We are told that we all have the same 24-hour day. But the reality is more complicated than that. We all have different circumstances, support systems, and resources.
Those successful people you admire have teams of invisible support systems behind the scenes.
But here’s the good news – you deserve support too! You don’t need to do it all. By identifying your strengths and priorities you can make space for what you love and are good at.
My friend, my invitation for you today is to feel empathy for yourself. Discover the Attributes of Empathy and learn to allow more support into your life.
This week I share why powerful people all have a team working behind them. Learn to be honest with your 24 hours, some ideas for saving time, and methods to get the most value from your day.
Unleash your full potential and become the leader you were born to be with Dare to Lead™. Use the button below to schedule your call with me.
LISTEN HERE
WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER
- What the 5 attributes of empathy are.
- Why you don’t have to do it all.
- How to leverage your resources.
- Why judgment is holding you back.
- How to spend money (or time) on things that bring you value.
RESOURCES FOR YOU
- Make sure you subscribe to the show and leave a review in Apple Podcasts
- Sign up here to receive Friday Podcast updates and Sunday Love letters.
- Would you like Koren to come to your city? Sign up and submit your town for a Dinner Party!
- Apply for coaching with me! I have 1-on-1 and group coaching opportunities this fall.
- Brené Brown
- Kristin Neff PH.D.
- Dr. Kristin Neff: Self-compassion as a motivator for change
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Koren (00:00:00) – Hey there. Ready to not just live and grind it out, but thrive in both your professional and personal life? Let’s co-create that journey together. Here are three options. One: engage in thought provoking conversations at our exclusive dinner party. Two: join Dare to Lead, my upcoming group coaching program kicking off this fall. Three: opt for personalized private coaching for a deep transformational journey. Don’t just work, thrive with meaningful work and personal fulfillment woven together. We’ll create a life that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. Ready to take the leap? Check the show notes for more. Can’t wait to work with you.
Music (00:00:56) – She’s dreaming, she’s drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.
Koren (00:01:12) – Hello and welcome. This is Koren Motekaitis. And you’re listening to How She Really Does It, the place where inspiration and possibility meet. My invitation for you today is to feel empathy for yourself.
Koren (00:01:32) – Empathy is one of the antidotes for shame. And I’m going to talk a bit about shame today. And probably the topic I’m going to be talking about is going to trigger shame. And the goal is for you to feel empathy for yourself. And I’m going to share with you what Teresa Wiseman says the attributes of empathy are. One is perspective taking and really taking in the perspective. So it’s really important when we go through something to think about it and ask ourselves what is this experience like for me and having that perspective? What may have more context to it than I may be seeing, Right? Being able to do that. And so often when we’re in shame, things really narrow. We don’t see a whole lot. We lose the ability to have perspective and we actually become perceptually blind. The other attribute of empathy is staying out of judgment. Listen, feel, experience. Don’t judge. Be there. Be curious. The third attribute of empathy, according to Teresa Wiseman, is recognizing emotion, noticing What am I feeling? What am I experiencing? Check in, feel.
Koren (00:02:52) – The fourth is being able to communicate our understanding about the emotion. And then the fifth is mindfulness, which is from Kristin Neff, who’s been a guest on this show as well. And mindfulness is the ability to understand your thoughts and your feelings without being attached to it. So my invitation for you today is to feel empathy towards yourself. So take perspective, stay out of judgment. You’re going to want to judge yourself. We’re so good at that. And that’s something that we could all work on, unlearning more and more, recognizing the different emotions. Like if shame comes up, that’s okay. Notice it. And as Todd Kashdan says, what is this negative emotion here to teach you? What’s the message? Being able to communicate, even saying to yourself as you listen to this, Oh. I’m feeling shame or oh, I notice I’m feeling anger. And what’s underneath that anger? Is it disappointment? Frustration? And then being mindful of it, noticing the stories that you tell in your own brain.
