Woman smiling with her hands on her hips while standing on a beachwalk, with water and mountains in the background.

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers reflects on how she learned to trust herself by letting go of control, working through anxiety, and rebuilding self-worth over time.

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For much of her life, Courtenay “Coco” Rogers moved through the world driven by fear, pressure, and the need to hold everything together. Her decisions, relationships, and sense of identity were shaped by external expectations and a constant effort to stay in control.

Over time, that way of living became harder to maintain. Letting go of alcohol, navigating a mental health crisis within her family, and confronting long-standing anxiety forced her to take a closer look at how she was showing up in her own life.

In this conversation, Courtenay shares what it looked like to slow down, examine her patterns, and begin the process of rebuilding trust in herself. Not through quick fixes, but through small, consistent changes that reshaped how she responded to fear, uncertainty, and the need for control.

We explore how self-trust develops over time, the role of intuition and self-awareness, and why learning to trust yourself often starts with letting go of who you thought you needed to be.

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Showing Up As Your Authentic Self

Brandi Fleck: Courtenay, a question that I ask everybody who comes on the show is, what does being human mean to you?

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: Being human to me means showing up authentically in every space that I enter.

Brandi Fleck: I love how concise you are.

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: Yeah, I'm working on it.

Brandi Fleck: Yeah, but that is a very powerful statement if you think about it.

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: It's completely changed my life.

Brandi Fleck: I think we're going to get into that a little bit today, so let's just dive in. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: Sure. I am a really proud mama to a teenager. She's going to be a junior in high school. I am the wife to one of the kindest, sweetest souls I've ever met in my life. I'm a really, really proud daughter. I am a sister. I am a retired politico.

I am a Navy veteran, and I am a woman who has figured out how to love herself with every single ounce of my livelihood. I am the operations director for a digital marketing agency. I just started this role about four months ago, so I'm a really proud professional. And I am a human being who has figured out how to love myself and love other human beings.

Brandi Fleck: Now, just full transparency for our audience, we've known each other for several years now, and I've seen you transform at a high level. Not always close up, but you have gone through such a journey where it really looks to me like there are these points on your journey that completely changed the trajectory of your life. What do you think about that?

Feeling Lost and Finding Yourself Again

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: For the past few years, I've been saying, like, oh, I've completely changed. I'm a totally different person. But what I realized through doing a lot of work on myself is I found myself. I've always been here. I was lost. I just wasn't being true to myself. I wasn't loving myself. I wasn't being my true, authentic self. I think it all started around my 40th birthday. Big decade. Wow, I'm turning 40. I should probably get my act together a little.

So I started making small changes. The first one was I released alcohol from my life almost five years ago. It had played a very large role in my life, one I did not realize until I released it. I think that was probably a really big step in my healing journey and the journey that I've been on for a while. I just woke up one morning, December 28th, 2019. I know exactly when it was. I was very hungover, as I had been most days for many, many years of my life. And I just said, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm just not doing this anymore.

I looked at my husband and I said, I think I'm done drinking. Actually, he was my boyfriend at the time. We didn't get married until 2020, but my man. I said, yeah, I think I'm done drinking. And he was like, okay, because I was drinking so much. I quit drinking that day. I've never craved alcohol. I could be at a party, people can come to my house, we have alcohol here. It doesn't bother me at all. My husband still has a beer every once in a while. I don't care what other people do with their bodies, but I was like, this is no longer serving me.

That helped me clear my mind so much. I have been a very anxious person for my entire life, undiagnosed for most of it. I did get an official diagnosis right around the age of 30, right after I had my daughter. I was diagnosed with postpartum, and then from there we dug into my anxiety issues. I had been taking medicine to help my anxiety issues, but then I was drinking alcohol, and the alcohol doesn't allow those meds to do what they need to do. So once I released that alcohol, the medication that I'd been on for 10 years actually started working.

I also let go of dairy. I did a diet elimination because my body was hurting all the time. Now, I was not healthy. I was not working out. I was not eating healthy, but I was only 40 years old and I felt like I was a grandma. I had what felt like arthritis. When I woke up in the morning, I could barely get out of bed. It was really bad. So I did an elimination diet, realized dairy was really inflaming my body, so I let go of that. That took me a while.

Then I decided to go full vegan. So it's been about two years since I have had any animal products in my body, and that has helped me immensely.

Family Crisis and a Turning Point

But the biggest thing that happened was that in November of 2022, my daughter had a mental health emergency. That is her story. I'm not here to talk about my daughter. I'm here to talk about me. But she had a mental health emergency that woke us up, and it woke up her entire family. I realized that I could continue to live the life that I had been living, where I was anxious and fearful and angry and judgmental and mean, or I could let it go. And I decided to let it go.

I decided to let it go because my daughter deserved that. My daughter deserved a mom who is healthy, and she deserves a mom who can get along with her dad. That was the biggest thing that happened. When she had this emergency, her dad and I, who have been divorced since she was about one, just looked at each other. He said these words, we have been awful to each other. And I said, we have. Then I looked at him straight in the eyes and I said, I'm not going to do that anymore. And he said, me neither.

