When Awareness Isn’t Enough: The Illusion of Progress and the Power of Pause

Ever feel like you’ve done all the work -- read the books, journaled the insights, sat through the breakthroughs -- and yet somehow you’re still looping through the same lessons? In this episode, Kim Romain and Louise Neil unpack the illusion of progress and explore why awareness alone doesn’t create change.

They dive into the “Groundhog Day” feeling of personal growth, the sticky shadows that follow every transformation, and the nervous-system wisdom behind learning to pause before pushing forward. Together, they explore how to regulate, reflect, and move through growth edges with more humanity, compassion, and ease.

Tune in if you’re navigating burnout, transition, or the pressure to keep evolving. This conversation will remind you that slowing down is often the most powerful move you can make.

Key Takeaways:

• Awareness is both a gift and a challenge; once we see, we can’t unsee.
• Ignorance might feel easier, but real change requires consciousness and courage.
• Our shadows travel with us, but their power fades each time we face them.
• Reflection is what turns awareness into evolution.
• The pause isn’t a luxury; it’s where integration and regulation happen.
• Self-awareness and nervous system regulation help us step off the hamster wheel of burnout.
• Humanity itself is repeating old patterns and we each hold a piece of what can change that.
• Reclaiming self, community, and connection is how we move forward with integrity.
• We already have the tools to evolve; the work is choosing to use them intentionally.

Key Moments:

00:00 – Welcome & Introductions

02:01 – Groundhog Day & the Feeling of Repetition

04:13 – The Gifts and Consequences of Awareness

11:25 – What Comes After Awareness

13:27 – Shadows That Follow Us

16:40 – Reflection as Evolution

21:52 – Returning to What’s Core

27:08 – The Bigger Lesson for Humanity

32:14 – Regulating the Nervous System

36:07 – Bringing Awareness into Action

36:58 – Closing Reflections

Join a circle of changemakers committed to leading with purpose, presence and ease inside Kim's Rising Visionaries mentorship program.

Reclaim your career and confidence during midlife through Louise's Rise & Redefine program.

If you’re loving this show, come check out the Feminist Podcasters Collective, where creators like us are uplifting diverse voices and driving meaningful change. If you’re looking for new shows to fill your feed, head to https://feministpodcasterscollective.com

Transcript

When Awareness Isn’t Enough: The Illusion of Progress and the Power of Pause

Episode 180

Release Date: October 7, 2025

Hosts: Kim Romain & Louise Neil

(00:00) Kim Romain: Have you ever felt like you've done all the work and somehow you're still right back where you started? That's what we're unpacking today. The illusion of progress, the sticky shadows that follow us through every growth edge and why the pause isn't weakness, it's wisdom. This isn't about hustling harder or pretending the world isn't a mess, because it is. It's about reclaiming your rhythm, remembering what's core to you and learning to move forward with presence instead of pressure. So let's get into it.

(01:43) Kim Romain: Hello, hello, hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Empowered and Embodied show. I am one of your co-hosts, Kim Romain, joined as always by my lovely co-host.

(01:54) Louise: That's me, I'm Louise, the other co-host.

(01:57) Kim Romain: Feels like we were just here.

(01:59) Louise: Feels like it.

(02:01) Kim Romain: Yeah. Do you ever feel like, I don't want to say hamster wheel, because like I've experienced that hamster wheel thing before. That's not quite where I want to go. But you ever felt like that Groundhog Day? It's like, oh.

(02:13) Louise: I was just gonna say that. Yeah, yeah. Do you ever feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day?

(02:18) Kim Romain: Yeah, or Andi McDowell. Like, totally oblivious to the fact that it keeps going on.

(02:25) Louise: For a while, I'm Andi MacDowell. For a while, I don't know that I'm stuck on this repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat kind of day or life. But then you clue in, at least I do, you clue in a little bit and now it's like, wait a minute, haven't I just been here? Aren't I doing the same things? There's something that changes that kind of... flips the switch from just going along with the flow to what the hell is the flow.

