Gently rebelling towards even more freedom and ease

If you've ever questioned whether it's possible to build a successful life and career without pushing yourself to the point of exhaustion, this episode is for you. I share insights gleaned from my own experiences, the transformative power of asking deep questions, and the importance of seeking support. The centerpiece of this episode is my recent road trip - a testament to the joy of gentle rebellion against exhaustion and the power of finding freedom in simple activities like walking. 

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to the Overwhelming's optional podcast, where each week, we find ways to gently rebel against the nonsense that overwhelming exhaustion are just the price you pay to have the life you want. Hello, hello, hello, how are you doing? This week's episode? I want to delve more into my road trip. Why? Because it was significant in so many ways and I'm so excited about it. And I'm excited about it because it proved to me that this stuff works, that, after all of this time of committing to gently rebelling against having to have overwhelming exhaustion in my life, if I want to have a successful, full life, rebelling against that consistently, often, messily, because I'm blazing my own trail, I'm giving it a go. It's not easy to do it on your own, but for me it just feels right. I feel like I haven't got a choice, and I don't mean that in a restrictive way, I mean in a highly driven, passionate. This is what I'm supposed to be doing away. But it doesn't mean it's easy as in oh yes, you just decide not to have overwhelming, that's the end of it. No, it's really made me delve into how my mind works, the idea that my body, when listened to, has wisdom to support me, being able to really connect to my heart and ask those difficult questions and then bringing that work through into the clients I work with means that I get to learn even more. So it's not just me. And then I find that there's a lot of my patterns, are also my clients patterns. So I've gathered all of this information, particularly over the last five years, which is when I really switched from using my mind to find a way to live fully. So having a psychology degree, studying Zen, yoga, buddhism, meditation, mindfulness, positive psychology which is the newer psychology, which is actually positive, rather than studying all of things that can go wrong. So before it was really really good at gathering information, at studying, at googling, at reading research papers and deciding which bits applied to me and which bits were most useful, or just going with it because research said that this was the best way, but I still burnt out.

Speaker 1: 2:38

I'm looking back. I would argue that's because I was overusing my mind. I was treating myself and my life as a problem to be solved. If only I could find the right information. And if you're like me, it's very easy to go down an information rabbit hole. You google one thing and then you find something else, or you read a book and then you follow the references or something mentioned in the book and then, before you know it, you've lost several hours of your life and you've got even more stuff to read and it's just more mind stuff.

Speaker 1: 3:09

And while I was busy doing this, I just got more productive, more knowledgeable, more committed to my well-being, more committed to other people's well-being, and then I burnt out. And I burnt out when I'd already set my business up and was in the process of transferring my way of working from full-time teaching, teaching and leading and coaching within the education system to what I thought would just be. I called it a well-being business. I didn't really know exactly what it would look like, but I had the skills, the knowledge and the experience to do something in well-being. And then I crashed and burned quite dramatically and, honestly, completely unexpectedly. And I'm laughing now because I can look back and see that version of myself and go for goodness sake, woman, what did you expect? But I had a plan right. I had very carefully construed plan. I'd done some retraining with a Zen master. I got my qualification in Zen yoga. I really wanted to work with the body and stop overusing my mind. That I felt very strongly about that and I'd taken a huge pay cut and taken on a part-time role which was supposed to support me as I transitioned out of education into the entrepreneurial world.

Speaker 1: 4:38

And within, in fact, the first day in this new role, I came back completely overwhelmed because I'd had hours and hours, all day, of information just being talked at and I still didn't know. And I was supposed to be teaching the next day and I had absolutely no idea. I didn't have a classroom, I didn't have anything set up, I couldn't access the IT system. They didn't have any books, which meant you had to use IT systems. I had nothing and I was supposed to go in the next day.

