Episode 137: Redefining Self-Care and Reclaiming Sovereignty
In today’s episode, I am talking with Mara Glatzel, MSW, an intuitive coach, writer, and podcast host about self-care and owning our needs.
Which of these examples looks like a day of self-care for you?
A hike through the woods with your nearest and dearest and a picnic lunch.
A rambunctious night of games, drinks, and pizza with friends.
Sleeping in and having coffee in bed, followed by a granola bowl on the back deck.
A chance to read your new fiction book, some yard work, and a barbeque on the grill.
Canceling plans to go canoeing because you just don’t feel good and need to rest.
Staying in bed all day, watching movies.
We have a set definition of what self-care should look like. But the reality is that any and all of the above ideas can be self-care!
For those of us with High Functioning Anxiety, we struggle with self-care. I mean, soul-nourishing, true downtime, really-giving-back-to-ourselves kind of self-care.
And yet our lack of self-care keeps us stuck in over-functioning and a lack of self-loyalty.
Sound familiar?
That’s why this month we’re talking about what keeps you stuck and how self-care (and lack thereof!) is one of those things.
My guest today is Mara Glatzel, MSW, an intuitive coach, writer, and podcast host who helps perfectionists and people pleasers reclaim their sovereignty. She’s a queer, femme wife and mother of two, recovering control freak, and a human who deeply understands the impulse to relegate her needs to the bottom of a very long to-do list in an attempt to prove her worth.
Mara also teaches everything she knows about identifying, honoring, and advocating for your needs in her 9-month online program, Tend. You can access her free training Revive: Self-Care That Works, hang with her on Instagram, or tune in to her weekly podcast, Needy.
Listen to the full episode to find out:
3 ways to avoid this endless spiral of “I got this” thinking
Why operating on autopilot is harmful—especially with high functioning anxiety
How our Monger distorts our perspective
And how that can affect our relationship with ourselves and with others
Resources mentioned:
+ Read the Transcript
Mara: That becoming your own sovereign leader of your own life means really turning towards yourself for confirmation, for information, for validation, for approval, and being the owner of your own. This,
Nancy: I have a question for you. Which of these examples is a day of self-care for you. Number one, a hike through the woods with your nearest and dearest and a picnic lunch followed by a rambunctious night of games, drinks, and pizza with friends.
Number two, sleeping in and having coffee in bed, followed by a granola bowl on the back deck and a chance to read your new fiction book, some work in the yard and a barbecue on the grill or number three, canceling plans to go canoeing because you just don't feel good and you need to rest. Staying in bed all day and watching movies, the correct answer is any and all of them can be self-care.
We have set a definition of what self care should look like the right way we talked about last week.
Your listening to the happier approach, the show that pulls back the curtain on the need to succeed, hustle and achieve at the price of our inner peace in relationships. I'm your host, Nancy Jane Smith.
What is self-care? According to my guest, Mara Glatzel self care is deep daily tending. I just love that!Oour theme for June is things that keep you stuck and self-care, or our lack of self-care is one of the things that keeps us stuck. Those of us with high functioning anxiety struggle with engaging in self-care?
Soul nourishing, true downtime, really giving back to ourselves self-care. Our lack of self-care keeps us stuck in overfunctioning and a lack of self loyalty. As Mara says, we have a hard time tending to ourselves. Mara Glatzel has a master's in social work. She's an intuitive coach writer and a podcast host of the podcast Needy, and she helps perfectionist and people-pleasers reclaim their sovereignty.
She's also a queer femme wife and mother of two, recovering control freak, and a human who deeply understands the impulse to relegate her needs to the bottom of a way long to do list in an attempt to prove her worth. Her superpower is saying what you need to hear when you need to hear it. And she is here to help you believe in yourself as much as she believes in you.
Mara has been one of my teachers for years. Her work takes a simple concept, self care and dives deep into it. Her Instagram feed regularly reminds me to pause and check in with myself. And she totally walks the talk. So I was thrilled when she agreed to share her wisdom on my podcast, Mara and I talk about her tagline, redefining self-care and reclaiming sovereignty, and what that means to her, how to prioritize yourself when you have overly prioritized others, how self-accountability is an act of self-love and why needs is such a bad word in our society and how she is reclaiming needs as a good thing.
