Alright, y’all. Welcome back to another episode of the Sophie Kessner podcast. I am very excited to have you on here. We’re trying a little bit of a new setup to see how this looks in the video format for repurposing content, which we’ll talk about in future episodes per use. But in today’s episode, what I really want to dive into and explore is a conversation around the epidemic we’re seeing for folks who have been going really, really hard in their business for a really long time and are experiencing either a bit of fatigue, burnout, emotional overwhelm, a sense of stagnancy where they’re not able to continue to move forward in the same way that they used to. Now I can speak about this both firsthand, having gone through my own experience with the burnout, and with a little bit of what I would call kind of like a midlife crisis in some ways, but also I see it a lot with many of the clients that I work with.
Now for a bit of context and background for the last three years or so, i have been training in trauma work, and the trauma work I’ve been training in is called somatic experiencing. Now, some of you might be familiar with that, some of you might not have any idea what that is, but essentially it is a type of modality that focuses on presenting enough space and opportunity and safety for the system And when I say system we’re talking about nervous system For the nervous system to be able to slowly, in a tight-traded way, meaning little by little, discharge the stuck and our stagnant energy that didn’t have the proper amount of time or space previously, and our safety previously, to fully discharge. So in the context of trauma and in the way that I like to look at it, i see it as two core categories that I currently study. I’m sure there are more, but these are the two that I study. There is what we would call shock trauma, and shock trauma is wonderful for SE work. Shock trauma is all around there being a specific event or experience that somebody goes through, and that specific experience is what creates a shock to the system. Now you can think of this as like a sudden loss, a car accident, somebody breaking up with you out of nowhere that you weren’t expecting, a surprise pregnancy things that often happened.Too much, too fast, too soon is the language double traditionally used inside of SE work. Now, with the too much too fast, too soon, this is a different category of trauma from something that is more chronic. Now, when we’re talking about chronic trauma and our trauma due to some sort of neglect, lack thereof, it can come in two different ways, right? One it can come from too much for too long or it can come from too little, too late. So there’s two ways that that can kind of show up, depending on the background and the history of the individual.
But I bring this up because oftentimes the way that the body experiences the trauma of business is less of the shock and it’s more of the chronic component, It’s more of the ongoing, consistently impeding stress that our systems are having to figure out how to cope with. How to deal with And the way that we learn to navigate, to cope, to deal with the stress is what we would then call or label coping strategies. Right, and depending on how much we identify with these strategies personalities, archetypes, defense systems, etc. And so then we develop this chronic sense of who we are, in the state of being, and a great example of this is really common in the entrepreneurial and just in general in the athletic world is we start to identify with this type of survival strategy, the coping strategy that we’ve developed as a way to navigate the intense stress that exists in our lives. So an example of this would be something like a business owner who is going into the online space having trained in whatever it is that they’re really great at and they’re needing to learn how to market, how to do sales, how to show up 24 seven, how to manage a team, how to manage clients, how to deliver to clients, and then how to do all of that at the same time, year round, nonstop. Now, as you can imagine, having to manage all of those different categories and labels and phases in the business can become extremely exhausting and extremely overwhelming. In fact, i would say this is why most folks don’t often stay in the entrepreneurial game very long, and if they do, they tend to develop other coping mechanisms, whether that’s through the need to constantly be achieving, always investing in new things, always looking for ways to enhance their creative and athletic ability through biohacking or other, whether it’s through less healthy mechanisms like smoking or drinking or drugs, but whatever it is, we develop a way to find some sort of release from the stress that the way we are living our lives is creating.
And the interesting thing about this that I personally find really curious in the online space is this idea that we are just supposed to build capacity to handle more, and it’s a narrative that I drastically bought into in the earlier years of my career until it proved to me that it just wasn’t actually true. Now, what I’m talking about when I say this is a few things. The first thing that I’m talking about is this idea that we always need to be going bigger, faster, as quickly as we possibly can. How much more can we do? How much more can we handle? How much more money can we make? How many more clients can we take on? How much bigger can we grow following and how fast can we do it?
And there’s no time to stop, to slow down, and it becomes what we would call a bit of an obsession. In some ways, there’s this tunnel vision that we develop around the need to achieve a certain goal, and in a lot of ways, that goal becomes a moving target. It’s not just this one thing that we’re doing. This one time it’s like, okay, we did that, now what’s the next thing? There becomes what I’ve referred to in previous episodes or previous content of mine as a bit of an achievement addiction.