(03:01) Kim Romain: It's so interesting. So I actually saw Andi McDowell's daughter in a movie that just opened and there was so much of the like everybody around her was going with the flow. It very cool movie, by the way, it's called Honey Don't and did not get great reviews. But if you like stylized independent films, good movie. Just a little plug there. But she was this private detective and it was very stylized 1940s style, but it was present day. people around her were definitely going with the flow. They were in that Andi McDowell, Groundhog Day state where it was like, just live in their lives. And she was like, the fuck? Like, come on people, do you not see what's happening here? And I... That's that waking up, right? That's the, but now I woke up and now I'm noticing that I'm in this constant sameness. So was I better off when I didn't know I was in that sameness or am I better off knowing that I am in the sameness so that I can do something about it?

(04:08) Louise: Yeah. Like is ignorance bliss or is it just ignorant?

(04:13) Kim Romain: I mean, I have some opinions on that. I very often want to believe that ignorance is bliss, and yet then I go back to, then it's ignorance. And I would rather not have, rather not be ignorant. How about yourself?

(04:29) Louise: Well, yeah, like, do you think to like the work that we do, like to be more self aware, especially in midlife, right? We're talking about all kinds of things that are happening physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, cosmically, like we're more, we become more aware. We're talking more about it and that sticks.

(04:34) Kim Romain: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

(04:50) Louise: Is it a byproduct of being more aware that now we see like, we come out of that ignorance, we step out of that sameness and now we're in this place of like, well, sometimes it's frustration, but now we're out of it and now we can really see what's happening. We can really feel what's going on and we didn't have that before. Like, do you think it's a byproduct of that work?

(05:05) Kim Romain: Yeah. I think it can be. I don't think that's the only way to get there, but I think it can be a byproduct of the work for sure. Yeah, I think that we, when we're, when we have awareness, whether it's self-awareness or awareness of anything else, when we have awareness, it is, it's, I don't know that it's possible to have ignorance. You can have ignorance of aspects, but like, if I've been studying self, I will have blind spots. There will be aspects of self that I will be ignorant to because I haven't explored that yet. But my heightened sense of awareness will reduce the amount of times that I'm not aware that I am in that blissful state of I had no idea. Does that make sense?

(06:08) Louise: Right. Well, yeah, like, and so is it, is it then like the preferred state? Because it comes with a lot of like, consequences almost. Yeah.

(06:20) Kim Romain: Awareness does? Yeah, 100%. It also comes with a lot of gifts. I, I... Having awareness, having higher consciousness allows us to live in a different state. We can be more open, we can be more loving, we can be more connected, we can have more depth to our relationships. Relationships to people, relationships to things, relationships to situations. I don't think we can have that depth without that level of consciousness and awareness. And so that's a gift. And yeah, with gifts there are, with everything there are consequences. And we do get to choose, right? We choose from the place of, choose not to go on that path. I choose not to raise my conscious nights. I choose not to become more aware. or I choose to go down that path of awareness, understanding that it will have some consequences with it. I mean, don't you think that's true?

(07:24) Louise: Well, and then, well, yes. And I also believe that as we kind of like, as we evolve and we go through this, the state into the altered state, the other state, the elevated state, that we also get to choose how sticky those consequences are. Like I think, I think we, get to like,

(07:46) Kim Romain: Mm. Yeah.

(07:49) Louise: It's not like, here, I've done all this work and, and, and now I know, like, now I see it's like Bill Murray, when he first like, recognizes that he's, he's reliving the same day. Right? Like, that's an, that's an awareness, hey, I've been here before, hey, I'm doing stuff. And he makes some changes, right? He, he starts conversations, he eats waffles differently, or pank, whatever that is, right?

(07:58) Kim Romain: you. Mm-hmm. He learns how to play piano.

(08:15) Louise: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Like he takes advantage of that. And yet he's still not like he's he still hasn't dealt with some of the consequences that are happening because he doesn't get out of the day. He keeps going around and around.

(08:30) Kim Romain: Well, because he hasn't, right, the moral of that is he hasn't learned the ultimate change that he needs to make. Because once we make, in that case, right, once we make that ultimate change, now we get to live something different. Now we get to experience something different. He was experiencing things differently, but his end goal was always the same. He wasn't going through all those different ways of doing things to elevate himself.

(08:41) Louise: Sure.

