52. How to Handle the Sunday Scaries
Are you familiar with the term Sunday Scaries?
I first heard this term back when I worked in corporate IT. It’s that feeling most of us get on Sunday when you realize how much you’re dreading going back to work on Monday.
Now, I know all about mine and my clients’ experiences of the Sunday Scaries, but I wanted to get more opinions. So I posted on Instagram and asked for more people’s insights.
For a lot of people, the Sunday Scaries come down to two things. Like my own experience, it’s the end of their leisure time, the time where they can be themselves and do what they want to do for themselves. But the thing that comes up more commonly for most people is work anxiety.
People are thinking about whether they closed out last week well enough, whether they set themselves up for success, and what kind of dumpster fire they’re going to need to put out this week.
All of this is on top of their mean thoughts about themselves, their capacity, and feelings of imposter syndrome. If you’re worried about work on Monday, of course your brain doesn’t want to deal with that.
The good news is that you can change things. Even if you have the Sunday Scaries now and you’ve always had them, it doesn’t mean you always have to have them. Whatever the reason you are experiencing the Sunday Scaries, we can address it all by looking at how we’re thinking about work, leisure, and how we spend our time.
So, in this episode, I’m showing you how to see the authority and agency you have over your work situation and how to develop a habit around thinking differently, so you don’t have to feel terrible about going back to work after the weekend.
And of course, we’re not just focusing on the thoughts here - I’m sharing how you can change your actions as well, so Sunday isn’t as scary for you moving forward.
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 teach and talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Where the feeling of the Sunday Scaries comes from.
How to see the thoughts that are making you uncomfortable about going back to work on Monday.
What’s going on internally when you’re thinking about Sunday as “the death of leisure”.
Where you can find freedom, choice, authority, and empowerment in your work environment.
Why we don’t have to love our work to enjoy our life and avoid the Sunday Scaries.
How to change the story you’re telling yourself about going back to work and make thinking it a practice.
What you can do to reduce the Sunday Scaries.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we are talking about the Sunday Scaries.
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.
Hey, y'all. Happy Wednesday. I have a great topic to discuss with you all today. But before we jump into that, I wanted to tell you a little bit about what I've been using my coaching skills on in my own life.
So for the last three years building my business, I've used a lot of my coaching skills on me when it comes to the business. That was kind of the big focus of a lot of my self-coaching and a lot of the coaching that I was getting from other coaches. And the business is going really well. I've hit some really big milestones. I'm really proud of it.
In the last year I've switched how I work in my hours and stuff to kind of bring the business more in line with the kind of work schedule that I want to have. Which means I start my workday at 10am Pacific. And I don't take calls, usually after 4pm Pacific. And then I have like four to five, to kind of finish up anything, send emails, that kind of stuff.
Because so much of my work is client facing, it's one on one Zoom calls with clients, I need some time at the end of the day to wrap things up and check the emails, get things like that done. But recently, I have started a new self-coaching project. And I want to tell y’all about it, even though it has nothing to do with all the stuff we normally talk about because I think it's just going to do a few things.
One of which is show you that even though I'm a coach and I'm an expert in the things I teach you about, I'm also a student. I'm also always learning. I'm also always in the process of applying the same things I teach you, to myself in my own life. And that is a process, it's not a one and done. It's not like I'm a coach so I never have problems. That's not what's happening over here.
As one of my coaches, Kara Loewentheil says, learning about coaching tools allows you to solve the problems you have now and then go on to have more interesting problems. And so that's one thing.
And then the second thing is just to give you an example of a different kind of thing you could be doing with the same tools that we're using in our work life. So those are the reasons I wanted to share this with you.
And the thing that I'm using coaching for right now is developing friendships. And I just got done saying how this doesn't have anything to do with work. But actually I take that back because a lot of times in workplaces developing relationships and developing friendships, community, whatever kind of bonds you want to call it, you might not consider it a full friendship so much as like a business relationship. But I think it's sort of all the same.
Because any relationship we have is always kind of in its own category with its limits and the amount that we show up vulnerably as ourselves and the amount that we retain our privacy. That happens in friendships and work relationships and all kinds of relationships, family, everything.
So basically, I moved, as I'm sure you know if you've been listening to the podcast, from Seattle to Sacramento about four months ago. And I had one friend in Sacramento that I actually knew from a coaching program I did as a client three years ago. She's amazing, I love her to death. Nicole, if you're listening, it's you. Thank you for being my friend. And she's amazing, but I also wanted to have more than one friend.
So I have done some stuff to kind of get that going. And some of that is action line stuff, like what actions am I taking? What actions am I choosing not to take? And some of it is the thought work, the mindset piece around how am I choosing to think? And of course some of it's also emotionality, what feelings am I leaning into to help me with this project?
And just like a work project, I have defined parameters. Like I wanted to build three to five deep friendships in Sacramento. And then also have other friendships of varying layers of deepness, super close friends, but also people who I see less often but really cherish and enjoy as well.
But the big project for me was getting some close friends. And the thing about that is that shit is going to take time. Building relationships, I think of it as like a layered process. So we don't just go from like zero to 100% usually. Occasionally you do, but usually we don't.
And so what that looks like is planting a lot of friendships seeds and beginning to establish relationships with people. And then layer that in with all the other shit I'm doing in my life. And then continuing to water those seeds and give them sun and attention. So that's the metaphor, is the seeds.
What it really looks like is I signed up for improv classes, shout out to all my improv friends. And then met people in there that I really liked and then began inviting them to do stuff. Like inviting them to go see improv shows, asking if we wanted to exchange numbers, seeing if they wanted to grab a glass of wine, doing other stuff like that.
And then I met this other wonderful human at an improv show, because of all things I was talking about astrology, and she was also interested in astrology. And so even though I felt awkward and nervous, I was like, “Hey, do you want to get together and talk about astrology?”
