From Waiting to Wonder: Embracing Self-Choice

In this powerful first episode, Eimear introduces the concept of the "waiting room" - that place where we wait for permission, validation, or someone else to choose us. Through personal stories and honest reflection, she explores how we can break free from this pattern and choose ourselves instead. Join the conversation to ignite your journey toward a profoundly fulfilling life.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

00:00 Welcome to Girl Choose Yourself

00:45 Why I Started This Podcast

01:00 The waiting room metaphor and how we get stuck there

03:18 Breaking free from cultural conditioning about what's possible

10:58 The Power of Running

14:42 Reclaiming Your True Self

17:09 Join the Journey

20:37 Closing Thoughts

KEY TAKEAWAYS

- We often wait for external permission to live fully

- True security comes from choosing yourself

- Small daily choices lead to transformative change

- Breaking one limiting belief challenges them all

- We're capable of far more than we imagine

QUOTABLE MOMENTS

"I'm greedy for a big juicy life... and I make no excuses for it!"

"We're more than we imagine. We can become and be more. And it begins with choosing ourselves."

RESOURCES 

🎁 FREE Path to Purpose Quiz: Take the quiz!

📚 Choose Yourself Book: Get the book!

⏱️ The 15 Minute Shift ($27): Give yourself the gift of clarity - your first brave step forward in less than the time it takes to scroll social media. Discover The Shift!

CONNECT WITH EIMEAR

📱 Instagram: @eimearzonecoach

💻 Website: eimearzone.com 📧

Email: hello@eimearzone.com

Subscribe to Girl, Choose Yourself on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

© 2025 Eimear Zone Coaching. All rights reserved.

Transcript

Hi, I'm Eimear Zone and welcome to the podcast and this episode.  I want to talk to you and explain a little bit about why I started this podcast.  Have you ever felt like you are in a waiting room in your life?  I think for a long time, without even realizing it, I was in a waiting room. I was waiting for somebody else to tell me what to do, to show me the way, to choose me, to pick me; to pick me for the job, to pick me for the opportunity, to pick me as the girlfriend in all these areas of my life.

I think I didn't have a sort of hardwired programming in myself, this belief that I could choose, that I could choose a really large life for myself, full of immense possibility.  And I think I'd seen all these, I guess quite cheesy, little signs and “Dream Big!” and “You Can Do Anything!”. And particularly as a young woman in the workforce back in my twenties, I'm 55 now, it's like “Women can have it all!”.

And that just felt quite oppressive. I wasn't quite sure what “all” was, but it felt very difficult.  And  I have felt this annoying sense, as I got older, that there had to be more for me than I had experienced so far.  And I felt this real realization that I think, you know, I've been waiting around. I've been waiting around for some permission slip to be granted by, I don't know, some omnipotent other, somebody who must be much more interesting, worthy, and powerful than just little old me, who was going to grant that to me.

And in the absence of that, I would just continue to plod along in my kind of all-right life. There just was this feeling that, this sense that there was more. And that's what this podcast is about. It's about exploring that,  exploring that journey that we're all in of life, and how we can find ourselves on a path in life that is not 100 percent of our own choosing. 

And that can be quite disconcerting.  It can be quite disconcerting to kind of wake up in a career, in a relationship, in a situation, and kind of go, How did I get here?  How did I keep taking one step after the other? And whose plan was I following? I think often we make, we put more attention and more time and more effort into maybe planning a vacation than we do into planning our lives.

I know I didn't. I know a lot of things were kind of accidental for me.  Career planning: I remember my sister, was very clear in what she wanted to do. I'm one of seven, my elder sister, wanted, knew very early on that she, well, pretty early on that she wanted to go into medicine. She wanted to be a doctor. 

And for a while I thought, Oh, I'll be a doctor too. Like really, just because she was being a doctor. And that seemed like, okay, I need a plan, get a plan. I'll copy your plan.  And then I realized that I wasn't interested in being a doctor at all and had a conversation with her once about careers and career guidance at school was not very sophisticated. 

And we have this chat about  I guess it was the beginning of visualizing who you would become. And I made my decision based primarily on fashion and that I wanted to wear nice clothes and nice suits. And so that was it. I was going to be a businesswoman. And, yeah, and I went into that area. I did an international marketing and languages course because I was also interested in languages.

I like to travel. And, that was it!  I did a business course and did marketing. And I think I was haphazardly planning things and that's okay, for a while. That's okay for a while until it's not okay. And I think many people, myself included, find that this sort of haphazard patched-together pathway through life is not necessarily going to lead us to a very fulfilling conclusion.

