Why Self-Care Isn’t Working for You (And the Power Shifts That Actually Do)

You’re hydrated.
 You’re taking your supplements.
 You’ve “worked on your nervous system.”
 You even took the vacation.

So… why are you still tired?

If self-care actually worked the way it’s been sold, most women would be well-rested, regulated, and thriving by now. But instead, many are stuck in a frustrating loop: reset, recover, repeat.

In this episode, we’re talking about why self-care isn’t working — and it’s not because you’re doing it wrong.

It’s because most self-care is designed to help you recover, not to help you change.

So you rest just enough to return to the same emotional labor, the same patterns, the same pace that drained you in the first place. And then you wonder why the exhaustion keeps coming back.

This episode is a compassionate wake-up call and a loving invitation to stop using self-care as a survival strategy — and start practicing it as self-leadership.

In This Episode, We Explore:

• Why checking all the self-care boxes still leaves so many women depleted
• The reset–repeat cycle that keeps burnout quietly alive
• How women leak power through over-explaining, over-caretaking, and over-controlling
• The difference between recovery and capacity-building
• Why burnout often shows up when things are actually going well
• What it means to become a resourced visionary — in life, relationships, and business

Transcript

0:00

Hi. Welcome back to the show. Hi, welcome back to the show, okay. Why your self-care isn't working, and I'm gonna go through the power shifts that actually will help you. There is a version of your self-care. There's a version of something that, things that you're doing that most women. Have mastered. I mean, you have mastered some things well in your life. You know, maybe drinking water. Maybe you've been taking salt baths lately. Maybe you're going for more walks. Maybe you know, you're clearing your energy more. Maybe you're getting out nature even maybe you're doing things that, um, are beautiful because they are. Those are beautiful things. But my question for you is, when you're done, are you still tired? Are you still exhausted? When you go on vacation, do you come back and feel good for like a day or two and then go back to feeling like crap again or feeling exhausted again? And listen, all that is beautiful. Vacations, walking nature, tea, right? Water, more water. All those things are wonderful things you're doing for yourself. So whatever it is, certainly keep honoring it. However, I'm suggesting to you today that they are no longer enough for the season you are in. Because if you're honest, the exhaustion you're carrying isn't coming from necessarily a lack of self-care rituals. Okay? It's coming from where you're leaking your power. Maybe it's conversations you keep having that make you feel like shit maybe it's the emotions you keep managing that aren't yours or absorbing. Maybe it's the money that you're underearning and getting really stressed about, right? Maybe those are ways you're trying to protect yourself or stay in, your comfort zone that are really depleting you. Maybe that rest that you're taking. It soos you short term, but it never actually restores you. Long-term. This episode is not just about some self-care maintenance, this is about self-leadership, and I want you to consider this a very compassionate wake up call for me to you. Not because you're doing something wrong, but because you're ready to do something different. And that is at the base of what we're talking today about, is doing something different. So let's jump in because there are five things I'm gonna address with you today. They're just five little areas that actually have big impact in our life, and I wanna talk to you about them. Your next level care. It isn't really about protecting yourself from life because life my dear is going to happen. Life is happening all around us. It's hard, it's sometimes really ugly. Um, sometimes it's harder than most. I think right now is a very difficult time for many of us sensitive people. And it's about learning how to stay in relationship with life without abandoning yourself. And this matters not just for your wellbeing, but for the balance of power in your relationships, for your capacity to lead at work or in your life, right, to be led and lead your ability to receive money without being in a process of burnout. That is attached to it, and your sense of sovereignty is at stake here. It's really important, and especially as we move into what many call the year of the horse. This has been a buzz everywhere. I did a couple episodes back. We, we talked about leaving the year, the snake and moving into this year of the horse, and it, it appears to be this energy of stamina and momentum and embodied power and. Many of us are like, yeah, I'm here for it. But then some people are like, but I'm tired, Michelle. I'm tired. I don't know. Can I, can I sustain some sort of stamina like that? I don't know. I'm tired. But here's the thing. You don't need to run faster. You need to leak less. Okay, because if you just keep leaking your power, you're gonna find yourself chronically something, right? Chronically resentful. Chronically, exhausted. Chronically