Untitled - July 31, 2025
00:00:00 Speaker: Hi, I'm Denise. Host of the Working Moms Redefined podcast. Let's join together as we lessen the hold of mom guilt in our lives, thrive in our careers, and raise great kids. You are doing enough. Let us boost your confidence today on this episode of Working Moms Redefined podcast. Shame or guilt? Hi, it's Denise with the Working Moms Redefined podcast and we are talking the difference today between feelings much like shame and guilt. I'll be honest, I think I am using guilt in place of shame in my own brain. Will never have guessed that if it wasn't for Julie. Julie gets to be our guest today. Julie Bowl is a nonprofit strategist and a leadership coach. That means she is committed to empowering mission driven leaders. The next question you might be asking is, um, that's not me. I don't have a mission. False. I'm gonna tell you right now, yes, you do. And Julie is going to be able to help us find it and figure out, are we living our lives in alignment with our true core values? One thing I love about a lot of our podcast guests is that we make it so that you are going to be able to leave here with tangible things, to be able to implement in the days to come. Lucky for you, Julie has tidbits that you'll be able to implement instantly in today's episode, not only because of her experience as a business coach because she is a working mom herself. She's been married to her husband, Mike for twenty two years and they have three kids, ages twenty, eighteen, and twelve. Julie is from Quincy and realizes that a lot of the people that she works with experience mom guilt. And so Julie, welcome. As we were talking offline, I just love that you've already said from the very beginning. She goes, I get it, working moms. By far the hardest thing that she sees is the guilt, which is what we often like to talk about. And we're going to dive right in. Julie, can you kind of tell me a little bit about where your passion come from and what you want people to experience when they listen to this podcast episode? Yeah, so I love the subject of this podcast, Working Moms Redefined, because I spent five years teaching the work of Doctor Brené Brown, which is around shame, shame, and vulnerability. And she used her body of research. If you know Brene Brown and follow her and love her, she used her body of research to create a leadership curriculum because we cannot lead if we're not willing to be vulnerable and we can't be vulnerable if we can't get a handle on shame. So you said guilt before. And so when we are teaching the leadership work from Bernie's, um, curriculum, we spend a lot of time pulling apart guilt versus shame. Guilt is actually known to lead to positive outcomes. If you feel guilty about something, you might change your behavior. We're not worried about guilt. We're actually worried about shame. Shame is I am bad versus guilt is I did something bad. We get to focus on the behavior when it's guilt. But if I am bad, it's just one and done. There's no changing it. So that's shame is actually what I love talking about. Because when we can root it out, that's where resilience come from. When we can surface it, look at it, we can change the narrative. And I have experienced no other shame like the shame of motherhood, I have never. So my husband's mom was a stay at home mom. My mom was also sort of a partial stay at home mom, and she helped my my dad run his business. They ran a business together, but she was home, so Automatically. I didn't have a model for a working mom. I and so I think what a lot of women our generation did was they said, okay, we have to be that aunt, have our careers, like we just have to take this base, make this a baseline and, and then just layer the career on top of it. I've got kids. I've got school age, you know, elementary school kids. I've got the range. And this is still to this day something I have to to constantly catch. What are the shame triggers here? What is the story I'm making up in my brain? Not to go off on a tangent so quickly, but yesterday I took my son to school to do, um, a training because he's been selected to be, um, I think it's called a House leader at his school. And my husband actually is the one that tracks everything that goes on with school. And I noticed I was feeling shame because I wasn't quite sure what this meeting was about. And if I was supposed to be there, what was going on? And we have so many preconceived notions about what a good mom is. She also has to be the one that's dialed in at school. She has to be the one that's doing the food. I mean, every single thing is supposed to come under our domain for the first. For my big kids, I was the mom. I did those things. I don't do those things anymore. They don't fit for me anymore. And my husband is much more invested in the community that we're part of. And it's just it's coming really natural for him to track those things. So I've let him hold that card, if you will. But I still have to remind myself, it's okay that you're not up on it and you're not quite sure, like, you know what grade he's going into. That's good, you know? But it's really interesting to see over and over those chain triggers that come up. Julian, I appreciate you sharing that. I find myself, first of all, the gold that you have already provided with between the differences of guilt and shame. Brené Brown actually has a book all about. Yes, the definitions of these different words, and I can't believe I've kind of actually