Speaker 1: 5:09

And it matters very much, doesn't it, how you start a job, the impression you make. That's your credibility, and, particularly as a teacher, teenagers are a tough crowd. You've got to get that credibility right. Once lost, I don't know if it's very regainable. So, yeah, I remember coming back on the first day and just walking the door and bursting into tears. I was exhausted, I was overwhelmed and I didn't know how I was going to do the job. And on top of that, although I'd taken a huge pay cut and had this part-time timetable, the impression I was getting was they expected me to actually be full-time. It was just a pay cut, which is ridiculous, because I couldn't afford to live off that pay cut anyway and I didn't want to.

Speaker 1: 5:50

The whole point was to have time to set up my business. So there was already a battle. It was already not what I was expecting and it was just so disappointing. So disappointing because people were really nice. So six weeks later I completely crashed and burnt and the journey to that was painful and humiliating, just horrid. I went from being able to control the inconvenient tear leakage maybe managing to hide it in the car on the way to and fro work to not being able to.

Speaker 1: 6:25

And that is crushing, because I used to be the kind of teacher who was inspiring, who could make maths an adventure, who could work with the hardest, most disaffected teenagers. I taught teachers, I coached senior leaders and failing teachers and new teachers. I spoke at conferences, I had a blog. Suddenly I couldn't even hold my own in the classroom. It was so humiliating, so soul-destroying, just crushed me.

Speaker 1: 7:01

And then I got to a stage where I realised I couldn't continue. It's just no way. I could not do it. Every cell in my body was screaming at me get out, get out, get out. And so I quit, which wasn't great, because I lost my confidence, I lost my health, I lost my career and I lost my financial stability, and we'd recently taken out a hefty mortgage because we'd actually found our dream home. So how do you get to keep the dream home, regain your health, regain your emotional stability, your confidence and build a career that works for you? Well, by deciding that there was a bottom line that you're not going back to. That's what happened to me.

Speaker 1: 7:46

Well, what I realised now is that I was running, I was in recovery mode and I was running. I was fearful that I would have to go back, and that's kind of in inverted commas, because there's no have to about it. I had a choice, but I felt that I might. It's almost like, you know, in a dream, when you're running away from something and you can feel yourself being sucked backwards to the monster or whatever Felt like. That Felt like if I didn't somehow make enough money teaching yoga, I would have to go back to teaching, and I didn't know how I could do that without losing myself. It was a horrible, horrible feeling, but what it also did, though, is give me when you burn your bridges in that way. It does make it an all or nothing situation. I mean, the pressure is immense. It's like there's a much easier way to do what I did, which I can see now, but at the time it felt that I had no choice and I just had to get on with it. And so I did.

Speaker 1: 8:41

And in the process of just getting on with it as in allowing my body to heal, allowing myself to recover my confidence, learning to recover myself properly, and just for a few months a few months to a year I started coaching very quickly once I got my confidence back. So I taught yoga for just over a year, but during half of that I was also doing online work and coaching. So it didn't take that long with hindsight, but at the time it felt like this huge expanse of time of just being in quite a new mode. So that was an interesting time in that I was really having to examine myself and think well, if I'm gonna put myself out there as you know, had to mark it as a yoga teacher I'd never done any marketing. It was the most bizarre thing. And then I hired a marketer and she said oh, you need an online presence and all of this. Oh, my goodness, where did that come from? I wasn't expecting that. So there were lots of things like that that forced me. It's like having a mirror held up to yourself and it forced me to examine myself and reflect, and there's a gift in that. There's a gift in what I call Zenpreneurship.

Speaker 1: 9:58

So becoming an online entrepreneur because you have to have visibility and I didn't particularly want visibility, but I did because I wanted to reach more people and grow my business and do work that felt satisfying and eventually was well paid that having to do that is like personal growth on I'm thinking of on acid, like that's a quote from the Lonely Planet. When we went to Delhi, the Lonely Planet said Delhi is like being in wacky races on acid. Do you know that cartoon? It's very old. It's a very old cartoon, probably 60s and 70s, called wacky races. So wacky races on acid would obviously be intensely crazy and in many ways, that's what my first few years as an online entrepreneur felt like, although increasingly I learned to let go of that feeling, which is one of being in your mind, worrying around, trying to work out what to do and at the same time, in my case, deciding that I do it without overwhelm. So that meant that that feeling had to go, because that wasn't acceptable.

