Welcome to my brand new mini series - Living and Working Lighter.
This is Part 1!
Living and Working Lighter creates so much more spaciousness, ease and enjoyment in our lives and allows us to be less attached to the goings on at work.
Inside this first episode I’m sharing about how we can create a more clear distinction between work & home life.
I’ll be sharing some of my favourite ways to “decompress” at the end of the day.
Apply these decompressing techniques and you’ll find your body feels so much more relaxed at the end of the day.
You’ll have more energy & brain space too!
Dropping out of that worky, masculine energy and into a softer, more present feminine energy, fosters a deeper connection and intimacy in your relationships as well.
Stay tuned for the next episode + for your chance to receive a personalised voice note with coaching from me for free over on Instagram (for a limited time).
If you want to go deeper into all of this work, check out Elevate The Mastermind.
Over the course of 6 life changing months, you’ll completely change your relationship with work & learn how to advance your career in a way that feels really good to you and to your body.
Work With Me:
Visit my website: annabellematson.com
Social Media
Welcome to my brand new mini series - Living and Working Lighter.
This is Part 1!
Living and Working Lighter creates so much more spaciousness, ease and enjoyment in our lives and allows us to be less attached to the goings on at work.
Inside this first episode I’m sharing about how we can create a more clear distinction between work & home life.
I’ll be sharing some of my favourite ways to “decompress” at the end of the day.
Apply these decompressing techniques and you’ll find your body feels so much more relaxed at the end of the day.
You’ll have more energy & brain space too!
Dropping out of that worky, masculine energy and into a softer, more present feminine energy, fosters a deeper connection and intimacy in your relationships as well.
Stay tuned for the next episode + for your chance to receive a personalised voice note with coaching from me for free over on Instagram (for a limited time).
If you want to go deeper into all of this work, check out Elevate The Mastermind.
Over the course of 6 life changing months, you’ll completely change your relationship with work & learn how to advance your career in a way that feels really good to you and to your body.
Work With Me:
Visit my website: annabellematson.com
Social Media
Hi, welcome back to the podcast. It's Annabelle here. I am excited because I'm bringing you a new mini series on the podcast where I'm talking about how we can live and work lighter in a lighter way. So I'm going to be sharing a series of mini episodes with you over the next few days to help break this all down. So what I mean by living and working lighter is it means. We can feel calmer. We can feel more peaceful, more grounded, even when we're facing challenging situations or even if our work or our life is feeling like it's got a lot of demands, that we're able to access that feeling of groundedness, peace. And calmness, it means that we're less attached to our successes and failures at work. It means we can come home at night and feel as though our bodies are lighter and more relaxed. Working and living lighter means that we have more brain space. So we aren't always thinking about work. We aren't always thinking about all the things that need to be done, or all of the things in the future. We can hold what needs to be done more lightly. And this creates so much more space. For the things that really matter most to us in our lives to connect with the people that we love in a deeper way. And it means we have energy to be able to do things outside of work. So in this mini series, I'm going to be taking you through some really practical tips to be able to make all of this possible for you. So that you can work and live from a lighter place. This is going to be a three part series. And in the third part of the series, there's going to be a really exciting thing that I'm going to be doing. So there's going to be an opportunity for you to receive personalized feedback from me via a voice note on inside my private messages and on Instagram or Facebook. So there's going to be a short exercise from the second episode of the series. And. You're going to be able to reach out to me and tell me which one of the things that I share with you inside this episode applies to you. And then I'm going to drop you a personalized voice note with some coaching to help you move through it. And it's totally for free. So there's going to be a limited time, there'll be a time limit on that personalized voice note offer. So make sure that you follow along this week. And keep an eye out for that because I'm really looking forward to kind of connecting with you in that personalized way. So, if you enjoy this mini series, please share it with a friend. This can also be something really great to share with a work colleague that you get on well with. Some of the stuff that we'll be sharing can be great things for you to do alongside of them. Maybe even setting up a bit of a challenge between the two of you. Or a group of you about how you can be applying some of this stuff so that you can experience all of these beautiful benefits that come from working and living in a lighter