Episode 206: Why Go, Go, Go, Collapse Is A Crappy Way To Rest.

Is your pattern Go, go, go, go, go, go, go go go collapse. If so you’re gonna want to listen to this entire episode. So pop your earbuds in, and let’s get started.

Welcome to the Full Frontal Living Podcast. I’m Lisa Carpenter, master life coach to driven ambitious humans who want more out of life without having to sacrifice themselves to achieve it all share how it’s possible to slow down, take better care of yourself, find more peace and ease, create sustainable energy, stop procrastination and overwhelm and fall in love with your life, your business and your body. This podcast is for you. If you’re ready to learn what it takes to thrive as a high performer, do less, but achieve more make you and your well being a top priority and create your extraordinary life. I’m so glad you’re here.

Well, hey, hey, thanks for tuning in to another episode of The Full Frontal living podcast. I’m your host, Lisa sounding a little bit different today, I’m on the tail end of a head cold. And I still have that kind of like, you know that voice you get when you’ve been sick, I’m still dealing with that. But I went, you know what, I’m just going to record an episode anyways, because you guys know I love to keep it real. So before we dive in today’s episode about a pattern that I see so many of my clients running, I wanted to let you know that I have openings on my calendar to start with new one to one clients in 2023. So if this is something that you have been considering for yourself, maybe you’ve been nervous about working with me, or you know, it’s the next step you need to take, but you’ve been waiting for that sign that right moment, Now is that time. So before you do anything else, head over to Lisa carpenter.ca forward slash coach me, so just coach me. And that will take you to an application form, what I want you to do is book a single individual coaching session with me. Now this is a paid session where we’re going to dive deep into what is going on for you. And every single one of my clients starts here. This is where we assess kind of where you’re at where it is you want to go, what is getting in your way, and then determine if you’re going to be a good fit moving forward to work with me in a longer term container. And I’ve got a couple of different options for what that can look like. That first session will be applied to your bigger coaching package. But it’s just I don’t do discovery calls. I don’t particularly like sales calls. It’s not really my jam. So I do basically paid coaching calls, because I want to know if you’re coachable. I want to know if we’re going to be a good fit together. And the truth is, I need to know if I think that I can help you if your problem is something that I’m really good at helping my clients solve. So if that sounds like you, if this episode resonates with you make sure that you head over and grab that individual coaching session. And let’s get started.

So today I wanted to read something from you from a little book called meditations for women who do too much by Ann Wilson shave. This is a really little great pocket book of daily kind of reads that you can sink into if you so desire to kind of get you to think about different aspects of your life that maybe you want to work on. So I’ve talked before about melody Beatty’s books, her daily meditations on codependency. I also have a book called Journey from the heart. But these are great little books to kind of pull out and just say, Okay, this is something I want to be working on. So today, I wanted to read you from that book, not a December date, it was just kind of where the book opened up to. And I was like, Oh, this is perfect. I need to talk about this on the podcast, because it’s so relevant to the season that we are in right now. Because we’re heading into holiday season, you may be listening to this, and you might be deep into holiday season already. And if you’re like most of my clients, you probably take on a tremendous amount of responsibility at this time of year. And I know for me personally, I’ve really had to learn over the years to let stuff go and let other people take care of things or just to delete it altogether. So I’m going to read this to you. And then we’re going to kind of go into it a little bit deeper. When we are addicted to working, being busy rushing around and taking care of other people. The only way that we can give ourselves permission to rest is by collapsing. It has been said that workaholism is the addiction of choice for those who feel unworthy. We are so driven to prove ourselves and to make a place for ourselves that we can never quite do enough no matter how much we do. If we just do enough, maybe we can justify our existence. We have trouble accepting that just are being may be enough, we all need solitude. And those of us who do too much can only justify taking it when we are near collapse, rushing, and then collapsing is not only exhausting to me, it wears everyone around me out to. So rushing. And then collapsing is a pattern of behavior that I see so many of my clients run.

