Balance & Beyond Podcast

Ever wondered how breaking free from societal norms and investing in yourself can transform your life?

Join me on a heartfelt journey as I celebrate my 45th birthday by sharing five invaluable lessons learned over the past five years. From overcoming the fear of spending on coaching and mentorship to rethinking the myth of perfect timing, I'll reveal how these insights have brought both personal and professional success. This episode promises to guide you toward navigating life's unpredictable paths with greater ease and efficiency, by embracing proactive steps and investing in your own growth.

We also dive deep into the profound shift required to prioritize health as the cornerstone of well-being and productivity. Discover how setting boundaries and involving family members can break the cycle of neglect caused by busyness and stress. I'll share personal stories of how embracing my uniqueness and letting go of societal conditioning has led to greater freedom and self-acceptance. Whether it's through unique health experiences or challenging societal expectations, this episode is packed with practical advice and inspirational anecdotes aimed at helping you achieve true balance and maximise your potential.

Episode Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Balance and Beyond, the podcast for ambitious women who refuse to accept burnout as the price of success. Here, we’re committed to empowering you with the tools and strategies you need to achieve true balance, where your career, relationships and health all thrive, and where you have the power to define success on your own terms. I honour the space you’ve created for yourself today, so take a breath, and let's dive right in…

It is my birthday the week that this episode is released, and so, in honour of me turning 45, yes, that would be officially mid-40s, I want to share with you the five biggest life lessons that I've had from 40 to 45. And these were lessons that nobody else has told me. 

Every year, when my birthday rolls around, I like to use it as an opportunity to really reflect on what has shifted in the past 12 months, and having a June birthday is wonderful, because this is a process I do at least twice a year. I do it around the end of the calendar year, then I get to do it around my birthday mid-year. What this does, is it gives me a chance to not just reflect, but also try to embed the lessons that I've learned. 

Too often, as humans, it's very easy for us to focus on what we didn't do or the mistakes we made, instead of actually saying, “Oh, what is working really well for me right now, and what can I do more of?” So, in honour of this mid-40s milestone, I want to share with you these core lessons, that I wish someone had sat me down at 40 and said, “This is what you're going to learn in the next five years.” Obviously, I wouldn't be here now, because I wouldn't have learned them myself. But, my aim in passing this on to you, is that perhaps you don't have to go through as much, let's call it “pain” or “suffering” as I did, to learn these. 

Lesson number one, and this took me a really, really long time to learn, probably more than the last five years, is that getting help is always faster than doing it yourself. I grew up with an English father who was quite the tight ass and hated spending money, and still does to this day, and so I had a lot of, “I'll do it myself.” “I don't want to pay for things.” “I'll take the cheap road.” And that's a money weed that I have to continue to work on, because it's always been embedded in me. And so, that is a conditioning piece that I've really had to learn to let go of, and know that, “You know what?” “Getting help is always going to be better, and faster.” 

And, rather than just focusing on the outlay, when you actually focus on the opportunity cost of what not investing in myself in different areas of my life has done to me, everything becomes very clear. So, as an example, I have a body coach in the UK. I've had many business coaches over my time, I've had mentors, I've got a team of people, whether it's a Reiki person, or a massage therapist. I go to regular saunas and floats, with various different guides. I'm always looking for the latest mentor, who is going to be here to support me.

And I do that because we either pay for things in two ways. We pay with time, or we pay with money, and I used to be someone who didn't want to pay with money, which then meant that I paid for things in time. And there were so many times I looked back, particularly in my thirties, when it was all about saving the money, because we weren't having babies and had a huge mortgage, and it made sense. 

But, the moment I started saying, “You know, I'm going to short circuit this.” “I want to learn from someone who's made all the mistakes, and I can avoid taking them.” Things changed so fast. One of my core values is speed, or efficiency, or getting stuff done. I don't like to wait. Patience, or impatience, will be my life's work. So, if I can spend some money to avoid wasting time going around in circles, then I will always do that. 

