Conflict Decoded Podcast

Imagine that you’re an antelope. You're grazing on the savanna, minding your own business, when suddenly, out of the shadows, bounds a lion straight toward you. You can’t fight the lion, so you leap into action, running as fast as you can. You run, run, run, and miraculously, you escape. Then, once the lion is gone, you do something that most mammals do after surviving a threat—You shake. As the antelope, escaping the lion is key to surviving, of course. But shaking after you escape is surprisingly important for your survival, too. That’s because, as Emily and Amelia Nagoski explain in their book, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, stress and stressors are distinct phenomena that require distinct solutions.[1] Here’s what that means: Stress vs. Stressors Stressors are any stimuli we perceive as a threat. For the antelope, the stressor is the lion. On the other hand, stress is our body’s response to a perceived threat—a cascade of neurochemicals and hormones that our bodies release to prompt us to find safety. As the antelope, you feel stress when the lion starts chasing you. Stress is not inherently bad for us; stress is what happens in our bodies when we perceive that someone or something we care about is at risk. However, stress can wreak havoc when it accumulates in our bodies. As the antelope, even though you escaped the lion, you still need to process the stress by shaking it out of your system. How to Release Your Stress Cultures across time and place have known that we need to shake, cry, laugh, dance, and move our bodies to discharge stress. Unfortunately, modern-day dominant culture, rooted in Puritanism and Calvinist Christianity, disdains physical expressions of emotion. As a result, many of us learn early on that others will reject us if we tremble, yawn, laugh too loud, or express too much emotion. But no matter our social conditioning, in addition to dealing with our stressors, we need to deal with our stress, including the stress of heartbreaking, infuriating, or stressful situations that we witness others experiencing, whether through direct care work, policy work, hearing the news, or witnessing our loved ones struggle If we don't fully discharge our stress, it can stay in our bodies long after we've dealt with the stressors, making it harder to sleep, focus our attention, and access the energy we need to keep going. The stress can build up until it becomes compassion fatigue or burnout. The good news is that because stress and stressors are distinct…  …it is possible to release at least some of our stress even if we don’t have the power to get rid of our stressors. In Burnout, the Nagoskis write that the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress cycle is (drum roll, please)—moving our bodies. They write: “Physical activity—literally any movement of your body—is your first line of attack in the battle against burnout.” Why Physical Movement? Because we’re mammals. We need to speak our body’s mammalian language. If we were faced with a lion, we would… run! If we’re faced with a challenging boss, we need to… run!   Of course, you don’t necessarily need to run away from your boss. You just need to run in addition to dealing with your boss. And, no, you do not need to run, per se. As someone who hated gym class, I am not about to run. What works for me is doing yoga, walking in nature, or hula hooping to reggaeton or ‘90s dance music. You might bounce on a rebounder, punch a kickboxing bag, go for a bike ride, jump rope, take an online exercise class, or crank up the Motown at the end of your day and dance. Somatic Practice If you struggle to integrate exercise into your life, all is not lost. Small micro-movements such as swinging your arms, tapping your face, clenching your muscles and releasing them, taking a long exhale, or circling your ankles can be surprisingly effective for discharging stress and settling the nervous system. These practices are often referred to as somatic practices, soma being a Greek word that means the body, mind, heart, and soul in their wholeness. Because these practices can be far easier to learn with visual and auditory guidance, I’ve created a  free online video portal called Somatic Practices for Social Change. I encourage you to experiment with the practices there and find out which ones soothe and settle you. Once you find a practice you like, experiment with anchoring it to a regular part of your day. For example, you might practice when you wake up, go to sleep, go to the bathroom, wash the dishes, or get into your car. Or you might place a sticky note somewhere you’ll see it frequently with words reminding you such as Practice or Move or Breathe. Then, when you’re facing a challenging decision or feeling activated, do your best to devote a moment to at least one settling practice before choosing your next steps. The more you engage with practices you find settling in the everyday moments, the easier it will probably become to remember to practice when you’re emotionally activated. As Resmaa Menakem, somatic abolitionist and author of My Grandmother’s Hands writes: “Few skills are more essential than the ability to settle your body. If you can settle your body, you are more likely to be calm, alert, and fully present, no matter what is going on around you…   Gather together a large group of unsettled bodies—or assemble a group of bodies and then unsettle them—and you get a mob or a riot.   But bring a large group of settled bodies together and you have a potential movement—and a potential force for tremendous good in the world.”[2] Think of these micro-movements like multivitamins or flossing your teeth. They can take some effort to integrate into your daily routine, but once you do, they can dramatically improve your wellbeing. Here’s a link to my free Somatic Practices for Social Change video portal. I hope you’ll check it out and enjoy. May you find many fun ways to release your stress and nourish your energy.   [1] Amelia & Emily Nagoski. Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. (New York, NY: Random House, 2020.) [2] Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. (Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017.)

I invite you to pick up an imaginary rubber band. Hook one end of the rubber band around your right forefinger and the other around your right thumb, with your palm facing away from you. Your forefinger represents the world and the life that you long for. Your thumb represents your current reality. Imagine pulling the rubber band between your forefinger and thumb and feeling the tension.[1] I call this inevitable chasm between where we are right now and where we long to be the Gap of Longing. This gap can become a Gap of Despair or a Gap of Hope. Let’s explore the Gap of Hope first. The Gap of Hope Hope is different from optimism.[2] Whereas optimism expects that our actions will probably bring a positive outcome and everything will probably turn out alright, hope faces reality. Hope knows there are no guarantees and that in many cases, the odds are not in our favor. And yet, in the face of devastation and peril, hope is the willingness to take a stand for what we love—whether that’s ourselves, our people, or the planet. In the words of writer and activist, Rebecca Solnit, hope says: “Anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it.” When I speak of despair and hope, I speak of them not as emotions but as stances or postures from which action can spring forth.[3] As abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba writes, “‘Hope is a discipline.’ [1] I first learned this rubber band model from Peter Senge’s 2006 book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization. He calls this the creative tension model. [2] Rebecca Solnit. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. (Haymarket Books, Chicago, IL: March 16, 2016.) [3] Meriame Kaba. https://theintercept.com/2021/03/17/intercepted-mariame-kaba-abolitionist-organizing/

Despite all of the evidence of your abilities and intelligence, does part of you believe that you’ll never be enough? When someone congratulates you or compliments you, does a voice in your head immediately start naming a litany of reasons why you don’t deserve it, telling you things like… Yeah, but that was just random luck. I didn’t work hard enough. It could have been better. I probably won’t be able to do it again. They didn’t really mean it. I shouldn’t brag. That really wasn’t anything special. Anyone could do that. What if someone finds out that I’m really a fraud? They don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s no big deal. I still need to work on this other thing…? If that’s you, then I invite you to ask yourself this question: When you give someone a gift, do you want them to frown, ignore you, or say it’s nothing special? Or would you rather have them receive your gift with a smile and a thank you? I for one would prefer the thank you, and I imagine that life would too. I believe that our abilities, strengths, skills, and talents are gifts that life has entrusted to us, whether through hard work, heartache, luck, study, experience, or the act of being born, and I believe each one of us has a sacred responsibility to reciprocate by acknowledging our gifts. Self-appreciation does not say—I’m better than you! or I’m more special! Self-appreciation says—Just like everyone else, I am a miraculously gifted and flawed human. I have areas for improvement, and I have so many gifts I am grateful for. Self-appreciation is not conceit. Self-appreciation is the skill of giving thanks for who we get to be in this life. When we acknowledge our gifts, we have an easier time understanding how we’re called to show up for change and which paths might bring us joy. As botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass, “This is our work, to discover what we can give. Isn’t this the purpose of education, to learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world?”[1]  And, as healer and dismantling racism trainer, Michelle Cassandra Johnson writes in Finding Refuge, “It is important to think of oneself as a medicine maker, because each one of us has a gift to offer the collective.”