Transcript Season 2, Episode 1: Is it Time to Quit and Start Over?
Transcript: Please excuse any typos. This was transcribed by an automated service.
Welcome to Allowed Season 2
I’m so excited that you’re here today to join us for the very first episode of season two. I am your coach, Caneel Joyce. If this is your first time listening, let me just tell you a little bit about who I am, what this show is and what it can do for you.
I am an executive coach. This podcast is all about the work that I do in my high end CEO coaching. It’s all about conscious leadership, conscious living and truly becoming the whole person that you are inside.
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Whether in your home, your business, your creative pursuits, or your philanthropic endeavors. I believe that this podcast can be the first step to a massive up shift in your personal growth and your self improvement. And how do I know this? I know because you told me. I get text messages, phone calls, letters, emails, social media posts, all from people who report back that even one single episode has meaningfully and permanently changed their lives. So I want to not take any credit for that. If that is you and you wrote to me saying that, that is all you. So first off, applaud yourself for showing up. Only the willing can be coached. So if you are willing to be here, that means you are the one willing to change. That means you are the one bringing your will into this, and you are the one allowing the change, growth and discoveries to happen.
The big goal here is your full aliveness. That is the goal. How do we get there? By allowing ourselves to be whole? I speak a lot on this podcast about how to be a leader. How do you be a leader? Why does that even matter to you? It’s important to understand that whenever I use that word leadership, I’m always talking about you as a whole person, as the leader of your life in every area of your life. Really, we think of them as separate areas, but they are one. They are whole. You as a partner, you as a friend, as a son or daughter, you as a romantic lover, you as a CEO, you as a manager, it matters not. All of it is one person that’s you. It’s important to know that everything I cover here is the same as what I cover with my high performing executive clients.
Coaching and Whole-Life Leadership Development
But they report back to me, wow, this is not just executive coaching. This is whole person coaching that impacts me as a whole person. And in fact, leadership is so much more about inner work than I ever thought. It is so much less about tactics. It’s so much less about ticking off items off a list. It is so much more about the willingness to be open and to allow what is there to exist. So let’s talk about having a growth mindset, mastering your mindset, mastering that willingness to grow and learn and seeing everything as here for you and your own learning.
That mindset is the key to mastering your leadership skills, leadership in all areas of your life as the CEO of your own life. There is only one person in that position and it will never be hired for by anyone else. No one else can take that job.That is you. That’s your job. And whether you knew you had it or not, I want you to look at yourself now in the mirror and say, “I am the chooser. I am the only chooser I am the only creator.” Whatever your circumstances are, the only path forward is choice. So I’m going to be here with you as we go through this season together, and you learn more deeply about the choices that you actually want to make. Not the choices you should make, not the choices you need to make, not the choices you have to make, the choices you want to make given the circumstances. And the results will be your full aliveness. How sexy is that?
So I’m so excited that you’re getting into this new season of the podcast here with us, especially because right now you’re getting a chance to really implement everything that we learned together back in season one. If you haven’t yet listened to season one, season one was introducing a lot of fundamental concepts of conscious leadership, of accountability, of personal growth.We got into what does it even mean to do your inner work, when are you coachable, when are you not, embracing all parts of yourself. You can go back and listen to those episodes. They’re all cataloged for you at allowedpodcast.com.
This season is where rubber hits the road. We are going to take each and every one of those concepts and we are going to apply them in your life. I will walk you through guided exercises right here, inside of the podcast. And for those who want to go deeper, you will be invited to join Allowed Insiders, which is a completely free extra level of content for those who are ready to do the work. And I make it super easy for you. And you’re going to get a free coaching session from me, that is short, simple, and sweet and helps you apply each of those concepts from season one into your life here in season two. So we’re going to start getting real.