Speaker 1: 11:16

So the reason that I want to talk about my road trip is that I'm really looking back. So I'm looking back. So it's nearly five years ago that I burnt out, and here I am now and there's no way from where I was there I can see where I am now, which was is as a successful coach, with a successful business, with an important message, with a podcast, a book, etc. So how did all of that happen? Because, if I couldn't imagine, how did I make it happen? Well, in tiny ways, by really asking deep questions of myself, by receiving coaching, by getting sport, by reading a lot, but mainly by this experiment. N equals one, just me in this experiment.

Speaker 1: 12:02

Is it possible to build a business, to have a successful life, without the usual route, the usual pushing through overwhelm into exhaustion and emotional instability, that crazy volcanic roller coaster where I've pushed myself too hard and not looked after myself properly? Is it possible? Well, I didn't actually ask if it was possible. I decided it was, and that's because, where I'd come from felt like being sucked backwards in a nightmare. I couldn't go backwards, I could only go forwards. And I think I think in some ways it was significant. It was significant because it felt very big, like a proper imploding of my life, because it had such a big impact on me personally, but also because it was my 50th year and I think I was just done. You know, I was just done. I was done with the.

Speaker 1: 12:56

You can either downsize, not have much money, not have much choice, or and also not have work. Matters to me, it really matters to me. I love working. I love meaningful, satisfying work. That matters to me, it's part for me, that's part of life Well lived. I want to develop my skills, I want to use my skills. It matters to me hugely.

Speaker 1: 13:19

So it's not really an option for me to downsize and I also want a lot of time off and in and buy. That it's not really. It's not just time. Is it because time, our experience of time I don't know about you, but my experience of time is very weird. I have days when I call them fat days, when it's just, they get wider in the middle, they're just so full of just loveliness, just the big, fat, abundant days, like just amazing days. And then I have days when I'm getting lots done but the day just disappears and it's too short.

Speaker 1: 13:59

I've got this sense of running out of time and I, when I say I want time for my life outside work, what I really mean is this feeling of freedom and ease, this spaciousness, this, this place where I can take up that part of my life where I'm not just kind of, it's not just a gap between working, is an actual life, and that really means for me stopping looking at work as something we do until we retire and then we have the space to do things, and finding a way to interweave that either during the day or during the year as much as possible. And I haven't actually found it that easy, to be honest, partly because setting up a business was much harder than I expected and also because I loved it much more than expected. So there's those two holding those two things at once, and I also am an intense obsessive person. So if I've got a project, I'm just all in on it, all in on it, all in on it, and I can easily just ignore everything else, including my body, and then I end up achy and rubbishy. So I've had to really focus on making a priority the rest of my life, and this year is when I feel I'm really succeeding, really really succeeding, and the road trip reflected that back as well, so in such a big joyful way. That's why I'm so excited about this road trip, because I was able to leave my business and feel really at ease about that, really wrap it up and practice the self-discipline of not just checking, not just checking, not just checking. You know that. Just check your work emails, just check your client messages, just check WhatsApp, just check social media.

Speaker 1: 16:00

No, really, really really wanted to be fully present in this road trip and I did it. And it's huge to me to have that feeling of freedom and ease, to just have those 10 days, 11 days of just focusing on where we are, where we're going next, what we're doing right now, thinking about what we might do tomorrow, but knowing it might change. And that's what I really liked. It was very, it was very much a flow state, it was very much a well, we were going to do this now. We really don't like it, so let's go and do this instead. There's something really good about that, really good about listening, listening to your body.