[2] So from now on, I challenge you to track glimmers of self-appreciation. Here are three practices that might help: When someone offers you a compliment, notice any initial feelings of discomfort, and then say, thank you. Keep emails expressing gratitude in a folder and/or a “Done List” of the goals you’ve accomplished. Learn to articulate your gifts and strengths—you’ll find questions to help you do so in the show notes. And if you notice yourself wanting to be better at something, that’s great, too! Our skills are not innate. The truth is that with enough desire, time, grit, and support, almost anyone can learn anything. To cultivate the stamina to learn what we want to learn, we must celebrate our tiny victories. Often the journey to developing new skills looks like a series of plateaus interspersed with occasional upward leaps. On the plateaus, we practice and practice and practice, sometimes with little noticeable change. Then all of a sudden, we have a great big aha! and can do something we’ve never done before. When we learn to celebrate ourselves, it becomes easier to show up on the plateaus and the dips in the road and to enjoy our leaps forward. Practice: Your Gifts & Strengths If you would like to get clearer about your existing gifts, strengths, and skills, I invite you to write down what comes up in response to the following questions: When do you feel so wholly immersed in the moment that time seems transformed and nothing else seems to matter? What are you doing when you experience an intense sense of alignment, as if you’re doing exactly what you’re meant to be doing? What challenges have given you gifts that you long to use to help others? What skills, strengths, talents, or knowledge are you most proud of? What’s unique or notable about you? What’s your most thrilling success or proudest achievement? What comes to you so naturally that you hardly think of it as a skill? What strengths are you excited to strengthen? What do you want to learn in the next phase of your career? When you’re complete, look over your list and highlight key threads. If you have a hard time recognizing your strengths, I encourage you to ask a trusted friend or two to answer the questions above for you. You might also take online strengths assessments to help you discover strengths that you’ve taken for granted. Keep in mind that these assessments are not static judgments of who you’ll always be; they are snapshots of who you are right now. Your answers will likely change as you grow. Also, although these assessments might give you insights into which work-life paths might suit you, please know that they cannot offer conclusive answers about your career. Here are a few that my clients and I have benefitted from: VIA Character Strengths Test. This free test ranks twenty-four strengths in order from strongest to weakest. It does not give nearly as much detail as the next two, but it is free and only takes five minutes. Clifton StrengthsFinder. The Top 5 Clifton Strengths assessment shows your top five strengths and offers a detailed description of each. Golden Personality Profiler. This is an in-depth assessment of several aspects of your personality and is similar to the Myers-Briggs. May you take joy in all that you are. Wishing you a lifetime of thanksgiving.   [1] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2020.) [2]

Your Next Experiment “Caminante no hay camino. Se hace el camino al andar.” —Juan Manuel Serrat sings this in Cantares, one of my all-time favorite songs. In English, the quote is translated as: “Traveler, there is no path. We make the path by walking.” This quote is attributed to many sources, including the First Peoples of Australia.   I invite you to ask yourself a question: What parts of your life do you love the most? This might be a child, a partner, a pet, a job, a creative pursuit, or something else. Then, ask yourself: How did this person or thing that I love so much come into my life? Imagine yourself going back in time, trying to trace each step that brought this beloved part of your life into your life. You’ll probably notice that while there may have been several intentional steps, there were probably many other chance occurrences that you could not have planned for. For example, I love my work as a city councilor, but joining city council was never in my plan. Instead, one day in April, 2023, I received a random text from my city council president, telling me that my precinct councilor was resigning and asking if I wanted to do it. Lots of smaller interactions during previous campaigns had led her to think I might be interested. Initially, I said no. I anticipated—and my predictions proved true—that being on council city would be a huge time commitment with basically no financial compensation, and that it would slow down my plans to bring my book into the world. I tried to find someone else to take the role, but everyone I asked said no. And, so after tuning in to my inner guidance and asking my soon-to-be colleagues on council lots of questions, I realized I wanted to do it. One thing that helped me get clear was something I’d learned from years of career coaching, which is that clarity is an emergent phenomenon. Emergence is the process by which something we could not have foreseen and that is greater than the sum of its parts arises from multiple small steps and interactions. Just like breathing, clarity is not an endpoint, a destination, or something we check off a grocery list. Getting clear about what to do next is an iterative practice—we notice the possibilities around us, do experiments, have conversations, try things out, gather information, and choose our next steps. Sometimes the information we gather tells us to keep going. Other times, we learn things that call us to pivot, choose a new direction, and try again. By repeating this process over and over again, some doors close that we had hoped would stay open, and other possibilities emerge that we might never have expected. When we resist emergence—as most of us do when we’re deeply invested in a plan or afraid what might happen if things go awry—we can overlook new opportunities, slow down the process, and feel more distress along the way. Of course, we long for certainty, perfect solutions, and an end to all the decision-making. Emergence can be uncomfortable. In fact, many facilitators call the twisty-turny path between divergence and convergence—between seeing possibilities and making decisions—the groan zone because we so often feel confused, impatient, bored, scared, and other flavors of discomfort during this phase. When we view our choices through a lens of finality and try to find the best, perfect, or final answer we are more likely to languish in doubt, indecision, and procrastination. But when we recognize the inevitability of uncertainty and approach each step as an experiment, it becomes easier to engage decision-making with a sense of play, the closing of doors can feel less painful, and new possibilities become easier to see. Everything is an experiment. We cannot know with certainty where any step will lead us. But we can learn from what happens. Conducting experiments is like flirting with a path. First, you say hello. Then, you go on a date. Perhaps that turns into something more. Perhaps not. Either way, you get to know the path, step by step, better before you make a long term commitment. You wade in rather than diving in. You test-drive the car before you buy it. If it works out, awesome! And, if it doesn’t, it will probably feel pretty disappointing. But you’re building skills of experimentation and learning along the way rather than staying stuck. And what still amazes me is that when we approach life as an experiment, we don’t just explore known possibilities; we create new ones. Experimentation builds momentum. One thing leads to another, and we discover opportunities that we could have never anticipated. Now, I invite you to play with a practice that I’ve come to rely on for choosing next steps and experiments called Satisfaction Scaling. One: Satisfaction Scaling Choose a goal that you want to move toward or a need that you want to focus on. Ask yourself—On a scale from zero to ten (on which zero is not at all satisfied and ten is completely satisfied without being judgy or grade-y), how satisfied are you with how well you're currently living this goal or fulfilling this need? Sense what number feels right in your body. Ask yourself—What has brought me to this number, as opposed to a zero? Why are you a one or a three or a five instead of a zero? Notice what’s already working to help you reach your goal. Write down what arises. Ask yourself: What might be my next toward a ten, my next experiment? It’s important to acknowledge that often, the choices that we have aren’t great ones. We need systemic change to create a world in which all people have better choices and easier access to meeting our needs.And, at the same time, we reclaim a bit of our personal power when we consciously choose a next step, no matter how small. So if reaching toward a ten feels completely unattainable, I invite you to get curious about what teeny, tiny step you might take in the direction of meeting your needs. If your energy is at two now, how might you shift to a four or a five? If it’s at five, how might you get to an eight? Choose a next step that feels doable, even if it seems negligible. You might be surprised about what a big difference a tiny change can make. After you identify a next step, ask yourself—What number do I imagine I’ll be at after taking this step? Imagine yourself at this new number and notice any insights that arise. If you’d like to identify more steps toward meeting your need or fulfilling your goal, repeat the process. You may come up with steps all the way to a ten. Or, you may feel done before then. Stop when you feel complete. Finally, make a plan to take your next step, to do your next experiment, breaking it down into a small enough chunk that you can commit to taking it this week.

