S1:E27 Why You Need To Take A Break (And What You Will Gain In The Process)
SHOW NOTES
The best things in life rarely happen as a result of sheer brute force. I get that you have ambitions and the clock always appears to be speeding up. And yet, there is more than enough time to do it right, without sacrificing yourself in the process. Listen in to learn a much more holistic way of approaching your goals and aspirations.
Warmly,
Linda
👍🏿If you enjoy the show, do me a favor and leave a review so that more people can find and benefit from the show.
💖 For comprehensive support from a licensed therapist, reach out to me through https://www.satyacounselingandyoga.com
Read below for full transcript.
[00:00] Intro by Linda:
Hi, I'm Linda, self-love coach and hypnotherapist who loves a good yoga class in my pajamas, listening to the belly laughs of my baby boys, and hunting down the best vegan donuts. This podcast is for ambitious and soulful women who want to feel fulfilled in all areas of their life and are ready to dive deep into the mysteries and wonders of the subconscious mind in order to achieve that. So if you are ready to be let loose from the shackles of self-sabotage and design a life of emotional freedom and everyday abundance, you are in the perfect place. Because life can get even better than you imagine, and the biggest shifts start inside of you. Welcome.
[00:00:46]
A couple of weeks ago, I recorded a podcast episode about how grief and fear are very tricky, hidden motivators for a lot of women in leadership. How grief often underlies part of what drives us to succeed and to excel to such great lengths in our careers and really any endeavor that we take on. Make sure you go back and listen to that episode of the Love Yourself Liberated podcast. I wanted to take that a bit further today and share with you what I've noticed in the women I've worked with and talked with, especially over these last few weeks, and share a little bit about my own story and how it ties into all of this.
There's always been such a heavy weight of human suffering on this planet. There's always been wars, people who hate each other, people who attack each other. Now people do it online — they do that freely, tearing one another down, slandering each other, spreading rumors — as well as physically harming one another for lots of different reasons, whether they seem rational or not. And this is nothing new to our day and age. This is nothing new to 2023 when I'm recording this. In fact, it's something that I have always felt very aware of and felt very heavy about.
I was a very precocious and sensitive young girl, and I felt very aware of things that were going on — not just around me in my local community, my city, my state, but also ways in which people were suffering or going without or facing harm, really anywhere on the globe. I attribute a lot of this not just to the fact that I had a natural temperament to care about people and to want to help people, but also the fact that my parents were very, very kind to me. And also the fact that my parents were immigrants to the US from West Africa, from Ghana. The idea of people being "over there" just never seemed very far away to me. That's just how I was programmed — with my cultural connections and my parents' friends and extended family back in Ghana, it never seemed very far away.
When I would hear little glimmers or pieces of things or see things on the news, whether it was a couple of states away or a couple of continents away, all of it seemed very close. And it seemed close because we all share humanity together. We all have a natural set of desires and hopes and a natural set of fears and things that make us feel anxious and not secure. Knowing that someone else could be experiencing hunger or facing displacement, or facing lack of resources or poverty somewhere else, just felt too close. Like, why is anyone experiencing this? If we all share our humanity, why is it happening to someone over there? Because I didn't do anything right to not be facing that same situation. I didn't choose where I got born. I didn't choose to be born in America. And yet here I was — I wasn't facing poverty, nothing extreme anyway. I wasn't facing hunger. We may not have had fancy meals or been able to go out to eat very much, but my parents were always able to put food on the table somehow. So it just felt really unfair, like someone should do something about this.
I think in the way that children do, they just know instinctively that things aren't as they should be if those kinds of things are going on. Of course, as adults, we still know that. As women, we still know that. But there can be a gradual jadedness, a disconnection that comes in when you're just living your life and moving along. You hear every once in a while about this terrible thing or that terrible thing, but you know that you have to function in your day-to-day life. You can't just sit down and be upset. There were a lot of folks during the summer of 2020 — those of you who know, you know what I'm talking about. A lot of Black folks online were like, "We have to just go to work and act like nothing's happening." And for us as women in general, there are a lot of us just having to go along because there are things to do. Tasks to be completed. Jobs to be done. Kids to take care of. And so on.
