Observation Creates Options (solo episode)

We're conditioned to believe that every problem can be solved by doing more.

More effort.
More discipline.
More productivity.
More hustle.

But what if that's exactly what's keeping us stuck?

In this first episode of Season 2, Ashley explores the difference between slowing down and stopping, why hustle culture can disconnect us from ourselves, and how a surprising health challenge taught her that observation creates options.

If you've been feeling overwhelmed, stuck, burned out, or unsure of your next move, this conversation is for you.

Topics include:

•  Slowing down without giving up 
•  Burnout and hustle culture 
•  Learning to trust yourself 
•  Blood sugar, health, and behavior change 
•  Sustainable wellness habits 
•  Personal growth and self-awareness 
•  Why observation creates options

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Further Forward: Honest Conversations on the Art of Becoming, is hosted by Ashley Mitchell. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome back to the Further Forward Podcast. I'm your host, Ashley Mitchell. This is season two, episode one of the podcast. What an exciting time because if there's a season two, if there is another iteration, it means I have not given up on the vision. And if you were listening to this podcast, there's also something that you have not given up on. There's something that resonates with you. And that's great news, baby. That's exactly where we want to be. I'm very excited. I don't know if you can tell. I am so grateful for your presence. It is so challenging and so vulnerable to grow in public, to let people hear and see all of your missteps, all of your cringy moments, all of the places that needed more nuance or explanation, and you didn't give it, all of the episodes that were just meh or like didn't land with you. You want everything to be good, right? You want to come out the gate and just be like soaring and just going up, up, up, up, up. And that's not the reality. The journey is like peaks and valleys, baby. And when you're, you know, showing up for your vision, there's only but so much you can do behind the scenes before you have to let people see, let people in. And that part has not been easy for me. But I'm glad, but I'm glad I'm here. I'm glad I didn't give up. I'm glad we're still going and we're still learning and we're still doing. And there are so many people that I want to have on this podcast as I'm just sort of out in the world and on social media and listening to what people are doing and how they're building a life and all of the, all of the really beautiful ways to just to be human and to be of service and to fight like hell to live your purpose and to be authentic. This shit is not easy. And I want to have those conversations and I want to know how people are giving themselves permission, how they're doing it, what they're like. I want to all of the things, all of the things I just need to know. Because in listening to how other people are doing it, it gives me permission to keep going myself, right? It reminds me that nobody has this figured out, right? That's why I want to talk to the folks who are in the mess of it. I don't want to talk to anyone who has it figured out. I don't want to talk to anyone who's perfect or who thinks they're perfect because no one's perfect. I don't want to talk to anyone who thinks that they have all the answers. I don't want to talk to anyone who is sitting on high telling everyone else what they're doing wrong. Sorry, no, not interested. Wrong podcast. I want to talk to the people who are scared shitless, who are crying in the shower, and who are fucking showing up anyway. That's who I want to talk to. Because that's who I want to keep becoming. So if that resonates with you, stick around. If it doesn't, you should probably just turn the podcast off right now because don't waste your time. Go find something that speaks to your soul. You know what I'm saying? Okay, I gotta talk about slowing down today. I've talked about slowing down so many times. And I think there's like a little piece of me that's been doing it wrong. If I could self-criticize, no, I'm not self-criticizing, it's growth, it's evolution. What I realized was that the slowing down conversation, I mean, everything needs more nuance, but this might need a little more nuance because when I say slow down, people like balk at me. Like, what do you mean? Like, what, like, where am I finding the time? I'm one of these people too, right? What do you mean rest? What do you mean sleep? What do you mean, you know, how am I supposed to do that when I have this, this, this, this, this? And how sometimes I interpret slowing down in my own brain, even though the words are literally slow down, I sometimes interpret it as stop. I don't know if you do this too, but I just I had to put this out there because I'm like, why do I get a crazy reaction sometimes? And why do I react crazy sometimes at the idea of slowing down? And I'm like, because potentially, and this is true for me, because the idea of stopping for a lot of people, certainly me as a mother, is impossible, girl. It's never happening. But when I think about it more, I'm I'm just saying, you know, you slow down before you crash. It doesn't even have to be a crash metaphor because I got into a car accident on Mother's Day and it was not cute. And so let's pick something else. Okay, you slow down so you can notice. So let's say you're driving down uh a historic highway, and you want to be able to take in the scene, or