deprived in some ways, chronically stressed out, burnt out. Maybe you find yourself in, chronic scarcity mindset. We can find ourselves fatigued in trying to hold ourselves as. Leaders in the world, in our circles, in our own life, there's all these ways we leak energy that we're gonna dive into today. So let's jump into the five practices. Stay with me till the end because number five is something you really need to hear, so don't miss it. But number one, I wanna talk to you about discernment versus over engagement in your life. Okay? So one way of looking at this, one piece of advice I have for you. It's to stop arguing with people that are invested in misunderstanding you. Okay, so here is the wake up call. Not every misunderstanding is yours to repair. I want you to hear this if you feel the constant pull to explain yourself, to justify yourself to clarify one more time, that's not communication. It's not healthy communication. It's an energetic negotiation for your safety, which is not up for grabs. It is not, that is non-negotiable. You shifting your internal world to hold the utmost respect and the utmost protection of your internal safety, your feeling like you are worthy and you are going to match and treat yourself. As worthy. Okay. And in personal life, this can look like you keep revisiting the same conversations with people and you're like, we've already had this conversation, but they wanna get something different from you, so they keep having it with you. You keep hoping that this time they're finally going to get you, but really each time you walk away feeling smaller or more exhausted, more burnt out, healthy relationships. Okay? I want you to hear this. Healthy relationships can tolerate. The concept of seeking to understand first and be understood. Second. Conflict or communication around feelings and experiences are not meant to have somebody who wins and somebody who loses. That's false. That is a very unhealthy way of coming into communication with somebody else in a relationship. And so I really wanna highlight the idea that you start to not only do this yourself, you're gonna model it, but you're also going to expect it from other people. And you're gonna set boundaries around it that are very clear. Okay? So that is. We're gonna understand the other person first and be understood. Second, it's a wonderful way to start a conversation. It's a great way to set ground rules. You know, you can swap turns, who's gonna do that? But really, if you understand that concept that this is not about winners and losers, that it's about deepening our relationship, understanding each other. Then you are going to be able to under see that the value in it is listening and respectfully hearing the other person. If the, if you're not getting that in return, It is time for you to stop allowing that conversation to keep happening. It. You have to have a boundary around this. If that person is trying to get away with winning and you losing and them right and you wrong, or whatever the situation is, it is time to put to name it. This is what's happening. This is the outcome that's never gonna happen, and I'm not gonna engage with you winning and me losing, or me winning and you losing. This is about understanding each other and I've tried to explain myself and you're, I'm, I can do not feel understood. And, don't allow that conversation any longer. Now, I say this because honestly, I think a lot of us, well-meaning just open-hearted folks, like I get this all the time in my practice where we don't really have that discernment and we really get into it with all these different areas in our life of people who are. Not invested in understanding us. They're actually invested in misunderstanding. They're invested in getting what they want and they do not want there, there, there's no interest in truly understanding. In fact, the way they win is by not really understanding you maybe like many others, and you have allowed this to continue and so you call back your power, you cut off the leak by no longer allowing that to continue. Okay? Now in business, I wanna highlight in each thing I'm gonna talk about, I'm gonna talk about in personal life as well as in business, I. I want you to think about if you own your own business, if you're an entrepreneur, or if you are, you know, especially if you're starting out. But either way, you, perhaps you overexplain yourself, maybe you overexplain your pricing, maybe you defend your boundaries. Maybe you exhaust yourself trying to be palatable instead of precise with people and clear, I can't tell you what a giant journey that was for me. I've been in my own business now for. About nine years. And I've got, I mean, I've, I've seen a lot. I've seen a lot. Of course I have, right? Just like any of us. But I actually remember the time that I really, made a change in this for me, and that was, I had a woman who contacted me and she knew my pricing. I'm very transparent. I'm really a big fan of transparency when it comes to things like that. So I had my pricing out there. She knew exactly how much I cost. I don't take insurance. I'm a private. Pay, therapist and healer and all the things so. She asked if she could make it, uh, have an in-person consult for 15 to 20 minutes. 