270: Self-Care for High Achievers

Episode Transcript

Erin Aquin  0:01  
Welcome to the Superabound podcast with master coaches Erin Aquin and Steve Haase, where business owners like you learn tools to help you clear up static and overcome challenges. You are listening to Episode 270 self care for high achievers, okay, we have such a good one just in time for probably one of the busiest weeks of the year for many of our listeners. If you're a high achiever, I know what a challenge self care can be for you. I know that when you are taking care of yourself that sometimes maybe you're getting a little bit perfectionistic about it. And when you're not, maybe you're feeling shameful about it. My guest today is Johann Boulter, an incredible coach, a high level executive, and someone who happens to be in our Superabound coach certification. So we've gotten to work with Johann Steven I, for the past several months, and I've had the opportunity to work with her and other places. But we know what an incredible coach, she is how connected she is to self care, she runs the school of radical self care. So you know, she knows a thing or two, and she's going to teach us some tools to help us get out of immediate or acute stress, and how to amplify your self care for the long run. I hope you love this episode. And if you want to learn more about Johann, you can head over to our show notes. Besuperabound.com/podcast to connect with her there. So welcome. I'm so excited to talk to you, the founder of the school for radical self care, which is such

an amazing concept and such a needed thing in the world. But I would love maybe we could just start with you introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about why you are really the self care expert. Well, I

Johann Boulter  2:05  
consider myself a holistic coach. So I bring in all different kinds of aspects of coaching.

I really want to be helping business owners and leaders who are stressed, overwhelmed and burnout to become more resilient through radical self care. And so nothing gets in the way of them pursuing and achieving their dreams. And I think there's some people out there who would love to have that kind of a business, but maybe don't have the personal connection to exactly why that is so important. So I'd love for you to share a little bit about your story and how you began this work. Yeah, so I've had over 30 years in finance and auditing, experience and practice. And over the course of my career, there's been many times more than I would like to say, but many times where they are within burnout or on the edge of burnout. Because there's a higher achiever, high achiever, just wanting to keep moving forward in my career, I'm always, you know, saying guest priming more things than I would like to being a single mom, wanting to kind of juggle all the things and the relevant down executive role. And I've been here for over five years. And when I first started in the role I

severely understaffed and I was learning a new role. And I was just so overwhelmed. And I just didn't know what to do, as I'm just about in tears every day. And I reached out and found coaching. And so I had disabled to be coached for and it was up, it took about four months for me to to start to feel better. And I just realized the power of it. And I just really wanted to help others. So I then started the certification program. So now I'm working on my third certification. So because when I do something, I want to do it as best I can. So I feel like I'm a lifelong learner and, and so I'm still learning. And so it's never never a done thing. And I'm always learning new ways to help manage stress and help help deal with things that kind of get in the way of what I want to be doing. Those

Erin Aquin  3:57  
of us who gravitate more towards self care, or like let's even I will often refer to as self investing, as a finance person. probably appreciate that. But I think those of us who do that have gone through the tough moments of being on in a burnout cycle or having that as a habit. And it's, you know, it's so interesting because you and I both work with a lot of high achieving people. And sometimes I think the world considers those people to be superhuman. Like, they don't need the weekend. They can work six days a week, they don't need to sleep. And you and I both know that is not true. And I think something that we really see eye to eye on is that the standard way in which most people approach self care is often not enough for people with a lot of responsibility with high level jobs. Have parents, single parents, I'm sure that's like that's even another layer of mental load. I would just love to hear maybe a little bit about your philosophy on how you approach self care with your clients and with yourself. Yeah,