What You Really Need “We have been raised to fear . . . our deepest cravings. And the fear of our deepest cravings keeps them suspect, keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, and leads us to settle for . . . many facets of our own oppression.”[1] —Audre Lorde, The Uses of the Erotic   I used to think it was indulgent and selfish to acknowledge my needs and desires, especially when so many people in the world suffer so much more than I do. I grew up with few models of self-love and care, and I was painfully aware of my white privilege from an early age. In my teens and early twenties, my reluctance to take good care of myself and my white guilt mixed together into a brew of savior mentality. I showed up in less-than-helpful ways and lived on the brink of burnout. Luckily, life sent me a wake up call at a relatively young age. My moment of truth came while lying on my bed in Oaxaca, Mexico, thirty-six weeks pregnant. I’d just returned from an appointment with my midwife. The hospitals in Oaxaca had extremely high rates of medical intervention in births, and I wanted a home birth. My midwife told me that my baby was breech and that my son would need to turn soon in order to have the birth I was hoping for. Lying on my bed, I placed my hands on my belly and asked my baby what he needed. I sensed his response immediately—Settle yourself. I’d been through a lot in the year leading up to that moment. My partner, who was undocumented at the time, was racially profiled while driving to work, and six months later, he was deported to Mexico. I had transferred with my job with the hotel workers’ union from New Haven, Connecticut to Phoenix, Arizona to be closer to him. A few months after that, I discovered I was pregnant, and I spent my pregnancy bouncing back and forth across borders, trying to figure out where we’d live next. Finally, at seven-months-pregnant, I moved to Oaxaca, Mexico. With my hands on my belly, I realized that to be the mother I wanted to be for my baby, I needed to feel settled in my body, which meant doing many things differently. I promised my son that I would learn to take better care of myself, and that started my journey to share this with you today. Now, it wasn’t an immediate jump from A to B—from neglecting my needs to honoring them at all times—and I am definitely still a work in progress, but I am so grateful to my son for the wake-up call and for starting me on this path toward aligning my life with my deepest needs and values. So, now that you know a bit of my story, let’s turn to you. How would you describe your relationship with your needs? When people ask you what you need or want, do you know exactly how to answer? Or do you struggle to respond? And, if you do know what you need, do you prioritize your needs? Would you like some acknowledgement of how hard it can be to meet your needs, with all of the demands that are on you and the lack of support we receive in our splintered society? Or would you like some acknowledgement that no one ever taught you to meet your needs well? One reason I see that many people struggle to understand and prioritize their needs is attachment wounds. So, before we go further, I want to take you on a brief detour to explore attachment theory and how babies learn to honor their needs—or not. Although most of us come into this world with the capacity to express whether or not our needs are met, we are not born with the ability to meet our needs. Instead, we rely on our caregivers to teach us to meet our needs. Here’s how we ideally develop the ability to identify our needs and feel safe, seen, soothed, and able to trust ourselves and others, an ability known as secure attachment:[2] Secure Attachment Let’s imagine that there’s a baby. The baby wakes up after a nap and starts crying. The caregiver comes into the room, coos lovingly to the baby, picks the baby up, and rocks the baby back and forth. The baby stops crying. The baby realizes, in perhaps not so many words: “Oh! That feels good! I felt lonely, and now I’m held. I needed attention.” After a moment, the baby starts to squirm with discomfort. The caregiver checks the baby’s diaper, realizes it’s wet, and changes the diaper. The baby realizes, consciously or unconsciously: “Oh! That feels good! I felt wet, and I needed to be dry!” After a few more moments, the baby begins to cry again. The baby hasn’t eaten for a couple of hours, so the caregiver offers the baby a breast or bottle. The baby eats, feels sated, and realizes: "Oh! I felt hungry, and now I feel full. I needed food!” In the ideal scenario, we humans develop the ability to honor our needs through being in relationship with people who attune to our needs and offer solutions that match. Babies develop secure attachment when caregivers consistently and effectively attune to their needs. However, if babies don’t receive attunement and repair consistently enough, they are less likely to learn to interpret, trust, or effectively respond to what they feel and need, and they are more likely to develop coping strategies including avoidant attachment and preoccupied attachment (also known as anxious or ambivalent attachment).[3] Let’s explore each of these now. Avoidant Attachment Let's now imagine that the same baby cries, but the caregiver consistently does not attune to or match the baby's needs. The caregiver may be hostile toward or critical of the baby or absent for reasons such as an illness or preoccupation with work or other responsibilities. The parent may also appear involved but only become excited about a shared interest with the child or the child’s high performance. This baby still experiences feelings of distress from their unmet needs, but it seems pointless to the baby to even pay attention when there’s nothing they can do to meet their needs. To make their needs manageable and turn down the pain of consistently unmet needs, they learn to ignore their body’s signals, turn away from their longings, act as if they’re getting what they need, or convince themselves that they don’t need anything at all. They may develop a tendency to flee the right hemisphere and the parts of the brain that signal unmet needs and to become highly cognitive and task-oriented instead. If you developed an avoidant attachment style, you may now have a harder time identifying your feelings, needs, and desires or even relating to the idea that you have needs in the first place. You may feel a sense of embarrassment or disgust when considering your longings, look down upon others for their messy emotions, feel irritated at the hassle of having to add your needs to your to-do list, or think you should need nothing at all.[4] Because avoidantly attached people had to rely on themselves to meet their own needs, they  tend to believe that other people won’t or can’t help them, that they shouldn’t trust other people, that they can only rely on themselves, or that their vulnerability might be used against them. In order to protect themselves from being hurt again, they often refuse help from others. Avoidantly attached people may show up as the most competent person in the room and become highly respected yet lonely leaders. Preoccupied Attachment Now, let’s imagine another baby. This time, the caregiver occasionally attunes to the baby and matches their response to the baby’s needs, but most of the time, the caregiver offers the wrong thing at the wrong time. For example, the baby cries out of loneliness, but the caregiver gives them a bottle or the baby feels overtired, but the caregiver sits them down in front of the tv. Preoccupied attachment often emerges when a primary caregiver relies on the child to meet the caregiver’s emotional or physical needs, and the child learns that their needs are more likely to be met if their caregiver's needs are met. As a result, the child learns to be preoccupied with others’ feelings and needs, prioritize other peoples' needs before their own, or hide their own feelings and needs in an attempt to please others. Preoccupied-attached people often do not trust themselves and can develop a pattern of seeking advice from others rather than following their own inner guidance. This lack of trust sometimes develops because the caregiver expected the child to handle adult responsibilities, so the child expects this of themself as well, but no matter how hard they try, the child doesn't have the power to meet all their needs effectively. As a result, the preoccupied child is likely to blame their inability to meet their needs on themselves and thus not trust themselves. Additionally, due to the fact that even when the child’s needs were met, the child came to expect that their needs soon enough would not be met, so preoccupied-attached people often learn to anticipate disappointment and feel a sense of foreboding, like something’s about to go wrong even when things are good. As adults, they may say “yeah, but” after sharing good things that are happening or explain why the good things aren't as good as they could be. They might be on high-alert to every little feeling and struggle to soothe themselves effectively. To avoid the pain of rejection or disappointment, preoccupied people sometimes appear to become avoidant. Although I had learned about attachment theory before, I didn’t really get it until taking Carmen Spagnola’s course, Secure, through her online membership site, the Numinous Network. For a deeper dive into healing attachment wounds, I highly recommend taking her course or reading her Medium article, Portrait of A Marriage (Yes, It’s Mine). To get a clearer picture of how these attachment strategies show up in your life, I recommend taking these free assessments: dianepooleheller.com/attachment-test/ and yourpersonality.net/attachment. You can also take these assessments repeatedly over time to track your healing.