I am so excited today to have Mara Glatzel on the podcast. I have followed Mara for a long time and just love her work. And I think you're going to love it too. So I'm just going to dive right in if that's cool. Your tagline is redefining self-care and reclaiming sovereignty.
What does that mean to you?
Mara: I've been working as a coach for a long time and about four or five years ago. I really pivoted my work towards helping people care for themselves, which of course is about the care. It's about meeting your needs on a daily basis. And it's also about healing the work in your relationship with yourself to know that you are deserving of having your needs met.
Much, it means that you're worthy and that you matter, and that you deserve a space in your own life, not only a space in your own life, but a space at the center of your life. And what I found was that a lot of conventional traditional self care advice was very prescriptive and really it's you would see this listicle of like here's 10 ways to take better care of yourself today.
And those things never really got to what I find most humans actually need in terms of support on a daily basis. And so by redefining your care, repurposing the idea of what it means to care for yourself so that it's not this prescriptive list of things that you check off, but instead the daily action.
It becomes the daily actions of being in relationship with yourself. So your care is responsive to whatever it is that you have going on. So whether that's, calling your insurance company to figure out something about your deductible or pouring yourself a glass of water, or, that calling up and talking to your kid's teacher, it's whatever the, your life requires that becomes the care.
That for so many of us we don't understand ourselves to be the sovereign leaders of our own lives. So instead of, looking outward for approval permission somebody else to say, you've done enough. Why don't you sit down and rest? Which of course never happens. We're all waiting for it.
Becoming your own sovereign leader of your own life means really turning towards yourself for confirmation, for information, for validation, for approval and being the owner of your own enough of this. And, it's amazing because in some ways these shifts can be slight, it's like a subtle reorientation.
And in other ways, it's this profound learning because of course we're conditioned to put other people before us to not want to be selfish to that we need to do all of these different things in order to be lovable in order to be worthy. And the shifts in our actions might be small, but the emotional underpinning can be enormous.
So I cover both in my work. I'd like to be both really tangible and also, deal with the messiness of being.
Nancy: Yeah, because, what's what I think I love about your work is that self-care is something, everyone fricking talks about self-care, but in the, and it's like a, one-off like, self-care like, make sure you do self-care, but you've devoted much of your, message to that depth of what self care means. So it's not just this, one-off make sure you take care of yourself thing. You call it daily tending and that idea that this is deeper than just taking a bubble bath, that sometimes it is, it's really showing up for yourself. And I think we give that a lot of lip service, but you really illustrate what that means and what that brings up.
Mara: Thank you. I try to, yeah. I think it's so funny because I'll all the time, we'll have, people are like, Mara, I'm a big problem. I need a big fix. I'm like, but are you drinking water? They're like, no, but I need your big guns. I'm like, what are you drinking water every day? And it's I say that sort of jokingly, but they are not drinking water.
Like we are not drinking water. And while I do think that a lot of us have. Tons of healing to do and tons of personal work to do. All of that requires energy. So if you don't have any energy, you're not going to have the energy to do that personal growth work. And we're continually beating ourselves up for not having the capacity to be introspective well, okay.
We need to work on the actual mechanics of. Of tending to our own capacity, to even have the energy, to have the conversation with ourselves about our bigger hopes and dreams, for example. And I find that people by and large beat themselves up for not having that capacity, but aren't doing the work to give themselves that capacity to begin with.
So it becomes this like tricky feedback loop. And so getting way back to the basics of things that. We already know we need, everybody knows you need it, but I'm really curious about, okay if you need it, why aren't you doing it? And
Nancy: What have you found for that?
Because that's across the board, a problem.
Mara: I've found that a lot of people that I work with are people who assumed a lot of responsibility when they were children. And so they have this feeling. Like I'm tired of taking care of myself. I'm tired of being responsible for everything.
And they tend to be people who are overly responsible for other people's stuff. And this idea of oh, like taking care of myself as one more thing that I have to put on the, the bottom of a very long list and, and met with the fact that we're a culture that is indoctrinated with this diet mentality concept of I need a big fancy splashy, thing we're going to here's my 10 point plan for reinventing myself this spring and daily tending.
