Coping With Ghosting

Kate Berski on Feeling Behind in Life & Breaking Free from Society’s Timeline

• Gretta Perlmutter • Season 1 • Episode 85

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Has your life veered dramatically off course from what you planned? Whether through ghosting, betrayal, or an unexpected life challenge, many of us find ourselves struggling with the gap between expectation and reality. This powerful conversation between Host Gretta and Kate Berski, mental health advocate, and author of "30 Phobia: Why Your 20s Suck and How to Get Unstuck," offers liberating perspectives for anyone feeling lost, behind, or simply different from the "normal" timeline. Learn about:

  • The “expectation gap” that can make us feel behind in life
  • Why social media comparisons fuel misery
  • Why loneliness spikes during life transitions
  • Mindset shifts for when you feel behind in career and finances
  • The myth of the “arrival fallacy” and chasing milestones
  • Kate’s 4-step framework for finding joy in the journey

Ready to break free from society's timeline and create a life that's authentically yours? This episode will help you redefine success on your terms and find peace exactly where you are.

Connect With Gretta

Free & Private Facebook Support Group | Instagram | YouTube | coachgretta.com

Host Gretta Perlmutter, MA, a Certified Post Betrayal Transformation® Coach, delivers evidence-based strategies to help clients transform after heartbreak, betrayal, and life’s toughest moments.

Connect With Kate Berski 

Kate's Website | Instagram | Read "30-Phobia" 

Kate Berski helps women take back their 20s and build a life that truly fits. She normalises being normal and busts societal ‘milestone myths’ with real facts and fresh data. 

Music: "Ghosted" by Gustavo Zaiah

Disclaimer: This information is designed to mentor and guide you to cope with Ghosting by cultivating a positive mindset and implementing self-care practices. It is for educational purposes only; it solely provides self-help tools. Coping With Ghosting does not provide health care or psychological therapy services and does not diagnose or treat any physical or mental ailment of the mind or body. The content is not a substitute for therapy or any advice given by a licensed psychologist or other licensed or registered professionals.

Support the show

Note to All Listeners: Ghosting is defined as: The practice of ending a personal relationship with someone by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication (Oxford Languages). When you leave an abusive situation without saying "goodbye," it's not ghosting, it's "self-protection." When you quietly exit a relationship after a boundary has been violated, it's not ghosting, it's "self-respect."

Gretta:

Welcome to Coping with Ghosting, the podcast that provides hope, healing and understanding for anyone who's been ghosted or betrayed. I'm your host, Gretta, and today is all about breaking free of societal expectations and living fully on your timeline. And if you're anything like me and your life hasn't exactly turned out like you thought it would, this show is for you, no matter how old you are. Here with me to discuss this topic is Kate Berski, a self-made millionaire and mental health advocate who survived the challenges of her 20s and is now dedicated to helping others do the same. Her unique blend of honesty, vulnerability and expertise has made her a voice of hope for young adults worldwide. In her bold and deeply relatable new book, 30 Phobia why your 20s Sucks and how to Get Unstuck, kate pulls back the curtain on the myth that your 20s are the best years of your life and shows why they often aren't. Thanks so much for joining me, kate.

Kate Berski:

Thank you so much, Gretta. I'm excited for this conversation.

Gretta:

Me too, and you know your book focuses on people in their 20s, but the themes that you explore are universal. My listeners span all ages. And being ghosted, being betrayed, it's shattered the vision of the future that they had for themselves, it's deterred their plans for love, friendship, marriage, careers. And when life doesn't go how we thought it would, especially when it feels like everyone else expects us to hit these specific goals by certain ages, it can feel like and I'm going to use quotes it can feel like we failed. So in your work you talk about this expectation gap and social media and how it makes it harder for us to achieve our goals, and I'd love for you to share your thoughts on this.

Kate Berski:

Great Love that question and you're definitely not alone in this. It's exactly why I started the 30 Phobia Project. So the expectation gap is essentially the gap between our expectations out of life, or out of particular life events, and our lived reality. And what so many of us are finding is there's a huge gulf between the way we expect our life to go, which milestones we hit, at what age, in what way we're experiencing them, and the way that we're actually living right now. And I think a lot of the reason behind the expectation gap is, you know, that traditional milestone, that traditional timeline that a lot of us seem to internalize from a very young age, the kind of traditional order of things that goes you know, you finish your education, you get started in your career, you earn a certain amount of money, you meet your person, you get married, you buy a house, you get a dog, la, la, la, la la.