(08:59) Kim Romain: He was going through all those things to get the woman. He was doing it to manipulate somebody else. And once he let go of that, once that character let go of that, then he was able to begin evolving and time started moving forward.

(09:14) Louise: Yeah, but I think we do that to ourselves too, like in real life, right? We get attached to something and then we can't let it go. We keep going around and around and over and over. I see this in my leadership clients often, right? It's like, I need the next step. I need to be the best. I need, right, to be there. And they get stuck in this.

(09:17) Kim Romain: 100%. Yeah.

(09:41) Louise: hamster wheel, this repeating of day after day after day, and the consequence is the burnout and the inability to escape that hamster wheel, because it's all that they know is this hamster wheel.

(09:56) Kim Romain: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I got a message from a client earlier today and we've been doing a lot of work. Ultimately, if you were to distill it down, it's that belief in self. And the work that we do has peeled back both cosmic and spiritual and strategic and very logically based layers of herself, so that she can see the totality of who she is and really embody it and believe in it. And there are still aspects, even though she has all this data coming from all these different sources, she still looks at that and goes, but how is that true? And so she left me a message today saying, well, I got more data, but I'm still struggling to believe it. It's the same thing of that. the hamster wheel of showing up and doing the same thing because we get locked into, we stick with a certain or what sticks to us, are these beliefs ways of being. behaviors, right? It does get sticky. And so if we want to shift that, if we want to go to that evolutionary phase where we have moved beyond, and we've talked about growth edges in here before, if we want to go beyond where we have been, it does take awareness. So that means that you are choosing to go down that path. And then what comes next?

(11:22) Louise: Mm-hmm.

(11:25) Kim Romain: We talked last time about transitions, the last time it was just the two of us. We had this great conversation about transitions. And so what happens when we get off that hamster wheel, when we move out of Groundhog Day? What happens next?

(11:38) Louise: I still think there's like this stickiness part that we're talking about and this like this, there's a shadow side that follows us when we step off the hamster wheel. Like it's not all sunshine and roses and buttercups to say like, now I'm self aware, I've grown, I'm coming through or I've come through this growth edge, things feel start to feel different, right? I think there's still sometimes this stickiness or the shadow side that we're not paying attention to. it can often start to like rear its head again. Like we come through it and we think we're through it, but then, you know, 10 steps later we're on a hamster wheel again. But it's not like, but it's not this continual growth edge, right? Like it's the same hamster wheel. It's the same day. It's not, it's not new. It's not a new growth edge. It's not something new. I know I think that we, we do. Right. But I think there's this false sense of a place that we get to say, like, I really do believe, like we think like that, that we've, we've come through it. And so then,

(12:24) Kim Romain: Thank. Although we haven't actually gone through it. We're coming up to it and we're pulling back away.

(12:49) Louise: we can easily let old habits sneak in. We can easily, like if we let our guard down, quote unquote, right, we let our guard down, these other things start to happen. But I think there's this false sense of like, I'm through it, so now I'm okay.

(13:07) Kim Romain: I think I'm following you. I think this, if I'm hearing you correctly, you're talking about basically when you go through this growth edge or through this eye of the needle, right? You've gone through, you've done the work, you've come through the other side and the expectation is those shadows didn't follow you.

(13:24) Louise: Right, because you're evolved, right? You've gone through it. Absolutely. Yeah.

(13:27) Kim Romain: Right, right. And that's not realistic because we are human and we do have things that are imprinted on our DNA and that are stocked to us. Does that mean that we can never shift that? Does that mean that we're all screwed and all of our shadows are always going to follow us and might as well give up?

(13:48) Louise: And I'm not saying that I'm saying like they sometimes we come through with this false sense of accomplishment or this false sense of completeness when when we haven't completed it when we haven't when we haven't fully been able to deal with those things.