We become addicted to the idea of achieving, and what’s confusing in this space is that this type of coping strategy to navigate life is rewarded and celebrated in the Western world especially. We look at that and we say, wow, look at how hard this person is working, look at how much they’ve sacrificed, look at how little they sleep or what, all of the things that come with it and we glorify it. And it’s not to say that these things are inherently bad or wrong, but it’s important to understand the holistic perspective in how operating in one Pacific way for an extended period of time then impacts the other aspects of our lives, and a conversation that I have with every client is redefining what success looks like and what it means to them. So the common idea of what we think success is is the money, is the fame, is the growth, is the success in the lens of being known, having social accolades, having a sense of being a space, who you are connected to in a certain environment, the way that you present yourself physically, but also socially, the assets that you accumulate. And we look at this and we say, ah, okay, they’ve got the card, they’ve got the house, they’ve got the bank account, they know the people, they’re in the places. That must be success, and what’s interesting about this is we are inundated with messages that continue to feed this idea to us from very early and young age, and it’s all throughout culture. So we never really question the values behind the definition, the values that go into creating this idea of what success is or what it looks like, And instead we oftentimes blindly buy into it, to no fault of our own or of anyone else’s. But what’s important to recognize and understand here is the reason why we’re buying into this is oftentimes because what we’re experiencing feels very less than the ideal, and so we create this idea or the story around.
One day, when I experience this have that ABC XYZ, i’ll no longer be dealing with these things, i’ll no longer feel this way, i’ll no longer look this way, i’ll no longer whatever it is, and I’ll finally be able to have whatever it is, whether that be the confidence, the self-assuredness, the access to resources, the elimination of fear, the elimination of self-doubt, the proving something to yourself or to others, all of which are incredibly common. And so we start to strive for this idea of success, believing so much of the messaging that we’ve grown up around in that this will solve the majority of our problems, that this will be the solution to the pain, to the sadness, to the guilt, the shame, whatever it is. If I could just do this thing And to a certain degree there might be truth behind this. It may ease the financial pressure, it may ease the struggle, it may ease the self-image, but what we have to be intentional about and conscientious of is unpacking and understanding. What are we compromising in the process of striving for this ideal of success?
We are so focused on what we’re gaining that we oftentimes don’t see what we’re losing or what we’re giving up in the process And, unfortunately for so much of the world, we don’t recognize it until it’s a little too late Now when we start to look at the achievement. That’s happening a lot of times. There’s a hyper-focus that gets built into it And that hyper-focus can feel like tunnel vision. I can’t stop, i can’t breathe, i can’t eat, i can’t do anything until this thing is done, until I get to this place, and I know this place very well. This is a total pattern of mine Which can be really, really great for getting through challenging things, for having a great sense of resilience and persistency.
And if we haven’t developed the capacity or the ability or the discipline. However, you want to look at this, to stop and pause and say I need to take a break, i need to tend to the other things in my life, then this strategy that was developed to support you in moving out of the pain in your life will quickly become something that perpetuates the problem. Because if we’re only always focused on one strategy, to achieving what it is that we think we want, we start to become blind to the impact of how that strategy is affecting other aspects of our life, which is why we have to start to look at how we’re defining what success is to us, what it means to us, what it looks like to us and how it feels for us. And the conversation that I have again and again and again with clients and we’re talking about folks who’ve built incredible success to what the general public would see is oftentimes they feel like they’ve lost themselves in it, like they have built something that they feel trapped in, like they have this massive thing that they’ve created but they don’t really have any freedom outside of it, because this thing is taking up their entire life And they feel a sense of obligation or responsibility to keep it going. They’ve got team members underneath them. They’ve got folks who are waiting on them, they’ve got clients who are painting them, and the thing that they’ve built to create a sense of freedom has then become the thing that they’ve built to trap themselves in, which is keeping them from what they’re really, really wanting.
And this tends to be the challenge in the entrepreneurial space specifically, but definitely in other areas as well. And so we have to begin to unpack where this need for achievement, for pushing for the extremism, has come from, and then we need to begin to understand what it is that we actually value, want and need, and the answer to these questions is going to be different for every single person. There may be crossover, but every person is going to have different things that they want to need, and that doesn’t mean that any are better or worse. It doesn’t mean that any are right or wrong, but it’s understanding what do you value. And what you value is going to be highly dependent on what you care about, the things that matter to you, the way that you want to experience your life, and a great example that I can give you in this is in the early years of my career, it was very much just about showing up and doing all of the things and growing and growing as quickly as possible, and I didn’t really have a whole lot of awareness about other things outside of myself, about other things outside of the immediate people in my life, which would be my partner and friends.