Speaker 1: 16:44

So what I found is, increasingly, I just wanted to be outside walking, and I don't mean like mad hiking, but just, you know, wandering around, just walking. There's something really lovely about walking. I was talking to a friend the other day and she'd come back from this amazing trip, three-week cycling trip in Scandinavia. But she said, yeah, but actually there's something about walking that she would really like to do, more walking. And I've been getting this increasingly. Something about walking and I guess I mean you can relate it to my whole one-minute mark and feel your feet on the ground. So for me, walking is that practice. I'm feeling my feet on the ground, I'm feeling the joints in my big toe, I'm feeling the hardness or softness of the ground beneath my feet. I'm feeling this connection to the earth. I'm feeling my body, I'm feeling the stretch in my calf muscles or my, my hips in particular. So I guess maybe that's why I don't know this and it's I don't know.

Speaker 1: 17:45

There's just something really freeing about it. You know you don't need anything to walk, you just walk. It's not a big deal, you just walk and and as you walk, you can talk, you can think, you can mind, journal, you can listen to something or you can just absorb the feelings around you of everything. There's so much to see. When you walk through a forest, there's so much to see. There's that deep green velvet moss on trunks that you get. There's the way the light comes through the leaves and the branches. There's the sound of birds, there's the rustle of a squirrel. There's just so much to see. And it here in England is constant change, because we have a lot of weather and we have proper seasons, and it's just extraordinary how much you can see and you can feel and you can hear, and and that's really good for me, for rooting me in the present moment and feeling grateful, feeling full, feeling abundant, feeling joyful, my heart fills.

Speaker 1: 18:58

That's what I like to do and it's actually super easy, right? You just walk, you just walk, you walk and you notice, you wonder, just wander along, pottering, pottering along, mooching along, no big deal, just walk. And we did a lot of walking and we also did a lot of driving and it was a similar driving to that walking, because we're just wondering. Really, the rule was you never go backwards. But apart from that, we were just going towards something we wanted to see and if we got, then we didn't like it, we just went to the next thing we wanted to see and that's this just is was so free, freedom, ease. I felt at ease. I felt at ease leaving my home and my business. I felt at ease not booking accommodation and just seeing what came next, allowing things to unfold, and it was brilliant because it it felt brilliant and it was a lot of fun and we saw amazing places and I got to spend time with my son, which is such a gift, and I went to a lot of the places I've been dreaming about going. Oh, I'd really like to go there and I've done it now and it's just that feels really satisfying, really good. Actually, doing the mini adventures, it was like a series of lot, yeah, series of mini adventures. I've ticked off loads of things I wanted to do and I've also found places where I want to go back, which is just lovely and it was. It worked. I really is.

Speaker 1: 20:33

This is what I've learned is the ability to focus fully on work and then to wrap it up and let go, feel safe in letting go, trusting, and then be fully present in time outside of work. We can really feel at ease at home with that, the level of adventure which is expansive, without anxiety about what's gonna happen. Because if we, if we have too too many things that are unknown, then it can cause overwhelm, because then you just start thinking about what, if, what, if. But if you get it right, you get a delicious sense of adventure, delicious sense of freedom, because you can be spontaneous and that matters, right. So it's this, this somewhere between structure and freedom, is it's having structure that allows you to have freedom.

Speaker 1: 21:36

So what were my structures that allowed me freedom? The gentle rebellion, my gentle rebellion, allowed me that freedom over time. Now it's taken me five years to really get it to this, what I would call a very, very high level. Along the way it's been perfectly brilliant actually. But this for me is a real sense of celebration, because this is way beyond what I knew was possible when I started my little life experiment. So that's really something to celebrate. So what were the structures within? The gentle rebellion is a huge amount of commitment.

Speaker 1: 22:12

I decided. I decided I'm going to do this and live with, live fully and successfully, without overwhelm, without exhaustion. The exhaustion comes from the overwhelm comes from pushing on through and ignoring my body and my heart and not supporting my mind in a good way. So I have to force myself to focus through overwhelm. So it's all linked to the overwhelm and the exhaustion. The exhaustion comes from pushing through the overwhelm. So I see it as this this circle just keeps going overwhelm, exhaustion, then you're more overwhelmed because you can't get out of it, and then you can't sleep properly and it just builds up and then you can't think straight and then you just work in a really inefficient way, that in a way where you're not looking after yourself properly, start eating rubbish food, start not moving enough it just doesn't work. And then you get snappy and grumpy and volcano like, and then that that just just rubbish. That's no, no way to live. So for me it's no way to live.

