Latest / Breaking the Timeline by Shana Francis / Your Body Is Ruining Your Career & You Don't Even Know It
Transcript
- Shana: Your body has been sending you a report card every single week. Your energy levels, your concentration, how you show up in difficult meetings, how quickly you recover when something goes wrong. It is all data. And most ambitious women I know are failing the assessment and blaming everything except the actual cause. Today we are fixing that. properly. The first thing I want to talk about is why this keeps getting deprioritized in the first place. Because I do not think it is laziness. I do not think it is a lack of discipline. I think it is the way conversations have been framed to us. If you spent any time in wellness content, the messaging around physical health is almost entirely framed around how you look, how you feel in your body, your relationship with food and movement. Which matters. I am not dismissing it, but it keeps physical health in a personal bucket, a self-care bucket. And when you are a young professional with limited time and a long list of priorities, the self-care bucket is the one that goes. First. Then there is the performance side of things, the biohacking content, the elite athlete stuff, the people talking about zone two training and VO2 Max and sleep tracking every single metric. And again, it is interesting, but if you are a 26 year old just trying to get through the week, train like a professional athlete, is not an actionable instruction. It just adds to the pile of things you are apparently not doing well enough. Your energy is a professional asset. The same way your skills are a professional asset, the way you network is a professional asset. It's like any asset, if you are not maintaining it, it goes. The returns go down. And in this case, the returns are your decision-making quality, your presence in rooms. They matter. Your ability to handle pressure without unraveling, your capacity to actually think creatively rather than just reactively grinding through tasks. That is not wellness. That is performance. And once you start seeing it that way, the question changes completely. It stops being, do I have time to prioritize my health? And it becomes, can I actually afford not to? Now think about it in terms you already apply at work. You would not walk in to a client meeting having done no preparation. You would have not submit a piece of work you knew was under resourced. You would not expect to do your best thinking in a meeting you have turned up to running on two hours of broken sleep and a coffee and say no lunch. And yet, that is the situation a lot of ambitious women are operating in on a completely regular basis and calling it fine. It is not fine. It is costing you, just not in a way that shows up on a spreadsheet. Let's get into the actual pattern because there will be a leak somewhere. There always is. I have coached and worked with A lot of early career women, and the pattern is almost always the same. On paper, doing everything right, credible, hardworking, smart, but hitting a wall that cannot explain what's happening. Opportunities are coming and going, never quite the obvious choice for something. And they know they could be. Given what feels like everything, and still feeling like they are invisible somehow. And when you look at the full picture, not just the professional week, but the actual week, it is the same story. Sleep that is broken or too short. Movement that has either disappeared or completely never existed in the first place. This inconsistency does not actually support the nervous system. Eating habits that are full of sugar and you have crashes throughout the day. This is cognitive demand at the highest. A low-grade stress response running continuously in the body with no physical outlet. And underneath all of it, an exhaustion so normalized it has stopped registering. Here is the thing about that. When your body is that state, it is operating in survival mode, not performance mode. Survival mode is the body's response to chronic depletion. It is managing threats. Not optimizing function. And you cannot access full presence, full authority, full emotional intelligence from survival mode. You are working from a physiological deficit. Your body has been sending you that information the whole time. The 3 p.m. crashes you have just accepted is part of your day. The Sunday anxiety that starts earlier and earlier in the afternoon. The way you feel After a week where you have not moved once versus the weeks where you have. The way your thinking changes when you have actually slept. That is all data. Most people have just never been given the framework to read it as a professional information. So I want to give you that framework. The first is sleep quality, and I want to be specific because I do not mean sleep quantity. Most people Have a rough idea of how many hours they are getting. What most people have not actually interrogated is whether these hours are doing anything. Do you wake up feeling recovered? Or are you waking up already tired, already behind, reaching for your phone before you have even properly surfaced? Because those are very different situations. And the number of hours do not tell you which one you are in. Seven hours of fragmented stressed screen adjacent sleep is generally not the same as seven hours of actual rest. The body does different things at different stages of sleep. Consolidating memory, regulating hormones, repairing tissue, processing the emotional