Ep. 30 The Emotional Patterns That Don't Allow High Achieving Women To Slow Down | Jenna Kutcher Got It Half Right

You hit the goal. You waited for the feeling. Something else showed up instead — and it wasn't gratitude. It was a quiet question: did I do this wrong?

Jenna Kutcher wrote something recently that hit a nerve for thousands of women. Her Substack essay The Honey Isn't The Point named the pivot so many high-achieving women are making right now — away from the hustle, toward the garden, the slower life, the thing that actually feels like theirs. And she got it beautifully right.

What she didn't get to — because it's not her lens — is why we couldn't slow down in the first place. The body-based, somatic healing piece. The pattern underneath the drive that no amount of awareness alone can touch.

In this episode we go there. Why the hustle was never really about ambition. Where the pattern actually came from. And why you can pivot to the slower life and still find yourself optimizing it — hustling in a different costume — if you haven't looked at what's underneath.

This is somatic coaching meets pattern work meets the conversation Jenna started and didn't finish.

🔗 Read Jenna's essay
🔗 Workshop replay — If I Rest I'll Lose Everything ($37)
🔗 The Intuitive Circle

Book 1:1 www.lesleyturner.ca/services

Subscribe to the pod:
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/730IxK6Le9bwgAwKQBbrfM?si=a649923b6d4f4a4b
Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-emotional-truth-nervous-system-regulation-somatic/id1896858957

