Episode 253: 5 Things I’ve Learned Since Last Season

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.Dr. Melissa Smith 0:00
Welcome back to the podcast, Pursue What Matters. I’m so excited to share with you five things that I’ve learned since last season.

Dr. Melissa Smith 0:07
Hi, I’m Dr Melissa Smith, welcome to the Pursue What Matters podcast where we focus on what it takes to thrive in love and work. Wow. I hope you’ve had a great summer. I have taken a break from podcasting, but definitely have not taken a break from life and work and balancing love, all the things that we focus on here on the podcast, and I am excited to be back with you for another season. So as you may recall, I’ve kind of changed the format of the podcast, so we’re gonna do some focus seasons, and hopefully that hopefully those podcasts are really meaningful for you. And I wanted to kick off this newest season by sharing with you some of my reflections about what I’ve learned in the past few months, since the last podcast, and I’m going to share five things, I’ve learned a lot more than five things, but we want to, we want to be respectful of your time, and I hope that as you listen to you know what I share, that first of all, it will be useful for you, that it can also be an invitation for you to reflect on your most recent season, whether that’s been this summer, whether that’s been the past six months, but for but for you to really take an opportunity to reflect on your life. So that is a game changer. We know that really clearly from the research that it’s not just enough to live life, right? There is real value in reflecting on our life, to take a look at the path we’ve been on, to see what we’ve learned, what’s been hard, What lessons do we still need to learn? Because we can be pretty stubborn, and we can keep making the same mistakes if we don’t enlist the power of reflection.

Dr. Melissa Smith 2:23
And so today, I want to share with you five things that I’ve learned since the last season of the podcast, and again, I hope they’re helpful for you. So of course, every week with the podcast, our goal is to help you pursue what matters by strengthening your confidence to lead in whatever area of your life that is important to you. So it could be a formal leadership role at work, it could be in your home, it could be in your community, so that the way you lead is really up to you, but my goal is to help you lead with clarity. Knowing what matters makes a huge difference. Leading with curiosity, right? This is all about reflection, learning to get curious about our experience, learning to get curious about the experience of others, and then, of course, leading and building a community, because we never get far alone, right? We do so much better with community. We are social animals. We need social connection. And there’s a real art and skill to building strong relationships, building a strong team, right? Specifically, if we think about work, there’s a real art to that, and it’s one of the areas that leaders really struggle with. And so that’s really my goal with the podcast.

Dr. Melissa Smith 3:42
And so, of course, today I want to share with you some of the lessons that I’ve learned since the last season. Lesson number one, there will always be ups and downs, but consistency matters. So this is not anything you need me to tell you, but life is full of ups and downs. There will be good times, there will be bad times, there will be uncertainty around every single corner. And I think you know one of the things that one of the ways that I have approached life in the past, is having a belief that it was my job to get rid of all the ups and downs. And you know how many of you have kind of fallen for this belief that you know, once these challenges are out of the way, or once the you know, that path is smoothed out, then everything will be okay. And of course, that is not true. And I really learned that in more powerful ways, I would say in the past few months that life is always going to throw you curveballs. There will always be ups and downs, and that’s not really the marker of a good life or a meaningful life, but more important than any of that. Is consistency. Consistency matters. You cannot control all the ups and downs in life, but you can manage how you manage yourself. Can you be consistent with yourself? Can you be consistent with self care? Can you be consistent in managing distress so that you can take those ups and downs head on without getting lost in the storm of it. So that’s been a really meaningful lesson for me this year. You know, over the past few years, I’ve had a pretty significant stressor that I’ve been dealing with, and I would say probably for, honestly, probably for the first, you know, year and a half or two years, I was just like, I need this to go away. Like I need this problem to stop. And of course, you know, I can, I can have a lot of empathy for myself, because when any of us are in in that situation, that’s a natural, normal human response. I just want the problem to disappear. But you know, my desire for that problem to disappear, it didn’t do anything to make the problem disappear. In fact, it just became more painful when it’s like, every day, yep, that problem’s still here. And it kind of moved me to a place of feeling a bit helpless. But once I, you know, learned again, because I’ve learned this many times in my life, is that, you know, there are going to be the ups and downs, but what can I do to ground myself in good self care? What can I do to have a growth mindset, to be resilient, that consistency matters. It makes all of the difference. And so that’s the first lesson that I’ve learned that I want to share with you. Okay, so now let’s move to the second lesson. So the second lesson is to slow down, really, it’s that important. So I’ve talked about slowing down before, and I would say in recent years, I’ve gotten a lot better at slowing down, but this is a message that for many hard charging leaders, right? You’re busy, you’ve got a lot of responsibility, both at home and at work, the message to slow down seems like the last thing you can do, but here’s what I’ve learned about the power of slowing down in the past few months, slowing down helps to connect me to what’s important and without that, without that ability to slow down and really focus on what’s important, it’s so easy to get lost in the whirlwind of doing, doing, doing, right. We get really reactive. We feel like maybe we just need to do everything, or we have poor decision making about, you know, the choices we’re making about how we spend our time and our energy. And so if you’re not careful, you can move into just this frenetic pace of doing without really having clarity about first of all, why am I doing this? Why does it matter? Is this the best use of my time? Is this really going to move the ball forward? Is it going to move me forward on my goals? Is it going to move the organization, move forward on their goals? Is it going to move the team forward?