load of the day. If a quality is not there, none of it is happening properly. And the result is not just tiredness, it is reduced working, memory processes slowing down, lower emotional regulation, high cortisol. You are showing up to your professional life running on a compromise system and wondering why everything feels slightly harder than it actually should. Now, if you generally cannot remember the last morning you woke up and felt ready. That is your data point. That is where your first leap is. The second is movement. And specifically, what happens to it when things get hard. Your hardest weeks. The ones where work is heavy, pressure is high, your calendar is full, and you are most tempted to cut the movement because you don't have time. Because what happens in those weeks is the thing that actually tells you where you stand with this. The relationship. Most people have with movement is that it is the first thing to grow when life gets demanding. And that is exactly backwards for what the body needs. The weeks where you are most cognitively and emotionally stretched are the weeks where physical movement has the highest return. Movement is how the nervous system discharges the stress hormones that have been building all day. It's how the brain gets the blood flow it needs to actually function. It's how you create the neurological conditions for being able to think clearly rather than just reactively. When you cut it in your hardest weeks, you are removing the thing that would have helped you get through them. And then the hard week becomes a hard two week. And a hard month. And then just like that. It becomes how things are right now. So the question is not whether you move in an average week. The question is what it looks like when things are hard. That is the honest audit. Now the third thing is what you are eating and when. Specifically in the middle of the working day. Now, this one sounds the least glamorous, and it is the one I see making the most immediate practical differences. If you are going from a small breakfast or no breakfast to a proper meal at two or three in the afternoon, you are running your brain through its highest demand hours. The meetings, the decisions, the hard conversations, the deep work on a blood sugar level that is nowhere near. Where it needs to be. This is not about diet culture. It is not about eating perfectly or becoming food obsessive. It is about the basic physiology of how the brain runs. Glucose is the brain's primary fuel. When it drops, concentration goes first. Then mood. Then your ability to handle anything that requires nuanced thinking or emotional regulation. What you eat at midday and whether you actually eat at midday shapes who you are in the meeting at free. That is just how it works. Now, a lot of women I know eat badly during the working day, not because they do not know better, but because they do not prioritize it. Lunch gets eaten at a desk in 10 minutes. Or push back or skipped entirely because there is too much happening. And they sit in a 3 pm meeting wondering why they feel flat and cannot quite think straight. The body told you, you just were not reading it as a professional problem. So three things sleep quality, not quantity, movement in your hardest weeks, not your easy ones, and midday feel. You do not need to fix all three this week. You need to look at all three and work out which one is making the most noise. Which one reading through that list made you slightly uncomfortable because you already know the answer. That is your one. Because here is what I have learned from trying to build multiple things simultaneously while always trying to train and think and show up properly. The version of you that is well rested, physically activated, and properly fed is generally a different professional than the depleted version. Not marginally different, noticeably different. The quality of your thinking, the way you carry yourself in a room. How you respond to pressure rather than just react to it, all of it changes. And that version of you is not a reward for when you calm down. That is the version of you that creates the momentum that moves things forward in the first place. Your body has been sending you the report. Start reading it. Now that is it for this week. And if this episode has made you think about not just your physical energy, but how all of this connects, how you are showing up in your career, your mindset, the full picture. That is exactly the kind of work I do with women one-to-one through Quora. It is not a fitness program. It is not a career coaching in silo. It is all of it together because that is the only way it actually works. If that sounds like something you want to explore, The link are in for show notes today. Now, come find me on socials or drop something below or even in our Substack newsletter. I want to know which one of these areas landed heaviest for you. Which one made you go, yeah? Okay, this is me. I read everything. And if you know someone who is working flat out and cannot figure out why things are not moving the way they should. Send them this session. It is exactly for them. And remember, as a community, we are always trying to help out our professional women, our colleagues, and making better decisions. So hopefully you've enjoyed today's session and you will take on what we have gone through and just see what is really creating the most noise and how can you make this a little bit better each time. Thank you for joining me and I can't wait to see you next week.