So not sexy compared to that, it's boring. It's I'm going to drink my water again. I'm going to drink my water again. I'm going to drink my water again. But what I find is that what we're actually craving isn't that one-off self care, but actually the consistency of mattering to somebody on a daily basis.
And, you can matter to yourself. You can take care of yourself and this doesn't mean that we're islands, I think community care is also really important and relational care is really important, what we're actually aching for is that consistency, it's like we go back to.
I have small children, what they need is knowing, like they're going to get breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I'm going to put them to bed at the same time every day. I'm going to like, keep an eye on whether they're drinking enough water or they're super dehydrated. Did they take their vitamins?
We are, we still need that kind of care, even when we're adults. And that tending to our most basic daily needs provides this internal scaffolding energetically for us to be available, to do all of the things that we want to do. So if we put it at the end of the list, We're burning ourselves out without doing anything, to restore our energy.
And so I like to think about it as, front-loading our own care, which is really tending to our capacity to show up for. Whether I'm working in my business, I'm parenting, I'm gardening, I'm coaching, whatever I'm doing, it requires energy. And if I'm not tending to my energetic capacity, I have nothing left to give.
Nancy: That's what the other thing is the idea of so many times when we hear about self care, it's that idea of. I know the false self-compassion of go ahead. Do whatever you want. Sit in front of the TV, do nothing. But with the idea of daily tending, you're saying there's sometimes there's stuff you don't want to do, like call.
The credit card company or whatever and paying bills and that stuff is also tending
Mara: . Yeah. So it's a slippery slope. Self-love is really tricky because I think that we are, we're fed these kinds of like romcom ideas of self-love oh, like have the cupcakes, do whatever. And like I'm pro cupcakes, but.
I think this idea of love equals letting go of all of the boundaries, all of the things that you need isn't useful actually. And so I like to think about how accountability is love too and how we can be accountable to ourselves. And what's tricky about this for me and I know for other people as well is that we're not taught how to motivate ourselves through, with compassion, through our natural enthusiasm. I was taught I was raised to beat myself up to get from here to there because that's, and I assumed that's what everybody does. It's I just absorbed that from society. I don't, I can't remember anybody modeling that for me directly, but that was like what people do it sucks and you do it.
And. It took until I was in my thirties really, before I started to realize oh wow, I can be nice to myself and get something done, enjoy the process. I can speak to myself kindly. And when I think about that, self-love what that looks like for me now is when I make promises to myself, I'm going to try to move my body every day, or I'm going to try to drink enough water or, I'm going to try to get outside, get some sunshine, which is really important to me right now. And I'm not doing that. That's a time to get curious and have a conversation with myself. That sounds something like, Hey Mara, how'd you do this thing noticed you're not doing it.
Like what's going on. Do you need a different time of day? Do you need support? Are there tools that you require that you don't have, is there a creative approach that we can take to it? For me that self-love is not letting myself off the hook to what I know that I need while also having those conversations in a way that the like tone of my inner landscape is kind and compassionate.
It's assuming that I'm doing the best that I can. And not that I'm like. Some like spec on the ground that needs to be like, prodded from here to there with a lot of cruelty, which is totally how I used to relate to myself. And I find that contrary to popular belief, I actually get so much more done now, which is amazing, oh if I don't, if I'm not mean to myself, I'm going to wake up three months down the line, watching daytime TV, having not done anything and covered in Dorito dust or something like that. But actually it turns out I really like to be spoken to nice.
Okay. Yeah, we can do that thing. Okay. This person who's like running the show cares about me and so when I talk about reclaiming sovereignty too, that's what I'm talking about. It's like reclaiming the tone of what's happening, the quality of conversation in your inner landscape or your self-talk and being a benevolent leader.
Nancy: I love that a benevolent leader. That's amazing. Yeah, because that's a big a big part of my work is working with the title of my book is be kind to yourself, feel happier and still accomplish your goals. So that, because if that was a huge aha for me, when I realized, oh, wait, I don't need the shaming monger voice in my head all the time.
I could actually, and that idea that I get more done, when I. Even like stupid stuff like laundry, if I'm like, I'm not feeling it today. There will be a day in the next 24, there will be a time in the next 24 hours when I'm feeling it because I need laundry or because of oh, go down and do the laundry right now.