And so I want to point out that I've been having to coach myself on this because it's not that I was just like, “Oh, I want friends. I'm going to take all these actions.” Yes, I want friends. Yes, I did take the actions. But what happened in between that was the part where I had to coach myself and get coaching from other coaches I know and love.
So the part where my brain is like, “Don't ask for their phone number. What if they say no?” Just like all humans, I too, am afraid of rejection. Just like y'all, I'm afraid of vulnerably putting myself out there and then either what if they say no? What if they just don't answer my Instagram message? What if they don't like me? I have all that shit too.
So I've been having to coach myself on that. And the way I've been doing that is bringing myself back to courage, bringing myself back to my vision. And also soothing myself about like, I might get rejected sometimes and that's okay. Is it my fucking favorite thing? Absolutely not. But is it okay? Yes. Can I tolerate it? Yes. Will it maybe sting a little? It probably will, and that's okay too because guess what? I can handle that and then keep going.
And when I hold the vision of what I'm creating really strongly in my mind, then I'm willing to go through the stinging, and the discomfort, and the painful bits, and to keep taking actions to create the thing I want. Even if I stumble, or even if I feel awkward, all of that. And it's been really fun.
And then the other thing I've been doing, which I of course, encourage y'all to do all the time, is celebrating the shit out of myself. Because I think once we do something that feels hard, it can be so easy to be like, “Oh, that wasn't that big of a deal. Anyone could invite someone to coffee. I didn't climb a mountain or anything.” But that kind of dismissiveness towards my own goal related activities, is not helping me.
Now sometimes I do think being purposely dismissive on the front end can be useful. Like when my brain is freaking out because it wants to ask somebody for their phone number. But it's also like, “Oh my gosh, what if they think I'm hitting on them? I'm not hitting on them. I have a partner.” Being dismissive, like gently, lovingly, playfully dismissive on that end, like, “Just say, words out of your face, Kori.” I think being a little dismissive on that side, if we do it with love and kindness to ourselves can be useful.
That's actually a coaching technique when people are very deep in the drama of the story that their brain is telling. To kind of bring it down with really simple language can help get them out from under that drama. So I've used that tactic on myself. But once we've done the thing that felt scary to us, that's not the time to be dismissive. That's the time to be celebrating. Because we want to celebrate and praise anything that we want to see more of.
So if we want to see more of ourselves being courageous and asking people to go to coffee with us and inviting people into friendship with us. If that is the behavior we want to create more of, celebrating it is going to help us do that. Because celebrating it makes it feel good.
I see this all the time, where people have these big, beautiful accomplishments, and then they dismiss them. And then of course they don't want to do fucking more of that. Why would you want to do something that feels hard if someone, who is you, is just going to dismiss you and tell you it's not a big deal? That's just not fucking fun, y'all. So that's not what we're doing, that's not how we're doing this shit.
Okay, so that's what I've been up to. And it's like, I'm not at the end, right? I've been here for four months. So have I successfully gotten phone numbers and texted people and put myself out there vulnerably to say, “I like you, I would like to hang out.” Sure, I've done that and that's great. It's so much to celebrate. And it's okay for me to be in process. I don't know yet who is going to be the people who become my deep close friends here.
What I know is that I have connections that I'm going to nourish and nurture. And then I'm going to keep making connections. And I'm going to allow that process to happen gradually and slowly. And that is such a lesson in its own. Because so often we're trying to, like I said before, we're trying to go from zero to 100%. But then sometimes we're going from zero to like 100% in a friendship with somebody that maybe isn't the person we actually want to be close friends with.
When we rush it, we don't give it time to sort itself out and time for us to assess and see how we feel and decide if that's where we actually want to keep developing the relationship and like investing our time. So I think so many of us in our culture are in such a rush to get to achievements. If we've set goals, we're in such a fucking rush to get there.
And it's not that that's bad, I like to go fast too. And something I've learned is that allowing things to go more slowly and allowing things to take more time and comforting ourselves along the way, and handling our vulnerability along the way, can lead to goals, once they're achieved, that are more sturdy.
So this can be true when it comes to things at work. Like slowly learning a new skill can give you a very sturdy basis in it. Slowly building your revenue can allow you time to do systems and processes and make that very sustainable over the long term.
Sometimes we go fast, and that can be fun, but it's not better. And sometimes it winds us up in places that then we just need to backtrack and go somewhere else anyways, because we're not always happy with where we wind up when we go super fucking fast.
Okay, so that's what I've been up to. So kind of a mini lesson in its own right. And if y'all want to learn more about that we can do a whole podcast on building relationships at work sometime. Let me know. Come Instagram me and tell me what you like about the podcast and what you'd like to see more of.
Okay, that's that. Now we're going to talk about the Sunday Scaries. So basically, what are the Sunday Scaries? I first heard this term back when I worked in corporate IT. And what it means is that feeling on Sunday when you're like, “Fuck, I have to go back to work tomorrow.”
Now, of course, I know deeply about my experience of this, and I know about my clients’ experience of it. But I wanted to get kind of even more people's experience of it. So I posted on Instagram a while back and asked people who experienced this to message me.
And I hopped on a phone call with a few of them, it was actually a Zoom call, I love to see faces. I work alone in my own home, let's be on a Zoom call. Anyways, I asked them about their experience of it and we talked about it.
And I think that for a lot of people the Sunday Scaries come down to one of two things. My leisure time is ending, this time I get to be myself and have my free time and do the things I need to do for myself as a person, that's ending. That's one of those. Interestingly, I didn't see as much of that in the people that I talked to.
