Journey to Iconic Podcast

Reveal Your Gifts: Transform Struggles Into Empowering Experiences

• Kirsten Barfoot • Season 1 • Episode 10

Share episode

What if your biggest struggles could actually become your greatest gifts? 

Join me, Kirsten Barfoot, as I share insights from my journey as a Gene Keys guide, revealing how transforming fear into love can lead to profound personal transformation. 

In this episode, we explore the concept of each Gene Key holding a challenge, a gift, and an enlightened state. By shifting our perspective—a bit like flipping a coin—we can discover the empowering aspects hidden within our challenges. 

Embrace the magic that emerges when we honour our emotions, from anger and anxiety to frustration, as they guide us toward growth and authenticity.

We'll also examine the role of authority and control in our lives, particularly in creative processes like podcasting. Discover how accepting that not everyone will resonate with our message can actually empower us to focus on what we can control. 

By trusting the process, we can use our unique voices with authenticity and compassion. This episode is an invitation to recognise the beauty in our struggles, transforming them into richer experiences of self-expression and deeper connections with others. 

Whether you're seeking personal growth or creative inspiration, this conversation promises to guide you toward a more empowered and authentic self.

Send us a text

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Journey to Iconic podcast, where we unlock your highest potentials through transformation and intuition. I'm your host, kirsten Barfoot, ceo of Journey to Iconic. Each week, we dive into the realms of personal growth, intuition and authentic leadership, guiding you to become the best version of yourself. Whether you're looking to enhance your personal brand, align with your true direction or tap into your inner wisdom, you're in the right place. Let's embark on this journey together and start transforming your life today. Hello, hello and welcome to this episode where I want to talk about transforming the struggle or the challenge into your gift. Now, depending on how long you have been aware of me or my work, you will know, or about to know, that I'm a Jean Keys guide. Now, this is the best body of work that I have found that supports and can easily take you on that journey from seeing what the struggle is, seeing what the challenge is and what gift is available, and then what is an enlightened version. Rundown, each gene key that we have we have several in our chart is um. We'll have a challenge, it will have a gift and it will have a city, which is the enlightened version. Essentially, the more you go into this work, you will see that both, all of them, essentially start with that fear response and you work your way into that love or that unconditional aspect of ourselves and the the work that I have done with it. I now start to see that really, we get so caught up in words and semantics and when you delve deeply into this, you will see that there really isn't. We see life as polarized, like there's this negative and there's positive right, and we'll see words like control and we'll see that as a negative word, and yet we will see something like trust in a positive. My invitation is to start to, you know, see that there is very much grey, and what I've discovered is that there are. It really is about our awareness, it's about our perspective, and both are true, depending on how we want to look at it.

Speaker 1:

And one of the best examples here, just to see the definite way in which we see things, is that we can see a coin. Now, every coin has a head and a tail, so there's one side will have some form of elaborate picture, some form of elaborate picture, and then on the you know like it'll have a symbolic representation of something, and yet on the back it will usually usually have a head. So it might be the head, the president or the queen or some important person. So when we see a coin, there are two definite different sides. So if you're standing in front of me and I'm holding the coin up, I will see one side and you will see the other side. So you can say, I see the head and I say, well, I can see the tail, I see the head, and I say, well, I can see the tail. And we can go into arguments about this and say, well, no, I see the head and no, I see the tail. So we're both right. Right, we're both correct, because what we can see is exactly what we're, what we're looking at. And yet if we turn the coin around, we can now get the other person's perspective, we get a different, we get a different view. And so there is, uh, that person now can see what we were seeing, which was the tails, and now I, I can see what they were seeing, which is the head, and so it's like, oh, wow.

Speaker 1:

So it depends on how you look at things as to empowering nature, and you can be right and you can fight to be right, and you can fight for your limitations or you can fight for your you know, for your infinite qualities as well. And so that's what I would like to invite you on that journey today is to having a look at a different perspective. So can we find a gift in the challenge? Can we find a gift in that struggle? And you know, my life has taught me to honor those struggles, to honor those challenges, because really there is a richness and a gift and a magic on the other side of those and and so there's been a lifetime of this experience, you know, experimentation with myself, with other people, like you know it, there is a real magic, magical quality to struggles and challenge. Now, do, do I always see the beauty and the magic in the moment?