Kate Berski:

And a lot of us kind of internalize that without questioning it.

Kate Berski:

And that is a huge source of all the disappointment, the disillusionment, the depression, the anxiety that so many adults, not even just young adults, are experiencing right now, because, as you said, life very rarely turns out how we expected it, and sometimes that's a bit because we haven't stopped to challenge where those expectations have come from, whether they're our own expectations, whether they're societal pressures that actually are not relevant to us.

Kate Berski:

So a lot of the work that I do is about questioning the timeline, pushing back on all that pressure, realizing that you know we are normal, because I think so much of what we see online on social media is abnormal, is enhanced reality, is false reality and when we're comparing, you know, the richest, richest, most successful, most beautiful, most apparently happy 1% of humans to our own lives, where we don't feel perfect and we don't feel like we're ticking all the boxes, we often are left, that we're left feeling like we're failing, flailing or falling behind, when in reality we're actually trucking along at much the same pace as most other people.

Kate Berski:

So I like to use quite a lot of data in the content that I create and I used a lot of data in my book to normalize being normal, to show people that if you are turning 30 or 40 or whatever age and you're not married and you don't have the white picket fence and you're not making a certain amount of money, you're actually probably in the majority, not the minority, that you might be comparing yourselves to, and not even to previous generations, because the current you know economic climate, the current cultural climate is completely different to the one in which our parents grew up in. So we can't really compare ourselves to them either. So that's just a bit of an introduction to what I do, but I really love this topic and kind of busting all those milestone myths is my jam.

Gretta:

Thank you so much for the work you're doing. I believe social media is curated content and it's really unhealthy to get stuck in that comparison trap. I mean, there's so much going on behind the scenes that nobody is posting. The other day my friend sent me a picture of a drink and it was this beautiful cocktail that she had made. And she said I want to be upfront with you, I spent like an hour making this one drink. You see the picture and you think that it took me like a minute that you know here it is. Look how easy it is, look how perfect my cocktail is. But she was like the soda exploded all over the place. I had to clean it all up. The lime I was trying to use was moldy. It was just a total nightmare to make this cocktail and I was just appreciative that she showed me the reality of what was happening behind the scenes, cause it's just easy to think, oh wow, she has this picture perfect life. But really things go wrong and people don't post the truth often enough.

Kate Berski:

Yeah, and wouldn't that have been much more exciting of a story to see the behind the scenes of that cocktail.

Kate Berski:

Because I believe that the squiggly success stories are more interesting, more relatable, more human and more inspiring when we realize that those people whose end goals we're looking at, whose achievements we're looking at, have been on a really squiggly path of experience, failure and rejection and ghosting and letdowns and struggles, and that has made their success even more inspiring.

Kate Berski:

In my book and I think as a society and as social media, we kind of have this milestone mentality where, like you say, we only look at the end result and we don't look at the path that person has gone into getting there and we don't look at their start point. Because if you're comparing yourself to somebody who has been born into a position of privilege, into, you know, a different kind of environment, a different set of cards than you've been dealt, and that's not a really like for like comparison. So I think one of the most useful mindsets that I want to help people adopt is there is really no such thing as ahead or behind. We're all on our own unique timeline, we're all on our own unique path. You are not ahead, you're not behind. You're right on time, you're right where you need to be, I promise.

Gretta:

I love that. Yeah, we've all had different experiences. Maybe they don't fit the cookie cutter mold of what our society tells us we should be, but that's what makes us unique, just like all of our thumbprints, our fingerprints.