you're driving through a beautiful neighborhood at Christmas time, you know, like one of those streets that are known for all of the houses, just having uh these insane light shows and fixtures and creations. And, you know, you drive down those streets at what five miles an hour? So you can notice, right? So that's all I'm saying. The slowing down is the noticing. It's reserved for taking the space to understand what's coming next. You notice how something makes you feel. You notice how something affects you, right? And you have to let it affect you, right? The noticing happens first, and then you take it in second. You let yourself be affected, you let yourself feel what breaks your heart, you let yourself feel what keeps you up at night. You let yourself feel what is what is happening in the world and what you think is going wrong in the world because you notice it, you feel it, and then guess what? What you already know. Then you can do something about it. Then the action comes. I'm not suggesting that you put your life on pause. I'm not suggesting that this needs to be this like big intervention or this massive shift, but I'm saying that most of us, especially the people listening to this podcast, we have dreams and we have goals and we want to be of service. But you can't do that if you're always running around like a chicken with its head cut off. I say this because I am this. Hello. Right? So you have to, I mean, you can do whatever you want. Let me speak for myself. I have to slow down in order to speed up, in order to think about speeding up. Right. I in order to think about what I'm gonna say on this podcast, I have to slow down and think about what is on my mind. What do I want to convey to people? What do I want to communicate? What do I want to talk about? How can I do that honestly and authentically? How can I create community around that? Not everything has to be at super speed. That's the fucking scam. Everybody wants you to think that it all has to happen right now, right? So why my phone is on do not disturb almost all day, 99.9% of the day. No, it does not have to be right now. Unless it's my husband, my kid, or some other kind of literal 911 emergency. No, it doesn't need to happen right now. I have to find more space for pausing, right? That means I have to shut out a lot of the social conditioning that we've been taken in, really, since, you know, the boom of the internet and our smartphones and being always available and always on. So I was thinking about this other big moment that I had to figure out how to pause, how to slow down in order to make something happen for myself. And I've talked before about having gestational diabetes when I was pregnant with Zion. And uh it has taken a really long time to get my A1C back down to something that I'm comfortable with. So to be clear, I'm not a diabetic. I know that the community is vast. So I want to be very specific. And uh toward the very, very end of pregnancy, maybe the last six or seven weeks or so, uh, I was on a small dose of insulin. But my A1C stayed elevated uh right below the pre-diabetes line, right? So if I didn't have this incredible background in health and wellness and all of these really incredible smart friends in the industry that uh know way more than I do that I could lean on, if I didn't have the resources to buy healthy food and keep up with all of my doctor's appointments and stuff like that, it could have very well gone over the edge. And as a black woman with family members who have had diabetes, high blood pressure, right? My paternal grandfather died of a heart attack. I'm not fucking around. Okay. And we know that if you've had gestational diabetes, you're more likely to develop type 2 diabetes. So this is, I mean, health is always serious, but but you know, okay, you hear me? Okay, okay. So I'm working with my doctor, whom I love. I've had the same doctor since I moved to New England. So we're talking 12 years now. Um, and so I'm like, dude, I'm trying. I'm trying. I work in this industry. I'm trying, I'm doing, I'm playing around with different habits, I'm figuring this out. And year over year, it's just not where I want it to be. And then I'm paying extra money for inside tracker and I'm testing my blood more often and I'm playing with different habits, and now I'm freaking the fuck out because I'm like, well, I'm spending hundreds of extra dollars every couple of months. Plus, I'm going to my yearly physicals, and this still isn't at a level where I'm comfortable. And that what and what does that mean for my overall health? What does that mean as I'm going into perimenopause? What does that mean for fertility? Right. I wouldn't say that I was in a constant spin, but it was very much something that was present in the background. And so this past year, my 2025 physical, it was still a little bit elevated. And I was like, God damn it, what are we going to do? And I flat out asked him, I was like, should I be on medication? I mean, anything. Uh, I forget the name of the diabetes medication. Um uh, because my stepdad, my stepdad was on it. It's like a, it's like a pill. So I'm like, you know, do you recommend that? Do you recommend a GLP one? And he's like, no, I don't recommend any medication. He's like, I think that one, you could figure this out. And he's like, I think that two, uh, you know, different, different bodies, different ethnicities, you know, respond to different things differently. He's like, I think you can do a little investigating. So he says, I want to see you back in three months. And I want