Personal Growth is Self Care
Coaching is not about sitting around and just feeling good or being calm, far from it. It’s about actually getting into the real world and making what you want to exist, exist in a way that feels good, not should. Good, not should. Starting today it is your chance to take on that powerful, awesome, sexy responsibility of leadership. That by the way, you already have. But to take it on consciously. This is your chance to be the leader of your work. This is the chance to be the leader of your business. This is the chance to be the leader of your family. This is your chance to be the leader of your household, your home, your belongings. To be the leader of your whole person. It all starts with you. You are the CEO of your own life right now today. So let’s talk about this relationship with yourself and why I’m so big on the self care piece. Make no mistake, I’m not asking you to get into a bubble bath.
I’m recommending a level of self care that is exquisite and personalized, and it’s not at all fluffy or woo woo unless that’s your thing. There’s no wrong way to do it, but the reason that’s going to be so important is because as we open ourselves up to a new level of what is possible, a new level of joy and success and fulfillment, actually, there’s a lot of work happening under the hood that you’re not even in charge of at that point. There is growth and transformation happening on a cellular level inside your body. And that means that you are being rewired and you need more care. You need nurturing, you need water, you need space, time and rest. You also need movement. And you need joy, laughter, freedom, expression, art. You may need different things than you’ve needed before.
And self care means being attuned to in the moment what you need without following a prescriptive plan, but responding to those needs. This is a foundational piece of how to create integrity with yourself as a leader. So just ask yourself right now in this very moment, what do you need? What do you need? What would make it easy to be here now and fully present to everything that’s happening around you, in front of you and inside of you. Fully present. Full presence, both gives and consumes energy. Full presence means you’re in flow so you become open to and for energy moving through you and beyond you. And that is what real leadership is about.
So integrity means I am willing to find out what I need and I’m going to allow myself to need it. And I’m going to make choices and create the resolution to what I need. If you’re not willing to get integrity with yourself, and that is fine, then you might find that you’re also having trouble getting into integrity with others, or perhaps it seems that others are having a hard time getting into integrity with you. All of these are beautiful, wonderful signs to just pay attention to.
And if you want to do something about them, I invite you to do it. And you don’t need my invitation, you’re already allowed. So that’s integrity. And I want you to hold that with you as if this is starting to feel hard, this whole life thing, if the challenges in front of you are feeling too great, if you are not in the mood to do the deep inner work, allow yourself to have those feelings and continue to move forward because we want to follow surgeon’s rules here, and we want to move slowly so that we can move smoothly. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. In each episode here, you will take a concept that you learned in season one and you’ll implement the next steps to shift your mindset piece by piece in the way that is authentic, sustainable, and lasting for you. This season is going to be so fundamental for your leadership skills and in your entire life, you will feel the impact of you stepping into your power as a leader.
How to Get Started on Your Personal Development Journey
If you’ve ever wondered how to get started on a personal growth journey, or you are a complete personal development junkie, devotee, and you’re wondering how can you reach the next level of self or you have asked yourself, how can I sustainably and permanently change my life? I am so sick of the same cycles going again and again, hey, this season is your answer. It can be if you’re willing. So what I want you to do right now is I want you to open up your podcast player and find this podcast and hit the subscribe button if you have not yet subscribed and just challenge yourself that each week you’ll listen to one episode and keep that momentum up. Today’s episode is really personal to me in what’s going on in my life right now. And I can’t wait to tell you some of these crazy stories.
And it’s also, I think, really relevant for you almost without a shadow of a doubt in particular, because of what we’ve been going through globally in the last couple of years. Today’s topic is about that big question that is often so hard to answer. Is it time to start over? Is it okay now to just quit and throw this away? It is not working. It’s too broke to fix it. It’s time for me to start over. And I don’t mean just quitting your job or bailing out of your life. I’m talking about starting fresh with a blank slate in any area that matters to you. And perhaps even zooming back as we always talk about on my team, let’s zoom this back even more.
How Can a Mindset Shift Change Your Life?
