Watching Everyone But Yourself

JFM Episode 9 (1): I'm Dr. Sima Desai, and this is the joy first method, where high achievers stop white knuckling their way forward and start building something that's actually theirs. Let's get to it. If you've followed my work for a while, you've probably heard me say something like, I'm not really a runner. And I think that's still pretty true today. I don't consider myself to be a runner by every definition. I don't love it. I don't typically run in marathons or half marathons. 5K is not really my thing. But I do know that. Cardio is something that's really important for me if I want to continue to live a very long, healthy, active life. So my husband and I have decided to start training for the Cap 10K, which is a big 10K race that Austin has every April. We did it last year, but I walked through it and I wanted to make sure that I could, you know, show up a little bit more fully and see how running would feel. So we started training this morning. And as we were running through close to the major intersection that runs through our neighborhood, I was so focused on watching Munish, my husband, that I lost myself in the process. I was watching the cars in the intersection pull up. I found myself worried that they wouldn't see him, that they would, the cars would, you know, run him over. And in all of that, I found myself tumbling forward faster than I knew what would happen or what could happen, and felt just my entire body crash against the pavement of the sidewalk. I could feel my knee scraped up, my elbows banged up. Thankfully, my head's okay. And I got up with my husband's help, dusted myself off, took a few breaths, and said, Okay, let's get back to it. I'm okay. Let's just keep running. And as I was running, there was a flood of creative downloads that were happening for me. And I couldn't wait to come back to my home office and share. the five lessons that I learned from falling on my morning run with you. Number one. I was so focused on watching my husband to make sure he was safe, to make sure he was cared for. I was laser focused on the cars that are coming in the intersection. Instead of fully trusting that he is a functioning, high performing adult who has complete agency and control and experience to cross a major intersection without help from me. Instead, I just Found myself, hyper-vigilant. Maybe it was because our daughter had actually had an accident on her scooter a few days before. I don't know what it was. But in my effort to try to keep him safe, I lost sight of myself. I knew that there was an uneven place in the sidewalk. I've run that route, walked that route a hundred thousand times in the decades that we've lived in this neighborhood. And despite all my familiarity, I was so focused on somebody else that I couldn't care for myself. And so, that hypervigilance cost me my ability to keep myself safe, to keep myself pain-free. And we do this as leaders all the time. We worry about if you're in, the world of medicine, we worry about our patients, we worry about our staff. We if you're a parent, you worry so much about your kids and trying to control external circumstances that you lose yourself in the process. And the number one reminder that I got from crashing on the pavement this morning was that we can't serve others if we don't care for ourselves first. Super obvious in hindsight. It's not something that I typically tend to neglect, but the universe is very intelligent and it has a way of reminding us when we're forgetting something crucial and critical. So care for yourself and your effort to show up and be a good leader, a good provider, a good team member, a good executive, a good lawyer, a good whatever it is that you do in the world. If you don't care for yourself first, what will happen is that you will find yourself in a very untethered place and walking yourself back from that usually takes more effort and creates all sorts of other ripples that you'd have to then address. So that was my first little intuitive hit as I was running postfall. The second insight I had was about how as high performance professionals, leaders, parents, we often push. We don't have any problems pushing through, powering through, doing quote unquote our best work when our back is against the wall. That's what got us to this place. Hyper ambitious existence was they're they're the result of habits that we've learned over time. But here's the thing it's not so often when I coach my clients, and the reason they wind up feeling like they they need some support is that they haven't yet learned the skill of how to discern. If pushing forward is actually the right response, the best response for the situation that they're in. We can all push forward, okay? We've heard it so many times. Muscle up, buttercup. But oftentimes pushing through is when we're when we're running on empty and we're trying to push through, that doesn't actually work. When a challenge knocks us to the ground, when we decide to keep going, it's important that we Make that decision from a place of an integrated, regulated nervous system, from a place of feeling whole, feeling clear in our decision, and not feeling afraid or fearful of the consequences. It's important that we take that decision not from a place of emptiness, but from a place of wholeness. You know, when we fall. We often we feel the pain, but we're moving too fast to really allow ourselves to focus on it. And we tell ourselves, it's because I don't have time to stop. But the truth is, what we need to do, at least in my experience, let me back that up because I don't want to tell you what you need to do. I have found that when we allow ourselves to feel all of the emotion, the fear, the anxiety, the pain. That is the fastest way to move forward. These emotions are like beach balls. And if you push them down underwater and you pretend that they don't exist, eventually, whoosh, that beach ball is going to come up and hit you in the face. And in the same way, my decision to keep running was made only after I allowed