And when I forced myself to do it, it's not the same, the energetically it's so different, but it does get done. Yeah. When I release the control a little bit.
Mara: Totally. And also by whatever means necessary, I ask myself too, it's like, all right, you don't want to do the laundry.
That's fine. It's totally boring. You do it. I have two kids, so I do a lot of laundry so much. And I'm like what could I do to make it. Am I going to fold the laundry while watching Veronica Mars? Sure. Why not going to listen to my favorite podcast? It's what can I do?
I think that's the other thing that's amazing to me is that we were so strict with ourselves. It's like doing a good job, means this like Spartan experience where we're like buckling down and I'm like, could you put on some fun music, you have a snack, like good. You make this experience enjoyable.
Like you can do that. And it seems. Silly, but it changes the entire landscape of your experience of whatever you're doing. I hate doing dishes. I really do cleaning up. My kitchen is like my top tier least favorite chore. But I have to do it. That's just the reality of life.
And so then I think about how can I make this sustainable? How can I make this enjoyable? You know what's within my power to. Curate this experience. So that it's well-suited for me personally.
Nancy: Yeah. That's yeah. I love that. That's well said. So you're so the idea, because what it is that you going back, you said the internal scaffolding that this, tending to yourself, builds internal scaffolding.
So then you can move forward and do the other work. The big guns. And I think that is something that we miss when we're just like, oh yeah, self care. We miss that we're really, this will pay off later. I just wrote down internal scaffolding with a big circle around it, in my notes.
Okay. So this morning as I was walking the dog in the pouring down rain, even though I checked the radar and I thought it was going to not be raining I was listening to your podcast, which is called needy. I just remember being so jealous of that title because it's so perfect.
You say Needy is a podcast for humans with needs, particularly those who pretend they don't have them amen to that. I can't relate to that at all. Ha why do you think we, and this is a loaded question, but why do you think we, particularly as women pretend we don't have needs?
Mara: I think because we think people like us better.
And the reality might be that people like us better when we don't. I don't think that's I don't think we pluck that idea out of thin air. Going back to that rom com idea. It's I think, we very early on make the association that certain kinds of people are worthy of love and being needy. Like I love the, I also love the title of my project. Needy is such a compelling word for me because. On so many personal fronts, it's like that idea and don't be needy, and really what I'm saying is don't take up too much space. Don't make it too difficult for somebody to be in relationship with you, which you like if you dig just below the surface, there's this belief that I need to apologize for myself. Somehow I need to make up for myself in some way, by being convenient, by being palatable, by being easy to be in relationship with. And, there is so much hurt right under that surface of, just feeling like you're too much just feeling nobody has the time or the energy to really deal with you.
And. I remember feeling like I, if there was just like one person in the world that I wasn't too much for, that would be amazing. Yeah. So this, my work was really born out of this idea of, we still need other people. We still want to be in a relationship with other people, but what if I became that one person that I wasn't too much for?
And it's hard because sometimes you're like, I think about I was like picking people for Dodge ball or something in elementary school. It's I don't want to pick myself first sometimes, it's I like, I want to pick myself last. So you are just like a total handful.
And I really am a total handful. But that's it, right? Byron Katie says, you're going to argue with what is you're going to lose, but only every time, what is true about me is that I think too much, I feel too much. I need too much by any margin of like appropriate society standards.
And I have been that. Since I was born. So being in relationship with myself means really expanding to accommodate everything that I am instead of constantly shaming myself for not fitting this like cookie cutter. This is what's good, and it's hard because I grew up. In a larger body. I, was told in no uncertain terms directly to my face from like elementary school that I should be lucky, right for any attention that people paid to me. We don't pluck these ideas out of nowhere. We are taught that we are not as worthy as somebody else. We are taught to make ourselves small, and we carry that into adulthood, into our relationships. And we have this real fear.
If I start bringing more of my true self to my life, who's going to be there. Are people still going to be around? And what I found is some people aren't and that, the fear of that, the riskiness of that, the worry of what happens when I allow my needs to enter into the situation and ask for what I really want.
And somebody says, no, thank you. And what I suspected was true, but like really hard to hold onto when I was that afraid was that on the other side, there might be more people who were excited and happy for, like being with me and my truest form. But I have so much compassion for how it can feel scary.