And to be honest, this was me for many, many, many years, I really sought out my worthiness, my value in all the things that I was doing and accomplishing. But I didn’t understand that on a conscious level, this was all running on an unconscious level. And what so many of you don’t understand is that most of your stories and beliefs and behaviors are driven by these unconscious, like these unconscious beliefs that you’re holding on to so you’ve got your conscious beliefs. But you also have these unconscious beliefs that often kind of run the show. And this is why it’s so important to and I’m going to be talking about this more in coming episodes, why it’s so important to move out of self-help, where you’re reading all the books, and you’re in the big massive group coaching programs and you’re, you know, answering questions and stuff into a container where you’re working more intimately with a coach or in a small group, where you can get individualized attention on you, because you’re not, you’re never going to ask yourself the questions that you need to ask to get to the thing that might really be holding you back, because you’re trying to fix your problem from being inside the reality that created the problem for you.

So it took work, therapists, coaches to get me to the place of understanding how much my own worthiness was attached to this pattern of doing and doing and doing. And this is why I felt like I could never take a rest or never take a break because there was no value in resting. The value was in doing why would I rest? Who does that. Whereas now I can tell you that rest, you’ve heard me say before, is a massive, it’s a massive success strategy. If you want to be more successful in your life, you need to make sure you’re getting adequate rest and not just when you’re so exhausted that you collapse, but baking it into your day. So we have to look at the stories that you have around rest. And we also have to look at the stories around why you believe that you always need to be doing all the things. So here we are, the holiday season. And this is where for many of you who’ve been doing this self-development work for years, this might be where you find yourself back in old patterns. Maybe all of a sudden, you’re realizing that you’ve taken on the responsibility of all the gift buying and the dinner making and the card sending and all these things without ever stepping back and saying well, wait a minute, do you need to be doing these things? Do you need to be doing all the gift buying?

So this year, I asked my hubby to help me out with more gift buying. And in years past it was kind of one of those things that I wanted to do myself. But did I need to or did I just do it because I believe that I was the best person suited for the job. Whereas year over year, I’m learning what else I can let go of what else I can delegate to other people. When it comes to Christmas dinner in our family, what we’re doing now is one person will cook the turkey. And then we’ll divide up all the side dish dishes between us. And then somebody will bring a dessert so that the workload is shared. Because all the women in my family have begun to realize, man, this is a big job. And it’s not a lot of fun. So you may be somebody who loves cooking. And you know, that just brings you so much joy. That is not me. So I love the eating of the food. I don’t love the making of all the food. So spreading that out instead of believing that I have to be making everything in order to earn my value as a mom or as a wife or as a you know, daughter or daughter-in-law. It’s just simply not true. These are all just stories that we tell ourselves as women.

So I want you to look at this holiday season even all this the things that are on your calendar. And do all of those events really bring you joy, or are you just saying yes to things out of obligation, feeling like you should or not wanting people to, you know, judge you if you don’t go to some of these things or, you know, feeling like you’re letting people down is something else that I hear from clients. And a big part of this work is being in the discomfort of putting yourself first and saying no to things. So that you don’t get to the end of the holiday season and you’re exhausted from your holidays.

So we learned many years ago, to just say no to things unless it’s a really like, Yes, I have to I want to do this, like, My soul is calling me to this event, then I will go. But otherwise, we keep it very, very low key in our house, we choose things that really bring us a lot of joy, like going to the Light Festival. And this year, I’m actually going to be, excuse me, this year, I’m going to be going to the symphony as well, they’re going to be playing a live version of home alone. So I’m really excited about that. But planning, putting events and planning events on my calendar strategically, so that they fit into the flow of the holidays. And so I’m not stalking event after event after event. And so that there’s a lot of time and space on there to really do nothing. If we want to stay in bed, if we want to go skiing, whatever it may be. The other thing is I looked at things that we could delete. So, you know, I haven’t sent out Christmas cards. Now in years, I just decided that that was a tradition that I no longer wanted to carry on. Every year, I do something for my clients. So I host a big kind of zoom party and I bring on an expert, guest of some way shape or form. For my clients, I’ve got something like that planned already for this year. And that’s my way of giving back. And it brings me a lot of joy to be able to do that. But things like writing Christmas cards, I didn’t get any joy out of that. And in fact, I felt like I was doing it because I should you know, quote, unquote, should do it. And I don’t want to live my life from shoulds. Because all of these things that you’re shooting on yourself about, I should go to this party, I should do Christmas cards, I should be baking all the cookies, I should be doing this, I should be doing that. These are the things that lead to that exhaustion and burnout and that collapse because you’re so tired, the only person that is putting pressure on you is you and this cycle of Go Go Go collapse. Eventually, that collapse becomes longer and longer and longer. Meaning you end up with health implications. And you’re forced to slow down for a much longer time.

