Episode 5 - Lisa

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Hello, and welcome to the Quiet Women Podcast. I'm your host, Stephanie Sumner. On this episode, we'll speak with Lisa Parker. Lisa and I have been friends for years. She was someone I consider to be exactly the opposite of a quiet woman, so I was shocked when she reached out to me with a desire to be on this podcast. It reminded me that appearances can be misleading, and you can't judge a book by its cover. I'm honored that she felt compelled to open up to me about the side of herself she's kept hidden for decades. Thank you so much for being part of my Quiet Women podcast. I've got to say that you are one of my favorite people. And thinking about you just brings a smile to my face. It was so much fun when I got to see you every day when we worked together so very long ago.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

So very long ago is right. Um thank you, first of all, for having me on the Quiet Woman podcast. Um I think it was 1994.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

I was somewhat fresh out of school and thought I was in heaven because I was in advertising and working with shopping malls. And I mean, for a young 20-something female, what could be better?

SPEAKER_01 1:50

That is so true. That is so true. I felt the same way. Like I could do creative work and it was involving like fashion and shopping and traveling to all these great stores. Like, what could be better?

SPEAKER_00 2:10

As a quiet woman myself, I will admit that I've been somewhat hesitant about promoting this podcast. So I first shared it with um some of my dearest friends, like you. And I'm I am thrilled that you enjoyed it and was honestly surprised that it resonated with you as much as it did, because I wouldn't have considered you a quiet woman. I mean, you're the fun, gregarious one that's the life of the party. And so I'm really curious about what is it about being a quiet woman that resonated with you.

SPEAKER_01 2:50

Well, I have to laugh because if you were to ask my friends and family and people that know me to describe me, I really do think the very last word that would come out of their mouth would be quiet.

SPEAKER_00 3:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:07

Because um, I think actually most people would describe me as loud. But uh, you know, things like gregarious life of the party makes people laugh, fun. Those are the kinds of things that most people use to describe me. But the truth is I am also, you know, insecure, fearful, uh, sometimes filled with doubt. I have low self-esteem, I question my worthiness. Um I've got a whole other side of myself that I am very quiet about. And I think a lot of people would find that surprising.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

It definitely surprises me. So why do you think you're that way? Why do you think you keep part of yourself quiet?

SPEAKER_01 4:05

Well, that's a good question. Um, I think most people have like a public persona and a private persona that don't always match. Um I have all kinds of reasons, I think, why I uh have a quiet side to me that doesn't show. Um when I'm out in public, of course, especially around a group of friends, I always, you know, am the talkative one and laughing and joking and projecting a lot of confidence, I think. But um but there are times definitely where I think maybe that could be not a cover-up, but I think it could just be a way of dealing with some of the deeper issues that I have with being insecure or not feeling confident enough. And I sort of, you know, put the funny face on to cover that up. And that's not to say that I I feel like I'm not being sincere um or authentic. It's just, you know, it's just what I've done to get by in public situations, whether I'm working or socializing or whatever. It's just it my my father was very gregarious and always told jokes, and he was the life of the party. And I think I, you know, saw him doing that, and I felt, okay, like that's what that's what you do.

SPEAKER_00 5:46

I think that that mask of humor that you talk about, I don't think you're unique by using that, by putting that on. You know, I saw something recently when you feel like crying, laugh instead.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

I mean, I was talking to Neil the other day, and he he said he's very insecure, and that's why he makes so many jokes. I'm like, I've I've been married for you 27 years. I never thought you were insecure.

SPEAKER_01 6:17

I can totally relate to that. I can totally relate to that.

SPEAKER_00 6:27

Is doing this interview hard for you?

SPEAKER_01 6:32

Yes. Uh, it's hard to be vulnerable and put myself out there. Um, but when I first learned that you were doing this podcast, and I went online and listened to episode one where you were kind of um pouring your thoughts and feelings out there, it really touched me. Like I thought to myself, that's really being pretty vulnerable. There's things about Stephanie I didn't know. And it was uh sort of eye-opening, and I thought, wow, that that did take a lot of courage. She she listened to Brene Brown and she's being putting all that out there. Even listening to your story, I got a feeling that it would probably be therapeutic for me to do something like that because I've been silent about a lot of things in my life. Um, I would say both the triumphs and the failures. I just don't talk about myself that much. And uh turning 60 made a little bit of difference in my life. Um, I'm less afraid of judgments and I'm more willing to accept myself in ways that I probably couldn't have 10, 20, 30 years ago. Your story just really resonated with me, and I thought to myself, I think I want to do that.