Now that's hard to carry. It's hard to juggle — how do I move forward with day-to-day life while also attending to the fact that part of me feels really sad, disheartened, disgusted, afraid? How do you move forward when you have these two things that feel completely at odds? That's the tension we live in. That's the place we live in, constantly having to derive meaning and figure out how to have an impact while also being sure to treasure my day-to-day life and be present with what's going on right in front of me, as well as what's happening over there.
[00:07:07]
This is a lot of why I do the work that I do. And I imagine part of why I'm bringing this up is because I imagine it's part of what drives you and what you do. I find that for women in particular, we want what we do to have meaning beyond just ourselves. We want the jobs we have, the relationships we invest in, to be meaningful and to leave a mark. We want to be able to shape the people around us in a positive way. And we want to leave something good behind us, even when we're gone — something that outlasts us.
This is why I love investing in women. This is why I love working with women to help them reclaim their time, their energy, to come back into that space where they have the capacity to actually feel fully their feelings and embody themselves while also living out their purpose and having greater impact as leaders. That's why I love doing that work, because I know that women tend to take whatever is poured onto their plate and they find ways to multiply it and give it out to everybody else. They always find a way to multiply it, to share what they have. And I'm not talking about sacrificing yourself to the extent where you're giving yourself scraps. That's not what I'm about. I'm talking about when you give a woman plenty, she finds a way to multiply it. That's just what she does. There are even studies that show that when women have healthy finances, when their income or their wealth is growing, you can see a direct relationship to how other people benefit from that as well — whether it's their children, their community, organizations that they're part of. They just naturally tend to invest and multiply in all these different ways.
Coming back to me — that sensitive little girl who felt really heavy by the suffering, whether it was down the street or halfway across the world — I know that while human beings are often the greatest enemy to other human beings, quite frankly, we are also often the answer to prayers, the answer to suffering, the answer to the needs for connection and love and belonging. We're able to give ourselves that kind of beauty and amazing connection as well.
So I want you to think about how what you pour into yourself — what you allow yourself to have, whether that's space and time to just think and let yourself be sad by whatever's going on, whether it's Congo or Palestine or Ukraine or anywhere else — actually, I don't even have time to list all the places where folks are suffering right now because it's way more than most of us have capacity to hold in our heads or in our hearts. It's just really overwhelming to know that our brothers and sisters around the world are hurting in these different ways that don't even make sense. But when you can take care of yourself, then you have that capacity to give and to become a solution, to become a bright light and a source of hope for the people you have influence over, the people you're connected to and in community with. And really, if each of us did that — if each woman did that around the world — the impact that we would have on changing these really large, disastrous, awful situations would be unstoppable.
So let's not discount the power of each of us investing in ourselves, giving love to ourselves, and then looking for ways around us that we can share that out — really changing the course of how we do human relationships. Because at the bottom of everything is human relationships, connection, people having healthy groundedness and a sense of belonging with each other. So many broken people end up in positions that they should never be in. And man, what if we just had way less room for that? What if we just had way less broken people? I know the solution isn't that simple. There are lots of different things that go on. But I also think about this — I learned a long time ago that a lot of the food scarcity that folks experience in different parts of the world isn't really about the fact that we don't have enough food on the planet to feed everyone. It's inequality. It's systems and structures and politics and tribalism and things like that that get in the way of everyone getting what they need. So if we all shifted out of trying to be greedy or take for ourselves, if we were less fearful of one another, then maybe we could all have what we need and even what we want. Because there is beauty and abundance in this world as well. It's just that it's being hoarded by the few.
[00:12:35]
So I want you to honor the fact that you may feel overwhelmed right now. There may be different times in the coming year that you're going to feel overwhelmed — whether it's by events happening outside in the world or in your own home or even in your own heart, in your own body. A lot of us are suffering in different ways as well. It's okay to take that time to feel what you're feeling. It's okay to take that time to admit that you don't have the answers right away. Just sit and be and give yourself that acceptance and that love and that compassion. And when you've had enough of that and you can feel that sense of being restored from the inside out, then move forward with your meaning-making — building hope, finding ways to be part of the solution, finding ways to be part of spreading the love, spreading the joy.