(14:03) Kim Romain: So yeah, I think, so the way that I see it is we have moved through something and yes, a shadow has come through, but the shadow has been diminished. Like not dissolved, but the power that's just shadow, the power that the stickiness has on us has shifted. So with each phase of evolution, I do believe that, well, it will come forward with us because very often those shadows and the things that have stuck to us are somehow tied to core wounds that we came into the world with. What are we here to actually learn during this lifetime, right? Each of us has maybe not preordained predestined paths, but we have energetic pathways or conduits that we're on. That's why things keep repeating for us. When we sit there and go, I've already learned this lesson, why do I have to learn it again? It's because yes, you are actually here to continue learning that lesson, to continue evolving, to continue working through it, but it doesn't diminish all of the work and the accomplishments that you've already done on it. you're just at a different level of working with that same problem because that problem is one of your, one of the problems you're here to solve and to work with in your lifetime. And it's a pain in the ass and a gift all at the same time, just like awareness.

(15:28) Louise: Yeah, and I think, you know, without that, without that bit of knowledge, without that understanding that, you know, it might look or feel like the same problem, it's different, it's on a different level, maybe, but there's this repeat, right, of like, here I am again, here's the lesson I'm learning again, why didn't I see that coming again, right? And so I think we can really absolutely,

(15:49) Kim Romain: Mm-hmm.

(15:55) Louise: without knowing it, we can get stuck on like, on the hamster wheel. Right? Like I do believe like there is this pulling back sometimes or this backtracking that we do because we think we've broken through or we've completed that task. Right? And so now that's done. I've broken that hamster wheel. I've got off February 1st. on to February 2 now and now it's all good except like it can replay again, right? By the end of the year, someday in September, it might feel like, right? here I am again. I'm repeating this again. What have I not learned? But it can often feel like, I'm back in that space.

(16:40) Kim Romain: I think that when we started this podcast, we started from a place of reflection. We really wanted to bring the concept of reflection into the world. And we have evolved. The podcast has evolved. The conversations we have have evolved. And yet what you're talking, what I hear you talking about is very much attached to the concept of reflection. If we're not pausing to reflect, if we're not pausing to look and say, yeah, I'm feeling it this time. What am I experiencing? How is that different reflecting back to the last time you experienced something that was reminiscent of this? What has changed between that now and then? What new information do I have? What new tools do I have access to? However you want to do that reflection. without that, we miss that. And that is how we stay on that hamster wheel.

(17:30) Louise: Yeah, yeah, yeah, because it's like, so what are you going to do different now? Like, and then I can talk to some folks who don't see that. Right. Like, not everybody sees that. Not everybody sees that they have these tools that they've developed or that they're a different person now than they were when they were right back repeating it before. And I see these like habits and these patterns come back,

(17:35) Kim Romain: Yeah.

(17:57) Louise: over and over again, and it's like, and like, and what are you going to do different this time? Right? Like, what is that, that, that, you know, let's not rinse and repeat the same thing over again. Let's, let's take what you've learned. Let's take your growth in your self-awareness so that we can, like, tackle this same problem a little bit differently. And each time we go through this iteration, we we come out the other side changed, right? But we have to remember that we're changed. We have to remember that we have different tools for the next time that it comes. But I see this in like organizations, right? That people get so stuck in this, like, but here I am again. And I have the same problem again. I have the same person, right? I have the same person or the same personality that's always right somehow beside me. causing me problems, they're causing me problems. And it's like, well, what's the lesson, right? What did you do last time? What could you do different this time? And it's a place to explore to see what's gonna work. But I don't think everybody sees that. It's just like, here we are again.

(19:07) Kim Romain: Of course, I mean, if everybody saw it, the collective wouldn't be in the shit storm that we're in right now. I mean, talk about repeating ourselves. When we look out into the collective, when we see what's actually happening in the world, right? It is so... It has rinsed and repeated. Different circumstances, different individuals, different reasonings. but you can still see the same pattern. So humanity is continuing to rinse and repeat. Humanity is a little bit stuck in Groundhog Day. Like we haven't evolved. And that's a lot of where I get excited about our potential as humanity, as a human race. Like what can we collectively be doing differently so that we can shift? So we don't keep making these same choices over and over and over again. So we don't keep banging our head against a wall and wondering why we have a headache. It's, I mean, there's so much here for me. I don't know which direction I want to go with my thought. It's so, I think it is both really exciting and really frustrating to be alive right now. And painful, obviously very painful. The frustration and the pain and the worry and the concern and the stress, all of that is us continuing to show up. the way humanity has shown up in every time the world feels like a shit storm. Right? We have history books that have shown us that. What's exciting is the conversations like this and conversations that I have with my clients and with others in my circles that lead me to believe very deeply that people are starting to try things differently. The number of people that have been laid off or who have taken deferred retirement or whatever the things are that are being offered from these corporations and organizations that don't know how to handle their people anymore. What are those people doing? Are they going out and finding another job? Many aren't because there aren't jobs to be had. So what are they doing? We're going back to... Mom and Pop shops, we're going back to these places of how do we as individuals take care of ourselves and take care of our communities, take care of our families. We're coming back to that, to something that existed before you and I were born because we're going to try to do something differently this time. I hope.

