Why it's so Important to Recalibrate and Heal Your Relationship with Yourself with Katie McDonald
In our culture, we develop negative beliefs around self-care and focusing on ourselves. Things like self-care is selfish, taking time for self-care is lazy. But our guest this week, Katie McDonald, creator of b.nourished, had to learn the hard way that taking care of yourself is the only way you can take care of anyone, or anything else. Through illness, burnout, and a deep desperation, Katie came to the hard truth of why recalibrating and healing your own relationship with yourself is really the key to your happiness, your success, etc. She reminds us that we do have permission. “Self Care is not indulgence. Self neglect is selfish.”
Who is Katie McDonald?
Katie is the creator of b.nourished. She's created a holistic executive coaching approach inspired by her own personal journey after early success as a high-performance corporate executive, followed by the intense responsibilities of motherhood chronic self-neglect, which led Katie to the depths of overwhelm, depression, and illness. Viewing self-care as a key to success rather than an obstacle, Katie has curated the proven practices of b.nourished through decades of self-study, speaking, and concierge coaching engagements, Katie and b.nourished are a testament to how intentionality and mindfulness, peace of mind, and productivity can actually go hand in hand. She's been featured in Huffington Post, Dwell, and more. Katie includes Brown University Center for Entrepreneurship, Eileen Fisher, Facebook, and others as her clients.
How Illness Lead to a Wake Up Call
Katie’s journey to her current life started when she was just living her life. She had the “doing part mastered. But the being part I had no idea. I burned myself out, I was addicted to business and had to have an extreme illness, ulcerative colitis, pneumonia, shingles, asthma allergy, I had to fall apart to wake up.” But she realized during her darkest days that if she recovered and actually implemented everything she had already studied, she would “go back to my tribe of doers. And I'm going to share what I learned I'm going to teach the doers how to be.”
Katie struggled with something a lot of us can relate to, feeling like she couldn’t be fully productive and make self-care a priority at the same time. She felt like “they couldn’t coexist. And I was always going to choose productivity, I love getting stuff done, except I came undone in the process.” She realized that in order to be fully productive and at her best, self-care needed to be at the forefront.
The first step was admitting to herself that this was the situation she was in and “in order to recover from the extreme, desperate state I was in is to tell myself that the only thing I was responsible for was my own well-being. That I had to heal, I had to recover. So I put myself in a crisis situation because I couldn't do it gently. I had very black and white thinking and I had to put myself in that extreme so that I could really see the consequences of my self-neglect.”
She had to take extreme measures and only focus on things related to her recovery. She had to learn how to say no and let go of her people-pleasing tendencies. It was a scary step for her but she was desperate and was feeling the drive to “get to people before they got too desperate, before their body demanded before their mind and soul demanded attention as mine did.” Now, she’s able to share what she had to learn herself with others.
The start of Katie’s work “addiction” began while she was working in corporate America while struggling for two years to conceive. But when she made the decision to quit, her son “came into our lives. And then I just took all that intensity and all that perfectionistic standards, and I applied it to parenting and got even sicker this time.” She said no to anything that didn’t directly relate to caring for her son but ended up feeling more alone than ever, “and yet in some ways, I felt so deeply connected, that the real suffering was the disconnection I was living neck up. That I really this illness, this disease required me to take the elevator down and inhabit my body and become whole again.”
Stop Running So You Can Recalibrate
I’m sure you can totally relate to feeling like you can’t quit your corporate job, or being in the throes of parenthood, or whatever it is, and you’re feeling like okay, what do I do? How can we start to balance where we’re at before we even get to that point? Something Katie recommends to her clients that’s super simple, but can seem complicated, is creating a tea ritual, “sit and have a cup of tea every day, or coffee. The bottom line is I want you to repair the relationship you have with yourself. And it starts with simply being in your own company.