What are all of the interconnected pieces where you want to start over? And usually what you’ll find at the core of that is there’s a mindset that you want to start over. If I could choose my mindset, as it relates to all of these areas where I’m not really experiencing my peak self, my peak aliveness, what’s the one mindset shift would change how I’m being in all those areas. It actually would be the simplest fix as to overhaul across the board. So getting up and out of the weeds and zooming back actually does conserve a lot of energy. And then it gives you a lot of energy to move forward and make those changes. However, easier said than done. And at this stage before you’ve decided to make that overhaul, there’s often a lot of fear surrounding starting over. This is completely rational and understandable. Humans are animals and all animals seek security, safety, and stability. We seek to normalize. We seek to keep things the same, but unfortunately, sometimes the same doesn’t feel the same anymore and our needs evolve and there’s growth.
And if you embrace it with a growth mindset, I think you’ll find that this is actually the fun in life are these changes. So if you’re feeling some of this fear, this very rational animal fear surrounding starting over, then hopefully this episode will help you to overcome that fear and to see that the benefits of starting over in the areas of your life in business are greater than the discomfort of staying stuck.
Building on a Faulty Foundation
If you’ve ever attempted to build something on a faulty foundation, anything from a house to a business plan built on a faulty business model or trying to make it work in a team when you just don’t have the right players on board, or you’ve got a chair. I had this one stool once and it literally had three legs and one of the legs, it would just never stay attached. It was an antique. I kept adding glue. It kept falling off. It was a faulty foundation. Doesn’t matter how much I didn’t care about the vase I put on top of that stool, the thing kept falling over. It was time to let that thing go. It took me a long time. So I totally understand the resistance.
But when we’re trying to build on this faulty foundation in your administration, your culture, your company, your body, your communication channels, your habits, your routines, your systems, your apps, think about all the different areas where there might be a faulty foundation in your life. Then you know that it’s a struggle to keep going. One thing I’m really huge on is removing friction. I don’t like friction. I want my life to be easy. I want it to be like, I get to zip through and slide through at exactly the pace I want to go. And sometimes that’s really, really slowly. And I want to remove the friction that’s going to try to keep forcing me to go faster than I’m ready. And I also want to remove friction that slows me down when I want to go quickly.
I want me to be the chooser and I don’t want to have a bunch of obstacles in my way. And I don’t want that for you either. I think we often think, well, it’s just hard, that’s the way it is, that’s the job. I’m here to champion it doesn’t need to be that way and we can let this be easy. So let’s remove the issues in the foundation by actually rebuilding the foundation so that when we build on top of it, we are not replicating friction systems. We are not recreating the same issues that keep getting in the way. You probably have in mind already some area where you are ready to look at the foundation and rebuild.
And maybe, again, maybe it’s something that spans across multiple areas of your life. For me, I addressed this in multiple areas simultaneously this year with my house, with my company, with my podcast, with the way that I organize my belongings and the way that I think about money and belongings and time and space, with my priorities and with my body. And I’m guessing that you have at least one or two of those areas, if not others, that I didn’t name where you could address the foundation. Here’s how to check and say, is this an area that may need some work? So just to push you a little further, I want to challenge you.
Are you Burnt Out, Stressed, Anxious, Confused, or Overwhelmed?
Is there some area where you feel burnout, overwhelmed, you’re out of integrity in some way with your own agreements to yourself or others, maybe others are repeatedly out of integrity with you. Maybe you don’t have clear agreements or perhaps you’ve forgotten your agreements altogether. And the idealistic self who wanted the best for you when you were young, that one seems to be just taking a nap on the backseat and is not even participating anymore in your inner dialogue about this. Let’s wake up the idealists and bring them back to center stage. This season we get to play that way. We get to create. So find that area. And I want to assure you that when you do have a solid foundation, things will stop collapsing all around you. Things will stop being hard. When you have a solid foundation, you can actually make progress. And when you put down one brick, you can put another one on top of it and another on top of that. Brick by brick, it keeps building. When you do not have a solid foundation, you might find that life feels like a constant fire drill.