In that exact moment in time, we completely changed how we treated each other. He's remarried. I am remarried. The four parents came together in the most beautiful way to save our child. That was a really scary time in my life. Now that we're on the other side of it, and she's healthy and happy and we all are just thriving, it was the catalyst. It was the catalyst for me to get my act together.

Brandi Fleck: Okay, I've got chills. I always get chills when we talk. It's so amazing. You just mentioned quite a few high points there that were turning points for you. What was in between the high points? What's it been like?

What Healing Actually Feels Like

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: It has been one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life and also one of the easiest things I've ever done in my life. I have made a lot of big, bold decisions. Many of them I'm incredibly proud of. They've gotten me to exactly where I am today. Some of those decisions I was making to make myself feel better. A lot of the decisions I've made in my life prior to this healing journey were led by my ego. I needed validation from external sources because I didn't love myself. I didn't have a lot of respect for myself.

When I started breaking down why I do the things that I do and then trying to figure out if my behavior serves me or not, I don't like using the words good or bad because behavior changes and we need some behaviors in our lives to protect us. But once I slowed down and realized, one, that the entire world was not against me, that I didn't have to be angry and judgmental and hateful of all the things happening around me, I really just slowed down.

I realized that I wasn't showing up as my best self, but I didn't know what my best self was. It's like telling somebody, do better, but I don't know what better is. For me, it took slowing down. I picked up the practice of journaling when everything happened with my daughter because I just didn't know what else to do. So I just started writing. I go back and I look at some of my journals, and they're just words, but I was writing. Then those words became sentences, and then they became a little bit more clear. Then I could go back and I could see some patterns, and I'm like, okay, why do I do this? Why do I do it over and over again?

Going back to that clarity that I finally had when I did release the alcohol, that was really, really helpful for me because I could then look at some of my behaviors in a different way once I removed the ego. Once I stopped doing things to make other people proud or to impress other people, and once I totally, completely focused on myself, which is not selfish at all, but I thought it was selfish. I was the woman who was doing for everyone else. Society, patriarchy, insert word here that forces us to do these things. But once I stopped doing that, I found time for myself. I found time to nurture myself. I had completely put myself last on every single list in every aspect of my life. So taking time to slow down is what I needed to wake myself up.

Woman and her teenage daughter smiling together as they take a selfie.

When your daughter's in the hospital and these really big, scary things are happening, it very quickly helps you look at your life differently. I decided I didn't want to live that way anymore. Here's the coolest part that I've realized about healing. We get to control ourselves 100%. I get to control my response to every single thing that happens to me, but I can't control a single other thing in this universe. Once I released that desperation for control, oh my gosh, it's freeing. It's freedom. It's deeply, deeply freeing.

Brandi Fleck: There is so much here. I've just been taking a few notes while you've been talking. I've got this phrase written down, desperation for control. I want to know how you even start to let that go. But another thing that's really important that I want to touch on before we get too far away from it is you've described yourself before you went on this journey as judgmental, angry, hateful. Those are really strong words. How did you even start to come to terms with the fact that you were acting in those ways?

Taking Accountability for Your Behavior and Actions

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: When my daughter had her emergency, I asked her, I said, what's wrong? What's happening? What's wrong? And she looked at me with so much honesty in her eyes, and she said, you, Mama. You're the problem, Mama. And I heard her. That made me start figuring out what my behavior is doing to the people around me. It's like you can't solve a problem until you know you have one. That was just the biggest gift to me, having my, at the time, 15-year-old daughter call me out.

Rather than lashing back or letting my ego go, what are you talking about, and continuing down that path of protecting myself, I just took a deep breath and I was like, okay, she's right. Then I decided to dig deeper into my therapy. I have been in therapy for a very long time. I feel very grateful that I've had access to those resources. I started asking for so much help from my friends and my family.

I requested feedback from people who I love the most. I had a great conversation with my brother, my little brother. He's 13 months younger than me, and he told me some heavy, tough stuff that he had seen in my behavior over the years. But instead of fighting him, I listened. I just received everything that he said, and I received it because I knew it was coming from a place of love. He wasn't telling me these things to hurt my feelings. He was telling me these things because he knew that I was ready to change, that I was ready to do the work.

So I stopped being a self-centered egomaniac, and I just started being quiet a lot more, being still. Oh my gosh, I've taken so many walks. I try to get my 10,000 steps in a day, and I really do. We live in a beautiful neighborhood, and we actually moved into this house about two months before everything with my daughter happened.

There are just amazing sidewalks and trees, and I would just walk for hours in silence. I found the gift of meditation along with journaling. When you're quiet, you open yourself up to receiving feedback from people. For me, it's also the universe. I'm really trying to listen to what's happening around me. There are a lot of messages. I just wasn't receiving them because I was not in a place to hear them.

