Hello, and welcome to The Single Spark Podcast. Yes, you heard that right. For any of you that might have listened to this podcast before, this is no longer officially The Single Girl's Guide to Life.
We used to be called that. This is just The Single Girl's Guide to Life 2.0. I've been away for a little bit, about a year with the odd episode back in October.
But in that time, things have changed a little bit. It's graduated on. The essence is still the same.
I haven't significantly changed as a person, not like I did from five years ago. But The Single Girl's Guide to Life is probably closed as a chapter. And it's all come to a head in recent weeks and months when I've done a few little lives, come back, I've teased it because I've been away setting up another business, supporting people, other business owners with content podcasts, funnily enough.
And every time I help in there with their podcasts, I deeply miss my own. And I deeply miss The Single Girl's Guide to Life. And people have commented that it lights you up, Sean, when you talk about it.
And I do, because I care deeply and passionately about so many social issues. Like a PSHE teacher, I literally get to talk about it day in, day out with teenagers. And it's not always the most constructive argument at times because they're learning to argue effectively.
But this is one that always stays with me. There's other little passions I've got as well, but this remains one of them. And so I've always toyed with coming back because this takes some time to put together, admittedly.
It takes sitting in front of a camera, recording, changing all the outfits, doing it, editing it. And we've tried to come up with some ways where we can streamline this. To make this quicker and easier for me from my end, stuff that you won't even notice in part, this otherwise to you is gonna be the same brilliant, hopefully, podcast that you loved anyway.
And I always knew there were the 100 episodes there, so I've paid for it to stay there for the last year, because I never wanted that resource to go. Never wanted any of the videos to go, never wanted any of the episodes to disappear. They've been there to listen to and enjoy.
But part of me always felt that there needed to be a graduation anyway. I've spoken to a few people, people will know this. I wanted to help singles in general, going through my own experience of then dating again and having success in dating, finding a relationship, not getting bowled over by the emotions.
I wanted to step more into the dating field. And you'd have seen that probably in some of the content that was there towards the end of the previous series. But we are now back with a new focus.
It was only about, at the time that you're hearing this, it was only about three weeks ago that the new name came to mind. I'd been stuck really with, I wanna do it, I wanna come back, but I wanna make it fresh, I wanna make it different. I want it to be reflective of where I am.
And I kept getting stuck. And all of a sudden, I was scrolling and I saw something about sparks, getting your spark back, and I was like, oh, hang on, wait, that's the language we use. It wasn't anything to do with single life, funny enough.
It was just personal development. And I was like, oh my goodness. This is it.
It was my, what I call, Harry Potter moment, where it came to me, and it came to me in such a way that The Single Girl's Life had come to me. The Single Girl's Life came to me, how many years ago was it now? Three.
You are literally listening to this, if you're listening to it, I'll tell you what. You're listening to the episode that's going out three years after the first episode of The Single Girl's Life Guide to Life did. And the reason for that is because I know it went out on my birthday three years ago.
My birthday was just on Monday when you're listening to this. And so I thought it would be nice to come back at basically the anniversary of. So this podcast is, for all things single life still, predominantly getting your spark back.
The bit that feels like it's missing when you end up going through a breakup, or the bit that you feel like gets drained as you don't progress as much as your friends do when they're having kids and they're coupled up and they've now got less time. And you're like, well, what about me? How do I deal with that?
And it's also got the dating edge because I truly believe that it does only take one single spark. And I think there's lots of sparks out there ready for us. And we happen to find the ones around us.
But dating can be one of the biggest areas that pulls our spark away from us because what a shit show it is out there at times. So it is back, it is alive. We're in a little bit more of a mature stage here.
We're talking about getting sparks back after relationships have fallen down. Because admittedly, I realized that going through a divorce at 26 is quite unusual actually. I'm now 30.
I'm well and truly on actually, I'm 31. Correct that, time of recording versus time of release. Remember it Chantelle.
And things are different. Things are different a little bit in your 30s. It becomes even more apparent that people are settling down around you.
It becomes more pressing to look at the idea of family. What does that mean? Is that something I want?
Time starts to tick a bit quicker than it did when you're in your 20s. So we're here to look at making sure you're as confident as you can be in your life, regardless of your relationship status. It doesn't matter if you're single or in a relationship.
