It's a deep stretch episode! At the end of the month, our founder talks about what self-care and inner work looked like for her. Grab a cup of tea and join the conversation.
Resources from the community: Clue, MyFlo, Eve by Glow, Stardust, Baud
Welcome to Inner Warmup, where your inner work begins. My name is Taylor Elyse Morrison, founder of Inner Workout. And you as always our expert guest. Thanks for being here today, let's kick things off with a quick check in question. Describe your mood today as weather.
If I had to describe my mood, I'd say that I am 65 and sunny. I'm a person who likes it to be at least 75 degrees. So I'm generally in a bright mood, feeling pretty good. But I could be just like, a little bit warmer. A little bit sunnier. I'm not at 100% today, but I can't complain, I'm doing pretty great.
So this is our first deep stretch episode, which is going to be a little bit different than the episodes throughout the rest of the month. So other episodes, I share a little bit. But my goal is really to just provide context to allow you some time for reflection during our interview. The deep stretch is where I get to share what's been going on for me during the month. And hopefully you get to know me a little bit better. There will still be a reflection question that I'll ask you later. But I thought we would just go ahead and get into looking at the month of April.
I titled this episode "April Showers" because one, as I'm looking out my window, it's raining outside. So it's top of mind for me. And also, I felt like I was experiencing different kinds of storms throughout the month. Like I could see this raining down of abundance, there were all these opportunities that kept coming my way. You know how sometimes they say when it rains, it pours? It felt like it has been that in April. But also it's been like that all year, where we had our Kickstarter. And we launched a new website. And we launched this podcast. And I have another team member that I didn't have at the beginning of the year. And it felt like there was just so so much goodness and richness that was coming down. And also, I didn't feel fully equipped to handle all of it.
So, I'm running my self care company, not because I think that I have all the answers on self care, but because focusing on self care has been extremely grounding for me. It's been a way for me to come back home to myself. And I want to help other people have that experience of coming back to themselves as well. And so yeah, let's see. So this raining down as there was all of this opportunity, it kind of shifted me into a mindset and it started really with the Kickstarter of like, go go go, because we're trying to hit a certain amount of money within a certain amount of days. And it felt like there's a lot of pressure. And then from the Kickstarter came all these other pieces. And I was just, it's like I blinked. And it was two months later, it was April, and I was still operating as if I was running a Kickstarter out of this abundance of opportunity where it felt like there was just rain showers of opportunity happen. I also realized I really, really, really needed to rest. It might come as a surprise to you that that's not easy for me to rest. But I did, I took a mental health day two Fridays in a row. And going forward, my intention and my goal is to take a mental health day, once a month on a weekday. I recognize that I have a lot of privilege and being able to do that. And I also feel like if I'm building this company because I want there to be a world in which burnout isn't something that we have to worry about. I want businesses to work differently. If I have an opportunity to model that myself, I want to be able to do that. And just being really really honest, I haven't taken a lot of time off since quitting my full time job. I haven't taken a lot of time off even since starting Inner Workout. At the end of last year I took two weeks off and I think that was my longest vacation time since 2018. A lot of times I'd be off on the holidays but kind of working or billing hours for other clients and as I've shifted into working for myself, I want to embody the type of workplace that I want to have as Inner Workout continues to grow and eventually has full time employees.
So I've leaned into rest, which feels very uncomfortable for me. And I wonder if this is something that you can relate to, if there are other people who are kind of go, go go. Sometimes when there's that moment, I experience that even at the beginning of a meditation, where all the thoughts are happening, and all the sudden, all these ideas are coming, and I'm like, Oh, I gotta run with them. And then I remember, oh, no, this is the space and the time that I sat aside for meditation. And so I'm going to sit here, the doing can happen later.
At a larger scale, that's what's been happening for me on my mental health days. And even as I try and get better at not working on the weekend, I really try and wrap up my work on Friday night. And sometimes I'll have to facilitate something on the weekend. But I'm trying not to do a lot of doing. And I sometimes feel this metaphorical like twitch, like, Oh, I got to do something, can I really sit here and read this book? Can I really sit here and enjoy cooking this meal, and then I have to remind myself that I can. So out of this abundance of opportunity that got me into this go go go mindset, it's really in been an invitation to rest more into institutionalize rest in my life. Rest isn't something that comes when I'm depleted anymore. Rest is something that I'm trying to do, proactively, and value it just as much as I do being quote unquote, productive. And that's a whole other episode and something that we'll probably dig into in the future, let us know if that's something that that interests you talking more about rest, or talking more about productivity. I've tried to get out of this mindset that I'm a machine that needs to be the most efficient and productive.
Okay, so that was one thing that I felt like was an April shower, the shower of opportunity that led me into rest. And then there was also this abundance of really dysregulating events. It felt like all of these tough things were raining down. And not that they're not always there, but it just felt like gut punch after gut punch, after gut punch. We're reliving the events of George Floyd's death through the Derek Chauvin trial, as we saw Daunte Wright be murdered. I'm based in Chicago - I haven't watched the video, but Adam Toledo's video was released. And that happened over the course of a week, all of this happening. And it's like...I felt a little bit like I was in a pressure cooker, where the stuff that was below the surface, sometimes a little bit of pressure you can handle. And then as it gets more and more, you got to let off the steam or you're going to explode. And in this constant raining down of events that were a lot, I needed to figure out how to protect my energy.