Speaker 1: 23:13

So it's the decision that I'm going to gently rebel, and the gently matters. So when I would argue that when I started I was just rebelling in a, in a fierce running away, I'm not doing it this way anymore, I'm gonna find a different way. And then I learned that that energy is the same energy that got me in trouble in the first place. I needed to change that energy because actually stomping my feet and demanding that the world allows me to live differently wasn't helping me. It's too fierce and that's when it became a gentle rebellion because, first of all, I needed to be gentle to myself and, secondly, I worked out it was how I was doing things, not really what I was doing. The how was much more important. So if I decided that I was going to rebel gently, allowed it to be a different energy, the kind of energy I wanted to step into. That I couldn't really name or wasn't really sure what it was about, but it felt right.

Speaker 1: 24:05

And then also, and I think very importantly, the gentle aspect means that it's private, it's secret. You don't have to declare it. I have to say I'm gonna do things differently now. I did declare that I was setting up a business. I'm gonna do it in this different way, but then I don't know then it was still private what I was. You know how I was working things out. Wasn't this big commitment to anybody else? The commitment was to me, it was internal, it was private. I was just experimenting can I do this? N equals 1, an experiment involving just me. And I created structures from that commitment.

Speaker 1: 24:49

So, for example, how I woke up in the morning mattered, and I really noticed that when I woke up in the morning, my mind was telling me stories already like oh, you didn't sleep very well, you're really tired, or you've got too much to do, you need to make some money, or you know you've failed, like you're rubbish, you're not good enough, and I decided I wasn't having that. So I started pulling my attention back to me and deciding that I was gonna have an unexpectedly lovely day. And that might sound silly, but it makes a huge difference. Just that bringing attention back from you know how your mind just travels through time and space really fast. I find it really affected to just bring all my energy back to me, bring my attention back and start again in the morning, so that it doesn't really matter then how I wake up, what my mind's doing, because there's that difficult bit isn't there. I don't know about you, but I wake up in a very sleepy state.

Speaker 1: 25:48

I'm not a I'm a slow morning person and without that structure and without that practice, I can easily get sucked in in my sleepy state into oh, I need to do this, need to do this, need to do this, and then I'm already under pressure because my mind's going to give me a hundred things to do, because my mind doesn't understand that it's not possible or necessary to do all of those things because my mind's in survival mode, so it's going. You ought to do this, you have to do this, otherwise disaster will happen. It's not actually true. You know, if you were seriously ill and you couldn't do any of those things, everything would still be okay. But we don't want to be seriously ill to find out how important our to-do list is.

Speaker 1: 26:29

It's much better, I feel, and I've found in my experience, to examine it, from that commitment to myself first. So I'm not going to push myself through a to-do list, a to-do list that demands I'm a slave to it. I'm going to do this differently and for me, the differently was well, I don't do overwhelm. So what does that mean? Well, it means whatever it means for that moment, all that time, all that thing I'm trying to do. It means removing the pressure and finding a different way to do it. How can I deal with what feels impossible and heavy in a different way? How can I do this without overwhelm? So the commitment becomes instead of the commitment to getting stuff done. The commitment becomes about doing things without overwhelm.

Speaker 1: 27:16

And because how we build something matters, because if we build success on the basis of overworking, then the success is built on dodgy ground but it's what we're taught to do and it's why a lot of us struggle, because we get to the successful stage and don't feel successful because we've built it on the wrong habits, the habits of pushing on through. It's very difficult to undo those without a lot of proper examination of that way of being and what it's doing, the costs of it. So that can be really really useful occasionally. But it's not helpful to have occasional emergency kick ass on your work as a permanent way to be. That is pushing through overwhelm and exhaustion. That just becomes a habit. I would argue it's a bad habit. It's not a healthy habit. It doesn't allow for the success and feeling of freedom and ease that we're striving for when we work that hard to have more choice, to have more freedom and ease.