SPEAKER_00 8:03

I'm so glad. You had told me about, um, I don't know what birthday it was, that you wrote three things down on a piece of paper.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Um I was single. I was in my late 30s. I guess I was having some sort of a self-awareness moment because I remember thinking, okay, I'm in my late 30s and I really want more out of life. I read a study years back that said if you write something down, it has an exponentially better chance of happening than if you just say it or think it. So I took out a piece of paper and I wrote down that I wanted to uh meet a good man and get married. I wanted to stop living in an apartment and buy a house, and I wanted to have a dog. So unconsciously, I guess at the time, I turned all of my focus and energy on those three things. And without realizing it, those three things happened within like a two-year period of time. Wow. It was pretty incredible.

SPEAKER_00 9:38

Why do you think they happen so quickly? I mean, a dog you can get the next day, and a house takes a little bit longer, but I mean, true love can take some people a lifetime. How did you get them so quickly?

SPEAKER_01 9:52

Well, this was before uh the internet and before online dating and all that kind of stuff. It wasn't before the internet, but it was definitely before all of the online dating things were out there. Uh a girlfriend and I went to lunch and we were looking at the spectator. It was like your your tabloid-size local, you know, independent little newspaper. And in the back, they published the personal ads.

SPEAKER_00 10:26

Oh, the days of the personal ads.

SPEAKER_01 10:29

I'm showing my age. Um, and uh my girlfriend and I were both single and we were in our late 30s, and we're like, well, let's just read some of these, and they were quite funny, they really were quite funny, but some of them were serious, and we just decided that we were gonna put an ad in the personals. Interestingly, the very first guy that responded to her ad, and the very first guy that responded to my ad ended up being our husbands. No way, yes way.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

I don't think I knew that you met your husband through the personals.

SPEAKER_01 11:09

Yep, that's how we met.

SPEAKER_00 11:12

Oh, that's great. You guys have been married for how long?

SPEAKER_01 11:16

Over 20 years now.

SPEAKER_00 11:20

So it worked.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

So it worked, it did work, and um, you know, that goes to show you that I think there is something to writing stuff down, you know. When I've heard people talk about vision boards and doing, you know, vision boards where they'll put things up on a board that they want their life to have in it, and I think there's some value in that too, but for some reason, writing those things down really helped me focus my energy towards manifesting what I wanted. You know, fast forward 12 years into our marriage, and that's when I was in my 50s and going through all these menopausal things, and um I basically realized that my life was out of control and I wasn't happy. And I thought, okay, maybe I need to pay attention to some of this uh work on myself and see where that takes me. I was feeling so depressed and I couldn't really find any motivation in anything. Um, there was a general lack of joy in my life. So I wanted to get out of that rut and get out of that dark place, but I really didn't know where to start or what to do. I did have a friend, she was a life coach. I really admired her and I thought, okay, let me like take a leap of faith here and try working with a life coach and let me see where that might take me. I told her that, you know, things that made me happy were like going outside with my dog in the park or um eating really delicious food or taking a nap in the middle of the day. You know, I was just brainstorming all these things that would make me happy. And she said, Well, Lisa, let's create a happiness index. Her catchphrase was, if you can measure it, you can manage it. So I had this heavy, dark, unjoyous feeling going on, and I created a happiness index, which was a spreadsheet of how many times I did stuff that made me happy, and I would write it down. And here we go again. I'm writing down things that made me happy, and I started getting happier. Another little uh quote that I took from um that session was when you start to take little baby steps forward, they don't feel like much in the beginning, but they can lead to something really big and profound in the end. And in the beginning, it really didn't feel like much. But uh I would say that over the course of a few months of these life coaching sessions, it did lead to some big changes.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Big changes like what?

