Ep. 73 - When Did Your Time Stop Feeling Like Yours? How Values Change Everything with Kathy Washburn

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Have you ever looked up on a Friday and couldn't find yourself in the week? You were there, you showed up, you did all the things — and somehow in the middle of all of it, you went missing.

In this episode, Kathy explores one of the most honest conversations she's been having lately: the relationship between busyness, values, and what it means to live a life that actually feels like yours. Drawing on research from Columbia Business School and the wisdom of Brene Brown, she unpacks why busyness has become a status symbol — and what it's costing us underneath the badge.

She also shares a question from a client that stopped her cold: How do I know I'm doing it? What are the signs that I'm actually living from my values? The answer becomes a warm, honest framework for celebrating the evidence of your own growth — something high-achievers rarely give themselves permission to do.

Whether you are in the middle of a big transition, feeling the weight of a life moving at life speed, or simply wondering whose values you've been living — this episode is a cup of coffee with a friend who has something important to share.

Topics discussed

• Why 'I'm too busy' is a values statement, whether we mean it to be or not
• The Columbia Business School research on busyness as a status symbol
• What Brene Brown calls 'the armor of crazy-busy'
• Why transitions are one of the most powerful times to do a values assessment
• The 7 signs that your values are actually working in your life
• How your body is tracking your values in real time
• The one truth worth keeping: you choose your values

View extended shownotes here

RECEIVE the attention you need to reconnect with your purpose. Click here to learn more about individual coaching with Kathy!

If this resonated, the most generous thing you can do is share it with one woman who needs to hear it. One share grows this community more than any algorithm.

Follow the show on your favorite platform, and come find me on Substack at senseofpeace.substack.com — that’s where the deeper conversation lives.

And if you’re ready to stop just listening and start doing this work — visit kathywashburn.net. I’d love to talk with you. 

Until next time — keep investing in yourself. It is always, always worth it.

#SpreadMadLove

Transcript

 Ep. 73 - When Did Your Time Stop Feeling Like Yours with Kathy Washburn

[00:00:00]

[00:00:48] Welcome and Setup

[00:00:48] Speaker: Hello, and welcome to The Self Investment Project podcast. I am so glad that you're here today. I have [00:01:00] something I think that's really important that I'd like to share with you. It's been sitting with me for a few weeks, and I think it's time to think it out loud together. So grab a cup of coffee, a cup of tea, what- or water is always good, and then uh, let's get started.

[00:01:17] Three Conversations Spark

[00:01:17] Speaker: So this all began with three conversations that happened pretty close together recently. One was with a client who asked me a question I wasn't quite ready for, one with someone going through a big life change who had f- felt like she had lost her footing, and the other one was about busyness, about that feeling that so many of us carry of life just moving at full speed, and somehow we're just along for the ride.

[00:01:52] Speaker: And all three of these led me back to the same place: values. I wanna talk about [00:02:00] values today in a way in the way that it actually landed for me through these conversations. They were personal, grounded, and honestly, I feel like they're pretty urgent. 

[00:02:11] Life at Life Speed

[00:02:11] Speaker: So I'm gonna start with the busyness one, because I think it's the conversation that most of us are living inside of right now.

[00:02:19] Speaker: Have you ever looked up on a Friday and genuinely could not account for the week? And I mean, you couldn't find yourself in it. You were there. You showed up. You did all the things, and somewhere in the middle of it, you just went missing. I call that life ha- happening at life speed. You're moving, you're producing, you're showing up, y- you're doing what needs to be done, but at the end of the day, there's this quiet question underneath everything: Was any of that actually mine?

[00:02:57] Busy as Status Armor

[00:02:57] Speaker: Here's something Brené Brown said [00:03:00] that has always resonated with me. I had it on a sticky note for a really long time on my computer screen. She said, "Crazy busy is a great armor. What a lot of us do today is to stay so busy and so in front of our lives that the truth of how we're feeling and what we really need can't catch up with us."

