Lean Out Podcast

Solocast: Do You Have Margin In Your Life?

• Dawn Baker • Season 4 • Episode 2

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In this episode, Dawn Baker talks about what it means to have margin. She shares some stories from her own life and the lives of her clients, in addition to ways you can get more margin in your own life.

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Welcome to the lean out podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Don baker. Are you looking for a new approach to finding authentic and sustainable work-life balance? You've come to the right. Place. For inspiration. information. and a community. community. of like-minded. Professionals. Let's get to the show. Hello. Hello. Thanks for being here. I've got some great guests coming early this season, but in keeping with my intention of preserving downtime during the holidays, I didn't contact anyone to schedule interviews until it was already the new year. So now I have these interviews scheduled, but none of them are gonna be completed until probably the end of January or early February. So you get another solo cast from me today. Before we go on with the episode, I want to remind you to send me your feedback on this show. I'd really like to hear from you personally. This is not a solicitation for reviews to increase my podcast rankings or anything like that. I really just want to know what you'd like to get out of the show this season. Please take a moment to hit that button in the show notes that says, send us a text and tell me your thoughts. Do you prefer the interviews, the solo casts, or do you like having the mix of both? Do you like the length of the shows or would you prefer them to be longer? I tend to try to keep them on the shorter side because that's what I personally look for when I am thinking about my favorite podcasts. But everyone has different preferences also. Who would you like interviewed, or what topics would you like me to cover? If you don't want to use the send us a text button, then go over to practice balance.com/getin. Touch and leave me a message there, or just send me a DM on Instagram and tell me your thoughts. And if you're not following me over on Instagram, go ahead while you're there and give me a follow. My handle is practice balance. Thank you so much. So recently I was coaching a client who identified one of her core values as flexibility. When I coach people on their values, I ask a series of questions about their chosen words, and those questions typically are, number one, what does this value mean to you? Number two, how is it currently showing up in your life? Or how are you living this value now? And number three, what do you need to do to get more of this value in your life going forward? So when I asked this particular client about how she demonstrates flexibility in her life currently, the first thing she said had to do with planning and scheduling. She said, I schedule a meeting with my spouse to plan vacation days each year with a priority of taking trips in the summer. She also said she schedules her kids' basketball games, her golf lessons, and her Pilates classes into her weekly calendar. Inside? I was like, wait a minute. How is scheduling and planning related to flexibility? When I initially think of the word flexibility, I think of being fluid, being spontaneous or flexible to change on a dime. And you might associate flexibility with these things too. So imagine my delight that my client was teaching me and reminding me something about flexibility. And the core principle is this, the foundation of flexibility is structure. It's not just about being able to bend and twist when forces are applied, and flexibility is really about preserving margin. So there's another term for you, margin, and that's what I wanna talk about more today. What is margin? I heard this great definition of margin from a book called Margin by Richard Swenson. He said, margin is the space between our loads and our limits. Having margin is the opposite of being overloaded and overscheduled. The consequence of being at our capacity with no margin is a thought spiral, and it looks like I should be able to handle all this. I don't need any help. I should be grateful for all these opportunities. And then you suck it up, withdraw, isolate, and double down. But at what cost? It's only a matter of time before you either get physically ill or maybe you lash out at someone you love and have an unwanted conflict. As humans, we are wired to live in tribes, to have help and to also have downtime. We are wired for rest, just like all animals. And if you missed last year's interview with Dr. Sandra Dalton Smith about the seven types of rest and the idea of sacred rest, I will link it in the show notes for you to go back and listen. Living with margin is counterculture to the way we've been trained as physicians and high octane professionals. We're told to add more, do more, and say yes despite what might be a feeling in our guts. And after our professional training ends, we continue on in this vein. It becomes expected that we'll add that extra patient into our schedule during lunch hour. Stay for that extra case at the end of the day, et cetera. I have another coaching client where we're working on placing boundaries at work because she has a hard time saying no to things like patient add-on requests and additional tasks that even occur. During her patient appointments. So the way we've been dealing with this is through structure and organization. She decluttered her office to make space for efficient charting and just an air of efficiency around her. She moved her patient hours to allow for some processing time in the middle of the day when it's not super busy in the clinic. So she doesn't have other staff distractions and she's working on scripts to say to patients or staff when she's caught off guard with asks and she wants to say no to them. I have personally built a lot of margin into my life. I work in a stressful environment, the hospital, and particularly the or, but I deliberately do it part-time. I know this is not an option for everyone, but it works really well for me because the cumulative stress of the, or adds up after repeated days, and I start to feel it by Thursday or Friday of a given week. I love that after one week of working in the or, I always have a significant amount of time off so I can recoup, and when I go back, I feel very energized again. If you work in the OR or in a similar type of high energy work environment, you could experiment with getting at least two to three days off after a certain number of days. And that number of days can