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We need a new definition of success—one that harmonizes meaning and money.
Imagine diving into your workday with renewed energy, leaving behind the exhaustion or dread of a monotonous grind.
Traditional beliefs about success and the root cause of burnout are the same:
Prove yourself.
Work harder.
Take care of the business, and it will take care of you.
We’re recycling the mindset and practices that keep us stuck. Our souls need a jumpstart into The Age of Humanity.
Tune in for a new way of working that honors our nervous system and the bottom line, using knowledge of the brain, the Bible, and business. We’ll discuss timeless truths that amplify growth, ignite change, and reshape the world of work. No corporate speak or business BS. Let’s get to the heart of a rewarding career and profitable growth.
We speak human about business.
What’s in it for You?
Value, Relevance, and Impact (VRI): No, it's not a new tech gadget—it's your ticket to making your work genuinely matter to you and your company.
Human-Centric Insights: We prioritize people over profits without sacrificing the bottom line. Think less "cog in the machine" and more "humans helping humans."
I'm your host, Rebecca Fleetwood Hesson, your thrive guide leading you into the new Age of Humanity. I’ve navigated the highs and lows of business and life, from achieving over $40 million in sales, teaching thousands of people around the world about leadership, trust, execution, and productivity to facing burnout, divorce, raising a couple of great humans (one with ADHD), and navigating the uncertainty of starting a business.
I’m committed to igniting change in the world by jumpstarting business into profitable growth with the timeless truths of our humanity.
Sound crazy? It’s only crazy until it works.
Hit subscribe to never miss an episode, and leave a review to help other listeners discover our show.
Want insight and advice on your real career and business challenges? Connect with me on social media or email me at rebecca@wethrive.live. Your story could spark our next conversation.
[00:00:00] Rebecca:
This is Write Your Own Story. Three Keys to Rise and Thrive in Life and Business. I'm your host, Rebecca Fleetwood Hession.
I have bad news, and I have good news. The bad news is, your pause button was broken when you got here.
Think of it as a factory defect. And I don't mean got here, I mean got into your career. So all of our pause buttons Have been off kilter. Have you been feeling that and experiencing that? Your pause button just feels like it's not working like it's supposed to. Well, the good news is I'm going to show you why that is, how it happened, and then I'm going to give you some information to reignite, reinspire that to start working again.
Because if we're talking about self-care strategies. We wouldn't need an hour of me giving you a list of things to do. We could all just sit here together and pull out Instagram and TikTok and pull out our favorite self care strategies and we could all just make our own list, right? And we'd be really inspired.
We'd be talking to each other and we'd be like, yeah, that's a good one. I'm going to do that. And then you go back to the reality of your life and life would just knock you on your Rear. And then you'd say, Why didn't I do that?
And you'd start to feel bad about yourself because you said you were gonna do it And then you didn't do it and then you have guilt and then you have shame and never in the history of the world Has guilt and shame inspired anyone to be better? So instead of doing the traditional let's all just do the thing I'm going to tell you why it's so hard to do the thing, and then show you why it's more important than ever that we collectively do things differently in the future.
I call myself a Thrive Guide, which practically speaking means I show up as a keynote speaker and an executive coach, I'm a career coach, and I host my own women's events under the brand The Badass Women's Council. And so, I love to think about thriving. As it relates to leadership, as it relates to business, because you all are career women.
And so if our business isn't going okay, it's hard for us to be okay. So what I'm going to talk to you today about is the collective of our life thriving, personal thriving, but also what does it mean for our businesses to thrive? And how can we bring all of that? And
You have everything you need right here, right now, in this very moment to thrive. That was your hardwired factory settings. You came with thriving. So I don't want you to believe that you have to go out and get another degree or another certification or another promotion for you to truly thrive. What I'm going to show you from a neuroscience perspective and from a history of work perspective, we were actually designed to thrive from the jump.
But what's gotten in the way is a lot of patterns of behavior and patterns of work that have made it really difficult to thrive. So you don't have to change who you are. For the love of everything holy, please don't change who you are. I want you to leave here, standing tall in your story, to be who you are, loud and proud.
But first, we're gonna need to spend some time looking at how this pause button got broken. And so in this time that I have, we're gonna go like a little dark for a minute. But I promise you we're going to get back up to where it's inspiring and good and fun. But we got to talk about some of this darkness and some of the stuff that's gotten in the way.
So,
the first thing that I want to show you is the very first framework that I created when I started my business eight years ago. I'd come out of 20 years with the Franklin Covey organization, a wildly successful career, and I was on the team that led the implementation process for the four disciplines of execution globally for clients.