Speaker 1: 28:15

So over time I've built up structures that support me in my gentle rebellion, that help me commit to it every day afresh and increasingly, and the more I do it the easier it gets, until it's reached a stage where suddenly I feel like I've got this enormous well of freedom and ease that I can tap into. And that's now the level I'm at. So what I'm doing now is now that holiday has shown me just what I've done. I want more. So I've decided to purposely bring that freedom and ease into my day to day life. Is it easy? Course not, because it's not normal. Most people don't go around going. Oh, how can I bring more freedom and ease into my life? So I'm just making this up, but it is working because I have those structures of paying attention to where my attention is going, mutually noticing how I'm feeling, what's working for me, controlling particularly where my attention goes, first thing in the morning and then in the dips during the day, doing things with intention. So, for example, one of my well, my top August priority is number one bring the freedom I felt on holiday into my daily life. So my priorities aren't goals, they're things to keep at the top of my mind. So it's not a finished thing, because then it becomes a pressure. It's a more of a kind of exploratory, exploratory attention, energy, investment thing. So bring the freedom I felt on holiday into my daily life. How can I do that?

Speaker 1: 30:02

So I started with well, I'm going to rehearse the memories that were really good. So I had a little notebook where I was writing down, as we went, what we did, because we did so many things we were forgetting, because it was just this rollercoaster of brilliant mini adventures. So I was writing down just like one word, like even just a place name or a meal or something funny, you know something memorable that happened. And then I've been going back and rehearsing those so I'll wake up. So what day am I? I'm recording this on a Tuesday. So this morning I was remembering the Tuesday where we left a youth hostel in the middle of nowhere in the Lake District and had this long, widening journey through beautiful Lake District and eventually ended up in the York Shedales. And that was just the beginning, because then we walked in the Dales and then we ended up in the Peak District. All in one day Absolutely amazing.

Speaker 1: 30:58

And you can say, well, sounds a bit fast, heidi, not when you do it this way, because we didn't prioritise accommodation or meals. It's surprising how much space you have, because it means that you're not having to go back to where you've set yourself a base, like if you get a holiday cottage or an Airbnb or a hotel, you're not going to go back to it, you're going forward, so you're nearer to where you want to be the next day. So that saves a lot of travelling time. Also, we didn't sit down very often to eat, which meant that can add I don't know at least two hours, possibly three, sometimes even four hours to your day. It's quite incredible what you can do when you do it in this kind of meandering way. It's really cool.

Speaker 1: 31:45

So actually, we did have what felt like a really good amount of time, and also because I was feeling very present, able to be really present, feeling really grateful and feeling really full. I was absorbing every experience, so every experience was fuller. So bending time with this fullness of experience is really cool. So what I'm doing is, each day I'm remembering where I was on that day in that holiday, and occasionally I'll message my son and say remember this. What are we doing then? So today is Tuesday and I'm remembering that, lovely, lovely and walking along Lake Windermere and then, oh my goodness, it's just amazing. And then we went to the Yorkshire Dales and we ended up getting a gluten-free sausage sandwich from this little cafe in this beautiful market town called Kirkby, longstail. Oh, my goodness, it was such a happy place, it was such a special experience, and there's lots about that experience that is good, and for me it's the remembering those things over again and then bringing that forward into my life so that I'm focused on the best bits of the holiday, the good bits, ignoring anything that wasn't as great. Most of it was amazing, but there's bits which were slightly disappointing. I'm just like letting those go. It doesn't matter, because there's so much good stuff to focus on.