Dr. Melissa Smith 8:34
And so slowing down has really helped me to to to get clear about focus and to also hold on to that focus, to remind myself why I’m, you know, making specific choices rather than other ones. Another benefit that I have found around slowing down is it has profoundly helped my sense of stress management, right? So stress is not a problem. I talk about that all the time. Stress is a feature, not a bug, of life. If you are living a meaningful life, you will have stress, and it’s not necessarily a problem. The key when it comes to stress is really in how we respond to it, right? Do we see it as a problem? Because the minute, the minute we see stress as a problem, it has a more negative impact on our body and our soul, so physical and mental health, it is powerful in that way. But when we think about, you know, the stressors that we all have, we all have things that are challenging, whether it’s work, whether it’s home, whether it’s relationships, but slowing down helps our nervous system to reset. Slowing down helps us to integrate the. Stressors that we’re dealing with, the challenges that we’re dealing with, and gain some perspective to really help our bodies to, you know, be up to the task, to remind our bodies, you know when, when we need to be in fight mode and when we need to be in reflection mode. Then let me tell you, there’s, it’s very rare for us at this point in in the history of the world, it’s very rare for us to need to be in fight or flight, and yet, too many of us are in fight or flight all the time. And if you think about that nervous system response of fight or flight, it is a speeding up of everything. It’s a speeding up of thinking, although the thinking becomes less effective, it’s a speeding up of heart rate. It’s a speeding up of everything within the body. So we really get big surges of adrenaline and cortisol, right? So we think about the stress hormones, and that’s helpful when we need to flee, but it’s not helpful for making grounded decisions. It’s not helpful for for maintaining good health in our bodies. And so slowing down, what I have noticed is really helped me to have clarity about what matters, and it’s helped me to really reset my nervous system. And so what is that slowing down look like? Well, sometimes it just means more unscheduled time, right?