I want you to be the happiest that you have ever been because you know exactly what you want. You've got that life. You've got the life that you can have to the extent you can have it.
I'm sure some of us, many of us, would love to have excess amounts of money to have a glorious place to live, multiple bedrooms, extra little side rooms, offices, swimming pools, saunas, whatever, and a few nice cars and the ability to go on holiday a number of times. It's not always possible straight away. It will happen for some of us.
It won't happen for many of us, but being happy with what you can control, what you do have the resources to have and living your life now, because I certainly don't believe that we're gonna be waiting for retirement to enjoy it. It's why I do what I do now. In theory, I get paid less than I ever have, but I have a life that I think is pretty extraordinary.
Sometimes I don't know how I get by. I do. I'm lucky for the things that I have.
Very fortunate to have this house, for example. But I love it. I absolutely adore it.
And I feel like I've made every conscious choice to do that. And as well as that, I feel like I'm in a relationship that I have experienced like no other. And I think I'm showing up in the relationship like I have no other, because of all of that other work that I did.
And that is what this podcast is gonna center around in general. Now today, we're gonna talk very specifically about how to get your single spark back after a breakup. Yes, I just read that off the notes page.
This is the kind of thing that you're gonna see if you're watching. On the audio, it's not gonna make any difference to you at all. But there's always been a video version and we're gonna be getting that out on YouTube.
It always has gone out on there when we get my bottom into gear and get it sorted. And for those of you that can see very timely on the YouTube video, you should be able to. It's such a shame.
I knew this would happen once I put them on. I was like, oh, you're not gonna see them. But I have blue trousers on, light blue trousers in the old colors because our new colors are pink, yellow and purple.
The blue is kind of out, but it's got stars on it. And I feel like it brings together the celebration of the fact that this is the first episode back, Single Spark, all the lights, the shining, the fireworks, the stars. If you've been watching the content over the last two weeks, hopefully you picked up on something of that nature.
Maybe you were part of Star Squad. So welcome. And we're gonna go straight in.
Maybe I'll be reading notes at time and you might see that. And that's because that bit is gonna make my life easier in the edit if I just get past that bit. I've always wanted it to be the most professional it could ever be.
And so be it, it will be. Listen to me, I don't think I've hummed that much at all and we've been running for seven and a half minutes, ta-da. But they're the kind of things that you can expect.
It will be a little bit different, but the reality is this is the same podcast that you probably know, love and have wished had come back. I know many of you have DM'd me saying, please bring it back, we want new episodes. We're here, we're officially doing it.
I'm here to record for today, it's gonna happen and we're gonna dive straight in. So thanks for sitting through that intro, that back. But I wanted to address that before we got straight into it, what has been happening, how it's changed and what this means for as a maybe new listener of The Single Spark.
It's gonna take some getting used to or as a loyal Single Girl's Guide to Life listener that's coming on the graduation journey with me. So let's dive into this situation of getting your single spark back after a breakup. A breakup is a significant time in your life where you go from having someone there probably all the time that you speak to every day and that you may see every day because you live together.
And then you in an almost instant don't have that anymore. That resource is cut off. Even in the healthiest of scenarios, like people need space, don't contact me, don't talk to me, suddenly that's all gone.
For myself in the situation I was in, I had been with my ex since I was 19, then 26. And probably from about the age of 19, we hadn't spent much time apart. I can think of the first holiday he had, which was for three weeks long in Turkey, and it wasn't that long into our relationship.
But we'd spoken most days on either text, video call, something like that. And it was really difficult to make the decision because I knew that leaving this person with me, not having that person that I'd had with me since I was effectively a child, since I was a teenager, to nothing. Who was I gonna talk to?
And this is where such an emphasis comes on the friendship, as you'd have heard in previous episodes. But if you're going through this right now, not the breakup itself, but this feeling of, I don't have my spark, you're probably looking at friends and thinking, I wish I had what they had. I wish I had the partner.
I wish I had the kids. Why can I not have that? And you might even start, you don't mean to, but you might even start judging them a bit.
You look at them, and when they make a negative comment about their partner, and their partner's pretty all right, actually, and what they're complaining about really isn't a complaint to make when you actually have someone, you're like, you don't even know what you've got. And you start thinking, how ungrateful, or right, like, well, I would kill to just have that person right now. And maybe even this feeling of jealousy comes in.