In that work, I learned all about control, measure, and optimize. We need dashboards, and metrics, and systems, and processes for our businesses to run well. But that's what the business needs. What we need as humans is personal. Emotional and social and the best leaders and the best teams, the best organizations know how to bring the business needs and the human needs together.
And so that's what we're going to talk about today is human needs first, and then we bring those into the business. Because over time, what's happened is, we started to believe that in order to be successful, we needed to control, measure, and optimize our personal lives. Let me give you an example. I'm a runner, and often times I will run with friends.
And it's not uncommon to get, you know, just, A mile down the, down the road or down the sidewalk and have that person I'm running with just stop and go, Ugh, now it doesn't count. And they're looking at their Apple Watch or whatever, you know, you're with me, right? what did they forget to do?
They forgot to press start. And they're losing their minds in the middle of the street. And I can laugh about it because I used to be this person, and I can tell that there's familiarity for you too, right? And I mean, it'll be mid sentence, mid conversation, just phew. And I love to, I love this moment now, it's one of my favorites, and I'll say, well, hold on.
I mean, I think our dopamine levels are up. Well, we're having good conversation, I'm trying to inspire them back to meeting those human needs, right? And they're saying, you don't understand. I said I was gonna do fifteen this week, if I didn't count that mile, now I got to get up early on Saturday. And we have soccer on Saturday.
That means I have to get up at 5 30. And they're just like, brrr. And I just stand back and let it happen. But we can't continue this idea that if we can't measure it and control it, that it doesn't count. Because when we do that, we leave behind the true human needs, which are more about connection. And what we really need on that run with a friend is the conversation.
And our dopamine levels to go up and our heart rate to go up. But we are just so mesmerized by I've got to track it more than I've got to feel it. And so I want to move us over here to this place where we re familiarize ourselves with our feelings. Because they matter in order for us to have a wildly successful business.
And so we're going to walk through some things today, how we got here to this place where we've got an epidemic of burnout. It's true. And it's on the rise. It's actually increasing since 2020. We're going to talk about that. Why we must change to get this ripple effect of change, because I want you to leave here knowing that self care strategies are for more people than just you.
Your self care isn't selfish. It's service. Your self care is for your family, it's for your colleagues, it's for your business, it's for your clients. Then I want to talk about where I'd like for us to go. I call it the Age of Humanity. And I'm going to describe what that looks like to you and invite you into this movement to steward the Age of Humanity.
And then finally, I'm going to give you two self care strategies for your life and your business. So we're going to spend the majority of the time setting the context for why this matters. And then we'll get to the, what can you do about it piece.
Alright, so, how did we get here to this place of burnout?
In order to describe the how we got here, I want to remind you that our brain is always operating off of old patterns of behavior. Eighty percent of your behaviors, the things that you do, are based on things that you've done in the past. It's just happening subconsciously on autopilot. Only 20 percent of the things that you do happen in this prefrontal cortex.
80 percent of what you do is just on repeat. And so I want to make that 80 percent of what's been on repeat, I want to make you aware of it, so that you can then make some conscious changes about those patterns. Okay, now we're going to go way back, in the way back machine. The first significant change that happened in our society that broke our pause button goes back to the 1900s.
So well, like I said, it wasn't your fault, but it is our responsibility now moving forward to do things very, very So when we made the shift from the agricultural age to the industrial age, here's what was happening and how that shifted. So in the agricultural age, everybody worked together for a shared purpose called survival.
In fact, farms were created as a shared food source, so people could collect around that and have a higher probability of surviving. In the agricultural age, you knew how your part of the community served everyone else. Somebody taught school, somebody ran the store, somebody grew crops, somebody took care of the livestock, some Everybody had a role that served Each other.
You had to show up to support one another in community. You were outside, you were moving your body. You had to have a strong amount of faith because weather and locust or something could take you out at any minute. You knew inherently that you weren't in control of the world. There were other forces at play.
And you worked and then you rested and you prepared to work again. And so in the agricultural age, everybody was working together as a community. And then the industrialists came along and they said, Hey, you want to make more money? Would you like to come in out of the elements? Would you like to have more reliability about your paycheck?
You won't have to worry so much about the weather or all of those things that are dangerous in your life. I'm going to pay you every week or whatever it was. And of course, the masses said, yeah, sign me up. And that is what happened. We had a huge economic uptick when we went from the agricultural age to the industrial age.
But we also had some profound unintended consequences. When we went to the industrial age, you went into work in the factory, and you did your work, but you really didn't know how it impacted other people. What if the bigger picture of that was You didn't really show up for a purpose. You showed up for a paycheck.