And we are really committed to pretending that we don't have needs because we need to belong. And, that need for belonging is so overdeveloped, because if you think about when you're a baby, your need for safety and your need for belonging are so intricately woven together that, you have to do whatever you deem necessary in order to belong to your family of origin, because your actual survival depends on it.
And then as you grow into adulthood, that's in most cases no longer true, but it still feels so true if you will so risky and so dangerous. So we have to be kind to ourselves. And so much of being that benevolent leader to ourselves is really learning how to belong to ourselves first.
And knowing that the relationship that we have with ourselves supersedes the relationships that we have with everyone else, because that's the one that we carry from when we're born, until we die and, through all of the relationships. In our lives and it can feel lonely. It's I remember one time.
Ah why did I have to stuck with myself? Why couldn't I be somebody cool or less difficult, or I don't know, ah everyone has it so much easier or nobody really has it that much easier. We all have stuff. And so basically it's don't pick yourself last, be that person that you're not too much for.
But that's not something you can pay lip service to. That's something that you. That you show to yourself, you prove to yourself every single day through your actions.
Nancy: And so in the podcast episode I was listening to, which was your story you talk to, there are two things you talked about that were that I was like, like I literally stopped and typed into my phone.
Oh, I need to ask more about this. The one that stopped me in my tracks was Self care is inconvenient or not self-care but self-trust means being inconvenient. And I was like, whoa, that is so true. So dead on. And yet God, that's so freaking hard, like that's a piece. I think that where we give lip service to self-trust and we need to pick ourselves first, blah, blah, blah.
But when we're in the trenches, Being inconvenient. And, you give the example of like being the one that says, no, I can't eat that or no, I need to take a break. And, I have chronic arthritis and I think that's why that stuck out to me. Because I'm inconvenient a lot.
And that is so hard for me. So talk, can you talk to that a little bit and just,
Mara: yeah. Having your own back and. Having your own back is an act of rebuilding that self-trust so much of being our true selves is inconvenient because we know on every level that the world would prefer us.
If we were like the cool person, like I always think oh, if I was like, what would a cool girl say? Oh, it's no problem. When really I'm like, it's a big problem. I just want to feel okay., I just want to not care so much about everything or not, it's like I have a lot of foods that I'm allergic to. And it's never easy. It's never just yeah, sure. Bake whatever, no problem. We are so taught to not inconvenience other people that like being good means making ourselves as small and easy as possible.
And anything that's not Yeah, sure. No problem is a problem. And yet we are, we're humans are inherently problematic because, we get tired, we have health limitations. We have. Preferences and needs, there's so many things about us that don't fit into that, that cookie cutter mold. The societal indoctrination and conditioning is heavy.
And, I think in this case, particularly around productivity, you know what we're seeing now, especially as we're recording this during this pandemic that people are. Scared for their lives and they're still shaming themselves for not being productive, so we just were able to see or risking their lives to go back to work because they need the money.
We see how productivity is king and anything that, that any human part of us automatically makes us less productive because we're not machines, we're not robots, we're humans. And that means we get tired. We, have to get up and go to the bathroom. We have get hungry, like we, we require things in order to keep going.
And in a world that would prefer us to push all that to the wayside in order to just keep showing up in this like excellent kind of way. It's problematic. And whenever we really prioritize those parts of ourselves, that's a revolutionary act. And I think, building up that paradigm shift of it's okay for me to be a human it's. Okay. For me to have needs and preferences and requirements for, continuation the more people that we can have around us that feel the same way. It's like this podcast is amazing, right? This is a great resource. But surrounding yourself, quite literally with voices that reaffirm your worthiness as a human being.
Nancy: Because I like how you say, because it's needs and preferences. It isn't, I know that I, have some stomach issues and I would been in my twenties, I would go and eat out with people that were making meals. I wouldn't tell them what would make me sick. I would just get sick, I would eat it later and then get sick because I didn't want to stand out as having a need.
And that's something that now I would, that is a. It's a medical problem. I'm going to be, I'm going to be more strict about it, but even just preferring not to have pizza, just because it's a preference. Not because anything's going to happen to me. I think that's where, we don't even do that.