Speaker 1: 33:18

And then last week I was evaluating how well am I doing at bringing this feeling of freedom and ease of my holidays my daily life? Could I bring it more? And I had noticed I was feeling some pressure because I've also been busy doing a lot of fun stuff. It's August, it's August, there's lots of fun stuff to do and I was feeling some pressure. So I thought, well, that's no good, I don't do pressure.

Speaker 1: 33:41

How can I use this practice of bringing the feeling, the incredible feeling, because it was so significantly up-leveled, how can I bring more of that into my daily life? So then I decided it needs to be an embodied practice, which is kind of what I was doing but is even more so. And I haven't got this right yet, I'm still still tapping into it. So my aim is to wake up in the morning, do the rehearsing of the memory linked to the day of the week and then actually stand looking at that beautiful view and feel it so that it's I'm walking around with that expansive joyful feeling. So that's the next level of practice. So this, to me, is how I'm supporting my gentle rebellion into more freedom and ease is by having these structures, these tiny, huge life-changing practices. This only takes moments. It's really powerful and it really works.

Speaker 1: 34:45

And another really important thing I'm doing with this new, no-transcript, huge level of freedom and ease to keep it going, to embed it, to make it even more part of my life is really taking stock, which is what I'm doing with this episode that I'm sharing with you. So I'm looking back five years ago to when I was in quite a lot of trouble in my life. It wasn't going well. And then I'm looking at how far I've come and celebrating that and noticing it, noticing how different I feel. And what I've noticed is I'm walking around differently. You know, when you do this thing like you can just put your shoulders back and hold your head up and feel confident, even if you're not feeling confident, like you just change your posture, it can feel significantly different.

Speaker 1: 35:35

But I've noticed that I'm doing that naturally more and more and more. So I'm feeling more confident, more justified in my decision to quit a career at a time when we really needed the money and to look after myself and to regain my health and confidence and to create something much, much better, much more suited to me to gently rebel, and I'm because I'm able to particularly look at the road trip I mean, I've done this all the way through because very important isn't it to take stock, to celebrate, but this feels really significant and really, as you can see, I'm really, really excited about this. This feels extra special. This is way beyond what I had dreamt and planned. I'd already reached my goal of well paid, meaningful work and, you know, able to have health and wellness and enjoy the rest of my life. I'd already done that, but this feels much bigger and I'm so excited about it. So I'm going to study it more, eek it out more, share it with you more, keep going, keep going, keep going. And so the celebrating that, the journey, the noticing no, usually noticing how far I've come and then the neutral. So it's I'm noticing that with excitement, to neutrally notice it, which is really helpful because it enables me to get super curious about it, which gives me even more information and I'm able to look at it from a more like a research point of view.

Speaker 1: 37:08

So what have I done differently? What are the practices that serve me best? What's working for me? Noticing similar things in my clients, etc. And just pulling it all together. Pulling it all together and saying, okay, so the tiny, huge life changing practices I start started with are even better now. They're much better because I've refined them. I've refined them for myself, I've refined them with my clients. I know what's working even better now. So it's that.

Speaker 1: 37:35

Is that? Celebrating, noticing, that's another thing I'm doing. Bring it into my day to day life really gathering, gathering the treasure of the journey. And then how am I keeping it going? So there's the daily practice, particularly in the morning, of embedding it and also noticing how I'm walking around with it within me, feeling this confident freedom and ease. Yes, I've done it and I'm doing it more, and it's getting better and better and better. Everything is always working out for me. That's a belief that I hold and something I say to myself often. Everything is always working out for me. And then, on top of that, do you know what I'm doing? Planning more road trips. Yay.

