How to Decide What Actually Matters

I hit pause on the podcast for a few weeks, and in that space, something became incredibly clear.

As I prepare to welcome my second child, I’ve been thinking a lot about time, priorities, and what actually deserves my attention. I started asking myself: If everything changed tomorrow, what would actually matter?

In this episode, I share why I stepped back from the podcast, what pregnancy has taught me about priorities, and how identifying my constraints helped me stop trying to do everything at once.

I talk about overwhelm, people-pleasing, motherhood, ambition, and why every season of life asks us to make different choices. I also share a framework for thinking about constraints and bottlenecks—and why trying to make everything a priority can actually keep us stuck.

If you’ve been feeling stretched too thin, overwhelmed by competing demands, or wondering why you keep repeating the same patterns, this episode is an invitation to pause, listen inward, and decide what truly deserves your time.

In this episode, I talk about:

• Why I unexpectedly took a break from the podcast
• How pregnancy changed the way I think about time and priorities
• The difference between priorities, constraints, and bottlenecks
• Why trying to do everything can become its own bottleneck
• The pressure to keep everything consistent, even when your life has changed
• How overwhelm can be a signal that something needs your attention
• Why every season of life requires us to make different choices
• The question I keep coming back to: What do I want, and what is holding me back?

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

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Further Forward Podcast. I'm your host, Ashley Mitchell. It's so nice to be back with you. I think it's been about a month, right? Maybe a little bit more. I definitely, in the last episode, I had said that we would podcast until maternity leave. So deprioritizing this podcast was a little bit unexpected. However, once I made the pregnancy announcement, and then, you know, as the, as the days went on, something just didn't feel right, authentic. Um, something didn't feel, something didn't feel aligned. Maybe that's the best, the best phrase. And so you haven't heard from me, not because I just got busy and sort of lost track of the podcast. You haven't heard from me because I needed to deprioritize the podcast in order to hear those priorities, those intentions, those, you know, those inner longings a little bit better. There is definitely um, there's definitely like a few other things that play into that as well. One of them being the actual constraint of time, right? Before giving birth. And so I think, I think when I announced on here, I was 11 or 12 weeks pregnant, something like that. So essentially six months to go. And so I was, I was thinking, thinking about my birth with Zion and how traumatic it ended up being for me and how the aftermath of that trauma was just so hard for years, for years. And a part of it is because it was so unexpected that I, it was, it just was just too hard for me to be present in it, to move through it, because I just couldn't help but continue to think, I can't believe this is happening to me. I can't believe this is happening to me. This is not what they said it would be like. What do I do? Where do I go? Feeling scared and pissed and embarrassed and oh, so just so many feelings. And also those are like just the feelings of just me. Like not to mention all of the things that you feel as a new mother and as someone giving birth during a pandemic. So I thought with birth six months away, Ashley, it is, it's it's very possible that you're going to have uh a birth that is less than ideal, right? It's very possible that you could get sick. It's very possible that you could deliver before 40 weeks. It's very possible that everything that you don't want to happen could happen. It's possible. We like to pretend that birth is not a big deal just because so many people do it and people have been doing it for millennia. It's just like, you know, oh my God, you're so cute. Oh my God, your baby bump. Oh my god, da-da-da-da-da, the clothes, the gender reveal, the whatever, whatever, whatever. But this is fucking dangerous. Okay. It's a dangerous thing that happens to the body. It is a body-changing thing that happens to the body. It is a brain-changing thing that happens. I will also say that a lot of mothers perpetuate this too, because in our panic over losing ourselves, the fact that we even think of it as losing ourselves, right? But in that panic, we also try to minimize it. We're also trying to just get back to quote unquote normal as quickly as possible, as if that is even fucking possible. There is no going back. Once you move forward, you know too much to try to go back. You can't unsee the forward, right? You just have to move through it. And so by trying to pretend like birth didn't happen or like your body never carried a baby, or trying to live a life and a schedule as if you're not a mother, to me, it perpetuates this idea that motherhood is not that big of a deal, that being pregnant is not that big of a deal. And so I thought if my