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A space to settle in and listen, and see where the episode takes you. This inspiring, reflective podcast is an invitation to travel deeper, with compassionate self-enquiry.
Henny shares insights from her own life, alongside practices that help us connect with our inner wisdom, explore our relationship with change and find a greater sense of flow. Henny believes we all hold our own answers, so there are no one-size-fits-all solutions here. This is a space to be with what’s true for you, and to grow from there.
If you’re drawn to slowing down, listening in, and exploring what it means to live with greater authenticity, this podcast is for you. Guided by psychology, mindfulness, therapeutic coaching, flow journaling, and everyday compassion, we explore ideas that help us step further into our inner worlds, in order to shape the changes we seek in our outer worlds.
Over the next three weeks which will take us to the end of this series, I'd love to focus even more deeply on this topic of resilience. So you might have heard last week's episode which was all about how resilience can look like many things and there were three key areas that I drew out in that episode and what I'd love to do is focus in on each one of those three key areas over these next three episodes. And today we're beginning with the self care bank. Welcome to the Henny Flynn podcast, the space for deepening self awareness with profound self compassion. I'm Henny.
Henny Flynn:I write, coach and speak about how exploring our inner world can transform how we experience our outer world, all founded on a bedrock of self love. Settle in and listen and see where the episode takes you. So I was really interested in the, or I was really curious rather, about the interest that this idea of the self care bank generated after I shared it last week. And it's a concept that first came to me a few years ago for a retreat that I ran and maybe we need to run that retreat again. It was a one day retreat which was all about our self care bank, how do we top it up, what happens when it starts to run empty?
Henny Flynn:And what are the things that we need to look out for that can drain it without us realising that's what's going on? And even as I say that, it's a bit like if you look at your bank account and you see that there's a deposit has come out and you didn't even remember spending that money or worse that somebody has taken it without your knowing. There are so many ways that this metaphor can work for us and I'm also very mindful that I spent twenty years working in financial services so maybe you can take the girl out of financial services but financial services never quite leaves the girl I'm not sure, people forget I said that one so basically what I'd really love to explore is one of the key areas that I outlined at the end of the last episode next week I'll also have a special guest with me exploring another one of those areas and we'll close the following week, we'll close the whole season the following week before I break for the summer. So, the particular extract that I'd love to turn our attention to today went like this: If you notice your reserves are depleted, that you are close to emptying your own self care bank because you have had no energy left for the things that restore you and keep your account topped up.
Henny Flynn:Remember, even noticing this can be part of how you begin to shift the outlay. Self awareness with self compassion is our most powerful asset, because it helps us see the truth of our experience, not so it exhausts us further and we collapse under it, but so we can also see the tiny steps we can take to change things in some small way for the better, whatever better might mean for you right now. So, what this speaks to is something that, you know, if you've been listening to the podcast for a long time and you know other teachers talk about this too, you know this idea that, you know, we have to have an awareness of what's happening in our lives, our, you know, the way that we think, in the way that we recognise, like how we respond to things happening around us and inside us. We have to have that self awareness in order to be able to affect any kind of change. You know, we can't change things unless we know it's there and so having an awareness that our reserves are low is actually such an important part of this whole topic of resilience.
Henny Flynn:You know, feeling is that so often, what can get labelled as lack of resilience is actually lack of resource and I remember when I was working in my old sort of corporate world and I remember resilience became this big buzzword and I absolutely loathed it, I thought it was just another stick to beat people up with. It felt like it was a way of saying these people who are overloaded, stressed beyond, you know, all reasonable measure, know have with like these excessive demands upon their time and their energy and their mental capacity, or if they're not achieving then it's simply that they're not resilient enough and it for me it just sounds like bullshit quite honestly and yeah I don't often swear on here do I? I mean I do swear and you know outside of here, but you know I don't often swear on here, but it really, really makes me cross when I see that word being used just as a way to dismiss the real challenges that people might be facing in their work life or in their sort of home life or you know sort of you know family life whatever it might be because you know most of us most of the time are mostly doing the best that we can with the resources that we have available to us.