I decided, because I don't want my daughter to hurt, I don't want anyone that I love, I don't want any human in the entire universe to hurt, because when we are hurting, we hurt other people. But when we heal ourselves and we give up the control and the ego and the desperation for knowing what's around the corner, when we give that up and we just live our lives in the present every day, that's when the magic happens. That's truly when the magic happens.

For me, it was like, well, I could continue my behavior and then my daughter would probably be back in a hospital or worse, or I can receive her message and change my behavior. Again, because I have control over myself. I don't have control over anyone else, but I get to control how I treat myself and how I treat other people.

Not only was I unkind to others, I was horribly unkind to myself. The inner monologue, I have a persona. I am very bold. I'm very straightforward. I'm incredibly confident. For a lot of years, I used those as almost like a wall where I could hide behind that big, bold personality. But on the inside, I was still drinking. I was still saying unkind things to myself. I didn't actually believe that I was capable of doing the big things that I was trying to do.

Now I know how special I am, and I know how powerful I am, and I know that when I make decisions, I'm making them out of love. I feel deeply that as long as you love yourself and as long as you love other humans, you're going to mess up. We're human beings. We're going to mess up. We're going to make a lot of mistakes. But the intention behind it is so much kinder and so much more powerful, and it's incredibly healing.

Brandi Fleck: There's a lot of love there. That sounds like it's been a motivator for you to make these changes. I've heard you use the word ego as well. When you described being an egomaniac, you were talking about being self-centered, and then earlier you were talking about loving yourself and finding yourself as not really being selfish.

What’s the difference?

When Ego Is Running the Show

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: I think it comes down to motivation, like why am I doing these things. I think the ego can protect us, and it does protect us. There’s a time and a place to let it come out, kind of put on your armor a little bit. It does point to us like, okay, this is a scary thing that you’re trying to do, tread carefully. I’m not saying that there’s not a place for that in our lives, but for me, I didn’t even know who I was. All I knew was this facade that I thought I was pretty good at portraying. I guess it worked for a while until it didn’t.

I think it really comes down to the motivation behind why we do what it is we do. Are we trying to get somebody to do something because we love them and because it’s helpful and beneficial and it will serve them, or are we trying to get somebody to do something because it serves us? Once I stopped putting myself in the position of trying to get everybody else to do what I wanted them to, and I just focused on myself, so much changed in my life. So much changed.

I do think there’s this level of society that tells women that we’re supposed to go do for everybody else, and then if there’s time left at the end of the day, maybe go take your bubble bath. But even then, make sure your kids are fed and the laundry is done and all that stuff before you go take care of yourself. I used to think of those things like baths or walks or time as a luxury. What I learned very quickly when I was in this state of fear, I was very scared when things with my daughter were going on, very constantly not knowing what that day is going to bring. I figured out that those beautiful times that I spent with myself, caring for myself, is how I could figure out why I was behaving the way I was behaving.

I would have these massive epiphanies. I would journal or I would meditate or I’d be on a long walk, and I would just be thinking about things, and I’d go, oh my gosh, that’s why I’m behaving that way, or this is why I felt this way, because I was letting myself have the time I needed to process big stuff. I’m processing big stuff that goes back to childhood because we’ve all been children. We’re all human beings, and things that happened to us as kids deeply impact us over the rest of our lives. But I wasn’t allowing myself that space and time, one, to feel my feelings. Oh my gosh, I don’t think I cried at all in years. I was numb. I was completely numb.

Some of it was the anxiety medicine that I was on. I think I needed to be numb to maybe get through some of that stuff. I will say another thing that I have released is I don’t take medication anymore that serves me. I also know that medication is very important and powerful for people who need it. I say if tomorrow my doctor said I think you might need to go back on this, I would. I’m not in any way saying meds are bad. I just have the tools now in my toolkit where I don’t need the meds. But I was feeling numb for so long that I just hadn’t felt my feelings. I didn’t know that I had emotions.

Now I cry all the time. It’s amazing. I will see a commercial or I’ll hear something or a friend will send me a text or I’ll just think of something and I cry. I cry because I’m happy, and I cry because I’m sad. We are beings that are supposed to feel our feelings, and I had pushed them so deep down inside. But now that I’m like, oh, this is what it feels like to feel, our emotions are there to protect us. We have them for a reason, and now I listen to them. I love crying. It’s kind of become a joke in my family. I’ll start to say something and I’ll get emotional about it, and everyone’s like, here she goes again. But I’m not ashamed of it. I love it. I love these feelings.

I’ve gotten emotional at work before. I’m not even going to justify it because we’re humans and we can get emotional whenever we want to. I’ve had very meaningful conversations with coworkers where I’ve gotten teary or I’ve gotten emotional, and it makes a difference because they see me as a human and I see them as a human. It’s freeing. I am lighter.

I have integrated exercise into my life because it feels good to move my body, and I hadn’t done that for years and years. I’ve lost weight naturally because I move so much. I move my body so much, but also I eat so healthy. Now that I know what it feels like to be in this healthy, strong body with emotions that are guiding me, it’s life-changing. It’s life-changing. I’m like, oh, this is how it’s supposed to be. This is me. I’ve just been hiding. I was hiding for a really, really long time, and then I found myself.