'cause I did, did, at the time I did 15 to 20 minute consults. They were usually over the phone, but she said, I'm gonna be in the area. Can, can I do it in person? I said, okay, sure. She was very interested, but she had questions. And when we met, really the only thing her questions were, were really all about how she can get me to change my pricing for her. And it. I'll tell you as an empath, at the time, I also was less clear and I was so just wanting to help everybody and I had to really like, get uncomfortable. I mean, she could hold discomfort, right? She had no problem with me squirming, right? She didn't really have any issues with that. I was the one that was feeling so uncomfortable making her squirm, right? So. Here I am and I'm, I'm thinking this is a moment and I'm in it, and I can see that she's asking me to change my pricing and I am sitting here saying, should I do it? Maybe if I do that, I'll, you know, I'll just do it for her. That's what I'll do. I'll just do it for her. And then I'm like, you know what? I wasn't paying attention to, am I gonna wanna work with this person if this is how this starts, the relationship, does this even make sense? It really hit me really hard in this particular situation, and I'll tell you, I was very proud of myself at the moment because it was really the first time I had to really dig my heels in and, and speak up and be very firm. Um, and I just said it with very absolute certainty that. This is who I am. This is how much I cost. This is, this is what my business is and this is who I am in it. And if that doesn't work for you, then of course there are lots of wonderful people in the world and it's just not meant to be here. And I was able to truly embody that, and I haven't gone back since. Really, that's what I mean by when I say, she was not in it to be like, Hey, I wanna understand really what you offer. I wanna understand what, what the cost is about. She didn't really, there wasn't like her showing up in that meeting because she wanted to learn more about what I was doing. I think she really just. Wanted to spend the time trying to get me to change my pricing. And so I just offer that because, you know, especially if you are in the helping field, that is a really difficult one because a lot of people have these underlying beliefs that if you're helping somebody you shouldn't charge. It's, it's really maddening, you know, because those of us that have a business around this, those of us, especially myself, I, I spent. Thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars on my education, nevermind postgraduate. So yes, it is a thing. And so if you resonate with this, I just wanted to give a call out to you out there if you are. In business and you are a helper in some way, and you come across this, that energy is just not for you or your space. And there are other beautiful souls out there that will meet that person where they're at and that will work for them. And that is okay. It's not like you're closing the door on their wellbeing or their, help seeking or their ability to receive help. It's just not gonna be from you. And so I just wanted to, really highlight that we can be more, we can have more discernment versus really over engaging with people that are not really there for us. Okay. And now practice number two. Clean expression without self abandonment. This is kind of an obvious one, but let's graze through it because I want to say this out loud again because Self abandonment is our own form of self-sabotage, and there's just no way around not talking about it today because if you are out there doing this, you are. Bleeding yourself of power and energy, so we have to say it. So imagine this saying how you feel about something without managing the response. That's the clean expression without self abandonment. How many women have learned that expressing truth is only safe if they soften the landing, if they, Peace and a please in the process. So they say it gently and then explain it and then reassure and then apologize for having said anything at all. This is not emotional intelligence. This isn't, this is self abandonment and is dressed up as kindness. There is a way, and I do think that I have worked really hard in embodying this and sometimes I'm not the best at it, but I think a lot of times I can really, this can be a strength of mine is there is a way for you to be honest and truthful and compassionate and graceful all at the same time. There is a way you can say, no, this is the bottom line. This is how it is. Right? I understand where you're coming from. I, I get that now. In relationships, you can feel responsible for how your honesty lands. So you dilute it. I'm sure you can relate to that, or you have something that you honestly feel, but you really, when it gets down to it, you dilute it and then you wonder why nothing changes and that's just a way we're self abandoning, is by diluting our truth, by not really speaking it. And in business you avoid having really clear policies, right? Hey, when this happens, like a cancellation policy or any other policy that you wanna have, you start getting wishy-washy around them. Or, you have them and people overlook them. They think you're not gonna really hold