Johann Boulter  5:16  
so I see mentioned, I'm a Holistic coach, I really want to see each person as a whole person. So wanting to help them, look at their mind, body, and spirit. And so often people just forget that their whole so with sad reminder, and some help along the way, to remind to remember that they are whole. And this is what radical self care is, is not just the self care where there's like double bass and just resting on the couch. And those are great, but they just they don't help address the stress that gets built up in your body. They may feel good in the moment, maybe not like if you're lying on the couch and trying to watch the show if your mind is going crazy with all the your To Do lists and your tasks and other things you should be doing is very hard to kind of rest. And so when I work with someone who is in them feeling super stressed, first of all, I want to help them to have some tools so that they just learned to deal deal with the immediate stress. So how can they just take the edge off. Because I know that when I first receive coaching, and when I've been coaching clients, sometimes you can't even get to the mindset work, because they're so stressed. And so it's giving them the tools to just start to learn to just release the valve and like, just let a little bit of that stress out so that then they can just get to a point where they're actually able to think clearly. So developing those tools on immediate stress. And then looking at how to incorporate some of those tools in your day to day life. So that then it becomes a practice so that you're just regularly releasing that stress, so it doesn't build up again. And as we're doing that, then we can start to look at some of the reasons why I that stress started to accumulate in the first place. But unless you're like looking at the body as well, making that mind body connection, and realizing how all of that is manifesting in your body, if we just look at our what's going on in our head, it's I don't find it as effective. Like, we've got to look at everything. I

Erin Aquin  7:05  
totally agree with you. And I'm also really glad that you said that it even for you personally, it took about four months before you started to notice a shift. I think sometimes with any solution, whether it's it's coaching, whether it's I don't know any any modality, really that's designed to help us with our self care. You know, we do live in a culture where we want immediate gratification, we want to feel better instantly. And if you have a lifetime or a career lifetime of building up stress in your body in your in the way that you approach problems, you know, we all get into patterns that work to some degree, but aren't always the most beneficial thing we could be doing for ourselves. So I think it's really important that people know that coaching is not an instant solution. And I love that you also talked about there's like a different approach to immediate stress versus how we deal with a long term sort of root issues. So when someone's in immediate stress, do you have any tools that you could even teach us right now you're on the podcast that someone could experiment with to see how this works for them? Yeah, so

Johann Boulter  8:27  
there's a few that that are really great, just depends on how you're feeling. So if you're feeling really stressed and anxious, and you feel like you also like run away, run and run, run away, like you're in a flight kind of stress response, then that might be different than if you're feeling really sluggish. And you just don't want to get off the couch feeling. So there might be different approaches to help with either one. And so when you're feeling super agitated, and you just got all this, you don't know what to do with it. And I said, you just feel like running. It's something simple as shaking it out. So it's like shaking your arms out, shaking your legs out, just like imagine what happens in nature. So like a gazelle who's being chased by a lion is running away. And then as soon as it gets to safety, it will just shake, like physically shake and get all that stress out. And then it will just be gone along and it just won't hold it in his body. But we don't do that with like kids, kids will do it, little kids will do it. They'll just move around and get agitated and just to shake it out and naturally but as adults, we learn to first learn we learned not to do that anymore. We want to be more reserved, and we want to hold it in and we don't want to show any signs of like, weakness we think is weakness. So we don't allow that to release. So when I try to teach this to my clients, they sometimes they can feel uncomfortable doing that, though anybody they see me shaking out. Let's go to the bathroom for a couple minutes. Go to the bathroom stall if you're at work to shake it like just shake it out and you can just release that pent up stress in your body. And otherwise just splashing cold water on your face. Ace, and that just helps calm the nervous system. Cold water on your wrists cold water in your face. Some of these are this really quick, they only take a couple of minutes. And it's amazing how much better you can feel, just by doing these a little little exercises,

Erin Aquin  10:13  
you know, when I'm feeling stressed, not sluggish, but more on the agitated part of the scale, I love to see them go for a walk, or to sometimes do a tough workout. Like I'm just like, I want to put this energy into something. And, and actually kind of revel in the things that feel hard a little bit. And it's a I don't know, if it's, I don't know if that's, if that's something that you ever work with clients on. But for me, sometimes that is that like burst of energy into something for a purpose that's ultimately for my own nourishment. You know, we you and I talk about sustaining rituals a lot in the, in the certification and and all the places that we get to work together. Having an outlet for energy is something that is so simple, and it's something people forget about.

Johann Boulter  11:11  
So important. And I'm glad you mentioned walking, because that is so simple to do. And you don't have to have any equipment, you don't have to even just going for a walk around the block. And just the act of walking and trying not to have any headphones on just being aware of your surroundings helps you become more present. And when you're watching where you're walking, instead of looking down into phone, when you're watching, when you're walking, just scanning the horizon, your eyes are moving, which is a known way to help calm the nervous system as well.