And I am going to admit here that I'm greedy. I'm greedy for a big juicy life. My life is pretty great, but I am greedy for more and I make no excuses for it apart from calling it greedy, which may seem like I am like it's a bad thing.  It's not a bad thing to want to express yourself fully in this life and to find out, geez, what might I be capable of?

And I think that's a question that I like to ask myself a lot now. And that is not really the background that I come from. Culturally, or in my immediate family, it was not like, you can do anything, you can be anything and a hugely supportive background. It was a great upbringing in many ways, but  I think we're very much constrained in what we can believe is possible for ourselves by the environment that we grow up in and what we see reflected there as what's, you know, what's possible or what's the right way to be and that was to go to college, get a job, get a stable job, get married, have kids.

And, and then it sort of peters out after that and, and that's okay. That's enough. You should be happy with that. It was never the idea, like people who were setting up businesses, those were other people.  People who were making like millions of dollars, those were other people. And they had to be somehow different from me.

And I think that you have to consciously evolve and grow out of your conditioning and “Girl, Choose Yourself!”  is about that. It's about noticing where we have got a bit stuck and we've stopped choosing ourselves or we never learned how to do it. We never learned how to get fully on our own side. And I think in a world that often didn't envisage women taking up an awful lot of space in it, it wasn't built by us or for us necessarily but by those who didn't consider that we were going to take up an awful lot of space in it.

And that just doesn't suit me one bit. Doesn't suit me one bit. It doesn't suit me for myself and it definitely doesn't suit me for my daughter. And it sure as hell doesn't suit me for any granddaughters that I have. 

And it really starts with us daily, day in, day out, choosing ourselves really powerfully. And that means really getting to know ourselves in a way that we, I think it's sort of a deep remembering.  I think we've forgotten who we are. Not to get too spiritual or anything, but I just, I like this idea that we, you know, we come into the world and we have a grand maybe blueprint for a deeply fulfilling life.

And we sort of forget it.  We forget it. And life is about waking up to remembering.  And so on my journey, I'm looking to remember, to remember the immensity of who I am and what I may be capable of. And through that,  to be of deep service to other people who also want to wake up to the power that is simmering within them.

And I think we all get an inkling of it and it's almost scary. And I've found myself that it, that it has felt easier to just go along with the environment of not kind of rocking the boat or not imagining things for myself being very different. And hearing those sounds, I guess, from childhood and young adulthood of, you know, Who does she think she is?!  and, and all those voices that kind of keep you, messaging that keeps you small, and it's, it's sort of everywhere. 

Don't step outside the vision that I have of you!  And so when you start doing that, like I don't think, I've written two books now, The Little Book of Good Enough, and then the one that just came out that really inspired this podcast, Choose Yourself.

I don't think I could have done that if I hadn't radically changed my environment. and cultivated relationships with people who write books and who celebrate people, who take chances and begin to imagine a different version of themselves and take action to grow into that vision of themselves.  I don't think I could have done that if I hadn't consciously cultivated an environment, where that's kind of normal. 

And I'm so grateful that I've done that. And the same thing with,  you know, running. I'm a runner. That sounds really  Interesting to say, actually, I'm just noticing how that feels in my body,  claiming that I'm a runner,  I've just run two marathons and in 2024, like pretty much back to back to major marathons around Berlin in September, and I ran the New York marathon in, 

When does that happen? The very beginning of November. I was like, I was told when I was younger that I didn't have a lot of stamina, but I was, you know, a sprinter. She can't do long distance. It's amazing how much that stuck in my head. And it took me physically training for my first marathon when I was turning 50 back in 2019.

I remember the moment I was tired,  really tired after maybe two miles, maybe less, maybe less actually.  So quite at the beginning of the training and I stopped and I was just going, Oh my God, I can't do this. I'm too tired. I'm just, maybe I'm just not somebody who can do endurance. And then it kind of hit me.

It's like, Oh,  Oh, you, you run when you're tired!  You run when you're tired, that's how you train. You don't stop when you're tired, you run when you're tired. And it sounds simple, really simple, right?  But that was sort of like, oh,  I have to meet myself tired, running, and be with that.  And that's how I ran marathons.

It's like, oh, this is tired. I can be with this,  you know, obviously not initially for all of the 26, whatever miles, but I was able to get a little bit longer in each run by going, Oh, this is the part where it feels more tired. I pull back a little bit. I go for a little bit longer and my body gets stronger. 