What You Feel “White supremacy has used the suppression of feelings to hold down communities. If you block the pain, you’ll likely block the feelings needed to fight back against oppression.” —Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement   Your body is your compass. I invite you to imagine that you’ve just been dropped into the middle of a vast wilderness. What do you want to make sure you have in your backpack? Sure, water, snacks, and bear/snake/tiger repellant would be great, but your number one tool, by far, is a compass. Without it, you’d wander in circles until your supplies ran out. On the path toward creating a life of justice and joy, there are many moments where we feel like we’ve been unceremoniously dumped in a vast wilderness. Lost. Stuck. Hurting. When the stakes feel high, it can be hard to discern which step to take next, let alone see possible paths forward. And yet, we each already have an internal compass. Beneath all the swirling thoughts, there is an inner wisdom that can help us discern our next steps even when we don’t know our final destination. Our bodies are extraordinarily sensitive navigational systems. When we come to a fork in the road on the path through life, our bodies offer sensations that indicate which direction is a yes, which is a no, and which is a maybe. Like tuning forks, our bodies say, “Don’t go that way. Go this way. Turn that way. Yup. Nope. Not yet. We need more information. Nope. Yup. Maybe.” Although your conscious mind may not know how to explain or justify your body’s signals—and may not yet even be consciously aware of them, your body is nevertheless processing and communicating all sorts of information below your conscious awareness. Every cell in our bodies is continuously tracking what’s happening in its own way and relaying information back to our brains. But what if you don’t quite trust your body’s signals? What if you feel dread about doing something that you know is good for you? Or what if you know that you need to get more comfortable with discomfort? Our bodies’ messages are often not simple. Discomfort doesn’t always mean stop. And comfort doesn’t necessarily mean go. Our sensations and emotions are information.[1] If you feel tension, constriction, or other uncomfortable sensations, your body is trying to tell you something. If you feel excitement, peace, or deep engagement, your body is sending a signal. Our feelings are like spokespeople for our needs. But it often takes practice to decipher the messages. Our first task is to notice what we feel without jumping to immediate reactions or conclusions. Then, after we notice we feel a feeling, our next task is to get curious about what we really need, which we’ll focus on in the next episode. For now, in this episode we’ll focus on how to discern what we feel in the first place and why noticing and discerning what we feel can be so hard. Why We Might Struggle to Feel & What Happens When We Don’t Perhaps you learned at an early age to negate your body’s signals. Maybe someone insisted that you stop crying when you felt sad, that you were fine when you felt sick, that you were making things up when you felt grossed out, or that your emotions or desires were destructive or irrational.[2] To protect yourself from rejection and meet your needs, you may have made unconscious agreements with yourself to not feel certain emotions, to ignore or suppress these feelings if they ever arose, or to believe that some feelings were wrong, weird, meaningless, dirty, excessive, or shameful. As a result, you might say that you’re anxious when you actually feel angry or that you’re frustrated when you actually feel sad. If your body holds a lot of unhealed trauma, it can feel excruciating to tune in to your body, so you might dissociate and flee to the apparent safety of your brain’s left hemisphere, that fix-it part that tries so hard to help you get over the pain. We each have our own unique styles of numbing. Even if you were raised by the most loving parents, you may ignore your body in an effort to cope with the pain of injustice, oppression, and collective trauma. It can seem like an indulgence to dwell in heartache, or you may not see the point of hanging out where it hurts. It may seem to make more sense to head straight into action instead. And yet, emotion is energy that wants to move through our bodies; think e-motion. When we ignore or try to suppress our bodies’ messages, the energy doesn’t go away. Instead, it can get stuck inside us, the stress accumulating. In an effort to receive our attention, our bodies may amplify the sensations—neck pain, fatigue, back pain, irritable bowels, headaches—or intensify our emotions—irritability, anxiety, despair, overwhelm, depression. Let me be clear, however, someone can be in absolute alignment with their inner guidance and still be disabled or sick. When we disregard our sensations and emotions, we miss out on the wealth of intelligence from our hearts, guts, and bodies. We become more likely to react in ways that don’t serve us or have a harder time trusting ourselves and others. And because the same physiological receptors in our bodies that feel pain also feel pleasure, when we vacate our bodies, we dull our joy. To discern what’s most important, what we long for, and what next steps might meet our needs, our task is to turn toward our bodies with warm, gentle attunement and try to put words to what we feel. Let’s discuss why naming our bodies’ sensations and emotions can be so helpful. Naming Feelings Soothes the Nervous System & Points Toward Clarity In the 1960s, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, Eugene Gendlin, set out to discover what made some types of therapy more effective than others. After researching many methodologies, Gendlin eventually discovered that the most significant factor was not what the therapists were doing at all. The most significant factor contributing to healing was something the clients were doing. The therapy clients who transformed their lives were the ones who were able to bring awareness to the hard-to-articulate sensations in their bodies—what Gendlin later named their felt sense—and to slowly give words to these feelings. Here’s part of why that is: Although research shows that most people don’t believe that naming feelings helps them feel better, fMRI imaging shows that when people find a word that matches their physical sensations and emotions, their amygdala—the emotional center of our brains—becomes less active and their nervous systems settle.[3] The body is continuously processing sensory and emotional information and sending raw emotional charges first to the amygdala and then to a part of the brain called the insula, which is responsible for matching emotions to words.[4] When the insula finds a word that matches what we feel, the amygdala and the rest of the body can experience a sense of soothing because the message has been received. However, if the insula is inactive, as it often is when people dissociate or are recalling trauma, or if we simply don’t know words that match what we feel, the body can be left carrying the message and stay in a state of ongoing anxiety, sometimes for decades.[5] We might not even know that we’re feeling a certain way until we receive resonance. For example, Sarah Peyton coined the term alarmed aloneness to describe the feeling we experience when our cortisol levels and heart rate elevate after someone important to us disappears, either physically or emotionally. Just being able to name alarmed aloneness helps me feel a settledness in my body, one that was harder for me to access before I learned this term. When we give words to our subtle sensations and emotions, it's as though we let our bodies know that we’re listening and our bodies can feel heard and relax. And, what’s more, when we name what we feel, we more easily access a plethora of information that helps us make sense of challenging experiences, get clear about what we need and want, discern our next steps, and communicate more clearly with others.