Erin Aquin  11:41  
When you feel stressed, and it's more of a draining feeling when it's more of like a sluggish, I just want to lay on the couch, I don't feel motivated, I don't want to do anything, sort of like a totally out of juice. Are there any Are you

Johann Boulter  11:55  
looking for comfort, right, you're looking for some fun, that kind of comfort. So maybe a weighted blanket, putting a weighted blanket on you just to give that comfort, you can even give yourself a hug, like just crossing your arms over your shoulders and just like tapping your your hands on alternate shoulders, and it just that action, the rocking can even rock back and forth. The rocking motion, just giving yourself that that nourishment and if you have a partner or a child, just giving them a hug, I'm not gonna just release all kinds of endorphins that will just help you kind of break, take the edge off a little bit of that sluggish feeling, and then some gentle movement. So movement that just really gentle and nourishing.

Erin Aquin  12:37  
And for anyone who's driving, well listen to this podcast, you don't have to write these down. Because Johann has a beautiful free tool on her website. And you can download it, it has some of these different take the edge off support tools that you can use. And I will link to that in the show notes as well. What else do you want to talk about today? Like what else would you think? I'm just thinking about this topic? Oh, you know what, let's talk about the holidays. Can we talk about that? Because I think we're gonna have it come out next week. Okay, that's okay. Okay. And another reason I wanted to have you on the show today is because this tends to be a busier time of year. For people, we're getting close to the end of the year. For business owners, this can be the moment where people really start to push if they're not feeling good about how the year went. And at the same time, you might feel I mean, where where I live, it's very wintry, I'm definitely feeling like a bear wanting to wait a little bit. And we will have some downtime in our business. But for a lot of business owners, this just feels like the most frantic peak of the year, I'm sure for executives as well. I'm curious, how do we I have my own ideas about this, but you are a radical self care. So curious what your ideas are for those busy seasons of life? How do we still maintain self care, rituals and routines?

Johann Boulter  14:12  
Yeah, so here, as a couple of ideas, one is deciding what's your non negotiables? So what are the things that really make a difference for you make you can have a lot of things that like over time, if you have any rituals that feel good, and you might want to have in your practice, but what are the ones that really really make a difference that if you don't have a really going to make you feel even more stressed or just not be as resilient, be able to handle things that are coming your way. So some key ones for me are sleep, like making sure that you're getting a minimum amount of sleep, and ideally, more than more and I'm always something I've always practicing is sleep. But you know, knowing what your minimum amount of sleep is, and so always making sure that you're kind of having that minimum amount and if there are times when that's not possible, then just to be aware of that and maybe try and have the can a couple of appstore naps. And then the other one at one for me is meditation. So the ideally, meditation, I'm doing that twice a day for 20 minutes, morning and evening. But when it's like super busy cycles, work or at home or the busy times of Christmas, I make sure that I at least meditate twice a day because that just doing the twice a day, but sometimes it's five minutes, sometimes it's just a couple of minutes of breathing. But keeping that minimum baseline of just meditating twice a day makes such a difference. And the other thing I want to say, but as always is Lisa kind of the sustaining rituals and practices that we put into place, we're not doing them because we want to become perfect meditators or perfect sleepers, or perfect Journalers, or any of those things, we put those into practice so that they help us be able to manage our life, manage the stresses that come up and be able to achieve what we want to achieve. And so if some of those things aren't done as perfectly as you would like to, that doesn't matter, it's just practicing and continuing to do kind of what's your minimum amount that you want to be doing to be able to stay stay resilient, and be still be able to kind of go about your day. So

