Recover Like a Boss: Prioritizing Self-Care for Personal and Professional Growth

Embrace the art of self-care and revolutionize the way you approach productivity. Join me, Annie Veblen-McCarty, as I recount the transformative insights gained from the As She Rises conference in Montreal. This event was a powerful catalyst for change, urging us to challenge the relentless hustle culture and embrace a more authentic and peaceful way of living. I share personal stories of releasing burdens and redefining my legacy, prompting us to question the “shoulds” that often dictate our lives. Discover how prioritizing self-care can lead to showing up as the best version of yourself, both in business and personal life.

The episode unfolds with a deep reflection on the importance of rest and recovery, addressing the need to pause and nurture our spirits amidst the chaos of daily demands. By prioritizing healing and self-nurturing, we can unlock a path towards becoming our highest selves. Let’s explore how to integrate these practices into our routines, ensuring we can be fully present and engaged with our loved ones, clients, and most importantly, ourselves. As you listen, I encourage you to reflect on your habits and consider how you might incorporate more moments of rest and self-care into your life, ultimately embracing a journey towards healing and personal growth.

Chapters

• 0:00 Embracing Recovery and Self-Care
• 12:13 Embracing Healing and Self-Nurturing

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey, this is Annie Veblen-McCarty and I'm gonna teach you how to be effortlessly productive. I've been an entrepreneur for over 20 years and I got sick and tired of experts preaching what business and life should look like and what I should be doing as a leader and to turn a profit, only to find myself wasting time, burned out, feeling inauthentic and still not making any money. On this show, we are ditching the shoulds. I'm giving you permission to do business differently. As a certified master coach, I believe that everything you need to have success and build the life and business of your dreams is already living on the inside. I'm going to empower you to lean into what you do best, help you see your path forward clearly and give you the strategy and action steps along the way to become effortlessly productive. Let's dive in.

Speaker 1: 0:58

Welcome to today's effortlessly productive. We are going to be talking today about recovering like a boss. So you are a business owner, you are a boss. You are a boss of yourself at the very least. Maybe you're a boss of VAs, maybe you're a boss of employees as well, and so it is really important that we show up for ourselves, for our clients, for those who work for us, in the best possible energy in a way that is actually going to make that meaningful progress in our business. So, while we are talking about this today, I recently came back from a trip to Montreal.

Speaker 1: 1:38

It was for a business conference called as she Rises conference. Called as she Rises. It was one of the most memorable, phenomenal in-person experiences I have ever had in my life. It was this business conference for business women that was very spiritually based and not religious spiritual but we did so many things with energy, work and breath work and all those things, as well as learning about branding and advertising and marketing and sales and making sure that our business is aligned for ourselves and our purpose and our mission and leaving our legacy. It was so incredible. So you can tell I'm still very excited. However, with all of that, it was also an extremely emotional weekend on a lot of different levels. I was able to release a lot of energy and a lot of things like heavy stuff that I had been carrying. I was able to work through and process and just really think about what I wanted out of my business, where I wanted to take it and why, on a completely different level than I ever have before, thinking about that legacy that I am leaving, not just for my kids and my family yes, that's a huge, important part of it but also for all of my clients and all the people in the world who I touch and I work with, and I will leave that lasting impact on. It was so much, so much good and so much just big emotion on so many different levels.

Speaker 1: 3:13

We also had a lot of fun. We were up early in the morning, we were doing some workouts together, we were in conference and workshops for the vast majority of the day, parties at night. It was the best time. My legs were so tired from dancing. I was into it. It was so much fun.

Speaker 1: 3:34

So I got home. Part of it was also my travel schedule. So I flew out on a Friday evening from an airport that I don't usually travel out of because this was an international flight. That was the best flight option for a nonstop for me, and I got home late, late on Sunday. So I woke up Monday morning completely drained in the best possible way, but completely drained. I was emotionally drained, I was mentally drained, I was physically drained, I was drained just completely done. Completely and totally done.

Speaker 1: 4:11

And I will tell you in the past, when I was coming from more of that hustle mode, I would have just pushed through. And yes, I could have pushed through. This is one of the big, important points that I want to share with you. Just because you can, just because you could, does not mean that that is the best decision to make, and I know that, coming back from other conferences that I have been to that were more of that hustle energy go, get it done, does not matter, do whatever it takes. I would have interpreted that message to be like you got to get the ground running on Monday and go after all those things that you wrote in your notebook on the weekend. And yes, in the past that's the direction I would have gone. And if I had woken up full of energy, yeah, I would have hit the ground running that day.

Speaker 1: 5:06

However, waking up feeling the way that I did, I knew that I had two choices. I could either push through and I would probably be exhausted for the entire rest of the week. I would not have been the best business owner for my clients. I would have not been a happy person for myself. I love sleep. I do not do well with very little sleep. I tend to get a little bit grouchy and mean, and not the highest version of myself, which was what the conference was all about.