forgot about that. You're right, labeling yourself as I am bad can so so bad for you. It literally can change the way that your cells are made up in your body. Yeah, believe something that is not true. So I. I love that guilt can actually motivate you to change. Whereas shame is the the really hard in issue one. And I know that so many of us do that applicable to the room mom example. I myself the whole baseline of this podcast was centered around I'm not the mom that my mom was, and that's okay. That phrase I have found myself needing to say time and time again, especially when I was the mom that was home every day. Once the kids got off the bus. When Sidney was younger in kindergarten, I was the one that was there. I got to see her read for the first time by herself. I had let some things go in the two years that when Hudson got to kindergarten this past year, I wasn't the one that was home the day that Hudson started reading by himself. Jeremy was. And like you admitted to, there was a little bit of shame talk, if you will, in that thought process when it happened. And I needed to talk myself through it and know also, I gave Jeremy a gift to be able to see that for the first time. But darn it, Julie, if it's not hard to coach ourselves through that. I know. Yeah. And it's funny. So I spent five years teaching this work of Brené Brown. The shame, resilience and, you know, pulling apart what's what shame, what's guilt, all of it. And I truly thought by the time I was done, I was going to be a locked in expert in immune like this would no longer be an issue. I mean, this story is from two nights ago. It's still there. The triggers are still there. They're so deeply wired in us. It's just the spotting and the noticing and then not taking it in, you know, just letting it kind of letting it air out and float away. Kind of mindfulness practice. Oh, that's an interesting thought, huh? It's not actually true. We made this intentional choice as parents, and this is his card. And all I'm doing is dropping the kid off. We're good. We're fine. You can tell that you have a lot of experience with working with working moms and leadership. Are there certain patterns or stories that you are seeing clients telling themselves right now? Yeah, yeah, it's really, really interesting. I gravitate towards working with women. I've worked in the nonprofit sector my entire career, and I came out on my own. That's a business owner about seven years ago, and ninety five percent of my clients are women. Many of most of them are probably mothers as well. I was just in a workshop last week where we were talking about limiting beliefs around business ownership, and a woman in the room said, well, this is actually related to motherhood, but it's coming up for me, this idea that I can't be a hands on mom and accelerate my career at the same time. So there's all there's some version of that story that I think does show up with women who are in successful leadership roles, and then kind of holding that image of what what they should be doing at home and what a hands on parent looks at home. And we spent some time pulling it apart. And I often do this with my clients. Um, what do you know is true? And so often at the end of the day, we look like different parents than our parents did. And how we choose to raise our kids looks different. And the people that they have access looks different. Like we don't have to be all the things. You know, we can invite other people into the circle. That can be things for our kids that we can't be for them. So I think, just again, letting go of this preconceived notion of what a quote unquote good mom looks like is the biggest thing. Mhm. How do we start doing that Julie. You know I think it is the first step is awareness. It's like making the invisible visible I love that phrase. It's just and here's the when we when we teach shame work we actually teach you to look for physical cues first because sometimes you don't have you don't even know what's happening in your brain because your brain has gone offline. You have been triggered by this massive train, you know, shame trigger and your brain is gone. It's in fight or flight. You're you're not using your prefrontal cortex at all. So what we start to do is we actually start to identify what are the the signals my body gives me when I'm in shame. If we can notice it, recognize it and interrupt it, then we're much more likely to actually say, oh, what was happening? What was I thinking? So. But so often that shame trigger just sets our bodies off, and then we just lose the ability to notice. And we're in this sort of reactive mode. So to me the first step is we start practicing noticing what shame feels like in our body. The good news is when you do this work, it's the same tone every time. So we can take a situation. And in fact, just talking about it, I can sometimes feel a little bit of a physiological response in my body. If we think back on a situation where we know we experience shame, we can start to remember, okay. So for me, my hands tingle and I start to get really short of breath. Um. I start to get narrowed. Vision. We can start to trace back. These are what the physiological symptoms are. And then notice them as they're happening. And then stop and ask ourselves like what's happening here? What what's going on around me? What is my thinking? That's a huge first step for me. You described tingling for me. I feel like this darkness and like a little bit of weight on my brain when the shame kicks in. For me, it's. And I always love to think like anxiety and gratefulness cannot live at the same time. And so even moments of shame to try and talk myself out of it after I recognize it, which sometimes I'll be honest, is a little too late. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if your brain goes offline. Yeah, you're in a chemical storm and it's managing that storm because it's not going to change in that moment until you continually practice it. And so, like you had said, finding a place to be aware of what is making the shame happen for me. I'll be honest, it started with having to buy cookies instead of bake them for school like my mom did. Once I worked through like, hey, nobody cares. Kids like cookies, whether they're homemade or whether they're purchased. The next step was, oh, I don't have to be the one to take and pick up from practice every time. It's okay to let dad do that. And it's it's just so different. And what I think probably said to myself is I'm putting guilt on myself. No, because I don't want to change that. Like, I love the fact that Jeremy is doing that. It's that self-talk, that negative self-talk. And I think, Julia, I can speak for both of us when saying all people who are in the realm of personal growth and self-development and those who are not, we're still mean to ourselves. Like this is still a work in progress for everybody. No one is perfect. You are not alone. And yet. Bummer. It's hard. Oh my goodness it is. It is. Uh. And it's interesting. I know you're a coach, so the thing we listen for is a coach is language. And you just said having to instead of instead of choosing to. Yes. You don't have to take the store bought cookies. You're choosing to take the store bought cookies because you're choosing where you're where you're investing your energy. But like we we catch it when we're coaches. Are you do you have to know? You choose to choose gives you choice. And when I say get to, I get to label it as a as an opportunity. And yet it's my kids. Correct me from time to time. Literally today, Sydney was like, oh, mommy, um, what do you have today? What, what? And I said, oh, I, I have two coaching clients and a podcast interview and, and then I have to go get my eyebrows waxed. I don't know if that's a choice or I get to on that one, but Sydney did correct me and I'm like, dang it, she's so right. But that's why it's so important, Julie, to have people in our lives like you, to keep us on that straight and narrow when we get a little off in our critical thinking, because sometimes we need that community and that accountability to be able to help us see who we truly want to be. Because sometimes, even as you described, as we're talking about shame, we then go towards those tendencies that we don't love. Yeah I know. So, so and we're going to talk about this I think a little bit later. But that's why. So I spent five years teaching Brené Brown's work. And there's a three day format that we use. And when she sold her company, I decided I'm going to create my own thing. And I really just wanted to do group coaching and community. I think this work is meant to be done in community. And when I debriefed the last cohort that we did, someone said to me, seeing other people process was the most powerful part for them, seeing because we would do exactly what you and I just did a minute ago. Do you have to take the cookies, or are you choosing to take the cookies like we would do those shifts in real time? And sometimes I had a coach once that said, you can't read the label on your own jar. Sometimes we can see it clear as day with someone else and we're like, yeah, that's how this concept is applicable, but we can't necessarily see it for ourselves. And so doing this kind of work in community is, I think, invaluable invaluable. And it's centered around our core values, core areas, things like vision and emotional agility. Like we've mentioned prior for you. We also look at self-trust and boundaries and accountability. How would you say that these show up in our bodies or in leadership of ourselves and our families? And then what happens if we're out of alignment besides shame. You know, it's interesting. I spent so long teaching Bernays work, and it's a beautiful body of work that I refer to it often, but what I was really missing and wanting more of was, um, more real strategies around emotional agility. And the emotional agility piece is learning to accurately label the emotion you're experiencing. Because when we mislabel the emotion, we actually respond incorrectly. So you mentioned this in your show notes. But when we like, anger is kind of a safe emotion, surprisingly to have, especially for men. It's acceptable to be angry. But sometimes if you look one layer deeper, you can get more granular and it might be loneliness. Your response to yourself if you say, I'm feeling lonely is completely different than your response for anger. So what will you dig into that toolkit of emotional agility. We do two word check ins every time we get together and I. I love those because they're so colorful and creative. When people do them, sometimes they use emotion words, sometimes they use just descriptors or phrases. And we can all relate to okay, that's the energy this person is coming in the room with, but nobody has to fix it. And and just teaching that alone, teaching that we can name and we can practice getting granular with our emotions. But that doesn't mean anyone else has to