You're inside. You weren't actually moving around so much. We lost a ton of our human connection and we gave a little bit of our power away because now we're dependent on somebody else to pay us to fund our lives. And so if I were to summarize it, we went from purpose to paycheck, community to independence.
A lot of the human needs that we have around being outside, in nature, moving our bodies, we started to move away from it. And most of the improvements in the industrial age went to serve the business needs, not our human needs. Electricity. Great. Now you can work third shift. I'll pay you more. So much for your circadian rhythms.
That's okay. Technology. Now you have flexibility. You can work from anywhere. But we didn't take advantage of it from a flexibility standpoint. We just took our laptop to spring break and we worked on our vacation. And so we've built this pattern that is serving the business needs more and more and more neglecting our human needs.
And when it worked really well for business. We took it to our education system, and we said okay, so no more about that one room schoolhouse where everybody learns from each other. Now we're going to separate you off, and you're going to work independently, and you're going to really be in a bit of a competition with your other friends and students to make sure that you get the best grades.
In school, helping is cheating. And so we've built these patterns over time, and it's just happened, and I don't think we were really paying enough attention to as it was happening. But the main thing about the industrial age that is so concerning to me is prove yourself and work harder became the mantra.
I gotta prove myself to get a promotion. I'll just work harder and then they will notice me. And then we took that into our parenting because, I mean, Is it, like, the hardest, weirdest, most uncertain role you've ever had in your life? Like, there's no guarantee this is gonna work out.
It's awful! And so you're just clinging to something that says, I'm doing this right, because they just hand you this kid in the hospital, you're like, I don't know what I'm doing. And then you're just left with him for, like, decades after that to figure it out. And so we cling to things from the system, like grades and attendance, to say, okay, I must be okay as a parent.
They're getting okay grades, and their attendance is okay. There is zero correlation between grades and attendance to life success. Many have studied it, many have tried to prove it, it does not exist. Proving yourself and working harder is the message that our children are getting. Because that's what we were told.
And so this idea of success just keeps getting pattern after pattern after pattern. And so, that's already problematic. And we get to 2019, and as has been referenced earlier, we end up with this World Health Organization report on burnout. It's It feels like it's finally catching up with us, that this prove yourself and work harder thing isn't really the game we want to play, it's an unwinnable game, because It's exhaustion, cynicism, no more suck it up left to give.
And I had just started my business a couple of years before this report came out, and I had also had my own bout with burnout in 2016, where I was honestly a wildly successful, making good money, doing all these great things for the Franklin Covey organization, and then found myself with two months of pneumonia so sick I couldn't leave my house.
that'll put you in a reflective state. And so I thought this burnout thing is real. I've had my own experience with it. And so I took this deep dive into understanding it and studying it. What I found to be true is the first report on burnout was not in 2019.
1974 was the very first report on burnout. Is that surprising to you? It was to me, but it my hypothesis about the industrial age model of work and education that led to parenting. I'm like, it was already me. So in 1974, a German American psychologist named Herbert Friedenberger was sitting around with some of his buddies one day at work and they were feeling some kind of way.
And one of them said, I don't know, I just feel burned out. And so Herbert being the good psychologist that he was said, Hey, I wonder if other people are feeling that way. So he conducted the first study on burnout and lo and behold. It actually was a thing that more people were experiencing. And so he defined it as the state of fatigue or frustration brought about by devotion.
Hang on to that word. Jot it down. We're coming back to it. To a cause. A way of life. A relationship. We would say to our careers. To our company. To our role. That failed to produce The expected reward. Expected reward. Jot that one down. So this devotion to something that you're putting everything into and it's really not giving back what you thought it would.
And so he produced this wheel of burnout that describes the twelve stages of burnout. It starts at the top and moves around clockwise. It starts with a compulsion To prove oneself. Always working harder. And as you move around the wheel, you lose yourself. A little bit more, and a little bit more, and a little bit more, until you end up with depression and burnout.
Ew! Ew! And so a good business consultant always goes to root cause. So I see this, and I'm like, Okay, so we don't have to deal with all 12 stages, if we can just get to the root cause. And there it was. Prove yourself and work harder.
This idea of proving ourself and working harder, it works better. Devotion is the root of burnout.
And so the definition of proving yourself, is this compulsion to serve, to do the right thing. Devotion is a beautiful thing, y'all. And as women, I love our devotion. I don't want us to be any different than we are right now, the way God intended. But I want us to channel that devotion, not out there, to prove ourselves to someone else.
But I want that devotion to be channeled into creating the conditions to thrive. And those are the things that I'm going to show you today with self care strategies. So we're not pointing our devotion out there. We're pointing our devotion more in here, to prepare ourselves to go out there, bold, healed, whole, healthy, ready to serve.