(21:49) Louise: Okay, but you said we're going back to something.

(21:52) Kim Romain: Because we have to repeat that's the same cycle that we as an individual have to do. We have to have the same lesson. Humanity has not figured this lesson out yet. So we now have to go back. We have to go back to do things like we have the same fucking problems that we had, you know, different times in the past. Not going to go down a history lesson here. Lots of lots of similar problems have happened throughout history. humanity has done is we've evolved a little bit each time. Whatever direction we're evolving, we evolved. We're at a pivot point again of humanity. I believe we're at a pivot point again of humanity that we get to choose how we evolve next. We may choose to continue down the path that we see in front of us. I don't believe that that is sustainable long-term. We've seen it historically not sustainable long-term. I don't believe it is. Maybe it is. Maybe that's what humanity chooses this time. The back to here is, what do we need as human beings? We need safety. It doesn't feel safe. It doesn't feel secure to be out there broadly right now for a lot of people. So that does mean going back to, coming back to something that is much smaller, much more intimate that we really haven't experienced since the eighties, nineties, where we've been living so out loud. I just went in a philosophical rant. Sorry.

(23:28) Louise: You did. And yet, and yet, that loudness, right, how we've been living out loud, and when we go back, it feels like we're losing a lot. Like we're losing a lot of ground that we made, that we made, aren't we?

(23:31) Kim Romain: I'm not star. That's it. Are we?

(23:47) Louise: It sure feels like it. Like when you look at the DIB space, it feels like there's a lot of ground that's being lost, right? Absolutely. There's a lot. Our rights as a woman, right? Like being stripped away. And so hear this going back doesn't sound all that great, Kim. It doesn't sound.

(23:52) Kim Romain: Yeah, when you look at trans rights. Yeah. Mm-hmm. No, I'm not talking about this. So right, that would be following that path. What happened the last time this happened? The last time we had large governments that were restraining human rights, what is the last time that that happened? What did humanity do?

(24:31) Louise: We haven't happened all the time,

(24:33) Kim Romain: We have it happen all the time. And what happens? Is it just because people are living on the internet all the time? Is that what stops things from happening? No, if it did, we wouldn't have what's going on right now. What we have an opportunity to do is to come back to our communities and say, what do we actually need? How do we do this without the distraction? And I'm not talking about the distraction of rights that are being stripped away. I'm talking about the communities ensuring that the rights are not stripped away and that those individuals are protected. But we don't always like what we think we need to do is to be out there doing it. Well, what we need to be doing it is in here first in right personally individually and then in our communities and our families in our homes. because the rest becomes distraction.

(25:25) Louise: And, you know, this coming back to self, right, that you mentioned, like, doing, that's doing the work that we're talking about, right? But it doesn't always feel like we get it right either. Just because we come back to self doesn't mean things are going to magically fix itself. Like, that's not the magic wand.

(25:38) Kim Romain: Mm-hmm. No. Nobody knows what the magic wand is. I mean, if we knew what the magic wand was, hopefully somebody would use it. Get us out of this.

(25:59) Louise: No, no, no, we would all be fighting over it in some way. right? Or not we, but we.

(26:02) Kim Romain: Well, right. Obviously, right? That, yes. And that's what we are fighting over. We're fighting, like the divisiveness that exists, the anger that exists is people fighting over some magical something that nobody even knows what it is anymore. It's like somebody said there was a magic bean and that bean has long ago disappeared. And again, I'm not talking about the human rights issues. I'm talking about how do we come together to ensure that humanity is evolving in that direction, if that's the direction that we're meant to evolve. I I believe it is. I don't believe that what we're currently seeing is the direction we're meant to evolve at all. And just like when we as individuals go, for fuck's sake, haven't we been here before? Like, didn't I already learn this lesson? Again, humanity is in the throes of that right now. What lessons does humanity have to wrestle with?

