Welcome to the Divine Worth podcast. My guest today is Emily Baker. Emily, how about you go ahead and introduce yourself?

Yeah, thank you so much, Karen. I appreciate you letting me and inviting me here today. I am a life coach. I work with LDS women, specifically helping them recognize how we have a divine identity, how to access and command spiritual power, and to be able to do that in a way that aligns with our divine feminine nature as children of God in our ability to become disciples of Jesus Christ. I'm a mom to four kiddos — three boys and a little girl. I love all things reading, barefoot, rain.

That's awesome. It sounds like what you do is very much what this podcast is about. Fun fact — I also have four kids. I have three girls and then our youngest is a boy.

Oh my gosh, that is too fun. That's the family I actually grew up in. I'm the oldest of three girls, then we had a little brother. So when I started having boys, I was like, I don't know what to do with boys. And now that I have a girl, I'm like, wait, I'm a boy mom. How do I have a girl?

That's funny. I always thought I was going to be a boy mom just because I grew up with three older brothers. So I ended up being a girl mom and it's been just awesome. I love that relationship. All right. Now that we've established connections, let's get more into what this podcast is all about. I would love to hear why you think it's so important for us to know our divine worth.

This is probably one of my favorite questions. For me, I feel like I originally was taught divine worth as sort of a faraway identity — you have heavenly parents and you existed in this spiritual world and like that's who you are. And it was like, great, what does that have to do with me in my life here today? But the more I've come to recognize that my human identity is actually my second one. Getting to know what is the spiritual part of me, who am I as a spiritual being first and foremost — that is then the opportunity to bring that version of me into my human life and experiences. So it's completely reoriented the way that I view myself, I view my life, I view relationships with other people.

Okay, so I love that shift in perspective because we can get so caught up in our mortal life and who we are as a mortal human being, right? And here you're talking about — let's switch that and focus in on the fact that we were spirit beings before we came here and we're still spirit beings inside these mortal bodies. Okay, so when did you first realize that a lack of self-worth was an issue either for you or for someone you love?

It almost has always been this undercurrent that was there for so much of my life. The most prominent time was actually when I was dating my husband — we were high school sweethearts. That was kind of the first time I really had somebody asking me more about myself. What did I want? What was important to me? And I didn't realize how connected that was to these feelings I had of not-enoughness or inadequacy. It was a weird thing where if you had asked me, I'd be like, I'm super confident! I'm really capable. I know I'm good at things. I was a high achiever in school. And so it was weird to try and figure out where this sense of not-enoughness was coming from. That was kind of my first clue — realizing that for me, there was a disconnect between my relationship with myself. I had a great relationship with God, with my family, with friends, but my relationship with me? That was the bit that was kind of lacking.

So that got you more internally thinking about who you were. What happened from there?

Yeah, so from there it was a really big journey and I feel like God was starting to connect me more with myself. I was trying to figure out how I felt about this relationship I was in. That started off as just kind of fun dating and then as we got older became a lot more serious — and that was not at all my plan. I was not going to be one of those Mormons who got married young. I had this whole plan — I was going to go to school, go on a mission, do the study abroad, graduate school, like all these things. And then I would get married and have kids and start my real life after that. And God basically said, I need you to do the opposite. I need you to get married young. And I was like, that is not my plan.

God was specifically walking me in so many different ways through this process of starting to understand who I was, but also putting this invitation out there — hey, I have an understanding of who you are and I have a vision and a plan for you and your life. How much are you willing to trust me in that and say yes to it? We ended up eloping and at 19, we went down to the courthouse and got married. And that began this initial journey — starting this foundation that I would later learn was critical to my understanding of my worth, coming from this place of partnering and having a trust in God and a trust in myself and the power of those two things operating together.

I love that, because when it comes to who we are and our potential, Heavenly Father knows so much more than we do. And so if we can put our faith and trust in him, he's going to tell us more about who we are. So here's something interesting — it sounds like you had a plan. Did you have this vision of who you were because of that plan? And then why is it that you were questioning who you were during this time?

I love that question. I think it goes back to this dichotomy again of like, I was this confident person, operating from my mind of like, well, this is what I want to do and these are all the good things. There was a part of it that was very much occupied in like, well, this is what you do. That is what my aunt did, what my cousins did. I had followed these women in my life that I had looked up to and so I naturally ascribed myself into that plan. I hadn't even considered what else was available or possible. It was kind of like God was pausing me for a minute and being like — girl, there is so much more that is here and available. I have some other ideas you may not be considering. Trust me here.