Kate Berski:

They're unique and we all need to embrace our unique paths Exactly, and you know I speak from experience, as I know you do. I mean, one of the big inspirations behind the 30 Phobia Project is my own quarter life crisis, when I'd kind of been trucking through life doing pretty well and suddenly reached my sort of mid to late 20s and started realizing that things weren't going exactly as planned and my plan at that point was to was very much focused on getting married and settling down and, you know, starting a family and all that stuff. And that wasn't happening for me. And I had a boyfriend at the time, a long term boyfriend who wasn't really committing, and I ended up issuing him with a very uncool marriage ultimatum. I kind of said, if you don't propose by the time I turn 30, I'm 29 now then I'm off, I'm done, I'm going to just start a new life in Australia. And you know that ultimatum was politely declined. Spoiler alert I did not get married by 30.

Kate Berski:

But what that hard stop, what that hard rejection did for me is force me to kind of actually stop for the first time in my life and re-evaluate where did these expectations for my life and this plan for my life actually come from? And it was only from doing that kind of internal work, from having that hard stop, that rejection, rejection that I realized. Those goals, those expectations were not mine at all when I thought about the kind of life that I wanted to live, what made me feel fulfilled and happy and what I really wanted, it wasn't really to do with settling down. It was quite the opposite. Actually, you know, my core values were around freedom and creativity, and I wanted to start a business, I wanted to travel the world. I wanted to make myself deliberately financially insecure so that I could, you know, take all these risks in life. None of that really tallied with getting married and getting a dog and buying a house.

Kate Berski:

So I'm so grateful for that experience because it made me, it set me on a new path, it helped me set new goals which were far more aligned to who I really was, and my life has turned out so much better. You know, I didn't tick any of those boxes by the time I turned 30. I tick some of them now, in a different order, but my life has turned up so different than I expected and it is so much better. So it's not necessarily a bad thing to go through one of those crisis, you know, I think if you don't go through a quarter life crisis, you might be heading for a midlife one. But it's great to have that stop, to make you kind of stop and rethink where those expectations come from. How can I reframe my goals to make them more aligned with who I really am and where I really want to get to?

Gretta:

Right. I think this is so helpful for anybody who's been ghosted or betrayed in love. Ghosted or betrayed in love because they may have had this vision of the future, including that white picket fence and children, with the person who ghosted them and, like you said, just it comes to a sudden stop and in this case there's usually typically no explanation whatsoever and they've never get an apology and everything just kind of shatters in front of their like eyes, like their whole entire dream and what they expected with this person is gone. And so now they're mourning the future, the vision of the future that they had. They like everything has changed.

Gretta:

But I think what you're saying is to make lemonade out of this like lemony situation, the sour, hard situation. Like, after grieving it and processing the feelings and really practicing the self-care to really reflect and say okay, what do I want, what do I need, what do I want my future relationships to look like? How can this not happen again? Like, what can I do to potentially learn the signs about ghosting, betrayal? How can I arm myself and set myself up for success in my future relationships? And did I really want to be with a person who actually didn't even have the basic respect and dignity to give me a goodbye at the very end. So I like this idea of reframing it and putting it in a way that aligns more with your own unique path, instead of just going to what our society says we should do.

Kate Berski:

Yeah, and I really agree with what you're saying about ghosting. I think the fact that it's so, the reason it's so hard, is because it creates a sort of explanation void, doesn't it? And the challenge with those events when they happen, when you don't, when you're not given a reason as to why that person is dropped off the face of the earth, is that you. It's very difficult for us as humans to separate the neutral facts that person has left from the stories that we tell ourselves the, the meaning we give those facts.

Kate Berski:

So the dangerous part of the ghosting is when we start to tell ourselves stories, when that negative self-talk kind of creeps in and it's like that person has left me because of some, you know, critical fault of my own, when in reality, you know, I know a lot of the experts you've interviewed have said the same thing that ghosting behavior says much more about them than it does about you. So the main piece of advice is try to interrupt those negative stories that you're telling yourself, as to fill that explanation gap, because there may not be one that relates to you. It's probably much more likely to relate to them and we can never know someone else's mind. So I think the work that you do is so valuable to help people just question those kind of moments as well.

Gretta:

Thank you. Being betrayed, being ghosted, it doesn't define who you are. It doesn't mean you're a failure. It doesn't even mean that what happened, that whole relationship, was a waste of time In my mind. Sometimes it's hard for people to hear this, but in my mind, every single person that we encounter gives us something, a learning experience at minimum. So there's a lot that can still happen in your life, despite the fact that you've been ghosted. You can learn to trust yourself again. You can learn to trust other people again. Don't live a half life because you had this horrible experience.