Koren (00:04:01) – And that what feelings arise from those stories. Today, I’m going to talk about this concept of, well, we all have the same 24 hours in a day. If I can do this, why not you? And we’d need to clarify. The intro of the show many times was, if this is possible for them, what is possible for you? And it wasn’t meant to shame. It was meant to inspire always within the context of your life. So I’ve often heard this concept of, oh, they have the same 24 hours as you. Why can’t you get it done? And it’s usually from somebody who’s famous, somebody who’s really successful telling people this. Why not you? Right. They did it. They have 24 hours a day. You have 24 hours a day. But what we don’t see is the invisible workforce behind that successful person, the team of people. They may have to help them, support them to get it done right. And so often we’ve taken this whole do it yourself concept and which can be a great, resilient strength that we have and our strengths can become our weaknesses, but we take that do it yourself concept and think we’re supposed to do it all all by yourself and be extremely self resilient.
Koren (00:05:23) – And that’s the thing. It’s not possible. So notice when you hear that message, famous and successful people or successful people that you may know, they have the same 24 hours a day, why not? You notice how you feel when you hear that message? Check in. How do you feel? My hunch is that you’re most likely feeling shame. And if you’ve been a long time listener, you may be familiar with this feeling because I talk about it a lot. Brené Brown’s been on the show and we’ve talked about it. And I remember when in the early days when she talked to me about it, I didn’t really understand what she was saying because I made it my life’s mission to not talk about that word because it had been a part of language as I was growing up in my life and I didn’t like it. It didn’t feel good. So I decided to outrun it until I’m hosting a podcast with this woman who’s talking about shame on my show. So shame is highly corrosive, and to me it’s the worst feeling.
Koren (00:06:30) – And now emotion researchers, they disagree. But to me, it’s the worst feeling. And so, like on a feelings continuum where a positive ten is joy and zero is calm and a negative ten, I give that to shame into fear. I give it a negative nine. The underlying message of shame is you are bad, you are broken, you are alone. You are the only one. Hence my story of how I could figure out my life when I was young was. I’m a Loser from Loser Street. And here’s the truth. And especially if we look at this from a place of empathy and we take the perspective in, well, every human has 24 hours in a day. Each person has different obstacles, different circumstances in different systems of support. I get it. We’ve been sold a bunch of cultural messages of self reliance and grit. That’s what you need. You just need self reliance and grit, right? That’s the whole do it yourself. That’s the whole rags to riches story. It’s so in our DNA, especially in the United States.
Koren (00:07:49) – And so self-reliance and grit and you can overcome and I in some ways have been a product of that myself. And I’ve also used that to weaponize and beat myself up of why aren’t I further along? Right? Especially if I go into those comparisons. So here’s the thing: My own self reliance and grit have also become my weaknesses because there was a time it was just work harder, just work harder and you’ll get there and you’ll get there and you’ll get there. But it was this hamster wheel because when I got there, it was, oh, I better work harder because here’s this next thing. Work harder, do it yourself. You must do it. Nobody else can do it as well as you. It’s faster to get done that way. Does that sound familiar? So my own self reliance and grit became my weakness. And then I created my own obstacles because I wouldn’t allow myself to create support for myself, for my business, for my personal life. It was I must do it all myself.
Koren (00:08:49) – So, for instance, in the early days of my company and my show, I used to do my own website, right? I’d figured it out. I figured out how to get the live podcasting stream, the live radio stream to the website so that people can listen to the interviews live. Right? I would do all the post-production work on the podcasts. I would go in and fix most of the website stuff unless it was a total crisis, and then I had to find somebody to hire out. Always the worst time to hire somebody new on your team is when you’re in crisis. That’ll be another show. But I did all this work. It was like, No, I could just do it and I would stay up late. It was like I could just stay up late. That’s okay. And I would lie to myself that some day I wouldn’t be doing this except I never made a plan, nor did I create support because I really believed I should be self-reliant and have grit because that’s what makes people successful, because we all have the same 24 hours.