Okay, so I love what you just said — girl, there's so much more here. Let's continue. What happened next?

Yeah, so we get married. We're living in a little condo down in Orem, Utah, just outside of Provo. We're trying to figure out what we're doing. And it's funny because it happened out of getting married. I remember being in the kitchen, making breakfast one day, and my husband is buttering toast and he can tell that I kind of pause. He's like, what's wrong? And I'm like, I like the butter all the way to the edges. The whole point of having toast is to eat butter. And he's just barely spreading anything on it in the middle. Before I actually said that to him, I was like, no, no, it's okay. Just finish doing whatever you're doing. And he stops dead center and says — no, tell me how you like your toast made. I don't want to find out in 30 or 40 years that I've been making your toast wrong and we end up getting divorced because you have this built-up resentment. Tell me how you like your toast.

And that kind of started this cascade of realizing I had preferences for different things, but I was not used to vocalizing them or even recognizing them in my own mind. So I was having these emotional responses but I viewed it as — that's not kind, I'm putting people out, I'm causing problems. And so there was this whole subconscious experience that I was going through that I didn't even realize I was having until I had somebody who was not buying it and was like, you're gonna tell me what you like. So I bought a book on people pleasing. And it had a worksheet portion of it where it was literally like — what is your favorite color? What is your favorite food? Actually going back to the literal basics. And I remember sitting there in the kitchen being like, could I actually decide something? It sounds so dumb sometimes when I explain it, but that was the level of what was happening. I did have these preferences. It's not that they weren't there — it was that they hadn't reached the consciousness of my mind and they weren't moving into my experience through my voice and my actions.

Okay, this is so interesting. The last podcast episode I recorded, she talked about how when she was a little girl her mom gave her a kind of would-you-rather book so she could get to know herself. And here you're coming in and sharing how you started to recognize — I do have these preferences that I didn't realize all these years, because I was just so focused on what can I do, how can I please others.

Yeah, and it's been fascinating because one of things I'm now also obsessed with is understanding divine femininity and what does that look like. There is this developmental process that is often different between masculine and feminine dynamics — masculine often has this connection first with the self and then goes on this journey of learning to serve others. And feminine has an opposite experience — we are first very connected and aware of others and the experiences going on around us, and then we go on this internal journey to come to know yourself. So I could read a room and pick up on the little underlying emotions in different family dynamics. But I hadn't yet learned how to recognize those same dynamics playing out in myself. That was the gap I was perceiving — experiencing it as not-enoughness, not trusting myself, not having worth — but it was really just a blossoming of my natural development of moving from being oriented to other people to coming into having a connection with myself.

I love this. One thing I have going on right now is writing a book — From Burden to Love, the Giver's Guide for Giving and Receiving Love. And it's interesting what you're saying because it's like we start with this service-oriented desire. We want to help others, we want to lift them up. We start to identify with that to the point that we go to the extreme where we stop receiving — when we really need both the giving and the receiving to create stronger relationships and make an even greater impact.

Yeah, well I love that you bring that up because fast forward a couple of years and I have our second son and it ends up being an emergency c-section and I'm in the hospital for about a month afterwards with some other complications. My son gets discharged and my sweet husband is working, taking care of a two-year-old and a newborn on his own while worried about his wife in the hospital. I get home and I have lost so much muscle mass that I can barely hold this ten-pound little brand new baby. We had just moved into a new apartment so we're still living in boxes. At this point I had started a business as a professional organizer and I was really good friends with the Utah professional organizers — there's a whole group of them — and they started coming over and they're unpacking my stuff and they're cleaning my toilet and bringing me tons of food.

And I remember just sitting there on the bed being literally incapacitated and feeling so uncomfortable to just be sitting there while somebody else is cleaning my toilet. It was a visceral reaction of — I'm resisting receiving this. And I remember reflecting and praying on that, and God coming to me and being like, I am literally incapacitating you because you will not learn to receive any other way. You've got to learn this lesson. So yes, you're going to sit there on that bed and you are going to let these people do things for you. It was a really humbling experience — kind of my first experience of feeling like God was saying, you are going to receive something.