Henny Flynn:And so if we are depleted in some way, if we are unresourced, if our self care bank is empty or running close to empty, it's extremely difficult to be resilient. And so, for me, I think, you know, so much of this conversation needs to change. It's actually about like how do we resource people? How do we, help people really stand steady in their own space and this is the theme of the field this season is all about standing in your own space. And the three themes that we explore as part of this overarching theme of standing in your own space is self expression, which is so vital for our sort of good psychological health and emotional health is being able to express ourselves as we are in alignment with who we are And secondly, boundaries, which is the topic that we covered this month.
Henny Flynn:Thirdly, it's the vulnerability boomerang, is what can happen when we do step into our own space and it feels unusual or you know a space that we're not so familiar with how vulnerable that can feel. But in terms of this concept of the self care bank, you know if we support ourselves maybe the people that report to us if that's your role at work or you know the people in our family group, people in our social group if we support them in resourcing themselves in know filling up their self care bank whether that's through actual practices, so things that are known to be restorative like, you know, movement, exercise, breath work, know practices like journaling, meditation, mindfulness, spending time in nature, you know all of these things they all help build our bank, but then there are also other things like how we connect or engage with other humans. We know that that is so vital that when people are lonely their resources can really sort of get affected or even if there are people around them but they feel lonely that's very very challenging for our human self. So how do we build moments of connection?
Henny Flynn:How do we create opportunities for people to share, to speak, to say what's happening for them and obviously that's a huge part of the work that I do, know, being a place where people can come and talk freely and say whatever is going on for them and through that find their own path almost always find their own path to the thing that's going to most support them. So, you know, all of this stuff and we can call it coaching, we can call it therapy, we can call it just talking, you know, whatever we want to call it, you know, of these things, these practices, these ways of being, these ways of connecting, they all help to resource us and when we're resourced, when our self care bank is, you know, the balance looks healthy, then we feel more resilient and I had so many messages from people about this the episode that's just gone out, the one that talks about resilience looks like many things, and many of those messages were reflecting on this idea of the self care bank. I think it's something that we can all connect with, And yeah, I mean, I think even as I'm saying that, will be creating another day retreat to explore that, because I think we also recognise when we pay attention to ourselves, we're willing to sit, to pause long enough with ourselves.
Henny Flynn:We all have the capacity to recognise when our resources are low and we might have learnt somewhere along the way of our life that you just keep going, that that's what resilience looks like, That you grit your teeth, you gird your loins, you square your shoulders, and you just keep going. There's a truck or a tractor going past on the road. I'm just gonna pause for a moment. Well, it's still there, but I've shut the door, so hopefully it's not too distracting. So, also I've managed to completely lose my thread, whatever I was saying, but basically yes, had lots of people connecting about this idea.
Henny Flynn:Oh, that's it. So, you know, we can self identify when our bank is low. The harder part I think is identifying when it's starting to deplete. And that's really where I think doing this work of self discovery, self knowledge, self awareness, whatever we want to call it, can really support us, because it enables us to notice before things start to get difficult or really difficult for us, that we start to be able to self regulate. And I'm, you know, saying that partly in terms of, you know, regulating our nervous system, but really about regulating like where our energy goes, regulating where we might need a different kind of boundary, not a barrier, but a boundary.
Henny Flynn:And in the field this month, when we were talking about the boundaries, we really sort of sat inside this idea of boundaries as a nuanced and sometimes quite delicate and soft thing. I think often we talk about boundaries as being, you know, very kind of like firm that's my boundary and I don't cross it, but in real life boundaries are often quite malleable things, the important thing is that we understand what we're doing with it and that we don't just go barreling through our own boundaries or through someone else's without knowing, what we're up to. So, is all about, this self awareness and I think it's such a vital part of resilience. I think it's something that often gets forgotten or ignored because certainly in a workplace or even in a societal, political usage, Lack of resilience often gets banded about, you know, what was that dreadful phrase? Oh, I can't even remember what it is now.
Henny Flynn:Oh, what is it that people say? It'll come to me. You know, when they sort of talk about like young people are basically have no resilience, but they call it something else. I mean it's so awful, I've even banished it from my head, I'll try and remember it. So in this kind of social political context, we often levy this idea of lack of resilience at people who are actually under resourced.