Erin Aquin  16:07  
this is another reason we get along so well. Because those are those are my top ones as well. And it's, it's really interesting, I actually had this experience a few months ago with a friend who I think of as someone who's amazing at self care. And we had this conversation about movement. And I said, Well, if you want to, if you need a workout, buddy, if you need a movement, buddy, I will totally do that for you. And she was like, Oh, I don't know, like, I just don't think I have an hour a day to work out. And I said, Did you know that there are like five minute core classes you can do? Did you know that 10 minutes of yoga before bed counts as movement. I count walking my kids to school for a five minute walk, it takes like those can also be sustaining rituals. I think sometimes people try to get so fancy and elaborate with what these things are. And that's great. If you want to run a marathon, we have a client right now who's like doing bodybuilding. And that's like a two workout a day situation. That is more of a of a personal lantern, I would call that more of a personal lantern, then a self investment sustaining ritual. Because sustaining rituals should be only ever that minimum baseline. And sometimes that's hard. You know, I'm also sleep is always top of my list as well. But it's because I've had so many issues over the years with my sleep. And I know it messes everything up, if I don't really find a way to make that a priority. But it's not fancy. It's not a fancy thing. It's just a human thing. And it could be why I'm actually interested to hear what you think about this. It could be why people have such great intentions for their self care, and find it really hard to follow through. Because these are not often big, huge productions, we have to reorganize our lives around. They are the simple things like I'm going to move for a few minutes every day, I'm going to have my minimum time in bed, I'm going to meditate, I'm going to make sure I need something green for the holiday season, which is always a challenge for me. But they're not glamorous things. And they also do require some consistent intention.

Johann Boulter  18:39  
Yeah. And intention is so important. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and I'm glad you mentioned that too, like this, it doesn't need to be fancy. And it can be small little bursts of of activity as well. One of my clients is a therapist and, and is meeting patient after patient after patient and was starting to have like problems with neck and shoulders and like leaves, they just stand up and stretch between they just takes two seconds or just get up and walk to get yourself a glass of water or just just having a little bit of movement. So you just start staying still. So it doesn't need to be like this great long exercise practice if you don't have time for it, but just doing little bits between each client can make such a difference.

Erin Aquin  19:20  
Yeah, and then you have any tips for how to incorporate those things like I love the water. How simple is that one? And yet, there's so many of us that probably don't drink the required amount of water for our bodies every day because we forget and it's just it's it's a background thing. So how do you actually encourage people to make those things intentional and more conscious?

Johann Boulter  19:45  
Sometimes linking it to something else you're doing. So if you're getting up to get a file from it from a desk or getting up to an A go to the bathroom, just then you're coming back just to make it a habit. Okay, I'm just gonna get myself into a glass of water or Oh, that that can be really simple. Also, wait, I wake up, this getting as much watering as I can as soon as I wake up, so I like hot water in the morning. It's just a really nice way of feels nourishing feels calming, feels cozy, especially in the wintertime just to have some hot water. And it's so easy, man, I just have one as soon as I get up, and then I have one a kind of a zone getting ready in the morning. So then I'm always I've always got our hour already, like two or three glasses of water in that warm water and the body just can absorb that so much easier in the especially in the morning. Yeah, so I think just kind of linking that to something else sometimes really helps, um, instead of trying to add it on as another thing to remember. Yeah.

Erin Aquin  20:39  
Because when these types of sustaining rituals that we're going to take on become a very long to do list. That is often when they get dropped.

Johann Boulter  20:54  
And then it becomes overwhelming. And yeah,

Erin Aquin  20:57  
yeah, yeah, exactly. One of the things I will often suggest to people, especially, you know, I think I think when people come for coaching, they, they're motivated at a at a level where they're like, Okay, we're going to change my life, and it's gonna be amazing. And there, they might be more game to do a whole bunch of things at once. I found personally, and maybe some people can do many things at once. But I found personally that with those small but foundational shifts of personal self care, I kind of just have to, like do one thing at a time. Like, for a year it was sleep, I did not force myself to do anything, but try to sleep. But then as my sleep started to get better, and I had more energy, I was like, oh, maybe I'll play with this working out thing I've heard people talk about your life, maybe I'll start to do a little more yoga, like there is some kind of a beautiful snowball effect that happens when you don't take this on like a project to fix yourself.

Johann Boulter  22:02  
We don't need to be fixed. We're just trying to add things or to develop things practice things that just help us feel better in our life. And, yeah, it could just be one thing at a time. And that one thing doesn't have to be perfect before you consider adding something else in. And they don't need to all take an hour, it could just be a few minutes. And if you try something out, and it doesn't feel good, you don't need to keep doing it. Like you can switch it out and experiment with other things, too. Yeah, so none of this needs to be perfect. And I think is how YouTubers are we take on the side, we're going to take on some of these practices, we think we need to do a perfect and we need to do two hours every morning of need to get up and meditate. And they need to journal and need to exercise and he do all of these things. And each one needs to be done perfectly in a certain amount of time. And no, it could just be one of those. Or it could be all of them. That may be a few minutes for each one. And it's a lot of experimentation to see what works for you. And you're not adding more things until it feels comfortable. And you feel safe and doing that. Because if you're forcing yourself into doing a bunch of things, it's gonna make you feel more stressed, kind of doing the opposite of what we're trying to achieve.

