Turns Out I'm Hot After All: How I Got My Power Back After a Breakup (And How You Can, Too, No Matter What's Happened In Your Life)

By Katti Power

I realized that the way I got my power back after my ex left me was the same way I help clients own who they are, so they can show up powerfully and go on to achieve amazing things, like winning national and international singing competitions, booking roles on Broadway tours, and speaking confidently to audiences of potential clients, ready to buy.

In fact, it occurred to me that the bulk of what I did to heal myself was the entire first step of my performance system, POWER UP Your Performance. I didn't even realize what I accomplished until I sat down to write this book. This discovery got my attention because of the quote that was always on my mind, "How you do one thing is how you do everything."

So, I'm going to share with you how I achieved this healing to get my power back so I could be, not just a whole person again, but a FIERCE, EMPOWERED, BADASS who refuses to ever go back to the life of before. I'll also share examples of how that practice lines up with the work I do with my clients.

If you are married, separated, divorced, broken-up, or just in a not-so-satisfying relationship and you find your sense of self has totally abandoned you, this book is a great place to get your footing so you can get back to living the life you want and deserve.

Or maybe you're in a fantastic relationship, but you devoted your entire life to the title of "Mom" or "Wife" and one day, you found yourself feeling like an empty shell with no identity of your own. I get it, and this book is for you.

If you're a performer - anyone who has to present to an audience of decisionmakers in high-pressure circumstances – and are looking to find your own power so you can experience the kinds of results my clients experience, this book will be an eye-opening look at how I work. I'll even share with you how you can connect with me if you'd like to go deeper.

Regardless of why you're here, this book is a place for you to discover how to get your sense of self back, how to heal the wounds you've suffered from your past, and how to move forward with a sense of power and ownership. To stand confidently and powerfully in your own incredible identity and discover the power it gives you to go boldly after the desires of your heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Katti Power
• Release date: Feb 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781736681206

Book preview

PREFACE

When I first got the idea to write my story in book form, it was going to be very different. It was just going to be a light-hearted look at my crazy year of being separated after 17 years of marriage, online dating in my 40s during a pandemic, and the discoveries I made along the way.

In fact, my cousins threw me a surprise (and very optimistically premature) divorce party where they showered me with quite the haul of divorce-inspired gifts, including a journal with a cover that read, Your vagina deserves much better anyway. I was convinced I would use it to document my adventures in COVID dating for this book. But like most of my favorite journals, it’s still empty and appears brand-new because I’m afraid to write in it.

Then, a client of mine, who is a brilliant writer, advised me to include the whole story, starting with the decline of my marriage, which technically started on the drive home from our honeymoon. That way, the light-hearted bit would pack more of a punch.

While that was probably very good advice, it sounded too depressing to me to dredge up all that muck, just to get to the fun or funny stuff.

Then, it occurred to me, largely from the prompting of my brilliant author coach, that the way I coach my performance clients to get clear on who they are and how they need to show up so they can achieve the HUGE goals they have for themselves, was the same way I got my power and sense of self back, after 17 years of being in a relationship where I believed I was unlovable.

That was a major moment of discovery for me.

And that’s how I decided to tell this story: by showing not just what happened to me and the steps I took to get through it, but by pointing out all the ways those steps were identical to the ones I take my clients through to achieve their goals.

This past year was a hell of an adventure, I’ll give it that, and I don’t at ALL mean because it was 2020 and we all lived in some kind of apocalyptic dumpster fire of all dumpster fires. Instead, I happened to be in the middle of an ugly divorce when the calendar struck 2020. The pandemic, the racial injustice, and RBG’s passing - as horrific as they all were - all just seemed like icing on a cake I was force-fed. But even with the nightmare of divorce that no one can prepare you for, I managed to have a pretty kickass first year of separation.

Let me take the advice of my client for a hot sec and give you a little backstory. I’m going to do this as kindly as possible and try not to bash anyone involved. This undertaking will possibly require some restraint on my part, but I’m up for the challenge.

I got married in 2002, and our journey to the altar was a whirlwind! We disagree about when we met, but we had our first date on December 15th, he proposed on April 9th, and we were married June 1st. So, in five and a half months, we dated, were engaged, and got married. The reason it was all so fast was that we both felt confident this was true love – that we were going to get married and be together forever anyway, so why wait? He knew right away – like a few weeks into dating - and his quick certainty scared me, at first. But I came to feel the same way about a month later.

We got engaged back in a distant time in my life when I was a Christian and believed that sex should be reserved for marriage. My ex and I had already messed up on this principle prior to meeting, but we were on the same page about being committed to waiting, which might have also played a factor in our quick decision to get married.

Now, don’t for a second think we didn’t do absolutely everything else but have sex because I don’t want to mislead you – we did it all. And then we got married and went on our honeymoon which had lots of remnants of The Lusty Month of May, even though it was technically June.

And then we drove home.

I’ve often said it was like I drove home from my honeymoon with a stranger who did a body swap with the guy who pursued me hard and had as much sexual desire as I did.

And for the next 17 years, that guy never came back.

I struggled to make a life with the stranger who took his place. The stranger had zero interest in physical intimacy, and I mean ZERO. I may be a strong woman, but I am old-fashioned in the sense that I want to be pursued – to feel like I’m wanted and desired and sexy. Yet the only times we had sex in my 17-year marriage were when I gave in and initiated because I just couldn’t wait for him to pursue me. We were in and out of counseling for this issue. We had affairs. And our relationship was rough.

So why did we stay together so long?

That’s the million-dollar question, right? I compare my decision to hold on to my marriage to that of an abuse victim who stays in a relationship because she somehow thinks she deserves mistreatment or that he truly loves her or that the abuse is not that bad. I’m not at all saying I’m an abuse victim, but over time, because of the circumstances of my situation, I grew to believe that my husband didn’t want to have sex with me because of something I was doing wrong. And I was determined to fix that suspected problem so he would love me.

I went on diet after diet, assuming his lack of love was because I was too fat for him to be attracted to me. I changed my hairstyle several times, trying to be sexier or more appealing to him. I rearranged my schedule so I was always available when he was, so that my busyness could never be an excuse thrown back at me. I put his goals in front of mine so he could feel supported and validated in the hopes that maybe my true belief in him would inspire him to want me. And I tried to not want his affection so much that I would feel disappointed when I was rejected.

Do you see where I’m going with this line of thought? I totally lost my sense of self in my attempts to be enough for my husband to desire me.

I call this pattern of continually altering myself and my desires to meet his unknown needs being an accommodator, and I do it in a variety of areas in my life. This quote from my business coach continued to resonate with me throughout the year: How you do one thing is how you do everything. If I accommodate my husband and his every desire, prioritizing his needs over mine, then that behavior shows up everywhere else in my life as well.

Sure enough, this pattern was true in my business as well; I accommodated clients’ scheduling needs without consideration of my own. I accommodated financial requests to delay, skip, or reduce payments without any consideration of my own financial goals and needs. I accommodated my own availability for clients who didn’t pay for private access to me because their goals were more of a priority to me than my own boundaries.

But the idea of, How you do one thing is how you do everything, didn’t just show up in the decline of my sense of self with regard to my business and my marriage. It showed up on the healing side as well. I managed to heal from being left by my ex faster than I imagined was possible, but that’s all because I followed my own steps to owning who you are so you can boldly and confidently achieve HUGE goals – the same steps I use with my performance clients.

This book is about how I