It was a really powerful lesson that opened this doorway of what it means to receive. I would later come to learn — especially as women — what the word receive really means and how essential it is. If you think about even the ordinances and in the temple, how many times do we use the word receive? Receive the Holy Ghost. It is an active part of spiritual power, of life, of covenant living, of relationship with God. And I believe we're supposed to be receiving life. The more that we receive, the more we have the capacity to put into our own lives and relationships and experiences.

That's so good. Okay, I do kind of want to go back just a little bit — because here you're finding more of what your preferences are. And sometimes when we start to do that, there's this fear that can come up because we might conflict with someone else's preferences. How did you start to handle that and continue to grow in that area even when that opposition started to happen?

So good. Thank you for asking that because it really was a genuine problem. I genuinely viewed it as — I care about other people, I want other people to be happy, so I wanted to be accommodating and kind. But it took some consciousness to start realizing that underneath that was a really big fear around contention. I do not know how to deal with contention. I grew up in a family where — I don't know if you ever watched Everybody Loves Raymond — but there's a character, Amy, who says, my parents wouldn't have yelled if their hair was on fire. And I was just like, that is my family. We do not yell, you do not get angry. I was not raised in a way to know how to handle conflict and differences and anger. I never saw that modeled.

My husband grew up in a family that was quite the opposite — they love to argue for fun. That was the whole part of their bonding experience. The first time I went to Sunday dinner and his two brothers are like getting into it and I'm just like, what is going on here? They're just having fun and enjoying it. So my husband comes into this marriage from this place of not being afraid of conflict or anger at all. And in a weird way, one of the most powerful things was actually learning how to deal with the emotion of anger itself. Before I could deal with contention, I had to deal with the underlying thing of — I don't know how to feel anger. I genuinely was like, I don't know what anger feels like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it, because it's this really bad thing.

I feel like a key part of it was actually my children. I was like, I want to figure this out for my children because my kids are two year olds and they're having anger and I want to be able to navigate them through that. And so that really became a doorway opening up for me — starting to learn how to recognize my emotions, how to process my emotions, and especially get in touch with anger. Once anger was no longer such a scary thing, contention also wasn't as scary because I could recognize I don't have to be afraid of the emotions I'm feeling. But also there was a whole other process of recognizing that just because I thought or felt something different than somebody else did not mean there had to be anger or conflict. That we could also just be two separate people who like different things. And that became one of our mottos in our family — everybody is allowed to like different things.

Yeah. And I like that you brought that in because there are two parts to that — how you started with feeling those more difficult, uncomfortable emotions. Because when you get to the point where you're able to process those emotions, that is the next step — to be able to recognize that it's okay for people to have differences. It's hard to accept that if we are not processing those more uncomfortable emotions.

And I think there's a unique lens that comes into play, especially as Latter-day Saints and as women who are in the church, because there's this beautiful doctrine and ideal of — we love going to the temple and everybody's dressed in white because we're all the same before God. And that idea of we want to build Zion and we're all together and everyone belongs. But it can be really easy to get caught in the spot of — if I'm feeling negative emotion, I'm doing something wrong. Like I'm sinning, I'm bad. I just need to trust God more. And not recognizing that our negative emotions are actually a beautiful, integral, central part of the process. And that when we are bypassing them or not allowing ourselves to experience them, we're missing out on a part of who we are.

I believe we started out like God. That's what it means to be a spiritual being — we are literal spiritual offspring of a heavenly father and a heavenly mother. And so that means we are already intrinsically divine. It's not something that we have to turn into. That was the starting point. And so from that lens, what then is the purpose of our human experience? To me, the purpose is something we see modeled through Jesus Christ — to descend from Godhood into humanity to gain a human physical body and to learn how to embody and express our divinity through our humanity.

We see that modeled so beautifully in Christ's life where he felt pain, he had suffering, he had anguish, but that did not make him any less divine. In fact, that was what allowed him to access the most powerful part of his ministry through the atonement. He had to feel pain. It was a central aspect of it — to the degree that he bled from every pore. And yet we sometimes want to cut that out of the experience. But that doesn't have any weight to it unless we learn to embody it. So there is this balancing game we're learning to do — almost like how to ride a bike — the two pedals of my humanness and my spiritualness. And when we get into a good rhythm with that, to me that is where I have found the greatest level of connection and where my worth connected.

