79. Exquisite Self-Care

A few weeks ago, I traveled to Seattle, and right after getting back, I immediately got a terrible cold.

I was super bummed about being sick, and I was upset to be taking more time off right after a vacation.

I hadn’t coached my clients in a week and right when I was supposed to be coming back, I had to cancel all my calls and lay in bed for several days straight.

It reminded me of my days in corporate, when I was often nervous to take days off, even when I really needed them.

(And this was internal pressure - my boss was very supportive any time I needed days off or other kinds of flexibility.)

Even with all the coaching I’ve had, my brain still struggles sometimes when it comes to needing to take time off to care for myself.

And I know I’m not the only one who grapples with this.

Many people feel guilty and struggle when they need to take time off.

Many people feel tempted to short change their own needs in order to get back to work faster.

But what if the thing we need the most is the ability to put our own needs first?

What if what we need most is to learn how to take exquisite care of ourselves, even when that means taking time off?

Tune in this week to discover what exquisite self-care means. I’m thinking about this in terms of sickness, however, this advice applies whenever you feel like you need to take a moment for yourself.

I’ll share how to overcome the discomfort of prioritizing yourself, and how it serves you and everyone around you when you can give yourself the self-care you deserve.

And for even more ideas about how to cultivate a practice of exquisite self care, check out episode 143 of Unf*ck Your Brain, by Kara Loewentheil. Kara is one of my coaches and the source from which I learned this concept.

If you want to supercharge your capacity to create a life that blows your mind, I have some one-on-one coaching slots opening up soon. Send me an email and let's talk about it or click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together! 

If there are topics y’all want me to talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you! 

I have a super fun announcement. This July, I’m launching my group coaching program Satisfied AF. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever designed in my life, so if you want to come together and be part of a community, build relationships, and figure things out so your life can feel satisfying as f*ck, click here to sign up for a consult.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:

  • Our brain’s go-to patterns when it comes to getting sick and prioritizing our recovery.

  • Why prioritizing self-care when you’re sick is an act of empowerment and sets an amazing example.

  • How to shift your thoughts around being sick and taking exquisite care of yourself.

  • Why exquisite self-care doesn’t necessarily conflict with productivity.

  • What you can do to make decisions that support you and prize your wellbeing above your productivity.

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:

FEATURED ON THE SHOW:

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

This week we are talking about exquisite self-care.

You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.

Hello, hello, hello. Happy Wednesday. I'm so excited to be talking to y'all, although, truth be told my voice is still a little sore from last week when I was sick. So it may be a short podcast. And yes, for those of you who don't know, I feel like most of you probably know because you're probably on socials with me. But I went to Seattle two weeks ago and then I came back and immediately got super fucking sick.

I took two Covid tests and they both came back negative, so I'm happy about that. And I did recover pretty quickly. But I was down for the count, my friends. And it brought up a lot of feelings for me. And that's kind of like tying into what I want to talk about this week. So when I say I want to talk about self-care with y'all, I'm specifically thinking about self-care in relation to having just gotten sick.

When I got sick right after being on vacation, that was a struggle for me mentally. And it reminded me of how much I used to struggle when I worked in corporate with needing to be out because I was sick or for other reasons, sometimes even taking vacation. I know a lot of people struggle with this.

And I see this happen like with my friends and clients all the time where they feel guilty. They feel guilty taking time off when they don't feel well. They feel guilty taking vacation sometimes. They feel guilty ending their workday if there is still work that they could do. And even with all the coaching I've had from other amazing coaches, and even with all the self-coaching I've done, I struggled with this last week too.

Like I said, I had just been on vacation so all my clients, most of them already hadn't talked to me for a week and I was out of the Slack even when I was on vacation. Slack is a chat platform I use to stay in touch with my clients and give them coaching in between our coaching calls. And then I came back, and I was like ready to coach everybody, and I had missed them.

And I did one day of calls, and I was a little sniffly and I thought like, oh, it's my allergies. Because I had been gone and I had come back, and I think I had forgotten to take allergy medication when I returned. And then by the end of that Monday I was like, “Oh shit, this is not just allergies coming back. I am coming down with something.”

And I was so pissed. I hate being sick, I mean, like who likes it, first of all? It's not super fun. But I also kind of have like a high sense of internal responsibility, which I bet a lot of y'all do too. So I felt responsible for coming back to be available to my clients who had already gone a week without coaching.