You actually start to, and it feels a bit irrational, but you start to dislike your friend. It might even lead you to spending less time with that friend if they talk about the relationship quite a lot, they have to bring their baby along. And you're like, hmm, I know this is a me problem, but this hurts, like, it's really hard to be around you in the state that I'm in right now.
And you end up getting caught in this cycle of spending even more time on your own. You come home from work, cook yourself dinner, because you're on your own, and you sometimes have to make an effort to cook the dinner because it's just you, you can't be bothered. So it's an oven meal, it's a ready meal, because that's the easiest thing right now.
And I don't have time to be dealing with that for myself and to do all the washing up afterwards, like that's long and that's difficult. And once you've done all of that, eaten, you've got two options usually. Two options is usually what happens.
You either lay out on the sofa and scroll the dating apps all evening in an attempt to find someone, downloading all the apps, starting all the conversations, hardly getting any reply at all. Or if you're out of the cycle of dating at that point in time, because you've just had enough of it, Netflix, Netflix is your best friend because how many things can you watch back to back? How many episodes of The Dallas Cheerleaders can you watch?
How many episodes of Bridgerton or how quick can you get through the Bridgerton series? Whatever it might be, these things are distracting you from anything else. And so you do that till bedtime, go to bed, wake up in the morning and go again effectively.
Wake up, breakfast, go to work, come home to an empty house and roll again. All of that time in between spent on scrolling. Weekends, you might have a couple of things on, but a lot of people are busy or they've got to bring their friends or they can't get involved because they've got the kids.
They don't have anyone to look after them. And you just think, because this is a telling sign, you just end up thinking, oh God, it would be so much easier if I was back with my ex. We've all been there.
We've all been there thinking, I've been there. You just think, oh, could I have just stayed? Would it have just been easier?
Because then I wouldn't be in this situation right now. If I had stayed, I would have my old house, my old three bed house that I had. If I just stayed, I'd have been able to see my dog a lot more in the end.
God, that one hit home. Woo, wasn't expecting that to happen on this podcast today. But that's how it was for me.
At times, I really did want my dog back. Anyways, you sit there and you think about these things because it would just be easier to be back, right? All of this effort, oh my God, the effort you have to put in dating, the stop-startedness of dating, the talking and then ghosting, or the talking and then, oh no, I'm not really looking for a relationship, and then they're back on a nap within three days.
It grinds you down and you can understand how your spark can get shot through all of those things. As a result, you try and keep busy because you need to be distracted. You know you can't sit and sit on your phone forever.
That's not helpful to you. You know you can't sit and binge watch everything on Netflix. They keep adding things too quickly or you've moved to Amazon Prime.
So you do organize things with some people, but then it doesn't feel that connected. People don't really get it. It's been a distraction just like the TV, just like the phone for a little bit.
But the minute you walk back into this house and you're on your own again, you just don't feel it. You don't do anything to look after yourself. You just needed another distraction for a bit of time.
And all of that compounds to not having your spark. And you know that you are using dating as a way to distract yourself. Yes, you want a relationship, but I can bet some of you started dating earlier than you should have done.
That you picked up that phone, downloaded the app, and you weren't really over your ex. You don't even have to be over your ex per se, but you need to be over the trauma of what it means to leave or end a relationship. It's upsetting.
People are very much, get back on the horse, go out there and date, go do it, find out what's going on. I made those mistakes. You use it just to fill the time.
You use it for a bit of excitement. You use it to bring back some kind of spark, and you think that they're sparks, except you probably get in the wall pulled over your eyes because you're in such a vulnerable situation. Maybe you're feeling, if you admitted it, in that desperate kind of vibe, if I just want something, I'd rather have something than nothing.
Same place that it comes from when we're saying, maybe I should just get back my ex. Maybe it would just be easier to get back with my ex. When you deserve so much better than that.
And another thing that you'll have tried is to try and make new friends. You'll have tried to go to hobby groups. You can't bind the right people.
You can't connect with them in the same way, because funny enough in those hobby groups, there are people in relationships, there's people that get married and all of these things trigger you. Because you're not over it yet. You've got to work through it.
