Latest / The Rosanne Callens Podcast / E16: You're Not Unproductive... You're Integrating!
Transcript
- Rosanne Callens: Hi friends, Roseanne Callins here. I want to talk about something that has been on my heart lately because if I'm being honest, I've been feeling a little bit guilty. And not because I did something wrong and not because I let somebody down. I've been feeling guilty because I haven't even been marketing my business the way I normally do. But if you know me, that's actually kind of funny. It's funny because I'm the kind of person who teaches people how to be visible. I help people with LinkedIn. I help people tell their stories. I help people put themselves out there. Yet for the last several weeks, I have found myself doing a lot less of that than usual. But the interesting part is that I haven't been sitting around doing nothing. My calendar hasn't been empty. In fact, There are days when I feel like I have a lot more ideas than I've had in years. Yet I kept carrying around this feeling that I should be doing more. And the more I sat with that feeling, the more I started asking myself why. The more I sat with that feeling, the more I started asking myself why. I said, Roseanne, why do you feel guilty when you're not producing something? Why are you struggling with seasons that don't have obvious outcomes? Friends, why is it that we even have such a hard time believing that something valuable is happening when there isn't a measurable result attached to it? Well, I started thinking about this after I returned home from Germany at the Americans Working Across the Globe at the end of April. First of all, it still seems surreal to say that out loud. I was in Garmish, Germany at a beautiful resort giving a keynote speech and five workshops. And sometimes I have these moments in my life where I say, wow, how did this happen? Germany was just one of those experiences that really changed me. Not overnight, not in some dramatic movie scene kind of way. It just changed me in that way that meaningful experiences often do. There is something so powerful about standing in front of a room and sharing a message that feels so deeply connected to who you are and who your audience is. There is something powerful about the conversations that happen afterward, the people who come up to you, the stories they share, all of the moments in the cafe where people come up and tell me, when you spoke about. This it just made me think of me and my life, and it felt like you were talking right to me. And I came home carrying a tremendous amount of energy and it wasn't exhausted energy. It was creative. It was creative energy. It was just like the kind of energy where your mind is racing with possibilities. The kind of energy that you can't stop thinking about what's next. The kind of energy where ideas, ideas are showing up faster and just way faster than you can even write them down. Maybe it's the note section of your phone, maybe it was in the journal, maybe it was on a post-it note, you know, just I had I had words everywhere. I've talked so much about Operation You and taking the time to take care of you that a new thing was even born for me. Electric leadership. That energy and that feeling of just everything coursing through you. It was beginning to take shape in a new way. It was becoming a message. And I heard it more and more in my gut. My desire to help people find the energy within themselves again. my philosophy, if you will, a framework started to take shape and just something much bigger than I had originally imagined. And then I came home and life, life happened. My daughter turned 21. Then we had junior prom for my other daughter. We celebrated friends getting their associates' degrees and bachelor's degrees. We attended multiple high school graduations. There were family dinners, pictures, conversations, celebrations, and all of those moments that have become the memories that we hold on to for years. And those things are very important. And for once, I wasn't rushing through them. I wasn't sitting in the audience secretly checking my emails. I wasn't even constantly thinking about what I should be posting on social media. I had abandoned my 77-day challenge for a while because I just wasn't gonna worry about whether I was creating enough content. I was simply there, present, fully present. Or at least I was. Trying my absolute hardest to be fully present. It's hard when your brain is just, you know, your your brain is on the go all the time, right? But while that sounds wonderful, it also felt surprisingly uncomfortable. Because somewhere along the way, I think I developed this belief that if I'm not actively producing something or doing something specific, that I should probably be doing more. And maybe you can relate, friends. Maybe you've ever taken a Saturday off and spent the entire day thinking about all of the things you should be accomplishing. Maybe you've gone on vacation but never really left work behind. Maybe you've sat down to relax and immediately started feeling guilty. I think a lot of us have, especially high achievers. Especially people who care deeply about their work, especially leaders. I mean, we're so used to measuring our progress by what we produce that we don't even know what to do with a time period that doesn't have a scoreboard. And that is exactly what this season was feeling like for me. It was a season without a scoreboard. And while all these amazing family milestones were happening. I was also investing heavily in my own professional development. I like to tell my clients that I get my own coaching as well. And I'm a firm believer in us having to invest in ourselves, to learn, to grow, and to show up for ourselves, I was attending trainings, listening to the podcasts that accompany the trainings, exploring new ideas, rebuilding my website. Refining my electric leadership curriculum and testing out pieces, even at my local Rotary, they were so great. one of the things I love about speaking at Rotary is that it gives me a chance to experiment in a crowd of people who love to serve others and they love to help. And I can try out a story, see what happens. I could test a concept