Because we were designed to serve. I mean, They picked us to bring these babies into the world, and they drive us crazy. The fact that we just don't sometimes just want to throw them out the back door and ignore them means that we are hardwired to take care of people. I'm okay with us being hardwired to take care of people, but let's do it really intentionally so we don't lose ourselves.
So I'm going to show you how to channel those, those self care strategies into the ripple effect of your family and your team and your business, because who you are matters. But the compulsion to prove ourself, here's the part that got me. It tends to affect the conscientious people, those who show up enthusiastic and accept responsibility.
Y'all, that's us. Burnout doesn't come for the slackers. It comes for us. Nothing comes for the slackers. We're too busy taking care of them. And so it is a real thing that we know about this history and this context so that we don't get stuck in these old patterns that are taking us into this burnout epidemic.
So we want to move past the prove yourself and work harder. Because what that really is called is not thriving, it's striving. The word strive actually means battle and conflict. So we're battling against our human needs, we're creating competitive environments where we feel like we're battling against each other.
We've got to set that down and move into thriving. Now, I told you about the shift from the agricultural age to the industrial age. So then what happens? We had the burnout report in 2019.
Okay, 2020. We had barely scratched the surface understanding the World Health Organization's report on burnout. And 2020 happens. And now we have the next greatest shift we have ever had in our society. And we're in it right now. Now, so what happened in 2020 was, wait for it, a pause, right? For the first time in our lifetime, a global pause button of all of the patterns that we had been living in our lives, thinking everything was just clipping along.
And we realized that we didn't have nearly as much control over our lives as we thought that we did. And when your brain experiences dramatic pattern disruption, that is a traumatic response. Because we are humans. We can say, suck it up buttercup, we got this, let's do this, we can do this. But our cellular structure is like, bitch please.
No, that's not working. So we can no longer just fake it. Our cellular structure is responding. And so our cellular structure responded to 2020 with a traumatic response. And here's how it played out. The first response was the flight response. And if you had the means to do it, people quit, largely women.
Millions of people left the workforce in the great resignation. Because trying to be the teacher, and the worker, and the spouse, and the mom, Boom! Millions of people said, I'm out. If you didn't have the means to quit, We had the next phase, which was quiet quitting. I need my paycheck, but I'm just gonna show up and do the bare minimum, not to get fired, But I gotta, I gotta pull it back.
No more proving myself and working harder, I gotta pull it back. Followed by managers and leaders. And you can't be mad at them, because they're just operating off of old patterns of the past. They said things like, Get back to work, get back to the office, where I can see you. We're gonna put email trackers on to make sure you're working.
Go back to the way it was. Because that's what happens, is our brain is always trying to find success from the past, find patterns from the past. Because our brain thinks same equals safe. But that's not actually true. And so the big fight response was, I don't want to go back to the office. I've proven now that I can work remote.
And now we're in this battle right now about what is the right answer. Well, I can tell you right now, the answer is not in the past. The answer is in creating a future of work that is different than what we've experienced before. Recycling old patterns, that ship has sailed because we've all experienced the freedom that remote work can bring for us.
And so then you've got a lot of everybody else sitting around in the FON response just trying to pick up the pieces after millions of people have left, the goals haven't been reduced and we're just trying to survive it. And so I tell you all of this because your pause button has been broken. But then we got this pause.
And now we're going to figure out how to move forward with that pause button on for us, so that we can take care of our human needs moving forward. We're going to move into thriving, not striving. We're ready to grow, prosper, and flourish. P. S. The word prosper doesn't just mean money. The root word means being well.
Prosperity means that I'm living well emotionally, socially, spiritually, physically. We're living a life where our human needs come first, and then we bring ourselves healed whole better into our work. Not the other way around. We're flipping the script on this story and these patterns. So, what does that mean to move forward in thriving?
I call it the age of humanity. The age of humanity is when our human needs are top priority. We're not saying things like, When I get caught up, I'll go do that thing. You know, you ain't never getting caught up. Somebody has been wearing so many clothes while you're gone, there's a stack of laundry bigger than you when you get back.
All those emails are coming in, all the time that you're, We're never getting caught up. So let's not lie to ourselves that there's this special place reserved for us in the future where we get to do all the things that we need to do. We need to integrate that into our lives to take care of ourselves so that we can be better in our business in the age of humanity.
And so, the age of humanity is human needs first, brought into the business. This is where you don't prove yourself, you know yourself, and create the conditions to thrive. Those are the two self care strategies that I'm going to show you today. How to know yourself and then create the conditions to thrive for you and for your business.
