Ep. 263: How To Stop Spending Yourself on Everything

Last week, I asked you to consider something.

And judging from the messages and the emails that flooded in, it hit home for a lot of you.

I asked you to consider this: What if you've been trying to solve the wrong problem all along?

Not a productivity problem. Not a motivation problem. Not even a time problem.

A capacity problem.

And so many of you wrote back and said some version of the same thing.

"Jennifer, I finally understand why I've been feeling this way."

But then almost every single message ended with the same question.

"Okay. Now what?"

Because here's the thing. Understanding that you're finite doesn't suddenly make your life smaller.

Your kids still need you. Your job still needs you.

The dishes still need to get done. Your parents still need help.

Life didn't magically become easier just because you listened to a podcast episode.

So today, I want to answer the question that naturally comes next.

How do you actually live differently once you realize there isn't enough of you to keep living the way you've been living?

Because that's the real question, isn't it? 

Not "is this true," but "what do I do about it."

Resources mentioned in this episode: 

https://www.jenniferroskamp.com/stop-trying-to-cram-everything-into-your-life

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Transcript

Well, okay, friend. So this question, the so what do I do about it question? I've been thinking about this all week, and I really kind of I kept thinking about the women who were listening to last week's conversation, kind of having that light bulb moment and and feeling seen for maybe the first time in a long time or ever. And then closing your laptop or putting the phone down or shutting it off, and then walking right back into the exact same life.

The same overflowing inbox, the same dishes in the sink that were there the last time you looked, the same laundry pile that somehow multiplies overnight. Don't ask me how that happens. The same expectation from yourself and from everyone around you that you'll just handle it, all of it, like you always do. And so, no understanding isn't enough. And

Understanding your limitations, it doesn't shrink your responsibilities. It doesn't clear your calendar. It doesn't make your mother-in-law stop calling at inconvenient times or your inbox stop refilling the second you empty it. But what that understanding can do, however, is change how you decide, how you react, how you respond to things. And that isn't a small thing. That's actually a big thing. So

Stick with me because we're about to take last week's conversation and turn it super practical. So let's get into it. Well, today's conversation might be one of the most practical ac practical conversations that we've ever had before because awareness is wonderful and powerful and freeing. I mean, I do love a good light bulb moment as much as the next person. But awareness by itself doesn't change your life. Your decisions do.

So let's talk about the decisions. Well, we need to we actually need to start here because I don't want you walking away from this conversation thinking the goal is to care less. That's not what our goal is. Most women don't overspend or overstretch themselves because they're irresponsible. They don't run themselves into the ground because they're bad at managing their time. They do it because they care. They care about their kids, they care about their marriages.

They care about their parents who are getting older and need more from them than they used to. They care about their homes and keeping them running and keeping everyone fed and clean and somewhat on schedule. They care about their friendships, they care about doing good work, they care about being dependable, about being the person that everyone can count on. None of those things are bad. In fact, all of those are really great, beautiful things. It's one of the best things about you if you are a woman like that. The problem was never

That you care too much. The problem is that you've never actually learned how to decide who and what deserves the best of you or even a piece of you at any given time. Nobody taught you that. I know I certainly wasn't taught that. I had to learn it the hard way in my 40s, buried under a a life that I loved, but that I could not keep up with. Think about your own week, the one you're in for just a second.

How many times did you say yes to something this week purely because saying no, the idea of saying no felt worse? Because you don't want to disappoint someone, because you don't want to be the mom who missed the event, you don't wanna be the friend who flaked out, you don't wanna be the daughter who didn't show up, or you don't wanna be the the client who didn't show up again. None of those fears make you weak or incapable, by the way. They make you someone who takes her relationships.

And her responsibilities seriously. But somewhere along the way, we started confusing, let's just call it taking it seriously, with saying yes to literally everything. And those are not the same thing. In fact, they're not even close to the same thing. And I want to say this plain and clear because I think a lot of us need permission to hear what I'm about to say. You can care deeply about someone and still tell them no.

You can love your kids fiercely and still not volunteer for every single thing that the school sends your way. You can be a devoted daughter and still not be the one who drops everything every single time. Caring and unlimited availability are not the same thing, even though we've spent years acting like they are. So if you've been sitting here feeling guilty because you're tired, hear me say this clearly.

Caring isn't your flaw. It's actually your gift. We just have to teach it some boundaries. And here's where most women get stuck, and I mean stuck because everything feels equally important. We've got laundry and doctor's appointments and birthday gifts that you still need to order. And then there's helping a friend who's going through something hard, and there's answering texts that have been sitting there for three days. There's cleaning the kitchen for the fourth time today, or maybe the fourteenth time today.