Kate Berski:

there is so much hope you can heal yeah, completely, and I have so many mantras in my head for these kind of moments and you know, one of them I think it came from Mel Robbins was you know there really are no deadlines on dreams. You really can find love at any time, find friendship, find your purpose. You can do those things at any time. Most of us are so fortunate to be living really, really long lives, so there are no deadlines. You know there isn't a stopwatch on success. There's no clock that's going to go off if you don't get married by 30.

Kate Berski:

In fact, you know finding a life partner is the most important decision we will ever make in life. You know our choice of partners is the most defining decision we will make. There really is no need to rush that decision. You know, marry in haste, repent at leisure, and you know that old saying is so true. So you know it's so useful to just remind yourself that it's much more important, you know, if you are single, or you're single beyond an age that you expected, remind yourself that it's more important to meet your person than to meet your deadline, because that deadline is not real.

Gretta:

I love that, thank you. Let's talk about friendship. So some people are struggling with loneliness, feeling like they should have a solid group of friends. They haven't found their people yet. Maybe they have really good friends, but then those people either betrayed them, ghosted them. What healing words can you offer to listeners who are feeling very alone right now and disconnected from others?

Kate Berski:

I love that you brought this up, because we are in the midst of a loneliness epidemic and Gen Z 20 somethings, the generation that I work mostly with. They are the loneliest generation for a number of different reasons, and I think the first thing that I would always say is you're not alone. Every single human experiences loneliness at some time in life, so it doesn't make you a freak or abnormal. You're not alone. We all experience this and it's a very valid feeling. It also tends to show up very strongly in transitional times. So if you're going through a transition in life whether it's a relationship breakup or a geographical move, you're switching careers, you've had a baby the chances of you experiencing loneliness increase a million fold. So if you're going through transition and you are feeling lonely, that is completely normal and expected. It's also temporary. Loneliness, like all emotions, is temporary. You will not always feel this way. So just remind yourself that way and give yourself permission to feel the loneliness, because it's actually your body telling you that something needs to happen. It's actually a motivational force, that feeling of loneliness, and I think one of the things I've learned about friendship from interviewing experts in this field is and you know, and just my own kind of experiences. I've geographically relocated quite a few times in life and each time I've experienced loneliness and each time I've been motivated to kind of start from scratch with making a friend group. And what I've noticed is making friends as an adult is very different to making friends as a child or as a teenager, because the conditions for friendship are not always kind of automatic and organic when you're an adult. So it has to become a much more proactive process and I think that's really a shock to a lot of people who are experiencing loneliness. So I think if you've allowed yourself to feel it and acknowledge that that's completely normal and you're not alone, then I want to help people, you know, make the first steps, make the small steps towards finding their tribe and just acknowledging that friendship breakups, friendship breakdowns, you know, distancing, disconnection, is all a completely normal part of life and it doesn't say anything again about you as a person. It doesn't mean you're unworthy of friendship. It just means that maybe that friendship has run its course or you know one of those kind of natural processes and it's a very normal feeling. I think.

Kate Berski:

You know, in my survey of 20-somethings I surveyed about 2,500 20-somethings in the UK and the US and you know, none of them were particularly happy with the state of their friendships.

Kate Berski:

Actually, which really was interesting to me because you know society tells us that our 20s are the best days of our lives and you have this vision of 20-somethings just being these social butterflies. But actually there's a huge amount of friendship anxiety going on for that generation. I think it was about 88% of 20-somethings I surveyed were not happy with the state of their friendships and you know about 50% thought they were growing apart from their friends. About 58% said their social life wasn't as fulfilling as it used to be. And the older we get, so even you know, within that decade of the 20s, the further along you are, the lower down the list friendship comes as a priority. But I believe the higher up the list it should be as a priority because you know there's so much evidence to show that friendship and real, genuine human connection is the source of, you know, healthier, happier and even longer life, so shouldn't be so low down the list, I think.