That will give us the thriving that we've always been hardwired for. We're going back to the factory settings that we were intended to live. Now,
back to the model of business as human. This doesn't mean that we're not going to take care of our business. I'm a business consultant. That's a bad idea. Business for our society is a way that we can live out our unique gifts, talents, abilities. We need to have purpose in our lives. I want you to go to work feeling that sense of purpose that you're showing up to serve others, not just for the paycheck.
So we're going to continue to do good business practices, but we're going to honor the needs of our nervous system and how we are designed to live and work. Both of these are crucial. I just want you to bring them together. So let's take a little moment to look at her nervous system. Now I've drawn this out on an actual flip chart page in my office to give you the understanding that this is a very rudimentary Look at your nervous system.
It's not meant to be science class. It's meant to be, let me give you some context for how your nervous system works so that you can honor those things and make sure that your cellular structure isn't having a battle inside you while you're trying to suck it up and do more. So your nervous system is basically three levels.
At the top is connection. In the middle is activation. And then at the bottom is shutdown. So keep those three in mind. And I'm going to show you what happens in each one of those. Connection is, the good stuff, man. That's where we like to be. That's where we have joy. That's where we can learn.
That's where we have creative ideas. That's where you actually make eye contact with someone and have a real conversation. You're not multitasking and pretending to listen. Connection is the good stuff that says to our bodies and our brains and our cells, Ooh, this is good. It's impossible to live there all the time.
We have to have all three of these levels, and here's how they interact. Activation is that like, uh, I gotta respond to this thing. It's the deadlines, it's that weird person you work with that just walked in your office that you don't really want to talk to and you're like triggered by it.
it's something that's coming at you, it feels like a threat. That's kind of the negative side of activation. But the positive side of activation is when you get really excited about something. I get activated before I come stand up here on stage, but I love to do it, but still my body is like, uh, activation.
And then shut down is literally that, shut down. What's happened in our worlds is that activation has grown and grown and grown and grown. And when that happens, it starves out connection literally as part of your physiology. The more activation you have, it robs from your connection piece. And so I want to teach you some things today that will give you proactive shutdown.
Not the kind that happens when we just can't anymore. Things like, you're on your way home from work, and you just had a day. And you get home, and you had these like, like at 10am, your best 10am self, was like, when I get home, I'm gonna. And then you had like these fun things that you were gonna do, even productive things that you were gonna do, and like all these things.
And PMU is like, hell no. And you get home, and the remote's there. That one works, and it goes right to Netflix, right? That one works really well. And then, someone you love walks in the room. And 10 AMU would have been like, come here, honey. 6 PMU is like, nope. And you're secretly thinking, just don't make eye contact.
Just don't make eye contact. Then you feel bad. You're in just can't. And that's real. it's not because you're a bad person. It's not because of anything that you are doing wrong or differently. Your cellular structure is saying, Look, our activation meter overload. We got nothing left for that connection thing you were planning at 10 o'clock this morning.
When Joe came in with that deadline, boom, connection went out. but that fact that you just can't is real. And so I want you not to experience very many more, just can't by proactively giving yourself shut down so that you have capacity to have the connection that you want to have with the people and the life that you love.
Even if it's doing a hobby that you like or doing something that you enjoy, it doesn't even have to be for someone else, for you, something you want to do. And so in order to proactively shut down, that gives us the capacity for that. So think of your life like a snow globe. When you shake up a snow globe, and all of that glittery snow that swirls all around, That represents all of the things in your life that you're responsible for.
And some of it's cool stuff that you love, projects that you love, people that you love, a career that you love, but it's a lot. There's a lot of it and it's just swirling and swirling and swirling. And so we have to put that snow globe down and then what happens? It all settles. And then what's inside the snow globe can see out.
And what's outside can see in for better connection. It's going to shake back up the next day. It's not going to stay settled forever. It's not broken. It needs shut down for a minute to rejuvenate so that you can handle all the stuff that's spinning around you.
our first self care strategy. That we're going to talk about today is drumroll, please
a daily stillness practice Because you're not going to get less stress So we need more stillness to build the capacity to handle the things that you want I mean think about it the things that cause you stress are the things that are most integral to your life I mean you can get rid of your spouse and your kids and your dog, but that's expensive and hard And so better just to learn strategies that help us better connect and have a better relationship with those people that we love.
So daily stillness practice, 10 to 30 minutes every day. It's called daily because daily. Every day. This is about breath work, journaling, meditate, you choose your own adventure for your daily stillness practice. Now, I want to get really real about this.
I had a client one time, said I'm an executive coach. She writes me this check or sends me money. We have our first session and I tell her that her first assignment is a daily stillness practice. And she looked at me dead in the eye and said, I want my money back. I said, okay, I can do that. She said that.
