Lean Out Podcast

Solocast: What Are You Avoiding?

• Dawn Baker • Season 3 • Episode 38

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In this episode, Dawn Baker talks about avoiding - difficult conversations, making changes to your work-life balance, or simply avoiding yourself. She discusses the audience question that spawned this solocast, why we avoid difficult things, and how we can move beyond our avoidance. We all avoid things from time to time, so listen in if you want to learn about why and what to do about it! 

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Welcome to the lean out podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Don baker. Are you looking for a new approach to finding authentic and sustainable work-life balance? You've come to the right. Place. For inspiration. information. and a community. community. of like-minded. Professionals. Let's get to the show. Hello. Hello. Thanks for being here. Today's episode is going to be all about avoiding, we all go through it from time to time. We avoid a difficult conversation or an interaction that we're worried might be awkward. We avoid saying no to something that we don't wanna do because we don't wanna hurt someone's feelings. And sometimes we avoid making changes to the status quo, even though we crave better balance because we anticipate the change will be difficult or uncomfortable. The kind of avoiding I wanna talk about today is avoiding yourself. What do I mean by that? I mean like avoiding sitting with yourself, being by yourself or feeling something deeper beyond a surface reactionary level of living in autopilot. Now, there might be various reasons that this might be occurring in your life, and I'm not gonna go into that. That really kind of goes into the realm of psychotherapy, but. Suffice it to say I love personal development work, self-improvement and reflection. But recently it occurred to me that not everyone else does. And for some people maybe it's painful for whatever reason. And for high octane professionals, the way to avoid is really to use your busyness in your to-do list as an excuse. What inspired this episode was I just gave a talk on shedding imposter syndrome and igniting your inner confidence at the brave enough women's CME conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. By the way, this conference was awesome. I had such a good time. If you're a woman professional, I highly recommend going next year. They hold it every year. The last weekend of September in Scottsdale, Arizona, I heard that women go year after year, and I didn't quite understand why, but now I understand. The community is really inviting. I have no affiliation with Sasha other than loving her work. But I highly recommend you check out this conference because it was super fun. It you miss my interview with Sasha Hil Cut, who is the founder of Brave Enough. You can find a link to it in the show notes after my presentation. I had a few reflection questions for the audience, which they worked on at their respective round tables, and then we came together to discuss the responses and ask questions. The reflection questions were, which of the four elements of confidence is hardest for you and why? What is one area or skill where you could be a beginner again and embark on a 30 day challenge? And the last one was identify one thing you could start doing today to increase your inner confidence. If you aren't sure what I'm referring to when I talk about the four elements of authentic confidence, then listen to the solo cast episode that I did called All About Confidence from about a year ago, which I will also link in the show notes. Also, if this intrigues you and you wanna take your confidence to the next level, check out my Lean Out Confidence course. You can use the Code Pod POD, making the course less than a month's worth of Starbucks orders, and it will be well worth your time and effort in taking steps toward cultivating the confidence to lean out. So after the period of reflection at the conference, one woman in the audience asked a question, and that question gave me pause. Have you ever given a presentation and someone asks a question and for a minute you're just stumped, but you don't wanna act like you're stumped, so you Babylon about something while you're trying to organize a bunch of things in your head to give an actual coherent answer. Or is that just me? I don't know. I don't even remember the exact words she used to ask her question, but it was something like, what do you do when you're so deep into your endless to-do list that you can't even think of starting to work on these elements of competence? And my initial response was something about constantly being in survival mode and doing a time audit to see where she could find even a few minutes each day to sit by herself in silence as a starting point. And to this, she replied, oh, finding time is not actually my problem. It's that I don't wanna get out of that top level mode of just go, go, go all the time. So what she was implying was that it feels better for her to stay at that superficial level, to stay in survival mode in autopilot. And at the time I really was stumped. I mean, I kind of knew what I wanted to say, but I also felt uncomfortable saying it in front of an audience of 200 women. So to that woman who asked, if you're listening to this episode, this is for you and I hope everyone else who tunes in today will get something out of it too. So why do we avoid. We naturally want to avoid discomfort. It's hardwired into our brains. It's an evolutionary holdover from the days when we needed to avoid perceived threats, difficulties, and rejection. In order to survive, we're inclined to take the path of least