Speaker 1: 38:17

So I wasn't expecting this, but I've noticed it's changing how easy I find it to take proper time off as in. So what I mean by proper time off is like a whole day or weekend or a week or a few days, like a mini holiday in the middle of normal life, rather than it being such a special occasion. So last weekend I went to the new forest and it was just less than two days, but it felt like a similar freedom and ease, as was with me on the road trip, and that's very exciting because that, showed me, doesn't have to be a big deal. It doesn't have to be a very long road trip. You can take a mini road trip and this is how it was different. So I didn't live that far from the beautiful new forest, but I do find that if we drive there for the day and come back again, I don't really want to do the same the next day. It feels too far and I just know I'm just going to go now. I can't be bothered, and this because I already live in a beautiful place, is not like I need to drive there to be in a beautiful place. So that means that to have a weekend there would have to stay over. And then it just feels like, oh, is it too near to stay over? No, go for it, it works. This is so.

Speaker 1: 39:40

This is what we did. We got out a book have you seen those? There's these cool books called Wild Guide or something. We got one for the area and then just went okay, what do you want to do? And I was going with a friend. I just said well, you know, I've been to the new forest a lot. What do you want to do? Partly because I get very easily overwhelmed with all of the things that you could do and I didn't want to spend any more time Googling or reading, and I was really happy to let somebody else choose, and it's also a really nice thing to do for a friend or a partner. Just say you choose, what do you want, and then you just get to make them happy by saying, yeah, let's do that, it's such a nice thing to do. And so we had a list of things. And then we realized that the list of things were really close together, so that worked really well. So that's a road trip already. Like that's a four hour road trip there already, even if we didn't stay over, because it's the spontaneous. Let's do this, let's go to this area, let's take this time out of our lives. Let's feel at ease, let's do it with a oh, do we feel like doing this? It's a real listening to the body and the heart.

Speaker 1: 40:50

So we packed up the dogs, we packed up the kayak in case we wanted to kayak as well, depending on the weather and off we went and it was just joyful and it felt like once again, time was was bent into much more expansive fullness. It was just so cool and I didn't know all of these cool places existed and we just went from one to the next, to the next and it we thought it would be like four hours and half past six and we were still like walking through this forest, we were lost, which was nice, it was really cool. And then we camped and we we were very, very lucky because we were quite happy to take tents. But when we tried to find a campsite, it said they were all booked and the only one we could get was a rent a tent, not glamping rent a tent, 30 quid, which was similar to what it would have been to stay in some of the campsites. So that was really cool because we didn't have to put a tent up. And when you're only doing it for one night it's a bit of a faff, and it did rain in the morning. We would have had to put a wet tent down. So that was really nice. How cool was that? But actually, when we arrived at the campsite, it wasn't fully booked at all. It was practically empty. So it was nice and quiet and it was just so nice, so nice. So that worked really really well because it had the similar essence of the road trip.

Speaker 1: 42:16

What do we feel like doing? Here's a list of things, here's a menu and let's just feel our way through it. What do we feel like doing? And when you've had enough, you just decide you're going to stop and go and find a cup of tea somewhere. It's so lovely to just let go into that. Let's go on a mini adventure. So I highly recommend just having even a road trip. That's like four hours, I think.

Speaker 1: 42:42

I think that could work to get this feeling of freedom and ease. I know it is working for me. I just invite you to find whatever makes you feel that sense of exciting adventure, without a fuss. That's the thing it's without a fuss, without it being a big deal. It's the letting go of everything, having to be hard and just saying, but what if we did? What if we did it in a simpler way, without overwhelm, without it requiring a huge I don't know? You know what? Sometimes you go on holiday, it would just so much to think about.

Speaker 1: 43:22

This is about not thinking about things as much, of letting go of the need to have everything organised, which originally I thought would make it harder, but actually I'm finding it's making it easier. And now, excitingly, I'm going on a road trip with my partner. So that's very, very exciting. So, yeah, road trips are in here, because freedom is my number one value and creating more freedom feels to me like living more and more fully. I hope you've enjoyed this week's episode, love to know your comments always, always here to write to Heidi at HeidiMartcouk, and I'll see you next week. Have an unexpectedly lovely week full of freedom and ease. Thank you so much for being part of this podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please do take a little moment of your time to share it, like it, etc. To help other people find it, and if you'd like to know more about my work, please go to wwwtidymarkcouk.