Dr. Melissa Smith 11:27
So I used to be one who scheduled every minute, and I thought, I really thought that that’s what I needed to do to get everything done, to be successful, to manage home and life. And I look back at all the years that I was doing, and honestly, it just kind of breaks my heart, because it wasn’t necessary. And not only was it not necessary, it was undermining, it was undermining to my health, it was undermining to my relationships, it was undermining, honestly, to my success at work. And so one of the ways that’s that I slow down at this time is I schedule unscheduled time, right? So that sounds kind of paradoxical, but I make sure, as I take a look at my calendar, that I have unscheduled time throughout the week. Now, some weeks are busier than others, right? But the important thing is that you’re intentional about having some downtime. So whether that is at the end of all, you know, maybe a long work day, it’s like there’s not much on the calendar. I don’t need to run from one thing to the next. I can, you know, I can slow it down. And that doesn’t mean I’m not doing anything, but it means I’m able to connect with others. I’m able to connect with myself and really pay attention to what would be helpful. You know, sometimes that means looking, going on a walk, sometimes that means writing, but knowing that I can choose, knowing that I don’t have to run from one thing to the next can make a big difference. Related to this, with slowing down, one of the other things that I’ve tried really hard to prioritize in the past few months. I’m not great at it all the time, but I notice when I do it, it makes a big difference, and that is, I put more of a buffer in between appointments or obligations.

Dr. Melissa Smith 13:24
So, for example, if I am leaving work to go to an appointment, you know, in the past, and this is, you know, this is recent past, past, I would work right up to the minute that I knew, like, if I don’t walk out this store, I’m going to be late for the appointment, right? And what that did, so write that. And that’s kind of that old mentality is like, work, work, work every minute to make the most of your time. But what that did I notice is it really set my nervous system up for a fight or flight response, because it was putting me in a time bind. And so then, you know, I’m driving to my appointment, I’m feeling rushed. You know, I don’t have the freedom to really chill in traffic. And you know, being on the road is not a recipe for rest and relaxation. And so I would get to my next appointment and I’d be flustered or I’d be stressed, and not that I, you know, felt totally burdened by this. But what I really noticed is physiologically, my body was in fight or flight. And so by simply, you know, having some self control and putting away my things 10 minutes earlier, right?

Dr. Melissa Smith 14:40
So giving myself an extra 10 minutes beyond what it takes, you know, to get to the next appointment has it’s, it’s made all the difference. Made all the difference in terms of arriving, being relaxed, not harried, not stressed out. And so that’s one of the other ways that I. Have slowed down. So another way that I slow down, I’m going to talk about this a little bit more with one of the other lessons is spending more time in nature. When we spend time in nature, we naturally pick up the rhythms of nature, and these are our original rhythms, whether that is, you know, listening to the breeze through the trees, whether that’s watching water flow right, like nature has a rhythm. And the research is really, really fascinating in this area, that as people spend more time in nature, their heart rate kind of resets to the rhythms of nature, and we naturally just kind of start to slow down. So it’s pretty cool. So that’s another thing that I’ve done, is spent more time in nature. And then the other thing that I have done that’s been really important, I’ve talked about, I talked about this last season, I’ll probably talk about it more this season, is I really have used regulating resources to help with nervous system regulation in my body, right? So it helps with everything. So, you know, the the one that I use most often is just slowing down my breathing, becoming aware of my breathing and recognizing like, Okay, I have time for a few deep breaths, and that literally slows our body down, but it also helps to clear our mind so that we can again have some focus and be intentional about what you know, what we may or may not choose to do next. And so that’s been another lesson that I have learned this year.

Dr. Melissa Smith 16:34
Okay, so now let’s head to the third lesson, which has been for me, right? And this is something I would say, right? Like, I can look at my life and see threads of this throughout my life, but one of the things I’ve really learned in a deeper way in the past few months is to take the path of responsibility. This is the path of purpose. This is the path of meaning. This is the path of connection. And I can think about so many experiences in the past few months, where my choices, years ago, even decades ago, around taking responsibility and not being not being afraid to shoulder responsibilities, even when there was uncertainty, even when I wasn’t sure that I could see it through, because that’s true for all of us. But when I have made those choices, they have paid the most meaningful dividends. And you know, I had some some some really beautiful experiences with that in the past few months, where my decision to to choose the path of responsibility has brought deep meaning and purpose into my life. And I’m just so grateful for that. And so, you know what? What does this mean, practically? And I would say, you know, we live in a society at this point where we are really taught to shun responsibility. The message that we often receive is, don’t do anything that might be hard for you. Don’t do anything that’s going to stress you out. Don’t do anything that’s going to put you outside of your comfort zone, you know it’s we really live in a self obsessed society where it’s just about our feelings, it’s just about vibes, right?