and watch people's reactions, and I can pay attention to the moments that make. made people lean forward and maybe some moments that didn't. And every time I learned something, not just about the audience, but about myself. So a few weeks ago, I went to another training and this word came about and it's really changed how I'm looking at this entire season. It's called integration. And the moment I heard that word, everything clicked. I wasn't being lazy and I wasn't avoiding work. And I actually I wasn't burnt out. I was integrating. The more I thought about it, the more I started wondering if I've been doing it wrong for all these years. I mean, how many times have you attended a conference, come home inspired, and immediately started making a list of everything you needed to do? Or how many times did you have you had a breakthrough and immediately turned it into a project? How many times have you learned something important and rushed to teach it? Before you had let it fully live inside yourself. I think about that conference in Germany and speaking and giving workshops. And if I'm honest, part of me was so excited to come home and capitalize on the momentum. On the plane, I was thinking, I'm gonna be posting more, I'm gonna be creating content. I'm gonna be using the testimonials I got from all the audience participants. I need to be promoting promoting something. Maybe I need to launch something. And yet every time I sat down to do those things, something just fell off. Not wrong, just premature. And I knew it wasn't time yet. it was almost like I was trying to harvest something. That hadn't fully grown yet. So the more I sat with that feeling, the more I realized that every season of expansion requires this time of integration, this season of integration, You can't experience something meaningful and immediately understand what it means. I mean, think about it. How many movies have we seen where you know the character's going through a huge change and then All of a sudden everything changes, right? that doesn't happen in real life all the time, You can't learn something important and instantly embody it. You can't have a life-changing experience and expect your identity to catch up overnight. That process takes time, everyone. And I think one of the reasons so many people feel so overwhelmed today. is because we're consuming information faster than we're integrating wisdom. You know, we're reading books, we're listening to podcasts, we're attending conferences, we're taking courses, we're watching videos, just learning constantly. And we need to have the time, we need to stop long enough to absorb it. we need to sit with what we've actually learned. And we need to allow that new knowledge and the things that we're integrating into ourselves to become part of who we are. And I think that's the part that we've forgotten. We are so great at gathering information, gathering, gathering, gathering. But we're not always great at integrating it. And that's why so many people feel exhausted despite learning so much. We're just learning faster than we're becoming. And as I watched my daughters hit these milestones over the last few months and my friends' children, I found myself thinking about how quickly life moves. And This is hard to not get emotional this at this time. One minute you're helping them tie their shoes. The next minute they're turning 21 or they're graduating. One minute they're asking you to drive them somewhere. And then you say, not again. And then the next minute they're driving themselves. And it just made me wonder how many of those moments I've rushed through over the years because I was focused on the next thing, the next client, the next workshop. The next opportunity, the next promotion, the next goal, the next achievement. And please understand me. I love goals and I love growth. And I certainly love ambition. But I think that sometimes our ambition can make us forget to absorb the life that we're actually living. And maybe that's what this season has been teaching me. Maybe the goal isn't to always ask, what's next? sometimes the better question is, what just happened? What did you learn? How did you grow? What's changed inside of you? Who are you becoming? Leadership isn't just about doing. Leadership is about becoming. Leadership is certainly about self-awareness and it's about recognizing the season that you're in and having the courage not to fight it. And that's so hard sometimes. One of the foundational ideas behind electric leadership is that we need to protect our energy if we want to sustain our impact. And so lately I've been realizing that protecting your energy isn't about always saying no to things. Sometimes it's about saying yes to stillness. Sometimes it's saying yes to reflection. Sometimes it's saying yes to learning. Saying yes to family. Saying yes to breathing room. Saying yes to becoming. And maybe saying yes to being silly again and just dancing. So if you've been feeling guilty lately because you're not producing at the level you normally do, I want to leave you with a question. Are you avoiding, or more excitingly, are you integrating? Because those are not the same thing. And if you are integrating, I hope you'll give yourself some grace. Trust the season, trust the process, and trust that not all growth is visible. Please trust that some of the most important work that you will ever do will not show up on a checklist. And trust that maybe you're not being unproductive at all. Maybe you're simply becoming. And becoming doesn't always look productive from the outside because you are integrating. Thank you for spending some time with me today, friends. I appreciate your patience in waiting for my next podcast and some of my upcoming social media posts. I appreciate you taking that time to let me integrate and for sharing my lesson with you of how challenging that was for me to give myself the grace to allow myself to integrate too. sometimes as coaches, we all need to walk through the same lessons that we're bringing our clients through. And so I'm going to challenge you to look at your life and ask yourself, what are you integrating? Have a great day, friends. Bye-bye.