Gretta:

I hear you and I agree, and I do have an episode called how to build a support network after being ghosted, for any listener who is feeling lonely right now and is interested in learning different ways on how to build more solid friendships. Here's another issue that a lot of people find extremely frustrating, and that's not reaching financial or career goals by a certain age, or even any age, you know. Examples include people who keep on getting ghosted during the job application process, people who have maybe suddenly lost their job without any type of warning. I know that's happening a lot right now in the USA. What words of comfort would you offer to help anyone who's listening and struggling with this navigate these intense feelings?

Kate Berski:

Yeah, I mean, there's quite a lot of different scenarios that you've mentioned there and I think, certainly in terms of financial goals. Obviously I know more about the 20 somethings than any other generation and what I found is that finance is the number one source of anxiety in young adults and there's a belief that everybody else is more kind of financially secure than they are, and that adds to that pressure. So you know, the reality is a lot of people are financially insecure in young mid adulthood. It's completely normal. If you are so, first of all, stop comparing and despairing to those people who look like they're doing incredibly well on social media or even on linkedin or whatever. You know that's kind of a that's a lot of showboating. So try to ignore that kind of external noise, that social media pressure, for a start.

Kate Berski:

Yeah, I think again, I would say that you know when a job hasn't worked out, there's a reason for that and you know whether it's that you've not kind of made it through the AI filters, in which case it's really not personal. You know you might be ghosting ghosted literally by a machine these days, which is a whole nother level of you know ghosting that we never used to have to deal with of a level of, you know, ghosting that we never used to have to deal with. But secondly, when you've not made it through you know the filters, or if a job has come to an end, or if you're just really unhappy in your current job, usually that is because it's misaligned somehow with your core values. I know, you know, from personal experience, when I've been least happy in work, when things really haven't been working out, I have, when I've had that kind of hard stop of either I've quit or, you know, found another job or you know I've realized it's time to move on.

Kate Berski:

I've noticed that I'm happy because that role was misaligned with my core values. For example, the way of working was really restrictive. I had a job in my early 20s where, for example, we were not allowed to talk at all during the work day. So it was like I'm a creative person, I'm a collaborative person. One of my core values is connection, collaboration. That was fundamentally misaligned with my values. It's no surprise I was really unhappy in that role. Again, I was later in life working in a creative agency, which is part of my career background, and I noticed that there was some, let's say, creativity with the truth towards clients which I wasn't comfortable with and I was deeply unhappy in that role. Again, it was misaligned with my core values.

Kate Berski:

So I think if you're faced with one of these rejections or these hard stops for some reason, try to try to see some of the positives, which is it gives you a chance to figure out what was working for you in that role and what wasn't working for you in that role and kind of use that to map out what kind of role you're looking for in the future, because it might be an opportunity to find a job that fits you much better actually.

Kate Berski:

And the final point I would make is particularly in the case of if you're applying for jobs and you're not getting anywhere, or you know my know my past as an entrepreneur. I experienced a huge amount of rejection, ghosting, you know galore. I'm really good at getting rejected now, but I see it in a really positive light these days because rejection builds resilience. The more nose you hear, the more you're able to hear nose, the more you're able to kind of roll with the punches and develop that strong backbone that will make you successful in life. And if you are out there getting rejected, it means you are in a growth zone, right Like you're pushing yourself, you're trying to go somewhere new, you're exploring new areas, you're trying to grow. So if you're in a situation of getting rejected, give yourself a big pat on the back, because it means you're really putting yourself out there. So I love to see the positives in these kind of challenging times as well.

Gretta:

Right. And you're not defined by how much money you earn. You're not defined by your job title. You're so much more than that, yeah.

Kate Berski:

Absolutely, and I know we're probably going to come on to talk about success. But I think so many of us have this again, this predetermined kind of societal definition of success in mind, and we kind of see success in terms of a list of accolades, something that could be measured, like you know things you could tick off on a on a bio list, you know a number of followers, a number in your bank account, you know things that you could almost write down on a list. But in reality and that's that milestone thinking and that milestone mentality that we're trained to have In reality a lot of people who have all those things don't feel happy and they are not necessarily successful people. Success, in my mind, is much more of a feeling than an achievement. So that's definitely a shift I've gone through personally and a lot of women I've spoken to have been on the same kind of journey. Now I feel successful if I feel I have purpose, if I'm able to have that kind of balance.