be responsible for it. We're just now having awareness of what's in the room with us. Um, so there's that piece. The other piece that I really felt like was missing was how you interrupt your body's response to shame because, you know, it's all very intellectual work, the work that we teach with dare to lead. My goodness, you don't have access to your brain when you've been triggered. And so I found a body of work around how you trigger that. What happens in your body when you trigger by shame the stress response that happens and how you can interrupt it because it just like you're not working with your full brain when you've been triggered by shame. And guess what? If you're the earliest memory I have of being able to label the shame trigger was like one of the very first, um, five hour compression planning sessions I did. I was in front of the room and, um, let me see if I can connect the point that I'm trying to make. I, I could not I did not have the prefrontal cortex to reason with myself in that moment because it triggered. And so this body work really teaches us physical strategies we can use to smiling's one of them. I mean, our brains are, like you said, you can't be grateful and anxious at the same time when you when you smile. I know you know the research around this. Your brain is like, oh, I guess she's safe. I guess it's okay. It's very confusing. I when I do it, when I'm driving and I don't want to trigger. I look like a maniac. I'm like, I hope no one, like, glances over and sees my, like, clenched smile. But, um, it actually would still work if you put a pen in your mouth, because it's creating that physical sensation that sends a signal to your brain. So those are the two things that we work on when we're in this workshop together is how are we going to interrupt that physiological response so that our brains are at their fullest capacity? And then the emotional agility. How do we really, really get, um, curious about the emotions we're feeling so that we can respond to them? I love that not only you explained the need behind the emotional agility, but then you gave actionable steps for people to be able to take and implement literally. Right now, on the day of this recording, it was raining here this morning, and knowing the smiling trick and knowing that seasonal depression can skyrocket Skyrocketed, even on days when it's just rainy and cloudy. I'm walking into my office today and I am, like, carrying everything and I'm just smiling. And it wasn't because I was super happy about getting rained on and I didn't have room for an umbrella. But darn it, if I didn't want my coffee to not get water and spilled on. So I was hurrying and I was smiling. And the first thing as I do when I walk in the front desk person goes, you're awfully smiley for a rainy day. And I said, goals because I did not feel it on the inside. But then I did after. And that's the power of sometimes our ignorant brains, right? Sometimes we have to trick it to be able to get it, to do what we need and want to do for the rest of the day. And obviously, Julie, when you see misalignment or someone out of alignment, what do you where does that conversation begin for you? It's really, really interesting. Um, our bodies will shut us down. That's the conversation that I ended up coming into with clients that, uh, I had one client when we first started working together. They had this undiagnosed fever, and she would literally she had a fever at a conference where we were at. And she's like, it's not contagious. My body is just going through this weird thing. When we are out of alignment with what is most important to us, we're constantly working against our truest selves. I think it just shuts our bodies down. Um, that looks a lot of different ways. But, um, that misalignment in who we are and, and how we're behaving or the situations we're in day in and day out, I see it a lot when people in, in organizations that just don't match what they believe in, the the behaviors that are taking place are so against what they believe in. You have to you almost start turning inwards and collapsing in. And it's a very difficult thing for your body to navigate that. That's the biggest sign for me. I love to catch it before we get to our bodies because man, our bodies are like, yeah, we're done. You know, you think you're going to keep pushing through. Watch out. You know, I got news for you. You don't get to do this anymore. And I it's interesting. I think it hits our forties a lot. I'm forty five. I see it really showing up at this age. There's some biological things happening anyway at this age, but our bodies are just like, I always kind of liken it to, you know, the staples. Easy button. Like, I've, I don't know if I can say this on your podcast, but that feels like the O button to me. Like I'm like, get it done, get it done, get it done. But eventually your body's just like, no, I don't want to. You know, it's like you can't keep pushing the button anymore. It doesn't work anymore. You have to really to dig into some new strategies. So what's the next right step that someone can take to figure out if they are in misalignment to get them back towards being in alignment. What's the easy work? So do values work? There are so many different schools of thought around how to discover your values. I actually refer to other people's work when I do values work. I am sure you do it in your coaching as well, but when you get really clear on who you are and what's important