Balance & Beyond
Balance and Beyond is the podcast for ambitious women refusing to accept burnout as the price of success. Here, we’re committed to empowering you with the tools and strategies you need to achieve true balance, where your career, relationships and health all thrive and where you have the power to define success on your own terms.
Balance & Beyond
Moment: The Truth About Emotional Bandwidth (And Why You’re So Snappy Lately)
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Welcome to Balance and Beyond Moments. Your weekly dose of insight, wisdom and mindset shifts, all in 10 minutes or less, Whether it's a powerful truth, a fresh perspective or a spark of inspiration, this is your space to pause, reflect and reset. Let's dive in. We see a lot of women really afraid of their feelings I would almost say terrified of them, and often the reason given is well, I've shoved these things so deep, deep down, and I'm so full of them that I'm terrified. If I let something out and I start to feel I'm going to be completely overwhelmed and like taken over by the wave, and then I'm going to start crying at work, and then I'm going to be considered weak and I'm going to become that emotional woman. It's big right. And so then it's like, okay, well, no, no, no, no, no, I don't. I don't need that intuition. I'll have the intuition without the feelings. Thank you. What's the what's the antidote to those fears? What would you say to someone who's worried about that?
Speaker 2:Well, your feelings are part of your life force first of all. So if you try to stuff your life force down, I mean you're right, it is going to come up. So people who are scared about what happens when I take the lid off this, I mean you're right that things are going to come up. I'm not going to lie and say that they are not, but what I want to impress upon you is that you're built for it. You're built for your feelings, so it won't kill you and, in fact, not only will it not kill you, but it will make you a stronger leader, it'll make you a stronger mom, it'll make you a stronger woman, because any emotions that you have suppressed actually are stealing your energy or stealing your part of your bandwidth, and so many women come to us with their they're like at the end of their bandwidth, they're burnt out, and so if you want more bandwidth back in your life, meaning you want more space in your body, like your nervous system you don't want to be reactionary all the time. You want to actually wake up and feel energized and not depleted. You want to not snap at your kids all the time All of those are symptoms of not having bandwidth and you know I gave the example of boundaries, so we need to set boundaries to observe your bandwidth.
Speaker 2:You also need to observe your emotions to observe your bandwidth, because your emotions that stagnate, they I call it emotional constipation they get blocked, locked up in your body and it actually steals your life force because it gets bound up with undigested emotion. We must digest our emotion because that's actually access to our power. Your grief, your anger, your frustration, your fears, those are all access or portals into claiming more of your power, more of your confidence. So many women want confidence. If you are running around with suppressed fear inside you, how can you ever access confidence? You have to be able and willing to confront what you've been afraid of and then allow that fear to be the thing that lifts you up into confidence. Right, but we try to ignore the fear and be confident anyway. But it's not how it works and I think that's why they're coming to us, because they're realizing it doesn't work that way.
Speaker 1:Well, there's this whole fake it till you make it I'll just pretend to be and what we see is so many women having this external confidence and you'd see them in a board meeting or an executive presentation and go, wow, they're so together. But what you haven't seen is them nauseous in the bathroom beforehand, or them screaming at their kids over dinner because they're terrified about what they said to John and, oh my God, john's now not going to like them and the fact that they wake up now at four in the morning, terrified about what just happened, the ramifications, because, oh my gosh, they were too loud. So, while they might look like it, this is where you're talking about. What's sucking.
Speaker 1:The bandwidth is not just the presentation where they appear confident, it's almost that external emotional pollution that is happening all around it and that's really what is burning everybody out. It's not just the event, because if you simply was confident for your 20 minute presentation and then you were done, nobody would be burning out, but it's this constant undercurrent of oh, I'm beating myself up and my inner critic and my high standards and my tyrant, and if we're carrying all that, we're not going to be able to access the other side of us, are we, which is tragic because it's there, right, and it's so ironic In the end you're still emotional, trying to suppress all the emotions.
Speaker 2:It's making you snappy, it's making you edgy, it's making you fearful, because you're afraid to face your emotions, but you're still emotional. So it's like why don't you just deal with the real thing? And I will say, though, that in the world, it's not like we have a lot of places to go to bring our emotions safely right. So, again, why people will find us because we're a great container for women to say, okay, I'm finally ready to feel what there is underneath. Here, I can really feel some of the grief or the fear or the anger that's been here, and you deserve if you're tuning into this, you deserve to meet those feelings and feel safe to do so. If you're tuning into this, you deserve to meet those feelings and feel safe to do so, and having a guide like Joe and myself on that journey with you is really imperative, and it's really an act of self-love and kindness, so that you don't just like try to open up this lid and then you're finding yourself like wallowing on the bathroom floor for the weekend because you opened it up and you don't know what to do with it, because it is a lot to open up.
Speaker 2:So I don't I don't say that to scare anybody, but it just just to say that you deserve professional guidance as you open that up, because it is something to navigate and wade through without being the tendency will be to fall into a story, the drama I'll put it that way the drama around our emotions, the drama around the grief or the anger, and that actually what that does is it stirs up the emotion but it doesn't allow resolution. So I mentioned you get your power back from your emotions. But once you resolve the emotion, not just by stirring them up, stirring it up just stirs up drama and then feels crappy for you and then you're on the bathroom floor and you know that's no fun. So we want you, we want you to actually feel your emotions and resolve them. And uh, there's an expression we say in the industry you have to feel it to heal it. And resolution requires another way of saying healing it or really feeling it and going through the emotion and getting to the other side, versus getting stuck in the middle of it feeling worse.
Speaker 1:So yeah, and I think this is what we see when people get support, what unlocks for them and this is why we call it a hidden superpower, because most men aren't as emotionally intuitive biologically as we are.
Speaker 1:We've been wired this way for a reason, and when we try to deny it and act like a man and pretend we don't have emotions, we're trying to act like a man in a woman's body and denying ourselves this gift of intuition, of access. And what we see, jacqueline, you and I have seen this in our own lives in terms of you open up additional radio frequencies that wouldn't be available. So you're looking at your work for the day oh my gosh, it's a lot. We could fall into the story of overwhelm. But when you've processed your work for the day, oh my gosh, it's a lot. We could fall into the story of overwhelm. But when you've processed your emotions, like, oh, there's some fear here, that's all right, I now know how to process it. This is what is my instinct. What does my intuition say is the most important thing for today? That Do it move on Instead of being paralyzed by indecinate and the overwhelm, and it's so easy to then get stuck in this cycle of trying to work it out with our heads Right.
Speaker 2:Yep, and all you have to do is just slow down. I know this sounds kind of overly simplified, but the answers inside. Another thing to say, but it's true, the answer's inside of you and so, but sometimes we forget how to listen to it. After years and years and years and years and years of listening to you know answers or following mandates that are external, so now it's time to tune into them, that internal wisdom and internal direction that brings us into alignment with our lives, and I think a lot of the women that's. What they're really seeking, ultimately is to come into alignment with their lives, and this is the place to do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and when we do that, that is what we call it a superpower. This is when everything starts to shift. When you become that woman of influence, when you step up as a leader, when you delegate, when you usually we see people get promoted very, very quickly because they show up incredibly differently. And then they're showing up whole and at home they're not yelling at the kids anymore and their marriage is more present. And this is what we want for every single woman. We want you to access the superpower. We want you to become a true woman of influence not a fake woman of influence to process these, to conquer your fears, and that is where the magic happens. Thanks for taking this moment for yourself. If this resonated, share it with a friend who needs to hear it today, and don't forget to subscribe to balance and beyond for full episodes and more of these bite-sized breakthroughs. See you next time.
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