Brandi Fleck: What were you hiding from?

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: That’s such a great question. I was hiding from not being perfect. I was hiding from my failures. I was hiding from shame. I was hiding from this expectation that I made up. No one did it. I did it. I made it up, this expectation of how I was supposed to be. I’m this age, I should be doing this, I’m supposed to have this.

I was hiding from a really bad divorce and the fallout that came from that. I was hiding from desperately wanting to partner. I wasn’t comfortable being by myself. I would go from boyfriend to boyfriend. I just always felt like I had to have somebody to validate me, so external validation is probably something else I was hiding from. I was hiding from happiness. It was almost like I’ve done a lot of work around self-worth and worthiness. I didn’t think I was worthy of this level of happiness. I just didn’t think that. I don’t get to have this. I’ve screwed up so much in my life. Why do I get to have this?

Then once I realized, yeah, I’ve screwed up a lot, and that’s just what being a human is. You literally don’t know what to do until you do it. We don’t figure out how to live our lives unless we mess up. It’s just part of being human. Now I embrace it, and I’m proud of it, and I’ve forgiven myself for all of it.

That’s new. That’s a new thing. Just the past couple of months, honestly, the deep forgiveness for me. Releasing stuff is one thing, like this no longer serves me, I don’t want to dwell on it, but I would still get these flashbacks to, oh, if I hadn’t behaved this way, maybe this wouldn’t have happened, or if I hadn’t done this, then maybe this. Now if that comes into my mind, I go, it’s okay. I literally say to myself, it’s okay, love, I forgive you, and then I move on. I don’t dwell on it. I don’t even think about it anymore. I probably say that to myself a couple times a day. It’s okay, love, I forgive you.

Brandi Fleck: Let me just say, it’s really exciting to hear that you’re still having breakthroughs. You’re still on this journey, and you’re at this forgiveness part of it, so that’s cool. Do you feel like this sort of coming home to yourself or finding yourself or maybe just unhiding, unmasking, however you want to put it, will be a lifelong journey.

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: Totally. I hope to heal until the day I die. I have slowed down. I read something about toxic positivity that I did not know was a thing, but after I read this post, I think it was a blog post, I was like, oh, I’m borderline getting there, where everything was a little too positive, maybe too many rainbows and unicorns. I don’t know, is there such thing as too many rainbows and unicorns? But we can push ourselves through the healing into this toxic positivity where we think everything has to be perfect all the time. So I’ve backed off from that.

What I do now is I’m just really focused on being present. With that presence practice, I want to be present every single moment for the rest of my life. I see that as I am healing in every single moment for the rest of my life, but I don’t need to constantly be journaling about it, or maybe it’s okay to take a break from meditation, or miss the gym for a couple days. My personality is that I can take everything to the extreme, including my healing.

Now I have found a balance where, to me, I want to get my journaling in every day. I love starting my day with a meditation. I love starting my day with a walk. Most of the time it happens, and if it doesn’t, not a big deal at all. I do not keep tabs. For a while, I was keeping tabs. I was like, oh, I didn’t do my seven things today that are going to help on my healing journey. Now I’m like, hey, I got up, I’m awake, I ate healthy, I nourished my body, and I did make it to the gym. Not a big deal at all.

Brandi Fleck: Let’s go back to the desperation for control. For some reason, this is connecting in my mind to forgiveness. I don’t know if it’s that way for you. Maybe this will come out in your answer, but what goes into letting go of that desperation for control?

Learning to Live Without Control

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: This is probably the hardest thing that I’ve had to release. For me, I’ve gone back and figured out where it came from. The only way I can truly let something go is to figure out the why. That’s just my brain.

I’m the eldest daughter, and my dad was in the military my whole life, and he was gone a lot. I always had this fear, because remember, there were no cell phones, there was no email. Now my daughter’s father is also in the military, and when he’s gone, she gets to talk to him all the time. I’m so grateful for technology because when I was a little girl, I was so scared. I was so scared that my dad was going to die or he was never going to come home.

So I thought, I’ll just control the entire world around me because I have no control over what’s happening to my dad while he’s on these ships. I had bags packed that I would have in my closet, emergency bags. Before I fell asleep every night, I would actually walk through my emergency operating procedure. If our house catches on fire, it is my responsibility to save my brother, to save our dog. I just had this deep, deep fear that led to anxiety. I was an anxious human. I still am an anxious human. I just luckily figured out how to handle it.

I really think it roots from this fear as a kid. The only way that you can get through that to ultimately let go of that control is you’ve got to let go of the fear. I figured out the only way you let go of the fear is to be present, because the past is in the past. Learn your mistakes. Don’t keep doing the same thing over and over. The future is completely unknown. Yes, there are things you can do.

You can financially plan so that you’re hopefully in a better position financially. You can work out so that you have a nice, healthy life. You definitely have things that you can control in your little slice of the world, but we don’t know what’s going to happen to our people. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We know scary, big, bad things happen all the time.