I've mentioned before on my past podcast, and I think it has even come up a little bit in some of the past self care Sunday newsletters, I love to serve. And many times when I'm experiencing something that's difficult, I go into service mode, what can I do? How can I fix this? How can I have something that I can wrap my hands around and be in control of. And that gets me once again to this place of depletion. It gets me back into that mode of doing and going and takes me out of being. And so I've already been on Instagram a lot less. And I turned it down even a little bit more over the course of the last week. I've been mindful and giving myself a lot of permission to not have to share everything, to not have to perform grief. And to be able to process things with my close community. And also to show joy and experience joy and prioritize that as well. Even in a time that has been really, really hard. I don't think I ever do this perfectly. I don't think I do anything perfectly. But I can see a huge sense of progress from a week like this in 2021 and how I'm handling it versus a week like this in 2020 versus the first time I can remember a week like this was in July of 2015. Yeah, and I didn't know how to handle it. I was in my corporate job. So every time I get a little bit better at figuring out how to protect my energy and how to nourish myself, and it's a lesson I'm still having to learn because this the world that we live in, and sometimes I feel like it's gonna get worse before it gets better. And maybe that's me being a little bit pessimistic as I look at the rain outside my window. I'll end it on a little bit of a higher note.
But this is a deep stretch like this is where I want to go there, I want to share what's on my mind and what I'm thinking about when it comes to self care, when it comes to personal development. So as transparent as I can be, I'm going to try and do that.
The third thing that I felt in terms of a storm or an April shower was this desire to change, which makes sense, because we have entered in a new season. I feel like Personally, I've entered into a new season, the business is definitely doing that. We've done that physically, as we've transitioned into spring, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. And I felt this sense of like, I need to redo everything. And we did that a little bit, right? We started this podcast, we launched the new website, but even behind the scenes, as I'm looking at business models, and what do we do next? What do we launch next? It felt like I needed to get rid of everything. And I could feel almost like these winds of change. But they were they were coming from within. And what I found for myself, at least, is that what I needed was to get rooted. I am naturally a person who can find the next thing in the next iteration to try. But for me to weather, this storm and this desire to change, and also all of the shifts that are happening around me, I need to get rooted in what I wanted, as a business owner, and what I wanted as a person.
That's not to say that there won't be changes in the future, or that I don't want to evolve. But that has to happen from a place of being very rooted. And what the other things that I shared, when there are a lot of opportunities and people saying what if you did this? Or what if you did that? And when there are events in your environment that are triggering, and kind of knock you off kilter, sometimes, like I mentioned, the desire to change is a desire to take back control. And it might lead me to change in ways that aren't for my own good and aren't for Inner Workout's longterm good. And so when I root into myself...what are my values, what are Inner Workout's values? That's the place where I want to make decisions from, that's the place where I want to allow myself to shift from.
So man, April really brought a lot with it. And it felt like a culmination of things that were happening underneath the surface for this entire year. That all of a sudden, surprise, you have to deal with all of this, or it will deal with you. It will force itself into the conversation. And I think I've done that. I don't think that, magically, May will be perfect. But I do think I was able to look in the face of what's what's happening with my relationship to rest. What I need to guard my energy, how I can root into what I want for the future of the company and what I want for my own future. So, these April showers, these metaphorical April showers, these literal April showers that I'm seeing outside my window are what I needed. They're calling me to shift. But shift doesn't always mean do everything completely different. Sometimes it was calling me to shift my approach, shift my mindset, shift my perspective. And I'm excited to continue to explore that in my own life and with you through our upcoming interviews. I mentioned that there would still be a question this week. And the question that I want to ask you is what did April teach you?
You can think about it through the lens of shifts of you one but as you heard me talk about my April. Did anything ring true for you? What lessons did you learn in April? What did this month teach you?
Thank you for sharing. I want to end our deep stretch episode by highlighting resources that were mentioned in the community. And as you're doing your own as you're participating in this interview and honing into your own self expertise, just want to remind you that you can share your thoughts in the community too and connect with other people who are becoming their own experts. So earlier this month, we talked about our menstrual cycles and what our cycles have taught us. And the topic of tracking your menstrual cycle using an app came up and so we crowdsource some apps that people have enjoyed. My personal favorites are my Flo and Eve by glow. Other ones that were mentioned were Clue and Stardust. I'll also throw in one that is in beta right now, should be launching really soon called Baud. All of these will be in the show notes. So thank you, for those of you who shared. I just feel really grateful to get to participate in this space. I was gonna say create a space but really, it's getting to participate in a space where you all can share your expertise and your knowledge and what you've learned around self care and learn from each other as well. So really, thank you for listening. Thank you for your time and for your expertise and take care.