And I'll just claim that it does take time. Time is the best healer, they say. Time matters.
But I also know people that have been out of their relationships for five years and still aren't over it. That time has not come yet. And that's because time on its own, it just continues.
You have to take action in that time. And that's the bit that takes time. The fact that when you take the action, like one tiny action's not gonna do it.
It's sustained, consistent effort over time. That's the time that makes the difference. So all of these things come into a play.
You're worried about what other people think of you. You're worried about what society will think of you as a single. And you then try to act in a particular way to fit in.
You think, well, I've got to act this way if I'm gonna find someone. Now, what I wanna share with you today of how to get your spark back is the three areas that I think that you've got to focus in in life. If you're going to actually get your spark back, if you're gonna use your time effectively to do that.
The most important thing that you've gotta do first, before you even go to the other three things though, first is heal. It's the bit I've just referred to, the not being ready for it, to try and rush through the experience that your breakup has just caused. If you're not six months out already from the relationship, breakup, don't try this yet, go heal.
A breakup is the same as any loss of any kind. Loss through someone passing away, loss through a job, loss through time, the way we lose our friends over time, loss. There's a whole grief experience to go through.
And I talk about the stages of grief in one of the old episodes that I will put a link to in the show notes. So you've got to go through those stages. You've got to be a bit angry, be a bit upset, probably be in denial in the first stage.
You can't even believe this is happening. What if I could just do this? What if I could just do that?
That's the very quick version of some of those stages. But the real three things that it takes to know what you really want to get your spark back is to firstly know yourself.
“so goddamn well that no matter what anybody says, you go, you're mad, because that's not what I want. When people say things to me about what I do with my life, when people send me jobs for teaching maths, head of year roles, they haven't really listened to anything that I've probably told them over the past few years, because at this stage, there is absolutely no way I'm going back to a full-time job.
Not unless shit really hits the fan, and I have to. I will only go back to a full-time employed job if I absolutely must. Financially, practically for some reason, it's gonna be driven by financials.
Having had two and a half years off now of not being full-time employed, having flexible zero hours contracted work, working on the business and generating some income through that, there's just no way I'm gonna choose to do that. So they might go, oh well, just in case you're interested, but I'm not. You're mad for sending that to me when you've heard so many times what's happening.
So when you have that feeling and that confidence, nothing can fall to you. You don't worry about what other people say anymore. You have this great power because you go, I know that like literally 99% of society do that.
being a full-time job, it's probably not 99%, but you know, a good 80 plus, I would say. But I don't wanna do it. I'm not here for it.
Not right now, not in this circumstance. No way, ho, say. And I might seem crazy to other people, but I don't care.
I really, really don't care. And this stage of knowing yourself, it's self-development on steroids. You've got to deep dive.
You've got to know yourself so well. You've got to know where things happened, why they happened, what happened, how. You have ended up the way that you are now, how that makes you you, and what that means for the choices and decisions that you're gonna make in your life is to connect with other people.
And the reason that you have to connect with other people is because we are born as people that socially get along. Now, you can say I'm an introvert, I like time on my own, cool. I would literally think, I appreciate that you prefer more time on your own than not, but I don't think anyone can survive by being completely on their own.
Because I think from what I've read, we are destined, we are built to interact with another. Simple biology, we can't reproduce without another and someone's gonna pull a like science card on me. We still need another cell.
We've not ever been able to like self impregnate at this point. We rely on somebody else. And so we have to interact with somebody else just to be the humans that we are.
I'm not saying that you have to spend all of your time with other people, but our lives matter when we have other people in our lives. They give us purpose. This is the bit that I know you guys struggle with the most because I know plenty of you that have listened for long enough and go back to listen to those episodes, can go out there and do stuff on your own.
But the thing you turn around to me and say is, like Chantelle, I can do it. I can go to a festival, go to the cinema, but it's no fun when you're on your own. It's no fun when you don't have someone to share it with.
Because we want to be able to share that experience with somebody. Part of my reason for setting up Chantelle's Coach was probably some sort of processing of that too. Like yes, I get to go on my journey, and I get to go and do these things on my own.
Guess who I get to tell? You guys. Same way with this podcast.