to you, then you can start saying, no wonder that job's not working. No wonder this relationship isn't working. No wonder this schedule isn't working. Or this this box I'm putting myself in as a mom isn't working. It just doesn't work with who I am and what's most important to me. So the first step is just doing the discovery work. There's a lot of different models out there that will help you narrow down the values that are most important to you. And I've tested dozens of dozens of I've probably tested ten different. And you probably have to methodologies for narrowing down your values. And to be honest, I like to take out the things that are just needs, like family and, um, you know, there's sometimes people that, you know, they're in sort of the stage of burnout. They will they will say, um, family and wellness. And I'm thinking you're actually just identifying the needs that are unmet right now. So that and that's my own interpretation, is I like to kind of separate things out that are just like basic human needs, that you should have to be healthy and happy and whole with the things that are really unique to you. So why's I so I'm certified under the Maxwell leadership entity and they have values cards. And I love that because you have thirty values. But I have not thought about to take out the emotional and like secure needs. That's very clever because of course we know that family and for some of us God are the top. Yes, yes. When you take those out, then you can really dive into, okay, this actually matters to me. Compassion. All of those things that have it that provoke an innate feeling in us. And so then you take these cards and you quickly, like, divide them in half and then you finalize ten and then you take the top five. And so it's almost like a game to get you to go a little bit faster, because if we put too much thought into it, we might start questioning it one hundred percent. And you're using the part of your brain that is relying on your subconscious intelligence, and you make better decisions that way under pressure than you do when you give a whole lot of time. Yeah. Good point. Such a good point. So as so many of us are now thinking like, okay, I gotta go figure out my values. We'll provide in the show notes a place for you to be able to do a worksheet of some sort as well as Julie, you have a resource which we will provide in our show notes to be able to take a questionnaire through Julie's website to see where you are at in certain areas as well. Before we talk too much more about that, so many of us are leading teams and families and communities, and yet we still don't necessarily feel like we're doing enough. Where would you say that tension kind of comes from, and how can we get a little bit more grounded? I'm going to sidestep where the tension comes from, because that I think there are intelligent people that kind of will tell us the conditioning that can happen to us. And I don't have the right words. But I will say a practice for getting grounded that I love is Kristin Neff's work on self-compassion. I I'm shocked how often I, I just like coaching clients. I have some coaching clients where every other call we do this together and it's never scripted. It's never intentional. But I can tell they're bringing all this energy in and and just you just feeling a lot. So we'll stop there. So Kristin Neff's work is centered around self-compassion. There's three components to it. The first is we. So we do three deep breaths. With the first breath we will. I ask people to put hands over their heart. We will literally say in our minds, this is hard. You give yourself permission to be in struggle. This is the part where I think we dismiss the validity validity of our pain, especially in the nonprofit sector, when we're often serving people who have much worse situations than we do. And so we're like, my pain doesn't matter. This is a way to say this is hard and give ourselves permission to be in struggle, especially around the things that are shaming to us. You know, we don't want to be in struggle. If I was a good mom, if I was a good wife, if I was a good human, I wouldn't have these feelings. But you do. So that first breath is. This is hard. Give yourself permission to be in struggle. And we know that. That the deep breathing helps regulate our nervous systems. The second breath is and this is the phrase. But you know what? I'm not alone. And this is reminding ourselves of our common humanity. It is normal and natural to struggle. And very often by the time we get to a third breath, tears will start coming with clients. The third breath is May I be kind to myself? Because so often we go into the judgment, the punishing, the forcing. And this is saying, May I be kind to myself? How about I treat myself? How I treat the other people that I love, you know? And so it's a really beautiful grounding technique when we're up against the standards of the world, which are just impossible to meet, the ones that we've internalized. And no matter how much work we do, they still creep up. You know, the store bought cookies versus the cookies. We know we've worked through this intellectually, and we've decided this isn't where I want to put my energy, but that trigger can still come up. So I love that practice. How do I help my kids not feel this way? Julie, what is it like these? This is hard. I'm not alone. May I be kind to myself? I know that my eight and a half year old could easily say these things to herself in these