(26:58) Louise: Right. Right.

(27:08) Kim Romain: That's the big question, I think. And that's the hamster wheel, that people want off of.

(27:14) Louise: So we've been made aware, right? We're now aware that we're stuck on this hamster wheel. We wanna get off. I think we know how to get off. I think so.

(27:16) Kim Romain: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I think a large percentage of the world population probably does know how to get off. Yeah. Yeah. They're just not in power.

(27:32) Louise: Right? Yet we're still on it. Yeah, we're still on it. And this going back, this like, but you know how to get off it. It's still this going back. It's still like, we go back before we can go forward.

(27:37) Kim Romain: Mm-hmm. Hmm? We reflect. When we reflect, we go back in our minds. When we go back, we say, I feel like the words are getting twisted a little bit there. I'm not talking about humanity going backwards. I'm not talking about, I'm talking about we go back to what's core to ourselves. We're not going backwards. We're coming back to what is core to ourselves as humanity, our core needs.

(28:09) Louise: Mm.

(28:22) Kim Romain: and the way that we take care of each other. So that's when I'm saying going back, that's what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about going backwards.

(28:30) Louise: okay. Yeah. Absolutely, right?

(28:32) Kim Romain: Big difference. No, but in the same way that we reflect, we look and we say, what do we know? We're not going back, like backwards. We're going into, yeah, we're not, yeah.

(28:47) Louise: Yeah, but it, no, and I can appreciate that, right? Like we, and I think like the nuance of those words, I think is important to understand because we, can feel like, like, like a backward step when we're not moving forward, right? Like when we actually need to pause and to reflect back as to what's working, what's not working, what do we leave behind? What do we take forward? because it doesn't feel like motion, forward motion. Right? And so I think that's really important to like, even though it might not feel like we're moving forward or feel like we're growing or feel like, like, feel that that motion, we are, we do need that space because we are gathering our wares, right? Like we're evaluating what we're going to take forward. We, it's like, like the hamster wheel comes to a stop and then we get to step off. Right? Yes, we need that pause.

(29:49) Kim Romain: We get to take that pause. So maybe that's a better to say what I'm talking about. It's the pause. It's the slowing down. It's the pausing. It's the gathering of what we know and it's the gathering of the people. So it is... For me, energetically, there is a reclamation. And so, right, that coming back, it's a reclamation energetically instead of pushing everything out. That's when I'm talking about being out there. Instead of pushing everything out, it's reclaiming it, reclaiming our family, reclaiming ourselves, reclaiming our communities,

(30:15) Louise: Mm-hmm.

(30:33) Kim Romain: so that we can reclaim humanity from what nonsense has taken us in a really shitty direction.

(30:40) Louise: Yeah. Yeah, and I don't think that's too much different than, you know, when I talk about like the individual, right? When I talk about, you know, as we, we, we can be doing all the quote unquote, right things, right? It's like, here's the hamster wheel, how I'm going around and around and around again. I'm gonna pause or I'm gonna slow it down so that I can get off. And then if we're not slowing down enough, or we're not,

(30:41) Kim Romain: Is that clearer?

(31:08) Louise: pausing long enough, we miss so much because then two steps later, people are on the hamster wheel again. Might look differently, but it's still a hamster wheel because we haven't taken that moment to really kind of settle in to understand what that lesson is or even understand what the problem is, right? What is it we're here to solve or what is it that keeps coming back? We often don't know what that is. until we do know, like it absolutely is just like jumping from one hamster wheel to the next. We do need to take that moment to find who we are. And that's what I see in so many clients who are burning out, right? Because it's not just the hamster wheel of like what's going on here. It's this bigger collective hamster wheel, right? Like what humanity is doing, it's a hamster wheel within a hamster wheel. And nobody has the time to pause because it feels like that maybe is not what's needed.