them to it, and you don't. And. It's just, it's, it's so frustrating to us to get caught up in that resentful cycle to feel like people are taking advantage. And reality is you're not being clear and you're not holding yourself up to what is right for you, And one of the costs is even financial, shows up. Money's a mirror. How are our bank accounts are mirrors, how is your bank account doing? How is your money flow doing? What does that look like? It's probably mirroring something to you. And a lot of times it's mirroring, depletion and exhaustion and it's showing us, right, like up and down, up and down. The mindset shift can be that you can be kind and clean, and you can be loving without being responsible for other people's reactions to what you know are clearly your boundaries. Practicing one sentence truths. Okay, this is your action tip. Practice saying one sentence truths. Like, stop there. No add-on explanations. Just let the silence do the work. Like just say a sentence, oh, that doesn't actually work for me. And then of course you can follow up with. Either a compromise or you can follow up with what does work for you, but I want you to try to get into the habit of saying less. Now, number three, again, there's five, ways that we're leaking power and that are really important for us to pay attention to when it comes to allowing our self-care to really start working for us. And when I get to number five, I think you're gonna understand the whole picture. Okay? So stay with me here., So practice number three is holding compassion without actually absorbing anything. That means listening without taking responsibility for anything else. You're not taking responsibility for other people's emotions or opinions or any of it. Like you are literally capable of being compassionate and listening, and nothing inside you changes. Nothing of your personal power, nothing of your values, of anything that you've attached to that's important to you. The rules and regulations and processes you have in place in your relationships as well as your businesses, right? You were taught probably that if someone feels something strongly, it must mean you need to do something about it. But presence does not require absorption, and it doesn't require that you fix things. So in your personal life, you might take on other people's moods, like we've talked about this number of times. So I'm not gonna go too deep into it, but you know, you can leave. Really absorbing and creating and taking on other people's moods. You feel guilty for not fixing if you walk away from something and leave it be and that's really because you don't understand the value that you just gave that person by simply witnessing something. We don't recognize the value in witnessing that most of our people. Not everyone, of course, but a lot of us don't actually even really want someone to come in and save the day. We think we do, but it never feels right because the answers have to be seen within us. Give me somebody all day, any day who will look at me and say, Michelle, you have the answers inside you. Let me help you figure them out. Uh, thank you. Oh my God. I'd pay a lot of money for that, right? Like, I am not looking for someone to come in and say, here's what you need to do. You need to do A, B, C, D, E, because I think I do. And then I go find that person. A k my husband, by the way, and. They tell me, this is what you have to do. Do this, do this, do this, do this, and it doesn't feel right. I'm like, but that doesn't feel right. Something's wrong with that. Right? It doesn't, it's not coming from me. It's not of me. It's not the intuition, knowing that's deeply embedded in me that already has the answers. Right? It's a stray from that, and so then we kind of don't take people's advice and then they get frustrated. They gave us the advice, right? We didn't take it. Or you get frustrated by other people. But because they're not listening to your advice and you're over giving with your advice and you're trying to fix and give all this advice, and then you end up re resentful because people aren't listening. They're not taking it because they didn't need your advice. They needed you to see through them and see their capabilities and allow them the space and the witnessing to get to that. And so I just wanted to really. Help you not confuse empathy with responsibility because they're different, right? And in business you might find yourself totally over supporting your clients in the same way. You blur rules, you tie your self-worth to their emotional state. It's really. Easy in a business to be like the expert, especially if you're an entrepreneur and someone's hiring you one-on-one or you are, you know, another healer, helper, therapist, coach. It can be really easy to blur that line between I'm the expert, I'm here to fix you and help you. And then you might start off that way, but you're going to quickly learn that that is actually not the gift to give that. Actually seeing what people have within them and working with that is the absolute power that you can give them the restoration they need, and we need to do that for ourselves. Now if you don't really look at your blurred roles in your business and tie your, your self worth, that's a