But, what I've learned, particularly in the last five years, is that this applies in all areas of my life, whether it's my body, whether it's the right naturopath for me, whether it's the right therapist for my child, or tutor for my child. This is the joy of doing this work, and what's interesting is, I have people say to me, “But, you can afford to invest in coaching, or osteo's, or whatever it might be, so yeah.” 

But, the reason that my business is successful is because I invest in myself. It's counterintuitive. But, categorically, particularly over the last five years, it is what has skyrocketed my business. Because, five years ago, I didn't really have a business. This was still an idea. It was still trying to take off. And so, everything that I have done over the past five years has been with people walking beside me. 

Lesson number two, which follows on from this “thinking that I could do it myself” thing is I was always told in life that it was all about the timing. “You have to get your timing right.” But, what I have learned in the last four years, is life is always going to throw you curveballs. There is never a perfect time for anything. 

So, what I've learned in the last four years is to actually start throwing the curveballs myself. Why wait for life, the universe, mother nature, god whatever you want to call it to go? Oh, you're going. Quite well, let's do this thing when we've actually moved into our house. 

We had moved into the house that we built, the house that was part of the blowing-up-my-life story, from Episode 1. And we'd bought a house, and then we'd moved in really quickly, and we'd also ended up going overseas at that point in time, which wasn't planned. And after 12 months, we declared, I think that it was 2017, that it was meant to be the “Year of Beige.” 

This was the year, and beige was intentional, because beige is boring. Nothing happens Like this is the year of beige. You know what happened in the “Year of Beige?” We blew up our lives, we sold the house, I started my business, my husband left his job, my health went down the toilet, his health went down the toilet. It's like, you can't control these things! 

Life is always going to throw things at you, some spanners in the works, and the more you now go, “You know what?” “I just accept that spanners are always going to come.” And, “Where can I start to throw them myself?” Rather than sitting on decisions, or worrying about “What am I going to make this mean?” Or “What are they going to think of me?” I've turned around and gone, “You know what?” “This house isn't the right house for us to live in anymore.”

This was when I was in my last house, which was the one after we blew up our life. We made the decision to sell in 10 minutes, and that was a massive curveball. Cause we weren't necessarily planning on moving. We were actually planning to renovate. And the moment that our plans got knocked back by the council, I went, “That's a sign.” And 10 minutes later I said, “I think we should sell.” And my husband's gone, “What?” And the old me would have said, “That's incredibly impulsive.” And, “How can you make such a big decision in such a short space of time?” 

But, this will come back to one of the later points. The more I've learned to trust my gut and go, “You know what?” “I think this has happened for a reason.” “Let me find the reason.” Actually, I was sitting uneasy with what we were doing, and how the budget was going, and what we were going to get for our money, and were we over-capitalising? 

I had a whole lot of niggling doubts until that moment when I got the second chance to go, “You know what?” “Maybe this isn't the right path for you.” I felt this instant calm in my body, this instant, “Yes, that feels great.” “That is what we need to be doing.” So, when you start to shake up your life, it actually becomes more fun. It's like, you get rewarded. 

Now, I'm not saying that blowing up my life was not painless. There was a lot of suffering in that. There was a lot of angst, there was a lot of loss. But when you start seeing life as a game, you may have heard it being called. “The Matrix” by people. Where, what if we are all literally video characters, walking around, and we can take it so seriously, and we can suffer so much? 

And I'm not saying that there is not immense suffering in the world, and I'm not saying there's not immense pain, but how can we hold on a little less tight to things that hit us, and go, “Okay, what am I?” “What's the lesson here?” “What's the gift in this experience?” “Maybe this is actually happening for my best and highest good.” So how do I take this and go, “All right, I'm going to turn this into a positive experience, no matter what it is.” 