myself to fall, catch my breath, feel the pain, assess the injuries to make sure that I was capable of still running. the nuance is are we moving forward from a sense of purpose and a a deep awareness of self? Or are we doing that from that place of untethered being? Pushing isn't the problem. It's when we do it because it's expected of us, because we fear the backlash, we fear like fear looking weak or lazy or incompetent. We often fear, well, if I don't push through, what's gonna happen? I'm gonna drop the ball. And then we catastrophize about all of the aftershock that might happen. But in this case, for my run, I decided to keep moving because I did it out of a sense of purpose. I was physically safe and I knew that my husband was with me, so I wasn't alone. And even if I were alone, I wouldn't have changed my decision because I knew I had other measures to keep me safe. A cell phone. I was running in daylight, things like that. But the difference too was I did it from a sense of purpose. I dedicated my run to my future self. For you know, I imagined myself at 80, being so glad that when I was in my 40s, I created time and space to run. I dedicated my run to my past self for when I was, you know. maybe feeling too overworked or too overwhelmed to be able to to take that run. I dedicated my run to out of a sense of gratitude for being able to physically move my body. And when we move from this place of purpose and we move from a place of wholeness, remarkable things happen. Which brings me to my third lesson. Here's the thing, you've already heard me say, I'm not a runner, okay? But by the end of that run, I was able to do these high speed, high-intensity bursts of training. I have never felt so free in my body on a run. It was honestly my best running performance ever, despite having had an injury. You know, and that is, I think, largely because I took all the pressure off. I didn't have goals on what the run should look like or feel like. My goal was only to do something as an act of love for my future self and out of gratitude for my current self. And I think that's true of life in general. We have our best results when we detach from the outcome and we dedicate to the process of just being present and whole and grounded. In the activity that we choose to do. So it to say that that was a welcome surprise is an understatement, but I think it's so reflective of life. This has been true for me, at least in every other way. I remember when I got my book deal to publish my book. I, in the way that all of that unfolded, I do not believe that that would have happened if I had woken up and said, I'm gonna publish a book and I'm gonna publish it this year, and this is how it's gonna happen, and this is what it's gonna be about. Every author I know has gotten letters of rejection, has felt lost, confused, isolated, lonely, frustrated at times. And while that was true for me in other ways of my book publishing process, the actual act of landing the deal and being asked to author a book was really magical, really surprising to me. It was almost effortless, but it was because I had dedicated all of the acts and things that led to that were done from a place of integrated wholeness. It was done from a place of being clear on my authenticity, my values, and following what brought me connected to my sense of joy, right? What's what what allowed me to be in that state of joy, how I was showing up in life. Is what honestly drew that opportunity to me. And so whether you're running or you're leading a multi-million dollar merger, or you are trying to get your kid to eat their broccoli, or you're trying to have a difficult conversation with a spouse, oftentimes we have our best outcomes when we can come from that place of wholeness. Number four. We choose our hard. As my husband and I were running back towards our house, the sun was still on its path to rising. And I, it was hot. We live in Austin. It's super, super muggy in September. And as we sort of we were running, he was ahead of me. My husband was ahead of me, but he decided to take the sidewalk that was on the side of the road that was in the sun. I decided to take to cross the road and go to the sidewalk that was shaded. And I just sort of noticed that he's. decided to stay where he was and I thought, I'm gonna go in the shade. And we finished our run and at the end of it we were talking. And he was like, I noticed that you went over to the other side. And I said, Yeah, I was hot. And the run was hard enough as it was, like it was it was the right amount of push and challenge. I didn't need to make it harder on myself unnecessarily. So I just found the path of resist least resistance that felt good to me. And he said, that's interesting. Because I stayed on the other side of the road because I know the sidewalk is more even there. And I felt more even-footed on that side of the road. And I thought that's so interesting. Because it would have been really easy for me to call out to him, to have him try to come to join me on my side, because that's the right side, that's the best side. But I just noticed what he was doing and let him run. And it turns out he had his reasons for staying where he did. He chose his heart. He chose to be. in the heat, but more mentally at peace that the sidewalk was more flat. I chose, even though I'd just fallen, to be on the side where there was more shade and all the while just being more mindful of where I was putting my feet. We do this all the time as leaders. We look at what other people are doing and we say, I don't think that's right. I don't think that this is the best way. I think my way is the best way. Let's try it this way. What if we did this? But the truth is, when we when we try to assert, oftentimes we lose valuable information about w the other person's decision-making process, the other person's experience and the other person's comfort level with things. So when we can approach a situation, especially in a challenge, or even when not, and we can just slow down enough to observe what members of our