See, we can't craft a relationship, nurture a relationship when we don't spend any time with someone. So I'm asking you to spend time with yourself because this state of frenzy, we can't outrun ourselves. I tried. It didn't work” From the moment you fill up your cup, to the very last sip, sit in silence with yourself, totally free from distractions or any other company and “slowly but surely, our wisdom comes back. We just get our body and spirit and mind. It's waiting for us to say I'm here. I'm slowing down, I'm present and the wisdom is there. We simply need to stop running.”
Creating this tea ritual for yourself will be the jump start of your mindfulness practice, it doesn’t need to be any fancy or out of the box practice, “we don't need robes, we don't need a mountain top, we need to be in our own company. The artist P!nk says in lyrics, the quiet scares because it screams the truth. And the truth is, wow, I'm tired. But that might be what we see like how tired we are, or how depleted we are or how disappointed or frustrated or stuck we might feel. Or, you know, what I hear over and over again, is the just Who am I if I'm not doing right, and we have to challenge the notion that we are condemned to a life of doing it.”
Another huge lesson for Katie was that she will never complete every single item on her to do list by the end of every day, no matter how productive and efficient she is, no matter how much she loves to get things done, “this list will never end. And that was the surrender that was like I give up, I give up. I can't do this pursuit anymore. So the work becomes if you want to get busy, get busy keeping your word to yourself. Say today I'm going to have a cup of tea and then do it every single day. And you know what, all of a sudden, all the promises that you've broken to yourself, in the obligations to everyone outside yourself, well, all of a sudden you start taking yourself seriously again, you start trusting yourself again, how can we trust someone who has broken promises over and over again to ourselves?” This is when we’re able to recalibrate our relationships with ourselves, by first understanding that in some way, we’ve disregarded ourselves.
Self-Care = Lazy
I know as well as anyone that it can be so difficult to slow down, to have that cup of tea, to take care of ourselves. We perceive it as laziness, and our society supports that perception. We build a life around “I’ll slow down when, when I finished everything I needed to do, then I'll take care of myself, when I get through this project, I'll take care of myself. Well, it's just a bunch of lies. Like we're deluding ourselves.” Instead, we have to totally reverse our thinking. Maybe it’s a super busy day, filled with meetings and projects, so we have to “double down on my self-care, I better make sure I get that really long walk in silence, I better make sure that I journal I better make sure that I meditate this morning, I better you know, eat really well, because I want to perform at my best.”
It took Katie reaching that desperate moment to realize that if she wasn’t taking care of herself, it was those around her that would suffer as well, including her son. “I had to use my responsibility to my son, to wake up my own responsibility to myself, it was that that's how far removed I was. And this is what I hear over and over again, we're afraid to look inward, we might not like what we see. And then we might feel that we're condemned that that's our life that we don't have any choices. We forget that every moment we can reinvent ourselves that we can grow and evolve, not because we're broken, but because we're curious about our evolution, what is our potential? How can I tame that bully of my mind, and actually have my own back? These are new questions that we weren't taught to ask.”
Katie compares the idea of self-care to the oxygen masks dropping in an airplane. When the plane is losing altitude and we “put it on ourselves so that we can help the people next to us, right? We get it in that context of dire circumstances, get day to day, it's so easy to blow off. So one of the things I do is, you know, remind ourselves that overwhelm is a habit and we can choose differently. So take a blank piece of paper and write it all out. Get it all out every thought, any task, be it business, personal, anything, get it all out and we're creating space in our mind. See, we're hired often or we hire ourselves if we're entrepreneurs, to be creative and agile and resourceful, and yet, our brains are crowded with obligations, many of which don't even belong to us. We're compensating, we're over functioning and neglecting ourselves in the process. We only have so much capacity. So I would encourage you to get that piece of paper and let it all out and then walk away from it.”
It’s important to be able to work through the overwhelm for yourself, to tell yourself that it’s going to be okay, to “choose what requires and demands my attention.” Give yourself the permission to revisit things another day or another week. What’s key is making self-care and self-connection your first priorities so that everything else can fall into place.
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Affirmation
I love myself fully and allow that love to expand to everyone around me.
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