tied to their emotional states, like until they feel better, you're not good enough, right? So the cost of that is big because it leads to your energy leaking, it leads to your burnout, it leads to your blurred boundaries, and. It even leads to your income being tied to caretaking instead of true leadership. It leads to your income showing you mirroring back to you, right? That it's all over the place. And so a mindset shift means being with somebody is different than carrying them and being with is more powerful. Some of us think, oh, no,, I know when a client really needs to be carried, and I would, I would ask you, how could you rephrase that or, or look at that differently so that you aren't perpetuating a cycle of your own burnout that I don't actually need to carry them. And if you could actually change how you see them as resilient and strong in ways they don't know. And that's how you need to, that's what you're there to show them. Right? And so an action here is when someone shares something heavy, I want you just to silently repeat to yourself this belongs to them. That it's, uh, sovereign to them. It belongs to them. They have ownership of it. I can stay present without taking it on. This belongs to them, and you can say it in a very holy, beautiful way that you're respecting the power of this belonging to them. And you're not gonna look at them as weak or that you need to come in and fix it, or you're gonna say, wow, you, this belongs to you and I'm gonna witness you carrying it and I'm gonna believe in you and trust in you and your abilities. Okay. Really powerful shift. You can see that, right? And so practice number four is our capacity over control. So let me break this down so that this makes sense 'cause that probably doesn't make a lot of sense in terms of the title, but capacity over control, letting discomfort exist without rushing in to fix it, is very similar, but lemme break it down a little bit further. Here's the hard truth. Most power leaks happen because we're trying to escape discomfort. We rush to smooth things over. We over-function, we micromanage our outcomes, but power doesn't come from control. It comes from capacity, and we're gonna really break this down in number four and number five. And when you walk away from these last two, I think you're gonna have a clearer picture of, at very least, a new way of looking at things and what questions you need to ask yourself. So if power doesn't come from control, and if it comes with capacity. Can you see when you don't feel safe, your habit might be to reach for control because control says if I manage everything, if I anticipate every outcome and fix discomfort quickly enough, I'll be okay. Capacity is different, and you're gonna really start to understand this idea of capacity. Capacity is the ability to stay present without tightening, to tolerate uncertainty, without rushing to hold tension, without needing to dominate or escape it. Because control is trying to eliminate discomfort immediately, and capacity expands your ability to be with it. When someone says, I have the capacity for that, they're saying I have the capacity to hold what is being given to me and still in my nervous system, remain calm and present and well, right? And this is where real power lives, not enforcing outcomes, but in having the nervous system strength to let life move without you bracing against it. Think of it like control is like about gripping life for, you know, gripping life, like for dear life, right? Capacity is about being able to just hold it and stay calm and at ease with ease, here's the tricky thing is we reach for control. When our capacity gets thin or feels is less right. The less capacity we have, the more stressed out and burnt out we have. The more controlling we become, the more we grasp for that control. But we know that as capacity grows. Control becomes unnecessary because peace is not an outside job. It's inside, right? So if our capacity grows, we don't have to control what's going on around us. We don't have to control any external factors because we have the capacity to hold it all. So we are still at peace, and we get peace from inside us. Peace is when. The world around you is chaos as it is right now, for sure. And pieces, your ability to. Find quiet time and, and feel stabilized within to ground yourself in the midst of this chaos, to be able to go back into an open heart, um, in the midst of pain and struggle all around you. That is peace. So in relationships you probably resolve too quickly. You bypass necessary tension as quickly as possible, and you might even trade your truth for the, you know, for perceived peace, right? That if I keep this back, they'll, I'll feel at peace. Everything here will feel better. But that's not real peace. It's not really feeling better because the price you pay for self abandonment is a lot of internal shit, like resentment and rumination and all the stuff that goes on that feels terrible and the power leak, right? So it's not really good. this was a really big lesson that I have learned on multiple occasions, so if that helps you feel better about yourself at all, you know that this is something I have to keep going back and learning. Even at this stage of my journey, little