way. Before we jump into the episode, I want to also invite you to check out Elevate the Mastermind. This is my intimate group coaching program for professional women and women in business, leaders and aspiring leaders. It's open for enrollment and we start on the 29th of February. So really soon across six life changing months, we're going to expand and go deeply into this concept of working light. And you're going to learn how to create a more sustainable, healthy relationship with work. Balanced relationship with work that leaves space for more living and more enjoying of your life. You're going to learn how to nurture your nervous system. So things that currently feel really challenging or triggering for you and your work will impact you much less or not even at all. So you're going to learn how to dial down those stress responses and experience work in such a different way. You'll learn how to rest in a deeper sense of belief and really feel more and more certain about yourself. Self and your skills. And as a result, you're gonna see yourself stepping into new opportunities and advancing your career in a whole new way, a way that feels lighter and easier on your body and mind. So we start on the 29th, 9th of February. I'd love for you to join us if it feels like a fit in the link for all of the information about the program is in the description of this episode. Okay, let's get into the first episode of this mini series. So one of the first things that I want to talk to you about is it's really unrealistic to assume that we would go from being all on during our working day. To then being all off and being completely rested, completely present, completely chilled out. That's not realistic. And it's kind of an unfair standard to hold ourselves to, to think that we can go from that really high functioning place. Doing, doing, doing, going, going, going, meeting all these deadlines, and then to feel like we could just instantly drop into feeling more present. So what I want you to think about this instead is think about it as a staircase. Think about where you are often, most often. When you finish the workday, like how you actually feel in your body at the end of a workday for a lot of people, their nervous system is overactivated. So it's kind of like a buzziness, a raciness, attention, a tightness in their body. And so you want to see that as you at the stop, the top of the staircase. Where you want to be, which is this working and living lighter place, it's that grounded place. It's that feeling of being calm, being really present, being really in your body. You want to see that as the bottom of the staircase, but you're starting at the end of the day at the top of the staircase. So what we actually need to do is we need to do some things that take us down the steps. To get to the bottom of the step staircase. We're not expecting that we're going to jump from the top to the bottom in one go. We need to create the space and be intentional with our time and do intentional things that support us to take those steps down. Step by step by step so that we eventually. Reach that beautiful, rested, calm, grounded place at the bottom of the staircase. And what we need to do is give ourselves intentional time to create that mental distinction between work and home life. We need to be able to do intentional things that help us close those open loops in our mind so that we don't have to keep thinking about work and all the things that need to be done throughout the day. If we don't do this, what often happens? So what happens is we come off the back of a really busy day where there have been a lot of demands, a lot of things on, we've had to think a lot, we've been up in our mind a lot. If we don't do anything about that to process that, we will try to buffer that stress in other ways and most often in ways that don't serve us. So have you ever found that you come off the back of a day That's felt really busy, really full on, it's been really demanding, and you find that you're just scrolling on your phone non stop. Or maybe you go straight into housework and you like manically try and race around the house and get a whole lot of stuff done. Maybe you notice that you're physically around home but mentally you're elsewhere, you're overthinking about all of the stuff that happened in the day, you might be replaying conversations in your mind that you had with people and thinking about what you could have said better. All of these things are an indication of a mind and a nervous system that is over activated. That is overworked and is looking to find some stability, but we're trying to buffer that over activation. Through these things that don't work, work for us, like the scrolling, like the overthinking, like the kind of mannequin stuff around the house. So what we want to do is we want to be able to process that stress and decompress from the day in a way that serves us much better. And here's the reason why this is important. I think a lot of the women that I work with and I suspect. If you're here, you'll relate to this as well, is that you can, you know, you're working at a high level during the day. There are a lot of demands on your time and your energy during the day. You've got a lot on the go with maybe work responsibilities and home life responsibilities. And a lot of these things, these roles and