And if it’s not a series of fires, then it’s multiple fires. It’s a complex of fires. And at some point you say, well, now I need to prioritize the fires. Which ones should I fight first, then second, then third? And then the question becomes, which fires can I just ignore? And some of those fires that are slow burning right now, and your focus has completely gone to the big ones, those little ones, some of them are going to keep burning and they’re going to come back and you’re going to see them again next year and the year after. And they are only going to grow. So when we don’t have this solid foundation of integrity and we are not addressing things that are just… we’re just outgrowing them. It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong, right? But do we want a life of firefighting? Do we want to lead like that?
Have you ever tried to take creative direction from a person who’s literally putting out a fire? It’s pretty hard. So if we want to step out of firefighting mode and we want to get more creative in our lives and really create something exquisite, that is blissful and easeful and exciting and sexy and alive to be in, there are some times when the best way to deal with it is actually to slash and burn and to let it all of it go. So this is the tricky bit. Which situation are you in? Are we talking about one little fire, a big forest fire, or is it time to slash and burn and regrow and rebuild? And that’s the question that we’re going to answer here today. So there’s times when you can completely benefit from starting fresh with a clean slate, it’s going to take some energy when you get there.
So while you are moving in that direction, I want to be thinking about how can I actually conserve energy right now? How can I not overextend myself? And how can I take exquisite care of myself so that I have a lot of energy when I get to that creative phase. Sometimes exhaustion is one of the best things that can happen because you actually can just let stuff go and let it burn and begin again. And then you have the energy to begin again. So I want you to really allow yourself to notice how you are feeling without shooting on yourself, about how you should feel.
You are allowed to stop. You’re allowed to stop trying to fix it. You are allowed to stop. You are allowed to change everything and you are allowed to start over.
Now, before we get even deeper on this topic of starting over, I want to quickly remind you to please go and hit the subscribe button in your podcast player so that you don’t miss out on this season’s episodes. I also want to mention that I have a brand new offering that I mentioned briefly at the beginning of the episode. This allows you to go even deeper into the topics after each episode. Every episode I’ll be giving out exclusive bonus content such as meditations, guided journaling, workshop, exercises. Sometimes I’m going to guide you through making a rapid fire list or brainstorming something. And these are short and sweet programs that you can quickly download if you’re in our Allowed insider program and it’s free. So go to allowedpodcast.com to sign up, and then you’ll have instant access to the exclusive free bonus material for each and every episode. And it’s released at the same exact time. So don’t miss out on anything. You are also going to get behind the scenes access and early access to events. I’m laughing about the behind the scenes, because you will see all the bloopers and it is… sometimes it gets a little messier around here and it’s fun.
I mean, this is a really fun enterprise to be in. So I’m excited for you to be in it with me and seeing the behind the scenes. I also have events. So especially once we are really back from COVID, I do host a few live events a year. I would love for you to join us if you happen to be in whatever city that I’m hosting those in. And I have live online events. And a lot of these events I do for free. Or I might say, “Hey, if you’re in town pitch in for dinner, it’s $10. Let’s all get together with a community of like-minded peers.” Sometimes it might be more. But you’ll have chances to win free mini coaching sessions with me and also with my colleagues throughout the entire year. You’ll get access to Allowed merchandise and even more. You can sign up for that right now at allowedpodcast.com to be an Allowed insider. This is a new program this year. I’m really, really excited about it. And I want to thank my team for giving me the nudge to do it. Because sometimes I’m shy about stuff like that.
Should you start over? What are the benefits of starting over? Is it time to quit and try something new?
Now let’s get back to starting over. Should you start over? What are the benefits of starting over and why would you even want to do it? What’s holding you back? These are all questions that I want you to think about and let’s address each of them. So should you start over? Is it too broke to fix? Are you sick of fixing it? Is it creating friction? Are you burnt out, exhausted, overwhelmed, feeling apathetic, kind of lacking energy and life? You feel like you don’t really care anymore. Pretty good sign. There’s something that can be torn down through away, and you can start over. What are the benefits of starting over?