I've got plenty of people to talk to, but I don't know if I've loved talking about this all the time, so maybe that's what I've missed. I've missed that social interaction of that, where I don't naturally get to talk about it so much, even though I do through PSHE lessons. Who knows?
But we want to find a select group of people that we deeply connect with. And we want to be able to do that with more and more people quicker. We want to do it in ways that mean we don't have to small talk our way through life all the time.
There are occasions where that is necessary. I reduce those occasions as much as possible. And then lastly, we have to connect that with the world again.
We have to find what it means to be in this world. And it might be related to other people. Might be related to something that we found out about ourselves.
But we also have to see what our place is in this world in some way. And it does not have to be big. People find value in it being big.
People like to go for big things. It feels great. But not everyone's built for greatness, is built for that level of impact.
We just have to work out what it means to us to be part of this society, this world, this function. And those are the three things that you gotta do to get your spark back. Because the first one gives you your confidence, gives you your certainty, gives you the things that you can work out you love, wanna do, continue doing.
It allows you to create the path. With others, you get to do it with someone. You get that experience.
And you get to pull people along with you. It brings the joy into your life. And then it comes down to the world and finding that place.
And that's kind of the purpose bit, the bit that we can give back with, the bit that makes it all mean something. And when the days are difficult, we understand what the narrative is. And if you go in focused on yourself and others, that's cool.
But it means that you might play small. You might play safe. If you can't work out what the narrative is in terms of what it means to be part of the full world, you might not live as great as you want to.
And as I said, it doesn't have to be the biggest thing on earth, but you might just not play it great enough for yourself. And you don't want to get to the end of the life and wish that you lived it a little bit bigger. And then if you focus on connecting with others and the world, you'll do everything to keep other people happy, your people please, you'll follow what other people have said and you'll do some great things.
But you won't necessarily have done anything great for yourself. And you'll always feel that disconnection, that things aren't quite right. They're not what you want to do.
Yes, you've got some great friends. Yes, you're doing some good in the world. It doesn't mean something to you.
It's not enough. And then you've got, well, you can focus on yourself and the world. But if you don't bring other people with you, you're gonna feel that lone wolf sense more than ever.
You're gonna feel lonelier than you probably did because you haven't got anyone to share it with. We don't have things to share with people. That's what creates that level of loneliness.
We don't feel like we belong. We don't feel like there's someone there that cares. We don't feel like someone's with us.
So you gotta have all three. You can't just focus on yourself in single life because other people matter. Matter for you feeling part of a community.
Matter because we wanna have people to support and to be supportive of us. So if you wanna be confident in everything that you do, the adventures you go on, the experiences you wanna have, whether you're on your own or with other people, if you wanna have bold conversations at work with friends without the fear of losing what that might mean, and if you wanna be so damn happy with your life that you don't worry or stress about what you don't have yet, including a relationship, including kids, including family life, including a house, a dream home, whatever it might be, dream job, you gotta work on these three things. Because once you have all of those three things, the confidence levels, the sparks skyrocket and you show up in the world in that way so very easily.
Because your spark is the bit of you being aligned and going out there and doing it. And you don't need to put any effort into sparkling because it happens as a byproduct of you doing the things that matter to you most. Having people to share it with, not many, just a few.
And having some level of appropriate impact on the rest of the world at the same time and where you fit in. That's what it takes to get your spark back. So as I say, healing's a key part.
I can't overlook it. You gotta go do that yourself. Otherwise, those three areas are the things that you have got to work on bit by bit.
And you can't just do one without the others. You've gotta know yourself. You've gotta work on being around others, connecting with others, and you've gotta connect back with the world again.
Find what it means to you to be in this place. It's very similar now I think of it to Ikigai. If you've ever heard of that, I'll put a link to the book.
It's a Japanese concept for things of like how to find your purpose in the world. A great book for you to go away and have a go at connecting back to yourself again. This is The Single Spark podcast, previously called The Single Girl's Guide to Life.
I am so excited to be back. I hope you've enjoyed this episode. As it's the first one back, I'd love you to go away and share this episode with someone.
Share it on Instagram, share it on WhatsApp, whatever it might be. And if you're an avid listener, then you can always share one of the old ones. That counts too.
But just share that. That way we can all keep sparkling together. I'll see you next time.
