Ep #129: The Exhaustion Double Down

You are listening to episode 129 of The Confident Coaches Podcast, the one where you stop exhausting yourself. All right, let’s go.

Welcome to The Confident Coaches Podcast, a place for creating the self-confidence you need to do your best work as a life coach. If you want to bring more boldness, more resilience, and more joy to your work, this is the place for you. I’m your host, Amy Latta. Let’s dive in.

Hello, my coach friends. How are you doing today? I hope you’re doing fabulously, as always. I hope this month of April has treated you so well. My birthday month is coming to an end by the time you listen to this. It’s been wonderful. It’s been fabulous. I’ve seen so many friends, I saw Hamilton, I celebrated my husband’s 50th birthday, my 48th.

I traveled to Austin. I traveled to Louisville. I booked Troy and I a trip to St. Thomas the end of June. It’s good. It’s good. It’s good, my friends, this is a good life we got going on here. And I’ve decided that on this week’s episode, we’ve been doing some really, really good coaching in Free To Paid Coach.

That is my brand new program, it’s only been out for a month. And this is a program that is a onetime payment of $1,000, you’re in forever. You get all of my modules that walk you through exactly how to go from a free to a confident paid coach. And we coach every single Tuesday afternoon.

And I’ve just think we’ve been doing such great coaching that I want to share some of what we’re doing inside with you. So I don’t know what we want to call this segment. We won’t do it every week, but it’s like from the coaching files, right? First of all, so many of these podcast episodes come directly from a coaching conversation that we’ve had throughout my coaching relationships.

And this one today actually showed up in both, Free To Paid Coach and in The Path to 100K Mastermind. So you can work with me two ways, Free To Paid Coach, which is enroll once, you’re in forever. It’s a $20,000 program for like $1,000, it’s a no brainer. It’s brilliant. And it’s everything that you need, like I tell you exactly the steps to take to sign your next client and exactly the steps to take to handle all of the bullshit thoughts, and feelings, and emotions, and all of the drama that comes up when you take those steps to sign those next clients.

And then we’re also identifying where your patriarchal thinking and hierarchical thinking is getting in your way so we can start debunking that. Because as I have said a few podcasts ago, it is patriarchal thinking that is preventing you from getting paid. So let’s identify it, let’s find it. Let’s elevate your brain to that of a paid coach. So who wants a little from the coaching files? Because we’re doing good, good stuff in there.

Oh, and then the other program, oh yeah, that’s what I was talking about. The other program is my Path To 100K Mastermind. So once you’re a paid coach, once you know how to go create clients, once you’ve started to identify the patriarchy in your mind, in Path To 100K I’m going to teach you how to replicate what’s working in your business, how to stop replicating what’s not working in your business, like how to let go of what’s not working in your business. And elevate your brain to that have a six figure coach who can tell the difference between those two things.

It’s so much fun. And this conversation today, what I’m kind of calling the exhaustion double down has come up in both groups. So I know this is something that every coach, I think this is just something that every human struggles with, I think.

Before I do that, as you guys know I love reading client reviews on the podcast. If you leave a review in Apple Podcasts, you can review on Spotify but it’s not so much a review as much as you’re just giving me a star rating. I would love star ratings on Spotify, love star ratings on Apple Podcasts, and written reviews. It just helps other coaches, other people find this podcast when you rate and review.

So I wanted to make sure I shared this review from Ashao and give a personal shout out. Ashao wrote, “Amy provides simple and insightful advice for growing your coaching business. Episodes are super helpful, I love how grounded and down to earth she is. And you can tell she genuinely cares about helping us. I definitely recommend giving her podcast a listen.”

See how simple that was? It’s super simple. So if you are listening on the Apple Podcasts app, I invite you to go write a review right now. If you’re listening on Spotify, I invite you to go ahead and tap on the main page and give me some stars. It just helps other people find the good work that we’re doing here.

And speaking of good work, let’s do it from the coaching files. This one is all about the exhaustion double down. Which I kind of have a funny story to share, it’s not unrelated to this. So I’ve just gotten back from traveling a lot over the past couple of weeks and I’m not the best sleeper when I travel. I’m a minimum of an eight hours kind of gal. And when I travel it’s more like between four and six hours.

So, you know, and yes, this episode is not about what I could be doing about that and things I could try. And some of it is hormonal and yada, yada, yada. But suffice it to say that I have been, for lack of better words, catching up on sleep. I’ve been trying to like catch up on sleep and my watch tells me if I have a sleep debt or a sleep credit. And I think today I finally finally got into the credit mark. I think it finally got out of the red and into the black.