Koren (00:09:52) – But I wasn’t seeing or acknowledging the invisible workforce that other people had. And it’s taken a long time to unlearn this and to learn a new way. Nowadays I have a small team of people, right? I have people who do post-production on these podcasts. It’s awesome to have that right where I can record this. They come in, they clean up the audio, they put the notes up on the show notes, get the links out there. I have somebody else who sends out the newsletter to you all so that you know when a new podcast is airing, we have that all set up so I can focus on creating the show for you, right? Doing the work with my clients and focus on those areas where my strengths are versus having to learn new technology or having to know computer code or whatever. The different things that I had to learn in order to do that. So here’s the thing. We don’t all have the same 24 hours because it all depends on the support that we have, right? Some people are able to get support to increase their time for other things.
Koren (00:11:03) – So for you, it may be you know, one of the things growing up is my family had limited financial means and back then it was very much my family worked on the cars. I don’t do that. I take my cars into the shop. I have somebody who works on my cars, with home repair. Again, my dad did all her home repair. I learned a long time ago that it’s way better to hire somebody to come in and do home repair jobs than for my husband and I to do that. That is a privilege that, yes, we have that maybe people don’t have. And some people really delight in doing home repairs. In our case, it just caused extra stress and tension. Also, because we were so busy with other things, we didn’t have the time for that. For some people, they can increase their time by having child care, whether it’s having somebody take care of your kids, drive your kids. Having carpools is a way to increase our time. You’re bringing together collating support and working together.
Koren (00:12:06) – For some people, it’s about having personal assistants to run errands. They can be doing other work. That’s really important. That’s going to help increase the bottom line, which for so many companies is really, really important. But what often happens is they get so busy doing the worker bee stuff that they have to figure out other times to do the leadership stuff and they run out of time. So being able to create support, it’s not about delegating and offloading the work and not doing it. It’s about creating systems in place so that people with their strengths or with their skill sets can work on that. For some people, it’s about having gardeners and having them. That’s another way being able to have your outside of your home taking care of so that it can rise up to meet you, so you can spend your time on the weekends doing other things, right? So those are some examples. A lot of them have to do with domestic help, right? And then there was example of the work. But those are examples of how do we create support so that we have more time.
Koren (00:13:10) – You know, maybe it’s having a bookkeeper. Having bookkeeper in my company is so fantastic. Having a CPA who understands the tax laws where I can meet with my CPA periodically over the course of the year and we can talk about stuff. I know it’s not my responsibility where I have to know it all. We can’t be experts in all these different fields. It’s not humanly possible, but yet we put that on ourselves. We should be, you know, top notch in every area versus what are our strengths, what are our skill sets and what or not, or what do we not have interest in doing? One of my favorite things I kid you not and do this probably like a couple of times a year. I love to pressure wash the back patio and around the house and in the front porch. That is something that I really love to do and it’s the only outdoor job that I really love to do. And I do that a couple times a year. Maybe it’s because I’m around water, right? And it’s surprised me that I love to do it, but I do.
Koren (00:14:14) – And if I didn’t love to do it, then that would be something I would hire out. And these become choices, right? We all make choices in how we choose to spend our money. And so, again, going back to the comment that’s made of, oh, every human has the same 24 hours. We have different circumstances. Right. There are people that don’t have running water like, you know, I do or many of you all here. Those listening to the show, they may not have running water in certain countries. And so they are walking down with a bucket to get water to bring it back. They have 24 hours. What they can get done in a day is going to be very different than I do, where I can turn water on in a faucet or I can stick clothes in a washing machine and go about my day. Right. We have different constraints and privileges. And that’s what’s really important is to have the perspective of what are the obstacles that you have, what is the support that you have, what is the support that you can choose to hire for really thinking about? And this comes down to money for some people, right? And it could be a barter situation, too, like the carpools.