Speaker 1:

Uh, no, um, sometimes challenges are really hard, you know, like, sometimes struggles are really hard. There can be a real darkness, there can be a real heaviness to these times in our life when we are going through something. Uh, you know, it could be the loss of somebody, it could be the breakup, it could be, you know, the loss of a job, it could be financial. You know crisis, there's all manner of. You know there's all sorts of things that can go on in people's lives, and maybe you've experienced one or two, or maybe you've experienced all of them, and maybe, when you're going through these things, it can be really easy to say, oh god, like, what have I done wrong? What is why me or everybody else seems to have it easy. Why do I have it hard, you know, and there can be a really real attachment to taking it personally, and my invitation is, even if you find it hard to to go. Yeah, I'm so grateful for this, or, yes, I'm so willing to see the, the gift in this. I can really see it. Maybe you can't, and that's okay. Um, there's a real beauty in the acceptance of the stage that you're in.

Speaker 1:

I'm not about, you know, trying to change any perceived negative emotions, because I feel that all emotions have their place. And, and the very, the very uh, when we are trying so hard to get rid of an emotion, or trying to ignore an emotion, or trying to sweep something under the carpet, the very act of doing that is really what is creating an exacerbation of any of that. So, so it really does serve us to take a step back, like, just, you know, uh, stop, uh, this is not the time for, you know, problem solving. It's not. It's not the time for the solution, finding you know this is a time to be still, this is a time to just honor the space that you're in, however dark it is.

Speaker 1:

Just, I invite you to have the courage to sit with it, to sit with the pain, to sit with the anguish, to sit with the unknown, because a lot of it is spurred on by this not knowing what's going to happen, the uncertainty and that can bring up so much discomfort. And yet you know that is where the magic happens. You know that is seriously where the magic happens. You know that is seriously where all of the magic happens is in the unknown. So, if we can allow ourselves to sit in that place of the discomfort, of the pain, of the anguish, this is a real place of transformation. This is what I call the void, like this is where we all things are possible, uh, so, if this is hard, that's okay. Acknowledge that this is hard.

Speaker 1:

And the words that I like to use when you know, when I'm struggling with something and I I feel that heat coming up and I I find it hard to be in that place of peace or, uh, you know gentleness or kindness or love. You know it's like there is a real pain there is. Just have those words. It's I am open and willing to discover the magic in this or to move through this, or I'm open and willing to find the gift in this situation. I'm open and willing to find gratitude for this, and also open and willing to be patient. Open and willing to be gentle, open and willing to love myself through this process, no matter what comes up, you know. So what will happen is there's a relaxation that can come that honors the space that you're in. So it's not trying to be in the past, where everything was rosy, or not trying to be in the future, where you've moved through it. It's like just being okay with the place that you're at. And so there's this real ease that can come from this.

Speaker 1:

Now, in my experience, there is a lot of clarity available in these moments, and that's why patience is required, because we don't necessarily know when, when this clarity is going to come. We don't know when this magic is going to come. We don't know when the enlightened version or when we're going to find the gratitude. We just have to hold that light and if you need me to hold this for you while you, you know, find it for yourself. Um, allow me to do that, allow me to be that light that holds it up and says for sure, there will be a moment where you will find that clarity. Okay, so just trust the process and know that that will be available to you when the time is right and when you least expect it. This light bulb moment is going to occur and you'll be like, oh my gosh, that's what it was about, and, for sure, in time, however long that is, because it could be a day, it could be six months, it could be a year, um, it could be an hour. Uh, is that there will be a sense of like gosh, I would not have been able to get to this next phase had I not gone through that.

Speaker 1:

So it's really about honoring that struggle or that challenge, because this is where we understand deeper parts of ourselves. This is where we see ourselves moving through something that we never thought that we could, and this is a really empowering place to be, because you go through enough of these, then for sure you're going to come to that place of definiteness or a realization that I can do this, because look what I've gone through. So, really honoring it and, uh, honoring each struggle, each challenge that they, when they come up, they are really pushing us to, uh, see more parts of ourselves, to get a deeper understanding of who we are, of all that we can get through, the resilience that that blossoms from this, and then you know, it makes us more unshakable when it comes to, you know, putting ourselves out there. Or you know moving through a discomfort zone, you know going through doing things that are not. You know moving into the unknown, moving into things that we don't necessarily know how to do. We can build that resilience and that capability within ourselves to know that we've traversed the unknown. We've traversed into unknown territory many, many times and we've come out and we've learnt and we've understood. And so that's when we build that confidence in ourselves to know that, no matter what happens, we're going to be okay, we're going to figure it out, and if it doesn't work out the way that we thought, then we can adjust or move, and you know we go in a different direction. But nothing is lost. Everything is information has some learning, some insight for us that brings about this richness and this acknowledgement of deeper aspects of ourselves that we may never have known had we not gone down that path.