birth was going to be in some ways the same, how would I spend the next six months? What would be the most important people, places, and things in my life? And when I was answering that question initially, this podcast was not, was not one of the things that made that list. So I'll tell you what did. The first thing was my family. This is the last time that our family will look like this. And so it was really special to me to just make sure we reveled in that, to make sure we had a lot of fun, to make sure my child knew that he is loved and we are so delighted by him. We enjoy him, we enjoy laughing with him, we enjoy going to dinner with him, we enjoy watching movies with him, we enjoy all the things that that we do. And of course there are annoying moments. He's five, but also I'm annoyed by almost everyone. The age doesn't really, the age doesn't really matter, right? I'm not trying to paint this like picture perfect thing where everything's blissful and we're all, you know, running through lavender fields together. But all in all, you know, we create an environment where we're just not always annoyed and overstimulated. We're just not. It happens and then we move out of it until it happens again. So family was one for sure. And then there was this aspect of my work, of my teaching, of being in person with folks. So I was subbing a lot of classes, teaching a lot. I relaunched my private training group. We were training out of my dear, dear girlfriend's house during the spring. And uh, so I started renting a space. And so we have our own gym space in the morning. I've been able to partner with another local nonprofit to teach yoga to women who are recovering from substance abuse. And I've also re-redone what is the right word? Like I've remained the way I'm saying it is wrong. The well, I'll say it this way. The Pilates Matte training that I originally got a few years ago started to feel unsatisfying and incomplete the more I teach Pilates. It's one of those, like, the more you know, the more you realize you don't actually know kind of things. And so I felt like I really wanted to redo this training. Now I'm stop trained on the reformer, and I wanted to be stop trained in that. I really love the method. I love what I've learned. It has just really been life-changing. And there's one particular teacher that I wanted to learn from. And the only way that I was going to be able to do it before this pregnancy was to train now. So it's a 95-hour training. I've done the first 30 hours of the actual coursework and learning. And now the final 60 hours will be all of the observation and teaching and stuff like that. But, you know, all of these things that I said to you, like these were the things that I most wanted to do, right? I had to also make sure I prioritize continuing to write, right? This memoir process is fucking brutal. It's brutal because the more you can't just, you can't just tell a story, right? You can't just, I don't know, you can't just be like, oh, my mom picked up a vase and threw it across the room and it shattered everywhere. You have to like give all the context and the color, and which means then you have to remember the context and the color, which means that sometimes I'm just sitting there crying. The more I remember, the more my body remembers things that I've suppressed and haven't wanted to talk about. You know, it just makes the process, it's something that cannot be rushed because it is so deeply felt. So all of these things had to come before other things. I haven't spent a ton of time with friends this summer. One of my girlfriends, I see her because she'll take class occasionally. We'll just grab a coffee after class. And it's like little chit-chat. Thank you, love you, bye. See you the next time, right? If everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. And I think I, generally speaking, feel guilty if I can't be the person who's able to fit it all in or do everything, even though I already do a lot. There's still this guilt that creeps up that's like, oh, yeah, I'm doing these seven things over here, but then I haven't done these seven things over there. And what are people gonna think? And are my friends gonna hate me? And and does that mean I'm not moving forward? And da-da-da-da-da. I just get in my head. And every time I do, I have to be like, hello, you are giving birth. It may or may not go well. What fucking choice are you gonna make? What are you gonna do? You're gonna run around to make everybody else happy? You're gonna run around to make everybody else comfortable? You're gonna miss out on being with your family, or you're gonna lose sleep. What are you gonna give up? What are you gonna give up to make other people happy or to make other people comfortable? And what I keep coming back to is the answer has to be absolutely fucking nothing. That's what it has to be, right? The external voice says, you know, things have to be a certain way, that consistency at the cost of everything else is what matters. The external voice is about putting things in boxes and categories, and there's a right way and the wrong way, right? The external voice is very black and white. But the internal voice, at least for me, is more about