to recheck this. And I'm like, okay, all right, three months. Let's go. So here's what I knew I didn't want to do as I'm sitting in my pause of like, okay, let me think this through. Number one, I can't do anything that isn't sustainable. So this is not the time for a balls to the wall, quote unquote, diet. This is not a sprint to try to please this man with a good number. This is not something that, you know, I'm not trying to run from myself. This isn't a moment in time. This is my life. This is my overall health. So I'm not going to do anything that I know I cannot sustain past that 12-week mark. So I know already that my exercise sort of structure routine is pretty good. I wouldn't say that I needed to change that. I thought, okay, you can do a better job of getting up and taking a walk, getting some gentle movement in before or sorry, after your heavier meals or your carb, your carb-heavy meals, because that's always great for blood sugar, sort of regardless of where your A1C sits, right? It's good for you to move after you eat. Okay, so let me try that. The second, let me think through this idea of nutrient timing. When am I eating? What am I eating? How close is it to things like waking up, working out, going to bed? Two nights a week, I teach night classes. So I'm gonna be eating later. I'm gonna be eating closer to bedtime, right? So now I'm just thinking about okay, well, what are those meals? If I know that I'm gonna be eating at 8:30 p.m., what does that look like? Is that a full meal? Is it four slices of pizza? Is it a protein shake? Is it yogurt and berries, right? How am I managing these things? But I had to think about it a little bit. And finally I thought about the proportions on my plate. So I have uh, I wouldn't say a mini obsession, but I appreciate the work of Glucose Goddess because I've actually learned more about my blood sugar from her than, you know, God forgive me, I'm sorry. But, you know, when I was pregnant and battling this gestational diabetes thing, I did have uh a registered dietitian, I did have an endocrinologist. It was not like I was flailing by myself. But whatever they were telling me just like was not sinking in. And I didn't feel like I was equipped to help myself. But the way that she explained how blood sugar worked and how you can structure meals, it was sort of like mind-blowing. So that started to really help how I was structuring my plate and making sure I was getting enough fiber. And wouldn't you know it? After those three months, my number finally came down to something that felt comfortable, something that I could celebrate, something that I felt good about. It was such a win for me, such a win. And it was just a moment where I could exhale. I am not in control over everything. But there was little things that I was missing because what happens is even though I'm in this industry, I still get caught up in the swirl. I'm also a client, right? And I'm also struggling to understand what information is correct, where I need to pivot and modify it all to a changing female body, right? So I think that I needed that pause and I needed him to say, no, you need to figure this out because the biggest message in the fitness industry, in the wellness industry, is just do more to go harder. You're not trying hard enough, you're not working out enough, you're not taking enough supplements. It's always more, more, more. Track this, track that, buy this, do this. This is the next big thing. This is how you need to do it. This workout is stupid. This workout is the only one that's valuable. This is how many minutes per day you should be doing it. And that's it's how can you listen to yourself if you're always listening to advice that may not be made for you? And of course, my favorite is no excuses, right? No excuses. And sometimes I get it. Sometimes we have excuses, and sometimes we have reasons, and sometimes it's hard to suss out which is which. However, if you take this attitude of straight up hustle and moving without thought and moving without intention, who the fuck are you? And what is the outcome that you're looking for? Do you even know if you don't give yourself the chance to figure it out? And how will you figure it out if you don't slow down? This is the whole thing. How does anything happen without a pause? It doesn't have to be long, but you have to pay attention. I have to pay attention, right? You can't let things make you feel like the last person you can trust is yourself. That would be the big miss. And I get it. Sometimes we're afraid to experiment because we're afraid to move backwards, because we've clawed our way to wherever we are, even if it's not the optimal place. But we've worked so hard to get where we are. And it's sometimes scary because if you make one wrong move, it could set you back. And then you're clawing your way forward again. I get that. I've been there too. But what I've learned is that observation creates options. So if you remember nothing else, it's that. Observation creates options. Have I said enough? Have I given enough for this episode? I mean, I think if if I if I keep going, it's I'm just gonna be rambling. And who wants that? You got stuff to do. I got stuff to do. I gotta go. Let me know what you think. All right. Let me know how you think about slowing down. I would love to be in conversation about this. And before I forget, make sure you like and review and share this episode because we are growing in season two, okay? And that starts with you. So send this episode to someone who needs it, okay? Love you, mean it. Bye.