responsibilities require us to spend a degree of time in our masculine energy. So we need to be in our masculine energy to be able to drive things forward and make things happen during the working day. But here's the issue. What I find for most of us is that we don't know how to come out of that energy. So. A lot of ambitious women who are working at a fast pace in the masculine energy during the day to get things done, but then they come home and they engage in their relationships from this worky masculine energy and. That becomes a problem because it becomes a real block in our intimacy, in our relationships with people at home. Whether that be like your husband, partner, it could be with your children. Continuing, like being in this continuous state of masculine energy makes it really hard to soften and to be present and to connect when we get home at night. So And then we often end up taking on, like, we carry with us that masculine energy from during the day and so we end up. And I think it's really important for us to understand that we're not seeing them step up, bringing that home. So we feel like we're always the ones that have to get things done, that we take on more household responsibilities than we need to, or we should, should do. We feel frustrated, resentful at our partner because we're not seeing them step up. But a lot of the time, it's because there isn't space for them to step up because we're in this masculine energy. There isn't the space for them to step up and take the charge and take the lead. Because we're in it. We're doing it for them. So this is why decompressing is so important. It's so important for you first and foremost because of what a big difference it makes and how you feel in your body at the end of the day. It helps you close those open loops, helps you come home and let home be like a restful place, a sanctuary for your body. And your mind and your nervous system to really restore after a busy day. But decompressing also allows us to come out of that worky masculine energy and soften. into our feminine energy. And that is the place where we can really truly connect with people at home, where we can, it fosters a much deeper sense of intimacy in our relationships. So, everything just works better when we know how to create that balance. We know we can be in our masculine for a portion of the day, but we know how to come out of it and soften. So let's actually talk practically about how we do this. If you find your mind gets really busy thinking all of the time, so let's say you come to the end of the day, and then you are about to finish up your day, and you just find that you, you get in the car, you come home, and your mind is just constantly thinking about all of the stuff that happened during the day, and all the things that need to happen the next day. What I would really invite you to do is to, before you actually leave work and finish up work, is to give yourself, like, don't work to the very last minute. Give yourself, like, 10 minutes at the end of the day to be able to write a list out of all of the things that your mind is saying, this is incomplete, or these are all the things that I need to remember, these are all the things that I need to do. Give yourself a little bit of space, 5 or 10 minutes at the end of the day, to write those down and get them on a piece of paper. That you leave at work. Then you don't have to keep thinking about these things. Your mind doesn't have to keep you cycling around in them so that you remember them. You actually give them a space to go to, which is on the piece of paper, and then you can leave that at work. So that can be really helpful. Let's think about your drive home. What I love about practices around self care is actually combining them with things that we're already doing. So this is great for people who are short on time. So let's say you drive home or you you, you're on a commute in some way. So you can adapt this depending on how you come home from work at night, but you'll drive home. Your commute can be a really great time. For decompressing, but it's also typically a time where we reach for more stimulation because we're reaching for more of what's familiar. We're feeling overstimulated from the day, and then we tend to get in the car and reach for more things that are stimulating to us. So this can often be a time where I find that people say that they pick up the phone and like call people or they are checking their emails at the lights or they're listening to music that's quite loud. Listening to a podcast all of that stuff is kind of again feeding that mental stimulation So I think you've probably done enough thinking and enough talking during the day So what I want you to think about is giving your mind and body a much needed break on your commute and your drive home So use this time intentionally you're driving home. You're going to be doing it anyway, so use this time intentionally I love to I don't actually have a drive home because I work from home But something that I love to offer clients and something that I love to do if I'm driving back from somewhere and need to decompress is put on soft music. I love the Spotify playlist Peaceful Meditation. It doesn't have any lyrics. It's just really soft gentle music that instantly feels very calming. So, put on some soft music, something