Dr. Melissa Smith 18:30
Oh boy we’ve really, we’ve forgotten this value that has been the foundation of our society, which is responsibility matters that you are not an island, that what you do impacts others, either for good or for bad, and choosing the path of responsibility really helps to not only strengthen you and help you to reach your potential, but you by that route, you have the chance to make a meaningful difference for others. So, you know, if we think about that with life, with work, right, take on projects. Be the one to volunteer. You will learn valuable lessons, right? And you might develop skills and hidden talents that you didn’t know, that you possessed. If we think about that in terms of relationships, right? We want to take the path of responsibility, and I know, especially in our most important relationships. So we think about our marriages, our partners, what I would say to you, and I can say that I have, I have been doing this, and it’s made a big positive difference is look for your part, right? When it comes to a long, lasting relationship, right? Our most intimate relationships, everyone has a part. There is no there is no villain or victim, because you. Just are in such close proximity. You You know your decisions are not your own. You need to be making decisions together, and you know whether it is a grumble of you know about an argument or something bigger in the relationship. Look for your part. Now that is not to say that you know we are we’re contributing or enabling others to not take responsibility for their part, like absolutely not. But your willingness to look for your part in a concern, in a problem, in a misunderstanding, is that it, first of all, will move you to humility, and that is so incredibly important when it comes to relationships, it will also lower your resentment, because the the best recipe for resentment is blaming someone else and feeling wronged, right. But when you can approach a situation with humility to say, Gosh, I’m, you know, like, I’m sure I did something here, or, you know, whether that was to exacerbate the situation, or, you know, to activate the other person. When you can look for your part, it really lowers a tendency towards resentment. It also increases your gratitude. Because this is what I can see like, as I have really looked for my part, I’m like, Man, I am. I am lucky that these people stick around because I, you know, like, I can be kind of difficult at times. And so it really does move you to gratitude of just like, gosh, I’m so grateful for these relationships, and I’m grateful for their patience with me. And, you know, I’m grateful for my patients, with my loved ones, but the net effect of all of that, when you look for your part in a relationship concern, or, you know, maybe it’s maybe there’s not even a problem, but it’s like it’s something we want to change or shift, focus on looking for your part will translate into stronger relationships, and that like, it just like there’s no way that that can’t happen in a relationship. Because, you know, our society teaches us to be selfish, and what is required for strong relationships a whole lot of selflessness. And so when we can look for our part, when we can look to help the other. We really do have exponentially better relationships, and so in every area of your life, take the path of responsibility.