There's returning that Amazon package before the return window closes. There's work deadlines and there's church commitments and there's meal planning for a family that apparently needs to eat every single day, multiple times a day for forever. There's checking on your mom. None of these things feel optional. Not one thing on the list of things that I just listed off are going to feel like something you could just skip over. And so our brain then does something really sneaky. It takes

Every single one of those things or whatever your list of things looks like and it dumps them into one giant bucket labeled important. And here's the problem with that bucket. When everything has equal emotional weight, nothing has clarity. You wake up every single morning reacting to whatever is loudest, not what actually matters most. And I want you to notice something else about that list that I just read. A doctor's appointment.

And a text that you haven't answered do not actually carry the same weight. Checking on your mom and returning an Amazon package are not the same size and scope when it comes to making a decision. But in your head, in that moment, they can feel and often do feel exactly the same. Equally urgent, equally important, equally guilt inducing, equally impossible to ignore.

And that really is the trap that we all fall into. It's not that you have too much to do. Plenty of women have a lot to do and still feel steady. The difference is whether everything is sorted or whether everything is sitting in that undifferentiated pile or bucket of I should or I have to. I talk to women all the time who describe their to-do list the same way. It doesn't feel like a list anymore.

It feels like a weight on your shoulders. It feels like a single, heavy, undifferentiated weight sitting right on your shoulders from the moment that you wake up. And that's exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with how many hours you've slept the night before. And it's also not a discipline problem. It's not a scheduling problem. It's a sorting problem. And nobody has ever taught us how to sort through these things.

So the heart of the whole conversation is this. I want you to really just kind of focus in on what I'm saying, okay? Every single yes that you give spends you. Not just your time. That's the part that we usually think about, but it's so much bigger than that. It spends your attention, it spends your emotional bandwidth, it spends your patience, it spends your focus, it spends your future energy, the energy that you were gonna need for something else later that day.

It spends your joy. It spends your presence. Nothing is free. Even good things cost something. Even good things cost something. And that's why you can have an entire Saturday off, right? You've got no work. You've got no obligations on the calendar. And you still feel completely wiped out by Sunday morning. Because in the midst of doing nothing, you weren't doing nothing.

You were spending yourself the whole time on decisions, on noticing what needed attention, on managing everyone around you and their moods and their needs and their requests, on mental load that doesn't show up on any calendar, but absolutely drains your tank. You spent yourself. It's not a mystery that you're feeling tired. It's actually math. So think of it like a bank account, right? Except instead of dollars, you're spending

Attention. Instead of a balance, you've got patience. And just like money, you can absolutely overdraw it. You can spend more than you have. And when you do, there's always a fee for going overdrawn. It just doesn't show up as a fee on a statement in this case. It shows up as snapping at your kids over something small. It shows up as crying in the shower for no obvious reason. It shows up as

Lying awake at two in the morning, wide awake with exhaustion, wondering why you can't just relax. That's the overdraft fee. And most of us have been paying it for years without even realizing what it was. And once you understand that every yes has a cost, you can start asking a very different question before you say yes.

So for years, probably decades, we've been asking the exact same question when we're presented with an opportunity. We ask, do I have time for this? And I I want to gently, yet not so gently, tell you that's the absolute wrong question. That's how you've gotten to where you are. Because the honest answer is almost always yes. You probably do have some bit of time. You can probably squeeze it in.

You are a resourceful woman who has figured out how to squeeze in far more than this in the past. But squeezing it in was never the real issue. The better question, the one that I want you to start asking when an opportunity presents itself, or even when your to-do list, when you walk over to that, right? The question is, does this deserve the best of me? Does this deserve a piece of me? Notice the difference. I'm not asking, does this matter?

Because let's be honest, most things do matter, at least a little. That is not a helpful filter anymore. I'm not asking, can I fit it in? Because you probably can. You're good at fitting things in. That's actually been a part of the problem. I'm asking something much more specific. I'm asking you to ask something much more specific. Does this deserve my best thinking? Does this deserve my best energy? Does this deserve my best?

Patience. Does this deserve my best attention? Because here's the truth that really none of us want to hear. Not everything does. The answer is going to be no sometimes. Some things deserve your competent attention. Some things deserve your bare minimum. And some things honestly deserve a no. And you need to know the difference. So let me give you a real example. Let's say that there's a committee in your township or small community.

And they ask you to head up a project. Does it matter? Sure. Could you technically fit it in? Probably. But does it deserve your best thinking, your best energy, your best creative attention in this season, in this year, in this timestamp of your life? And when you ask that question, the answer could be maybe not. Maybe it deserves a kind no or a not right now.

So that your best thinking can go towards your marriage or your work or the older kid who's struggling and needs more of you than usual. That doesn't make you a bad community member. It makes you someone who fully understands that saying yes to everything isn't actually generosity. It's avoidance of an uncomfortable conversation with yourself, primarily. Now again, that

It doesn't make you unkind when you say no. It makes you intentional.