moments. Should we start teaching this? I think we should. So, um, I'll brag on my kids a little bit. You know, Gabe, um. He's eighteen. He started his own business. My daughter Madeline, um, just started a job as a nine one one operator, and she's an incredibly compassionate human being. And I, as a mom, was like, oh, like, I'm glad you're the other one on the end, and you're the person on the other end of the call when someone is having the worst moment of their life. But how are you going to not take it on? And she was over recently and she had a really, really hard call. And, you know, she was kind of breaking down. And I said, let's do this together. And I don't know if your kids are this way, but my kids are like, don't use your stuff on me. My my husband's the same one. He's like, don't you coach me. Don't you use your stuff on me? And but I think there was just a tender enough moment. And she was just like, I need some comfort that she was open to it. And we just we did. We did exactly what I just said. Okay, let's put our hands on our heart, take that deep breath in. And when you're imagining that deep breath in, you're actually kind of imagining your ribs expanding. And there's a trick I don't know if you know this one. If you do like an extra sniff on the top of that breath, it's a shudder. And it's what babies do when they're calming themselves down. You know, like a baby who's been crying for a while and they go, ah, you know, that's what we're doing with our bodies, with this breathing. And so, yeah, I just told her that. I said, okay, this is hard. Like give yourself permission to be in struggle, but I'm not alone like other people feel this way. Is that thinking we're alone? That's a shame, trigger. Thinking it's just me. I'm the only one that feels this way. And may I be kind to myself. And, um. Yeah, it was a beautiful moment, and I was really delighted that she let me walk her through it. And I think we can do that. We can walk our kids through it. So cool. Thank you for sharing. Wow. Yeah. So many high performing leaders, women especially, we kind of talked about how maybe we default to the wrong emotion and we want to label it, you know, mad or stressed or anger when ultimately maybe there's something a little bit deeper there to really identify the experience. One book that I absolutely love in order to be able to do this is The Untethered Soul, talks about how we are not our feelings. We are experiencing our feelings. Yes, yes. Beautiful. And yet it's a hard skill to develop, right? And it can change how we show up as leaders, especially in moments of conflict or pressure. So how do you help people navigate, like you referenced earlier, deciding what emotion they're actually feeling? You you hinted at this, and I'll just explicitly call it out. The language that we use when we talk about our emotions. I am sad versus I feel sad. Huge distinction, just like the distinction between shame and guilt. I am sad means I. That's my identity versus I feel sad. It takes it away from our identity to an experience that can be fleeting. So the interesting thing is, when you spend emotion or backup, when you spend energy running from emotion, it actually amplifies. But if you pause and I view this often in my coaching, my coaching training taught us to do this, where you actually ask people to stay in the emotion and they will spend so much time running from it like, nope, nope, nope, don't want to be here. And we say, okay, let's come back to that feeling. What's it feel like when we actually let ourselves feel the emotion? I think it's like seven seconds is how long it actually lasts. You know how many years you can run from an emotion because you don't want to feel it? It's remarkable. And then we can start to see it shift because we felt it. When we do the two word check in, um, in our group coaching. Oftentimes I'll do it again after and I'll see how we are are emotion. Words have shifted just over that ninety minutes. So it just kind of takes the power away from the emotion by shifting how we refer to it. I am versus I feel and then letting ourselves feel it. Mhm. So cool. I am going to implement that two word check in with the kids. That is so good. And it's something that they can grasp. And I know that at first they'll be like happy or mad. But to dig a little deeper, let that be okay for the first couple of times. But then to dig a little deeper, I really like that. I really like that. I love when they start to get really creative. Um, I wish I would have written some down that I love, but sometimes people will use phrases and I think I know exactly what you mean. Um, so we don't have to be limited to emotion words. It can be spicy. It can be, you know, it can be some version of an emotion word that just fits the mood of what you're feeling. And what often happens is we realize that seemingly opposite emotions can exist at the same time. So you can feel stuck and clear. How is that possible? But it's really interesting when we give ourselves permission to label and practice naming to that Seemingly conflicting emotions can exist at the same time. Mhm. That's cool. That's an extra layer I would say. Yeah. You reference that you work oftentimes with high performing women and more oftentimes they're not probably leadership positions. You probably have kids. So you are fully aware of the shame that so many of us feel from time to time. And yet it is so darn hard for some of us. And I'm raising my hand if you're watching