Speaker 1: 5:42

The whole weekend was becoming that highest version of yourself. It would not have been my highest version, that is for absolute sure. I would have not been the best mom for my kids, the best wife for my husband, the best employer for my employees and my husband's business. I would not have shown up from a good energy to work with my VAs. None of that would have gone well. The kids that I coach on our sports teams nobody would have gotten the best version of me, that highest version of myself. I could have done it, but there would have been sacrifices along the way.

Speaker 1: 6:18

So I decided to do something different. I decided to truly embody what the weekend had been about, to embrace that highest version of myself. And I asked myself what do I need right now? What do I need to be able to show up, starting maybe tomorrow, maybe not today. Maybe tomorrow is that highest version of myself? And the answer was very clear to me. I needed to take a nap. That was one. I did get up, got my kids off to school, showed them so much love because I did truly miss them.

Speaker 1: 6:51

While I was gone and I went to work out with my trainer, my PT strengthening trainer, and had an amazing workout. I came home, I took a shower and I got into bed and had the most amazing nap and then just let myself kind of be, let myself sit in peace, let myself process, process all the stuff that we had talked about that weekend. And yeah, the processing is still going on. That's an ongoing thing. It's an ongoing process to process. But I did not force myself to do anything, to be anything. Those expectations I had done an episode on hidden expectations a few weeks ago. If you did not hear that episode, go listen. I did not have those hidden expectations for myself that I was going to get any specific thing accomplished. I just let myself flow through the day and what happened was, instead of being a wreck for the entire week and not being able to do anything, well, for that entire week I listened to my intuition, I tuned into my body.

Speaker 1: 8:06

That was one of the workshops we did at business conference was to stop being in our head. It's one thing to sit there and have thoughts Even when we're meditating, we can have thoughts but so rarely do we actually just tune into how our body is feeling and let ourselves sit in that body and, whether it's a good emotion or a bad emotion, a good feeling, a bad feeling, a mixed feeling all over the map. We rarely just sit there and I allowed myself to just be, and it might have been a day in the past. I would have said I wasted that day. I learned so much at this conference. I should come home you guys know how much I hate the word should. I should have come home and I should have hit the ground running and I should have done all the branding work and I should have done this workbook and I should have taken this class, this masterclass that I had gotten for free, and I should have hopped into these groups to see what people were doing. And I threw all that out the window and I just let myself follow my own intuition and tuned into what I needed that day.

Speaker 1: 9:16

And what happened was magical because that day I was tired, I was drained, I was exhausted on all those different levels. The next day I woke up and I had a fire and an excitement unlike I had ever had before. And now I know this sounds like I've literally never let myself rest, and that's not true. I have come home from conferences or work trips and given myself that day of rest, but I realized in the process I never was really leaning into and letting what I had learned, what I had taken away from the weekend, truly integrate into myself. It was always like, oh, we just need to rest. Oh, maybe we'll try to get something done, clean up the house, like there still were those expectations, there still was that pressure to do something, to be productive, that doing, doing, doing, doing and never allowing myself to be. And so this episode is short today.

Speaker 1: 10:16

But this is your permission slip to tune into yourself, to use your intuition and especially whether it is that you have been at an event, like I was, where you had such a profound, just impactful, emotional, physical experience of like just being so on and so energetic and so alive that you come back and you are exhausted. This could also be when you have news. Maybe that is not good news, it's not something you want to hear, when you're going through a difficult time, when you're processing pain, when you have had something amazing and magical. I know I've had the same feeling and experience, like when all of my sisters got married and there was that lead up and excitement to the wedding and we had the wedding feeling and experience like when all of my sisters got married and there was that lead up and excitement to the wedding and we had the wedding and it was most magical, beautiful time. And then there's that letdown after. I know I often feel that letdown after the holidays as well. Any big experience or trip or vacation or thing that we are so looking forward to or thing that we are so looking forward to, we also end up with this letdown.

Speaker 1: 11:29

So there are times where, yes, it is a season to push, it is a day to push, it's a day to integrate and do everything that you can learn to do. It's a productive day. There are also days and times when it's really important just to tune into ourselves and ask that question what do I need today? What is going to allow me to be that highest version of myself, for myself, for my business, for my family, for everybody around me, for my clients, and how do I achieve that? How can I stay more focused and more centered in myself rather than just taking the action and doing the things? So I hope you enjoyed this episode today.

Speaker 1: 12:13

I cannot wait to hear, drop into the comments. When was the last time that you allowed yourself this rest, this recovery, this time to process, this time to integrate, this time to relive and rethink about those experiences, or just the time you need to heal? I think that was part of it. The weekend included so much healing work. I needed time to continue that healing. That healing process can take time, it can take care, it can take that nurture right, nurturing ourselves.

Speaker 1: 12:49

And I would love to hear how this resonates with you and if you are like me, past me, where we would just push through no matter what because we knew we could do it. I knew I could do it, I knew I would make it through, I would survive. I am a survivor. I will rise to any challenge, but it does not mean that that challenge, that push, is the highest version of myself. So I cannot wait to hear how this lands, what you do with this, how you treat yourself differently, how you allow yourself that time to recover like a boss. Thank you for listening today. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day.