Even more gem of wisdom from Kara...
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It's Thursday, and as promised, here I am to share even more Kara brilliance with you. Also! I actually just got to see Kara in person this past weekend. She did a live event called Clutch College, and I attended as an assistant coach.
Y'all. How did I get so lucky that this is my real, actual life?? Also, this is a trick question, because I know how I got here, and the answer is by spending countless hours breaking my own brain (and getting it broken for me via excellent coaching from Kara and others). Like yes, I am lucky and I do have an enormous amount of personal privilege, AND it's also true that I have dedicated and rededicated myself to becoming the coach I want to be, and doing so has required consistent work and effort on my part.
As you know, I am a hardcore Kara fan, and getting to teach and coach at her event was an incredible experience that meant so much to me. If you'd told me one year ago that this would be happening, I would not have believed you. It would have sounded way too good to be true. I would not have been able to see the path from the person I was to the person I have become.
But this is what coaching does. Coaching creates massive transformation, often in less time than you would have believed possible (even though, sometimes, things don't seem to be changing that much day to day).
It's a paradox that I'm beginning to love (although it used to drive me nuts). We can completely transform ourselves and our lives while the day to day still feels remarkably the same, until suddenly, you look around, and nothing is the way it used to be. This is one reason it matters so much to notice and enjoy what is working. In addition to transforming our lives, we have to teach ourselves to recognize and enjoy our own transformation.
When we don't take time to do this, when we try to rush our growth and hurry up and get to whatever the next big thing is, two things happen. 1. We actually go slower. 2. None of our accomplishments matter to us.
Rushing growth does not work. The more you try to hurry, the slower you will go. When you're willing to go slow, things go faster. It sounds backwards, but that's how it is.
And like I just said, when we try to rush and hurry, none of our accomplishments matter. We think we just need one more gold star, but let's be honest, if you are not enjoying the 17 gold stars you already have, you will not enjoy the next one either and your brain will already be looking for the one after that.
And all of this brings me to the second Kara lesson I want to teach you.
Here it is: while you may think that judging yourself is helping you crush it at work, life, and more, self-judgment actually just slows us down and makes us hate everything.
Does this sound melodramatic? It is, but it's also not.
If you do this, you are not alone. This is how many of us were parented. Our parents used judgment (and shame and fear tactics) to get us to do what they wanted us to do. Let me be clear. They did not do this because they're bad and terrible. They did this because that's the way they were taught to think, too.
They did this because no one sat them down and helped them see that some of their thoughts were working and doing great things for them while other thoughts they had were not working at all and were actually harming them and fucking shit up.
We are so lucky, as a culture and as a generation, that it has become more normal to examine our own perspective and to change what isn't working for us. There is no greater power than the power of choosing how to think, on purpose.
Back to the judgment thing. A lot of womxn believe that the secret to their success is that they're hard on themselves. They are used to being super self critical, and they are also used to crushing their goals. Here's the problem: they're crushing themselves in the process.
This is how burnout happens. Burnout happens when you try to create positive results using negative feelings. When you try to motivate yourself by judging yourself. And here's the truth. You can do things that way for a while. You can actually create some really cool positive results for yourself. But the downside is, no matter what cool thing you create for yourself, when you create it by judging the shit out of yourself, then the achievement itself feels like that judgment.
There are so many womxn out there right now who have built glorious lives for themselves and still feel terrible. Because the fuel that they used was judgment and self criticism.
They keep trying to get just one more achievement and one more accomplishment, assuming that they'll feel better when they do. But, of course, they won't. Because a life built on self criticism and judgment feels like shit, even if it looks amazing on the outside.
And this is really interesting, because what we want from a life of accomplishment and success isn't even the accomplishment and success itself. We only want those things because we want to feel like we're ok, like we're good enough, like we're worthy of love and belonging.
And we could have all of that right now, in this very moment, if we were willing to. We could love ourselves just the way we are, imperfections and all. But instead, we try to buy our self worth by hustling and accomplishing and achieving. But when we do that, we never get what we're looking for.
And this is what I really mean when I say you can't judge your way to a life you love.
It's possible that you don't yet know how to achieve and accomplish without being mean to yourself. That's ok. I didn't used to know either. For those of us with a lot of practice in self judgment and criticism, it can feel weird and unfamiliar to try doing things a new way. That's ok, too.
It may be true that you've judged and criticized yourself into action in the past. You may, like so many womxn, think that's the key to your success. But it's not.
The key to your success is you.
It's you, showing up again and again, despite how mean you are to yourself, not because of it.
It's you, in between all the self critical thoughts, really enjoying the project you're working on.
It's you, being willing to try again or to keep going, even though you've already tried a lot.
It's you, wanting to create something amazing with the time you have on this wild, weird planet.
And here's the thing. When you learn it's possible you can crush it and get stuff done without the judgment and criticism, when you're willing to try being kind to yourself and being compassionate instead of self-punishing, when you're willing to let yourself be a human and still believe you might be capable of something amazing, well, that's when you'll begin to see what you can truly do.
This feels wayyyy better than judging and criticizing yourself. And you will also get way more shit done. You will do things you cannot even begin to imagine right now.
How is this possible? I'll tell you. When you are committed to being kind to yourself no matter what happens, when you aren't willing to judge and shame and criticize yourself into action, then you can try anything and keep trying even if it doesn't work right away or doesn't do what you expected it to. And you can also rest when you need to, because there's no rush.
When you can like and love yourself just the way you are, then you can also do anything you want, because you don't have to bend over backwards to accomplish every possible thing in an endless effort to earn your own approval (which was never going to work anyways).
What would you do, if you never had to prove yourself to yourself again and every effort was actually just about having fun and creating the life you want because you can and it's glorious? That can be your life if you decide you want it to be.
And y'all, if you've decided it's time to stop judging yourself so you can finally get shit done without burning out in the process, I can help you with that. Schedule a consult and let's talk about it.
Wishing you all the best, always,
Kori
PS If you have a friend who's suffering from burnout, send them my quiz! It will make them laugh. It will make them cry. It will give them actual steps they can take to start feeling better TODAY.
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