us on our YouTube channel to step away from work. I know me personally as a high performer that I have maybe have less I can't say had, but have less of the shame or the thought of okay, if I step away for a day, it's all going to fall apart. We went this past summer for the first time. We went on a Disney cruise and I went into this thinking, oh my gosh. I was like twenty. Oh my gosh how is this going to go eighty percent. You know what? We have such a solid team. Our framework is really good. Our clients are going to be taken care of. But I was still twenty percent like oh my gosh, what's going to happen? Preparing for that worst. That's not me. That is the shame talking. That is like if you're going to go into internal family system talk, that is a five year old little girl sitting in her kindergarten classroom that's saying I have to do in order to feel love. You know, that type of label. And yet it's really hard. And so when we went on this Disney cruise, I prepped, I said, how much is internet going to be per day? Twenty six dollars? Absolutely not. I called us cellular. Um, they said, oh, it'll be this. Okay. And then what about since it's a cruise? Oh that's three that is three dollars for one minute of phone call or three. Don't come at me. US cellular, if these numbers are wrong. Or three dollars for three megabytes or something crazy. Then I thought, okay, nope, I'm fiscally responsible. I'm not paying that, Denise. It's going to be okay. And so I'll be honest, Julie, I on day two, I had to sit in a beach chair and cry. And it was from the overwhelming feeling of, I don't have to do it all. Yet I love getting to do it all with the mix of how long have I been operating at this state? I couldn't I, Jeremy and I talked through. I've never not worked in eight years. I mean, everywhere, right? And and I guess I don't even really consider work to be work. It is a I love the opportunities that we get to do through this business and other businesses that we have. It is truly a joy. But dang, that requires a lot. And there was a feeling of I am stepping out and taking a risk by not being present. Why do you think for so many of us that can relate to that? Why does rest feel so risky for people? And I ask you a question instead. As a fellow coach, I witnessed the outcomes. What was the outcome of being stranded on a cruise where you couldn't work? It was exactly what I and my family needed and it was wonderful. Like, now I'm like, okay, I, I want to integrate that feeling, that pause more because not only does it allow me to show up better for the kids, it allows us to connect even better. Yeah. So it's interesting because when we were telling your story, you were kind of saying, but I like my work, I love my work, and it's not taking anything from me. But then this situation forced you to completely set it down and there was a deeper connection engagement there. So when you think about the story your brain was making up before you went versus today. What do you know is true? I know to be true that our businesses run well with or without me, and that my family feels love. Dang. And you know how much more powerful your business is going to be with this new lens operating out of such a different mindset instead of operating out of fear? Yeah. Yep. And why? Why do we do that? Is it easy? I think it's because the stories our brains make up. So our brains are trying to create certainty when there is no certainty. So I actually love how Bernie talks about this. I spent years teaching her work, and she she retells the story really, really well when she talks about the story of rain makes up. So your your brain was making up a couple of stories and one was a little slippery story, like, oh, I love this. So this isn't even really work. You know, those are the stories that are kind of hard to sift out and then then debunk where no, actually trusting your team and the systems you built gives you better, deeper connection. And that that disconnection is, is good for your business. So the the brain makes up stories for certainty so that it can get a little dopamine release. Like, oh, now I know what's what's good and what's bad. And the, the trick is to, to be able to actually surface those narratives and then fact check them as to the question why? Why our brains do it? The closest answer I have is because we want certainty, because we feel safe with certainty. So, um, we make up these stories about what what's true and what's not true. And often they're based in fear, like you said. And that five year old version of yourself that thinks that her productivity is her worth all of those things. But there's a great opportunity when they come up to challenge them and then do what we just did, which is okay. What was the outcome? You know, that the universe conspired or God conspired to make sure that you had no access to work. It was going to cost you thirty six dollars a day or three dollars a minute. You weren't going to work. So what was the outcome? That I think that's a huge piece is like when you get to the end, looking back and saying, okay, what was what was really true? Mhm. Listeners, if you're not enticed and excited to work with Julie, you're gonna have to get in line because I most definitely am as well. Julie, this has been so fun. Before we part ways, this is my new favorite thing that we've been doing on this podcast is like a lightning round, kind of like your two word check in, which, okay, let's start that. Instead of using, we'll