If I have a medical condition, then it's okay to say I have a preference, but if I just prefer it because I like pizza or I don't like pizza, it's a whole big thing and our brains, but it's the same thing, but it's justifying
Mara: Yeah. It's so funny. My clients are always like, wait, but is it a need or is it a desire?
Yeah. I see what you're doing here. I see. It's okay, now we've decided that needs are okay, but only needs not a step further are important. And the reality is, it's like somebody is cooking you dinner. They that's an act of love for you, right? Hey, random person let me do this loving thing for you.
It's they want to make you something. They don't want to make you something that makes you sick, they don't want to make you something that you don't like, or we'll see. It's oh, we're going out somewhere. Where do you want to go? I don't know. Where do you want to go? How about Tai in my head?
I'm like, not tai, not do I say not tai? No. And so I think, yeah. It's really important. If we're going to build genuine relationships with other people that we allow our needs and preferences into the conversation, the same way that we would want to know somebody else's needs and preferences, I think about how much allowance and permission, for all of the people in my life to be spectacularly human. And I'm like what do you need? I want to make this extra special, good feeling for you, but why wouldn't I let somebody give that to me in return? Why wouldn't I trust that maybe somebody who, says they want to do that actually means it.
And all of that goes back to believing that we're worthy of that kind of care. And we can't outsource.It's never going to be enough. We could see, receive so much evidence, so much permission, so much, affirmation, which like, we're not going to receive that much anyway, because as much as we need, because like it's not anybody else's full-time job to make us feel good about ourselves, much as I wish it were, so it's it's no, it's never going to be enough. And we have to be the sovereign leaders of our lives and really. Do that internal work to see oh wow, this person's making me dinner. I'm going to assume that it's not because they feel like arm twisted into it. It's because they actually want to.
And so I'm also going to assume that it's safe to say I can't eat dairy. If the shoe were on the other foot, I wouldn't, want to honor that preference for somebody else. Absolutely.
Nancy: Yeah. Because even as you said, please don't make it Tai. My brain was like, oh, but you should try new things and you should be open to, like it was almost immediate.
Mara: We have to be very vigilant. I don’t want to say vigilant because I don't want anybody to be stressed out, but we have to be aware that we're, our social conditioning is such that we're really tricky. This is a very nuanced, the immediacy of how we censor ourselves is really profound.
So starting to walk that back, Oh, wow. And we don't have to beat ourselves up for it. It's oh, wow. See what I just did there. I told myself pretty immediately that what I wanted and needed was impossible here. Is that actually true? It doesn't feel risky. Is there something I could ask for, because we don't have to splay ourselves open at every point.
We can push our edges a little bit and say, how about not Tai today?
Nancy: Yeah, it just is. It's funny how it comes so quick, so then this is a question on your podcast. You talked about self-trust you said self-trust can sometimes disguise itself as following rules. So for those of us that are rule followers, we think we're engaging in self-trust, but we're not.
So I know I'm springing this question on you, but what does that mean? Because I'm a big rule follower and I know a lot of that's something I work on daily is the rules loosening that.
Mara: So it's I like to think about this as, whose rules are we following? I'm a big rule follower too.
And I will say that I am being impeccable with my word is something that is really important to me. Follow through is really important to me. And once I say I'm going to do something, it's put it on my tombstone. I will be there at the appointed time. No matter what, because I just that's how my brain operates and I like steps and I like, clear like paths from here to there.
But what is interesting is how. Unless I'm paying attention. My life is filled up with rules written by somebody else and for somebody else. And, I noticed this in a big way maybe in 2012 because I, I had my whole life was set up and it looked really good. And I had followed a path that I accumulated at some point from the what was good manual. And I hadn't, I never stopped and say is this what I do? Is this what I think is right? Is this what I think is good? And so I think that there's a piece of self-trust that has to do with being in relationship with ourselves and being in a state of inquiry and, following through with what we say that we're going to do but making sure that what we say we're going to do is something that.
Actually works for us. That's in alignment with our own values system. That's in integrity for us. And that's the piece that I was, had been skipping over. I had just been like, oh it says this is good, or right. I was. Constantly polling for opinions from other people and, pulling experts in for somebody better, smarter than me who would know what to do.
And when I was able to realize like there, by and large, almost across the board, there is no universally right or wrong answer. There's just the answer that works for you and make sense to you. And that we're doing the best that we can with the tools that. In the minute, which means looking back on ourselves is always going to disappoint, embarrass us in some ways, because we're always getting better.