Rather than focusing on that, which is what I did all the time, I would just go to the worst-case scenario, I’m just present. I’m just as present as humanly possible. I focus on this exact moment because there’s nothing I can do about it. If we get a phone call with bad news, I’ll deal with it. I have the tools. I trust myself. I say all the time, I trust myself and I trust the universe. I know I’ll make the right decision because I also listen to my intuition. It turns out I have magic. I am a magical person. When I listen to my intuition, I do what is necessary to not just survive but to thrive.

Now that I listen to myself and I pay attention to myself, it is wild, the things that I feel. I will know when something’s happening to somebody close to me. I’ll have a feeling about them, and then they’ll call or they’ll text, or I’ll hear, oh, this was happening. I know when it’s time to move forward with something. Okay, I need to do this. Sometimes I don’t know why I need to do it, but then looking back on it, I’m like, oh, that was my intuition. My intuition was guiding me this entire time.

If I just trust my intuition and trust myself, I’m not going to make a bad decision. I’ll make a decision, and it may or may not work out, but as long as I’m making that decision from a place of love, a place of self-love, it will work out. It will absolutely work out.

How to Tune Into Your Own Intuition

Brandi Fleck: Yeah. Now, how did you go about tuning into and starting to trust your intuition?

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: I started listening to a bunch of meditations on Spotify and YouTube. I would literally just type in meditation for anxiety, meditation for whatever feeling I was feeling, and then I would let my intuition guide me. I would listen to the one I’m like, this is the one I’m supposed to listen to. I had total strangers who happen to have beautiful meditations guide me through this process. It sounds silly, but I did.

I just started trusting that there are people who were in a space already where I wanted to be, and not in a comparison way, because that’s another thing I used to do all the time, compare myself to everybody else. Why do we do that? We’re all just humans trying to figure out every single day how to make it to the next day. So not in a comparison way, but I would be like, that person looks very centered, that person really speaks kindly to themselves, or that person lives in a manner that I think I would like to live that way. So I would just listen to what they had to say.

I’m an avid reader, and I’ve done a lot of reading. I mean, Brené Brown, let’s be vulnerable. There have been so many amazing books on healing and moving forward. Yung Pueblo is one of my absolute favorite authors. He actually has a book called The Way Forward, and it all comes back to trusting yourself. To me, it comes back to being present and trusting yourself. Every day, I just practice as much as I can to be present and to trust myself and to ask for help.

I had deep shame in asking for help. I felt like I was weak or I was incapable or I was a loser if I could not do something on my own. Then I realized we can’t do anything on our own. We are meant as humans to work together. That’s why we have families. That’s why we have communities. This is why I have amazing people in my life. When everything happened with my daughter, I just called my people, and they all showed up. They all said, how can I help you? In fact, most of them didn’t even say how can I help you. They just showed up and they started helping.

Then I realized how much easier life is when you ask for help and when you openly accept help. I’ve taken that with me in my daily life. In my new job, I’ve decided I’m not going to try to figure out the answers myself. I’m a responsible professional grown-up, but we have coworkers for a reason. The people around us are great at their job.

Ask them for help. Ask them for support. It doesn’t mean that you’re stupid. I really thought I was stupid if I didn’t know all the answers, and now I’m like, no one has all the answers. It’s literally impossible. AI robots don’t even have all the answers. It’s impossible. So I just release it. I just, the idea of perfection is now foreign to me. It does not exist, and I love asking people for help. It’s really powerful.

Brandi Fleck: Yeah, and you hear so many people, well, I think I do, a lot of my clients have trouble asking for help. It sounds like, based on what you’ve been saying, that it’s all tied to fear. Not asking for help, feeling shame, feeling like you’re going to look stupid, all of it.

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: Yeah. Fear is one of the… now let me say that I did figure out that fear is important. If you go back and look at us through evolution, fear is what tells us to run when an animal is going to chase you, when you are out hunting for your food. Fear serves a purpose when we listen to it from an intuitive perspective. But to just walk through life being afraid of everything makes you miserable. I was a miserable human being because I was afraid of everything, because I didn’t trust myself, and I didn’t trust myself because I didn’t love myself.

Brandi Fleck: Okay, so the more you started to love yourself, the more your trust grew?

Couple standing close together, smiling for a selfie in an outdoor amphitheater with tiered seating visible behind them.

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: Totally. Because I love myself so much, so of course I trust myself. I trust myself to ask the right questions. Again, I’m not saying I do it all on my own. I don’t trust myself to do it myself. I trust myself to go, oh, I need support in this area. Let me ask my husband. Let me ask a friend. Let me ask a professional. So to me, yes, it was very much that fully falling in love with myself led to me being able to trust myself.

Brandi Fleck: That’s amazing. Let me just say, I have never heard anybody describe it that way. I think it’s really important for our listeners to take that away, that the more self-love you can foster, the more trust you can foster. What does it mean to you to trust yourself?