Kate Berski:

And everybody has their own definition of success and for one person it might be numbers in a bank account, for someone else it might be I'm home every day to have dinner with my kids. That is a really successful life. So it's another reason why we need to let go and switch off those societal definitions and tune into our own definitions of success. And the best marker of whether you're successful is is how happy you feel every day, and not how many big boxes you can tick off yeah, those are.

Gretta:

Those are powerful insights and I agree, I think detaching ourselves from numbers, whether it be the number of likes we get on a post or the age we are, and like putting ourselves in the little age cage or saying like, oh, I'm popular because I have this many followers, like that is so just let up. What would your life look like if you could let those numbers go? How would you feel differently?

Kate Berski:

Those are my questions for the listeners.

Kate Berski:

I know. I love that you brought that up because I think the challenge that so many of us are facing I think social media has made it so much more difficult is we are all seeking external validation. That is incredibly dangerous. To put your own self-worth in the hands of millions of people that you don't even know, that don't even care about you. You know likes on a post does not make you happy. Take it from me, you know it's. It's only when we can make that switch from seeking external validation to validating ourselves, to doing things to our own satisfaction, that is, honestly the cure for feeling insecure and compare and despair. I validate myself, I'm good enough, I'm doing things to my own satisfaction rather than for the satisfaction of other people, and it's something that I think over time and with practice we get better at. And it's something that I think over time and with practice we get better at. So it's this kind of compare and despair, this seeking of external validation, is a real challenge for people in their younger life particularly.

Gretta:

Right, and everybody is at a different spot. So maybe for you, maybe just today, getting out of bed is the success right, because listeners might be completely heartbroken, maybe they have just been ghosted by somebody they really truly love, care deeply about. And doing anything is hard, so just making it through the day is a success. So it's a reminder to take it one day at a time and stop comparing yourself to what others are doing. I have a quote from a saint, the millennial saint blessed Carlo Acutis, and he says everyone is born as an original, but many people end up dying as photocopies.

Kate Berski:

Boom. Wow, hard hitting there.

Gretta:

Yeah, so live out your own dream, your own path, and stop using outdated societal expectations as a barometer for success.

Kate Berski:

Exactly, exactly, agree, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Gretta:

Exactly Agree, yeah, yeah. So you discuss the arrival fallacy and how people can stop living in the waiting room. Can you share what?

Kate Berski:

you mean by this with listeners? Yeah, of course. So if you're not familiar with the arrival fallacy, it's a psychological term which basically describes the very human, very natural feelings we have around success. So we have this feeling that when we achieve certain milestones, when we achieve certain goals, we will have eternal happiness. Usually it's expressed in the way of people saying I will be happy when I'm rich, I'll be happy when I have a partner, I will be happy when I'm a size eight. Whatever it is that you have in your mind as a goal, you have that genuine belief that you'll be happy when you achieve that goal. And psychological research studies consistently proves that it is not true. It is a fallacy, both in terms of what actually motivates humans and makes us happy and fulfilled and how people genuinely feel when they achieve goals.

Kate Berski:

So take, you know, for example, achieving a really big milestone, a financial goal. The expectation is, you know, if you become a millionaire, you will be eternally happy. But how many millionaires have you looked at who are not happy? You know every single lottery winner. You know there tends to be like a short term spike in happiness. But happiness is a temporary emotion. It doesn't last for life and you know, I've experienced this personally as well, because back in 2017, 2018, my husband and I founded a beauty company called Curlsmith and we were struggling entrepreneurs for many years and we were grinding away and I think the one thing that was keeping us going was the thought that one day we might eventually sell the company and achieve that financial security that we'd always dreamed of. I think a lot of entrepreneurs have that kind of dream in mind and obviously we expected we'd be hugely elated and happy for the rest of our days if we achieve that goal, and we were fortunate enough that that did happen to us. Back in 2022, we sold the company to an American corporation.

Kate Berski:

But what was interesting is it didn't feel like that incredible, you know, elation moment that we expected and that so many people expected. You know people would say how does it feel? Did you kind of jump on a yacht and pop champagne? It actually felt like quite an anticlimax. We felt like our entire I mean, we've been working around the clock for five, six years on this project and our entire purpose disappeared overnight. It felt really weird.