That was my experience. Mine was about losing my leisure time and it going away. And, honestly, I was like, “Oh my God, I can't sleep in for like five more days.” That was like one of the things I was always upset about back when I worked in corporate and had a strict schedule where I had to get up really early.
But a lot of the people I've talked to, a lot of my clients and then the people that I talked to after doing that post online, that was not the thing for them. The thing for them is it was all about work anxiety. It was all about like, “Did I close out last week well enough? Did I set myself up for success? What kind of dumpster fire am I going to discover tomorrow? What could be going wrong? What mean thoughts am I going to think about myself and my capacity? Am I going to feel like an imposter? Am I going to have to deal with this difficult person?”
So a lot of it was about wanting to avoid the experience of work versus my experience, which was wanting to hang on to the freedom of the weekend.
So either experience you have, or if you have a different experience, which you might because we're varied as humans, and we all have our own experiences. It's going to depend a little on the approach.
But I do think there's one component of this that really just comes down to how we're thinking, both about work and about leisure. How we're thinking about our time, and the ways we spend our time.
So for people like me, who it's about the death of leisure, to give you an example of my very dramatic brain and the way it thinks about things. For those people, I think it's about noticing how we're thinking about the weekend versus the week and noticing how it's like very all or nothing thinking.
Like the weekend is all leisure and work week is all work and work is a bummer. And it's taking me away from myself. And you're allowed to think like that if you want to, of course. So whatever you want, you have total agency and authority. But I don't think it's a very fun experience and I know it wasn't for me.
And it was actually equally available to me to think about all the ways in which my workdays were also full of a lot of freedom for me. Yeah, I chose to get up and go into a workplace and do the work that was assigned to me. But there was so much freedom threaded into that, like so much ability to go get a coffee with my friend, and go to this other thing, and organize what order I was going to do my work in and decide what I was going to wear.
I mean, these things might sound silly, but when we feel disempowered, when we feel trapped, reminding ourselves how we always have freedom and how we always have choice is super important. It changes how things feel. If I don't want to feel like I'm at the mercy of my work, you know, not my current work, obviously. But if I didn't want to feel like I was at the mercy of being employed, I had to tell myself the story about how I wasn't at the mercy of that and how I was actually always in charge.
And if you want to take this to a really extreme, I didn't even have to go to work. That was not required. I chose to go to work because I didn't want the consequence of not going to work. I didn't want to lose my job. I didn't want to lose my paycheck. And putting that authority and that choice back into my own hands is so powerful, it was so powerful for me then. So that's the part that comes down to how you think about it.
And for the people, which I see this as being much more common, who what they’re actually worried about is what they're going to think about their actual work, it's the same thing but it's going to look a little different.
So if the first thing you're going to think on Monday morning is, “I'm not prepared enough. I fucked this up. I'm not smart enough. I can't handle this.” That's going to feel terrible. Of course, you don't want to do that. Of course, your brain wants to avoid that. Of course, your brain is feeling like the Sunday Scaries about going back into that head space.
But no matter what the circumstances of your work are, you're never required to think like that. You're never required to think you're terrible at your job. You're never required to think it's too hard or that you can't handle it. Again, you're allowed to. But what's that creating for you when you think that way? It's making work something to be afraid of, versus something that can be enjoyable.
And I do realize there's this whole capitalist myth about love your work, and you'll never work a day in your life. I don't think we have to love our work. I don't think it's required. I don't think it's morally better. I don't think it means we're doing better at life. I just think it's possible and it's fun.
I think it's possible and it's fun to enjoy our work. And it's a gift that we can give ourselves. Not a gift we're giving to capitalism. Not a gift we're giving to our employer or the job itself. A gift we can give to ourselves because we are the ones who are experiencing our lives and our work.
So how we think about things determines how we experience them. So if we think about them differently, that's for us. It's not for anyone else. So again, it's like seeing what are the thoughts that you're afraid of having? What are the thoughts that feel so terrible? And then looking into how the opposite of them is true or how another thing could also be true that feels better.
And then, this is key y’all, you got to practice that new way of thinking when you're not in the hard thing, whatever the hard thing is. Whatever the hard thing is, that's always the time that it's hardest to change the story. Stories are habits, thoughts are habits, the way we think about things are habitual.
So if you want to have a different experience, you’ve got to practice that new habit, not just during like the “hard time.” And the hard time is usually, what? Sunday between the hours of 4 and 11pm. So we got to be practicing at other times.
Like if on Sunday at 5pm you don't want to like feel the scaries about going to work the next morning, we also need to be practicing about what we're going to be thinking at 9am on Monday. Okay, so that's the thought piece, the mindset piece of changing this situation.
But we don't just change our thoughts here on the Love Your Job Before You Leave It podcast; we also work on changing our actions so we can set ourselves up for success. And how do we do that?
So the people that I talked to, like I said, they didn't have the same pattern as me. They had the pattern of the worrying and the fear really being about their ability to do their job. And the thing that I saw with multiple people was they would dive into work on Monday and at first, they maybe would feel like, “Oh, did I set up well enough? Did I prepare well enough?”
But then they would get into the swing of it, and they would work really hard on Monday, pretty hard on Tuesday, medium hard on Wednesday, Thursday, like, okay, we're working. And then Friday was kind of like I've worked myself out. And now I'm tired and I'm just kind of like, “Get me to 5pm” or “get me to 3pm” or just like, “Let me fucking end this work week already.”
It's kind of like we run out of fucks throughout the week. Like Monday morning we’re like, “Oh, I have a lot of fucks, I have a lot of anxiety. I got to do really good at this job.” And by Friday we're like, “I sort of don't care.” And I had this, even though my Sunday Scaries were different, I did have this experience too when I worked in corporate.
So for that, yeah, we can change the thoughts and how we think about our work and ourselves in general. But we can also put in some systems and processes. And one of the systems that I talked about with one of the people I talked to was this idea that what if we finish our week out strong?