use some of the other questions I prepared. But like tell me right now two word check in. How are you feeling right now. Ah I would say Warm. And energized. Okay. Warm and energized. Those are good. Safe and sane. I almost, I almost said heard, but safe. My words feel safe with you without judgment. And I'm going to go with scene. I just feel like you have a very deep way of being able to see inside a person and pulling out the right information with simple questions, like you said at the very beginning, asking the right questions. So to benefit everybody else, they're now asking themselves, okay, two words that I feel. So do that as well. Julie, what is one small habit or ritual, if you will, that instantly helps you reset when you feel like your energy might be off a little bit. So we talked about the self-compassion break. That's one of them. So it says three steps, but one that I've been playing with recently I don't have a label for it. Literally shaking. It's like if you put music on and you shake and you move, you are there's something happening in your body where you're kind of releasing things. So that is a trick that I've been playing with recently. I've had to work some long, long days, and I'm not used to working for a project. And I'm like, movement and literal shaking is a way to just release things in your body. It makes me think of when Hudson gets hit by a baseball and we yell, shake it off! Shake it off! Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay, cool. Okay, so now you're going to fill in the blank. A courageous leader always. What? Taciturn. That's exactly using transparency. That's exactly what. Yeah. Well done. Okay. Last one. I don't have a coffee cup, but I do have an energy drink. If you had to create a leadership slogan or mantra, and that's not the right word. If you got to on a coffee mug. What would it say? I would actually borrow this one from Brene Brown. Clears can say that again, clear is kind awesome. Elaborate what that means to you. So so often we hold back from speaking the truth, from saying what's really going on because we don't want to hurt people. And so this clear as kind is actually a reframe that says, no, we can tell the truth. We can be clear, we can be direct. Because especially when we think about it, in leadership, people need feedback to grow. But very often we kind of withhold feedback around this idea that we're being nice. Well, it's not nice to withhold feedback that people need to grow. So I love clear as kind because it just kind of releases us from this idea that we need to sugarcoat things. I'm not. It's not saying be brass, be aggressive, be direct, but be clear. You know, if you're not happy, you have to say that if something is wrong, you have to say that. You know, tiptoeing around doesn't help anyone in this situation. So wise. Julie, what a pleasure. Oh my goodness. It has been our pleasure to get to learn from you. Julie again has her own consulting business. It's Julie Bull Consulting. We have her connection opportunities with all of you in the show. Notes, her LinkedIn, her website that has a. Oh, tell me about that, Julie. What can they. That little test that they can take, I took it. Yes. So it's called the Courageous Leadership Scorecard. It is a self reflection on five different domains. So self-trust is in there. Emotional agility is in there. I don't know if I can list them all off the top of my head. Uh, self-compassion. So how do you talk to yourself in those hard moments? Boundaries. You know, so all of those areas are in the scorecard and the value of doing the self-reflection is it's going to surface some thoughts for you, some awareness. And then the question that I asked, you can take advantage of the call afterwards if you want. Or one of the questions I will ask either way is what's one area you want to move the needle on? Because I don't want anyone to take that self-assessment and say, I have to change all of these things, because then it's overwhelming and you're not going to do anything. But if you decide you want to change, um, I think there's one that says, I say yes to opportunities. I say no when opportunities don't align with my needs, values or capacity. And that's often one where people are like, nope, I, I say yes too much and then I end up out of energy. So say that's the one you want to move the needle on. It feels really tangible. Okay, I'm just going to focus on this one thing. I'm going to say more no more often when it doesn't align with my needs, my capacity or my values. And then you're going to start to see you get some energy back. So you'll do your own self-assessment and you'll see what is an area that I definitely want to shift. And sometimes I tell people, if it's not important to you and you scored low, don't worry about it. Pick the one that is important to you. With that, listeners could not wrap it up any better. Connect with Julie and your life will improve. Thank you so much for listening and as a reminder, you can do hard things. Thank you for listening to the Working Moms Redefined podcast. It is not lost on me that you chose to spend time together. Thank you. Let's connect outside of this space on socials. We'd love for you to follow us on Instagram, Facebook LinkedIn, Pinterest. We've got it all to connect with you. If you feel as if someone in your life could be impacted by this message, feel free to share it. That is the biggest compliment as we part ways together. Remember, you can do hard things.