I pulled up podcast episodes that, you know, I’ve been keeping a file of things that we’ve been coaching on in Free To Paid Coach and in Path To 100K Mastermind. And I’ve been keeping this file and the first one I was like, “Oh, I have already talked about this.” But I don’t think I have. I actually went through my podcast episodes and I do not see today’s topic as a podcast I’ve already recorded. But my brain is like, “No, we’ve 100% already recorded this already.”

And I just think it’s kind of funny because my brain is literally, as I’m speaking into this microphone, like, “Listen, you’re tired, we should probably just go to bed and figure this out later.” Like the very topic I’m wanting to talk to you about, I am in the middle of as I’m talking to you about it. And it is affecting my work in a way that like I’m looking over my notes for this episode and I’m going, “Am I sure? Have I not talked about this already?”

So I’m literally sharing with you one way these exhaustion stories that we tell ourselves, like they feel so very true, okay? So I want to start off with this, I know that this feels true. And also, here’s why we need to stop exhausting ourselves even more than we might already be to start with.

So really what I’m talking about is how do you show up in your business when you are having an off day? How do you show up in your business when you’ve traveled a couple of times and you don’t sleep well when you do travel? And you have the data that says you aren’t sleeping, you know, you are only sleeping an average of four to six hours a night when normally you would sleep over eight hours.

Or sometimes an off day doesn’t even have to do with your sleep, right? Maybe you slept fine and you just, you know, I even hate the phrase get up on the wrong side of the bed. But, you know, you’re just a little off. Maybe it is your hormones. Maybe your brain was up all night thinking about something. Maybe you’re kind of grumpy.

You know those mornings where you just kind of, like you get out of bed, you stub your toe, you miss the toilet seat a little bit when you go to the bathroom. You go to make coffee and like… Have you ever had this where like, I need the coffee so I can make the coffee? Where you’re like mismeasuring or you’re like pouring it into the wrong thing.

I don’t have a coffee pot anymore where the pot goes under the thing. I do a French press now. But back in the old days, when I had a regular old coffee pot, how many times I would like forget to put the coffee pot to catch the coffee. And so coffee would just be spilling everywhere.

Or maybe you’re just like your clothes are pinching and not feeling weird. You know, you’ve got a kid somewhere in the house, or a spouse or partner somewhere in the house that maybe they’re being grumpy. Like it’s just off, right? It’s just one of those days where you’re stumbling. Mentally, physically you’re just kind of, another way to describe a day like this would be like swimming in mud. I even did that with my mouth, right?

It’s like your body’s moving forward but it’s just you’re out of sync. You’re out of sorts. It could be sleep deprivation, it could be hormones, it could be any number of factors, but you’re having an off day. And here’s the interesting thing that happened, is that within one week, both in Free To Paid Coach and in Path To 100K Mastermind, two very different clients were telling me that their energy has to be in it.

In order for them to show up in their business, their energy has to show up. As if their energy was this thing they either had or they didn’t have. And one of the clients even said, “I’m only really good when I’m in flow, or when I’m in hype energy.” So flow energy or hype energy, like I need to feel like my brain is on. And I know this story. Do I know this story, this is one of my favorite stories to indulge in.

So first and foremost, it’s really important to see, and this is why I’m calling this the exhaustion double down, is that when you focus on how off you feel, on how non-energetic you feel, on how exhausted you feel, you only create more exhaustion. All we have to do is put this into a coaching model, which is what I use in my coaching.

You have the circumstance of how many times you’ve stubbed your toe, spilled coffee, yelled at your kids. The number of hours of sleep that you got, where you are in your cycle, or if you’re in perimenopause like I am and you never know where you are in your cycle, right? You have this as your circumstance, right?

I got four and a half hours of sleep before spending an entire day interacting with a thousand coaches at a coaching conference. Now if I’m focusing on, “Oh, I slept so terrible last night. I can’t do anything right this morning. Oh God, I’m just so tired. Are you tired? I’m just so tired. Oh, I stayed up way too late last night, I totally shouldn’t have done that.” It sounds like you’re telling the truth. It sounds like you’re just recounting the details, right?

It sounds like you’re just giving the facts, but the way in which you are telling that story is 100% on the thought line. And when I tell the story that way, how do I feel? I can literally feel my shoulders slump, my energy just like pour out of my fingertips. I’m literally just like sitting in my chair right now like, “Oh my god, it’s so exhausting.” I’m literally creating more exhaustion on top of however I am feeling physically.

I am putting emotional and mental exhaustion, and emotional and mental offness on top of any physical offness I might be experiencing. Do you see that? Of course you can tell the story that way. But as soon as you put it into the model, look at what you were creating. Because then if I’m telling the story that way with my thoughts and I’m feeling more tired, more exhausted, now I actually feel true exhaustion.