Erin Aquin  23:07  
Yes, that's such an important distinction, like not waiting for it to be perfect or needing it to be perfect, but also not pushing yourself in a way that doesn't actually meals, nourishment. And I think that it's really tricky. I think that's something that is really great to explore with a coach because we all have patterns and tendencies. And if we're high achievers, that we're probably going to be more of the pushy sort. So it can be really helpful to just explore and understand what for you personally is the difference between something that is for yourself care, and for your inner nourishment. And what made me falls in the category of growth and stretching. When I was a yoga teacher, primarily, I guess I'm teaching a little yoga these days again, but when I did that as my full time job, I used to look at this through the lens of Yin and Yang. Yang being more of the type of self care that's for our personal development that helps us grow. You know, if we were talking about it as a movement practice, it's the hardcore weight workout. Whereas a more Yin style of self care would be the things that do bring comfort and nourishment and ease for the nervous system. And we totally need both. But if you have a lot of stress in your life, and you are a creative person, you have a high level job. You're busy, you have plenty of young energy already going on. And you might need at certain points in the year especially. We're where we are it's winter and it's cold, it's getting there. This is a Morgan time of year it's more effective and being being cozy is not the same as being lazy or unthoughtful, or unintentional?

Johann Boulter  25:03  
Yeah, and both are important. Yeah, in different cycles in the seasons of nature, but also in the seasons of your own life, like there might be times where you just need the nourishment and other times where you want to go, and you want that little bit of extra push. And even when you're doing that, it's it's within within your own tolerance level. So if you're pushing yourself too much, and kind of going out of your window tolerance, then you can push yourself into a, into a stress mode and into into burnout. So learning kind of just playing with that edge a little bit. And balancing it out with the the practices and then more calming practices, so that you have, if you do have a burst of energy, you're allowing yourself to recover, because often I find that, you know, in my career is that this is all of these kind of milestones you're working towards, and you just keep going and you reach one. And then okay, that was the next one, instead of like taking that time to celebrate what you've just achieved. And to really sit with that for a moment, and doesn't need to take a lot of time. But just that practice of doing a little bit of reflecting is all part of self care as well before you start to move into the next the next milestone the next lantern. Because otherwise, you'll burn yourself out, you can't keep going and keep going, you might be able to do that when you're like 20. But when you start to get that on in your career, it becomes harder to bounce back like you didn't really do need, I find that you really do need that time to recover. And all of these practices can be used to help with that recovery. And it might be a little bit different than each time. But having a tool set of ones that we'll experiment with, sometimes one will work and sometimes you need a few. And that's all okay. Yeah,

Erin Aquin  26:41  
you know, that it's it's so interesting that you say that when we were writing the Superabound book, and you know, we talked about this in, in several programs in the certification as well. But it's one of the reasons why we have this process for how to reach a lantern, when we're talking about the tangible challenges that are the terrain between someone and their next goal or milestone. And two of those phases are reflect and rest is something we had to kind of very consciously build into our methodology because it's the thing that most of our clients will skip. I'm sure some of your clients are like this, too. They will. We're just human. We're like, Okay, we lit that lantern, there's another lantern up there, we better get going because we're probably behind. But before we can actually repeat the whole process of making decisions, and moving towards what we want, it's really good to have the period of time to reflect on where we've been what we've achieved what we've learned, and then actually begun some downtime. Yeah,

Johann Boulter  27:51  
and that downtime can look different for different people. Yeah, and it's in that reflecting and the rest piece is also like learning to process all those amount of positive emotions that you felt. So allowing yourself to feel proud allowing yourself to feel excited, allowing yourself to pat yourself on the back for what you've achieved, because it's just as important to process those emotions as it is for all the negative ones. Because they can also keep building up and building up in your body and they can become you could become burned out by not allowing yourself to feel those as well. Yes.