I don't know if you all know my friend Ari Honarvar — I might link to her website in the notes — but she's a beautiful, compassionate human being. She lives in California with her family and she's an example of that. She's an example of a woman who is just so full of heart, so full of care and concern for other humans. Her hands are dipped in all these different pots of ways she can give and shower and pay forward what she knows she has to offer. And while she is a beautiful and unique person, she's not the only one. Any one of you can have a more massive impact than you ever thought possible.
Ari Honarvar’s Website: Rumi With A View
So when it comes to who you are as an individual person, an individual woman, and how you lead or how you influence those at work or at home or anything like that — please don't minimize the impact of what you do. This is where it all starts. This is where the good stuff starts. The level that you're at is perfect. You can have such a tremendous, life-changing effect on somebody else that you may not even realize the ripple effects of. You may not even live long enough to see it — it may outlast you by decades, by hundreds of years. But the effect that you can have just in the ways that you interact, that you speak to other people, that you show up, that you give your light — you never know how far that can reach.
So in this time of great difficulty — whatever time that is, whether it's personal or not — I want you to remember that. Give that time to yourself to feel what you feel. Allow yourself that time. And eventually come back to it. Because we need you. And that's why I'm invested in you. Because I know that through me, through all of us, we really can change our part of the world. And that matters. That matters for something.
[00:15:37]
If you would like to learn more about the programs I offer for women of influence, women who are in leadership, please check out my link below for Love Yourself Liberated. It's a personalized, high-touch group coaching experience to help you pour that love into yourself and to address your own inner wounds, to address your own inner child, balance out your masculinity and femininity, and nourish yourself from the inside out so that you can show up more powerfully in your leadership and have more of that positive and credible impact wherever you leave your fingerprint.
I consider myself the secret weapon for busy but overwhelmed, high-stress women in leadership, because that's who I've been working with for years at this point. And I've been helping them get control of their lives, their schedules, get back connected and really deeply rooted in their relationships that have grown weak or strained. And I want to help you with that too — help you decrease your stress and maximize your pleasure in everyday life. If you want to learn more about that, just go ahead and check out that link. I look forward to hearing from you. I hope this encourages you, and I'll talk with you soon.
[Editing Note: This program is not currently available. If you are interested in this content and guidance, it is now exclusively provided through my concierge psychotherapy practice, Satya Counseling & Yoga.]
You hung with me to the end, my shero. If you benefited from this episode, please say thanks by leaving a wonderful review. It helps me know what's helping you the most and allows more like-minded women to find and learn from this podcast. We don't want to keep all the good stuff for ourselves. See you next time.
Meet Your Host!
Linda Sanderville, LCSW, RYT-200 is the founder of Satya Counseling & Yoga LLC. She specializes in concierge therapy for female founders and public figures, helping high-profile women navigate public scandal, executive burnout, and the values that will define the second half of life. Based in Albuquerque and serving clients virtually in DC, Maryland, Virginia, and beyond, Linda combines clinical expertise with somatic wisdom to help leaders reclaim their truth.
Interested in Working with a Concierge Therapist in Fairfax VA, Bethesda MD or Washington D.C.?
Is the inability to rest or slow down leading to burnout in your professional and personal life? Reclaim your joy and vitality while managing your professional commitments through holistic and evidence based counseling. Our specialized support at Satya Counseling & Yoga is designed to fit seamlessly into your busy life, empowering you to conquer trauma-based responses and thrive. Prioritize your mental well-being – embark on a transformative journey towards a happier and more fulfilling life by following these three steps to get started:
Schedule a complimentary 15-minute call to see if we’ll be the right fit.
Begin meeting with me, therapist and trauma-informed yoga teacher, Linda Sanderville, to rediscover your healthy, authentic self.
Start moving forward in your personal and professional life in a positive and healthy way!