Henny Flynn:So financially under resourced, under resourced in terms of their housing, under resourced in terms of their education and actually when we attend to these really core foundational needs, we see that people perform much better and I use that word perform with a huge caveat around it, what does that even mean? But people are able to operate in their lives in a way that perhaps feels more in alignment with who they are, who they truly are. So, know, sort of seeing that our bank is getting low or seeing that it's, it needs a little bit of a top up. This is really important and last time in the last episode I also talked about how, you know, one of the wonderful things about being human is that we can borrow from our future selves, you know, there are times in our lives where something happens and we just have to dig deep, we just have to get through whatever it is that's happening and, you know, we see this in, you know, where people exhibit great courage or, you know, astonishing sort of feats of kindness and endurance and, you know, really standing up for others or and, you know, and they are often borrowing from their future self.
Henny Flynn:They're really leaning into their deep resilience, but these things they take a toll and often what happens is that we are exhausted at the end of it and we need to rebuild ourselves and if we're exhausted and needing to rebuild ourselves, it's not because we lack resilience, it's because our resources are low. Yeah, as you can probably tell, I feel quite strongly about this stuff. I also think that this whole idea of resilience, it feels so resonant right now. I actually, I think I might have mentioned this in the last episode, you know, I'm really interested about doing more sort of corporate work, you know, talks and executive coaching as well, because I see with the people that I already work with colleagues, with other, you know, sort of friends sharing, that there is so much challenge on leaders' shoulders in workplaces right now and the one thing that I think we can probably all agree on is that, you know, we want our leadership teams to be compassionate and empathetic and resourced and able to make good decisions and not reacting from a place of depletion, but responding to the world from a place of calm and curiosity and kindness and consideration and humanity and that is something that feels really resonant with this whole conversation around resilience.
Henny Flynn:And, you know, I think there's something I sort of mentioned about boundaries, there's something else here about boundaries, I think, are part of what enables us to maintain our resilience, you know, being clear about where our boundaries are, where we end and another person begins, you know, that's part of how, this work of resilience can really support us and it certainly is part of what helps us protect our reserves that are in our self care bank too, and also, you know, there's a line that I shared again in the field this month, which was, you know, to pause is itself a boundary and so, you know, when we think about pausing and, you know, the extension of that, which is of course rest, as being, you know, such an important tool for what enables us to be able to show up in the world and to be strong and resilient. You know, I think there's so much, so many of the, what's the word that the kind of the learnings that we can have if we've grown up in a corporate environment, so many of those learnings can point away from rest or pausing being valuable things, you know, often, certainly in some of the environments where I worked, you know, decisiveness was valued much more highly than reflection, or I remember sort of one person in my team once telling me that he had been told never tell somebody that you don't know the answer, which is just nonsense, know, that to me sounds like something that's immediately going to deplete you, because you're not showing up authentically, You know, if you're pretending that you know something, even if you know that what you're saying is nonsense, that's not, in alignment with yourself and therefore that's another little thing that will potentially deplete your self care bank and ultimately your resilience, your resourcefulness So, that was a bit of a blah blah blah.
Henny Flynn:Let's see what came out of my mouth. I think also just one other point on this is, you know, I mentioned before that I really struggle often with the way that the phrase resilience is used. Yet, one of the chapters in the Heart of Change, which is the book that we work through on the year long IMMERSE programme, one of those chapters is called Compassionate Resilience, and that's really what we're talking about here, because when we understand ourselves with self compassion, when we have self awareness with self compassion, or you know that phrase that I often use, compassionate self inquiry, then that actually is what leads us to resilience. So, we can think of resilience as being a compassionate thing in that context. I just wanted to name that as well.
Henny Flynn:All right, my darlings. Was there anything else I wanted to share? Don't think so but next week I've got a special guest I've got Adam coming back Adam Lind who's the author of Floating Home and he's been on the show before and we're going to talk about how masking can present itself as a form of resilience and I'm really interested to unpack that with Adam so it might be a slightly longer episode and I'm sure it will go off in lots of lovely delicious directions so I look forward to that and in the meantime I wish you so much love and a hug and a wave.