What does my action line show up as? I’m either going to argue with myself. I’m going to complain. I’m going to think about how unfair it is that I have to work on my business when I feel so tired. Or I’m not even going to do that at all, I’m just going to be like, “Fine, I just won’t work on my business at all.” I’ll be grumpy and I’m going to hate everybody. Which, of course, the result that I’m creating is just more of that terrible story that I was talking about, of that terrible story I was telling, right?

So see how talking about how tired you are literally just makes you more tired? So why do we keep telling the story this way? I know like three, off the top of my head, like just off the top of my head is first of all, because we just think that it’s true. No one has ever taken the time to point out to us that we had the option of telling our story a different way.

Like obviously, I would tell the story this way. I’m just reporting the facts, ma’am. Did you see how many hours I got? My watch is showing me. Or I’m able to look at the clock, I know I was up not able to sleep from 1 to 3am last night. I know that I couldn’t figure out how to fall back asleep and how much more tired I am.

And we don’t realize that this is optional. I love hearing stories about people and one that’s coming to my brain right now is another podcaster, Dax Shepard. And he had the story that he was a terrible sleeper and he decided one New Year’s Eve or New Year’s day he was just going to stop talking about how terrible of a sleeper he is. And he suddenly sleeps a lot better.

It’s really weird. It’s almost like our thoughts create things. So just because it feels true and just because you can provide a lot of evidence for it, as soon as you put it into the model you can just start to question why would I continue to talk about this story? But I do know why, for reasons no number two and three.

You know, we kind of love swapping exhaustion stories. I see you, particularly if you’re a mama. Like we really love swapping exhaustion stories, right? Because we are in charge of 976 things on any given day and so it becomes this badge of honor of like, “Oh, you think you have it bad? Oh my goodness, I didn’t get any sleep last night. Oh, at least you got some sleep.” Right? Like this becomes this thing that us humans do where we love to swap sob stories.

And, of course, the question is why are we swapping sob stories? Not everybody does this. I know lots of people who do not engage in the exhaustion double down. But oh, I know a whole hell of a lot of us that do engage in the exhaustion double down. And I just want you to see are you wearing that as a badge of honor? Are you wearing your tiredness and your offness as one of those like where we’re competing for who has it worse?

Which is such an interesting thing that we humans like to do, isn’t it? I don’t do it at all like I used to. In fact, I don’t think I actually catch myself doing it that often anymore. But this is definitely something that I used to do. And I wasn’t even the worst offender that I knew. I definitely knew other people who played the exhaustion double down or the badge of honor of being so tired, even more so than I did. And I thought, “Oh, at least I’m not as bad as them.” See, I was still doing like a comparison game. So are you wearing it as a badge of honor?

And then the third reason is because it’s a really great excuse, right? If you’re engaging in the exhaustion double down, then you have a great excuse for not having to solve for how to attract your best clients and become a confident paid coach. You can be like, “Listen, I was just off. I had an entire week of just off. So I need my energy to be up. My energy has to be in it. I need to feel really good. I need to be in flow. I need to be hype. Because if I’m not…”

This is where we can use the model against ourselves. Well, Amy, you said I need to have nothing but a positive thought and a positive feeling in order to create positive results. I’m like, well, they influence them. And we’re going to get to this in just a moment, by the way. What to do, when you are having one of these off days and how it’s possible to still create positive results, even when you don’t feel fabulous.

Okay? This is where you have to learn, like life coaching 101, your thoughts create your feelings drive your actions. So if you want positive results, you need positive actions. And if you want positive actions, you need positive emotions and you need positive thoughts. But that’s not how human beings work. That’s like you have to have the basic understanding of how human beings work, then you get into like the reality of how human beings work.

And we are all feeling a variety of emotions all of the time. And if you only wait until you only feel good, you’re going to work like five days a month. Now, unless you decide in advance you’re only working five days a month, then that’s not a problem. But most of you, that’s not what you’re deciding.

So of course, if you can just focus on like my energy just wasn’t in it. I was just so tired and, you know what? My energy has to just be there. And oh, good, I don’t have to go figure out why I haven’t gotten a consult call even though I posted five times last week.

I posted five times last week and nobody responded and I don’t have any consult calls. And you know, I didn’t sleep that well. You know what? I think I’m really tired. You know what? I’m tired. You know what? Maybe I’m just really tired, yeah, that’s it. You have to be aware of that.

Now, I am not saying we don’t take days off for tiredness, I’m getting to that in a moment. Okay? So don’t now think like, don’t listen halfway through and be like, “Amy said, I can never take a day off.” No, just be aware that we love to tell these exhaustion double down stories because A, it’s never even occurred to us that it’s not true. B, it’s a badge of honor that we can talk about how tiring our life is. And C, it’s a great excuse to not have to solve for why people aren’t signing up for consult calls with you.