And so we’ll change our habitual thoughts about ourselves in our work, but we can also address this idea of like, “Did I prepare well enough? Did I wrap things up well enough? Will I know where I am on Monday morning? Am I going to have forgotten everything important, blah, blah, blah?”
So the system that this person they came up with was that by Friday afternoon, that's too late, right? We're all like, “Whatever, who gives a shit?” So what we decided was on Friday morning she would have this ritual that she was going to do every Friday.
It was going to be how she closed her week out. And it was going to be kind of like coming up with a list of things that would need to be addressed on Monday and where everything was with them, and kind of closing things out in a formal way.
And the interesting thing is, she was doing this anyways, I'm pretty sure. But she was doing it in a stressed out way on Sunday night like, “Oh fuck, I have to go back into the work week tomorrow. What was even working on last week? What do I need to make sure happens? Who do I need to check in with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
But that felt stressful and terrible. And she was doing it during non-working hours. Versus if you go ahead and choose to do it on Friday morning and you set it up and it's done. And then you can look at it first thing Monday morning, then on Sunday night you can be like, “I did that already. It's set up. It's handled. I know what I'm working on. I know who I need to check in with.”
And so we are still changing the mindset. But we've also changed our activities such that it's easier for us to believe the new mindset too. So sometimes we just changed the way we think. But sometimes we change the way we think and the way we act, and we do it in tandem and they build off each other. So that's something you can try.
It's interesting, right? Because it might be the kind of thing where on Friday morning, you're like, “I don't feel like doing that.” But then what I would do there is think to myself about how this is a gift to my future self.
Making choices like, “Oh, I'm going to do this ahead of time even though I don't really feel like it in this moment, but I'm going to choose to.” We can force ourselves to which uses willpower, you're allowed to do that. But I don't recommend because it's not sustainable over the long term.
Willpower is like a muscle; it fatigues and runs out. Versus if you're doing it like this is a gift to me. That's kind of a different thing. To me, that's not willpower, that's more like generosity towards our future self.
So give it a try. It might not work. For this person, she texted me and she was like, “This was super helpful.” Maybe it is super helpful for you. Maybe you have to tweak it a little bit. Maybe there's a different system. But what I want you to think about is what if it's possible to set myself up in a way where I don't have to have the Sunday Scaries?
Like what if the Sunday Scaries are fucking optional? What if I actually have my own best answers inside me and I can set my myself up in a way that I can go back into work feeling refreshed, feeling energized, feeling excited? Feeling confident that I've got what it takes to do this project, or I've got what it takes to finish up all these tasks or whatever the thing is.
Now, if you're more like what I used to experience with the Sunday Scaries, you might need a different methodology. Something else might feel better because the heart of these two things is two different issues even though they're both Sunday Scaries.
At the heart of the one issue is feeling like we're trapped in our work, and we don't have enough freedom, we don't have enough time for ourselves. And at the heart of the other one is being worried we're not going to be able to do our work good enough or to do well enough. And that Monday morning is going to come around and crush us with like the weight of our own inadequacy.
So while they are the same things, Sunday Scaries are different problems, and they need to be addressed in different ways. So one gets addressed by addressing our thoughts about our own capacity to do good work and setting ourselves up with systems that enable us to do good work. The other one is a little bit different.
And so for me, the way that I handled this, like I said before, a lot of it was about looking for like how do I actually want to feel? I wanted to feel free to do my life my way. So looking for evidence that I was doing my life my way. And looking for places where I could do my life even more my way.
So maybe that meant changing up the way I was doing my corporate work. Or maybe it meant changing up the way I was doing my evenings on the weekend. Or maybe it meant changing something else up. When we crave freedom, that is about the story we're telling ourselves about whether we have freedom or not. But it also can be about finding the places in our lives where we're following someone else's rules and we don't want to be, and then addressing those.
And I mean, ultimately, I did choose to leave that job. And I did choose to start my business. And I do feel a lot more freedom in my business. But you can kind of think this through on the short term, long term. Like, what is it that I want? What is it like the Sunday Scaries are informing me about? What are they informing me that I have a craving for? And how can I give that to myself?
And if you're not ready to leave your job, or maybe it's not even true that all you want is like unending leisure time, figuring out what it is you actually do want and how you can give yourself that, and start in the micro. Start with the smallest steps you can and celebrate the shit out of that and then work up from there.
And so some of the things I did when I was in corporate were like changing my schedule around. Asking for more work from home time. Asking to be able to get up and work from home and then come into the office later. And so even the days I went into the office, I was never in the office before like nine and usually not before 10, even though our workday started at seven.
I realized when I said I wasn't there before nine y’all are probably like, “Isn't that when days start?” No, not when you work in corporate IT and your VP is in London, that was not when our day started.
So the big overarching thing I want to offer you is that even if you have the Sunday Scaries, even if you've always had them, even if you used to have them when you were a kid about going to school on Mondays, that doesn't mean you always have to have them.
I want to offer that this experience, you can change it. You can have a different experience. And in order to do that, we want to unpack why you in particular have it and what information it's giving you. And then how you can use that information to move yourself bit by bit closer, both with how you're thinking about your life and the things you're doing in your life, moving yourself closer to the life that you want to have.
Okay, that's what I have for you today. But I also just want to say, if this is really showing you that there are moves you want to take to bring yourself closer to having your dream career. And I say dream career, but I really mean having whatever the next one of a kind career step is for you.
If you want to like your job 10% more. If you want to like your job 50% more. If you want to like your job more and also get to work launching that side hustle. Whatever it is that you're craving in your career. If you want to start making moves to create that and you want my brain alongside you, helping you every step of the way and showing you the things that maybe your brain can't see because a lot of our own growth is invisible to us. Which is why I also have coaches.