Erin Aquin  28:20  
Okay. I am so excited that you just brought this up because I think there's people that we're gonna go, huh. But in the process positive emotions. What is she talking about? It's actually amazing. A lot of high achievers and perfectionists don't actually know how to feel. The good emotions, the positive, beautiful, wonderful emotions. And I guess you've I guess you've come across this before, I'd love to just hear how you how you explain this to folks.

Johann Boulter  28:54  
Here's a few ways to explain it. But I guess when we wanted the most for visual lenses, imagine you're on this like roller coaster. So there's we're all on a roller coaster of life. And we all have these stressors that come up and it's normal. And that we shouldn't all have a flatline because every Dad, there's things, you know, things that are gonna come up, positive or negative, that make us kind of go up and down this roller coaster. And if we are going up the roller coaster to achieving this amazing, amazing thing. If we don't allow ourselves to write back down the next hump, we're going to go Okay, now we're up to the next one. And then you now you're gonna keep going up and up and up. And if you don't allow yourself to come down, the further you go up, you're gonna start to get out of your kind of what's called a window of tolerance. So then you move into this stress cycle over your body becomes nervous system becomes dysregulated, you can become really agitated and stressed and anxious. And that's where we just think of these are all negative emotions. But the reason you got there is because you didn't allow yourself to feel when you kind of reached the top of that hill on the roller coaster. I'm excited like that's allowing it and acknowledging it, noticing it sitting and breathing into it. It can feel super uncomfortable. I've had clients where it's like taken a long time. for them to actually be able to sit with that and just acknowledge it and feel that because they think that they just need to move on to the next thing. But then you never feel good enough, you never feel like you've actually achieved it if you don't allow yourself to feel to sit with that, because then you're just looking to the next thing. And you're never acknowledging that you've actually achieved something. This is

Erin Aquin  30:17  
a phenomenon, I think that happens to everyone who achieves like their wildest dream of success. Because if you don't know how to feel that moment that you've been visualizing for so long, it's really easy for your brain to just take that and make it into an issue. And to say, Well, I'm gonna lose it. I just coached someone, one of our clients recently who has turned their business from like a side project, that they were doing part time into now, a million dollar business. And there was this whole sort of, I've seen it with other people as well. But it's almost like a mini identity crisis, because everything they thought they knew about how the world works, is not so. And luckily, this person, you know, we coach, so she has an outlet to process it. But I think that it's another reason for high level folks, why it can feel lonely, and stressful. Because who do you talk, it's so strange to say, Oh, I feel so stressed out about all this money I made about how well my my life is going. You can't really say that in a lot of circles, and feel, okay, it's very hard to even approach what might need to be processed. It's another reason I think every business owner or every leader should have a coach, because we do need containers for that. And the other thing I wanted to know Steve actually knew you wanted me to ask you was how should busy people handle self care? Because one of the things that we really admire, and we really want to know, your secret is you have so much on the go your coach, your high level executive, you still make time to do programs, certification, ongoing learning, personal development, you meditate twice a day. Wow, how have you figured out how to do that for yourself? And what would you suggest maybe other busy folks do just to begin? Yeah, so

