The First Step to stop snapping at people you love

Have you ever come home from a long shift and snapped at the people you love most? In this episode, Dr. Asha Padmanabhan shares a personal story of how stress from the OR spilled over into her family life — and the surprising first step that helped her change it: self-awareness.

Listeners will hear why self-awareness is the overlooked foundation for confidence and clarity, how ignoring signals affects relationships at work and home, and a one-minute practice to reset before walking into a new space.

Free resource: Saying No Without Guilt
 Exploratory call: https://calendly.com/ashapadmanabhan/exploratory-session-with-asha

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🌐 Website: www.theleadershiprx.com
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Transcript

0:06

Have you ever come home after a long day at the hospital or clinic and before you know it, you have snapped at your spouse or kids? I remember many evenings like this. I would come off a long day in the or. I walk in the door. My daughter hadn't finished her homework. My husband asked me what was for dinner and just like that. Snap. The anger spills over before I even knew what was happening and what followed was frustration, guilt, and a cloud over the entire evening For a long time, I brushed these moments off. I told myself, I'm just tired. I'm just stressed. This is normal. This is my job. What I didn't realize is that I was missing signals. My body and my mind were giving me warnings and I wasn't paying attention. Hi, I'm Dr. Asha Padmanabhan and I'm a Board Certified anesthesiologist, a physician leader and a Certified coach. Through Leadership RX coaching, I help women Physicians build the confidence, communication, and mindset skills to thrive. Not just in medicine, but in every part of your lives. And today we are gonna talk about self-awareness, what it really means, how you can start developing it, and why it matters more than you might think. Those moments when I snapped at home were small. In the grand scheme of things. What they left everyone hurt and they left me feeling guilty. Can you relate? And if I'm honest, I blamed everyone else at first. If only my daughter had done her homework, if only dinner had been handled, if only my son handled his sports well. If only my husband understood how tired I was and how hard I worked over time though, I began to see that the problem wasn't them. It was me. Or more Cully. It was my lack of awareness of what was going on inside of me. It was only after I started working on myself with my own coaches, that I began to understand what self-awareness really looked like, and that's a big word, but stick with me. I started realizing what that looked like and how it impacted everything I said and did not just at home, but at work. After a lot of coaching and then learning to coach myself, I learned to notice what I was feeling before I walked in the door and I started to connect the dots. The days when I had good cases, when I ate lunch, when I had supportive interaction with colleagues, I came home more patient, calmer, more able to handle the chaos of family life. But the days when I hadn't had time to eat when I had. Dealt with stress or conflict or tough cases when I felt stretched thin. Even the smallest things, the same questions, the same undone homework would trigger an explosion. That was my first real lesson in self-awareness. But the thing, self-awareness isn't an abstract philosophical concept. It's really practical. What it means is noticing what's going on inside you before it spills out onto everyone else. It's catching that you are exhausted before you lash out. It's realizing you are hungry before you lose your patience. It's noticing the tension in your shoulders before the words come out sharp, and that's what changed everything for me. So how do you start building self-awareness in a way that feels doable and not overwhelming and in a way that makes a difference in your life? Here's a simple practice. You can start trying today before you walk into your house at the end of your workday. Pause for just a minute and think about what you're feeling. Are you feeling tired? Are you feeling hungry? Are you feeling stressed? Ask yourself those three questions. Am I hungry? Am I exhausted? Am I still carrying stress from work? Notice your feelings and sometimes it might take a little work to go from noticing what you're feeling to noticing why you're feeling that. Because sometimes we just know what we feel and we don't know what it is because it takes time to figure out that it might be you are hungry when you might not even think that. After you ask yourself those three questions, then give yourself a moment. Give yourself what you need. It might be a snack, it might be some time, a few minutes just to sit in the driveway, not doing anything but listening to music. It might be just taking a few deep breaths and slowing down and taking a few minutes to yourself. It might be sitting outside your door, or it might be. Sitting at a park for a few minutes, or even in your car, in the garage at work, something just to reset yourself, a quick reset before you get to the next part of your day. I started doing this in my driveway after I got home from work, before I walked in the door. I literally just would sit in the car for a few minutes before going inside and. That just shifted everything. It gave me some time to myself. A few minutes to calm my mind down and to shift into the mode of being a mom, and then instead of unloading on my family, that pause gave me back some control over how I wanted to show up. And my evenings felt calmer and lighter and more connected. Now, don't get me wrong, I did snap more times after that as well, but those became fewer once I started recognizing my own signals, what my body was trying to tell me, what my mind was trying to tell me, and figuring out what I was feeling and why once you start noticing those physical signals. You get better at noticing your thoughts, the thoughts that might say, you're not good enough, you may not belong here, you don't belong in this room. You might fail. Don't even try the thoughts that might be your inner critic. And just like with snapping at home, the first step is becoming aware, and we'll talk more about that in future episodes. The thing is you can't change a thought that you don't notice. You can't change feelings that you don't notice why they're happening. The moment you start seeing those feelings and those thoughts for what they are and doing something about it, they lose some of the power. So let me give you another example. One of my clients told me she was constantly on edge at home, even though she had a very supportive spouse, very supportive family, and they all worked really well together. When we dug a little deeper, she realized what she was doing. She was carrying some of the tension home from her work day when her charts were not finished. And even when she was trying to be present for her family, she was worrying about. What she needed to get done, how many charts she needed to finish, how late she would have to stay up into the day, into the night, and it was stressing her out so that she was trying to rush everyone through the evening schedule so she could sit and work on her charts. Once we started recognizing that she could move into resetting and finish as much as possible at work, but even if she didn't. She realized that she had to do a little reset and put everything away for later so we practiced that. We practiced a one minute awareness before she left the hospital. She'd ask herself, what am I feeling right now? And what do I need to do? And the days that she had a lot of charts, she knew that she would have to get back to it, but she had given herself a permission to just enjoy the time with her family. Within a few weeks, she noticed her evenings were calmer. She wasn't snapping as much, and had more energy for the people she loved. That's the power of awareness. It doesn't just change your mood, it changes your relationships. So here's my invitation for you this week. Start noticing, start noticing your feelings. Start noticing your thoughts. Catch one signal. Maybe it is just one signal in your body or in your thoughts before it takes over. It could be your tight shoulders, your empty stomach, or your stressed mind. Just pause wherever you are, whether that's at work, whether that's at home. Notice it and give yourself what you need before you walk into the next room, the next conversation, the next patient. And if you want more support with this, I have a free resource that I created just for women physicians like you and like me, and it is called How to say no without guilt. Because a lot of times we pile our schedule up with things that we should have said no to. It's all about helping you set boundaries with clarity and confidence because awareness and boundaries go hand in hand and you can grab it through the link in the show notes. And if you are ready to take this work deeper, just like I told you with my own coach, I'd love to talk with you. I coach women physicians just like you. Book a free exploratory call with me. The link is in the notes. Thank you for spending a few minutes with me today and remember. Notice what's happening inside you that isn't selfish. It's the first step to showing up the way you want to at work and at home.