true self. Remembering that the wisdom we seek is often found within. Keep shining, keep speaking, keep listening to your inner voice and join us next time as we continue this wisdom journey to wholehearted living. And if you enjoyed this episode, please give it a five star review and share with all of the beloved sisters in your life. Love you, sweet friends. And I'll see you next week on she speaks.