journeys and in order to, in order to be able to see what is coming in order to grow, in order to create a path, in order to find excellence, you just have to start. And people may not like it, but it's not their journey. So I've been trying to also let go of this expectation of by deprioritizing the podcast for a time that I was somehow doing something wrong. The end of the pod a month ago signaled the beginning of these other areas of my life that flourished, which then led me to remember, okay, I actually really love the podcast. I miss the podcast and I miss talking to other women. I miss writing on Substack. I miss some of the things that I had to let go of, actually aren't things that long term I want to go away. So then that becomes great information. So then that it's just, okay, now you look for a window where this makes sense. So that's how I, that's how I sort of have been reconciling it. Does any of that make sense? I hope so. I don't know. I also read this incredible book called Inside the Box by David Epstein. And in this book, he talks about this idea of bottlenecks and constraints. And I've thought about this a lot as well as I was just trying to reshape my time, which I know I'll continue to do, right? Because as the pregnancy progresses, I might feel differently and I might have to continue to reshape my time again and again and again. But he talks about constraints as like the things that aren't moving, right? Like a constraint is my commute time every week. Unless I quit my jobs, plural, this time cannot be moved. This time in the car cannot be moved, this time teaching cannot be moved. I cannot re-jigger this time. So I actually did a practice of writing down all of my constraints because as someone who thinks that they can fit more in than they can, as someone who tries to do it all, even to her detriment, I needed to see where the constraints were. And then the bottlenecks are kind of like where everything is getting stuck. Just think of a bottleneck when you're driving on the road, right? And where traffic is created, where things are slowed down. And so I thought about, I mean, even the mere making everything a priority is a bottleneck because everything cannot be a priority. So trying to give equal weight and equal time to things that don't deserve it creates like sludge, emotional, physical sludge in the system. I say this to you because sometimes I feel like a crazy person, like all I do is talk about the same things. But in reality, all we're doing is the same thing over and over again in every stage of life, in every season. What do I want and what is holding me back? And the only way you can get there is to pause. And now there are many different tools to do this. There are many different books you can read. But at the end of the day, if you don't do the work to either push stuff out of the way or put stuff on the back burner, or journal these questions, or talk to a therapist or whatever, if you don't know the answers, you're gonna continue to spin the fuck out. You're gonna continue getting the same results. I don't think that life pours it on because there's some deity or some divine source that hates you. I don't think that there's some spiritual thing out in the universe that's like, you know what? I'm gonna fuck up Ashley's life today because she deserves it. Like, I just don't believe that that's even possible. But I do believe that when life pours it on, when I feel like I'm flailing or failing, I believe that it's meant to reveal something. Pain is always a signal, right? It's a signal that something needs to be paid attention to. So if I'm feeling overwhelmed, if I'm feeling like everything is too much, then I just need to stop and identify like who and what deserves my time because it's not worth it to me to feel that way, especially over a prolonged period of time. It's not how I want to live my life. And I think that if you don't make those decisions, or if you don't take the time to do that investigative work, you just keep repeating the same lessons. You can change jobs as much as you want. You could marry somebody else, you could have different friends, whatever. But like sometimes you are the problem. Sometimes it's your pattern. That's why the same shit keeps coming up because you just keep accepting the same shit. And I don't want to be accepting the same shit. So, what I can say to you is that I like doing this podcast. I like being here. And if you like being here with me, you should stay. And that's it. Next week, I am dropping an episode that I did a month or two ago with my friend Beth. Yeah, I've been sitting on this. And you know what? You know what's so funny is that Beth, because she is my sister friend, she didn't even ask. She didn't even dare ask. When is the episode coming out? What's going on with the podcast? No, because she already knows. She already knows that I know what I'm doing. And she knows that I will go into these little holes of making meaning and figuring things out, and I will re-emerge and something will be better for it. And that is the cycle over and over again. So this episode is finally going to come out next week, next Thursday, with me and Beth. So hopefully, I will see you then. Bye.