SPEAKER_01 14:56

Uh I really started moving towards a different career. Um this was, you know, when I was in my mid-50s. And I thought, well, first of all, that's silly. I can't start a new career when I'm in my mid-50s. But because I wasn't being fulfilled, I really did want to sort of change things up. And I did slowly but surely find more joy in my personal life, but my professional life was still stagnant, and I didn't really enjoy the work anymore, so I did want to move towards a new path in in my career. I did stop the coaching and I settled into a just a a comfort with being uncomfortable, again, not really finding the courage or the ability to fail or make a mistake or be vulnerable because I had all these fears. I was I was letting fear take over. I actually have another friend who started studying life coaching, and um she needed somebody to uh help her get her certification. So I agreed to be a client, and we had more coaching sessions, and I was focusing on my career path. In one of our sessions, I was talking about my lack of self-confidence, and I got pretty emotional talking about my parents' divorce.

SPEAKER_00 17:01

So it all goes back to our parents.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

Well, I I think it does to some extent. Um, my parents got a divorce when I was a teenager. It was not a um amicable event, it was very uh angry and filled with a lot of bad stuff. And the imprint that left on me uh I didn't really realize at the time, but I didn't have the tools to deal with all the feelings I was feeling as a teenager. And I think that was maybe the beginning of where I started being really quiet and shutting off my feelings because I just kind of bottled up all of my feelings and stayed quiet about them. I wanted to still, you know, have a relationship with my father, even though he had moved out, and I wanted to still have a relationship with my mother, even though she was not in a good place. So I kind of did what I needed to do on the outside to make sure everything was light and happy and okay, and on the inside it was anything but, but I wasn't talking about it.

SPEAKER_00 18:36

And you wanted to keep things light and happy because you felt like that was your role.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

Like you, I was an only child, yeah, and I didn't have any siblings to bounce things off of, so yeah, I guess I did feel like it was my role. And a lot of that negative stuff feeds into the quiet parts of me that have these insecurities and and these other things that I don't talk about.

SPEAKER_00 19:11

How so?

SPEAKER_01 19:14

Well, so I got emotional with my life coach in this session, and uh she said, Lisa, you probably want to uh seek out a therapist because I'm not licensed to deal with this kind of a thing. So I ended up um meeting with a therapist, and we talked about all of these things that were feeding into my inability to step out into this new career path I wanted. So for 40 years, I had been walking, or over 40 years, I had been walking around carrying all this stuff in silence. And in these therapy sessions, it all started to come out.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

Wow, 40 years that you'd been sitting on all that.

SPEAKER_01 20:09

It really has lifted a weight out of me. It really has made me feel lighter in that I just kind of got it off my chest, first of all. And through different sessions, I now realize that there's all kinds of factors, but when it comes right down to it, when we wake up every morning, we have a whole bunch of choices that we get presented with every single day. And it's a it's really on us, it's on ourselves to choose how we want to proceed.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

And you can choose joy when you wake up in the morning.

SPEAKER_01 20:58

It is a choice, it is most definitely a choice. I had a fantastic relationship with my mother. We were best friends. All of my friends thought she was their best friend. Like my mother was just a girl's girl, and um she and I had a very honest relationship with each other. I told my mother everything. As she was preparing to exit my life, is when actually Robert came into my life. Um, I did give it a little boost with that personal ad, but but but I think there was some divine uh energy happening because as my mother was leaving my life, Robert came into my life, and he, my husband, is actually. A person that I find I can be 100% open, no judgment, honest. We have a very healthy, uh judgment-free relationship where we talk to each other freely. So he's that person for me in my life now. But I think we all need somebody other than our spouse to talk to. When I did seek out that first life coach, that was probably the first time I ever had that authentic spill the beans kind of conversation with somebody outside of my immediate family.

SPEAKER_00 22:42

You have lots of friends. There are a lot of people that are around to support you. Why did you feel like you couldn't share that part of yourself with someone that was already in your life?

SPEAKER_01 22:55

I don't know, Stephanie. I really don't know. I guess it was my default position just not to open up and talk about the stuff that made me worry or made me feel insecure. I didn't want to share that part with anybody. I just kept it, I just kept it suppressed. And I I don't think that it was just, it was not a natural feeling for me to open up with anybody.