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: When I trust myself, I know no matter what decision I make, I know it’s going to lead me in the right direction. I may fail. I might make a decision that leads to failure, but that failure is going to teach me a lesson, and then I’m going to figure out how to do it differently next time. Or I’m going to trust myself to make the decision, and then that decision is going to open another door or move me in a forward momentum.

I hear my intuition tell me what I need to do, and it turns out she, my intuition, she’s a woman. I think I correlate a lot of my intuition also with Mother Nature. Mother Nature is kind of my spiritual guide. The universe, Mother Nature, me, my intuition has been talking to me my entire life. I just wasn’t listening. Now I’m listening, and because I trust myself, I trust myself to make a decision. Either way, it’s going to work out. It’s totally going to work out.

Not in a way of everything’s perfect. Life is tough. We’re human beings living on a planet. There are tough things about life in general. I’m not sitting here saying just trust yourself and everything’s perfect and you get everything you want all the time. And I kind of am saying that, because when you trust yourself and you’re making those decisions from a deep, loving, trusting place, it’s going to work out. That’s the part that helped me release my anxiety.

I would just be so anxious about what about this and what about this and then this could happen and then this. All of those things could happen, but they probably won’t. As long as it came from my gut and I listen to her, it’s totally going to work out.

Brandi Fleck: Now it’s funny because I’m looking at the time and I’m like, I was going to ask you about your childhood and all of these things, but at this point I don’t feel like it’s that important. Just really quickly, though, is it safe to say you had a very loving childhood?

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: I really did. I have the best family. All families are weird, and I had the best family. My family loves deeply. My parents did the absolute best they could with the tools that they had, and I am doing the absolute best I can as a parent with the tools that I have. Once I framed life that way, I am very aware of how difficult it was to be a woman my mother’s age and to be a woman my grandmother’s age and my great-grandmother’s age.

I cannot imagine what it was to walk through this life as a woman in the 50s. It’s tough for a woman in 2024. It’s a lot easier because of the women who came before us and did incredible work to get us what we have, and it is still tough to be a woman.

I think I used to have some judgment, like how could you possibly fill in the blank. The reason is because that’s literally the only choice that they had. I know that my family is full of love. We are really great at unlearning. I am so proud of our family because we have gone down a path, and I’ve gone down different paths from things that I used to believe, groups that I used to be a part of. I would pick something and I would cling onto it really hard. I would go 100% in, and then I realized that all of that stuff that I learned, I can actually unlearn too.

Different members of my family, we’ve all guided ourselves through these learnings and these unlearnings. To me, that’s probably one of the most powerful things. If you can learn it, you can unlearn it. Our family is proof that when you take time and you do the work, it really can matter.

Brandi Fleck: It’s interesting because even if you have a loving childhood, there are still factors and things that play in that would imprint you in a way that you still need healing or self-discovery. Would you say that’s true?

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: Oh, absolutely. I think it goes back to we’re all human beings. There is no book. There are a lot of books out there, but they’re based on different perspectives. We are all our own people. We all have our own lived experience. So the way you walk through this world is very different from how I walk through this world, and so how can I possibly think that you’re going to understand things the way that I do, and vice versa?

Brandi Fleck: What is the most important thing that you’ve learned since you’ve started this journey?

When Self Trust Starts to Replace Fear

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: Hands down, the most important thing that I’ve learned is that when you love yourself, everything else falls into place. Period.

Brandi Fleck: How do you start to love yourself?

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: I think the first thing you have to do is have a long, hard conversation with yourself. I love talking to myself. I do it on my walks. I just talk to myself a lot. It’s almost like I have to have a little chat with myself. When I hear something come up like, oh, that was so stupid, why did you do that, then I’ll go, no, that’s not how we talk to ourselves. I wouldn’t talk to someone I love that way, and I love myself a lot, so I’m not going to talk to myself that way.

It’s like calling out your own behaviors toward yourself. When you start doing that, when you start recognizing how many times a day you talk poorly to yourself, it’s a little scary. So I was like, okay, I’m just not going to do that anymore. It took me a really long time, and I still catch myself, but you have to be in a space where you are going to be able to receive your own feedback.

I think there’s a deep level of self-awareness, but you have to want to be self-aware. For me, I had to be ready to receive feedback, not just from my people but also from myself. All feedback is an opportunity to improve. Sometimes somebody could be really mean to you, and that’s not feedback, that’s just someone being unkind.

I could have a whole podcast on boundaries. Boundaries have played a huge role in my healing, a massive role. To know that, hey, this is my boundary, and it’s not your boundary, and this actually has nothing to do with you and everything to do with me. Once I put boundaries, and not walls, I used to put walls up. There’s a big difference between walls and boundaries. Boundaries are protecting me. Walls were hiding me.

Once I’ve got those boundaries up so I feel safe, I’m in a safe space. Once I stopped talking unkindly to myself and realized that I am such a special person, what that helped me realize is that every human is special. Every single human is special. I stopped othering. I stopped putting people in boxes. I stopped expecting people to believe the same thing that I believe just because that’s what I believe, and I just fully accept people exactly as they are.