things come up and I'm like, oh my God. I don't even know what's happening in the moment until after. I was in conflict a couple years ago with somebody and it, it blew up and it was slowly building and then blew, right? It was like there was something happening. I just wanted to keep, like, I just kept saying, oh, I just forgive this person. I just forgive them. I forgive them. I forgive them, and they would do things to treat me poorly or treat my family poorly or do things that were really, you know, were not okay. And. I couldn't believe how it just kept happening. And I was like, wow. And what I should have done, of course, I should have done is I should have spoken directly to it. Right? But I kept thinking, oh, this is all just gonna blow over. It's gonna be fine. You know, I just wanted to resolve it too quickly. Okay. All I wanted to do was resolve it. I, I was so invested in resolving this as quickly as possible to move on that I. Completely bypassed everything that was going on within me. The saying that this isn't okay, you need to speak up. And you know, it got crazy. It got like after school special, crazy. It was just really, really intense moment. And it wasn't until then that it really blew up that I was like, oh my gosh, I just did that. I went through an old habit of mine, a really old habit of mine to. Just dismiss, dismiss, dismiss. I come in with an open heart. I'm forgiving. It's okay, right? Like I just wanted to make it better. Make it better. I just kept trying to resolve it within me and outside of me way too quickly and ended up just blowing up, right? It ended up. It probably would've been much better if I had spoken. And so I just want to humanize this, that it's really common for us to do in our lives, and there are probably times in your life where you've done that, and and in business, let's talk about that. Maybe you panic, during uncertainty you chase certainty. Instead of building resilience, maybe you. Collapse during expansion. You know that, how that looks. If you have your own business, like where you put yourself out there, you put yourself out there, and then we, we win and we get something and we build and then we freak out and then we, we get small and then we go hide for a little bit, and then we put ourselves out there again and there's just like a rollercoaster ride. We can see it in our business, we can see it in our bank accounts. We can see this. Way of, of managing our lives where we jump in, we hold on tight, we control, control, control or you know, and then we go through this process because we don't have the capacity, we haven't built the capacity, and so we end up burning out and. That ends up leaving us with fragile confidence in all skates, whether that be family, friends, business, whatever, like it changes how we feel about ourselves, about other people, about our relationships. We get a lot of fear-based decision making that happens, and again, that inconsistency in our, in our income when it comes to business and. We have to really shift our mindset to recognize that discomfort is not the enemy. Discomfort is not danger. It is training. It's a workout at the gym, right? And an action step for you. I want you to practice staying in mild discomfort for like 90 seconds, longer than you want to. In the beginning it's gonna be 90 seconds, and it's gonna be an hour, and then it's gonna be a couple days, right? Are you just going to start? Building your nervous system leadership muscles, I'm asking you to just hold here when you wanna quickly say, forget about it. It's okay. Don't worry about it. Or you wanna make a decision,, where you are bypassing all your internal feelings that are happening, right, that are gonna. Leak your capacity in the future. You know that that's your, that's the stake, that's the cost. Then you are gonna hold that longer. You're gonna need to see what happens in front of you. Just hold, bite your tongue, let time pass. See what happens. You can start with 90 seconds if you want, and then you know, you can always go back later. You can rescue if you need to. You can give in, but I want you to practice the muscle of holding. It's so, so important. But here is the really big. Reset that really leads into this, and that is number five, and, I wanna talk about looking at rest as a power accumulation. So it's not necessarily escape, it's not relief. I wanna talk about capacity further, and I wanna look at how you can expand your capacity because what's happening. As I mentioned it, the whole point of this is to talk to you about why your self-care isn't working. Because all these little things are adding up all these, this leaking is happening and you're exhausted, and then you do the things that that are necessary and that are really important, but you don't feel better after. And I wanna talk to you about ways in which you can accumulate power. I want you to look at rest isn't something you earn after depletion. It's not something you use to recover from self abandonment. Not any longer. That's what you do, right? Like you self abandon, you do these things, you leak this power for all the reasons we've talked about, and then you give yourself rest and maybe you sleep more or you get a vacation, or you do the