If you want that, come message me, let's work together. I want to help you build your one of a kind career and give you the tools that are going to help you be able to do that in a sustainable, joyful way. I have so much proof of concept. I've done this work with so many people. It might seem mystifying to you, but it's my day to day for me. And I want to help you with that.
So come reach out to me, DM me on Instagram, reach out via my website. And let's build that career you've been longing for because you can have it. And no, your life won't be 100% amazing when you do because that's never what we're selling here. Like I said, coaching allows us to solve the problems we have and then have more interesting problems. Like I said, like my coach, Kara said.
And we can do that for you too and it's fucking awesome. Even if there are other interesting problems to solve later. It's so satisfying to move in the direction you've been longing to move in. I know from experience, I have my business. It's amazing. There's also a bunch of interesting problems I never had to deal with when I was in corporate, but I'm so glad I'm here. And I want to help you get to a place in your career where you're also so glad you're there. So let's do it.
All right y'all, have a great week. Bye.
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.
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.
Hey, y'all. Happy Wednesday. I have a great topic to discuss with you all today. But before we jump into that, I wanted to tell you a little bit about what I've been using my coaching skills on in my own life.
So for the last three years building my business, I've used a lot of my coaching skills on me when it comes to the business. That was kind of the big focus of a lot of my self-coaching and a lot of the coaching that I was getting from other coaches. And the business is going really well. I've hit some really big milestones. I'm really proud of it.
In the last year I've switched how I work in my hours and stuff to kind of bring the business more in line with the kind of work schedule that I want to have. Which means I start my workday at 10am Pacific. And I don't take calls, usually after 4pm Pacific. And then I have like four to five, to kind of finish up anything, send emails, that kind of stuff.
Because so much of my work is client facing, it's one on one Zoom calls with clients, I need some time at the end of the day to wrap things up and check the emails, get things like that done. But recently, I have started a new self-coaching project. And I want to tell y’all about it, even though it has nothing to do with all the stuff we normally talk about because I think it's just going to do a few things.
One of which is show you that even though I'm a coach and I'm an expert in the things I teach you about, I'm also a student. I'm also always learning. I'm also always in the process of applying the same things I teach you, to myself in my own life. And that is a process, it's not a one and done. It's not like I'm a coach so I never have problems. That's not what's happening over here.
As one of my coaches, Kara Loewentheil says, learning about coaching tools allows you to solve the problems you have now and then go on to have more interesting problems. And so that's one thing.
And then the second thing is just to give you an example of a different kind of thing you could be doing with the same tools that we're using in our work life. So those are the reasons I wanted to share this with you.
And the thing that I'm using coaching for right now is developing friendships. And I just got done saying how this doesn't have anything to do with work. But actually I take that back because a lot of times in workplaces developing relationships and developing friendships, community, whatever kind of bonds you want to call it, you might not consider it a full friendship so much as like a business relationship. But I think it's sort of all the same.
Because any relationship we have is always kind of in its own category with its limits and the amount that we show up vulnerably as ourselves and the amount that we retain our privacy. That happens in friendships and work relationships and all kinds of relationships, family, everything.
So basically, I moved, as I'm sure you know if you've been listening to the podcast, from Seattle to Sacramento about four months ago. And I had one friend in Sacramento that I actually knew from a coaching program I did as a client three years ago. She's amazing, I love her to death. Nicole, if you're listening, it's you. Thank you for being my friend. And she's amazing, but I also wanted to have more than one friend.
So I have done some stuff to kind of get that going. And some of that is action line stuff, like what actions am I taking? What actions am I choosing not to take? And some of it is the thought work, the mindset piece around how am I choosing to think? And of course some of it's also emotionality, what feelings am I leaning into to help me with this project?
And just like a work project, I have defined parameters. Like I wanted to build three to five deep friendships in Sacramento. And then also have other friendships of varying layers of deepness, super close friends, but also people who I see less often but really cherish and enjoy as well.
But the big project for me was getting some close friends. And the thing about that is that shit is going to take time. Building relationships, I think of it as like a layered process. So we don't just go from like zero to 100% usually. Occasionally you do, but usually we don't.
And so what that looks like is planting a lot of friendships seeds and beginning to establish relationships with people. And then layer that in with all the other shit I'm doing in my life. And then continuing to water those seeds and give them sun and attention. So that's the metaphor, is the seeds.
What it really looks like is I signed up for improv classes, shout out to all my improv friends. And then met people in there that I really liked and then began inviting them to do stuff. Like inviting them to go see improv shows, asking if we wanted to exchange numbers, seeing if they wanted to grab a glass of wine, doing other stuff like that.
And then I met this other wonderful human at an improv show, because of all things I was talking about astrology, and she was also interested in astrology. And so even though I felt awkward and nervous, I was like, “Hey, do you want to get together and talk about astrology?”
And so I want to point out that I've been having to coach myself on this because it's not that I was just like, “Oh, I want friends. I'm going to take all these actions.” Yes, I want friends. Yes, I did take the actions. But what happened in between that was the part where I had to coach myself and get coaching from other coaches I know and love.
So the part where my brain is like, “Don't ask for their phone number. What if they say no?” Just like all humans, I too, am afraid of rejection. Just like y'all, I'm afraid of vulnerably putting myself out there and then either what if they say no? What if they just don't answer my Instagram message? What if they don't like me? I have all that shit too.
So I've been having to coach myself on that. And the way I've been doing that is bringing myself back to courage, bringing myself back to my vision. And also soothing myself about like, I might get rejected sometimes and that's okay. Is it my fucking favorite thing? Absolutely not. But is it okay? Yes. Can I tolerate it? Yes. Will it maybe sting a little? It probably will, and that's okay too because guess what? I can handle that and then keep going.