And so those curveballs that have come my way in the last five years have been extraordinary things. Some of them, like I said, I would never, ever have expected some of the health challenges, some of the challenges with children. But, the more that you just accept it's part of this game, the easier life becomes, and the less tired your hands and your knuckles get from being white, and holding on so tight all the time. 

The third lesson, which has really come as I've let go of holding on so tightly and accepting these curveballs, is this mantra that I've heard my whole life, and this is where “Your health is your wealth.” But, I never really believed it. I don't know about you, but in my 20s, and probably even my 30s, I thought I was invincible. Like, “I'll be fine.” “Old age, that's way down the track.” “I'm fine.” “I can do what I want.” “I can run half marathons.”

You know that point you were dealing with in your 30s, little kids. Obviously, 20s was like, “We can go out at midnight” and “We've got these jobs, and we've got two incomes, and we can do whatever we want.” But, in the last five years, particularly between 40 and 45, and I now have a lot of friends, you know, in their 50s, I've also got my parents, they are getting older. My dad's about to turn 85. My mum's in her late seventies. A lot of my friends' parents are the same age. I'm starting to see this trend of, you know, what we do in our forties. 

The decisions we make now about our health, about our wellbeing, about our wellness, have an exponential impact on what happens to us later in life. And I don't want to be one of those people who gets to 60, and then gets an incurable disease, or gets cancer, and the supposed best years of my life when I've cashed up, when the children have moved out of home, when I'm winding down from a work perspective, not that that may have happened with me. But when I've got less responsibilities, I don't want to be sick. 

I don't want to wait until it is very much the feeling of, “That?” “I'll take care of that later.” “I'll wait till something breaks.” And it becomes harder and harder to bounce back. And so many women that come to me are in a very, very bad way physically. They're trying to mindset their way out of a health problem, chronic auto-immune diseases. We all know that 80% to 90% of most illnesses and diseases come from, or are in some way impacted by stress, and that stress can be largely self-inflicted. We tell ourselves it's the job, but actually, it's the way that we respond to that job. 

The shift that I had to make to really embody that, “Your health is your wealth” is I had to start believing that my health was actually worth not just investing in, but primarily investing in time. Because, I would take care of myself. But “Oh, you know, I've been a bit busy.” “No time for a walk today.” Or “Oh no, I didn't have time to go to the doctor.” Or “I didn't have time to sleep, I was too stressed.” Or if I was in bed, I wasn't sleeping because my head wouldn't switch off, and then I was tired. Then we might have a few too many glasses of wine because we're trying to unwind. 

And so, I was stuck in this cycle of really taking advantage of my body, and I'm somebody who I am not a professional athlete as much as sometimes you think that might be a nice life. My future, my family's security, is built on my brain. I don't do anything with my hands, except type, and they're pretty useless. 

So, if my brain exists in my body, if I do not take care of my body, my brain is not going to be at its best self, and therefore, I'm never going to realise my potential, I'm never going to fulfil my purpose and my mission, I'm never going to maximise the financial wealth creation opportunities for my family. I'm going to be cutting everybody short, and I'm going to be feeling like crap. Why would I want to live that way? So the mindset shift, and the shifts that had to be made for me in the last five years to really prioritise my health, have been to actually realise that I am worth taking care of. Full stop. 

This is not just about, you know, #self-care, #self-love. This is about actually embodying and raising my own standards, as to how I'm prepared to treat my body. And that is tied to the first point I made, where I now know that it's worth me investing in the right people to help my body. Whether it's physios, or osteo’s, or naturopaths, or whatever it is. I'm not going to try to do it myself, and pretend that living in a body that feels “meh” all the time is good enough. 

It's only once I've been able to raise my standards for how I treat myself, my standards for how I talk to myself, my standards for how I boundary my time, that those boundaries are ever actually sticking. And even right now, you know, my husband has broken his foot, and so he can't drive, and ordinarily he'd drive our daughter to the train station every morning. Well, now, a couple of days a week, “Sorry honey, I'm going for a run, and you can catch the bus.” 