(32:14) Kim Romain: particularly when our nervous systems are so misaligned, so janky, so out of whack because of the very real distractions of the horrific things that are happening in the world. We want to, whether we're trying to sit down and work on a project or have a meeting or hire a new, I was just in a conversation this morning with one of my clients. She's so distracted by just so much that's happening in her community and in the world. And she's trying to hire somebody new that she couldn't actually think through what are the questions I need to ask this person so that they can be integrated into our organization. So having to sit there and help her understand what does it mean to regulate your nervous system because the world feels like it does. means to pause. And all I know you want to do is run forward because you want to fix what feels like a problem in the moment. Right?

(33:14) Louise: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So, so what can we do about that?

(33:21) Kim Romain: The pause. I feel like to continue to encourage the pause. I think we need to, talk, people talk about the pause. People talk about taking a breath. People talk about, right. So it's, that's not part of the conversation that's not being had. I think the part of the conversation that's not being had is how to do that effectively. How to do that so that you don't traumatize yourself. So you don't feel like, if I pause, I have to rush back into something else, right? Exacerbating any burnout that you may be experiencing, exacerbating anything else that you may be feeling. A pause actually regulates you. And if you're not regulated before you step back in, then you're flipping yourself onto that hamster wheel without your feet underneath you. And that is like, I went to a fun house one time. I went into one of those tumble tunnels.

(33:52) Louise: Mmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

(34:16) Kim Romain: and I was upside down because I did not have my feet underneath me, let me tell you that is not fun. And that's what we're doing when we're not taking the time to regulate.

(34:21) Louise: Yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, it reminds me of that awkward pause. Like the pause that we think is long enough is not long enough. Like it has to be longer. If you're sitting in conversation with someone and there's that awkward silence, right? That pause, it's like, wait it out. Like be there a little bit longer. Like let that feeling of like, awkwardness and uncomfortableness, like really like sit in before you jump in. And that's the same here. Like really sit in that time, really sit in that until it's uncomfortable, until you can actually really get through it instead of just like, that was long enough because now it's uncomfortable. So now I must be going, right? I think that that length of pause is, is the signal is like if it's uncomfortable, stay.

(35:29) Kim Romain: Yeah, well that's prematurely leaving that growth edge.

(35:30) Louise: Right? Like stay there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It comes back to, yeah, just what I've, and that's just what I've seen, right? And that's what I've been seeing lately and my clients and I've been seeing it in myself, right? Where I was like, yeah, yeah, I got this, I got this. And then it's like, boom, I don't got it so much. But staying and pausing and reflecting before you move forward, you gotta. You gotta know what you're taking forward before you move forward. Yeah.

(36:07) Kim Romain: And again, be aware that those shadows are going to move with you. They should be turned down a little bit each time you go through, but they're going to keep showing up. So what do you want to do each time those shadows show up, differently or not, you may choose to do things the same, and that's okay, because circumstances are also different. taking the time to reflect, to analyze, to understand is, I think,

(36:21) Louise: Mm-hmm.

(36:33) Kim Romain: the most effective way to work with it because it's, you said it, it's uncomfortable. Yeah. And as humans, we don't like that.

(36:38) Louise: It's uncomfortable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I was going to say speaking of uncomfortable, but I won't. It's like speaking of comfortable. What are you putting out into the world to make it a little more with a little more ease?

(36:58) Kim Romain: Hmm. to play in all the spaces that I always play in and cooking up a little something on the side from this podcast. This is not going anywhere, but there's a little, there's a little something, something where it's going to be a little solo voice of Kim out there in the world for a little while. So yeah. How about you? What's going on with you?

(37:11) Louise: Mmm. Love that. You can always find me on Substack, and really leaning in. I don't know if you know this, but mid October is, menopause day. And so it gives us, some voice and some conversations maybe around menopause in the workplace, that we haven't been having. so yeah, so that's always, interesting and fun time for me.

(37:43) Kim Romain: Exciting to see how that all comes through and what conversations we have around that time too.

(37:48) Louise: Absolutely. Thanks for your time today, Kim.

(37:52) Kim Romain: Thank you, Louise.

(37:54) Louise: Alright, take care. Bye for now, everyone.