Everything Life Coaching: The Positive Psychology and Science Behind Coaching · Lumia Coach Training

The Stories We Tell Ourselves: How to Rewrite Your Life ft. Deanna Moffitt

·45 min·2 clips

Deanna Moffitt sits down with Noelle Cordeaux for a wide-ranging conversation about the stories people inherit and the stories they can choose to rewrite. The discussion starts with the emotional charge of being seen and approved, and how that kind of recognition can feel deeply rewarding. From there, it shifts into the other side of the experience: the sharp, bodily sting of feeling wrong. Noelle and Deanna tie that feeling to social construction and culture, suggesting that many of the rules people follow are learned long before they are ever questioned. The conversation treats belonging as something that reaches beyond preference. It becomes a nervous-system event, with approval lighting up pleasure and judgment triggering something closer to threat. That gives the episode its tension. It makes the ordinary habit of pleasing other people feel less like personality and more like a survival strategy. Deanna brings the lens back to authenticity, pointing to the way people can drift off their own path when they keep chasing someone else’s expectations. The episode stays with that idea instead of rushing past it. It asks what happens when a person keeps living inside another person’s story long enough to forget their own. The back-and-forth is reflective and cumulative, building a case through examples, pauses, and restatements rather than a tidy lecture. At one point, the conversation folds in neuroscience language such as the orbitofrontal cortex and pain centers. Those terms never feel detached from the human problem the guests are actually naming. They are used to make the emotional experience of approval and shame feel more concrete. The result is a coaching conversation that stays grounded in daily life. It is about dinner decisions, difficult conversations, self-protection, and the quiet cost of always choosing the safer script. The episode also keeps returning to the idea that rewriting a life is not only about insight. It is about tolerating the discomfort that comes with breaking pattern. By the end, the conversation leaves coaching feeling less like advice and more like a practice of noticing, questioning, and choosing again.

As heard by us

A coaching conversation about approval, authenticity, and the cost of pleasing others.

This episode treats storytelling as a coaching practice and keeps circling back to approval, wrongness, and authenticity. Deanna Moffitt and Noelle Cordeaux talk through the pull of being validated by other people, the sting of being judged, and the way people-pleasing can knock…

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Why you'd press play

When you want a gentler entry into a conversation about coaching, authenticity, and people-pleasing.

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