things that we talked about and you still feel like crap. I wanna talk about. How true rest and what happens during that time. We're gonna call it rest, but you know, respite, right? True respite. Expand your ability to hold more life, expand your ability to hold more money, expand your ability to hold more responsibility. It's not necessarily relief or escape it's capacity. And so if you were to look at, wow, I'm taking time. What is my goals here? It's not necessarily get relief, it's not necessarily escape. It's about building your capacity. So let's talk about this because this is where a lot of women think they're practicing self-care, but are actually just recovering from burnout and exhaustion most of the time. Here's the wake up call. If your rest only happens after exhaustion, it's really just like repair, okay? And repair brings you back to the same conditions that burned you out in the first place. Hear that, that the things you're doing are just bringing you back to the same conditions that burn you out in the first place. Unless you're making big changes and you're using that time to build your capacity. I don't wanna just help you feel better temporarily I wanna help you change what your system can sustainably hold so that you can hold more. So when capacity is low in your personal life, your rest becomes like a collapse, right? So like you get time off, you push through until you're depleted, then you shut down and you numb instead of restore, right? You recover just enough to reenter the same pace, the same emotional load, the same expectations. You do things like you watch Netflix all day, or you binge on, you know, this, that, or the other thing. And we could go into all the addictions we have, right? In order to feel better. And please don't get this, take this as shaming because I love myself a good show. So I am not against any of the things, but I'm looking at the difference between giving yourself just enough of something so that you can tolerate going back into your life and doing the same thing over again or shifting into. How you can build capacity. So building capacity can even look like pausing before you're exhausted. Like do you have red flags that go off before you get to the point of burnout and are you paying attention to them? I'm just wondering, asking for a friend, right? Like, how about allowing rest that integrates emotions instead of bypassing them? So if the time you're gonna take have it be going inward and sitting with your emotions. If you go into my inspiration hub, I have a really wonderful ask and receive free, giveaway that you can tap into that asks you to go in and unlock the emotions that are stuck in your body and talk with them. Listen to them, hear them, and actually free yourself of them. You are gonna feel so much better after, but we're not doing that right. That's not what we're really necessarily doing during our downtime. Also. What about leaving space unfilled on a more regular basis? Not as avoidance, but as self-trust? Like what if you could just start doing some self-trust building in your life where you're like, okay, I'm allowing more space here. I don't even know what I'm gonna do with it. Maybe that's where I visualize, And reconnect with my why on what I'm doing and doing for the rest of the day. Like, why am I doing those things? Why are they important to me? And really reconnecting with that. This kind of rest increases your ability to stay present in your life without constantly needing to escape it. And business rebuilding from burnout looks like taking time off. Right. And then you come back and you're motivated and you create the same pace, the same pressure, the same emotional labor, and then you've suffer from burnout again. And it also shows up in when we're financially stressed. I mean, it just becomes a really big thing and it becomes a hit to our self esteem and how we are doing. but building capacity is gonna ask you a different question, and I want you to ask yourself this. Looking at your business, what would make and or your life, you know, maybe you don't have a business, but what would make this no longer cost me so much? If you look at a relationship you're struggling with, what could I do here that would make this different and not cost me so much? Capacity building and business though does mean maybe if you are an entrepreneur, designing offers that don't require you to be emotionally on all the time. Maybe you're creating really clear scopes so you're not blurring into areas that you don't really want to be. You're not doing jobs that you don't really wanna do, right? You're building predictability in your income, your workload, your rest before your body. Screams at you, forces it, right? Like gets sick, does all the things it does 'cause the body keeps a score. And this is really important for us to have more capacity and that keeps us chugging along strong, right? This is what allows financial independence without urgency. No more hustle, less leakage. So the cost of not changing this thing, see if it doesn't shift. Here's what happens. You don't just burn out because you know you're failing at things or things aren't working and you're tired of it. You might actually start burning out when things are