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, everybody. So I read something this week, and my first reaction was a bit of a trigger. Like, oh my gosh, did this person just say this better than I ever could? And then something else immediately kicked in, something kind of quiet, my highest self, my intuition, and it said, Yes, this was beautifully written, but there's so much more to this story, and you know it. This author is not supposed to know this part because that is your lens. So go deeper, take this article and run with it. And that's what I'm here to do today. Hey, I'm Leslie Turner. I'm a mom, a somatic practitioner, and an intuitive coach. This is the intuitive drop. Short conversations about emotional truth, the nervous system, and living from your intuition in real life without losing your mind along the way. Let's drop in. Jenna Couture wrote something on her Substack recently called The Honey Isn't the Point. And I'll link it in my show notes. And the response was enormous. Women were sharing it, saving it, sending it to their friends, like it said something they'd been trying to say for a long time. And I get it, because she named something that is happening right now on a grand scale. Women are hitting their milestones. So the revenue goal, the launch, the number they've been chasing for years. But instead of celebration, they're finding this quiet question: Did I do this wrong? Why doesn't this feel better? Why is my nervous system already scanning for the next thing instead of letting me sit here for five minutes? And I hear it in my office all the time. And we do hear the advice: don't forget to celebrate your milestones. Enjoy the moment. Be grateful for how far you've come. But your body's not listening. The body is saying, I don't deserve to stop. I need to get to the next thing. And no amount of gratitude journaling is going to touch that. Jenna talks in her article about women making pivots, choosing the slow life, gardens, chickens, bees, 400 square foot apartments in Paris over the businesses they built with everything they had. I don't think that's a coincidence. Something is shifting collectively and it's worth paying attention to. She also talked about a map, the one we all follow faithfully, get the degree, the career, the revenue, the followers, and how at some point we looked up and realized, I don't even recognize this map. Who wrote it? And the destination was chosen for us without our input. And she's right, but I want to take that a little bit further because the map wasn't just written by society or our parents' expectations. The map was written by us at a time when our patterns were running the show, when we were young enough that staying in motion felt like survival. And the more we do the inner work, the more awareness we have, the more we realize the map doesn't actually make sense anymore. The threshold we're hustling towards, who set that threshold? Who told us what success was supposed to look like? I catch myself doing this all the time. There's a certain level I want to hit with my practice. And sometimes I stop and go, who made that number? Who decided that that's where I need to go? Why can't success be a Tuesday afternoon in the pool with my kid? Why does it have to be the number in a bank account or the size of my audience? Now, consistent money matters. I'm not arguing that there's a real freedom in having money, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise, but not at the cost of my mental and emotional health, not at the cost of relationships that actually matter to me. And that's what Jenna is pointing at. Here's where I want to go further. Because recognizing the map is one thing. Understanding who drew it and why you followed it so faithfully, that's something else entirely. And that's where her essay stops and this conversation begins. If this is already landing somewhere in you, something is pulling in your stomach right now, stay with me. I'm going to tell you what's actually underneath it, and at the end I'll tell you where to go if you want to do something about it. But I need you to hear this before we keep going. This is not your fault. The pattern that has kept you running, that high drive and achievement, the inability to stop even when every part of you wants to stop, you didn't actually choose that. A younger version of you built it because she needed to. Maybe you watched your mom run herself into the ground and your nervous system absorbed that as the blueprint of what a good wife and mom look like. Maybe it came through your genetics before you even took your first breath. Maybe there's a five-year-old version of you that decided that staying in motion meant staying safe, staying loved, or staying worthy. And she made that decision so early and so quietly that you never even knew what happened. Because she was doing the most intelligent thing she knew how to do. And it worked. It kept you safe. It also built your business and it made you someone who gets shit done. But the problem is she's still running the show. And she doesn't know that the threat is gone. Now I'll use my life as a bit of an example, because usually that lands faster than anything else. I used to think that my issue was that I needed to prove I could handle everything. Classic eldest daughter stuff. I don't let things fall through the cracks because I'm the one that holds it together. That was my story about myself for years, and I stuck to it. And then one day I was kind of sitting with this pattern as I do, doing the inner work, and I'm thinking about something as ordinary as laundry. And my husband needed a shirt at the time, and my son needed underwear for the next morning. And I hadn't actually done the laundry, I'd forgotten. And the feeling that came up wasn't, oh shoot, I forgot. It was deep shame. It was, whoa, I'm not keeping up my end of the bargain. I'm letting things fall through the cracks. I'm going to be seen as someone who can't handle my own life. This is not just about dropping a ball and hoping it bounces. This is proof of something about me. That was my layer. And I share it because I've sat across from enough women to know it's probably yours too. Now, maybe not in the laundry sense, but something just as ordinary, something that shouldn't carry that much weight, but does. That's what kept me moving. And moving looked like ambition, which seems great. And ambition built a business. And then I looked up and realized that that business was running a protection strategy that I didn't even know was there. Does that sound familiar? That's not me or you having an issue with productivity. That's self-worth. And self-worth problems don't get solved by better systems or more intention or even, you know, an essay you read on the internet. They live in the body, in the nervous system that learned very early before you had the words for it, that slowing down wasn't safe, that rest had to be earned, that the moment you stopped performing capability, something bad would happen. Someone would yell at you, maybe you would get hit. Now, here's the part I really want you to hear, because this is where Jenna's essay, as brilliant as it is, kind of stops short. She talks about that pivot, the garden, the slower life, the chickens, and she frames awareness as the thing that gets you there. And she's right that awareness is part of it. But what I see in the women that I work with is that you can pivot to the slower life. You can get the chickens, you can choose the garden over the grind. But if you haven't looked at the patterns that brought you into hustle in the first place, the fear of failure, the fear of falling behind, the fear of not being enough, those patterns will come with you. And suddenly you'll find yourself optimizing your slow life. You're making it hustle in a different costume because the pattern didn't go anywhere. It just changed its outfit. Now, this is the work we do one-on-one, and even in the intuitive circle. I'm not throwing more information about the pattern. You already know it's there. But we're practicing it in real time. We're working with it in your body to allow it to loosen so that it's not driving your motivation, your business, your habits, your life anymore. Now, what I just described, the worth tied to output, the fear of being seen as someone who can't handle her own life. Now, that might be your layer. And for a lot of women it is. But I want to guess that it might not be the deepest one. When I went further into my own pattern work, I found something even underneath that, a fear I hadn't named yet. And when I found it, holy smokes, it recontextualized everything. Why I hustle, why I achieve, why slowing down felt like a specific kind of danger that I had never actually articulated. Now, I'm not going to name it here. And that's not me trying to be mysterious about it, but because if I just handed this to you as a concept, it won't land the way it needs to. And that's the difference between knowing and intellectualizing something and actually working with it in your body. What I will tell you is that a couple of weeks ago I ran a workshop called If I Rest, I'll lose everything. And we went there all the way to that root cause. And the replay is available on my website at Lesleturner.ca slash workshops. It's $37. So if today was enough, just keep listening to the podcast because we go deep every week. And if you're ready for more than a podcast can hold, the links to work with me are all in the show notes. Jenna Kucher named something important, and a lot of women felt less alone because of it. And that matters. But what I want you to leave with is that the quiet isn't a wrong turn. Needing to slow down is not a flaw that suddenly shows its head. The pivot, the garden the chickens, the simpler life, that can be real and lasting, but only if you're willing to look at what's underneath it. Because the pattern you've been running isn't a personal failing. It's a survival strategy that outlived its purpose. And the work, that real work I've been describing, is creating enough space to hear yourself. Not just what your mom wanted you to do at 17, not the threshold someone else set for you somewhere along the way. The version of you sitting on the couch right now, what does she actually want? And when you find her, please acknowledge the one who hustled her way here with compassion. She was doing the best she could with what she had at the time. And that's exactly the purpose of this podcast to bring awareness, compassion, a little bit of insight to the patterns that are running the show, the patterns that were developed by the little girl inside you that needed them to survive. And if that's what you get out of today's episode, that is enough. We'll see you next week.