002: Overcoming fear of leaving a dangerous situation + setting boundaries – Ruby Usman
In this episode:
In this episode of The Fearless Females Podcast your host Tegan Mathews interviews Ruby Usman who shares:
- What it was like growing up in a country where women were treated as second-class citizens
- How she managed to escape a violent marriage
- What it was like to breathe for the first time
- How she learnt to set boundaries and decide for herself what was acceptable and what wasn’t
- Why self-care is so important both for ourselves and for the good of others
Tegan’s Take Aways:
- When you know you’re going to be facing something that will trigger your fear, prepare and create a strategy before hand to support you to succeed
- Replace anger with curiosity and you will find peace
- People hurt other people when their needs aren’t being met so it’s so important to give yourself self care
- You have to want things to be different before you can decide and take action
- Say yes to new experiences – it’s the only way you are going to find out if you like it or not
About Ruby Usman
Ruby Usman is a change-maker and passionate self-care specialist. With a brilliant business mind, an international career and first-hand experience of the hardships of life, she is an inspiring speaker and author of the book “Self-Care for Parents”.
Growing up in a third world country where women were oppressed and self-care was non-existent, Ruby witnessed the consequences of this neglect, manifesting in a violent and frightening community. This is her motivation for helping her clients find the balance between bliss and drive – strategic bliss is her overarching goal and her ultimate strength.
Contact Ruby Usman
www.rubyusman.com.au
A Gift for Listeners From Ruby Usman:
Download your free copy of Ruby Usman’s book – Self Care for Parents
By entering your name & email address we agree we won’t share your details with anyone. You will receive your book plus occasional emails from Ruby Usman. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Show Notes: Episode 002: Ruby Usman
Ruby’s Fearless Story
- Felt like I had no existence – was told you must be a reproductive machine and a slave to the person you marry
- Blessed to have parents who believed education was a non-negotiable
- Parents gave me critical thought & that gave me the ability to stand up against society and leave Pakistan
- I call myself a self-care activist
- Reconnecting people with their needs – when you do, you can’t hurt other people
One Highlight Moment
- I believe in seizing the day so I have lots of ‘moments’
- 9th April 2002 in Germany – first trip overseas
- There was a river flowing and I was on top of a hill with the wind on my face
- This is what it feels like to breathe
- I have never known this feeling before consciously as an adult
- That moment was my re-birth
- It gave me the courage to leave my marriage
- I was another person before 9th April and another person after
- My experiences before that contributed to who I am today
- But before that I felt like a prisoner of my life
- Before that I thought I couldn’t get out of the abusive marriage
- I felt like I didn’t deserve love so why try
- After 9th April none of that mattered because I now knew how to take free breathes and that was enough to start my journey
How did you turn it around
- I had tried to get out of the abusive marriage before but discovered I was afraid of being alone
- As soon as I left him I had a panic attack and it was so severe I asked to be with him again
- My boss at the time – who I have dedicated my book to – said to me:
- When you are going to do something difficult that you know you are going to feel afraid
- Why not create strategies before hand so that when it comes time to be afraid, you already have something prepared
- Wow, I thought, that is so simple and so logical
- So what I did was I created a power point presentation
- I knew that eating watermelon was the only thing that made me feel better during my panic attacks
- So I wrote – eat watermelon
- Do not call him – and the reasons why I shouldn’t
- Then I posted them in front of the bed so that they were there all the time to remind me
- If those reminders hadn’t been there I can honestly say I would have called him
- And I turned off my phone because I knew if it was on, I would call him
- It’s so important to have a plan when you feel you have to leave a situation
- It’s also very simple and that’s the beauty of it
- It’s all about knowing and then creating a system to compensate for it
A specific facing fears moment
- You were extremely courageous and faced your perpetrator. How did you prepare for that and what was it like for you?
- When I left the marriage I was full of hatred for men and for the world and for everybody
- I did not think I could trust anyone
- I also didn’t have any friends because the relationship I had been in, he didn’t allow me to have any friends
- So it was a stage zero for me
- So I went and did a course called Asia works
- It was a five-day course, then a three day advanced and a three-month leadership program
- The first five days was about awareness and it made me confront all the hatred I had
- I had to face what was behind that which was all the pain I was storing within my own body
- After that I became curious as to what would drive someone to hurt someone else
- I thought, maybe if I can understand what was going through his mind when he did those things to me, then I can understand what happened to me
- And if I can understand him then maybe I can understand this pattern within that society
- So I put myself into a situation where I could have a conversation with him
- But that was easier said than done – how do you start a conversation like that
- “Hi, you abused me a while ago and do you know why you did that?”