[6] As Eugene Gendlin’s research demonstrates and as I’ve seen with my clients, listening to and naming our bodies’ messages is a skill that almost everyone can develop. So back to that question—What if I don’t know if I can trust my body’s feelings? Our task is to not necessarily trust or not trust our feelings but, rather, to pay attention and then get curious about what our bodies are trying to communicate. Many of our feelings arise from habitual responses, which can feel like urges or pulls, like itches that want to be scratched, like we’re compelled to do something. Sometimes, our habits pull us toward behaviors that would meet our needs well. Sometimes, they do not. What most of us do, most of the time, when we feel a feeling is that we react immediately, almost automatically following the sensation’s impulse to move toward or away from a certain direction. And this can lead to actions we later regret or don’t quite understand. In contrast, radical discernment is the practice of shifting from those unconscious reactions to conscious choice. Rather than impulsively following our sensations, with radical discernment, we become aware of the sensations that arise within us, and take them as cues to pause, discern what we need and what our situation needs, and consciously choose our response. When we practice noticing what we feel, over time, we cultivate the ability to discern between the urges of habit and the deep-bellied, matter-of-fact yeses, nos, and maybes that arise from a deeper sense of calling. And, bear in mind, it’s not always either/or—your wanting to do something can arise from more than one place within you, from both habit and a more true longing or calling. In the next episode,

Self-Resonance: How “When people change the way they speak to themselves, they change the way their brain works.” - Sarah Peyton   In the last episode, I introduced the concept of resonance—that experience of relaxation we feel when we’re accompanied and truly understood by another—and I shared how self-resonance lays the soil in which all the other practices of radical discernment can take root. When we accompany ourselves with warm, precise attunement, it becomes so much easier to soothe our fear and pain, decipher our bodies’ messages, and chart a path that honors our needs and our values. In this podcast, I’ll introduce you to three fundamental aspects of self-resonance—self-warmth, self-accompaniment, and self-attunement, and six practices to help you cultivate self-resonance. As you read, I invite you to get curious about how you are or are not already practicing these, because The more awareness we bring to how we treat ourselves, the more choice we have to treat ourselves well. Aspect One: Self-Warmth I invite you to bring to mind someone, real or imaginary, who is exquisitely capable of offering you warmth and care. They see you through kind eyes, speak to you in a caring tone of voice, and if you would like them to, put an arm around your shoulders or hold your hand. You feel your body relax as they offer you love and hold you in unconditional positive regard. This is the feeling of warmth.  Aspect Two: Self-Accompaniment In his book, Narrative Medicine, Lakota-Cherokee shaman and psychiatrist Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona writes that the dominant culture’s focus on individual healing is a historically new phenomenon. In shamanic traditions, healing almost always takes place within community. Mehl-Madrona writes, Beyond any technique, relationships are what heal.[1] Trauma usually occurs in relationship, so healing ideally happens in relationship too. Accompaniment means to come beside or to go along with. Resonance requires a sense of accompaniment, the sense someone we trust is with us. We humans are relational creatures who need accompaniment from others to feel whole, and so, ideally, we receive resonance from other people we trust—friend, partner, family member, skilled therapist, coach, or practice buddy. If it feels hard to let ourselves be loved by other humans, we can also receive a sense of accompaniment from companion animals, trees, rivers, landscapes, other aspects of nature, songs, ancestors, or a sense of a greater spirit or the divine. We can also learn to accompany ourselves. Aspect Three: Self-Attunement To attune means to bring into harmony. Attuning to ourselves or another is like adjusting the radio dial until we find the signal we’re looking for. To find that signal, we focus our soft attention with genuine curiosity and ask gentle, open-ended questions to understand what is happening for us, without aiming to change the situation. We know we’ve found the signal we’re seeking when the other person or the part of ourselves we’re attuning to responds with Yes, that’s it! Now that we have the three aspects of self-resonance, let’s explore six practices for cultivating self-resonance. Before we go, I want to remind you that when people hold a lot of unhealed trauma, attempting to practice self-resonance can bring up painful feelings. Warmth can melt us out of a numb, frozen state, and sometimes, that can feel uncomfortable or scary. If that happens for you as you experiment with these practices, please take care of yourself. You might pause, scan the room for safety, wiggle your hands and feet, or do whatever else you need to return to a more comfortable state. You might also seek out a trauma-informed therapist or another professional who can help you cultivate a sense of inner safety before you dive in alone. It can be hard for us humans to offer ourselves resonance until someone else models resonance for us. Practice One: Turning Toward Yourself The Arabic word for heart is Qalb, which means to turn. Accompanying ourselves requires that we turn our heart’s attention toward ourselves. From now on, I invite you to pay attention—When you notice that you don’t feel so great, I invite you to get curious about whether it feels like your heart is energetically turning away from or turning toward the part of yourself that is struggling. If you sense that your heart is turning away from yourself, try getting gently curious about what might help you turn toward yourself. Ask yourself: What might help me welcome and turn toward this part of myself that is struggling? Listen for what arises, without pressuring yourself to shift in any given direction.  Practice Two: Imagining Giving & Receiving Warmth I invite you to imagine that there are two parts of yourself—1) an emotional part that feels all your emotions, such as sadness, fear, loneliness, confusion, anger, disgust, and even happiness, and 2) a second, resonating part of yourself who accompanies the emotional part and offers warm attunement. Self-resonance can feel either like 1) seeing through the eyes of your emotional self and receiving warmth and attunement from your resonant self or 2) seeing through the eyes of our resonant self and offering warmth and attunement to your emotional self. For years, I only practiced the latter, strongly identifying with the loving, resonant witness, because I believe that that’s who we are at our core. Over the years, however, I’ve found that many clients have an easier time starting with imagining themselves as their emotional selves and in their minds’ eyes, receiving love from a resonant self witness or even from a competent protector such as a future self, ancestor, or spiritual being.