Respecting your Power
I'm really excited about finally getting to this subject. Today we're going to be talking about respecting your power.
I've been wanting to talk about this for a while because I went through this experience a while ago, but now I'm on the other side and I'm prepared to talk about it. I think it's Nicole Walters that says that you're supposed to share from your scars, not from your wounds and that's because our scars are healed. You’ve learned the lessons and now you're able to share. Versus our wounds being open, fresh, new, and prone to infection. You don't share at that point, you keep the wound covered up so it can heal. But in my case, I'm on the other side, I think I've learned the lessons and I'm so happy to share.
The idea of respecting and owning your power is a subject that's coming up a lot in my universe because I've got a 14 year old daughter. And for those of you who have teen or tween daughters, you'll understand. You've got this young woman who's coming into her power and it's a beautiful thing, for the most part. So, you’ve got this young woman coming into her power and she's testing it. She's experimenting with it. She's pushing boundaries and she's taking you to the edge of everything. And it's a good thing because I want her to feel comfortable and confident in wielding her power, knowing how to own it and use it, while she's out there in the world. But not in my house. Not against me. Right?! So, I find myself having a lot of conversations with my daughter about what it means to be a powerful woman. And so, yes, this is coming up a lot in my universe.
It’s a conversation I'm having with my teenager, but I know what the conversation that us women probably should be having a little bit more. Because as we are coming into power, leveling up, succeeding, excelling, and obtaining this power, I don't find that we are having the commiserate conversations about, respecting, replenishing and how to manage that power. Historically, power has not belonged to us. It belonged to a different group of people who looked a lot different than us, you know, white men. So, as women, we've been coming up through the ranks, obtaining power and getting there. But the being there holds a lot of lessons for us that we have been slow in learning.
I'm going to talk a little bit more about that in a second, but I’d like to share what happened to me. A while ago, I realized that my body did not feel good. I was struggling. I just didn't feel like myself. I didn't feel good in my skin. At least not as good as I'm used to feeling. I didn't feel like the liberated and free me I am used to. I'm used to feeling liberated and free, nimble and fluid and comfortable in my skin. I literally feel like I'm flying in my body. But that had not been how I’ve been feeling recently.
So, usually Monday through Friday, in the morning I lift and then in the evenings, I do yoga. I do yoga in the afternoon/evening because for me it is not a workout. It is the mental and emotional release that I get from yoga. I've been maintaining that schedule for years because it works for me. But I had found that recently, when I was going to do my evening yoga practice, that my body was, was stiff and sore. And it just, it didn't feel good. It was almost painful. It was almost like the beginning of my yoga journey when my body would not give. I like to use the analogy of a brand new rubber band. You know when you stretch that brand new rubber band that first time, it kind of snaps and it has a give to it after that? But before that it's really tight? Well, that's how my body felt. It felt really, really tight. There was just no give. So, I started to stretch every morning. I would finish lifting and then I would go and hit the mat for 10-15 minutes immediately following my workout while my body was still warm and stretch. I would still do yoga in the evening, but even that wasn't working. I really felt like something was wrong.
My recovery was trash, and I was concerned. I calmed down and did some backtracking. I thought “okay, let me rationalize this. Let me go through the list of things that this could possibly be wrong”.
I thought about my water….check.
My rest….check.
Working out (lol…obviously I was doing that)….check.
But then I got to my nutrition and realized that I had accidentally become vegetarian. This is something that I will come back and talk about at some point, because again, I'm on the other side of that lesson and I think it's important to share. So, stay tuned.
The realization was that I wasn't eating meat, which also means my body was not getting enough protein or amino acids, so it wasn't recovering. It was no wonder my body felt like trash. Because this was an accident, I didn't plan for it. I wasn't supplementing or trying to eat other protein sources. I wasn't doing anything. I just wasn't eating meat and my body was quite literally breaking down.
So once I identified the issue, I got to work. I began to formulate a plan so that I'm getting the nutrition that my body needs in order to thrive. But in the meantime, I had to some choices to make about the actual workout. I am used to going in the gym and going hard. I get to the gym and I love using my strength. I'm a strong woman. I have built up muscle and a strength over these years that I'm really proud of. And I feel good. I feel powerful using that strength. And so, I'll go into the gym and curl 30 pound dumbbells, and I will bench press 135. But if I were to continue to do that, it would completely shred my muscles. My recovery has been trashed. So, I didn't want to go into the gym and use all of my power and use all of my strength and then pay the cost of not being able to recover. Does that make sense? It just wasn't worth it. I want to do this, but knowing what it would take out of me or require of me was a too great of a cost. I did not want to use my power, knowing how it was hurting me in the long run.