Nothing less than your full aliveness, nothing less than your wholeness, your full power, your creativity. Life energy is exquisite. Now, what’s holding you back? A lot of times it’s fear. Having a completely blank slate in front of you can be intimidating. When I did my PhD at the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, actually, I spent six years researching the blank slate. That was my dissertation research topic and the relationship between that blank slate and our creativity. So the blank page, the blank canvas, the empty score, can be terrifying and actually is not conducive to our creativity until we create our own constraints to help give it some structure. So don’t worry, I’m not going to leave you hanging here. We’re going to find a way to have a blank slate. And then where do we get that structure from so that we are constrained, not by friction, not by things we don’t want and obstacles and stuff that we just have to deal with it because it’s there, but instead we’re constrained by our desires, our vision, our creativity, our authentic self, the things we actually care about.
And then that will give us the structure so that we can build something awesome and move forward so that you can build something awesome. Sometimes we think, and you might think this, that it’s better to keep building off of what you already have. But really the problem is that what you have is actually built on a cracked and faulty foundation that never really was set up to handle the growth and change in evolution that you’re experiencing or the new circumstances that were surprises in your life or just handling the pivots that you made at some point. The foundation isn’t bad or wrong, but it isn’t working anymore. I know all of us have had to pivot a lot over the last few years. I certainly have. And with everything going on in the world, it’s one of the first times, probably in history, that that’s a really shared experience. So here you are right now with a real chance to start fresh and to create systems and new foundations that actually support you where you are at this very moment.
Using the Challenge of a Blank Slate as an Opportunity to Reorganize and Streamline Your Life
This is exactly where I found myself at the beginning of the year. Let me tell you a story. So right before Christmas of 2020, in my house, my beloved house, my beloved old 100 year old house, we began having a series of homeowner catastrophes. We had multiple floods, unrelated, back to back. We had skunk oil dragged through the house by my dog at four in the morning. We had rats come into the house when we were gone for one night only. We had sewage come up. I mean, it was gross you guys. I was like, I don’t want to know what happens next. Back to back issues. And we had already been sort of debating, do we want to stay or do we want to go? We’re really kind of bursting at the seams here, especially in COVID. COVID does not seem to be going away anytime soon. We are working from home, we’ve got two kids at home. We’ve got a really energetic new little puppy tearing everything up and this house is just… it’s not working for us anymore.
And we loved that house and we put so much effort into it, so much love. But at that point, the effort was already put in and those are what… an economist would say those are sunk costs. So it’s really easy to say just because I put in a lot of love and effort means I should stay, means I should just keep putting in more and more and more. And we really felt like the writing was on the wall. By the time we had the last flood, the rain flood that followed the sewage flood while the brand new hardwood floors had just been installed, we really laughed and looked up and said, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the clarity.” Because we loved that neighborhood and that house so much. And we were so just in limbo about it for years. What should we do? And finally it was just this clear series of signs, it is time to say goodbye and to get out.
Honestly guys, the last night we spent in that house, we didn’t even know it was the last night. We basically escaped so that they could put down the new hardwood floors again and air out the walls and get it all renovated and fixed up so that we could sell it. And we were out of there. We ended up living… We’ve lived in four houses this year. So we started in that house and then we rented two for a short amount of time each. And then this past weekend, a couple days ago, we moved into a house that we actually bought. It happens to be right near my parents. I am so excited. And I feel like this is the first time since December 12th, 2020, that I’ve been in a house that has peace because it’s not temporary, I’m not packing and unpacking. I am… It is quiet and I feel like a different person.
And each time we did this move, though, I took advantage of the challenge, of the opportunity to, one, challenge any stories that I had or that people wanted to tell me about how hard it was, how hard it was to move and to instead embrace it with a growth mindset of this is for me, this happened for me. This happened for us. What in your life right now as everyone saying it so hard but if you just say, I know because I trust that everything that happens, happens for me, as hard as it is, how is this for you? How is this “bad thing” happening? How is it for you? And that’s the mindset that we looked at it with. I’m really proud of my family as we went through this. And yes, was it effortful? Absolutely. Oh my gosh. I mean, I noticed it took us about a month to unpack into each place, but I really wanted to fully unpack because I wanted to deal with all of the stuff that we were lugging around with us.