[2] I invite you to play with trying to access these two perspectives now. I’ll guide you. To begin, I invite you to imagine someone who you trust to offer you warmth and care. This may be someone from your family line, a caretaker from earlier in your life, a friend, partner, teacher, mentor, companion animal, character from a story or book, famous person, spirit or deity, ancestor, or another being from the more than human realm. Imagine that this being is beaming upon you radiant, glowing care and affection, and notice how it feels to be held in their loving gaze. If this feels challenging, please know that you’re not alone. When we haven’t received much warm accompaniment from other people, of course it can be hard to imagine receiving warm accompaniment from other people. For now, I invite you to approach this practice with a sense of experimentation, knowing that it can take repeated practice before we’re able to start imagining and experiencing receiving love. If you’re able to feel this sense of warmth and care, I invite you to linger a bit in the sensation, allowing yourself to bask in their love for you. Then, slowly, I invite you to play with imagining that you are looking through the eyes of this being who is shining the light of this warmth and care upon you. Imagine that you are this being who loves you so much. Notice what happens in your body when you do that, soaking in any pleasant sensations you feel. Then, slowly, I invite you to allow this image to fade. Now, I invite you to bring to mind someone you experience warm, uncomplicated love for, such as a child, companion animal, dear friend, beloved place, or something or someone else that you love. Imagine turning your attention toward this beloved being in your mind’s eye, welcoming them with your presence and shining a light of affection upon them. See if you can sense in your body the warmth and care you feel for this beloved being, and notice where you feel these sensations in your body. Experiment with amplifying the warm sensations, turning up the volume., and imagine absorbing them, as if your cells were tiny sponges. If you notice feelings of pain or sadness, see if you can imagine holding the part of you that is hurting with tenderness and care. If it feels relatively easy to access this sense of fondness and affection for another, I invite you to play with swapping out the image of the one you love and replacing it with an image of yourself, shining the light of warmth and care upon yourself. Notice what happens in your body when you do that, not trying to push anything, taking any pleasant sensations you feel. Then, when you feel complete, slowly allow the images to fade away, and bring your attention back to the present moment. As you go throughout your days, I invite you to keep experimenting with embodying your resonant self, offering warmth to your emotional self, and with embodying your emotional self, receiving warmth from your loving, resonant self. You might even toggle between the two perspectives, choosing whichever feels most supportive at the moment. Practice Three: Greeting Yourself by Your Name We start most conversations with other people by saying hello, and we deserve the same care and respect from ourselves.[3] When you notice an uncomfortable feeling arise within you, rather than ignoring or trying to change how you feel, experiment with greeting the feeling like an old friend or a young child who you love, offering an open-hearted hello, and greeting yourself by your name—like, Oh, hello, Katherine! Greeting ourselves by name can help us do what development psychologist Dr. Robert Kegan called the subject-object shift.[4] We shift from being subject to our experience and lacking choice to gaining the observational distance that helps us consciously choose our response. Practice Four: Soothing Self-Touch Back when I taught childbirth classes, one of my favorite lessons was about oxytocin, adrenalin, and how love acts as an antidote to fear. Here’s what I told my pregnant clients:  There are two major hormones at play in birth: oxytocin and adrenaline.

Self-Resonance “We are all rather like tree rings and shell patterns in that what has happened to us leaves a permanent record. The goal of trauma work, therefore, as I see it, is not to erase or cure but rather to expand and include and grow larger than whatever has happened to us.”[1] – Francesca Mason Boring   It Feels Good to be Heard One day when my son, Kai, was six, he and his friend were playing with a balloon at a birthday party. Suddenly, Kai’s friend’s three-year-old sister, let’s call her Gabi, ran crying out of the room. A few minutes later, I stood up and went to the bedroom, where she sat on the bed crying. Gabi’s mother was kneeling in front of her, pleading with her to stop crying, and her grandfather was standing in a corner with his guitar, strumming an upbeat song in an attempt to cheer her up. Meanwhile, Gabi was seemingly oblivious to all their cajoling. With her mother’s consent, I sat down beside Gabi and asked what was wrong. Between sobs, she told me that the boys had taken her balloon. It wasn’t their balloon. It was her balloon. And they hadn’t asked for it. I looked Gabi in the eyes and said, “That’s really sad, isn’t it? Are you really sad? Do you really want your balloon back?” Gabi turned and looked at me with a puzzled expression, as if she was surprised to finally be heard. Then she heaved a huge sigh, put her head on my shoulder, and slowly stopped crying. “Yeah,” she said, seeming relieved that someone had asked her what she needed without trying to convince her to feel differently. After a moment, we stood up, hand in hand, and went to ask the boys to give her the balloon back. They promptly did. What happened between Gabi and me that day was resonance. What is Resonance The word resonance comes from the Latin word resonare, meaning to sound back. Resonance is what happens between two people when one person brings their warm, curious attention to the other in an attempt to understand them, and the second person responds with—Yes, that's it! When someone shows that they truly get you, and your body relaxes and responds with, Yes! that's resonance. Our human bodies vibrate at different frequencies depending on our emotions, and when we resonate with another person, it’s as though our emotional worlds vibrate together. Resonance is compassion-plus. Compassion means to suffer with. Self-compassion researcher Kristin Neff identifies three components of self-compassion: 1) mindfulness—an awareness of what’s happening without trying to change it, 2) self-kindness, 3) a recognition of our common humanity and how we are not alone in our pain.[2] We can feel compassion toward someone else without them even knowing it, but as Sarah Peyton writes in Your Resonant Self, “we cannot be resonant with a person unless we are being relational—resonance is a two-person experience. Someone else can’t simply declare a resonance with us. The receivers are the ones who get to say whether or not someone else’s presence or language feels resonant”[3] Although I had been deliberately practicing resonance toward myself, my clients, and my loved ones for nearly a decade before discovering Sarah Peyton’s work, I hadn’t been calling it resonance. I’m so grateful to Sarah Peyton for naming the importance of resonance and teaching the neuroscience behind it. This precise language has helped me become even more precise in my practice. Resonance can happen verbally or nonverbally, and we can receive resonance from a part of ourselves, another person, an animal companion, a song, nature, or any being in the more-than-human realm. Today, I want to talk about self-resonance, the practice and skill of offering resonance to ourselves. Rather than practicing self-resonance, when most of us encounter a challenging situation, we ignore, criticize, dismiss, negate, or diminish what they feel; try to fix what’s wrong before truly understanding what’s going on; or tell ourselves there must be something wrong with ourselves or others. In contrast, resonance looks like warmly attuning to and deeply understanding what we or another feel, think, and need, even if we don’t like what we or the other person is doing and are hoping we’ll change behavior. Self-resonance creates the inner sense of safety we need to hear our inner guidance, discern what we need, listen to what’s really going on for other people, and choose next steps that honor our needs. Resonance is like tending the soil within us so that all the other seeds of radical discernment can take root. Before we explore how to cultivate self-resonance, which we’ll do in the next chapter, it’s important to discuss what makes self-resonance challenging—personal and collective trauma—and how resonance heals the brain. We’re about to talk a bit about trauma. If you start feeling overwhelmed as you listen, please pause and care for yourself. You might scan your room for safety, move your arms and legs, turn your body from side to side, or drink some water. Becoming overwhelmed can be a sign that seeking support from a trauma-informed therapist or healing practitioner could be helpful. Why Self-Resonance Can Be Challenging Let’s start with a definition of trauma. Although most people think of trauma as a difficult event, trauma is not an event.[4] We can go through difficult experiences, feel difficult emotions, and yet not be traumatized. So then, what is trauma? There are many definitions. My favorite comes from Sarah Peyton. In her book, Your Resonant Self Workbook, Peyton writes: “[Trauma is] the experience of something difficult, during or after which we are not accompanied by warm and precise understanding, either from ourselves or from others.”