Johann Boulter  32:22  
I think a couple of things that that ties into what have you learned through your certification program, as well as part of this, that attending tryouts. So there's like two, we've talked a lot about sustaining rituals. But there's also visionary practices, and there's filters, personal filters. And so connecting, and remembering why I'm doing all of this, and what I'm trying to do like connecting to that my vision is super important. And I teach clients to do that, too. Because when they're feeling stressed, when they're feeling all of these things, like why am I like, why am I putting myself through all of this, it's like, just connecting back to, oh, this is what I'm trying to achieve. And this is why I'm here. And, and then that just like, Okay, now it makes sense. And now just having that the fuel that kind of give gives you the fueled I'm trying to keep going. So that's super important. And then the other is the filters. And so, like having that vision or practicing knowing what your vision is, when you're making a decision, or deciding what you're going to do with your time is like, is this taking me closer or further away? And that doesn't mean that everything you do has to be in pursuit of the vision or the goal or the lantern. But you know, it's 30 self sustaining practices, like knowing that, okay, well, now I need to do a little bit of active rest so I can keep going, that's gonna help me get there as opposed to Okay, well, if I've been going out five nights a week, and staying super late, that might be okay in the short term, but I know I'm going to be super tired, I'm going to crash. Especially as I've I'm noticing as I get older, I just can't do that as often anymore. And if someone then asked me if I want to go out for dinner as I can, I've been out for a few nights while maybe making that decision. No, I'm going to have it we do it next week. So just little things like that just to be aware of in the moment of you know what, you know, use your your own tolerance or your own ability to kind of take on and do things in your personal time and in your day to day job or whatever you might be doing. So then yeah, that might be more of a personal thing. But even in your day job, learning to say no to things or learning to delegate or learning because it's higher achievers as well. We've got where we are because we've said yes to a lot of things. At some point, it's important to start to to filter out which things are going to help you do your job well. And which things you can delegate and which things you can start to say no to or not necessarily a hard no but not right now. Mike can we do that take on that project for now or week for now I have this as my priority right now. So allowing it to be okay to be able to say you know have the heart that the hard no or the soft no now and not now but later and also delegating to team members and also at home. I mean, you can delegate the if you have kids, like it's gonna be doing things to help around the house too. And I'm not saying yes to every single activity they want to do. So

Erin Aquin  35:02  
good. I think that's the other, you know, you just made a really important connection to for folks, if you've created success, because you've said yes, expecting that it will be uncomfortable to start saying no. But understanding that we're trying to work towards something that's actually important to you. And the saying no to the things that aren't aligned with that, when you can, is, you know, it's a cliche, but it's like it's saying yes to you. It's saying yes to your bigger vision, because then you have the time and the space back. When we talk about personal filter, I always teach that it's really the trickiest one. For most of us, it's tricky, because it has emotions. But it's also very simple. It's very simple to say, just saying yes or no to that, like what brings me closer, what brings me closer to my vision. And hopefully, if you've created a life where you are in a leadership position, and you do have success and the means to support yourself, if you are willing to let go of the reins a little bit, usually, a lot of those supports are already in place, you maybe just haven't been utilizing them fully. One of the personal things that we delegate is our food, we delegate our cooking, to a meal service that drops off, like six days of meals pre made that all we have to do is warm them up and eat them. And my life is so much better, it gives me back an hour or okay, it gives Steve back an hour of his time from having to cook every day. So there are things that you get to do as you have built up success. And I really appreciate knowing that these tools have been meaningful to you and that they're aligned with what you actually already do. It's always very cool to hear some another amazing coach talk about tools that we that we love. And I want to do something I don't know that I've ever done this before on the podcast, I just want to give you like my full two thumbs up 100% recommendation for anyone who is looking for a personal coach, I've had the pleasure of working with you very closely over the last few months. Joe is already an amazing coach, you didn't need my my certification to be an amazing coach. But for someone who listens to this podcast, and maybe wants a coach that has an understanding of the Superabound tools, and such a deep and rich connection to holistic thinking and coaching, you are that person. And I just want to tell anyone listening that if there was a coach, I was going to hire tomorrow it would be Johann so get her before she's full. Work with her while you can. It's just been such a such an honor to to get to know you to get to work with you to learn from you. And yeah, I don't know that I've ever given a formal recommendation before but I'm giving it now.

Johann Boulter  38:09  
And thank you, I really, really appreciate that, especially with working with you for for two programs. So I mean, I see you as a mentor. So I really appreciate that. Thank you. Well,

Erin Aquin  38:17  
I mean, we we just feel very lucky to have you in our world and there's so much written richness here. I think everyone needs their own coach. So one of the best of the best is right here. And we want you to connect can people book you right now? Are you taking new clients? I am taking new clients. Okay, so 2024 could be the year for folks listening. I'm going to post everything about you in the show notes so people can can meet you learn more and definitely get that free. take the edge off. tool. So anything else you want to share before we wrap up?

Johann Boulter  38:53  
No, I guess I just wanted to, I guess just encourage people that everything we've spoken out today, you don't need to this isn't another thing you need to try be perfect at. These are just all practices to experiment with and keep what resonates and let the rest go.

Erin Aquin  39:09  
Beautifully. Beautifully said. Yes. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you