Knowing When to Step Back and Reevaluate Your Priorities

Welcome back! After a summer hiatus, we’re picking up right where we left off. Pressing pause wasn’t easy, but it was essential. Taking this break gave me the space to rebalance my priorities, protect my mental health, and make sure my “priority jar” is filled with the things that matter most.

In this episode, I share:

• The priority jar concept from my book, The Reset Button
• Why I stepped back from the podcast this summer and how I spent my time
• The reality of post-book launch depression and feeling lost despite success
• Why it’s important to regularly “dump out your jar” to reassess priorities
• How to give yourself permission to release the “shoulds” and focus on what truly matters

What’s ahead: New episodes every Wednesday—solo shows, conversations with my husband/co-host Greg, and interviews with inspiring guests who are also navigating life’s balancing act.

If this conversation resonates with you, please share it with someone who might need the reminder. And, don't forget to subscribe a leave a review to help others find The Cameo Show! Many thanks!

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome Back After Summer Break
• 2:43 The Priority Jar Concept Explained
• 6:23 Summer Update and Family Time
• 9:08 Post-Book Launch Depression
• 13:13 Dumping Out the Jar
• 15:26 Closing Thoughts and What's Next

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:29

Hello and welcome to the Cameo Show man. It feels good to say that again. The last time we were together was back in May, right before my book the Reset Button came out. And then, well, I did something very off-brand and I took the summer off. Since we started the podcast, I've taken maybe a couple of weeks off during a holiday season. This was the longest break and I'm so glad to be back with you. Welcome.

Speaker 1: 1:01

In the last episode I told you you can be tired and still show up for what matters, and I still mean that. I still believe that to be true. But here's what else I believe to be true. I think it's really important to know when you need to take a step back and make sure you're showing up for the right things. That last episode I was literally recording in the back of a car at a graduation ceremony and it was important to me to do so, to show up for myself, for you and my son, all at the same time. But then we went right into full on book launch. I was in the middle of it already and I realized that my jar, my priority jar, that my jar, my priority jar, which I'm going to explain what that is in just a second was full and it wasn't with the right stuff. And I hadn't really stopped to reevaluate in a while. I thought it was full of the right stuff, but that's the sneaky trick. So let me tell you about the jar In my book. If you haven't read the Reset Button, it is available on Amazon. Shameless plug.

Speaker 1: 2:19

But in my book I take a concept from Stephen Covey, the author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. You may have heard of it. It's a time management concept. He uses this analogy of having a jar and larger rocks, pebbles and sand. He explains that the large rocks are the important meetings, the things that you cannot bypass. They require your time. And then the pebbles are not urgent, but they're still essential to business, so they're important. And then the sand is kind of like all the other stuff. That's like not really important, it's not really urgent and it takes up a ton of your time. And I love that because I like to visually conceptualize this.

Speaker 1: 3:10

But that concept in my book is represented as meaningfulness. The big rocks represent the most meaningful things in my life Myself, my health, my husband and marriage, my kids, other close relationships, my personal interests and hobbies. And then the pebbles represent other things that are still important to me, but maybe play second fiddle to those things, right? And then the sand is everything else, the nice to haves, but not essential, like signing up for every snack list for my kids' activities or going to every networking meeting on the planet for my business. It's not that they're not important, it's just that they take up a lot of time and maybe they aren't as much of a priority for me as the other things. And that's okay.

Speaker 1: 4:07

Everybody's jar looks different. That's just an example of maybe what mine looks like. Right A decade ago we dumped that jar out, each of us and we said, okay, what big rocks are in the jar and which ones have been pushed out by all of the sand and other shit that we've decided along the way to let fill up our jar, sometimes unknowingly, and we did a great job of putting those rocks back in by size to make sure that it was full of big rocks and not full of sand. Well, here we are a decade later and, as I was mentioning, it was time to dump out my jar again, because some of the stuff that was in there were things that Maybe I thought should be important to me. Maybe I thought should be the things I need to do for a successful book launch or promotion.

Speaker 1: 5:06

Maybe just taking up way too much room Not essential, knocking out my time with my kids, my time with my husband, my time with myself, my time to train, my time to play music, my time to spend on my business, all of the things that are my big rocks. And the podcast is important to me. But I got to be honest please don't take offense to this as my listener, because I love and appreciate each and every one of you and want to show up in the way that you need me to to make your life better. But the podcast was kind of a pebble in the grand scheme of things. When I look at my rocks, right, if my family life is in turmoil or if I'm spread too thin and I'm like literally running on fumes, something's got to give and it can't be me, it can't be my kids, right? So it had to be the podcast. And I want to stop right there. And I want to just remind you again everyone's jar looks different and you're the one that gets to decide what goes in, and so if it's offensive to someone when you start moving around your jar. You dump it out and you start moving around what's inside of it. You have to decide if that's in alignment with who you are Tough truth, harsh reality, difficult conversations. Maybe I had to make the difficult decision that I was going to take time off from the podcast so that I didn't lose sight of all of the things that needed to be inside the jar getting the most of my energy and attention. So here's how it went.

Speaker 1: 6:36

I'll give you a little update. We kicked off the summer with a family vacation. It was amazing. The kids are 15 and 19. And so they're amazing little travel buddies. We had a blast. It was the perfect balance of recharging, adventure, downtime, reconnecting, eating, but being mindful Like it was an amazing vacation. I'm so very grateful that we had that time together, especially before, of course, life speeds up again, because it inevitably always does.