So, the other option that I explored was going into the gym and moderating. You know, just going half-assed basically. And I hated it. I absolutely hated it. That did not last long, because there was no joy. There was no fulfillment. There's no value going into the gym and just going through the motions. My body didn’t benefit and my mind didn't benefit. I was frustrated. The only benefit was that my muscles were getting a chance to recover, but they could recover if I just stayed in bed! I didn't need to go to the gym to rest my muscles. I can rest my muscles at home. I get up and go to the gym early. Usually, it's still dark outside. And if the goal was just to spare my muscles, I'd stay my butt in bed and sleep in. So that just wasn't fun. I had to decide what I was going to do. And when I sat back and understood where I was and what was going on with me, I was kind of shocked.
I feel like I know my body very well. I talk a lot about having a relationship with my body and I just wasn't prepared for all of this. So as I was formulating a plan on how to receive the nutrients my body needed, there was still more of an energetic, spiritual questioning taking place. I was questioning why did this happen? How did this happen? My thought was, “this has never happened to me before. I can't believe this is happening.” But when I got to thinking about it and meditating on it, I received a message from spirit that was clear. And that message was, “Yeah…Cassandra, as a matter of fact, you haven been here before.”
I’ve been here before in my corporate life. I've been in corporate for about 20 years, the first 10 years, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I was just here for the ride. But the last 10 years I've been really intentional about climbing the corporate ladder, if you will. I had really great men and female mentors, but some of the female mentors really stick out in my mind that helped me get promoted, take on new assignments and stretch myself. They were fantastic about helping me navigate the corporate world, but what they weren't able to teach me how to manage the responsibility and power that I was obtaining as I was growing.
I was pulling in power. People were giving it to me (well it was actually just the perception of power. You don't really have power in corporate, but they make you think you do). So, I was learning a lot but I wasn't really being taught how to take care of and respect my power. What I mean by that is, I was super woman during the week, Monday through Friday . When I was in my work world, I was super woman. I was coming in early, staying late, doing all the things. And you know, in corporate you are a hero for those things. You are a “team player”. You are loyal to the company. They make you feel all different types of good. There are bonuses, gifts and money all for sacrificing yourself for corporate. And you have a sense of power, even though, again, it's not real power. So, Monday through Friday, I was doing everything I could to maintain my power, but then I would sleep damn near all day on the weekends. And during family time I would be on my phone answering emails or other forms of multitasking. I would be stressed out and almost resentful towards my children about their doctor's appointments or their school events or anything that was taking me away from the power that I had at corporate. And it wasn't just my children. Anything that forced me to cancel or be late for a conference call, a meeting, a business trip or anything that interrupted that corporate rhythm, I felt was being a hater. LOL…I felt like they didn't want me to be great. Because clearly, I was great at work and I liked the way that felt. I mean, that's that… I liked the way that felt. But I didn't appreciate how much my children needed me. I didn't appreciate how much I needed me! I wasn't there even for myself. I didn't realize at that time how much this was taking out of me. I didn't realize the cost of my success. I didn't realize the cost to me and my family for me to obtain and then maintain this power. And the reason I didn't realize it is because that's what everyone was doing. That was the norm. There was no counter narrative. No one was coming to check on me. No one was like “Hey Cassandra, you doing okay?” or “Are you taking care of yourself?” There was none of that. It was “High-five! You stayed up all night to finish that report!” There was no one doing it any other way. Our ideas about what it is to be successful and powerful require a sacrifice that we're totally willing to give. The sacrifice of our health, our time, our sanity, our family life, whatever, all for the sake of maintaining or obtaining this power. Finally, there came a day where I said “This is not cool. This is not how I want to live my life.” Having this power, being this successful was taking a lot out of me and I don't want to spend my life like this. There had to be a change. Fast forward to the way I live my life today and how you have come to know me today is with much greater harmony in my life. I don't like the term ‘balance’. Balance to me is not a bad word, but it's a, it's definitely a falsehood. Anyway, I put all of that aside and changed my life.
Ultimately, the message for everyone here today is that there is (and I've said this for years) a parallel between you as a person and your fitness or your health. There is that saying, “the way you do one thing is the way you do everything.” And that was absolutely the case here. As much as I didn't want to admit it at first, or I couldn't draw the connection. But the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. You take yourself into everything you do. You take yourself everywhere you go. And so, if you are mismanaging power in one area of your life, you're probably mismanaging power in other areas of your life.