And when I hold the vision of what I'm creating really strongly in my mind, then I'm willing to go through the stinging, and the discomfort, and the painful bits, and to keep taking actions to create the thing I want. Even if I stumble, or even if I feel awkward, all of that. And it's been really fun.
And then the other thing I've been doing, which I of course, encourage y'all to do all the time, is celebrating the shit out of myself. Because I think once we do something that feels hard, it can be so easy to be like, “Oh, that wasn't that big of a deal. Anyone could invite someone to coffee. I didn't climb a mountain or anything.” But that kind of dismissiveness towards my own goal related activities, is not helping me.
Now sometimes I do think being purposely dismissive on the front end can be useful. Like when my brain is freaking out because it wants to ask somebody for their phone number. But it's also like, “Oh my gosh, what if they think I'm hitting on them? I'm not hitting on them. I have a partner.” Being dismissive, like gently, lovingly, playfully dismissive on that end, like, “Just say, words out of your face, Kori.” I think being a little dismissive on that side, if we do it with love and kindness to ourselves can be useful.
That's actually a coaching technique when people are very deep in the drama of the story that their brain is telling. To kind of bring it down with really simple language can help get them out from under that drama. So I've used that tactic on myself. But once we've done the thing that felt scary to us, that's not the time to be dismissive. That's the time to be celebrating. Because we want to celebrate and praise anything that we want to see more of.
So if we want to see more of ourselves being courageous and asking people to go to coffee with us and inviting people into friendship with us. If that is the behavior we want to create more of, celebrating it is going to help us do that. Because celebrating it makes it feel good.
I see this all the time, where people have these big, beautiful accomplishments, and then they dismiss them. And then of course they don't want to do fucking more of that. Why would you want to do something that feels hard if someone, who is you, is just going to dismiss you and tell you it's not a big deal? That's just not fucking fun, y'all. So that's not what we're doing, that's not how we're doing this shit.
Okay, so that's what I've been up to. And it's like, I'm not at the end, right? I've been here for four months. So have I successfully gotten phone numbers and texted people and put myself out there vulnerably to say, “I like you, I would like to hang out.” Sure, I've done that and that's great. It's so much to celebrate. And it's okay for me to be in process. I don't know yet who is going to be the people who become my deep close friends here.
What I know is that I have connections that I'm going to nourish and nurture. And then I'm going to keep making connections. And I'm going to allow that process to happen gradually and slowly. And that is such a lesson in its own. Because so often we're trying to, like I said before, we're trying to go from zero to 100%. But then sometimes we're going from zero to like 100% in a friendship with somebody that maybe isn't the person we actually want to be close friends with.
When we rush it, we don't give it time to sort itself out and time for us to assess and see how we feel and decide if that's where we actually want to keep developing the relationship and like investing our time. So I think so many of us in our culture are in such a rush to get to achievements. If we've set goals, we're in such a fucking rush to get there.
And it's not that that's bad, I like to go fast too. And something I've learned is that allowing things to go more slowly and allowing things to take more time and comforting ourselves along the way, and handling our vulnerability along the way, can lead to goals, once they're achieved, that are more sturdy.
So this can be true when it comes to things at work. Like slowly learning a new skill can give you a very sturdy basis in it. Slowly building your revenue can allow you time to do systems and processes and make that very sustainable over the long term.
Sometimes we go fast, and that can be fun, but it's not better. And sometimes it winds us up in places that then we just need to backtrack and go somewhere else anyways, because we're not always happy with where we wind up when we go super fucking fast.
Okay, so that's what I've been up to. So kind of a mini lesson in its own right. And if y'all want to learn more about that we can do a whole podcast on building relationships at work sometime. Let me know. Come Instagram me and tell me what you like about the podcast and what you'd like to see more of.
Okay, that's that. Now we're going to talk about the Sunday Scaries. So basically, what are the Sunday Scaries? I first heard this term back when I worked in corporate IT. And what it means is that feeling on Sunday when you're like, “Fuck, I have to go back to work tomorrow.”
Now, of course, I know deeply about my experience of this, and I know about my clients’ experience of it. But I wanted to get kind of even more people's experience of it. So I posted on Instagram a while back and asked people who experienced this to message me.
And I hopped on a phone call with a few of them, it was actually a Zoom call, I love to see faces. I work alone in my own home, let's be on a Zoom call. Anyways, I asked them about their experience of it and we talked about it.
And I think that for a lot of people the Sunday Scaries come down to one of two things. My leisure time is ending, this time I get to be myself and have my free time and do the things I need to do for myself as a person, that's ending. That's one of those. Interestingly, I didn't see as much of that in the people that I talked to.
That was my experience. Mine was about losing my leisure time and it going away. And, honestly, I was like, “Oh my God, I can't sleep in for like five more days.” That was like one of the things I was always upset about back when I worked in corporate and had a strict schedule where I had to get up really early.
But a lot of the people I've talked to, a lot of my clients and then the people that I talked to after doing that post online, that was not the thing for them. The thing for them is it was all about work anxiety. It was all about like, “Did I close out last week well enough? Did I set myself up for success? What kind of dumpster fire am I going to discover tomorrow? What could be going wrong? What mean thoughts am I going to think about myself and my capacity? Am I going to feel like an imposter? Am I going to have to deal with this difficult person?”
So a lot of it was about wanting to avoid the experience of work versus my experience, which was wanting to hang on to the freedom of the weekend.
So either experience you have, or if you have a different experience, which you might because we're varied as humans, and we all have our own experiences. It's going to depend a little on the approach.
But I do think there's one component of this that really just comes down to how we're thinking, both about work and about leisure. How we're thinking about our time, and the ways we spend our time.