That terrifies me. How many of you are thinking, oh, a daily stillness practice, that feels really uncomfortable? Okay? Because of the patterns of the past, you're going to suck at it at first. It is going to suck. It's going to be hard. You know why? Because you haven't done it. You haven't done it enough. And so anything worth doing to give you those better results like working out that first time you go to the gym on January 4th And you're like, oh, this sucks Daily stillness is gonna be the same thing, but I can promise you That it's had more profound impact on my life and the lives of my clients than anything else I'm a really good business consultant.
I give really good advice About their business, but none of it matters as much as this one practice This has mattered to them and their business. You know the other benefit of it? They look better. I mean, you can buy more creams and stuff, but this, free, available in your house. It will change your life, but you're going to have to get okay with it sucking at first.
And so this client said, okay, uh, I might try it, but I need you to write me out a list of how to do it. And I said, well, what do you mean? She goes, like, do I just sit there? Like, what do I do? What do I think about? That is the byproduct of years of activation. I had a doctor on my podcast one time. She said, we're all addicted to something.
And if it's not drugs and alcohol, sex or shopping, which some of those sound way more fun, it is busy. So most professionals, their addiction of choice is busy. I always have to be moving all the time. And your cellular structure is screaming that it needs rest. And when we can rest, we can better connect with those people and those things that we really deeply care about and want to connect with.
how are you going to make this work in your life. Car time is even a way that you can get stillness. Just turn off the radio, drop those kids off wherever they need to go, and just take yourself a minute.
We don't have to overcomplicate it,
my favorite part of my daily stillness practice is I always involve nature. I live in the Midwest. It's all seasons, but I'm outside first thing in the morning because the first sunlight of the day is magical healing powers. And if you actually want to take your stillness to another level, take your shoes off and stand on the ground, on the earth, and let the energy of the earth align to your energy, and it will, whoop, put you in a really good, happy place.
But I love looking out and observing nature as part of my stillness practice that gets me out of my own head, and I'll find something that I think is just amazingly beautiful, and I'll say, the God that created that also created me. I should walk this And it's just that one little moment where I go, okay, all that stress and all that stuff that I'm thinking about.
I'm okay. I've got what I need. I'm equipped for this. So the, the part two of your daily stillness practice is ensuring that the words that you use to talk about you are loving, kind, beautiful words. Because the most important story is the story that you tell yourself about yourself. Because when you say something, your brain believes everything you say and just responds to it like a computer program.
So if you say, I'm so stressed, your brain goes, pump the cortisol. If you say, I'm so tired, your brain goes, wah, wah, wah. And so the more that we can speak what we want, versus what might be in front of us in the moment, we'll align our cellular structure differently to move towards those things that we want.
So in that daily stillness practice, give yourself that, I'm okay. There's lots of stuff spinning around. I got a lot of things to take care of, but in this moment, I'm okay. And just ground yourself in that moment of you've survived everything up till this point, you're going to be okay. You've got what it takes to get through this next thing.
Because what you create in that daily stillness practice is this energetic, vibes are real science, not just Instagram woo. And when you go into the world after your daily stillness practice, you're better vibe. People want to be around you. They want to connect with you. When you go into a room just stressed to the nines, you don't have to open your mouth and people can feel that presence before it even, even say anything.
And so our daily stillness practice, our strategies for self care aren't just for us. We are the vibe setters in our homes, And so this is for them. This is for your team at work. This is not selfish. This is so you put out into the world. Your best self, who you really are, underneath all of the commitments that you have.
There was a study done in the 90s called Change or Die, and it was a group of cardiology patients that were told, if you don't change your behaviors, you're gonna die. Seems like it would be motivating, right? A very small percentage of them changed their behaviors. Wah, wah, wah.
And so what they found was that the percentage that changed their behaviors had two characteristics. One, they had something inspiring they wanted to live for. They had a hopeful, joy filled future that they couldn't wait to get to. I want to walk my daughter down the aisle. I want to help raise those grandkids.
I want to, whatever it was, but it was so good that they were willing to do whatever they needed to, to get there. The other characteristic that they had in common was they were in community with people. Remember, we're personal, emotional, and social. So personally, there was something emotional, joy filled, that they wanted.
And it was something they were going to do with others, and they had others that were supporting them in this change. That's the stance we want to take. We're not moving away from burnout. We're moving towards the life that we want. We're saying, I want a life that is, that feels like I'm gonna, and then get excited about it enough that you're willing to do the things to take care of yourself, to enjoy the life that you want.