resistance, and that's natural. When we avoid difficult situations, it then provides temporary relief, reinforcing our desire to avoid, and the cycle just perpetuates. So this is not a weakness or a personality flaw. I wanna make that clear. It's something we all have the tendency to do only now in our modern society. The stakes aren't as high and the avoiding can actually be detrimental to our health and happiness. Uh, maybe it manifests as distracting yourself from work, saying no to opportunities and blaming it on your to-do list or procrastinating, and this keeps you disconnected from the people you care about and from yourself. One of the largest predictors of happiness is our degree of connection with other people and also with ourselves. As I've talked about before, hard is relative. The hard stuff is going to be whatever's hard for you. It might be having a difficult conversation with someone. It might be looking at all your accounts and credit card statements and seeing the reality of what's really going in and coming out. I had a coaching client once who wanted to significantly decrease her work responsibilities and in the transition, hopefully take a long trip because travel had been one of her core values and it was missing in the recent years of her life. But when I probed on what was holding her back from setting these things in motion, she had a real scarcity mindset about her finances. When she described her financial situation to me, it actually did sound like something she could swing, but she had to do the uncomfortable work of peeling back the curtain and looking at all the inputs and outputs to prove it to herself, and she just didn't wanna do it. And in the case of a woman who asked me the question during the talk, the hard thing might just be spending time by yourself doing inner work. Or attempting to embark on a self-improvement journey of some sort. In the spirit of this episode, I have to admit that I avoided saying the hard things in the moment to the person who was asking the question. My brain just didn't wanna go there because I'm naturally an avoider of conflict, gravitating instead towards harmony and relating to others. So how do you break out of a cycle of avoiding yourself? When I responded to the question at the talk, I still said something to her about carving out time to spend by yourself, starting with just a few minutes a day. Because in my mind, the only answer to this is exposure therapy. Have you ever heard of exposure therapy in medical school? It was discussed in the psych class talking about getting rid of phobias or anxiety. There are classic examples like the fear of getting into an elevator. So in exposure therapy, the first step is to look at pictures of the inside and outside of an elevator. The next step is to watch videos related to riding an elevator, and the third step might be to approach an elevator and maybe hit the buttons on the outside. The next step might be to step inside the elevator and hit the buttons on the inside and then come back out. So you get the picture. Eventually you end up riding the elevator. You expose yourself to the fear little bits at a time and gradually increase. So if your avoidance is yourself, start by spending just a few minutes alone, without your phone, without other inputs, without a book, or a podcast, or any other method of escape. Find a quiet, distraction free place. The only thing I'd recommend having with you is a journal and a pen. Feel free to start your alone time without writing, but eventually you're going to want to maybe write some stuff down. Journaling is a really powerful tool to get things out of your emotional subconscious mind and put them into your logical problem solving mind. Another great thing to do would be to take a walk by yourself again without distractions. You have to shift your mindset to embrace emotional agility as well, because we live in this culture of toxic positivity and quick fixes. Everyone just wants to make things better with the snap of the fingers. But the reality is that you can experience any emotion you have that ability, whether it's positive or negative, and you can experience your emotions on your own timetable. If this process of exposure therapy to yourself takes you a long time to progress, then so be it. But if you've been avoiding yourself, I highly recommend that you do something. Start small. Look at it as a journey. You'll be more connected to yourself and to the people in your life that you care about, and then you'll have tools to progress on your own personal development journey, whether that be leaning out at work or developing confidence or something else you wanna change about your life. I hope this podcast is helpful for you today. What do you think? Does this resonate with you? We all avoid difficult things at times, so the question is, what have you been avoiding? Leave a comment on the blog post associated with this podcast@practicebalance.com. Send me a message through your podcast listening app or DM me on Instagram I'm practice balance. Thanks for listening to the lean out podcast. If you find these conversations inspiring and useful, please forward them to a friend and also leave a review on iTunes or Spotify so that other people can find them easier. If you want to get in touch with me, you can find me at my website, practice balanced.com, where you can subscribe to my newsletter and get updates regularly about new podcast episodes, blog posts, speaking, engagements, and coaching services. You can also support my work by buying my book, lean out a professional woman's guide to finding authentic work-life balance for yourself, a friend, family member, or coworker. Have a great day and we'll see you next time