So for people like me, who it's about the death of leisure, to give you an example of my very dramatic brain and the way it thinks about things. For those people, I think it's about noticing how we're thinking about the weekend versus the week and noticing how it's like very all or nothing thinking.
Like the weekend is all leisure and work week is all work and work is a bummer. And it's taking me away from myself. And you're allowed to think like that if you want to, of course. So whatever you want, you have total agency and authority. But I don't think it's a very fun experience and I know it wasn't for me.
And it was actually equally available to me to think about all the ways in which my workdays were also full of a lot of freedom for me. Yeah, I chose to get up and go into a workplace and do the work that was assigned to me. But there was so much freedom threaded into that, like so much ability to go get a coffee with my friend, and go to this other thing, and organize what order I was going to do my work in and decide what I was going to wear.
I mean, these things might sound silly, but when we feel disempowered, when we feel trapped, reminding ourselves how we always have freedom and how we always have choice is super important. It changes how things feel. If I don't want to feel like I'm at the mercy of my work, you know, not my current work, obviously. But if I didn't want to feel like I was at the mercy of being employed, I had to tell myself the story about how I wasn't at the mercy of that and how I was actually always in charge.
And if you want to take this to a really extreme, I didn't even have to go to work. That was not required. I chose to go to work because I didn't want the consequence of not going to work. I didn't want to lose my job. I didn't want to lose my paycheck. And putting that authority and that choice back into my own hands is so powerful, it was so powerful for me then. So that's the part that comes down to how you think about it.
And for the people, which I see this as being much more common, who what they’re actually worried about is what they're going to think about their actual work, it's the same thing but it's going to look a little different.
So if the first thing you're going to think on Monday morning is, “I'm not prepared enough. I fucked this up. I'm not smart enough. I can't handle this.” That's going to feel terrible. Of course, you don't want to do that. Of course, your brain wants to avoid that. Of course, your brain is feeling like the Sunday Scaries about going back into that head space.
But no matter what the circumstances of your work are, you're never required to think like that. You're never required to think you're terrible at your job. You're never required to think it's too hard or that you can't handle it. Again, you're allowed to. But what's that creating for you when you think that way? It's making work something to be afraid of, versus something that can be enjoyable.
And I do realize there's this whole capitalist myth about love your work, and you'll never work a day in your life. I don't think we have to love our work. I don't think it's required. I don't think it's morally better. I don't think it means we're doing better at life. I just think it's possible and it's fun.
I think it's possible and it's fun to enjoy our work. And it's a gift that we can give ourselves. Not a gift we're giving to capitalism. Not a gift we're giving to our employer or the job itself. A gift we can give to ourselves because we are the ones who are experiencing our lives and our work.
So how we think about things determines how we experience them. So if we think about them differently, that's for us. It's not for anyone else. So again, it's like seeing what are the thoughts that you're afraid of having? What are the thoughts that feel so terrible? And then looking into how the opposite of them is true or how another thing could also be true that feels better.
And then, this is key y’all, you got to practice that new way of thinking when you're not in the hard thing, whatever the hard thing is. Whatever the hard thing is, that's always the time that it's hardest to change the story. Stories are habits, thoughts are habits, the way we think about things are habitual.
So if you want to have a different experience, you’ve got to practice that new habit, not just during like the “hard time.” And the hard time is usually, what? Sunday between the hours of 4 and 11pm. So we got to be practicing at other times.
Like if on Sunday at 5pm you don't want to like feel the scaries about going to work the next morning, we also need to be practicing about what we're going to be thinking at 9am on Monday. Okay, so that's the thought piece, the mindset piece of changing this situation.
But we don't just change our thoughts here on the Love Your Job Before You Leave It podcast; we also work on changing our actions so we can set ourselves up for success. And how do we do that?
So the people that I talked to, like I said, they didn't have the same pattern as me. They had the pattern of the worrying and the fear really being about their ability to do their job. And the thing that I saw with multiple people was they would dive into work on Monday and at first, they maybe would feel like, “Oh, did I set up well enough? Did I prepare well enough?”
But then they would get into the swing of it, and they would work really hard on Monday, pretty hard on Tuesday, medium hard on Wednesday, Thursday, like, okay, we're working. And then Friday was kind of like I've worked myself out. And now I'm tired and I'm just kind of like, “Get me to 5pm” or “get me to 3pm” or just like, “Let me fucking end this work week already.”
It's kind of like we run out of fucks throughout the week. Like Monday morning we’re like, “Oh, I have a lot of fucks, I have a lot of anxiety. I got to do really good at this job.” And by Friday we're like, “I sort of don't care.” And I had this, even though my Sunday Scaries were different, I did have this experience too when I worked in corporate.
So for that, yeah, we can change the thoughts and how we think about our work and ourselves in general. But we can also put in some systems and processes. And one of the systems that I talked about with one of the people I talked to was this idea that what if we finish our week out strong?
And so we’ll change our habitual thoughts about ourselves in our work, but we can also address this idea of like, “Did I prepare well enough? Did I wrap things up well enough? Will I know where I am on Monday morning? Am I going to have forgotten everything important, blah, blah, blah?”
So the system that this person they came up with was that by Friday afternoon, that's too late, right? We're all like, “Whatever, who gives a shit?” So what we decided was on Friday morning she would have this ritual that she was going to do every Friday.
It was going to be how she closed her week out. And it was going to be kind of like coming up with a list of things that would need to be addressed on Monday and where everything was with them, and kind of closing things out in a formal way.
And the interesting thing is, she was doing this anyways, I'm pretty sure. But she was doing it in a stressed out way on Sunday night like, “Oh fuck, I have to go back into the work week tomorrow. What was even working on last week? What do I need to make sure happens? Who do I need to check in with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
But that felt stressful and terrible. And she was doing it during non-working hours. Versus if you go ahead and choose to do it on Friday morning and you set it up and it's done. And then you can look at it first thing Monday morning, then on Sunday night you can be like, “I did that already. It's set up. It's handled. I know what I'm working on. I know who I need to check in with.”