Kate Berski:

It felt like we were handing over our baby with very little kind of transition time and I think because we've been so incredibly stressed out over the past few years. We just got super sick for like a month. We were just in bed so sick and you know it. Really, we never did pop that bottle of champagne. I think we've still got it in the fridge three years later. So it was interesting for me to experience in real life the arrival fallacy that it didn't feel how we expected it to feel. So ever since then, I've switched my thinking to much more of a process, positive, so much more about celebrating the small wins, the everyday wins, as you say, the little things in life that give you joy, rather than waiting and waiting in the waiting room for those big milestones, because you may never get there, it might feel different when you do and it might just play out differently than you expect. So stop waiting for those milestone moments and start like celebrating the little wins, however small they are.

Gretta:

Yeah, live in the moment, find the good in every day. I love it. That's brilliant. Is there anything else you'd like to share with listeners regarding anything we discussed today?

Kate Berski:

I think you know if I. What was interesting to me is, over the course of the project for researching my book, I interviewed over 40 experts in mental health, mindset, motivation. I surveyed two and a half thousand women. I was putting content live on Instagram and TikTok and writing the book in real time and getting lots and lots of data and feedback, and I was hearing so many consistent themes from all of the experts, particularly about how to deal with any challenge in life. So, whatever you're stuck with whether it's romance, friendship, career, finance, whatever the kind of part of life that you're stuck in um, there's four steps that you can use to overcome those challenges, get unstuck and feel so much better. And so I'll leave you with the four steps, and the first one is um, stop looking out. We've talked about this a lot today. Stop looking outside yourself, to society, to other people, for validation, for inspiration, for the plan for your life, because it's your life. Start looking in instead, tune into your own real wants, desires and needs. If something is a should, it's not coming from you, so drop the shoulds. Shoulds are external expectations, they're other people's things. That not your problem if you, if you're doing something because you should do it that's not for you. Reframe it as a want or a need or it's not for you, um. So stop looking out, start looking in, reframe your goals. I've talked a lot about this, but it was a breakthrough for me when I realized this is the way to unlock every single future that you want, which is, you know. Stop that milestone mentality, stop living in the waiting room, stop looking at the end goal and start embracing the process and having a process positive approach. So behavioral goals are far more motivating and far more likely to succeed than milestone goals.

Kate Berski:

So don't say I'm going to lose 40 pounds. Don't say I'm going to meet my boyfriend by the time I'm 30. Say, you know, commit to small behaviors. I'm going to meet my boyfriend by the time I'm 30. Say you know, commit to small behaviors. I'm going to go to the gym three times a week for 20 minutes. I am going to ask one new person to coffee every month. Something that's within your control, something behavioral, something achievable, something small. So much more likely to succeed. So reframe your goals.

Kate Berski:

And the final one which we've talked about is celebrate the small wins. Like we've said, however small the win, celebrate something every day. I love doing a shout out on instagram once in a while and saying tell me your small wins, and it's everything from becoming a dog parent to getting out of bed after a bad mental health crisis to, you know, making your first meal, um, as an adult. You know, whatever it is, however small, celebrate that stuff, because it's really worth celebrating and society needs to get better at. You know, celebrating the alternative milestones and the small wins, because that's really what makes us feel happy.

Gretta:

I love that set of tips. They're very profound and I'm going to take them to heart and implement them into my life. So thank you.

Kate Berski:

Oh, happy to help, always happy them into my life. So thank you oh happy to help Always happy. Yeah, how can listeners connect with you so you can find me on my website, kateberskicom. You can read my new book, 30 Phobia. You can find that on Amazon and you could find me on Instagram at kateberski as well. I'm always happy to hear from you. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Gretta:

I'm always happy to hear from you.

Kate Berski:

Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me.

Gretta:

I love that. This is great and listeners, please follow at Coping With Ghosting on social media. Join my free and private Coping With Ghosting Facebook support group and leave a rating for this podcast so other people can find it. Subscribe across all platforms, including YouTube. People can find it Subscribe across all platforms, including YouTube. Finally, remember, when you're ghosted, you have more time to connect with yourself and people who have stellar communication skills. You deserve the best.