SPEAKER_00 23:30

Until today.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

Well, I've had some practice with a couple of my coaches and my therapist, but like I said, when when you you sent me that email announcing that you were starting the Quiet Woman podcast, and I read what you had written, and I and I listened to your episode, it was like, wow, wow, this is great. And it it wasn't a lot of forethought. I just kind of immediately, you know, reacted to that, and and I think my my body just said, okay, let's open up to Stephanie. I'm honored.

SPEAKER_00 24:22

When you started on this journey of looking inward, were you consciously trying to find your intended purpose?

SPEAKER_01 24:34

I have always envied those people who would say, I love what I do so much, I would still do it even if I didn't get paid. I have never had that kind of clarity or passion in anything that I did. And I went to a uh art school, I went to Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, and the degree that I got in college was communication arts and design. So I had studied all aspects of design to get that degree, but I ended up choosing graphic design and advertising and going on that for my career path. But I always loved interior design and colors and fabrics and textures and patterns. I liked fashion too. I just I really leaned more towards the whole interior design as what I felt my intended purpose might be.

SPEAKER_00 25:46

I remember loving to go to your apartment and then your house, oh my gosh, was so cool. You definitely have a knack with interior design.

SPEAKER_01 25:57

Thank you. Thank you very much. It it energizes me, it really energizes me. I get emails from the universe every morning. It's actually uh tut.com. And one of the emails I got earlier this year really resonated with me, and I can't remember exactly what it said, but it was something like if something keeps reoccurring in your thoughts, or you find yourself coming back to the same thought over and over, then that is your intended purpose in life. And I read that and I was like, oh my gosh, from the time I worked with my very first life coach, like eight or nine years ago, through all these other things, that's the one thing that kept coming back to me over and over again was this desire to work in interior design and home furnishings and and and home staging, because home staging had become a thing. And I thought that's it, that is really it. That like like Steve Martin in that movie, I have a special purpose. And in reading that email from the universe, I was like, okay, that's it. That's it. I am going to do this. This is why I'm here. If I want to really be happy and do something that fulfills me, I want to go into interior design and home staging. I'm actually going to do it.

SPEAKER_00 27:50

Amen to that. You know, the emails from the universe, I think that they can fall on deaf ears unless you are in a mind space to actually receive the message. And you were at a point, and I think I'm speaking from my own experience, to really get the value of those words and make them work for you.

SPEAKER_01 28:19

That is absolutely true. Because a lot of times, you know, we are presented with things every day and it does fall on deaf ears or gets a blind eye. It, you know, you do have to be open to receive and notice those things.

SPEAKER_00 28:44

You have uncovered so much about yourself over the last several years, decades. So, what are you now doing with all that knowledge?

SPEAKER_01 28:57

So, I think a lot of the things that I've studied and a lot of the sessions that I've been in with these beautiful people that have helped me along the way is that um there is definitely something to be grateful for every single day of our life. And that helps me not get in the doldrums. You know, if you're if you're grateful for something, it's really hard to be sad. Um and basically the more that we can be our authentic true selves and not carry around that burden of whatever we're fearful of, the better off we all are.

SPEAKER_00 29:47

Well, I think you're making great strides.

SPEAKER_01 29:50

To me, that's what Quiet Women sort of says to me. Your premise is a hundred percent correct. There's a bunch of us out here. Being quiet, I think, is a part of all of us, especially if you are a woman. But finding a way to speak up or resolve issues from your childhood that kept you quiet, or follow whatever that recurring thought that you keep having is, that can be very empowering.

SPEAKER_00 30:43

Because we quiet women don't often talk about ourselves, it's not always obvious to our friends and even our family when they should step in to offer assistance. It's up to us to ask for that help, which isn't always easy. Lisa's story is a good reminder of the hope and joy that exists when you find the courage to trust and give your complete self to others. Follow Lisa's home staging journey at designeclectic.net. Thank you for listening to this episode of Quiet Women. I invite you to join our Facebook community. Search for Quiet Women Podcast. And if you are a Quian with a story to share, or would like to nominate someone to be a guest on this podcast, please reach out to me at Quietwomenpodcast at gmail.com. Until next time, remember, your silence doesn't define you. Your unique and complex life is what has made you into the amazing person you are today. I see you. We all see you, and we are here for you, and we cheer for you.