It’s the 25th episode of the Curiously You Podcast with guest Lara Heacock! Today we talk about stopping the "yes-girl' impulse being more kind to ourselves, and making time for self care by setting boundaries.
As we begin to practice self-care and setting time aside for ourselves, we put boundaries in place that allow us to be more in tune with our needs, our relationships and therefore practice a way to enhance the quality of our life.
We learn that fear and resistance is a part of the process, which we can work through by practicing self awareness and compassion, rather than allowing it to stop us in our tracks.
You’ll love this episode if:
– You are becoming increasingly exhausted from keeping things together
You are fearful of setting boundaries and need some tools on how to have the hard conversations.
Something in your life and your relationships has to change.
Time-stamped Show Notes
04:03 Lara discusses her journey to practicing self-care and setting boundaries. She gained a degree in psychology and fell into corporate America. She later found herself getting an MBA, and shifted to technical recruiting.
The last two years of her job, she felt unsettled and couldn’t get out of bed. Both home and work wasn’t going well, and she felt exhausted and depleted. She began to look into coaching and found a life coach.
Through working with the coach, she found that she was not physically or emotionally taking care of herself, which was leading to burn out. The coaching taught her the skills to overcome that unsettled feeling that would be triggered as anger when she was not practicing self care.
08:06 Upon deeper reflection, Lara found this anger was triggered primarily because she was not setting boundaries, and so without boundaries the level of invasiveness caused her to feel angry.
She was the “yes girl”: need someone to speak to at 2am? She’s there. Locked your keys inside your house? She’s be there with a spare set of keys. Not enough time at work? She’ll do all your work for you!
It was exhausting always having to keep it together, and she began getting annoyed and eating poorly. She realised that she didn’t have compassion for anyone, and felt she had a lack of capacity to forgive and understand others. This was the starting point for her to develop self-awareness, self care, and set boundaries.
10:32 Lara wanted to be more compassionate and open herself up to kindness daily, which caused a cycle of resentment because she wasn’t doing it for herself.
She decided she needed an entry point to implement self-care and ultimately set boundaries in her life. So, she took every Saturday and made it about self-kindness; watching Netflix or getting together with the people she cared about. For others, this entry point could be getting a manicure or going for a ten minute walk. The entry-point is a great way to get started, and learn to keep up those self-care practices.
13:27 Setting boundaries to practice self-care at first can be quite an uncomfortable experience. Lara found fear crept in, and the way she dealt with that was to always be in action. However, she learnt that it’s important to figure out your access point and take care of yourself emotionally, this will be unique to each person.
The important thing is to find ways to keep a consistent on-going behaviour. Setting high and rigid expectations will probably lead to disappointment and quitting self-care practices.
18:08 Lara cultivated an inner dialogue where she congratulated herself and practiced self-compassion. This helped build self-awareness of the choices she made, and of her behaviour.
Change is an up and down journey, and as humans, we have a natural tendency to self-talk toward lofty expectations of perfection, and when we can’t meet them, we just stop.
Slip into compassion and figure out how to take baby steps. Talk internally in the same way you talk to a cherished person in your life, like a child or your best friend.
24:07 The best way to have difficult conversations is to first have a close inner circle and support system.
Self kindness practice enables you to face difficulties. It also brings a level of self-awareness of how you want to feel so you can effectively set boundaries to take care of yourself.
Lara focused on how she wanted to feel, and this enabled her to move forward. She used examples where her and her husband had a Tuesday night as work night. When this fell away for a really long time, and she let her story about that situation take over, instead of having a conversation with him about it.
This triggered her to go into the negative spiral of victim mode. Finally, she found the courage to have a conversation with her husband and in five minutes, she was about to resolve the fears she had wrapped in a story for a number of weeks.
28:40 The stories we wrap around situations generally our “go to” stories, and their resulting emotions. Because we fall into fear and find it had to have conversations about setting boundaries, it takes a while for self-care practices to come naturally. However, eventually it gets to a point where we can’t avoid it anymore.
For Lara, when she is in this process, she tries to consciously think about what she knows she is coming up against, and what she chooses. It takes a while to get to the point of having a conversation effortlessly. The “fear story” is generally always is the reason why you’re not having a conversation.
[35:22] Some tips around having difficult work conversations is to “know your why and back it up with data.”
What’s my why? Why do I need to have this conversation? If it’s in a business setting, you can craft the argument around the intention you have.
Lara provides an example of a client who displayed the secret sauce of life – being able to do the hard things even though they’re hard: what we perceive to be “hard” goes from being a wall to a road bump. Scary and hard doesn’t mean a stop sign.
[40:57] Lara is now a teacher in the coaching program she went through. With all the work she does, she realises that fear around setting boundaries and self-care is just a part of the process; it does not have to be a stopping point.
She now recognises that she must feed herself with self kindness she feels fear arising.
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