She's not particularly happy about that, because she has to get up about seven minutes earlier, and anyone who's got a teenager knows those seven minutes are absolutely crucial to the rest of their day, or so I've been told. However, I have to be prepared to upset her, to make her not happy with me, in order to say I matter, my health matters, and if this is the best time for me to go for a walk. That fits in my day well, somebody else is going to have to be inconvenienced, and that this is the best time for me to go for a walk. That fits in my day well, somebody else is going to have to be inconvenienced, and that was what the old me would never do. Oh, I can't put anybody else out, so I will either get up at 5am and attempt to exercise when nobody else is awake, so therefore I'm not inconveniencing everybody else. 

However, I am depriving myself of sleep because, when I was up until midnight, or on the couch at 1am, trying to catch up on everything, and then attempting to get up at five and exercise, because it's the only time that I supposedly could fit it in. No, it's the only time I used to think I could fit it in, without inconveniencing anybody. 

But now my husband and I, obviously not so much, now, because he can't walk, but it would be like, “Right, who's exercising in the morning?” “What do I need to take?” “What do you need to take?” He goes to the gym at lunch times. He plays soccer on the weekends. “Okay, who do I need to drop off so that you can go and play your soccer?” “I'm playing soccer this year, because that's something I want to do for me.” 

So, that means that he's on dancing duty on Friday nights, and maybe that's not what he used to do, or wants to do, and sometimes he has to miss out on going to the pub with his mates on a Friday night, but that's because that's what matters for me. 

So, holding those standards, holding those boundaries, has been so important for me actually having this foundation now of self-worth, to be able to focus on my body, to ensure I get the right help. And I get to feel fabulous most of the time, even though my weight, ironically, hasn't really changed, apart from babies, since I was 18-19. 

But, I feel so much better, I feel so much healthier. I have even more energy than I've ever had. I'm probably fitter than I have been in a really, really long time, and that has only happened in these last five years, as I've really changed these standards. 

So, something for you to think about is, if you are saying, if you feel like your health is not where it needs to be, what have you got to shift for your standards, for yourself to actually boundary and invest in yourself? And the biggest thing we need to be investing in our health is actually time and energy. So, they are the two things you need to invest in. The money is inconsequential relative to the actual time we have to do it ourselves. 

So, to recap where we're at so far, my top three lessons, and there's still two more to go, is that getting help is always faster than doing it yourself, life is always going to throw you curveballs, so why not have some more fun throwing them yourself, and really embody that? Your health is your wealth. Do not take it for granted, and ensure that you build the boundaries and the self-worth and the inner sense of self. Then, do the inner deep work to make sure that you can really embody that statement. 

The fourth lesson that I had learned is that, again, you hear these as platitudes, I would say. But, if I'm honest, I never really believed them, because if anything is quote-unquote “conventional wisdom”, I've almost convinced myself to ignore it because, say well, if everybody else believes that, then that's probably wrong. 

So, I want to believe something different, and this is, that your intuition is always right. I've done other podcast episodes where I've talked about, what you could call, my journey through the “woo”, or my journey to unlock my intuition and I have followed more nudges than I am probably even aware of, but anytime I have ignored that voice that said, “Do this” or “Don't do this” or “What about this?” It's never gone well. 

And the reason that I usually ignored that voice was, well, in my 30s, I didn't have as much access to it, because it was very much drowned out by my own head. And that is still a path that I am continuing to go on, to access that intuition, and that deep inner knowing about, “This is right for me”, or “Yes for this”, or whatever it may be. 

But, the thing that I had to learn to do in the last five years is really give myself permission to do things that don't make sense to my head. I have always been a very logical person. I've always been someone who can make things make sense. I could justify and argue my way out of anything and give you data or reasons as to why this was the case. 