I'm not much of a movie person. I like movies, but not a movie buff. But I do have some form of frame of reference from movies about superheroes, young superheroes coming into their power and needing to be taught how to use their power so they don't hurt themselves or anyone else. Does that sound familiar? There are certain things that superheroes must do so that they use and replenish their powers so that they can continue. So that there's a continuance of their ability to go out there and save the world. Because they could end up hurting themselves or hurting others if they're not properly using their power. That’s what this reminds me of.
As women, we come into these positions of power, but we aren't being taught how to use or replinish that power. The ethics or guidelines for using this power. It has completely missed us. No, one's talking about that. The other part about that is, no one is asking us to go out there and save the world (well maybe depending on the kind of the environment that you work in). By and large, some of the sacrifices we're willing to make are being made on our own volition. No one is coming in demanding that of us. We have this idea that we are the only people in the world that can do whatever the job is, or we're the only ones who can do the way we think it should be done. So we willingly sacrifice ourselves. We throw ourselves on the alter of corporate success and corporate power even though no one's really asking us to do that. Honestly, it comes down to our ego. I'm going to come back and talk about how we as women make far too many sacrifices that no one is asking us to make because of our ego.
At the end of the day, there's rules of engagement and guidelines, when it comes power or strength and we haven’t learned about them. In this particular case, with my body and the lack of recovery, I learned about it at late stage. It was after my body literally began to break down because it wasn’t getting protein and amino acids and was cannibalizing itself that I realized. My body was eating my muscle in order to receive the protein in the amino acids that I wasn't feeding it. In my case, it was just some tissue and some muscle fibers, mostly in my legs, you know, that were being affected. But for people who aren't properly managing their power, there's other organs, including their heart, that is being affected negatively. I am blessed that my ‘hard hitting lesson’ was just aesthetic and I can go on to live a good quality life and live at all. I'm very fortunate. But there are many people whose only muscle being worked at all is, is their heart. And if they're not respecting and replenishing their power they could suffer negative consequences.
Now, I know the woman that I'm talking to. I know you because I've been you. I’ve been there. I get it. And we are out here killing it. We are the Queens of carrying a heavy load and making it look good! Making it look fucking fantastic as a matter of fact! But at what cost?
So, you're killing it, but stuck on medications?
You're killing it, but you are exhausted and cannot get through the day without red bulls or tons of coffee and caffeine? (And that's actually encouraging that storage, which can be another podcast if you like)
You are killing it, but you're too tired to have fun with your friends and family?
You’re killing it, but you're surprised when you can't fit into your clothes anymore?
You're killing it, but you require a bottle of wine every night and all day on the weekends? You know, it's ‘Rose all day!’
So, you're killing it, but at what point is the cost too great? At what point do we draw the line and say, this is costing me too much? We don't often pause long enough to give ourselves permission to really think about that.
Now the great news is that you are in position in a position of power. You've already proven to yourself that you can do amazing things. You've already proven yourself, that you can accomplish whatever you want. You are, where you are, because you have that internal drive, strength and fortitude. You looked around at some point in your life and realized you are the only one who can do this for yourself. And then you went out there and you did it! The reason you are where you are is because you have the ability to affect change in your life. And this is no different. This is absolutely no different.
I’ll end with this…
Being in a state of gratitude is the next step. It is one of the best, first steps we can take towards making a change in our life, especially when it comes to slowing down, treating ourselves better, respecting and replenishing the power that we are. Being in a state of gratitude forces you to acknowledge where you are and the fact that you can achieve anything you want in life. You can’t be in gratitude and still be shaking your head ‘no, I can't, that's not possible.’ You can't have appreciation and denial at the same time. So when you enter a state of gratitude, your gratitude is proof that what you want is possible. You can literally look around, touch and feel the things that you are grateful for, even if it's just yourself. But if you can touch and feel the things that you're grateful for you know that it's possible. And so, sit in that, knowing. Sit in that awareness. Sit in the understanding that what you have around was possible. It's not a dream. It's not a wish because you are grateful for it. It IS! Your current appreciation for your circumstances makes it a fact. It's not something out there in the ethers. It's real. You can do anything. So, lets learn how to respect, honor and care for this power that we've worked so hard for and earned. Let's figure out how to use it responsibly. Let's figure out how to properly replenish it. Because if we don't have you as the beautiful, wonderful superhero that you are, taking care of yourself, then who is going to save the world? We need you Sis!