Now, if you are racist, if you are blatantly mean, if you are abusing another human being, I will be the first person to call it out and probably put my body in front of it. In no way am I saying that I allow people to be hateful and unkind, but in your general life, walking through life, let that stuff roll off your back. Just let it go.

But it’s self-awareness. You’ve got to be ready to do the work, and I just was not ready. It clearly took something really, really big happening in my life to thrust me into this. My hope is that people don’t have to have something bad happen to them to get to a place where they want to love themselves.

How cool would it be if we all knew that it was safe and beautiful to fall in love with yourself at a very young age and not feel ashamed, not feel guilty. I think the guilt for a lot of it was like, if I’m giving myself this time, I feel guilty because I’m not giving it to other people. I don’t feel one bit guilty. The coolest part is the people around me, they don’t think I’m being a jerk or selfish either. They’re like, good for you. In fact, I’m inspiring my husband. He eats mostly vegan now. We go to the gym. We work out together all the time. He says to his friends, yeah, I’m watching Courtenay and I’m seeing all this work that she’s doing on herself, and I’m realizing I could do a little more of this or I could do less of that. It’s really cool. It’s really beautiful to see people be inspired.

Brandi Fleck: We’ve talked about the catalyst for this process. We’ve talked a little bit about the things that you were doing that you stopped doing or that happened that sort of kept you on this path. I’ll go ahead and just say, what have I not asked you that you think is important to share?

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: I think it’s really important for all humans to know that we have everything we need inside of us to live our best lives, and we get to decide what that looks like. My best life is going to look different from yours, from our friends, but the tools that we need, we were born with. If you think about it as a kid, and I know you’ve probably got deep experience with this with your trauma-informed coaching, when you’re a child, none of these thoughts go through your mind. We are not worried about what people think about me when we’re running around, jumping and playing in puddles and screaming with glee and joy and delight.

It’s society and it’s this pressure of growing up that we put on ourselves where we start to change who we are. We are born exactly who we are supposed to be. Now, yeah, you’ve got to learn your alphabet, you’ve got to learn the things that help you become an adult, but we’ve got to stop trying to change who we are. This is tough, especially in the day of social media, in the day of everyone looks a certain way on Instagram and all of that stuff.

One thing that I didn’t realize that I was doing so much of, I was literally covering myself. I was covering my face with makeup. I was covering my hair with hair dye. I was covering my body with clothes. I would cover up my beautiful tattoos that I love so much. I was covering and hiding myself. I was also spending a lot of money to do all of those things because I felt this pressure to be something different than who I am.

I naturally stopped getting my hair done because it just wasn’t safe to leave, and then all of a sudden my gray started coming out, and I was like, oh my gosh, this is really cute. Then I was like, okay, I’m just not going to dye my hair anymore. Plus it was nice to not spend that money. Then I just got a little lazy, which it’s not lazy, it’s just natural, and I just stopped wearing makeup because I was like, I just don’t want to wear makeup anymore. Then I started wearing clothes that make me feel great, not that are cool, not that are stylish. It’s like, this feels good on my body, and this is what I want to wear.

Now when I look at myself in the mirror, I’m like, you are so beautiful. I tell myself that. I’m like, you’re so beautiful. It’s not in a bragging way. It’s not like I think I’m hotter than someone else. I’m not comparing myself to anyone, but I look at myself and I see myself, or I’ll see a picture of myself and I’m like, God, I’m so beautiful. That’s so powerful because when we love ourselves and we’re secure in who we are, we’re not mean to other people.

Especially in this state of being that we’re in right now, where there’s a lot of divisiveness, there’s a lot of anger, there’s a lot of your side, my side, I’m right, you’re wrong, I don’t like how you live your life and you don’t like how I live my life, when we stop judging other people and we see them for exactly who they are, we’re so much alike. We really are so alike. We have so much more in common than not, and I think that’s literally the key to changing the world. I think that normalizing self-love is the key to changing the world, and I want to be a part of that.

That’s why I said, Brandi, I want to be on your podcast because I want to share my story, because we need to hear more people talking about epic failures and scary stuff. I was a total mess, and now I’m not, because when we decide to fall madly in love with ourselves, we change the trajectory of our lives and we break generational cycles. I have broken generational cycles in my family. Alcoholism runs deep, deep, and I woke up that morning and I said, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to end up in rehab, and I just stopped drinking.

I’ve struggled with my weight since I had my daughter, and I just said, I’m not going to struggle anymore. I’m going to be strong, and I’m going to be healthy. I don’t care what I weigh, but I want to be strong and I want to be healthy. I got back into the gym, and I lift weights every day because I want to be a strong woman who, when I am a hundred years old, I can still walk the neighborhood and look at the beautiful trees, and I don’t want someone to have to be pushing me in a wheelchair. These are the things that we have full control over.