And I felt like I should be able to do that, right? And when I say I felt like I should be able to do that, I felt responsible, like these are thoughts, right? These are not actual feelings. They’re thoughts I was having about who I am and what I should be capable of. But guess what? I'm a human in a human body, and my human body was like, “You're going to lay your ass down, my friend.”

And usually when I get sick I'm one of those people who sits on the couch and feels sorry for myself and watches a lot of TV. But when I tell you I was sick, I was in bed for like probably in bed 20 to 22 hours a day, sleeping for like 15 to 18 of those hours when I first got sick. And then by the end of the week it was more like only sleeping for like 12 hours. And I'm like Friday, I finally was like feeling mostly better, so I did a little work. But even then I had to take a lot of rest, I couldn't take all my calls.

And it was just a nice humbling reminder that we don't have complete voice and choice over what goes on in our lives. I'm all about being a person who uses the power I have to create more of what I want. And also some things are outside of my control. And I mean, arguably, with getting sick it's like a little bit in and out. I probably could have made some more health promoting decisions, maybe I wouldn't have gotten sick.

But I'm also not trying to be a perfectionist, especially because I have so much experience being a perfectionist and seeing the havoc that that can cause. When I was younger, just like a little side note, when I was younger, every time I would get sick I would get like so mad at myself and try to like analyze my behaviors to see like what had caused it versus accepting, yes, some behaviors are more health promoting and I'm a human in a human body and human bodies get sick sometimes.

Especially in the world we live in, well, I was going to say now, but at that point it was then where I was seeing tons of people all the time without masks on, right? Like going to the office and stuff. Although a lot of us are seeing people that masks on now. I still wear my mask a lot.

But anyways, the point is there is this part of me that thinks I should be able to totally control everything and have everything go according to my plan. And that shit is just not true, right? And listen, I get it, that can be frustrating. I feel frustrated when that happens in my life. And it's also another opportunity for me to think about like, how do I want to think about this on purpose? Who do I want to be in this situation?

And so one trick that I use a lot when I'm thinking about like, who do I want to be in this situation, because I have a human brain just like everyone else and my human brain really loves to have a lot of self-pity and like rage against the world and be like, “It's not fair, I shouldn't get sick.” And feel sorry for myself. That is definitely one of my brain’s go-to patterns.

And another one of my brains go-to patterns, like I was mentioning earlier, is to feel guilty and to feel like I should be able to be better. I should be able to do more. I should be able to go on vacation and then not get sick. Or I should be able to get sick and then still work because it shouldn't be so bad being sick. And these are ridiculous ideas, obviously. But my brain has them, and maybe your brain does too, okay?

But a question that I find to be really powerful is what kind of example do I want to give to my clients? And a question that you may ask yourself that's really powerful may be different than that. Maybe you don't have clients, but maybe there's someone in your life that you want to be an example to.

And something that I learned a long time ago, and I can't remember where I learned this. I feel like someone told me this or I read it somewhere. This is not a Kori Linn original idea, but the idea is that my clients, people who come and work with me as their coach, they're not just learning the things I teach them. They're not just learning what I say on the podcast. They're learning me. They're learning by example as well.

And so when I think about that, it kind of opens my brain up to a new realm of possibility. And this kind of relates to, I have another podcast called How To Be Your Own Mentor or something like that. And one of the things I talk about in there is like how to tap into your own inner knowing by using a powerful question or a powerful frame that helps you discover things that are actually your ideas, but your ideas when you view your life from a slightly different perspective.

So this is one way I do that. I ask myself, “What do I want to teach my clients directly? But what do I want to teach them indirectly by how I choose to handle this situation?” And in this way, everything that ever happens in my life gets imbued with like a little bit of magic because it's no longer just my life and me trying to coach myself and navigate the shit that's coming up.

It's now me seeing everything in my life as an opportunity for me to think deeply about who I want to be as a person and what I want to show my clients is available. And I know for a lot of my clients, they would probably feel guilty, they would probably think they should be able to go back to work sooner. They would probably hesitate to give themselves the full rest.

And not just my clients, I think a lot of people would do that because we live in a culture that puts such an obsession, that puts such an emphasis on productivity and on productivity being connected to worth. And y'all know how I feel about that, there's a whole podcast episode about that as well.

So I was thinking about that, and I was like, I would love, if it were my clients, to invite them into the idea that they could take exquisite care of themselves. And that that could be good for them in their healing body, if they were sick like me. But that it could also be good for fucking everyone else, right?

So I thought about that, and it really created this internal shift in me and the way I was thinking about being sick. Because, like I said, I was getting caught up in this wasn't the plan, and I feel guilty, and my people aren't being supported, and beating myself up probably a little, like I said, for some of the choices that I made, staying up late one night, stuff like that.

