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Why Do We Struggle to Slow Down · #BeMoreLobster

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about the fear of slowing down.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever felt like you can't slow down, even though you desperately want to?
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever considered why you might be afraid to slow down?
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Are you worried that things will fall apart, that maybe you won't get going again?
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Or perhaps that you won't like what you see if you stop moving so fast.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Trust me, you are not alone.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: As a recovering type A, slowing down has got me more out of my comfort zone than any action, anything that I've ever done, slowing down has been the hardest thing.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: But honestly, I was in a season of my life where I felt like I had no other choice.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: So if you are feeling overwhelmed, stuck, caught between where you are and where you think you should be or where you want to be, then this episode is for you.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to start this conversation by sharing my belief that we're actually conditioned to keep going and to keep busy.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this conditioning for me starts with my mother, whom I love very, very much.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: And having had conversations with friends and people of my sort of age, it seems to be a common theme of our mums, right?
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: So it'll be a generational thing that's been passed down.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, like I said, my mum's just turned 82.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: And if me and my sister say to her, Mum, have you done your stretching?
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Mum, have you sat down and read a book?
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Mum, have you done this?
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Her response is always, oh no, I'm too busy.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have the time.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: This is a woman that gets up and cleans her bungalow from back to front every single day.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: And she'll do knocking the door 15 to 20,000 steps, walking the dog.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: She's always keeping herself busy.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I can see looking back in my timeline where my mum was always busy.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I think sometimes there was resentment there.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like when, and I've done this myself, you know, like when your partner is sat down and you're like, you're you're cleaning up, you're maybe doing the dishes, you're cooking the dinner, you've got 20 things on the go, and they're sat down on their phone or they're watching television, completely oblivious, and you get really pissed about that.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: And rather than just saying, look, I could do with some help, we just carry on and we get that sort of martyrdom complex.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: I recognize that a lot.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: And looking back, I can see that with my mum.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not blaming my mum, but I'm just I'm offering you this opportunity to have a look at where we have gained this uh this mentality, this programming.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then let's look at society as a whole.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's fair to say that there has definitely been um a heavy lean on valuing more, more being better, more success, more status, more money, more productivity, more doing.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: And we get stuck in this trap of external validation.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: How society and social media for sure, although I'll talk about social media in a minute, has us feeling this need to keep up and keep going.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: I even had a conversation with my daughter um yesterday who turns 25 on my 50th birthday.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Amazing that we were like we were born at the same time, too.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, it's another story.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: And she was she's on a kind of bit of a health regime.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, Mom, sometimes it's so exhausting because there are so many things that I feel like I should be doing.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: There's always somebody telling me I should be adding this or taking this or doing this and not doing this.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, That's a problem because we get so caught up in all the things that we could do, become so overwhelming.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: Invariably, we end up doing little or nothing, and we just kick get this stop-start mentality going.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I said, it's totally okay to just do one thing and practice it for a month and then add on when you feel kind of ready to do that.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I watched her visibly just soften with that permission that it's okay to do less and do that thing consistently.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: So going back to that whole thing of being like catching up, keep going, keeping up, it's like if you're not going hard, then you should be going home.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: If you're not out of your getting out of your comfort zone, then you're leading your life with um laziness and mediocrity.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: It then feeds into this rest is something that you have to earn, that you have to deserve.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: If it's outside of the acceptable window of weekends, holidays, maybe evenings, then it feels like it's a luxury to stop, to take a rest, to slow down.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to talk a little bit about the journey that I've been on with this slowing down, and I'll go into it more in other episodes to kind of explain why I got here.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: But what I've noticed is that being on this journey, I've had plenty of opportunities to ask myself, what is the fear here?
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Why is this so hard for me?
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I can 100% relate to that desperate need not to be mediocre.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I hadn't even heard the word mediocre until about 2014, when I first read Brendan Paschard's book, The Motivation Manifesto.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: I feel very blessed every day that I went out to the States and trained to be one of his coaches with him.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: But looking back now and having this conversation, I can see that what I did was make a connection between mediocrity and the life that I had before, before I found coaching, before I started my own business, I made it mean that mediocrity was everything and anything outside of constantly striving, of constantly growing, of constantly achieving.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: And because I've had that taste of what was possible, which was completely different to my life as a single parent of two children, claim benefits, right?
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: It felt like I was absolutely determined not to go back there.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: That was mediocrity, that was lack, that was that was I didn't want to go back there.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: But the crazy thing is, as I was writing out some of the notes for this conversation, I was really happy then.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: I social media was like nowhere near what it is now.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going back like a long time.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: I sound freaking hell, I sound really old.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'm going back about 20 years, so 20, 20, 18, 20 years.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: So social media wasn't even a thing.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I was in a new relationship, I was super happy, my kids were happy, we had enough, we had purpose, we were getting ourselves out of a lot of debt, we wanted to buy a house.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: I was really happy.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I find it interesting to have that contrast that when I was shown more, what I had didn't seem enough.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: And yet there was so much happiness in that space, maybe just something to consider.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: So going back to that mediocrity, I guess there was this thing of I was narrowing a new circle.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't want to be judged for having no ambition.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then the conversation that started was if I stop, what does that say about me?