[00:03:27] Speaker: I'm gonna read that again. "Crazy busy is a great armor." What a lot of us do is stay so busy and so out in front of our lives that the truth of how we're feeling and what we really need can't catch up with us.

[00:03:49] Speaker: There's also research from Columbia Business School that adds another layer to this. Professor Silvia Bellezza published a study in the Journal of [00:04:00] Consumer Research finding that Americans increasingly see busy, overworked people, let's call them, as high status. She called it conspicuous consumption of time.

[00:04:15] Speaker: Mm. Conspicuous consumption of time. She also noted that a generation ago, leisure was what signaled prestige. Today, we wear our busyness like a badge. And the researchers who studied this say something I find really clarifying. Busyness is a prioritization problem. That's the academic version. But here's mine. I'm too busy. It's rarely about time. It's about what we've decided, consciously or quietly, matters. I, I heard at a conference recently that decision or to [00:05:00] decide in Latin, there's a root that means to cut off.

[00:05:04] Speaker: So we are cutting off all of the other possibilities when we decide what matters. Think about that. When we say, "I'm too busy," we're making a value statement, whether we mean it or not. The result of chronic busyness with no values anchor is that we end up with no margin. There's no room to breathe, to feel, to choose.

[00:05:29] Speaker: Busy living, but the aliveness underneath, it gets harder to access, and you have so much more capacity than that. You have more choice than you're currently using. 

[00:05:43] Values Reclaim Time

[00:05:43] Speaker: Here's what I know to be true from years of doing this work, and I wanna just highlight, I did not jump into this work until my 50s. I always assumed that values were part of a corporate culture You know, we value [00:06:00] collaboration.

[00:06:01] Speaker: We value honesty. I saw it, I worked in corporate culture. I was very honed in on values, corporate values, but never did I turn that around and, and wonder what my own personal values were. So when you know what you value, your time becomes your own again, and I know that to be true. When you know what you value, your time becomes your own again.

[00:06:30] Speaker: Values act like a filter. When you are clear on what actually matters to you, decisions feel more obvious. Your yeses become hell yes, and your no is a defiant and clear no. Your energy gets to go somewhere that means something to you, and that is a profound shift. 

[00:06:52] Transitions Need Values

[00:06:52] Speaker: The second conversation that kept coming back to me was with someone in the middle of a really significant transition.[00:07:00]

[00:07:00] Speaker: Divorce is not easy, and this was a divorce that she didn't entirely choose. And she felt completely untethered. The divorce just happened to coincide with the departure of her youngest child to college. And it all makes so much sense, and again, I've been in her shoes. I know what that feels like when everything that you've attached yourself to is now gone.

[00:07:26] Speaker: You know, the ground shifts, a relationship ends, a career ends, a whole season of life closes. Even if it's chosen, even if you choose to stop working, you're on to your next chapter, the old maps stop working, and in that space, the natural instinct is to start following whoever seems to know what they're d- doing or where they're going.

[00:07:51] Speaker: what I shared with her is that transition is actually one of the most beautiful times to do a values assessment. [00:08:00] The disruption itself is the invitation. Change, it cracks things open. The old structure loosens, and in that loosening, there's a genuinely rare window to ask, "Hmm, what do I want now for this next season?"

[00:08:19] Speaker: And what is such a good important question there is, what matters to me in this season? What am I ready to choose for myself? If you think that's you right now, if you're in the thick of a change and it feels like free-falling- The ground is still there. I know that's super hard to understand when you feel like you're standing amidst the rubble, but your values are the ground.

[00:08:45] Speaker: We just have to find them together. 

[00:08:48] Client Asks Proof

[00:08:48] Speaker: And then there's this conversation that really started all of this. I have a client who is a few weeks into her values discovery practice, and I just have to note this client is in her [00:09:00] late 20s, which absolutely elates me. I am so excited that this younger generation is not waiting till they're 50 years old to figure this all out.

[00:09:09] Speaker: But she has spent a long time taking extraordinarily good care of everyone around her, and she's now learning that she can turn that care towards herself. And I just say hallelujah that these young women are taking this on. If you've been around this podcast at all, you know that this is the work to turn the care toward yourself.