Dr. Melissa Smith 22:33
So that’s another thing that I have learned and has been reconfirmed to me in this past season. So now let’s move to the fourth lesson. So the fourth lesson that I have really learned and taken to heart in the past few months has been to, and this is kind of related to the first one, but it’s it’s to stop trying to get rid of challenges, right? There will always be problems in life, but instead change how you respond to them, right? So, just like I talked about consistency with the first lesson here, we really want to focus on where we have power, and that is in how we respond to the challenges we face. And first of all, right, the very first opportunity that we have when it comes to looking at challenges in life is, do we see our challenges as problems? So if you identify the challenges you’re facing, the things you’re going through, as a problem, that that act right there really makes it more likely that you’re not going to learn lessons from this issue. But if you can look at it as a challenge, as an opportunity. And I know that that sounds very cliche, but it’s cliche for a reason, because mindset makes a huge difference, right? Of course, we have all of the great research from Carol Dweck and others on the power of mindset. So having a growth mindset. So whatever the stressor may be, whatever the challenge may be, seeing it as a vehicle for your growth, seeing it as a vehicle for you, becoming the person you would like to be, a vehicle for you reaching your potential. Well, when you can do that right, the challenge is still the challenge right. The nature of the work has not shifted, but your ability right and your willingness, which is really important, your willingness to take on that challenge, shifts everything. And you develop the ability along the way. Right? None of us, when we face a challenge, have every skill and characteristic that we need to be successful in facing that challenge, but it is the willingness to take the first step. It is the willingness to say, here I go, and to have a good attitude, to ask for help, to just keep. Keep moving, that makes all the difference. And this really lends a lot of perspective to life. And again, it’s not that the hard things become less hard, but we develop perspective about what’s hard. We develop meaning and purpose and gratitude, again, for the opportunity to learn the lessons. And what I would say for me is, you know, this approach to life is also deeply rooted in my faith. And you know, if we look through our Christendom, right, we have a history of peoples facing major challenges, and it is in facing the challenges that they learn the lessons from God that they they become who they need to be, right? And, you know, there are so many good examples, but if we look at the faith tradition, one of the most powerful examples is Moses, right? He, he was a pretty simple man, and yet, he was asked to do a great thing, and he definitely did not, did not possess everything he needed to be successful, but he was willing. And so, you know, just like him, like we all, have opportunities to grow and develop and to be of good use in life. And so that willingness to respond to challenges with optimism, with hope, with faith, can really make all of the difference. And so that’s been another lesson that I’ve learned this year.

Dr. Melissa Smith 26:37
So now let’s move to the fifth lesson. I’ll probably talk a little bit more about this, maybe in one of the other episodes, but it is to do hard things out in nature. So I already talked a little bit about nature. But you know, as humans, we were designed to live and interact with nature. So much of the life that we live now with all of our creature comforts, and don’t get me wrong, I really like them, but they are removing us artificially from nature, and we as humans are designed for nature and so doing hard things out in nature. What I mean by this, first of all, and primarily, is with your body, right? Like the human body has so much potential, and yet very few of us ever really even see a hint of that potential. And so one of the things I was able to do in the past few months was prepare for a very big physical challenge out in nature. And so there was the event itself, which lasted about two weeks, but I had months and months of preparing. And what I would say is this changed me fundamentally. And again, I’ll talk more about this, maybe in another podcast, but I learned that I could do more than I thought I could do. I learned that that upper limit that I sometimes put on myself is really artificial. I learned that there is peace in nature. I’ve known that for a long time, but I I learned that in a more, in a in a deeper way, right, like in my bones and so, you know, as humans, we are physical beings.

Dr. Melissa Smith 28:24
We are meant to to to fully engage in life and in nature. And so if you find yourself mostly sitting at a computer, mostly using your head, not really using your body, I would invite you to find a way to do hard things out in nature. And your hard thing might be different from from another listener’s hard thing that it that matters less so than really stepping up and pushing yourself. And what you know, the last thing I’ll say about this is that willingness to do that translates into lessons in every single area of your life, and I’m still really collecting some of the lessons, but it’s pretty powerful. So there you go. There are five lessons that I’ve learned since last season. I sure hope that they’re helpful for you, and mostly I hope that this will be an invitation for you to reflect on, you know, the past few months in your own life, to reflect on, what have I learned? What do I still need to learn? What do I take from these, these past few months that can, that can help me on the path forward? There’s really, there’s real power in that sort of reflection and being intentional about our lives. So I hope it can be helpful for you. Head on over to my website to check out the show notes with the resources for this episode at www.drmelissasmith.com/253-fivethingsivelearned. and that’s just all as one word. So again, that’s www.drmelissasmith.com/253-fivethingsivelearned. I certainly hope that you will connect with me on social media. I’m on Instagram at Dr Melissa Smith, I’ve always got content related to the podcast, and I’d love to interact with you there. In the meantime, I’m Dr Melissa Smith, remember love and work, work and love. That’s all there is until next time, take good care. You.

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