without lyrics. I think putting essential oils on or using essential oils when you get in the car can also be really grounding. So this could be essentially like there's often car diffusers that you can buy that you can actually put into your car, or just putting a couple of drops of essential oils on your palms, rubbing them together, taking like 10 deep breaths the minute you get into the car. Lavender is a great essential oil. Cedarwood is another lovely grounding oil. Choose something that feels really relaxing for you. Essential oils can be an amazing little tool there. So you're in the car, you've got your soft music playing, maybe you've got some essential oils diffusing. Can you start to feel how your nervous system Can begin to unwind and relax you're driving the car. I recommend like running your hand over the steering wheel and really leading that ground you and help you kind of come into your body. If you notice it's a time you think a lot, hold onto the steering wheel, run your hands around the steering wheel, notice how it feels having your hand. Around it. What's the texture? What's the feeling like? It's kind of using your senses to be able to come back into your body. It's gonna really help. Maybe you set yourself a goal that on my drive home, I'm gonna breathe really deeply for 15 breaths. So I get in the car and the first thing I do as I start driving is I count down from 15. And I do 15 really deep breaths. So we're not saying breathe deeply for 5 minutes. 15 deep breaths will only take you a minute or two. And there's been some amazing studies that have been done that actually confirm that 15 deep breaths is enough to bring us back into parasympathetic nervous system. That lovely rest and restore nervous system. So 15 feels manageable. You probably feel so good that you want to keep going. You want to keep doing some more breathing. But that can be a great starting point. So can you see how this is no extra time? We're using the time of your commute. Something you're already doing. But you're using it intentionally. If you work from home, you could think about like a similar routine, but slightly different since you're not in your car. Maybe you go for a short walk around the block. You actually intentionally close your laptop and close the door. So I have an office in our home, so I I always put my lap, close my laptop and I close the door. I don't have it open so that I can really feel that distinction between, okay, work is done. It's now home time. Maybe you have a shower to literally wash the day off. You get changed into clothes that feel like softer. Some essential oils like we shared earlier, taking some deep breaths. I know for me, when I as an extra tip for any mums that are listening, I've become a mum in the last 14 months. I've got a wee girl and I find that the days that I'm working, when I go and pick her up from her daycare, I can't go straight from working to straight in the car to picking her up. I need to make sure that I've allocated a small amount of time And sometimes it's only, I've only got 10 minutes before I go and pick her up to do some of these things so that by the time I get to her, I've come out of that really kind of work energy and I've been able to kind of soften into that more kind of grounded present energy for her. And I find that makes. Parenting is so much easier. So, you know, when she comes home, she's often tired, and there might be big emotions that are coming up. It makes it so much easier to deal with those things when we're in that more grounded state. So really think about that. If you're picking up kids from school or from daycare, how could you just give yourself that small amount of time to be able to do some of these things? To soften, to relax, to ground your body because it just makes it all so much easier. So we've talked about your commute, we've talked about soft music, breathing, essential oils, using your senses, maybe going for a gentle walk if you work from home. Having a shower, getting changed. If you don't have children, or maybe your kids are older, so you've got more time when you come home, then here are some more ideas of things that you could do to decompress from the day. So, as I said, have a shower, wash the day off, get into clothes that feel more soft and more comfortable. Things that make you more, make you feel more feminine. Maybe you make a commitment to yourself that before you get into doing dinner and doing chores around the home, that you give yourself an extra 20 minutes, or however long feels good to you, just to take a breath, to decompress even more deeply. So, Lying on your back with your legs up the wall. I love that. It's like a yoga pose. It's so relaxing to the nervous system. Maybe you go out for a dental walk. It can also be really important, I think, to process some of what has happened during the day as well. So, This can be helpful to use at any point at the end of the day, maybe even before you go to bed, if you find that that's a time when your mind starts spinning a lot. Maybe there's been some stuff that's happened during the day that's really triggered you, that you need to get out of your head so you don't keep recycling it through your mind. So I would recommend a technique that I call release writing. So you get a piece of paper out and you just literally write out all your