So I'd like for you to jot down the answer to these questions as you think about implementing practices that take care of you. I want to fill in the blank in order to fill in the blank. Because if I don't, I want to practice this daily stillness, even though I think it's going to suck, in order to really start to be more calm and present with my family.
Because if I don't, I'm missing out on some of the best years of my kids lives. As an example. Take a couple minutes to write your story.
And I'll reinforce what I've said earlier. Guilt and shame are never going to be the motivators to live the inspired life that you deserve. And so the more that you can talk to yourself in inspiring ways that leads you to the life that you really want, the better it is for you, and the better it is for those around you.
You can use this little framework in a variety of ways. I find it insanely helpful. Next, self care strategy ties together your work and your life. I call it VRI. Value, relevance, and impact. Value represents you, your value, who you are. The value that you bring to your life. The value that you bring to your job.
Who you are. Your gifts, your talents, your abilities. And relevance is how you take your value and make it matter in relevant ways to your work. And then look for the impact. The human impact and the business impact. The human impact is going to be measured by how it feels in that interaction. And the business impact is usually measured in time or money.
So we're going to walk through how you can use a weekly VRI practice. So you're not proving yourself for somebody else to tell you if you're good. You know you're good. You have value. How is it relevant? How does it make an impact? So let's walk through it. Your value is in you and your story, which includes your gifts, your talents, your abilities, but it also includes your struggles, your challenges, your hopes, your dreams.
It encompasses your whole story. Your life. And so I want to start with you looking at what is my value with a simple little exercise. I want you to think about the things that you love to do that you're great at and jot those down. What do you love to do that you're great at? And it doesn't have to be written in corporate speak business terms.
I'd prefer it not be. Maybe I'm great at optimism. It could be something that is about a human exchange. It doesn't have to be a business skill, but it can be, but jot down those things that you're really good at, that you love to do.
And then if we want to create capacity, what are those things that suck, that you're not good at, that you're doing, that you can delegate to somebody else, or just stop doing because it's sucking your energy. Somebody, one of my clients said to me, I hate the dinner conversation. What are we having for dinner?
She was like, it sucks my will to live every time somebody asks me that. Now this is, like you, a career professional. I said, do a meal kit. Do HelloFresh. Three days a week, take that off your table. Take that off your brain. Put it on your table. Off your brain. It was like this light bulb went off. I was like, it's It's not that much more expensive, and if it's sucking your will to live, I'd say the cost is already really high for you trying to figure it out yourself.
Like, she orders HelloFresh delivery and calls me like it's the second coming of Christ. She was like, you have no idea how much this has changed my life. Yeah, I do. Because that's one of the things that I hated. There are strategies that we can implement that are super simple, but we're so busy. All the time, not even pausing to think about it, that we could just get rid of that thing that we don't like.
Or ask others in your house to help more than they are is another one too, but we don't have time for that today. Okay, so we started with your value. I want to go a little bit deeper because I want you to love your story. I want you to love your value. So here's a couple more questions for you to jot down answers to about yourself using this acronym of love.
What are the things that you've learned in your life, kind of the academic list of things, whatever pops to the top of your brain, don't think about it in resume format, just what comes to mind. Let your subconscious drive this exercise. What do you, what have you learned? Jot down a few things.
Oh, what have you overcome?
There's beauty in that resilience of overcoming.
The next one needs a little more explanation. V, what have you verified is true for you? And verification means it may not be true for someone else, but it's very true for you. I'll give you two examples for me. One is personal. I have verified that no matter how cute Reese Witherspoon looks and bangs, I do not.
I've tried multiple times. I have pictures to prove that's not good for me. I have verified at this chapter of my career when I started my business eight years ago that I needed more creative freedom Which is why I left a wildly successful job Where I did great work to do something different because I had verified that I was not feeling my best self because I wanted more Creativity so verification is that's just about you.
That's not about anybody else. What have you verified is true for you?
And E is what lights up your emotions. And sometimes that's joy and excitement and sometimes it's rage and frustration, but it's something that gets you charged up. Mine is connection. Anytime I see groups of people that look like they've been put to the side or are lonely in some way, oof, that one hits me in my heart.
What's that emotional component for you?
So now you have started a list from the things that you love to do that you're great at, and this list of things that comes from your story. Your experiences. That is your superpower. That right there on that paper. That right here in your heart. That's who you are. That is valuable. Right here. Right now.
With not another certification. Not another anything. Not another promotion. Nothing. Right here. Right now. And when you sit in that daily stillness practice, I want you to start to feel the love of that. So that when you take it out to work, it comes with good vibrations. And then, we're going to take your value, and you're going to make that matter.