There have been quite a lot of decisions in the last five years that haven't made any sense and I've had everybody around me going, “What?” and challenging me on. “Are you really sure?” One of the big ones was when we sold our last house, and bought this one. It was happening at the same time as we decided to go to Norway, to this cutting edge health clinic that has changed all our lives. 

And my parents sat me down and said, “Are you really sure you should be going to Norway right now?” “You're trying to sell your house.” “You haven't bought one yet.” “You don't even know what you're going to get over there.” “You don't even know why you're going.” “You said there, you don't even know why you're going.” “You said you don't want to go back to Europe, and yet you're going to do this.” “You'll be away over Christmas, and you don't know where you're going to live when you come back.” 

And I said, “I have to go.” And there was this look, and from many friends like, “What?” “Are you nuts?” Like yes, that intuition was absolutely right, and it has saved my husband's life, guaranteed. It's absolutely changed Stella's life in terms of where she's at now emotionally, mentally, academically. It's definitely changed around Nikita, and probably reversed an irreversible disease that she was on the pathway to get. So, none of that made sense, but it always makes sense later. And so what now? 

In learning that my intuition is always right and doing the work, I need to unlock access to that intuition, and to better turn it up and turn it down in my head and really have faith that when it doesn't make sense, it will later. And that is what has allowed me to stand up to people who are questioning my sanity, questioning what is wrong with me, and are trying to pepper me with logic. And I just sit there and I say, “I don't know why, but I'm going.” 

And so really understanding “How do you tune into your intuition?” “How do you build that muscle?” It has changed everything about our lives in the last five years. And I know as I continue to improve my access to it, as I continue to dial it up and find different ways to access it, everything will click into place. I'm currently studying kinesiology as a new modality to do this. Again, it's something that I've loved being a participant in. Another thing that I invest in is I've loved it so much that I want to know how to do it myself now. 

And that was my intuition that said, “This is the first thing that's actually grabbed you” and said “Ho, ho, ho, you want more of that?” So, it's led me down many paths. This, I guess, this desire to follow my intuition, you could call it “the nudge to follow my intuition”, and who knows where it's going to take me on the pathway to 50. 

But I know that anytime I followed it, there have been no regrets, there have only been learnings. Of course, has it always been quote, unquote, “right?” Well, that depends on your definition. Because sometimes I followed a nudge and then I’ve gone, “Oh, this doesn't feel right.” I've then pivoted and changed course, but actually, I met somebody at that seminar, or that thing, that while it didn't make sense at the time, maybe I was there for that for a different reason than what I actually knew at the time. 

So, really, having faith that life is happening for you has been a really big part of me. Being able to accept that that intuition is there. Every single human has it deep within us. You call it trusting your gut, you call it “a knowing.” You call it a nudge, you call it a lightning bolt. I don't care what you call it, we all have it. And your life gets infinitely better when you can learn to trust it. Faster decisions, no regret, no overthinking, and just this beautiful grounded sense of, “I'm on the right path”, and “I'm doing the right things that are right for me.” 

And doing things for me brings us to my last point, which has really been, again, something else that I've heard around the place. But, there was this last piece to it that nobody ever said, and you've probably heard the saying, you know,”Own your uniqueness” before. And there's lots of hashtags about this everywhere. 

But what I never really understood, is when you own your uniqueness, you are actually inherently saying “I'm different from everybody else.” And that can be really tricky, because I spent a lot of my life trying to fit in. I spent a lot of my life with a lot of conditioning about being perfect, or being perceived to be a certain way, or keeping it all together, or being the strong one. And when you own your uniqueness and say, “You know what?” “Sometimes I'm a bit weird, sometimes I do crazy stuff.” 

I've even learnt that, you know, we know that all our bodies are unique. But as I've learnt more and more about my body, as I've invested in all this health, and biometric data, and all these things, you know, my body is very unique. My heart rate variability is very unique. My resting heart rate is crazy low. My heart rate variability is very high. Even when I went into labour, the doctors were like, “Oh, you're not labouring like anybody else does.”