[5] In other words, trauma is being too alone during challenging events or circumstances. These events and circumstances could include single, acute events like an accident, attack, or sudden loss; ongoing, complex circumstances such as being raised by emotionally unavailable or unpredictable parents; or systemic oppressions such as poverty, racism, or transphobia. Unhealed trauma can also be passed down through generations within a family, workplace, or community. If we’re lucky, we are accompanied by someone who accompanies us with warm understanding through our difficult experience. If we’re not so lucky, the trauma lingers. After experiencing a traumatic event or circumstance, our amygdala—the small, almond-shaped emotional center deep in the brain—stores the unconscious memories as if they were happening in the present time.[6] From then on, the amygdala constantly and automatically scans our present-day experiences for similarities to the traumatic situation.[7] When something happens that reminds us—usually unconsciously—of the trauma, the amygdala sets off an alarm and activates the rest of the body-brain to react as if the traumatic circumstances were happening now. In an attempt to protect ourselves and the people we love from the event ever happening again, we humans develop coping strategies such as hypervigilance, aggression, distrusting ourselves and others, disconnecting from ourselves and others, not holding ourselves or others accountable, isolation, misinterpreting other’s actions, not holding boundaries, workaholism, overthinking, overplanning, power-hoarding, perfectionism, replicating oppressive behaviors that don’t align with our values, blaming others, controlling our environments, managing other peoples’ lives, or using alcohol, drugs, nicotine, sugar, screens, food, gambling, shopping, staying busy, partying, sex, spiritual practices, or other behaviors or substances to numb our pain. One of the most common coping strategies that people form in an attempt to keep themselves safe are unconscious contracts—agreements or promises that we make without full awareness, usually to ourselves, to act or not act in a certain way. For instance, many people form unconscious contracts with themselves not to offer themselves compassion until the world’s problems are solved, believing that compassion is something that should be reserved for others in a down-power position such as young children, hurt animals, the planet, or people with less systemic privilege. Many others promise themselves that they will not to make themselves vulnerable in order to protect themselves from future disappointment or rejection. And, of course, vulnerability is often required in order to receive and offer ourselves resonance. Although our coping strategies make absolute sense to the part of us that is trying to protect us, these strategies can be hard to understand and wreak havoc in our lives. Of course we try to convince the part of ourselves who’s acting up not to feel, think, or act in ways that don’t meet our current needs well. And so, if you find yourself feeling feelings, thinking thoughts, or reacting in ways that you don’t understand, it may be a sign that you’re touching an old trauma and that a part of you is trying to protect you. One coping strategy that I find many highly-functioning, high-achieving people revert to—myself included—and which makes resonance challenging, is left-shifting, as in shifting to the left hemisphere of the brain. As neuroscientist, Iain McGilchrist, writes in his book, The Master and His Emissary, the left and right hemispheres of the brain are very different. Whereas the right hemisphere is the relational brain which perceives complexity and systems in their wholeness, the left hemisphere is the instrumental, get-it-done brain, which separates things into parts and compares them to each other. The brain’s body map lives in the right hemisphere, so to be able to discern the messages from our bodies, we must be able to access the right hemisphere. And resonance arises from the right hemisphere as well.

I invite you to ask yourself this question: When you feel hungry, angry, lonely, tired, sore, stressed, or sad, how do you respond? Do you ignore how you feel, bypass your body's signals, continue to power through your day, or lecture yourself about what you should be doing differently to feel better? Or do you approach your uncomfortable feelings as a cue to pause, get curious about what you need, and choose a step toward meeting your needs? Or do you do some of each, sometimes tending to how you feel and sometimes ignoring yourself? In Episodes Six and Seven, I’ve shared with you the power of pausing to transform old habits and make choices that meet your needs. If you’re curious to learn more, I recommend listening to those episodes. Today, I want to build on the practice of pausing by encouraging you to be on the lookout for a new set of cues and to pause when you notice them. These cues can be summed up with the acronym HALT(S). The HALT(S) practice has its roots in the recovery movement, and its premise is simple: We humans are more likely to make choices that don’t serve us well when we don’t feel good. Traditionally, the acronym is HALT—hungry, angry, lonely, and tired. I add the letter “S” to represent sore, stressed, and sad. Here’s the practice: Throughout your days, pay attention to how you feel, and if you notice that you feel hungry, angry, lonely, tired, sore, stressed, or sad, take it as a cue to halt. Pause. Then, get curious. Ask yourself: What small steps am I able and willing to take to feel better now? Then take whatever steps feel doable. You may have time to close your computer, go for a long walk, eat a nourishing meal, phone a friend, or get your journal out and reflect on why you’re feeling what you’re feeling. Or you may be in the middle of a busy work day and only have a moment to acknowledge your feelings and needs, and may need to wait to tend to your needs until later that day or week. If you’re feeling pretty crummy (like a 1, 2, or 3 on a scale where 10 is feeling the best and 0 is feeling the worst), get curious about what you might do to shift to a 5 or 6. If you’re at a 6, get curious about what might help you shift to an 8 or a 9. And, of course, if 10 feels easy enough, go for that. But don’t go for perfection. Just stay curious about what might help you feel a little bit better, and take whatever steps feel doable now. To help remind you to pause, you might grab a sticky note, write “HALT(S)” on it, and put it somewhere you’ll see it. Then, pay attention, and take notes about what helps you feel better. Imagine that you are backpacking through life, and keep a list of the basics you need in your pack to feel nourished enough. I invite you to start that list now. If you’d like, grab your journal and write down a list of the basics that help you feel not bad. As you learn more about what helps you feel nourished, energized, and supported, add any new practices to your list. Make sure to stay focused on the basics. We can only carry so much comfortably in our packs, and it’s important not to weigh ourselves down with too many must-dos. Your list may also include some limits you place on yourself—like not staying up past a certain hour or not scrolling the internet longer than is good for you. If part of you resists or rebels against these limits, I invite you to imagine that you are reparenting yourself—taking responsibility for what you need, offering yourself the care you may have missed out on as a little one, and setting loving limits to nurture yourself. Of course, when we set limits for little ones, they don’t always like it. They might even throw a tantrum especially when they’re feeling hungry, angry, lonely, tired, sore, stressed, or sad. But as an adult who loves them, you know they need limits. Similarly, self-care sometimes looks like stopping and saying no to ourselves. And when we practice noticing and pausing when we don’t feel good, turning our loving attention toward the struggling parts of ourselves, and choosing practical steps to nurture ourselves, we offer ourselves the love and care we so deserve.