Koren (00:15:30) – That’s definitely a barter situation. It’s okay, let’s pull our resources together. If we carpool instead of everybody driving our kids, whether it’s the swim practice, soccer practice, baseball practice, how do we pull our resources together so that we can take turns which then will free up more time? Right. So that’s something to look at. So whether it’s doing an exchange or it’s doing an exchange of money. So one is an exchange of time which is bartering, the other is an exchange of money. One of the things to think about is what is your money for? You know, what do you want from your money? And instead of this, there’s not enough money, right? Because I have coached clients at all sorts of different income levels, all sorts of net worth levels, negative net worth levels as well. And the thing is, is that it’s what it’s not so much about. How much money do you make, especially once you hit a certain amount, depending on, you know, what state you live in, what country you live in.
Koren (00:16:31) – But what do you want from that money and what is that money here for? And being really deliberate about it. So often we spend money on things that don’t align with our priorities or our values, right? So being really clear about that or getting clear about that, what is this money here for and can it provide support for you in some ways? What are other ways that maybe you don’t need to spend that money and you can make the exchange of time? Okay. So it’s either an exchange of time or it’s exchange of money. The third thing is, or it’s expecting less. When I say expecting less, it’s getting more realistic goals of what is achievable in the amount of space in time that you really have. What can you really get done in that hour? And especially if you have young kids, right? Or if you are caretaking for an aging parent or a family member or you maybe you are married, but you have a spouse that travels a lot and you have a lot of the invisible work in your home.
Koren (00:17:40) – Being realistic about what you can get done. So often we have these unrealistic, unconscious expectations of ourselves and we beat the crap out of ourselves, and we need to stop with that. So paying attention to what? Do you have the ability to increase support either by trading time or trading money? And where else can you maybe reduce your expectations so that instead of being in these stealth expectations, these unconscious. Right, this is what it’s supposed to be like, but it’s really not the real life, especially, you know, with your circumstances. Okay. Part of empathy is staying out of judgment. And one of the areas that I coach my clients all day long on is they don’t want to be judged, right. They don’t want to be judged by so many other people. They’re mad about being judged. They feel shame about being judged. They’re upset about being judged. And yet they’re doing it to themselves all day long. And so, again, when you notice that you’re judging yourself because you’re not able to get done as much as whoever that person is, that seems to accomplish so much.
Koren (00:18:54) – What is their invisible system that you may not see that helps support them get to where they’re at? And water is the invisible system that you have or do not have. And what are the obstacles? And then start building the support that you need and start removing the obstacles and some obstacles. They’re just a part of what we have. They’re part of the choices that we make, understanding that they’re there. So the big thing is stop judging yourself, because when you judge yourself, you’re not going to be able to find solutions. In realizing that not everybody has the same 24 hours in a day when people have incredible support systems and taking care of a lot, Right. Their brain, their decisions that they have to make are freed up for other things. Right. And so when they know that, oh, somebody’s taking care of this and they don’t have to be responsible for that, it’s fantastic because it allows them to focus on other areas. We cannot be excellent in everything. And typically people that may look like they’re excellent, everything.
Koren (00:20:04) – They’ve got a pretty big team of people that are supporting them with that. What are your strengths? What are your priorities and what aren’t your strengths? And be able to own that without judging yourself. It’s okay. One of my girlfriends, she was always amazed because I would hire people to hang either. Whether it was art, it was my Kelly Ray Roberts art collection or photos or frames. I hire people to hang things on my walls, and it was always mind blowing for her that I would choose to spend money in that way. And part of it was there’s so much anxiety and perfectionism that comes up of like, if I mess up and I screw up the paint or screw up the wall, what’s going to happen? Or what if it’s not perfect? So it was easier to have my person come and hang this stuff for me and pay a check than it was for me to do it myself. And some of you may be like Koren, I’m so good at that. I have a really good friend who’s fantastic at hanging all that stuff.