be different for everyone. Because remember, margin is the space between load and limit. And so you've gotta figure out where your individual limit lies. Like where do you start to feel unhealthy? And by that I mean maybe poor sleep, quality, impaired digestion, feelings of heightened anxiety or sadness, maybe snappiness with your family or people that you live with. And these are just some possible symptoms that come to mind. After how many days of work in a row or how many weeks of work without a break longer than a weekend do you start to see these things showing up for you? The other way I preserve margin in my life is by making sure I don't take on too many outside projects or roles. Now, it's not like people are knocking down my doors with asks, and I have all these opportunities to consider and say no to. But when I'm thinking of taking on something new, like speaking at an event or writing an article, contributing to someone else's work, or even writing another book, I always consider margin. When I'm faced with these situations, I think to myself, how is this going to fit into my life right now? What's the timeline for this new endeavor? This is an important question because I'll squeeze the margin sometimes a little bit for something that's a short term timeline type thing, but also another question I ask is, what do I need to eliminate or relax if I'm going to add this thing in? So let's talk about some things you can do to increase margin in your life. My first suggestion is daily alone, time for prayer, meditation, or reflection of some kind. Have you ever noticed or maybe heard other people say when they have a problem to solve at work or something that's been weighing on their mind, they go and do nothing or they go take a walk or take a shower, and then suddenly the solution comes to them. This is the power of building some stillness into your life on a regular basis. When you have a regular practice like this, your creativity and focus improve for other tasks and decisions that need to be made. I have a lot of information on my website, about easy ways that you can do meditation or mindfulness activities. So go over there and in the search bar you can type the word mindfulness and you'll get some different articles with ideas. And I have shared them on the podcast before as well. Number two. Know your values. I've also mentioned this on the show before, but if you do not know your core values, you can go to practice balance.com and get a free core values exercise. What you can also do is just search the term list of core values and pick a list you like. There are many, and the list that I tend to use for my coaching is. A fusion of a few different lists that I've found online myself. So take a look at the words and ask yourself, which words on the list speak to you, which words matter most to you in your life. You can also ask questions like, which words come to mind when I'm thinking of what I learned during significant points in my life? And they could be high points or low points. What words represent things or people that I love or that inspire me? What gets me really fired up? Those are some good questions to ask when you're trying to figure out your values. You want to narrow down your core values to three to five words, and then use them to make decisions about how you are spending your time. If you get an ask and it's not a hell yes, learn how to say no. My book Lean Out has a whole section on this, and there are other resources if you search for that term online as well. A good starting point is to simply build in a waiting period, say one day before you ever say yes or no to anything that is asked of you. So my third suggestion is to decrease your distractions. Pick one social media platform app or entertainment channel you use, but can identify as a significant time suck and try eliminating it. I heard Sasha Hilt, who is a physician mom and the founder of Brave Enough, say in one of her podcast episodes that she doesn't watch TV shows. And I'm not surprised because I'm the same. I might watch a short series over a very short period of time, but I don't subscribe or really keep up to any of the shows that I see people talking about on social media. And I also don't watch sports events. You can try something like this for 30 days and see how it goes, and if you really miss whatever it is you gave up, by all means add it back in, but maybe consider trying another thing to eliminate and see if that helps. We could all use less distraction in our lives at this point. Number four is to schedule in your flexibility. I talked about this concept in a couple different podcasts from years past. The one that I can remember is an episode titled Time with Maria Colon Gonzalez. She goes so far as to add read book or walk the dog onto her calendar, and I love that concept. And we also talked about it when I interviewed Dr. Una. She uses scheduling to make sure she gets in her fun activities and balance activities because otherwise she knows herself and she has a tendency to overwork. I will link both of these episodes in the show notes for you to go back and listen to them in case you miss them. I personally add to my calendar things like workouts, content creation, taking my child to a specific event, journaling and even reminders to do self-care tasks like take supplements that I tend to forget. So there you have it. I hope these tips were helpful to you today in thinking about margin. Take a moment and think about your life right now. Do you have margin or are you overloaded and overscheduled? Are you thinking that you're flexible? But what you're really doing is bending to fit everyone else's expectations or do your yeses and nos follow a simple structure? Share your thoughts with me by sending me a text through your podcast listening app, leaving a comment on the blog post associated with this episode@practicebalance.com or sending me a DM on Instagram. Thanks again for listening. I'm practice balance. Thanks for listening to the lean out podcast. If you find these conversations inspiring and useful, please forward them to a friend and also leave a review on iTunes or Spotify so that other people can find them easier. If you want to get in touch with me, you can find me at my website, practice balanced.com, where you can subscribe to my newsletter and get updates regularly about new podcast episodes, blog posts, speaking, engagements, and coaching services. You can also support my work by buying my book, lean out a professional woman's guide to finding authentic work-life balance for yourself, a friend, family member, or coworker. Have a great day and we'll see you next time