All of the stuff that was in kind of random categories since our last house was kind of too small and things had to be stored in so many different unrelated locations. So I wanted to really pair down, organize, purge. And so I embraced each of those packings and unpackings as an opportunity to get life in order as chaotic as it kind of felt, but mostly seemed on the outside. And the other thing I noticed is that as we were going through all of these moves, the podcast that you’re listening to right now that we had recorded religiously an episode a week, at least, for 68 episodes, that became not fun anymore. I noticed I wasn’t looking forward to recording, which I used to… I mean, these are my favorite days. I love making this podcast. I love it. And the fact that I’d be showing up to that and like, I don’t want to do it.
That probably started a little bit in COVID because it was so challenging to figure out where I could find any peace and quiet with all the kids home and all that, but I still wanted to do it. It was with the moves. And so I listened to that. I said, I need to just face some reality here. This is feeling impossible. Every time I sit down to record somebody walks in the door because something is breaking, it’s a mover or my kids can’t find something because their stuff is still in boxes. And we are trying to get the studio set up in new a new house every couple months. And I’m trying to figure out where the right… one of these hundreds of random cables and cords that we use for this setup, which you can see it, Allowed Insider, you can see this crazy setup, there’s a lot involved. And it was just… it became so hard. And it was hard, not just for me, but it was hard for my team. It was hard for them to show up.
They’re on time, I’m late. I’m running in, I’m sweaty. I have not taken a shower in days upon days. I don’t want to do it. I’m trying to put on my game face. I’m super disorganized. I’m dehydrated. Just not really in fighting shape for making a podcast. But I was so stubborn about letting it go because I wanted to keep up that record of consistency. And then I realized, we’re out of episodes. We have nothing left to put out and I cannot see how it is physically possible to record another one. So we stopped. We stopped. Didn’t even tell you. I wanted to be telling you all this stuff then because I didn’t want to leave you hanging. But I embraced that pause. I said, clearly I need this pause. I’m going to focus. Everything is trying to bring my attention inward and into the family and into the home.
And I’m going to listen to that. And I’m going to listen to what my energy does when I work on the podcast. I mean, it was getting herky jerky and falling was a good sign that that was just not what I had a whole body yes to doing at that time. But also, interestingly, personal stuff was happening for everyone on my team simultaneously. I mean, Heather had another baby. She had baby number five. We were all dealing with moves and health and family things and so many things that kept coming up, it became abundantly clear this podcast is not wanting to happen right now. And so we made that pause even longer. It was no longer a reactive pause, it was an intentional pause. Let’s actually really stop. And while we’re doing this, how is this for us? It’s for us because there’s all these things we wanted to change anyway. Actually, do I even want to be the kind of person who makes a podcast each and every week? Actually, no.
Part of the reason I was so stubborn about that is because I’ve never done anything every week of my life for that many weeks in a row. It was the first time. I’m not that kind of person. I like, I’m wavy, flowy. I like to go up and down. I like to sprint and then totally chill. So I think I’m just coming to terms with, I’m not an every week person, I’m a podcast seasons person. And so we changed that too. And we revamped how we are shooting this. We revamped our studio space, our equipment. We said, we want this to get out to more people. We’re going to invest in making our social media really valuable and interesting. And we are going to invest in our community and we’re going to invest in our rest and ourself and we’re going to trust, this is the big thing, we’re going to trust that this is all for us, and it’s all for our listeners, and it’s all for our clients, and this is in service.
What is happening now is in service. And that trust is what enabled us to find the pace that is the pace that this wanted to happen at. So we moved slowly for a while, but we didn’t stop. We didn’t stop caring about it and thinking about it. But when we needed to stop working on it, we stopped. And then when we’re rebuilding, now, we have built a foundation behind the scenes over this past summer that is going to make this season so awesome. And it feels so good. It feels so supported. I feel so supported by the team. I think we all are supporting each other better than we ever, ever have. We even integrated a new teammate and we’ve built systems and processes. I mean, it’s like, yes. We’re all like, this is how we wanted it to be. And it feels so good.