A few years back, I took a course on organization with one of my favorite business coaches, George Kao. Until then, I had a constant sense of living for tomorrow, always hoping I’d have time to enjoy my life once I finished the current project. But seeing George’s schedule inspired me and, in retrospect, changed my life. After seeing George’s calendar, I changed my calendar from a default monthly view to a weekly view, scheduled time for breaks, a weekly review practice, responding to emails, bigger projects and goals, exercise, and friends, and color-coded each type of activity. I quickly discovered—as have many of my clients have since then—that this practice, which I came to call conscious calendaring—helped me develop a better sense of how much time I needed to get tasks done, set more realistic goals, pause throughout my days, close the computer at the end of the day, and accomplish my goals. And, I found that whereas productivity culture trains us to believe that we should do more than is humanly possible and that we should hack our way into superhumanly manufacturing more time, my conscious calendaring practice helps me get a human-sized amount of the most important stuff done. I’ve included a snapshot of a week of my calendar in the show notes. To some people, it might appear rigid or extreme to account for every moment from waking until bedtime. But I can choose to veer away from my plans if I discern that changing course better meets my needs, and I often do. And as opposed to feeling constricted, my calendar helps me experience far more ease and spaciousness than I did before. Today, I’ll share seven conscious calendaring practices that can help you integrate more pause and presence into your life and align your life with what matters most to you. But first, let’s talk about which calendar tool to use. Now, I’m not making any money off of this recommendation, and I’m loathe to be a salesperson for Google. And yet, if you’re not already using a digital calendar, I strongly recommend Google calendars. Bear in mind that my recommendation to shift from a paper calendar to an online system often elicits strong resistance in people who feel wedded to a paper system, so if you feel averse to using an online system, here’s what I’d say: If your paper system has supported you to be in right relationship with time, do what works. That said, over many years of supporting many clients to shift to an online system, I’ve discovered that nearly all of my clients find that, after some initial practice and persistence, a digital calendar helps them develop a much more choiceful and easeful relationship with time. That’s because, as opposed to a paper schedule, an online calendar allows us to easily move blocks of time around, create repeating events, shift calendar views between monthly, weekly, and other timeframes, and make other changes to reflect our current needs. Writing on paper just isn’t so iterable. And, in case you’re new to Google calendars, I’ve included a link to a great Google Calendars tutorial in the show notes. If you are completely opposed to using an online system, you might also check out Franklin Covey planners, which I’ve seen some clients have success with. Also, I encourage you to use only one calendar to hold all your commitments. As you may have experienced, storing commitments in multiple calendars can create a feeling of frazzledness and lead to dropped balls. Once you decide which calendar tool you’ll use, do the following: Set the default view to weekly, which I find works best for seeing time constraints and the regular rhythms of life. Create repeating blocks of time to reflect your repeating daily, weekly, and monthly commitments such as workplace meetings, childcare, or exercise. These repeating events will become your default calendar, so that you don’t have to recreate your calendar from scratch each week. Color-code your different types of tasks. This can make it easier for your brain to understand and interact with your various commitments. Then, integrate the following seven conscious calendaring practices into your schedule as much as feels helpful and possible. And, before I share them with you, it’s important to acknowledge that not everyone has the privilege to implement these practices to the same extent, depending on access to support and resources. If any of these practices feels impossible to you right now, please offer yourself some warmth and acknowledgement. Then, if you so choose, I invite you to get curious about which steps you might be able to integrate into your life, at least to some extent. One: Schedule Breaks Between Meetings To do our best thinking and be fully present to the people we’re currently with, we need to pause between meetings. Although many people schedule meetings to start and stop on the same hour, say at 10am, it is literally impossible to leave one meeting and enter the next precisely at the same time. If we schedule meetings to end and begin at the exact same time, we wind up either cutting short the people we’re with in the first meeting or showing up late to the next. To prevent this, I recommend scheduling fifteen minute breaks (or another amount of time that works well for you) between all meetings. You can use this time to pause and center, stretch, go to the bathroom, drink water, eat food, wrap up thoughts from one meeting, prepare for the next, or whatever else you need. Two: Schedule At Least One Meeting-Free Day Per Week My clients usually feel nervous about this change, but scheduling one meeting-free day per week is one of the most simple yet reliable practices I’ve seen for helping my clients heal from burnout. I invite you to ask yourself whether one meeting-free day per week is something that would support you, and if so, what you might do to make it happen. Three: Identify and Articulate Times That Work Best For You to Schedule Meetings Then, when scheduling a meeting, suggest specific times that would work for your schedule, instead of just asking the other person when they’re available, and before accepting an invitation, pause, check in with your calendar to see if it fits, and if not, offer an alternative. You might also create a scheduling link with meeting times that honor your parameters. Four: Group Like-Tasks (including Small Tasks) Many people drain and frazzle their energy by constantly context-switching—bouncing from one type of task to another throughout the day. An antidote to context-switching that can effectively free up energy for deeper work is grouping like-tasks—scheduling several similar tasks back-to-back rather than scattering them throughout the day. For example, I schedule private coaching clients on Thursdays and Fridays, and when I have a lot of calls to make, I schedule Phone Call Time and make the calls all at once. Five: Schedule Small Task Time Small Task Time are blocks of time for tasks that take less than fifteen minutes and are a great way to minimize context-switching. Play with scheduling Small Task Time when you have less energy for creative work such as during a post-lunch slump or at the end of the day. Six: Schedule Sleep & Bedtime When my burned-out clients come to me for help getting clear about what’s next in their careers, they often have a hard time discerning what they want or taking any steps forward until they replenish their energy and improve their sleep. Once they’re getting enough sleep, they're often surprised how much easier it becomes to make big life decisions. So, if you’re often tired, and especially if you’re considering a big change, I implore you to prioritize improving your sleep. Investigate how much sleep you need—different people need different amounts, usually between seven and nine hours—and pay attention to what helps you fall and stay asleep. Commit to putting yourself to bed on time and doing the things that help you sleep better. And if you struggle to sleep well, I’m sending you some acknowledgement for how frustrating and exhausting that can be. In case you find them helpful, here are a few steps I’ve seen help my clients get to the bottom of their sleep problems: Seeing a primary care provider to rule out medical conditions like thyroid or hormonal imbalances, chronic fatigue, and sleep disorders. Reading The Sleep Fix, by Diane Macedo. Googling sleep hygiene and choosing steps that resonate. Keeping a journal next to your bed and writing down any thoughts that arise as you try to fall asleep. This is my go-to practice on nights when my mind doesn’t want to stop churning. Seven: Schedule the Bigger Pauses That Honor Your Needs Although assembly-line capitalist culture trains us to expect ourselves to produce constantly, the reality is that, like the seasons, moon, tides, and every non-human living creature, we humans are subject to the natural rhythms of life. I invite you to reflect on what bigger pauses you’d like to integrate into your life, such as ones that honor your bioregion’s seasons or your important cultural rituals. For example, a dear friend and I do our best to schedule a small celebration each Solstice, Equinox, and cross-quarter (February 1, May 1, August 1, and November 1), and I schedule weeks off in December and August, taking my breaks at the same time that many people around me tend to pause as well. I invite you to think through each of these seven conscious calendaring practices and choose a next step or two to implement in the coming weeks. Keep in mind that setting up an effective calendar system often initially takes more time than people think it should. When I first began, I initially needed to devote several hours across several days to setting up my calendar, and I needed to keep tweeking my calendar over the next several months to create a system that supported my needs well. That said,