And so I don't think I could have done that if I hadn't put myself in a position where I intended to grow, I intended to break, almost like break that identity of somebody who didn't have strong stamina. And I decided, I am going to show myself that that is not true.  And it's a very, obviously a very, very physical path when you're breaking that identity and burning it down. 

And I love to run because I believe that when you're - when you do that because you go through such physical and mental challenges when you run distance,  it makes you challenge every other area, every other limiting identity and label that you've put on yourself.  because you literally demonstrate that it's not true.

It's this tangible thing. Oh, I didn't think I could run around the block.  I just did. Huh. What else am I wrong about?  It's that powerful. So if you're able to physically if it's something that you could entertain, I really encourage people to just do a 5K, and prove to yourself through that physicality that you can do hard things and you can do things that you didn't think you could do and that you can take on new identities with intention and action and focus and support.  

So that's what this podcast is about. It's about a reinvention or really a reclamation, of who you are, a remembering of who you are. Because I believe that you are capable of a huge amount more than you may currently be creating and experiencing in your life.

All of us are.  And that it takes, it can, your life can really change. You can begin to create things that will make you so proud and begin to think, Oh right, that's who I am!  I'm not this smaller version that just hasn't felt right, that's felt pretty crappy actually.  That wasn't, that isn't the truth of me.

The truth of me is something a lot more powerful and I've sensed it.  I can feel myself kind of getting emotional just saying this, I, you know, I've sensed it.  I've touched it. I've seen a glimmer of it on occasion and I want to live there. I want to live there.  That feels like a place I want to go. And often we just don't know how to get there. 

And I wrote Choose Yourself really as sort of this blueprint, really this pathway because it's so noisy, isn't it? It's so distracting. I  mean,  New Year's resolutions, I really.  My phone. I'm just going to have to limit myself. The amount of time I spend on that device - because it's so addictive and draining.

And the more time I spend, on my phone, the worse I feel. I mean, the worst I feel!  It's so distracting.  Our attention is just hijacked and we get hooked. And then you feel, well, I feel crap.  I feel crap about myself when I waste my time on that.  And it doesn't get me where I want to go.  It doesn't put me in a position where I'm really in touch with who I truly am, like the best of myself.

It really just activates the parts of myself that serve me the least. And I don't want to do that anymore. And I suspect you don't want to do it either. So I would like to invite you to listen to this podcast and to come into a different space, a space that's about possibility and your potential and your power and touching into that, activating that, becoming your own ally, your own best friend, rather than always trying to recover from actions that lead to regret. 

The kind of, Why did I do that again? Why am I? Why isn't it? 

We're more than we imagine. We're more than we imagine. We can become and be more. And it begins with choosing ourselves.  One day at a time, one moment at a time, at those junctures for decisions. For me, it's, you know, in some of its simplest forms, it's the late-night snacking when I'm not choosing myself when I go at 11 o'clock at night and decide that I'll have an ice cream. 

You know, how do we interrupt patterns where we're not choosing ourselves?  So I hope in this podcast there'll be moments and episodes when it's just me. Like today,  talking to you and there'll be other times, many times when I'll be inviting guests on to the podcast to talk about their own journeys through life and where they felt like they've been in betrayal, when they've not been choosing themselves, when they've just been on autopilot,  pleasing other people,  you know, playing old scripts,  behaving in ways that make other people comfortable in denying their own truth.

And moments of change,  changing direction, getting on their own side.  And what we all can learn from and feel inspired by these stories of other people,  you know, taking that,  you know, making that pivot and saying, okay, enough! Enough, there's more. And I think the more we're in, I think the more that we are in community with people who are bravely getting on their own side, who are choosing themselves,  the more that that can sort of permeate ourselves and, and we can begin to make that a theme in our own lives,  that we choose ourselves.

And I really think that when we begin to do that, we, it's almost like  You know, people, you know, you're really tapping into your authenticity, then you're really beginning to know who you are, and it lights you up when you're on purpose, when you're connected into your wholeness, and the truth of who you are, when you're in pursuit of that, when that is your intention. 

Man,  you really light yourself up,  and other people notice it, and you're inspiring people. You're inspiring other people, and that can only be a good thing. That can only be a good thing.  So I'll just close with this; In the highly unlikely event that nobody has told you this yet today,  let me be the one to have the honor of reminding you that you are truly magnificent - Magnificent! - and the world is a far more beautiful place because you, you, are here with us all.  Be safe, be well, until the next time.