[00:09:37] Speaker: That is how we are gonna help the people that we most wanna help and the circles that we influence, the places we work and play, love, and live. So, sorry, that's a sidetrack on youth, but this work is for anybody at any time. It's just very encouraging for me to see that people are doing it [00:10:00] younger.

[00:10:01] Speaker: So she actually asked me this question that I had to just hang out in for a second. She said, "Kathy, how do I know I'm actually doing it? What does it look like when it's working, this values thing?" Honestly, I love that question so much because it comes from someone who has been trying so hard. She's terrified of missing the evidence of her own growth, and maybe terrified is too strong of a word, but she wants to know that she's doing it right, and that's perfectly fine.

[00:10:36] Speaker: I think a lot of this work we have to intellectualize first before it can sink into our bodies. And I know that people who have spent years measuring their worth by their impact on others or needing to be needed by others, change towards oneself can be genuinely [00:11:00] invisible to them. They're so practiced at reading everybody else's room that they forget to look for signs of their own becoming.

[00:11:09] Speaker: Evidence matters, and the research says that the celebration of that evidence is really what lays down those new neural pathways, because pleasure, our, our brains love pleasure. So, observing the evidence that it's happening and celebrating when it does, really intentionally letting yourself kinda sense drench in, in it, and that's only for 90 seconds.

[00:11:38] Speaker: You don't have to swim in it all day long. 

[00:11:41] Seven Signs Overview

[00:11:58] Speaker: But to just let yourself feel this new way of being, that's how the brain says, "Oh, I want more of that." So I want to offer you what I offered her, and walk you through seven signs that I came up with, and it... This [00:12:00] took me a, a while to kinda come up with, and it was such a, such a good exercise for myself.

[00:12:07] Speaker: As we go through them, I want you to receive them as an invitation to notice and celebrate what is already quietly beautifully changing in you. And this is not a report card. If one of these signs is not resonating and your mind chatter starts to go down the shoulding all over yourself, stop.

[00:12:32] Speaker: Just note with a sense of curiosity, "Hmm, I can dive into this a little deeper." And at any time, you can, you can email me. We, I, I read every single comment. I respond to every message, whether you're my client or not. I want this work to really land. So if you're struggling with one of these signs, I have an exercise that [00:13:00] supports each one of them.

[00:13:01] Speaker: So here we go. The signs you are living from your values. 

[00:13:07] Signs One and Two

[00:13:07] Speaker: Sign one: a quiet sense of enough starts to show up. In our culture, the comparison spiral is nuts, bonkers. Comparing ourself to the Joneses, I think that's always the phrase. But when you're living by your values, the comparison spiral loses some of its pull.

[00:13:31] Speaker: Someone else's highlight reel lands differently than it used to, and that's because you're anchored to what you actually value. You're measuring your life by your own standards. That shift, even when it's subtle, is worth pausing to notice and celebrating. Sign two- The good moments start to stand out.

[00:13:54] Speaker: Those moments where you feel completely like yourself, where time goes a little [00:14:00] funny because you're so fully present. When you're living in alignment, those moments multiply, and when you start to catch them as they're happening, it's a whole different experience. That's called resonance. 

[00:14:14] Signs Three and Four

[00:14:14] Speaker: Sign three: you understand your pain differently.

[00:14:19] Speaker: This is kind of a counterintuitive one, so stay with me here. When you know what you value, you know why things hurt, and there's a real clarity in that. John O'Donohue, a beautiful poet and writer, he wrote that, "Our desires are the messengers of our unlived life, calling us to attention and action while we still have time."

[00:14:47] Speaker: Your pain is pointing you towards something that matters, and that's really useful information. Sign four: you notice who generally moves you. [00:15:00] Think about the people who stir something in your chest, the ones who make you feel, "Yes! That." What they stand for tends to mirror what is inside of you waiting to be claimed.

[00:15:14] Speaker: When you can see that clearly, you're doing the work. 

