What I learned from my belly flop of a year

If you were to look at my year from a reasonable distance, it would certainly be described as 'not one of my best.' I had to fairly unexpectedly take time off of work to deal with health issues, I returned and then took an intentional step back in my corporate ladder-climb (to the shock and horror of coworkers), and have leaned even more into my yoga and movement teaching...which has many wondering if my journey will culminate with an Eat, Pray, Love moment before I fully get back on my previous wagon.

But if you were to look at my year in close up, this year has maybe been one of my best. I'm certainly ending the year in a way better place than where I started. I feel more like myself than I have in a long time. I have time to cultivate relationships with the people I love. I have time to do deep work that matters to me. I don't feel like I'm hurtling toward burnout at the speed of light. I am building connection and community in the place where I live. I have enough energy to actually help people I work with. I have more clarity about what I want from my work and my life, and a clearer path to making it happen. I'm not getting back on the previous wagon that looked really good on paper but wasn't actually getting me closer to a life that felt fulfilling and meaningful to me.

And so, because it’s the time of year that everyone is posting their reflections, I thought I’d share mine from this weird year.

It's not worth your health. No job is worth your health, and your health is impacted sooner and faster than you think. Maybe this sounds like the cheesy, mindfulness, wellness stuff they are selling on every social media post, but apparently I hadn’t heard it enough.? It’s not your dream job if you’re not actually enjoying the dream. Our culture often normalizes feeling unwell - especially as a result of our high stress jobs. It’s easy to feel like ‘nothing is really wrong’ when everyone around you has all the same symptoms. But just because the symptoms are common, it doesn’t make them normal.?

You can’t wellness your way out of a situation that is not sustainable. No amount of green juice, exercise, cold showers, or meditation will solve the problem of a situation that ultimately doesn’t support your needs. It would be way easier to juice our way out of stress, burnout and systems that set us up for failure, but that's not how it works. Telling people they are stressed out and burned out because they aren’t doing enough wellness is just another way to deflect the systemic reasons we are stressed and burned out.?

Managers, your employees don’t need you to be everything. For so long I stayed in my role because I worried about what would happen to the people I supported as a manager. I know this isn’t just me, because I coach managers all the time who say the same thing - ‘I don’t want to take time off because I don’t want to cause the team harm’ or ‘I don’t want to further traumatize the team with the churn of me taking a new role.‘ Nope. The team doesn’t need you that much, and if they do, the organization is fundamentally broken. Do people need compassionate, thoughtful, empathetic leaders? Yes. Do leaders have impact over employee experience? Of course. Are you, as a manager, responsible for people’s health, happiness, and free will to move on if a situation doesn’t serve them? Nope. You have to take care of you.?

You are a body. No matter how much want to, we can’t separate ourselves from our physical forms. We experience this world as bodies, and the more disconnected we become from the them, the more our creativity, innovation, and cognitive faculties suffer. 80% of our bodies signals are sent from the body to the brain. 80%!!! That means only 20% of the bodies signals are sent from your brain to your body. We are not walking sacks of meat with brains acting as the central command center. It’s the other way around - most of what’s happening in your brain is an unconscious, body first action, with a conscious component. Understanding this has made a massive impact on how I work, how I coach people I work with, and how I think about organizational and team health.?

Nervous system health is the key. Understanding and working with my nervous system has been the single most import thing I’ve learned to recover my health, feel like myself again, and understand where it all went wrong in the first place. I wish that everyone understood how our nervous systems worked, and how we can work with them to experience life feeling more regulated, stable, and connected.

Being all of myself is my strength. I started this year keeping two parts of myself separate. There was corporate design leader Carlye, and somatic coach Carlye….they were different pieces, and I actively worked to keep them that way. I’ve learned that keeping those things separate is a detriment, not a strength. My years of teaching, researching, and understanding movement and mindfulness is integral to the way I lead, coach and develop people and teams. My experience working as a corporate leader helps me understand how to access and understand the people who need access to somatic and nervous system work the most. My experiences make me perfectly suited to the work I’m doing. I have to bring my entire self to all the spaces I’m in, and if those spaces aren’t ready for all of me, they aren’t the right spaces.?