Okay, so then I want you to even explore how is this not even true? Where have you performed fabulously when you weren’t feeling it? Oh, and I guarantee you we all have. We have all had off days, but something was happening and we needed to show up and we were able to show up. You have so much evidence in your life how you are a complex human being with a mixture of both positive and negative emotions, and can still show up powerfully for yourself.

In particular, one of the people that I was coaching, she used to perform like in very high-end orchestras and in concerts. And she’s like, “Oh my gosh, all of the time. It didn’t matter how we were doing, how my day went, I was always able to focus in that moment to get done what I needed to get done and to perform beautifully because that was my job. That’s what we did.”

And all of us have done this, particularly if you are a parent you’ve absolutely done this, you’ve absolutely rallied behind your family, behind your kids. Now be really careful, I don’t mean that we’re sacrificing ourselves for our business any more than we would sacrifice ourselves. Again, we’re going to talk about this in a couple more minutes.

But we have so much evidence of how we have shown up powerfully for our clients, for ourselves, for our families, for our jobs, for life, even when we’ve been in an off situation. So then what should you do? Now, I will tell you this, that I used to coach to plan ahead of time. Decide now, the next time you have one of these “off days” how you want to show up. But I don’t coach that anymore because I’ve gone even deeper than that.

That assumed that there is always a right answer and that’s not, again, how human beings work. I’m actually showing you right now how you can evolve in your coaching by continuing to do this work. So I used to coach have a plan ahead of time the next time this happens, that way you don’t have to dilly dally and figure out what you should or shouldn’t do. You already have an answer for that.

But I actually want to, instead coach you to have trust in yourself in the moment that you can decide what you need. That you can choose to take a day of rest and to love yourself for it. And it’s not an excuse not to do the hard work of running your business, but it’s actually a mental health day. It’s a conscious choice, coming from a place of love and grace and compassion for yourself.

Or that you can also decide that you’re going to work anyway and the number of hours of sleep that you got, or the number of times you stubbed your toe and spilled coffee or whatever else happened is just a circumstance. And you get to decide how you think about yourself and your day on the thought line. You get to decide how you’re going to tell that story.

Some of my best coaching has come from when I’ve had like three brain cells and I just got super laser focused. Actually I coached in my coach’s, in her program, literally 47 minutes after I got back from a four hour ride in the car back from Louisville driving through thunderstorms the entire time.

I even started the session, “Listen, my brain is a little bit fried. I’m going to be super laser focused.” I kept misspeaking and so I just said, “Apologies again that I keep misspeaking, I’m saving all of my brain cells for my brain to coach you.”

I even used it as an example of like, “Listen, we’re doing this and my brain is laser focused. That means some other stuff might be falling through the cracks and that’s totally okay because I’m reserving all of my brain’s power on coaching you powerfully.” And I did and it was an hour of fire.

And so this really comes down to I trust myself. I trust myself to know what is best for me. So that some days I may not get the hours of sleep I prefer or the deep sleep that I crave, and I can also get a lot done. And then other days I can say, “You know what? I see what I need to get done and I’m going to move this here, and here, and here, and I’m going to choose rest instead.”

Because what you need and what you desire may be different each time. The answer to the exhaustion double down is I trust myself. I’m not going to continue to tell these tales this way, which only leads to more exhaustion. And I trust that I know what is best for me, and my business, and my family today. And what would you need to believe about yourself in order to create that trust so that you can feel love or grace or compassion for yourself? That’s the model to solve for, right?

Right now everybody’s model is woe is me on the thought line, which the feeling line is extra exhaustion. And then all the ways you show up from there guilt, bargaining, negotiating, whining. I know because that’s me sometimes, I’ve totally done that.

And really what the model is that I want you to have is the same circumstances, the number of hours you slept, the things that have happened that day from a totally neutral point of view. And instead, I want you to put love, or grace, or compassion, or trust on the feeling line. And what does that model look like?

Then on the action line you get to make a powerful decision so that you don’t engage in this exhaustion double down. All right, my friends? So this is the kind of coaching that we are doing in Free To Paid Coach. This is the kind of work that we’re doing because this is what’s preventing you from showing up to make offers, to do the work for yourself, to figure out what you need to do, the steps that you are going to take to sign your next paid client. This is what we’re coaching on.

We’d love to have you in there. We’re waiting for you inside and you can enroll right now. You can enroll at any time, amylatta.com/FTPC. We are wrapping up the first 30 day make offers challenge. Some people started on day one, some people have come in on day 17 and started. Some people have come in on day 22 and started. You can start at any point. We’re waiting for you right now. This is the place and this is the program that you’ve been waiting for.

All right, until next week, let’s get paid coach.

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Thanks so much for listening to The Confident Coaches Podcast. I invite you to learn more. Come visit me at amylatta.com and until next week, let’s go do epic stuff.