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: What are people gonna think about me?
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: What am I gonna think about me if I stop and slow down and reassess what it is that I want with my life?
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Will I regret not having or being more at the end of my life?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I used to run a program called the Success Superstar Formula when I used to coach uh small business owners.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I used to have uh a formula, and one of the questions in the formula was, what's the conversation you don't want to be having when you're towards the end of your life?
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: And since losing my dad and having some conversations with him towards the end of his life, my take on that has completely and utterly changed.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: But back then, and and just being able to kind of bring these thought processes in as I'm going through this journey of slowing down, that whole thing of will I regret not having or being more at the end of my life, that led me to so much more peace about where I am now.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe that'd be a good question for you.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: I also thought about who am I and how do I find meaning if it's not in more.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I think now, as I'm answering that question for myself, just having this conversation with you, the more that I want now is a different kind of more.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's more simplicity, it's more connection, it's more conversation, it's more peace, it's more freedom.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Again, another conversation to be had, but just wanted to offer you that that context and that contrast.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: So here's some questions that I use for myself that maybe you can ask for yourself what happens if I stop?
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: What's the point of stopping?
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Who am I without the constant movement?
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: What does it mean about me that I want or need to stop?
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Does it mean that I'm wasting my life if I stop, if I slow down?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now I would like to potentially, I hope, offer you a perspective shift.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, what if slowing down has nothing to do with failure?
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe not even anything to do with exhaustion, although exhaustion can definitely come into it, and it did for me, but it was more of an emotional, spiritual exhaustion than a mental.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: What if it had nothing to do with failure and everything to do with self-love and creating the space that you need for clarity and redirection?
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because the goal of slowing down, of making space, of stopping, if that serves you, it's got nothing to do about doing nothing per se.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it's got everything to do with acutely attuning yourself to your needs and where you invest your energy.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: When I did my podcast in the past, I used to like to offer some kind of exercise at the end.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to do that in some of these podcasts because I don't want to overwhelm you with things to do, but I want to share this one because it's so it's so powerful.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to offer you a way that you can start slowing down without adding stuff to your list.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because isn't it weird how in slowing down it still feels like we're adding more?
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to offer you a way to do it without adding anything, really, with certainly without any guilt, and just something that you can you can um drop into your everyday life just as it is, right?
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to tell you, you don't have to slam the brakes on overnight.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: You can start with this one thing, and this one small thing is called the 60-second pause.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd love to show you what it is, and I'd love for you to do it with me.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: So assuming you're not driving, and you can just take a beat now, let's just take 60 seconds together.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have my timer, so it might not even take 60 seconds, it might take 30.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: But here we go.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I would just like you to just stop wherever you are, just stop and take a beat.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to close your eyes and take a deep breath.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: If it's relevant, I want you to feel your feet on the ground.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: Just feel your body sitting in the seat, laying on the couch, like whatever it is, just feel your body, feel your feet in the space that you're in.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: And just take a moment to notice how your body feels.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Relax your jaw, relax your tongue, relax your throat.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Drop your shoulders, soften your tummy, soften your buttocks, and relax the feet.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: And just breathe space into you.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Breathe space around the thoughts.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: Breathe space around the emotions.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Please breathe space into your body.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: And just be witness.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Just slow it all down.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Slow down the breathing.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: Slow down the thinking.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Create the space.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: And you can just rest here.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: If you wanted to finish the 60-second pause on a question, you can simply ask yourself, what do I actually need right now?
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: And just hear or feel what comes up.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that, my love, is the power of the 60-second pause.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even know that we did 60 seconds.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's how quick it is to or how powerful it is to just take a timeout and just pattern interrupt the speed.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: Pattern interrupt the automatic, unconscious patterns of velocity that take us over in our life and have us not connected, not present, racing from one thing to the next in some kind of belief that more is better or we've got to keep going at this breakneck speed.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: Do the 60-second pause.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: So if I can invite you now to take one thought from today, it's this you are not behind.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: You are exactly where you need to be.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: If you'd like to reflect, you can ask, where in my life do I feel like I can't slow down?
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: And if you could give yourself permission to just start with a 60-second pause throughout the day, what do you think could change?
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: If you enjoyed this conversation, come join me for more over in my free Facebook community, the Seeking Simplicity Facebook group.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we also run a free book club, which you are more than welcome to join in.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: We clicked every Wednesday at 7 p.m.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: UK time for connection, conversation, and community.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need to be reading the book.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: If you are reading the book, you don't need to be up to date with the book.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: We just want to create connection and community.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: So if this resonated with you, please make sure you stay tuned for the next episode.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining me for the Seeking 50 podcast, and I will speak to you again next time.