And I can’t even begin to tell you how many women I’ve worked with who’ve gone through adrenal fatigue, they’ve done the work to get better. And the work for them was like taking the supplements and you know, trying to eat better, but they didn’t actually look at the behaviors and the beliefs that was driving them to go go go all the time. So guess what, they end up back on that hairy fringe of adrenal fatigue again, and it does not feel good. So I want you to look around at your life for the holidays, I want you to really ask yourself, What things do you need to potentially delegate? What things do you need to maybe delete?

I had a client who I still think this this story is just so ironic, but she is a I love her. You’re probably listening, you know who you are. She’s a perfectionist. And by what she does for a living, you know, things need to look nice, it’s it’s her job requires that things look great. She she’s an interior designer. So things do need to look a certain way. It’s part of her brand. However, she has spent her whole life trying to make everything so perfect for everybody and do all the right things and tick all the boxes as mom. And she’s realizing now that slowing down is so important for maintaining her health, not just maintaining but staying healthy. And that she’s been using all of this stuff, all the extra things she does, thinking it was coming from a place of love, and she does love her family. But it was more often than not coming from a place of trying to avoid the things that she couldn’t be within herself. So this year, she decided after we had a conversation, that there was going to be one less Christmas tree going up in her house. Yes, you heard that right, one less Christmas tree. So I don’t remember if she said they normally put up three or five. But it was multiple Christmas trees. And they weren’t going to scale it back this year. And it was a conversation that she had to have with her family and her daughter. Because there’s this expectation that mom is going to do all these things. This is what we do every year. And when we set new boundaries, and we start saying no, we have to be able to talk to our family or friends and just say like, look, this is not something I’m going to be doing anymore. This is what’s more important to me. It doesn’t mean that I don’t love you doesn’t mean that I don’t care. It doesn’t. It didn’t mean that she doesn’t love Christmas. This was the year that she has decided to put what she needs first and how she wants to feel through this Christmas season and I’m super proud of her and you know what? Her daughter will be totally fine that she is getting one less tree and also sent to her that this is a really great opportunity to say, you know, if you’re running into something like this in your house as well to say to the other person, look, if this is really important to you, like I 100% support you in this, you could, you know, you can put up the tree if you want the tree up, right? If people really want something, you’ve taught them that you’re going to take care of it for them.

And setting boundaries and letting go of things is about handing that responsibility back to other people and saying, like, look, I love you. And this is no longer my responsibility. So if it’s really important to you, I’m going to let you run with it. And that’s that, and then you you let it go. So remember, like I said, we teach people how to treat us. And often times people will start stomping their feet when we start changing, because now it impacts their lives. But at the end of the day, they have to be responsible for the things that they want need, just like you have to be responsible for the things you want need.

So if you want to break this pattern of Go, go go, if you want to break this pattern of chasing your worthiness in all of your accomplishments, and all the things that you’re doing, it starts by slowing down and recognizing that you matter. Even when you’re not doing anything, that you don’t need to work your way to worthiness, that you don’t need to put up multiple Christmas trees to show your family that you love them. And that that you know you You’re important in the world, just by being you just by being on this planet.

And I think what I’m going to end, this episode is reminding you that when you are constantly rushing and then collapsing and doing all the things and then collapsing, you’re actually being abusive, you’re being abusive towards yourself. And there is not a single client that I’ve worked with where we haven’t had to do some work around self worth. And that feeling of enough. If you are constantly abusing yourself like this, you are adding fuel to the fire of that belief that you are not good enough. So if you wouldn’t want to see this behavior in one of your kids, right, so your daughter’s grown, she’s rushing around all the time and constantly burnt out. If you would look at her and think that’s not okay, she’s gonna get sick, or you know, she’s not taking care of herself because this is what she’s doing. If you wouldn’t tolerate it in one of your children, or you would see it as a red flag and someone else. Why are you allowing it in your own life.

So, this holiday season, really practice what it means to slow down to let go of things to do less better. You’ve heard me say that before. And to enjoy your Christmas season and allow yourself to rest without having to collapse into it. Just make rest a priority. So where can you create more space in the weeks to come just for you to relax into the season. And enjoy because that’s what life is about.

Alright, so until the next episode, remember if you’ve been waiting to work with me now is the time these one to one slots are not going to last very long. So head over to Lisacarpenter.ca/coachme grab your individual coaching session, and we will go from there. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you on the next episode.