The food that we put into our body, I put nothing into my body that doesn’t serve me. I’ve literally released alcohol. I also used to smoke cigarettes, so I quit smoking before I quit alcohol. I don’t have to take meds anymore for my anxiety. I eat nothing if it’s not from a plant. I drink a ton of water. I drink mushroom coffee, and the last vice that I gave up about three months ago was sugar. I don’t even eat sugar anymore. I actually can’t even stomach the idea of processed sugar. It makes me sick. Even thinking about it makes me sick.

All of these things, my body’s been telling me this for so long, don’t eat this, don’t drink that, and now I listen to my body and I listen to my intuition, and I’m really healthy and I’m really happy. I want other people to know, especially women, I want other women to know, ignore what everyone else is saying to you and just fall in love with yourself. We’re so good at falling in love with other people. We’re so good at falling in love with our children, but we will serve our children and our partners and this universe better when we love ourselves.

Brandi Fleck: Thank you so much for sharing your story. I know that this isn’t a platform that you’ve monetized or anything like that, but if anybody did want to learn more, is there somewhere they can find you, or is that even a thing?

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: That’s a really good question. TBD. I think, and I’m listening to my intuition on this, I do think I want to figure out a platform. It’s funny, about a week ago I Googled which platform is best for sharing content. Is it going to be Medium? Is it going to be Substack? I think it’s coming. I still have a goal of writing a book and being a published author one day. I started down that journey when everything happened with my daughter and realized that I was actually telling her story and not mine, and I finally figured out that that didn’t feel good in my body. So I stopped that process. I am manifesting that one day. I do think I’ll write a book.

But for now, I’m on Instagram. I post a lot of pictures of trees and dogs and vegan recipes, which if you go back and look at my Instagram from three, four, five years ago, it was very, very different.

Brandi Fleck: Something that really piqued my interest when we were talking earlier, but we just didn’t go there, was that you have had somewhat of a political career. How has it been shifting from being so political to so unplugged?

Letting Go of a Version of Yourself

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: Magical. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. Truly. I was doing what I was doing. I’ve run for office twice. I was the vice chair of a local party. I was doing that to fill a void, a void that is no longer there. I don’t need it. I don’t need it anymore. I still love watching people who are doing the work because there’s a lot of work out there that needs to be done, but I don’t feel like I need to be a part of it.

That was tough. I will say I had to get through grief and I had to get through guilt. I did kind of mourn this world that I was in, where I was constantly informed of everything that was happening and I was building strategy behind the local party and helping to recruit candidates. That stuff is really cool and powerful, but it went back to me. I wasn’t doing it for the right reason. I still say I will talk to anybody who wants to run for office and I’ll tell you the truth, so that is something I would totally give my energy there.

But literally four days ago, I get a text from my cousin. She did a group text to myself and my mom. My mom is still very active in local politics. There was something happening in Nashville, hey y’all should come to this, very compelling reasons. It is a very important movement around women’s reproductive health rights. I’m all in. I believe very much that this is an important battle to fight. I did the math. It was on a Saturday. I was like, I could go to this. I don’t have plans. I could. I didn’t want to, and it does not serve me.

My reply was, my political days are behind me, and I’m so grateful that you’re doing this work. I didn’t feel guilt. I didn’t feel shame. I actually came out and told my husband, I said no, and I don’t feel guilty about it. He was like, yeah, you should never feel guilty about it. You have done so much. You should never feel guilty. I was like, okay, well, I’m not going to anymore.

It was a process. It was definitely a process, but once I left politics, there are so many people doing the work, and they’re smarter than me, more capable than me. They have cooler ideas than me. Sometimes you’ve got to leave so that other people can come in and do what needs to be done. So set that ego aside.

Brandi Fleck: Yes.

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: It was totally my ego, which you kind of have to have an ego to run for office. It will protect you. But I don’t want to be a lawmaker. I think I wanted to run for office. I wanted the attention. It was a great experience, and I learned a lot, and I have some of my best friends that I will have for the rest of my life because of that. I’m so grateful for that chapter, but I don’t actually want to be a lawmaker. So why was I doing it?

It took me stepping back and stepping away. One thing that my very honest, amazing daughter said after the second time that I ran for office and I lost, which I will say, me running for office the first time inspired a lot of people to run for office, so I know that my actions in 2016 have made a difference, and I’m so proud of that. Again, I’ve made incredible friends, so I don’t regret it at all.

Then I ran again in 2022, and I almost won, but I didn’t because the universe was protecting me. I said very calmly, you know what, I think that’s it. I think two is good enough. My daughter looked at me and she said, I’m so glad to hear you say that, Mama. I do not like campaign Courtenay. She was mean. She was angry. She was judgmental, and I didn’t like her one bit. I was like, you know what, I didn’t like her either. I’m proud of her, but that wasn’t me. It’s very powerful to let that go.

Brandi Fleck: Courtenay, I just thank you so much for sharing your story. It really has been a powerful journey to observe and now hear about. So beautiful.

Courtenay “Coco” Rogers: Thank you so much. Thank you for answering my text with a yes. You don’t get what you don’t ask for.