- So I wasn’t brave enough to say that but I did ask him what was going on for him when we shared the experiences we did
- And he said those were the darkest allies for him and he never wishes to revisit them in his life again
- And that brought me to understand that sexual abuse does not define him, it’s one of the things he did
- And that started this search for me on why people hurt other people
What did you learn from this
- There is a book The Lucifer Effect by Dr. Philip Zimbardo
- He created an experiment with volunteer prisoners
- Within five days of the experiment there were riots, guards abusing prisoners and all sorts of things so he had to shut it down
- What came out of it is that if you deny a person what they need or what makes them happy, they are going to react and sometimes that reaction hurts other people
- Similar to fight, flight or freeze where if someone is put into a situation, these will be their reactions
- I spent a lot of time being numb to my emotions
- I was just lucky that I was able to leave that world and create a life for myself and not everyone is able to do that
- Imagine a life where you have to provide for your wife, children, parents, sisters and you aren’t supposed to show weakness
- You’re not supposed to talk about your feelings
- And they are burdened by those responsibilities and it has to come out some how
- I love how you had curiosity because with knowledge comes power and by creating that understanding it created peace for you
- You could see him as a person who acted out badly – which doesn’t excuse what he did, but it helped you to understand and find peace with that
- Having the courage to speak to him about that was hugely courageous and commendable and amazing
- Its amazing, when things happen to us, instead of confronting them we take it out on other people which isn’t good for them or us
- We are never happy when we take it out on other people
- It comes down to a choice, if I want to stay in the known, the familiar, even if I don’t like it then the tools won’t appear
- You have to want it to be different
- For me, I had never dreamed of leaving Pakistan. As a girl its just not possible to do that and create an independent life
- So I understand its hard but I think everyone can do it, you just have to make up your mind.
- I was so hell bent on finding something that works. In 21 months I saw 24 different professionals to handle and confront what I had to deal with
- That’s how much stand I took for my life
How did you get to the point of determination
- I think curiosity is one and willing to take a stand for your life
- Deep down I wanted to become a better person
- I said no to what I didn’t find acceptable
- And that meant I had to find something to accept
- That’s how I live my life now – if its something new then I just ‘lets do it’ because that’s the only way I am going to find me
- The moment I accept bad, I am saying I don’t deserve good and I am telling the other person that it’s ok for them to do that to me
- Sometimes you have to experience something before you know if its acceptable to you or not
- I would like to acknowledge my mother for that
- I had exposure but my mother didn’t
- So she came to visit me and I took her paragliding, to a strip club and dancing
- She had never danced in her whole life, she had never worn a skirt or let her hair out
- And she said yes to experiencing it
- Its ok that when we do something new and it doesn’t work out
- Not everything is supposed to work out
- It’s a rainbow
- When we don’t accept bad it stops us from doing something about it
- But if it does get worse you will find something to make it better
- Believing that you can handle anything takes practice
- The universe will never throw us anything we can’t handle
- We only attract those things that are of the same vibration as where we are
- There’s nothing you can’t handle – that’s just fear trying to keep you small that tells you otherwise
What are you passionate about today
- Helping people reconnect with their needs
- I believe we live a life where we feel that if we are to be happy we have to say no to people
- I believe we can create win-wins
- So I call myself a self-care activist because I want to bring self-care revolution
- As a parent – instead of saying I have to stop thinking of myself in order to raise this child
- If you come from the mentality that I am not responsible for shaping my child I am responsible for loving and I can include my child in my life then its win win
- Showing self-love to yourself is a wonderful example to set for your children
What is something in your future plan that scares you
- I want to make emotional learning and emotional vocabulary something that is in all our institutions in the future
- For example, as part of pre-natal classes so that we are not trying to control our babies, we are letting them experience life instead of making it into something that is not
- It scares me because I don’t know how I am going to do it
- Roots of empathy where they bring a toddler and a mother into the classroom so that they build empathy and get to experience what it’s like to feel other people’s feelings.
- What a great plan that is to have
Five Fast Fun Fearless Facts about Ruby Usman
- Who inspires you? Growth and learning
- Favourite thing to do each day? Meditation and connecting with friends
- What’s something that still scares you? Camping alone at night
- Favourite technique or app or book? App = Day One Journaling App, Book = Andrews game in eleven minutes
- If you could wave a magic wand and fix one thing in the world right now, what would it be and why? Bring more self-awareness – unless we know, we can’t do anything about it
Gift for listeners
Book – Self Care for Parents – downloadable gift
Final Question
If you could turn back time what’s the one piece of advice you wish you could give your fourteen-year-old self?
- I don’t regret anything in my life
- I don’t want to change anything – like the butterfly effect, I wouldn’t want to change anything
- I would say to my fourteen-year-old self though – don’t worry, don’t think too much, it’s going to be ok
Where can people reach out to you? www.rubyusman.com.au
A Gift for Listeners From Ruby Usman:
Download your free copy of Ruby Usman’s book – Self Care for Parents
By entering your name & email address we agree we won’t share your details with anyone. You will receive your book plus occasional emails from Ruby Usman. You can unsubscribe at any time.