[00:15:17] Signs Five to Seven

[00:15:17] Speaker: Sign five: mornings feel different. There's something pulling you forward before your feet hit the floor. And on those days that that's harder to find, you know you have a framework for understanding why. That dread is a signal, and you know how to work with it.

[00:15:36] Speaker: Sign six: writing about what matters to you comes more easily. I invite people to spend 10 minutes writing about what's important to them in any given area, why it's important, what it feels like when they're honoring it. If words flow, you're connected. If you sit quietly with the page for a [00:16:00] while, that's valuable information too.

[00:16:04] Speaker: Sign seven: you want to share what you care about. That's something profoundly human in that impulse. When you're genuinely connected to your own inner life, you want to bring other people into it. Research suggests that the desire to share what we hold dear may be part of why we developed language in the first place.

[00:16:28] Speaker: We were once that vital to each other's survival. Ugh. I love that idea, and I think it's worth revisiting

[00:16:38] Speaker: So there's seven signs that you are living your values in action. Again, this is not a test. This is you being a fascinated anthropologist. And if what you're coming up with is, "Wow, I need to figure out what my values are," [00:17:00] or, "I need to reassess what my values were 'cause things have changed," I have many practices about values.

[00:17:10] Speaker: I will include one in the show notes a link to one. And again, if one of those seven specifically are highlighting an area where you're like, "Hmm. Nah, can't get there," just send me a message. My email address is hello@kathywashburn.net.

[00:17:33] Embodied Values Signals

[00:17:33] Speaker: So there's one thing I'd like to add, especially because this quarter we've been exploring what it means to live in an embodied life. Every single one of those signs shows up in your body before it shows up anywhere else. The comparison spiral, for example, has a physical feeling. The morning that pulls you forward versus has, has you wanting to pull the covers over [00:18:00] your head also has a physical feeling.

[00:18:04] Speaker: The tightness when you've said yes and meant something totally different, the lightness when you've honored yourself, all of it lives in the body first before the thought, before your words. The heart math researchers found something I find stunning. The heart sends more signals to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. More signals go up than down, which means the intelligent you- intelligence that you need is already in you.

[00:18:42] Speaker: Your body is tracking your real values in real time When your values belong to someone else, the body registers that. A low-grade restlessness you can't quite name. The exhaustion that sleep doesn't seem to fix. But [00:19:00] when you're living from your own chosen values, something eases. Decisions feel cleaner because you have cut off everything else.

[00:19:12] Speaker: The internal friction softens. That is what embodied living actually feels like. It's that felt sense of being at home in yourself because you are following your own heart mattering.

[00:19:28] Choose and Live Values

[00:19:28] Speaker: There's one thing that I most want you to carry with you today. You choose your values. You explore, reflect, select, and own them. And then you get to live from them, imperfectly and on purpose.

[00:19:48] Speaker: And when you do, your time starts to feel like your own again. The noise quiets enough to hear yourself. The things that never really were [00:20:00] yours start to loosen their grip and even you let go of them. And your energy, your attention, your yes, they start to go somewhere that really matters to your own heart.

[00:20:13] Invitation and Closing

[00:20:13] Speaker: So here's the invitation. Just notice, is a values practice something that is in your near future? And what is the one thing that you can do right now to move yourself towards that direction?

[00:20:30] Speaker: So I want to come back to where we started. That feeling of life at life speed. The week you couldn't find yourself in. I believe that we are busy with things that deserve our reconsideration. And the way back to yourself is through clarity. Clarity about what you actually value. What is your heart mattering?

[00:20:57] Speaker: And what you want your one [00:21:00] wild and crazy life to be built on. That is what this work is. That is what this quarter on this show is about, living from the inside out, letting your body and your values and your truest self lead. Thank you for your gift of time today. If something landed, I'd love for you to share this with someone that you might, think might need to hear it.

[00:21:27] Speaker: you can look at Substack this week. I think I'm gonna write a companion piece that goes a little deeper, and the link is always in the show notes. Until then, I wish you well 

[00:21:38]

[00:22:19] ​