really working right. Maybe in your life at work, in your business or in your, your, your social life, whatever, things are going really well, but because of all the ways you've leaked your powers and because of your lack of capacity, when things go well, that's when we start to burn out. It's terrible, right? And in our, in our business and in our life, we can get even more people pulling at our energy, right? Maybe there's more demands for visibility, for responsibility, but without a capacity, expansion feels like a threat. I want you to hear that. Without capacity, without feeling resourced for what's coming, expansion feels like a threat. So you collapse and then you recover, and then you repeat, and then expansion comes again, knocking on the door, and then it feels like a threat because you're not resourced for it, and then you repeat the cycle. That's not a rest issue. It's a power container issue. So ask yourself, does the way I am resting. Actually expand my capacity? Or is it just helping me survive the pace that I'm afraid to change? That's a really big question. What are you afraid to change that you know would help you have more capacity? You know, rebuilding from burnout. I see this all the time. It really restores you to who you were before you got on left for vacation, let's say. Right? You get back, you're like, oh my God, I found myself, I feel so much better. And then, it fizzles, right? You, you're back to who you were, so you go through the same cycle again. But building capacity changes what your system. Can sustainably hold. So it changes everything. It isn't just rest after exhaustion. It's designing your business or your life. So exhaustion isn't required. Burnout. Recovery gets you back in the game while capacity building changes, the rules of the game, how you're going to interact with people, how you're going to show up, how you're going to promote, how you're going to put yourself out there. so you can see the picture here that I'm showing you is how can you make changes that. Will in fact honor your ability to hold what you choose to hold, what you want, to hold, what you want in your life. And sometimes we have to let the rest go, but you are looking at what expands that. And really we have to look at not leaking any power any longer. Obviously, right. That's we, we know that now we have to look at more self-trust, more inward experiences, and really understanding that I, you need to be resourced for the things you're trying to do so that you can actually do them right? You need to have the resources for them. So if you've ever felt like you're doing all the right self-care things and you still end up exhausted, this is why. And I hope that I've somehow managed to take these big ideas that I have and make them sound clear and concise so that you can understand them. But most self-care is designed to help you recover. Not to help you change, and change is a name of the game when you keep burning out repeatedly, so you rest, you reset, you feel a little better, and then you step right back into the same patterns, the same dynamic. The same place that drain you in the first place. And it's not a failure, that's a system doing exactly what it is designed to do, but recovery alone will never create sustainability, right? That self-care stops working when it's used to make unsustainable life feel temporarily tolerable, so that self-care stops working when it is used. The way that you're weaponizing self-care is to use it to maintain an unsustainable life and what actually changes things is power. It's not force, it's not control, but the kind of power that comes from being resourced like we talked about emotionally, energetically, financially, and relationally. That's what these practices are pointing to. Discernment instead of over engagement, like we talked about, expressing yourself without self abandonment, compassion without absorption, right? Having capacity and allow letting go, versus control and rest. That builds. Stamina, not just relief. These are not just coping tools, they're like leadership shifts. And I use that word because you are here as an energetic being to lead a life, and many times we're in that life. We are leading other people with us. So because when you're resourced, you don't need. To recover from your life, you have the clarity and steadiness to reimagine it. And so part of that leadership is being the visionary of your life, right? Being the person who can look at what do you want? The work of the visionary, the woman who doesn't just survive the system she's in, but has the capacity to change. It is how we grow, and that's why real self-care doesn't ask you like, how do I get through this? It asks what needs to change so I don't have to recover from my own life. And that my dear is where self-care is not maintenance, it is self-leadership. So I hope that this really hit home in some aspects for you. I'd love to hear about it. I love when I receive your emails or you can catch me at Michelle Erman. I would love to hear what you guys thoughts are here. If there's anything that sticks out to you, that would be amazing. So thank you again for listening. I am so appreciative of you. Have a beautiful week and I will see you next week. Bye for now.