So we redid that. But of course, when you redo something like that, that’s as big in our business as this is, it also meant looking at how are we creating how it was before. And do we need to shift that too? And what we found is, yes. How are we being is reactive. We’re not being highly accountable. We’re not being transparent. We’re not making decisions and taking the time it takes to make the decisions. We are in go mode all the time. So we’re going to make some decisions. We’re going to really sit with them. If it doesn’t feel good, we’re going to talk about it. We’re going to get stuff in place. And we’re going to make this exactly as we want it to be. And including, we’re going to prioritize as we want to be. So there’s a lot of stuff that before I might get really nitpicky about that, I am working day by day in not getting nitpicky about it. Trying to not make everyone crazy, just because I’m crazy sometimes.
How to Get Organized by Creating Clear Agreements
And just, what’s really important? What really matters? What can we just not even check off the list, but just delete from the list? We did that this morning. So we changed a lot of things about how we’re operating. We got really clear agreements in place. We got really clear descriptions of everybody’s role, who does what, who’s accountable for which piece and who’s responsible. Who’s the decision maker, who’s responsible for the results, who’s responsible for getting it done, different things. Who’s weighing in on stuff, who doesn’t need to weigh in on stuff. When do we need to stop everything and talk about stuff? How do we want to communicate? Which channels do we use? What time do we use them? It sounds complicated but what it creates is the lack of friction and flow in which all of us get to be alive and fully creative and bring our best selves. So I just through three big areas; home, podcast and our business and our team.
And then the last of course is the most important one, which is the foundation of all of it, which is my family. And that’s one that I’m in no interest of restarting but I revise and I think about with a great intention, how are we working together. And each time I’ve shifted something about the business or the house. That’s the first lens that I use to look at it is how is this in service of my family and what does my family need and how can I help them have what they need. Knowing that we’re a system, I’m part of that system. Sometimes what I need isn’t what they want. But I think there’s… usually there’s a way to make it work across the board for everyone when you have that mindset of how is this for me.
So that’s the chapter that I’m excited to even have more attention for right now that a lot of the kind of logistical chaos is done from all these moves and we are setting up systems, a new mud room, things are so organized and it’s making everyone feel so peaceful. And my husband is kicking in his surfing and it’s just so great. I’m thrilled. So that’s what’s been going on with me, a lot of restarts, a lot. And I am no holds barred on what needs to get torn down and rebuilt, no holds barred. So where were you in the beginning of the year? Where were you? What was going on in your life? Was there any point where you felt like you were breaking down mentally, physically, burnt out, maybe really overwhelmed at work, frustrated with things at home? How are you feeling then and are any of those patterns still around? Is any of that residual friction remaining?
Do You Have Broken Commitments?
Can you find perhaps a broken system in there or a lack of clear agreements? Maybe some commitments that are out of integrity with your deepest, most authentic self, the things you actually care about? My coach, Diana Chapman, says, “How do we know what we are committed to? We look at your results and that’s how we know what you’re committed to.” It’s not what we talk about. It’s not what we say. It’s what actually happens. Because if you’re committed to something, that means you leverage all of your resources to make it happen. All of them. So are there some broken commitments, broken systems and broken agreements that you can identify? Even just, hey, we never really made that agreement explicit. And that’s why that foundation feels really faulty. If you find something like that, I want you to zoom back and say, is that the only one? Is it just a little crack, a hairline crack in the foundation or is the foundation just straight up not stable anymore and it’s time to tear it out and rebuild?
If you think maybe it is time, but I’m not sure, how do I know for sure it’s time to rebuild? My guess would be that that’s your answer is that it is time. The human tendency is going to always be keep it the same. Don’t rebuild it. And the longer we wait to rebuild, the harder it is. Have you ever been to a construction site where there hasn’t been a good system for removing all the rubble as you go and people are trying to build and they’re working around an old fallen down wall? Or even go into your garage, if you have a garage, go into your purse or your backpack, if you haven’t removed all the clutter that really doesn’t need to be there and you’re like, well, I guess we have to have a longer power cord because we can’t stretch it around this whole entire pile of old furniture and Christmas things that I wish I didn’t own and so now we need to buy a 20 foot power cord, you don’t.