So, this really is the message that I'm passionate about sharing with women. When we spend ourselves on everything around us, the people we love most often receive what's left over. Let me say that again. When we spend ourselves on everything, the people we love most often receive what's left. They get what's left, not because we love them less.

In fact, that's probably the farthest thing from accurate. But because by the time we finally get to them, at the end of a long day, we're running on fumes. We've already spent our patience on the 14 small fires that we put out before 9 a.m. We've already spent our focus on answering emails. At the end of a long day, we just have nothing left. We've already spent our emotional energy holding everyone else's feelings and their needs and their moods.

And then dinner happens or bedtime or a conversation with your husband or your teenager finally opens up and says something real at 948 at night, right when you have nothing left to give. And we wonder why we don't recognize ourselves anymore. Why we snap when we don't want to snap, why we feel disconnected from the very people that we're doing all of this for in the first place. It's not because you don't love them enough, it's because you spent yourself everywhere else first.

I hear this from women constantly. They tell me, I I don't understand why I have nothing left for my husband by the time we finally have a moment. Or why do I lose my patience with my kids the second we walk in the door? When I held it together all day at work? Or why does my best friend get the version of me that's distracted and half listening when she deserves so much more than that? It's never because you don't love them or care about them.

It's because love isn't the only ingredient that's required. Presence, your ability to be present, requires capacity. Patience requires capacity. Being fully invested and involved in a conversation requires capacity. And if you've already spent it on 14 smaller things that didn't actually deserve your best, well, there's nothing left in the tank when it matters most. And this is the part that used to keep me up at night.

It it's not reflecting on my big failures, but the small, quiet ones. The moments my kids tried to tell me something and I nodded along while thinking about six other things at the same time. The times my amazing friends text me just to check on me and I don't have anything left to message her back. Those moments, they add up. And they add up quietly, which makes them easy to miss until you look back on an entire season and realize that you weren't really there for any of it.

Even though you were physically present the whole time. So here's the really important question: what if you could have something different? Imagine waking up, already knowing where your best energy belongs. Imagine making decisions without the guilt spiral that usually follows. Imagine saying out loud, or even just in your head, that matters, but it doesn't deserve the best of me today, or a piece of me at all. And actually believing it.

Imagine not feeling like every single request or text or invitation or ask deserves an immediate yes. Imagine living according to intention instead of interruption.

Picture what a Tuesday actually looks like when you're operating this way. You wake up, and instead of immediately scrolling through everything demanding your attention, you already have a sense of where your best belongs that day. Someone asks for a favor, and instead of the automatic yes just tumbling out of your mouth before your brain even catches up, there's a pause. There's a real pause, a long one, long enough to ask the question: Does this deserve me today in this season?

Sometimes the answer will still be yes. This isn't about becoming a woman who says no to everything. It's about becoming a woman who says yes on purpose instead of by default. That's genuinely what I want for you. Not a better planner, not a new app, but a different way of deciding.

So let me tell you about a particular day that that changed kind of how I think about all of this, right? I had a full plate that week. My kids had swim meets, not not the championship, not some huge unmissable event, just a regular Thursday swim meet. My kids are swimmers. The kind that you go to 20 times a season without thinking twice about it. My old self that day would have brought my laptop. I would have sat in those bleachers, half watching, half answering emails between

Different events that my kids were in, telling myself I was being efficient. I was getting it all done. I I was present enough. But that day, I didn't bring my laptop. I left it at home on purpose. Which, if you know me, you know that's not nothing. I am not someone who naturally leaves her laptop behind. And I remember sitting there thinking about everything that I should have been doing instead of just sitting there fully plugged in. The emails, they weren't gonna answer themselves. The the

product prep that I was doing. It wasn't gonna get done by itself. There was a dozen things at least that felt urgent and important and like they deserved my attention right then. But you know what? I looked at my kids warming up and I asked my question. I asked myself the question that I now ask myself on the regular, does this deserve the best of me? And that answer that day was yes. And it wasn't because the emails didn't matter. They did.

But because I only get so many swim meets with my kids. And I get an unlimited number of days in the week with my email inbox. And so I watched every event. I cheered loudly, the way that moms do. I got goosebumps when they did well and they were so excited. And here's what surprised me just a little bit about that laptop that I left at home. The world, it didn't end. You know what? That product that I was in the in the formation phase of, it still got created.

The emails that got answered just a few hours later than I originally had planned. And you know what? Nothing fell apart. And here's the part that I really want you to hear. My old self would have brought the laptop and told herself that she was doing both things well, watching the meet and staying on top of work stuff. But the truth is, I would have done both things poorly. I would have half watched my kids and half answered emails and given neither one my best.