Okay, that is fascinating. I'm a coach and one thing I do is take people through feeling those uncomfortable emotions from this place of love and acceptance. Because a lot of the times when we feel lonely, when we feel neglected or unseen, it's actually because we're neglecting a part of ourself. Those emotions are just indicators that there's something we need to learn. Something that a part of ourself is trying to tell us. And so just taking that time to get really clear on what that part of ourself is telling us and then thanking that part of ourself for wanting that — it's just such a powerful experience.

Yeah, that's so beautiful. I love how you phrased that. I relate to it very much because that's something similar I love to describe when I'm helping somebody work through emotions — the uncomfortable ones are most like the rumble strips on the freeway. They kind of let you know when you're veering off track and when we're coming back on. And so they're actually really powerful. Because what I love is looking at it through this lens — that is our true self, our spiritual self that is trying to say there's a part of me I want to bring into this human physical experience. And so it's letting us recognize what's that next piece I get to embody? I think of the fullness of who we are spiritually as this giant version of us — funneling into our human experience. And when I started reframing it as — this is an invitation to be more of who I already am — well, that's a little bit of a different story. Because more is sometimes a scary word, right? But if it's, this is who I already am and I just get to practice bringing more of who I already am into my life — that's different.

These are the questions that I ask everyone. What is your favorite divine worth scripture?

I love that you asked this one. My favorite one is Exodus 3:14 — where God says unto Moses, I am that I am. And I love that phrase because my lens is always — what does it actually mean if I am a literal child of God? If God is saying I am that I am, then that is my desire too — to recognize how can I become a being who knows within the core of who I am, I am that I am. What that phrase means to me is this beautiful idea that God is not God because God has power over everyone and everything — which is a flawed version of how we sometimes view God. I think of it instead that God is God because no one and nothing has power over God. And that has become the foundation of really getting rooted in my worth. Because not my circumstances, not what other people think, not what's going on in my life — none of those things get to decide or dictate who I am or how I'm going to show up in the world.

I am that I am. And when I remember that piece of it, my worth is solid because it's not dependent on a person changing or the way that I show up or how my kids turn out or the grade I got. None of those things matter anymore. I am that I am because this is who I am and it's who I choose to be. And so that's my space that I'm always coming back to, especially when it's in terms of my worth.

And that goes along so well with our entire discussion here. And just that phrase — making room for more of who I am — it all ties in. So thank you so much for sharing that. My next question is what is one small and simple thing that those listening can do to take action on what we've been talking about?

That is such a good question. My basic rule of thumb — the fundamental question I always come back to when I'm struggling, when I'm lost, when I don't know what to do — is: what do I want? Because when I ask myself what do I want, it always reorients me to where I need to go. I struggled with desire for a long time. I was like, oh, that's too selfish. But what I realized is if I would stop and actually ask myself, usually the answers were things like, I want to lie down in my bed for a second. Or even something as simple as, I want a cookie. And it was like, oh — I want some joy in my life. I want to feel a little something. That always gives me the opportunity to reorient back to myself first. Because when I reorient back to who I am, I'm automatically reorienting back to God — because I am an extension of God, the fullness of me. And so from that place, I can get back into my life. Asking what I want and finding some sort of pleasure or joy or fun — those are the fastest ways I find to reconnect with that worth.

Okay. Even now as we're talking I'm like, I've got more questions. I am going to ask this one though — because we talked about feeling the uncomfortable emotions. Sometimes it's also uncomfortable for us to feel joy and those emotions we actually want more of.

Yes, when they start showing up in your life — I was literally talking to my mentor this past week of like, I'm starting to hit some of the experiences that I wanted in life. And I'm like, I'm so uncomfortable. I can't have this much joy in my life. Like something is wrong to be feeling this good. And there is a piece of like, we have to acclimate to it sometimes. So yes, love that.

Okay, so good. So yeah, maybe we'll have a whole episode on that later. We'll have to do another one. Alright, well Emily, I have just one more question — how can those listening connect with you?

The easiest way is probably on Instagram. I'm Emily Carolynn Baker there. Carolynn has two N's — it's my mom and my grandma's name combined together. And that's probably the easiest way. I love doing free webinars. I have my mentorship program. There are lots of ways we connect and play together. And I love sharing fun LDS stories and experiences there too. So that's probably the best place.

Alright, great. Well Emily, this has been great talking to you. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.