As caregivers, “strong” friends, empaths, etc. we know a thing or two about listening. Whether it’s a coaching session, or lending an ear to a friend, listening is what we’re good at. The question we’re reflecting on this week is when is the last time you heard yourself? What does that look like for you?
Listen to this episode to reflect with Taylor as she shares the last time she heard a word from herself.
Mentioned In The Episode
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Welcome back to Inner Warmup where your inner work begins. My name is Taylor Elyse Morrison, I am the creator of Inner Workout and you as always, our expert guest. Thank you for being here. So the question that I've got for you this week is when's the last time you heard yourself? When's the last time you heard yourself? And if you've been following along, we're going back to the basics of self-care this month. And I get this question all the time…whenever I'm doing an interview or having conversations related to self-care, people tend to ask, okay, so if you were talking to a beginner, what would you tell them about self care? What's the first place you would have them start?
And I always say, the starting point, the easiest starting point, not super sexy, is to find space to listen within. Take a minute, as little as a minute, to not have a podcast…not have music, and just listen to yourself. Just you and your body and your thoughts and your emotions. Hanging out, sitting together with nothing else to distract you. That's always the starting point that I offer. Because if you'll remember the way that I talked about self-care, listening within, and responding in the most loving way possible, it's a conversation. And when you are just getting to know yourself, and getting to know the other aspects of yourself, you may find that you're not quite speaking the same language. Something's happening in your body, something's happening emotionally.
But you don't really know what it means because you may have spent your whole life or a season of your life ignoring that part of you. And when you listen within, you start to notice, okay, I'm getting a tingling feeling in my stomach. I don't know what you mean yet, but I hear you. And then over time, you might begin to see oh, that tingling feeling comes when I'm really excited about something. Yeah, it's a little bit of nerves. but it's mostly I'm excited about it. I'm excited to take that step with that risk of that action.
And the more that you listen within, the more you get to know what it feels like.
When you're talking to yourself like, oh, there's that twitch, I must be more stressed out than I even realized.
Or, Oh, this is what happens when I get really tired. It's harder for me to focus, I feel a little loopy. That's my sign that it's time for me to go to bed.
Or oh, I'm feeling really emotional. If I really want to hear from myself writing it out is going to help.
That's what you get to when you start listening to yourself more, you take those spaces to listen within. And so that's why I wanted to offer up this question of when's the last time you heard yourself because if you can think back to that last time, you already have a data point. And that data point can serve as your starting point for how you care for yourself. So for me, the last time I heard myself clearly was not too long ago. It was a Thursday night and I was sitting on my couch. I was actually planning on not working but I was just feeling really inspired. And I wanted to start mapping out some goals and some visions for what Q2 of this year would look like for me. But I ran into a little bit of trouble.
I realized that I had been doing a lot of this in Notion and that it just wasn't really working for me. We use notion for the way that we organize the podcast and how we store our files and send things to the editor and make sure all of our team members have what they need. And yet when I was wanting to do my own personal planning for Q2, I just was not feeling doing it on Notion. And I have this tablet, a remarkable tablet that's kind of like an iPad, but it's like an iPad and a Kindle. So I can write things on there but it doesn't really feel like I am looking at a screen. And so I started putzing around, looking to see if I could create a template for myself or if there were templates and next thing I knew, I had gotten a new planner and I started writing out in my digital planner things that I wanted, and creating kind of this new workflow for myself.
And all of a sudden, I was journaling and dreaming and setting intentions in a way that I hadn't done in a while. And something as simple of listening to myself, and realizing, oh, a lot of my ideas, a lot of how my creativity flows is through actually physically writing things down. So I've shifted more of my workflow to involve handwriting.
And I also was able to be really honest with myself. If you didn't listen to our February episodes on love and honesty, you might want to go back and listen to those. There's some good stuff in there. And I could say okay, what do I actually want for next quarter? And it started coming through so clearly. And I didn't filter myself, I wasn't like, ooh, that is too big…no, that's not possible. Or I didn't say, oh, that's really basic. Like really Taylor, that's important to you? I didn’t just laugh things off as being oh, that's silly. That shouldn't matter to you.
I created space and I created this vision that was entirely around what I wanted and I needed in this season because I was listening within. And the conversation was facilitated through handwriting. So I made note of that and like I told you, I shifted how I work to include more handwriting. I was honest, I didn't filter myself. And that ended up being this beautiful meeting with myself. So that's the last time I heard from myself. And you heard how it informed some of my daily actions and how I choose to work going forward. So now I'll turn the mic over to you.
When is the last time you heard yourself and really think about like, what was I doing? Were there modalities like writing or singing or playing an instrument? What time of day was it? All of those things can then help you intentionally hear from yourself going forward.
Thanks for reflecting with me. If you had anything pop up, feel free to DM us on Instagram or if you want to be in conversation with more folks who are thinking about these things too, we’d love to have you join us in the group chat. Thanks for your time and as always for your expertise. Take care!