You don’t. But there is some effort involved, right? In getting that stuff clear. And it’s like, clearing as you go will help the foundation to not break. And if it’s broken, it’s a lot easier to fix it early than it is to fix it late. So if you’re on the fence, you’re, I’m not sure I really need to like quit this thing or totally restart or rebuild this system or this relationship or restart my career, but you’re like, but it really might be, but I’m really not sure, just know that that’s fear and just give yourself a little hug or cross your hands over your heart and just say, it makes sense that I’m scared. Of course, I’m scared. What’s left after I remove this? Nothing.
Fear and the Blank Slate Complex
What’s that movie, that ’80s movie, that never ending story, right? The Nothing. Is that the right movie? I think so. So the never ending story, the scariest thing that could ever sweep through is nothing. And we’re all so scared of the “nothing”. We don’t like that blank slate. We don’t like not knowing what’s going to be ahead. Fear physiologically is very closely related to excitement, right? Fear often has a story as a perceived threat.
I want you to say, if I just trust that everything is for me, then that fear actually becomes heightened awareness and energy and it becomes excitement. I can remove the sense of threat and I can trust that fear just means there’s something new that’s going to happen and I don’t know what it is. That’s the wisdom of fear. The wisdom of fear is, I don’t know yet. I’m going to learn something here. There’s something new to be created here. So it’s okay that you’re feeling that fear. Of course, it makes sense. But if you could just sit with, “I trust that vacuum, and that that emptiness is for me.”
And here’s the next thing I want you to trust yourself on and I want you to also trust that the world around you, the universe, source, God, whatever you believe, is going to provide you also with ample creative energy, resources and vision to fill that void. What’s a vacuum? Vacuum is an empty space, an empty space. What does a vacuum inherently do? It sucks things in. So if you hate your couch, have no couch. Get rid of it. A new couch will arrive. It works. It’s how you leverage a vacuum and we’re going to do that in your whole entire life.
All right. So that should give you a lot to think about. We’re going to stop here for those listening only to the podcast. But if you are an Allowed Insider, then you can go deeper right now with your exclusive bonus content for this. So go to allowedpodcast.com to become an Allowed Insider if you are not one yet and get my free list making exercise. This is an exercise that helps you make a bug list of all of the areas in your life that are bugging you all the little things here and there are, the broken dishes, everything in your life where you might want to make a change someday, and then I’ll help you zoom back to find the elegant solution. These are actual exercises in Allowed Insider that you would do with me if you were in a personal coaching session with me. This list making exercise is just one example and there’s much more to come.
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Additional Conscious Leadership Resources
We also are going to be linking, from the show notes, to additional resources and materials that can support you in diving deeper into this. I’ll also be linking back to episodes from season one that are directly relevant to what we talked about here today on the episode about starting over.
So some of these episodes include episode 59, Creating Clear Agreements, 58, What is Integrity? 39 is about Whole Body Yes and what I mean when I say that and how you can know if you have a whole body yes or not, which is the most simple way of cleaning up your life. How to get back into integrity by revising your agreements. I’ll link back to episode 38, The Change Formula. Episode 9, Restorative Zone of Genius. You get the picture.
Also, while we’re on the topic of starting over and with me in the midst of finishing up this last move. One of my favorite little heroes is the wonderful Marie Kondo. I will link to her book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. It is not a book just about decluttering your closet, my friends, it is a life changing book that I think you will find inspiring and energizing and actually kind of soothing at this point when you’re thinking about making big changes and rebuilding the foundation of your life.
Yay. All right. Episode one of season two is now complete. I’m going to say goodbye from here and I hope to hear from you on social. Please reach out, leave a review and I will see you next week. And don’t forget to become an Allowed Insider at allowedpodcast.com have a great week.