Koren (00:21:10) – She allows for the imperfections. For me, it’s the out of practice, right? My ability would allow me to do that is to own my story and love myself, right? This is where I’m at and that’s okay. And when I talk about money, one of the important things is that I used to think it was about, you know, you must be frugal, must be really frugal, like really kind of white knuckle like, really hold on tight to that money. Grasp it tight, you know, be thrifty. Don’t be frivolous. And when I’ve come to understand over time is spending money on things that I really, really value and being really discerning or really I don’t want to know if it’s like ruthless, but like being really ruthless about the things that do not bring value. And I’ve said this here time and time again. I do not spend $0.10 on a paper bag. Sometimes I’ve been out. I recently was out of town and we had a grocery store and I didn’t bring it in from my car because I didn’t realize we were going to the grocery store.
Koren (00:22:14) – I remember there was that inner turmoil of like, I can’t believe I’m doing this. And I was like, It’s okay. It’s $0.10, right? But for the most part, like, I’m really diligent about bringing paper bags to the grocery store when I go. There’s no need to pay for that. It doesn’t bring me value. What are the things that bring me value? What are the things that I enjoy spending money on? And that’s something that’s really important to think about is what is your money for? Do you spend money on things that bring you value in your life? And are you ruthless with the things that don’t? So as you go through looking at your 24 hours in a day and stop judging yourself if you can’t get done what others can, you may not know the support that they have right in the systems that they have in place that allows them. And it doesn’t help you if you go in and learn to be curious to see what maybe that they have set up, that you can then either steal, not steal, take, but like take that concept, steal that idea, that concept and apply it in your own life or maybe be able to hire.
Koren (00:23:18) – I’m not saying steal somebody else’s babysitter because that doesn’t ever go well. Right. But what are some concepts, some ideas that can help you make your life have a little bit more ease and space so we don’t all have the same 24 hours in a day. And let’s remember that we don’t. So what do you want from your 24 hours? What do you have capacity for with your 24 hours? What do you need? And then go from there and look at what you want to create. All right. I’m smiling big for you. Hey there. You know, coaching is a term you’re hearing a lot these days, but let’s be real, good coaching, the kind that truly changes lives is more than a buzzword. Imagine your favorite sports team without their coach. Hard to picture, right? A coach is someone who sees their blind spots, pushes them forward to perform better and help them achieve their goals, and above all, is always there to support them. And that’s what I aim to be for you in your journey.
Koren (00:24:20) – But here’s the thing. It’s not just about advancing your career. It’s about living in integration, where the work you do is not. Only rewarding but deeply meaningful. It’s about fostering, loving, connected relationships not only with others, but also with yourselves as you do your meaningful work in your life. It’s not about splitting your time perfectly between work and life, because life in all it’s wonderful and your predictability doesn’t work that way. It’s about weaving your professional personal life together in a way that each one enriches the other, allowing you to thrive in all the areas of your life. Here’s how we can kick start this transformative journey. One. Dinner Parties. Imagine an evening filled with fantastic food, thought provoking conversation, and people who are on the same journey as you will share stories, learn from each other, and of course have a lot of fun and connection. Interested. Let us know where you’d like us to host one. You can fill out the form linked in the show notes. Two. If you prefer a group environment, join one of my group coaching programs.
Koren (00:25:38) – My upcoming one is Dare to Lead starting this fall. It’s an amazing way to grow, surrounded by folks who share similar challenges and aspirations as you while they’re pursuing to unlock their leadership potential. Three. For more tailored experience, we can dive deep with private one on one coaching. This is a chance for you to focus purely on your journey, your goals, your struggles and your growth. So three opportunities. One goal. Thriving in a life where meaningful work and personal fulfillment are interwoven seamlessly into your life. Ready to take the next step? All the details are in the show notes. And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for updates. Remember, our growth isn’t just about work. It’s about creating a life that feels good on the inside, not one that just looks good on the outside. So let’s do this. Can’t wait to work with you.
Music (00:26:45) – She’s dreaming, she’s drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.