So, an example of this. I was working with a client the other day and we were talking about one of her colleagues and she's using VRI to have a conversation with a colleague and we were talking about what was really great about this, this person. And she said, man, she's always just so optimistic. And when we're in meetings and we're having this really tough conversations and things aren't going well at work, she has a way of like bringing everybody back on track so that we can get things solved and we don't get like down the gloom doom place.
Great. What's the impact of that? Well, we're able to solve problems quicker. Everybody on the team is more invested in the answers that we come up with. You see, our value doesn't necessarily have to be a business skill off of a resume. Our value is in who you are and how you show up. So how can you take who you are, your value, and go make it really relevant in your job?
Jot down a few ideas of how do you currently take who you are and make it really Relevant.
You have such tremendous value in who you are, and I just want that to show up at work every day. People need to be seen and heard more than they ever have. You are not a machine here to produce. You are a beautiful human here to have value, relevance, and impact in who you are.
Keep showing up like that. And so what I want you to do is when you're sitting in that daily stillness practice and you're preparing that morning to go out into your work, bring that, bring those human elements into your job because that is what people need and that is what people will remember.
Because the impact isn't just on us individually as humans. You've now given her the confidence to go and do better work. So we can also sit and ask ourselves, Okay, what is the difference that I make to the money making model of the business? You're going to sit down each week at the end of the week and you're going to write out or think about on your drive home in the car, How was I valuable, relevant?
and impactful this week. Because we're done proving ourselves, y'all. Now we're gonna stand up for being ourselves. Knowing our value. And showing up to it in a really intentional way. And as you do that each week, show yourself gratitude. Feel the gratitude of that moment.
I want our strength and our confidence to come from us knowing ourselves and knowing that when we show up, we want to devote ourselves to the people in our jobs and the work that we do. We're wired for devotion. We just need to channel it in to the things that matter most.
But the other thing that we're going to have to add to that is knowing the money making model of our business. That's not the CFO's job, that's not finance's job, everybody in the entire organization needs to know how the money making model of the organization works. Here's why. This, on the left, represents the list of stuff that you have that you think you need to get done.
The list on the right is what you're actually going to get done. Have you ever got all the way done with your list? Ever? Like, or at least in this last year? Right? Ever? We're not getting caught up. And so when you make that list, I want you to go through your list of projects and tasks and activities and I want you to ask yourself, which of these are the most relevant and impactful not only to the people, the customers, the colleagues, but the money making model of the organization.
Because when you know that, you have power. When you do the work that matters most. You feel better. The organization benefits. We're not waiting for somebody else to sort our list. Pay the price to get to know the money making model of your organization. Ask to sit with people who can share more information with you.
I trust me. They want you to know more about that so that you can have a bigger impact. We're not leaving that to somebody else. And then each week. You'll feel better about who you are and what you do. You're not waiting on a performance review. You're not waiting for somebody else to tell you you're great.
You are great. You are responsible for feeding your own soul. Nobody's coming to save us. We don't need saved. We need to stand taller. What did 14 year old you do for fun?
14 year old you. Go back. So this is before you have a driver's license. This is, you got autonomy in your life finally. You don't always have to go to the grocery store with mom or grandma or whatever. You can make some choices about your music or whatever. What was 14 year old you doing for fun?
There are clues inside of 14 year old you about those things that will feed your soul. My clients say simple things sometimes. I used to love to read. Then read something for fun. It doesn't have to be another business book. Do something that feeds your soul.
I want your story to inspire your kids, your grandkids, the new hires coming into your organization. I want you to be you. Your best you. Not what somebody else wants of you, but what you want of you. Because you are already enough, I just want you to stand taller in knowing that and using that for relevance and impact in your organization.
I want you to feel good to be. And in that stillness, that pause that you're going to reignite in your life, let that be the place where you get re inspired to be so much of who you are that people can't help but notice and want to connect with you. Because I believe the age of humanity is going to be largely led by women who are willing to stand up in that authenticity.
Because I think if we can change the work, we really can change the world. Because honest to God, making money ought to feel better.
but I'm going to leave you today saying to you that I know the value that you have and I can't wait to see what happens when you go out and show everyone else how relevant and impactful you really are.
thanks for listening to this episode. I would love it if you would go to Apple Podcast and leave a rating and a review, and then you can go to rebecca fleetwood hessian.com and join the Badass Women's Council. And if you really wanna take a deeper dive, join the movement of a thousand Thriving Women.
There's amazing Thrive tools there for you today. Love you.
Hey y'all. Fun fact. If you like the music for the podcast, that is actually my son, Cameron Hessian, and I would love it if you would go to Spotify and iTunes and follow him and download some of his other music. My personal favorite is TV Land.