Speaker 1:

So my invitation today is to honour that struggle, honour the challenge. And I know it's hard, I know it's hard and um, and you know I never used to talk about this kind of stuff because I found it really icky. I found it really hard to talk about this or even to acknowledge that there was struggle or there was challenge. And yet that is a real uh, that's a real setback, because that that's when we build up these blocks within us and that's when we um, we have those silent saboteurs that come up and bite us in the bum. You know, have you ever had those situations where you're like getting you, you get totally surprised by life because all of a sudden there's this rosy picture of something when the alarm bells were really there, or the little intuitive nudges were there, we weren't listening to it, and that's when we get the rug pulled out from under us and you know that's that's no fun. So it's like acknowledge that, that there is a struggle, acknowledge that you might be angry or frustrated or sad or depressed or anxious or whatever it is, because when we can acknowledge where we're at, that's great. Okay, cool, maybe I just sit down for five minutes or I have a cup of tea for five minutes, or, you know, I go and talk to a friend, or you know. Then it's about that deep acceptance again of what's happening, because then we know it and we can do something about it. And I think that's where the power comes in. Is that when we are acknowledging the full realm of everything that's happening, and be okay, because this is when we move through things quicker. Otherwise, you know, things linger around and it just takes forever and that's when we get like, oh, that's, that's no fun either. So, uh, so anyway. So my invitation is to, um, you know, honor that challenge. I started off talking about the, the gene keys, because you know, um, this is a real I. What I like about it is that it gives a real indicator as to the words that you can use.

Speaker 1:

So I've spoken before about you know, I have the challenge which turns into authority and has the valour at the enlightened version. You know this has been a contemplation over time to understand what those words mean, how they show up in my life, and you know the discomfort that comes from. You know the control both from the negative and positive aspects. Then there's that authority is like trying to work out. How does authority become a gift?

Speaker 1:

But you know now I can see, you know, putting a podcast together there's an element of control that needs to happen. Like I need to control what it is that I'm saying. I need to control the elements that I'm using. There's an authority about what I'm saying. I need to control the elements that I'm using. There's an authority about what I'm saying. I need to believe what I'm saying. I need to understand what I'm saying. I can't just talk about nonsense and you know nobody's going to listen to that. But if there's something that has meaning and purpose, and maybe it's not for everyone, and that's that's okay. I've totally made peace with that. So there's an authority about about the words that are used and the way that I say things.

Speaker 1:

And then there's that trust. It's like trusting the process, trusting that this isn't for everyone and trusting not so much in necessarily the audience, but trusting that there's the reach and trusting that this will reach the people who are meant to hear it. So there's a big difference in, you know, controlling and wanting everything to be perfect so that I can speak to X, y, z. There's that real manufacture of trying to control all of the elements, trying to control the outcome, trying to make sure that I reach 10 000 people in one day and all of the things. That is what leads, excuse me, to stress, it's what leads to stress.

Speaker 1:

So, when we can honor that, we, we control what we can, you know, control what is in our, in our capability of doing. That's what we control. What we can, you know, control what is in our, in our capability of doing, that's what we control. Uh, we, we do what we do with the authority that we have and, um, you know the meaning and purpose that we attribute to our work. And then we trust the process, trust that our work does have meaning and merit to certain people, to everyone, not necessarily To the people who are right, yes, and so that is when we can really, you know, really bring that ownership of our full self, most full, authentic self-expression.

Speaker 1:

You know, we can use our inner voice, we can allow that to permeate through the noise. This is how we stand up out in a crowd. Is that we own our unique voice, not to sound like anyone else, not to be like anyone else, but to say the way that we say it, or to be the way that we are, because not everyone's going to set up their own podcast, it's not everyone's cup of tea, but you know, we all want to stand out in a crowd, we all want to be known for something, and so what is it that you want to stand for? And acknowledging that those struggles and those challenges are supporting you in this process of being the most authentic version of yourself, because this is what gives you that richer experience of yourself and that compassion for other people. So you're not telling people what to do, you're inviting them on a journey with you, and that's it. That's the key is like having people who like and love you for who you are, and that you love and like and respect in turn. So I hope this has been helpful and I look forward to seeing you in the next one.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for joining me on this episode of Journey to Iconic Podcast. I hope you found inspiration and practical insights to help you unlock your highest potential. If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe, rate and leave a review to help others find us for more resources and to connect with our community. Follow kirsten barford on linkedin and other socials or visit our website at wwwkirstenbarfordcom. Remember your journey to iconic starts with embracing your unique self and stepping into your power. Until next time, keep moving forward, trust yourself and remember I've got you.