team are doing, what our patients are doing, what our clients are doing, what our kids are doing, and get really curious about what their experience is like, we often uncover a lot of gold that in fact ends up bridging. The relationship, nurturing the relationship, strengthening the relationship, because now we've invited compassion and empathy and a more expansive, curious lens onto the stage. The fifth and final lesson, I'm sure there will be more, but the five that I came up with, and this is this is more of a meta lesson. It's broader and I think definitely less tangible than the other four. And the lesson is this: we are spiritual beings having a human experience. We are consciousness that's wearing a costume of the human body that we were gifted. In other words, we are not, we ourselves are not the mind, the body, or the intellect. We are not the objects, feelings, and thoughts that we experience in life. We're consciousness. We can only observe because we are not the body or the mind or the meaning that we make our that our mind has, the intellect, we know that because we can observe it. Right? If you can observe it, that means by definition, you are not that. You are consciousness. We can't observe anything more than that. We can feel the the the state of consciousness through our body, through our mind. We might See the effects of it on our health and our relationships out in the world. But the innate consciousness that exists within each of us is ever present, just like our joy. And that's why joy is ever present, ever accessible, because our joy is one aspect of our consciousness. That's why when we return to our joy, it feels so good and it yields better results, is because. We're returning to that state of consciousness that is more pure, more realized. If this fifth lesson is not quite landing for you, that's that's okay. This is a h this is not a necessarily an easy one to grasp. And for me, even, I know and understand this concept in theory. I'm only within recent years starting to actually practically apply this lesson, but it comes back in in, you know. Life presents this lesson for us to remember in all sorts of ways. And the way that that lesson was presented for me this morning in my decision to keep running was to say, yeah, that's right. My body is something that I'm feeling. It's something that I can care for, but it's not actually me. I'm not going to be the one. My soul is not in pain. My soul is is actually complete and whole as is. So it is from that wholeness that I decide to honor and care for my body. Despite the scrapes, desi despite the the weeping that was going on from the wounds. You can if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see my little bandage. That is this fifth lesson is absolutely a more abstract, more meta lesson. It's one that scholars and and seers and seekers discuss and have have discussed for centuries. It's the subject of so many spiritual texts and philosophies. But it's a good one to keep in mind. An analogy I like to use is we're we're sort of in this like, I'm not a gamer. I'm not a I'm not somebody that enjoys video games. But that's really a good analogy in and it helps me think about this concept that way is if we're just dropped into this realm, this video game, if you will, and we're playing it. We're deciding, you know, what to do, how we experience things within our bodies. That's why the mindset work is so important. We get to decide our experiences based on the beliefs that we create. So it gives life perspective, certainly, when you, when you recognize that these are Experiences are meaningful experiences and they're also temporary. And we get to decide what these experiences mean. We get to decide what experiences we want to have. And we are empowered in choosing to co-create those experiences. We can do that more easily when we choose to connect with our innate sense of joy. That's my download of Five lessons that I learned from tumbling forward this morning unexpectedly on my morning run. Care for ourselves before we go care for others. Make sure that when you decide to quote unquote push forward or move forward, you're doing it from a place of integrated wholeness, from a place of grounded clarity, from a place of purpose. It always helps us then uncover number three, our best performance, our best outcomes, our our most liberated, most joyous sensations can come from when we act out of that grounded whole place. Number four, we choose our hard and our level of effort is not a reflection or a competition with anybody else. And when we see someone else do something differently, if we can approach that with curiosity instead of judgment or control, Oftentimes we can learn invaluable things about the people and things around us. And lesson five, it's just a gentle reminder: we are ultimate consciousness. We are spiritual beings in a human body. We are not our body, our mind, or our intellect. We are not the objects, feelings, or thoughts that we perceive in this life experience. We are ultimate consciousness. And what we make of our life while we were on this earth is wholly up to us. Okay, guys. I am going to let this sit with you. And I'm so curious though how this lands. So if you are finding yourself having questions about it, or if you're not quite sure, if you're having resistance, you know, noodle on it and reach out to me. I love hearing from people, especially my readers that are on my newsletter list. Guys, I thank you so much for tuning in every other week when these episodes drop. It is so much fun to hear from you guys. I invite you to to keep connecting. Okay. Thanks guys. Here's to you putting your own joy first. If something in today's episode landed for you, great, sit with it. And then share it. Send it to the founder who's running on fumes, the leader who's got everything and still feels like something's missing, the friend you keep meaning to check on. That's how this work travels, from person to person, the way real change always does. 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