That's what spending yourself everywhere actually looks like in real life. It's not one big dramatic failure. It's just a hundred small little moments where nobody actually gets your best, including you. But something in me shifted because I had proof, real proof, that I could protect something good by intentionally saying no to something else. That was also good. That's the key right there. That's the whole lesson.

It was never about choosing between good and bad. It was never about making something good, choosing something good. So therefore, this over here must be must be bad. It was about choosing between good and better and finally having the clarity to know the difference. And here's what I've realized, especially after this year, this last year, a couple of years of working with women through exactly the same concept. Most women don't need another planner.

Or a downloadable resource of some kind. They don't need another color-coded calendar. They don't need another morning routine promising to change their entire life in five days. They need a completely different decision-making framework. Because until you know what deserves you, you're going to keep spending yourself everywhere on repeat, season after season, year after year, especially because it's the only thing you know. I've watched women try every single version of trying harder.

Better planners, color-coded calendars, 5 a.m. wake up calls, habit trackers. And every single time the plan eventually collapses because the plan or the lack thereof was never the problem. Nobody sat down and decided ahead of time what actually deserved their capacity. And so the plan just became one more thing competing for her attention, right alongside everything else in that same overstuffed bucket that we talked about earlier.

And that's exactly why I built something to fix this. I'm gonna be teaching a live workshop, and it's called Stop Trying to Cram Everything Into Your Life. It's a better way to make decisions and protect your capacity and build a life that actually fits you. And here's what I know to be true. Listening to this conversation today, it might help you recognize the problem.

You might be nodding along right now thinking, yes, this is exactly what's been happening in my life. But recognition isn't transformation. Transformation happens when you take these ideas and you apply them to your calendar, to your relationships, to your commitments, to the actual specific real life mess of your week. And that's exactly what we're gonna be doing together in this three-hour workshop. We're not gonna talk about becoming more productive.

We are not going to try to squeeze more into your already full schedule. We are not going to build another impossible routine that you'll abandon in two weeks and then feel guilty about. Instead, I'm gonna walk you through an entirely different way of looking at your life. We're calling it the capacity decision system. And it's built around one simple, honest truth. Your most valuable resource was never your time, it's you.

Together in this live three hour workshop, we're gonna figure out what deserves your best, what simply feels urgent but doesn't deserve your best, what's quietly draining you without you even noticing, what belongs in this season of your life and what doesn't. And most importantly, how to start making decisions that finally fit the actual human who is living in your actual life.

Not some idealized version of you with more hours in the day, but the real you. You'll walk away with clarity on what deserves your capacity right now. You'll have a realistic roadmap for the rest of the year. And you'll have a decision system, not a planner that expires, but a system that you'll keep using every single time life changes because it will keep changing. That's just the way that life works.

This workshop is definitely not about squeezing more out of you. It's actually the opposite. It's about finally giving yourself permission to stop treating your capacity like it's unlimited. To stop believing that if you just try a little harder or if you just push a little further or if you wake up a little bit earlier, you'll finally get on top of it all. You won't. Not because you're failing, but because that was never actually possible for anyone, ever.

And once you accept that something remarkable happens, you stop white knuckling your way through your days and you start making decisions from a place of clarity instead of panic. That's the shift that we're gonna be building together in this workshop. Not a better to-do list, a better way of deciding what belongs on it in the first place. So make sure you check the notes below for a link that you can use to join us live.

Or watch on the replay on your own time, especially if the live event has already passed. We'll have the replay there for you. Now, here are the takeaways I want to make sure that you have in addition to signing up to join me for this workshop. Again, whether live or on the real play, on the replay. My hope is that you stop spending yourself everywhere. So, takeaway number one: you are not an unlimited resource.

And that was never the problem. The problem is that no one ever taught you what to do once you realized, you know what? I don't have anything left to give. Recognizing your limits isn't failure, but it's not enough either. It's the first honest step towards making better decisions. That's what comes next. Takeaway number two, every yes spends something. Time, energy, attention, emotional bandwidth, patience. Nothing is free, even the good things.

Before you say yes again, ask yourself what it's actually going to cost you. Takeaway number three, stop asking, do I have time? And start asking, does this deserve the best of me? Because that's what you want to give to everything. That single shift in the question you ask yourself will change almost every decision that you make from here on forward from here on out. Takeaway number four: protecting something better sometimes means.

intentionally saying no to something good. And it's that that isn't an unkind thing that you're doing. And it's also not selfish. It's what it looks like to finally live on purpose instead of by accident. Now here's what I hope you remember after today, whether or not you join us in the workshop, you only get one life to spend. You only get one version of you to spend it with. My hope is genuinely that you stop spending yourself everywhere.

And you start spending yourself where it matters most. That's what I want to leave you with today. I would love to see you in the workshop. Friend, you can do this. I'm here to show you how. We'll see you there.