And the business is really the main thing. But when I had my son, i was abruptly forced to have to reevaluate all of it. What mattered, what I cared about, why I cared about those things, what I really wanted, how I wanted to experience myself, my life and decide how I wanted to move forward, how I wanted to shift things, because what I started to realize was in the way that my life was shifting in. Motherhood is an incredibly big transition. The way that I was operating previously was not sustainable for the life that I had now created And by that I mean what I valued and how I was living when I was a single woman in my early 20s was not going to be sustainable for me in a committed relationship with a newborn and toddler.
And one of the things that I found that was incredibly overwhelming but also healing in a lot of ways, was my ability to reconnect back to my roots. For a lot of my younger adult life, i spent a lot of time focused on feeling like I needed to do it all on my own and like I couldn’t depend on anybody. I had a lot of distrust with others, but luckily, in the process of transitioning into motherhood, i was forced to have to depend on others, to lean on family and community, and it made me feel a lot of things that I didn’t think I would feel. I started to feel so much more appreciation and gratitude, but also a lot of guilt and shame for not recognizing what was there in front of me. And through the years I’ve had to do a lot of the deep work to repair within myself the relationship that I have to these things, because what I’ve started to recognize is how much I actually value these things like family, like community, the relationships in my life. That is drastically different from what I had valued previously, and what I mean when I say this is in my early 20s I valued most the relationships with the people that I felt were going to be giving me a sense of positioning or authority in the way that I wanted to be perceived in the world, because I thought that was the thing that was going to get me to the thing And what I realized after having my son and after having going through an entire dark night of the soul and years of re-evaluation and re-deconstruction and reconstruction, was the things that I actually valued most were the relationships with the people that were always there, and for me personally, that was family.
It was family and my partner and the friends that never left. Now, that might not be true for everybody, that might not be the value for everybody, and that’s okay. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. That doesn’t mean my values are wrong. It doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you.
But this was my experience, my lived experience, and I share that because oftentimes in the path to developing businesses are achieving at a high level or growing things to exponential rates, it can be very easy to get stuck in the achievement. It can be very easy to get stuck in the doing of life that we forget to experience life itself. So what we want to get curious about and the question that I ask, both myself and with clients, is how do you actually want to experience your day-to-day, how do you actually want to feel in the process of growing and building this thing? It’s not to say that you can’t have both, because it’s true, you can, so long as the way in which you’re going about it is supportive of the way you want to be feeling and experiencing it. And this becomes the question, because so often we get so caught up in the speed at which we are going and constantly wanting to move faster, that we’re willing to compromise in the short term And I again have been notoriously guilty of this as well. So we are willing to compromise and to sacrifice intermittently to try to speed up the process, and I believe personally this is my, my own opinion that this sense of urgency is really built into the culture. It’s really built into the way that we experience life.
From the very beginning, there’s never, there’s never enough time. It never feels like there’s enough time to do it all, and we want to feel like we’re getting there faster. If you explore other cultures and other places in the world, it’s very much less so the fact They move a lot slower. And that slower pace to somebody who has always grown up in the Western world might feel incredibly confronting, because it begs us to question why and how we’re moving about things And it almost matches a point of superiority within ourselves. We feel like because we can go faster and do more, that we are better than. And the reality is it’s just different. It’s just different. It’s about what you value.
So, coming back to the conversation of deciding what you want and how you want to experience your life, this becomes an interesting one, because usually when we first start to do this work, it’s the conversation of the cars or the house or the debt or the travel or the whatever it is. But when we start to go a little bit deeper, underneath that, we start to get curious about what is the feeling underneath it A sense of financial security. I don’t want to have to worry, i want to feel safe, i want to feel taken care of. Okay, well, when you have that, then what? Why do you want that? So I can just be here and I can just be present and be happy and finally let go. Okay, let go of what? So I can let go of the stress and the fear and the anxiety. Okay, now we’re getting to the thing We want to create a life where we don’t have to be constantly living with the fear and the stress and the anxiety.
And if that’s the case, then what we want to look at is what is it in our life today. What is it about? how we’re living, about how we’re building, about how we’re doing life that is consistently creating this ongoing sense, or this chronic sense of anxiety and fear and our overwhelm, or whatever the things might be, and then when we look at that, we start to get insight into what those micro changes need to be in order for us to start to change the way that we experience the process of creating the thing. Now, a really beautiful example of this, in business especially, is a conversation that I have a lot, a lot with clients, and that is the conversation of reconciling with this idea that this business that I built isn’t actually the business that I want And it is such a catch 22.