So, rather than spending a lot of my energy which I used to do burying it, pushing it down, trying to pretend that I'm quote unquote “normal”, which means nothing, by the way, actually by me adopting and really embracing my uniqueness, and what makes me me, I actually give everyone around me permission to do the same. 

And I would say, of all the lessons that I've had over the last five years, this one has been the hardest. It sounds silly that it's really hard to be yourself, but anybody who is on this path knows that you have to let go of so much. So much conditioning, so much meaning, so much fear of rejection, fear of safety, fear of being kicked out of the tribe, fear of judgement. And the moment you can start walking through that, the freer you become. 

And freedom is one of my core values. It's why I do so many things in life. It’s to have this perceived sense of what I believe freedom means to me. And the more free I feel, this sense is directly related to how much I am owning who I am, and every single human is unique in this world. We all have our own quirks, we all have our own likes, our own dislikes, our pieces that make us wonderful. 

And the world would actually be a much better place if we could all put down all of these weeds and all of these judgments about, “Oh, I really want that, but what are they going to think of me?” “And they're going to think I'm entitled if I have that, and they're going to think I'm a spoiled brat and oh…”, “But then they're going to think that I'm not humble enough, and then they're going to think it is exhausting.” And I used to very much be on this pathway. 

I grew up mostly as an only child. My grandmother would always say to me,  and my mom particularly, “Don't let her be spoiled, she's an only child, she will be spoiled.” And so, ironically, my mum went out of her way to prove that I was not spoiled by very much unspoiling me, and that really is a trend that has been followed. It is then trying to fit in, trying to put a lid on my success, or my greatness, and not wanting to hurt other people's feelings, and not wanting to make other people feel bad, and not be a show-off, and not be bossy. And it's exhausting, and this is work that I have to continue to do. 

Every fortnight in my kinesiology sessions I uncover more. More ways that I'm holding myself back, more ways that I'm contorting, more ways that I'm chameleoning myself. It's part of the human condition. But this becomes the greatest part, and I would say, the greatest fun. The greatest challenge, and the greatest rewards now come from really going deep on who you are, what's possible for you, and as you start to shed these layers that you didn't even know you were carrying, these pieces of armour that have been weighing you down for so long, there is so much more magic and miracles that start to become available. 

We start playing in the realms of impossibility, we start talking about collapsing time, and all of that has only happened the more that I have owned who I am, the more that I have shown the world who I am, the more I have spoken up as I am, whether that's sharing my story, or sharing my challenges, or sharing the things that I've learned, that the world becomes a better place, and I become a better person, and it becomes this beautiful symbolic relationship between the two. 

So, if you've learnt nothing else from these five, this half decade of wisdom, you could call it. I really would love for you to pull out whatever lessons are meant for you, because that's why you're listening today. But, to own yourself, to do the work on yourself, to embrace who you are, to walk through the fire and out the other side, it is a journey and a pathway that you will never, ever regret. As for me, I'm going into 45, doing a lot of driving with a husband with a broken foot, and with children that are dancing and all these things. 

But I'm going to make time for myself. I have a lot of fun things planned every year. I like to turn my birthday into a bit of a festival, because why not? Because I can. So, I will be celebrating all of you for listening to the podcast. It has been my greatest pleasure to share parts of this journey, and parts of this wild ride, so thank you for giving me the chance to reflect today, and be able to swim in so much of what I have learned. So, happy birthday to me, and here's to five extra pieces of wisdom for you. 

OUTRO: Thank you for joining us today on the Balance and Beyond Podcast. We're so glad you carved out this time for yourself. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend who might need to hear this today. And if you're feeling extra generous, leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice would mean the world. If you’re keen to dive deeper into our world, visit us at www.balanceinstitute.com to discover more about the toolkit that has helped thousands of women avoid burnout and create a life of balance, and beyond.Thanks again for tuning in, and we'll see you next time on the Balance & Beyond Podcast.