And instead I was like, “Oh yeah, what would it look like to just take exquisite care of myself emotionally, physically, while I have this cold? While I recover from having this cold what kind of decisions am I going to make about when to start taking calls again? What kind of decisions am I going to make about how I allow my body to be sick, how I support my body while it's sick?”

If I'm coming at it from the lens that not only am I allowed to do that, not only is it okay to do that, but it could be like deeply in line with my values. And it could be this exquisite self-care where I'm prizing my wellbeing above my productivity. Where I’m prizing my wellbeing above my ability to deliver what I said I would.

And listen, I have high integrity, you have high integrity, we’re high integrity people, we want to deliver what we said we would. But sometimes bodies get sick, sometimes circumstances change. And I think it's really important that we see that and realize that we can give ourselves the gift of flexibility and the gift of being allowed to change our mind, and the gift of being imperfect, because we are imperfect.

So you can resist that and, you know, shits going to come crumbling down around you eventually at some point. That's not a threat, I think that's just what life is. Or you can embrace it and plan for it, and decide that you can have an incredible life while being imperfect.

So for me, the question of how do I take exquisite care of myself, like how would I demonstrate exquisite self-care in this situation led me to cancel more calls than I might have otherwise done. And yeah, that meant more of my clients went longer without talking to me. But I think that doing that is probably allowing me to heal in a more effective way and heal faster.

So it's interesting because a minute ago I basically pitted taking care of myself against productivity. But the irony is I actually think when we take really good care of ourselves, we are more productive. But I think in order to get that, we have to first give ourselves permission to not be productive, right? This is like weird. This is like a paradox, okay?

So it's like giving ourselves permission to not be productive in order to exquisitely care for ourselves, actually leads to more productivity later. But I think of that productivity as like a beautiful side effect because it's not the thing we're driving and aiming directly at. Because when we drive and aim directly at productivity above all else, sometimes we get a little lost in there and we actually overwork and do things that in the long run don't lead to productivity.

So I don't know what's going on in your life. Like maybe you're catching a little cold, maybe something else is going on with you. Maybe you have like 16 work tasks assigned to you and you're trying to sort out how to do which. Maybe you're planning to log off of work at like 5pm every day, but you notice that you still have energy and there's still things you could do, and so you're struggling to take that time for yourself.

And also, obviously, as with everything, this could apply to other areas of your life besides work as well. But I think just a powerful question for y'all to ask yourself is, what would it look like to take exquisite care of myself? What would it look like to take exquisite care of myself in this situation? What would it look like to prize exquisite self-care over all these other things that our culture teaches us are so valuable?

And again, exquisite self-care isn't necessarily actually in conflict with all these other things, but it may seem like it is to you. So are you willing to prize it first and then let the other things come later? And you get to decide for yourself. As with everything, you are the authority. You have all the agency. You get to decide whatever you want to decide, it's your life.

But I think a really powerful question to have a life well lived and to have a lot of wellbeing, which I know matters deeply to me and maybe matters deeply to you, is to ask how to take exquisite self-care, is to ask how to take exquisite care of yourself in all the various situations where it is often so tempting not to.

All right, y'all. That's what I have for you today. If you want more of this, there are two ways to work with me currently. I am accepting clients one on one, my one on one offering has a wait list until July. So if you want to come work with me, come sign up for a consult and let's get that started because there will be a wait list before I can begin our time together.

And I also, in July, I have a group coaching program launching. It's going to be incredible. It's called Satisfied As Fuck and it's all about how to build a life and career that is satisfying as fuck for you, whatever that means.

All right, y'all have a lovely week. I'll talk to you next time. Bye.

Hey y’all, I just wanted to add in a little note to say that the concept of exquisite self-care and specifically calling it exquisite, is something that I learned from Kara Loewentheil. And if you like this concept, I would definitely encourage you to check out Unfuck Your Brain episode 143, where Kara explains in more detail her teachings on radical self-love and exquisite self-care.

When I recorded this podcast, I was still recovering from being sick and I knew I had learned this phrase from somewhere, but I couldn’t place exactly where it was or find it by Googling, and it wasn’t until today that I remembered it was from Kara, and I definitely want to give her credit because it’s her idea.

I think this happens a lot where we learn ideas from people and then forget where we learned them from, and we’re imperfect, and sometimes that’s going to happen. But when we remember, we can just add that information, and now you have it.

Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.

 

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