thoughts and feelings and be really honest about it. Even if you were like writing stuff that you'd never want anyone else to read, just rip it up afterwards or burn it afterwards, but get a paper, piece of paper out and write out all your thoughts and feelings about the things that have come up during the day. Get it out of your mind and onto the piece of paper, because the reason why it's. Those thoughts keep circulating through your mind is that they're looking for a way to be released. They want to come out. So give them that release. Give them that outlet, that way to come out of your mind and onto the piece of paper. So I hope these decompressing techniques have been helpful for you. This is so important, I think, for us to, to learn how to decompress so we take off that armour from the day. The armour that we can come home with can really harden us. And when we're in that hardened state, it can feel really hard to connect, to drop down into that level of presence that our children often ask us to be in. It can be hard for us to connect deeply with. A partner, a husband, whoever that might be. So, all of this work is just going to support you to have a better distinction between work life and home life and really give you much more space in your life, much more mental space, so that work doesn't feel like it's taking over your whole life, that you physically leave work but you come home and mentally and think about it for the rest of the evening. Taking the time to implement some of these intentional decompressing techniques, makes I'm going to help you create that clearer distinction to close some of those mental loops and be able to just find rest and be able to restore when you come home because that's really what home should be. It should be a place where our nervous system can take like a deep exhale and be able to. To restore and kind of regather itself, regulate itself. We've got to be able to give ourselves opportunities to feel that way. So this is an important technique to be able to live and work in a lighter way. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend or colleague. As I said earlier, maybe you want to make a wee challenge out of this for the week. And you kind of set yourselves a goal that you're going to implement a couple of these things. Each night for a whole week and see how you feel come Friday. I can guarantee you by the time you get to the end of the week, you're going to have so much more energy. You're going to feel a lot more rested. So share this with someone who you feel would benefit from it also. And come back and check out the next episode of this mini series to keep an eye out for the opportunity to get personalized coaching from me via a voice note on Instagram or Facebook. There's going to be a limited time available for that where I'm going to be offering some personalized coaching for you for free. And if you. Recognize yourself in a lot of what I've been talking about. If you would love to be able to work in a lighter way, then do check out Elevate the Mastermind, my six month intimate group coaching program for professional women, women in business, leaders, and aspiring leaders. This is a six month program that really will completely change your life. It's going to change the way you interact with work. It's going to change the way you experience challenges at work. So things that used to feel Really stressful that would cause you to overthink a lot that would make you feel really tense. And overwhelmed. All of those things are going to feel so much lighter and easier for you through the techniques that I teach you. It's going to be a way, really, a lot of what we talk about in the mastermind is not only about changing your relationship with work being able to. Have a healthier, more sustainable, more balanced approach with work, but it also touches so many other aspects of your life. So what we talk about in the mastermind is not only going to help you at work and experience that in a much lighter and easier way, but it's going to really improve your relationships. Your friendships it's going to support you so much in terms of how you feel within yourself. So it's not really a part of your life that this work won't touch, even though it's a, it's a program that's focused on, on working in your career. It's going to help you in so many other areas as well. So if this is a year where you've kind of come in thinking. I want this to be different. I don't want to feel burnt out this year. I don't want work to take over my whole life. I want to be able to do this differently. I want to find a way where I can still have ambition. I can still achieve amazing things, but how do I do this in a way that feels easier on me, easier on my mind and body? This is what we do inside the mastermind. It's a place to be to, to learn how to advance your career in a whole new way. And you're going to learn how to. We start on the 29th we begin the link for all of the information about the mastermind is in the description of this episode. And if you have any questions, if you want to book a time to have a chat with me about it and whether it's right for you, then you can do that on that page as well. So go and check out the information about the program, if that's of interest, and I look forward to connecting with you in part two of this mini series very soon.