Because so much of the time we build this thing and it’s successful and it works and it’s doing really well, but we feel trapped in it. We don’t actually feel like we have the freedom in the life. We feel like we are, in some ways, an employee to our business, to our clients, and that can feel incredibly stressful because we don’t feel like we can say no, we owe them something, they’re paying us this money, they’re affording us it, but we’re also responsible to the team members, depending on the size and the scope of the business. So we have to begin to wonder what else is possible. What do you really want to experience? Now?
a conversation that I’ve had with multiple friends and clients over the last few years, and myself included, is do I actually want to be constantly launching online and running giant high-tech agro programs? And when I saw it that the answer for me was no, and oftentimes for some of my clients the answer was similar. They didn’t want to actually be coaches. They didn’t actually want to be responsible for having to show up to calls and constantly be catering to try to help their clients get through and hold their hands in the process. Yet their entire business was built around that. That was the business. The business is to sit here and move people through this process and get them these goals and launch to the next level and grow the team and constantly hit new revenue income goals and grow as quickly as possible, as fast as possible, and constantly expand.
And in that process, it’s so easy to get caught up in the expansion that we lose ourselves and we lose what we really want and we are not able to take a second to take a pulse on how we actually feel in that process. And this is oftentimes where we see folks build something really really big, really really fast, but then a year or two later they’ve completely dismantled everything they’ve built to go on what would be a bit of a sabbatical a sole sabbatical, if you would to rediscover and reconnect with what really matters to them. Now. This does not have to be the path for everybody. This is not saying that every single person in this process has to go and burn down their entire business, but what it does mean is we can create the time and the space to allow ourselves to be able to consistently be checking in and attuning to how we feel and what we need, and making those micro adjustments in the process.
And oftentimes this does require a sense of being willing to slow down, to let go, to not have to be in that constant state of urgency. And this is where so much of the trauma work that we were talking about in the beginning becomes imperative for this process. Because if we are living in a way to which just myself here if we are living in a way in which we are operating in that core archetype or that core survival strategy or that core coping mechanism, which is tunnel vision, which is the go, which is the never stopping, the constantly going, the needing to go faster, bigger, more, all the time, always moving, never feeling like there’s enough time, never feeling like you can get it all done, always feeling like you should be doing more. Trying to change the behavior before working with where the behavior is coming from is only gonna create more resistance, more frustration, more pain, more anxiety. So what we want to actually be doing inside of these experiences is less so around trying to change the behavior itself, but more so around how do we actually create a felt sense, experience of safety in the body for this person to be able to start to come out of that space of hypervigilance? And how can we slowly, over time, expand that ability to stay in a more regulated space longer, while over time this starts to become more of the norm? Because what we see in the counter side of this is that it’s less of the slowly coming out and getting into more of a rhythm here, and it’s more of an oscillation between going, going, going in the state of hypervigilance until there’s literally nothing left and we collapse in our body. It forces us to shut down, it forces us to be quiet and to sit and to stay still until we can’t take it anymore, and then we develop the will to push again and we are just constantly oscillating between these two spaces.
Now, this is not what I would recommend, though. I have experienced this and I’ve witnessed and worked with clients who’ve been stuck in these places. What we’re talking about is slow. It is a slow process to rework, renegotiate and repattern chronic symptoms of living in a state of hypervigilance or a state of always needing to go faster and do more, be bigger. It needs to take time because the pattern happened over time And you can think of this pattern like a muscle.
If you’ve spent your whole life only lifting with your upper body but never learning how to use your legs, it’s gonna feel incredibly foreign and uncomfortable to have to learn how to use your legs and they’re gonna feel incredibly weak and fragile, and that’s okay. What we want to start to do is learn how to balance them so we can use the strength that we’ve built in our upper body to support building the strength in our lower body. Now, for those of you that are into fitness, this analogy might make a lot more sense For those of you who are less familiar with fitness, this might be a little more foreign, but essentially, what I’m trying to say is we want to balance. We want to learn how to start to balance the system, because oftentimes in these places and spaces and in folks who’ve lived and navigated life in this way, we are overdeveloped in one category and underdeveloped in another, and that’s not a bad thing, but it’s recognizing where is the over and under development and how do we start to actually support that process.
Now, we’ve gone into a lot in today’s episode, so I appreciate those of you who have stuck with me.
This is definitely a little bit of some different content, but I feel like it’s incredibly important in the conversation for a multitude of reasons, but the biggest one being that this is the internal work, that this is the real work when it comes to business, when it comes to life, is better understanding ourselves, better understanding who we are, why we are the way that we are and how we can start to make changes if we don’t want to actually stay where we are, and the byproduct of this work is the thing that we actually want. It’s just the strategy is a little different. So if you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, as always, please feel free to leave a review and rate on your favorite podcast platforms. It means the world to us. If there’s questions that you have, you can always email and reach out to
[email protected], or you could always reach out to me on Instagram, and I am Sophie Kessner. Otherwise, i will see you all on the next episode. Thank you so much.