And so we are still changing the mindset. But we've also changed our activities such that it's easier for us to believe the new mindset too. So sometimes we just changed the way we think. But sometimes we change the way we think and the way we act, and we do it in tandem and they build off each other. So that's something you can try.
It's interesting, right? Because it might be the kind of thing where on Friday morning, you're like, “I don't feel like doing that.” But then what I would do there is think to myself about how this is a gift to my future self.
Making choices like, “Oh, I'm going to do this ahead of time even though I don't really feel like it in this moment, but I'm going to choose to.” We can force ourselves to which uses willpower, you're allowed to do that. But I don't recommend because it's not sustainable over the long term.
Willpower is like a muscle; it fatigues and runs out. Versus if you're doing it like this is a gift to me. That's kind of a different thing. To me, that's not willpower, that's more like generosity towards our future self.
So give it a try. It might not work. For this person, she texted me and she was like, “This was super helpful.” Maybe it is super helpful for you. Maybe you have to tweak it a little bit. Maybe there's a different system. But what I want you to think about is what if it's possible to set myself up in a way where I don't have to have the Sunday Scaries?
Like what if the Sunday Scaries are fucking optional? What if I actually have my own best answers inside me and I can set my myself up in a way that I can go back into work feeling refreshed, feeling energized, feeling excited? Feeling confident that I've got what it takes to do this project, or I've got what it takes to finish up all these tasks or whatever the thing is.
Now, if you're more like what I used to experience with the Sunday Scaries, you might need a different methodology. Something else might feel better because the heart of these two things is two different issues even though they're both Sunday Scaries.
At the heart of the one issue is feeling like we're trapped in our work, and we don't have enough freedom, we don't have enough time for ourselves. And at the heart of the other one is being worried we're not going to be able to do our work good enough or to do well enough. And that Monday morning is going to come around and crush us with like the weight of our own inadequacy.
So while they are the same things, Sunday Scaries are different problems, and they need to be addressed in different ways. So one gets addressed by addressing our thoughts about our own capacity to do good work and setting ourselves up with systems that enable us to do good work. The other one is a little bit different.
And so for me, the way that I handled this, like I said before, a lot of it was about looking for like how do I actually want to feel? I wanted to feel free to do my life my way. So looking for evidence that I was doing my life my way. And looking for places where I could do my life even more my way.
So maybe that meant changing up the way I was doing my corporate work. Or maybe it meant changing up the way I was doing my evenings on the weekend. Or maybe it meant changing something else up. When we crave freedom, that is about the story we're telling ourselves about whether we have freedom or not. But it also can be about finding the places in our lives where we're following someone else's rules and we don't want to be, and then addressing those.
And I mean, ultimately, I did choose to leave that job. And I did choose to start my business. And I do feel a lot more freedom in my business. But you can kind of think this through on the short term, long term. Like, what is it that I want? What is it like the Sunday Scaries are informing me about? What are they informing me that I have a craving for? And how can I give that to myself?
And if you're not ready to leave your job, or maybe it's not even true that all you want is like unending leisure time, figuring out what it is you actually do want and how you can give yourself that, and start in the micro. Start with the smallest steps you can and celebrate the shit out of that and then work up from there.
And so some of the things I did when I was in corporate were like changing my schedule around. Asking for more work from home time. Asking to be able to get up and work from home and then come into the office later. And so even the days I went into the office, I was never in the office before like nine and usually not before 10, even though our workday started at seven.
I realized when I said I wasn't there before nine y’all are probably like, “Isn't that when days start?” No, not when you work in corporate IT and your VP is in London, that was not when our day started.
So the big overarching thing I want to offer you is that even if you have the Sunday Scaries, even if you've always had them, even if you used to have them when you were a kid about going to school on Mondays, that doesn't mean you always have to have them.
I want to offer that this experience, you can change it. You can have a different experience. And in order to do that, we want to unpack why you in particular have it and what information it's giving you. And then how you can use that information to move yourself bit by bit closer, both with how you're thinking about your life and the things you're doing in your life, moving yourself closer to the life that you want to have.
Okay, that's what I have for you today. But I also just want to say, if this is really showing you that there are moves you want to take to bring yourself closer to having your dream career. And I say dream career, but I really mean having whatever the next one of a kind career step is for you.
If you want to like your job 10% more. If you want to like your job 50% more. If you want to like your job more and also get to work launching that side hustle. Whatever it is that you're craving in your career. If you want to start making moves to create that and you want my brain alongside you, helping you every step of the way and showing you the things that maybe your brain can't see because a lot of our own growth is invisible to us. Which is why I also have coaches.
If you want that, come message me, let's work together. I want to help you build your one of a kind career and give you the tools that are going to help you be able to do that in a sustainable, joyful way. I have so much proof of concept. I've done this work with so many people. It might seem mystifying to you, but it's my day to day for me. And I want to help you with that.
So come reach out to me, DM me on Instagram, reach out via my website. And let's build that career you've been longing for because you can have it. And no, your life won't be 100% amazing when you do because that's never what we're selling here. Like I said, coaching allows us to solve the problems we have and then have more interesting problems. Like I said, like my coach, Kara said.
And we can do that for you too and it's fucking awesome. Even if there are other interesting problems to solve later. It's so satisfying to move in the direction you've been longing to move in. I know from experience, I have my business. It's amazing. There's also a bunch of interesting problems I never had to deal with when I was in corporate, but I'm so glad I'm here. And I want to help you get to a place in your career where you're also so glad you're there. So let's do it.
All right y'all, have a great week. Bye.
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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