Speaker 1: 7:11

I'm a huge advocate side note of making sure that you prioritize taking your family on a vacation once a year, if not more. It doesn't have to be elaborate, it doesn't have to be overly expensive, but what it does do is drills down time that you won't get back, that you get to spend with your family and make memories that you won't ever forget and that don't have a price tag. Looking back, there were times when Greg and I didn't have enough money to even pay our bills and we still made it a point to go on some type of an adventure or carve out the time to spend with our kids, and I am so glad we did, because now that they're older, I look back and I realize if we didn't do it then I would have missed out on all of those opportunities to create memories, to see things with them and experience things for the first time with them. So if you haven't made family vacation a priority, please, please try to, especially if you have young kids. So we get back from vacation and we almost immediately had family in town for about a week and it was all of our family on Greg's side. So so Greg's mom and dad, his brother, sister-in-law and our two nephews, and it was beautiful and we had so much fun with them and it was time for us to all be together, which we don't often get, for all of us to get together like that, and it was chaotic and it was perfect in all the ways that family visits can and should be.

Speaker 1: 8:39

Then came this weird in-between space for me and I'm just going to be like really honest and transparent. The book was out and that was a huge talk about rocks. That was a huge boulder, emotionally, task wise, it was a lot just to get the damn thing done and out and I finally had a little bit of space, because I had been going, going, going since the book came out and I found myself in this kind of like what now? Fog, like post-project depression, and I'm serious, I don't want to throw around the word depression loosely, but I've never really felt like that, if I'm being quite honest, and it wasn't anything external that was making me feel that way.

Speaker 1: 9:29

I think I was just feeling unsure and that uncertainty made me go a little bit dark. Lots of great things were happening around me, things I had only in my wildest dreams considered were possible, but I kind of felt like I don't. I can't see any of that and I can't see a way forward right now. All I can see are all these things that I feel like I should be doing, and, even though some of them are exciting and are in alignment with what I know to be next or desire to be next, I can't bring myself to face them right now. So I took some time to just stop and recenter myself and it looked different than it ever had in the past, all while still trying to be present for my kids and husband, obviously. But even they noticed, like you're a little off, I'm an excitable person and I.

Speaker 1: 10:40

I was having a hard time and then, just as I started to kind of snap out of it, we got hit by sickness. Ben got sick, first our son, then Greg and then finally me, and each of us had it for like almost two weeks, and then the next one two weeks and then finally me. It was like we were just passing around all of this medicine trying to figure out how to make everyone feel better High fevers, lingering cough, razor blade, throat. It was awful, but finally that subsided and I started to feel humid again. Then it was back to school time and I intended to bring this podcast back at the beginning of August when I kind of found my footing again and August came and went with back to school, because each year I somehow I'm confused by why it snuck up on me and how busy we are, kind of like the holidays, and I gave myself some grace and I just decided. You know what. It's going to be okay if I prolong it a little bit longer, and here we are, and it's okay, and that's how we landed here in this moment.

Speaker 1: 11:50

Now, if we can go back to dumping out the jar, I feel like I've done that a few times this summer taking everything the commitments, the responsibilities, the relationships, the projects and pouring them out onto the table and then only putting back in the jar what was meaningful to me right now. And right now is an important part of that sentence, because, as I said, everyone's jar looks different. Everybody's rocks represent something different. Well, each moment changes, right? I mean? We are all in different phases of life. Once you feel like you have one figured out, specifically with your kids, for example, something else comes up, they change, and then you're like, oh man, okay, I got to figure this out.

Speaker 1: 12:34

So keep in mind that this dumping out the jar to reestablish your priorities and make sure that they are in the right representation is an ongoing practice. The thing that you have to keep in mind each time you do it, though, is that you have to stay true to yourself and give yourself permission to not refill your jar with all of the shit that drains you the shoulds, the shame, the guilt, the regret, the busyness just to be busy, the keeping up with the Joneses, no more. So welcome back. Thank you for being here. I encourage you to take a look at your jar, dump it out, figure out what's in there, what's taking up space. That shouldn't be any longer or maybe you shouldn't have been to begin with, to make sure that your big rocks, the things that are most important to you and most meaningful to you, have room inside the jar. You can find more about my interpretation of that concept, as well as many other things, in my book.

Speaker 1: 13:42

The Reset Button that I've mentioned. It is available on Amazon and there is a link in the show notes for you to find that. You can also sign up directly on my website for my sub stack. It's called Word Up With Cameo and each Sunday I changed it from Friday to Sunday I send out an email and post in my sub stack called the weekly reset, where it's really just continuation of the conversations that we're having here and an invitation to communicate with other people who might be experiencing the same thing and give you a new perspective and some new ideas. Thank you for being here, for joining us.

Speaker 1: 14:24

We have new episodes every Wednesday.

Speaker 1: 14:26

We're going to have episodes just me and you together.

Speaker 1: 14:29

We're going to have episodes where my husband, greg, joins us. That's always a new, interesting perspective to whatever we're talking about. We're going to have episodes with bomb guests. I've already recorded a few of those that will drop after we're back online and you are going to love each and every single one of them because they're going to make your life better, provide a new perspective, share their own struggles, triumphs and help you feel more connected to yourself. In doing so, and I do hope you'll join us again. If something landed with you on this episode, please share it with someone. That's how we connect and pay it forward. We're all in the same boat. We're all juggling a million things, trying to figure it all out, and sometimes we feel very isolated in doing so, like why can't I handle it all? Well, if anything, I hope this episode helped you understand that we're just human and it's normal to not be able to handle it all, and we can heal ourselves and each other by making sure everyone is very clear about that Until next time.