So you know that there was no thing I could do that would be like capital G good. That everybody would agree on. And that was a profound disappointment for me because I was vested in being good. And I was really invested in knowing what that was, and so there was a lot of grief associated with giving that up because I don't want to just be right.
I don't want to pick myself for Dodge ball. I don't want to just be me out in the middle of nowhere. I feel so small. I feel so insignificant. I feel like I don't possibly have the tools to make any kind of decision, but, it's really interesting. And there are so many opportunities to rebuild our self-trust in this way, I'm thinking.
During this time, before my governor I live in Massachusetts, before my governor pulled my kids out of school and, shut everything down, like we had already shut down. And that was because in my family, because I was tired of spending my whole day scrolling through finding opinions, trying to figure it out, all these things, feeling scared, wanting somebody to tell me what to do.
And I made the decision like, oh, wow. Okay. I actually have self-trust and I have agency and I can make decisions on my own behalf. And, my partner and I work for ourselves. So we were able to do this, but like we just, we pulled our kids out of school. We were like, we just need to stop and make the decision that we were going to stay here for the next two weeks and see what happens.
And I think we have so many opportunities. Obviously we live in societies. There are certain rules that guide those societies, but there's a lot of room, maneuverability for choice and preference within that. We just have to feel strong enough to do that for ourselves and strong enough. Does it mean, like I still feel small and insignificant and like spectacularly unprepared to make decisions on my own, but that's not, I don't assume that's ever going to change.
And that doesn't mean that I can't trust myself. That's just me. Yeah. It's scary. Who are you to think? I need to be, I feel like that about being a parent across the board. It's am I adult enough to be in charge of these people… I don't think so. I can barely take care of myself but here we are doing the best we can with what we have.
Nancy: Yeah, because I noticed on the opposite when our governor announced he was going to open up. My anxiety went through the roof. Because I was like, oh my, no. Oh my God, we're going to open up. Oh my God. I don't feel, I don't think this is right. And then. You can do what you want to do. Like you don't have to rejoin.
And that was new for me to just switch that. Because that's something on a daily basis, like I'll have a rule about, the right thing to eat for breakfast or the rule for, the right time to eat lunch. Like everything in my life is a rule or a competition. It's all about, doing it.
Is something that I actively work on readjusting. Okay. So then the other question I have is your blog. And I realize it's an old one. But it's still tops on your blog page. And it's one of those blogs that I wish I had written myself: Is Accepting Myself Avoiding Self-Improvement. is the title of it. And I have so many people, a lot of my listeners, they're here because they love self-improvement. And that mix of I can't accept myself because there's still so much, I want to improve on talk to me about that.
Mara: Yeah. That goes back to these weird ideas about self love that we have.
It's if I accept myself as I am, that I'm somehow just like putting a cap on any future growth and I don't want to stagnate. So I better, like be, always fixing, always improving and self-acceptance really says that there may be a lot of things that you want and need to take care of in your life, but that there's nothing wrong with you.
And that there's nothing to fix about you. And, it goes back to some of what I said about that Byron Katie quote about, If you want to argue with what is you're going to lose, but only every time. And I am that too much person that like total handful person that I was when I was three years old.
And when I was 11 years old and when I was 20 years old and now currently I am never going to out life hack or grow myself. I've done tons of work on myself over my lifetime. But I'm never going to not be myself. And so I think that the self-acceptance piece is really about honoring and working with your original factory settings.
Like I have things that are always going to trigger me. I have things that are always going to be harder for me than other things. I have things on the other side that I'm great at. Like these are the things that are true about me and those things may change like on a spectrum, like we're all moving all the time.
Like my capacity is impacted by my care of myself. It's not like things are static. But I'm never going to not be me. And so for me, that self-acceptance is really about honoring who I am and working from that place. It's like thinking, no matter how much I work out, like my legs are never going to be longer than they are.
I have short legs that is true about me. And I could like work to change the shape of my legs, but they're never going to. Longer. They're always going to be short legs. And what am I going to spend my whole life pissed that I have these short legs, and that's what it is for me.
It's we're going to spend our whole lives at odds with our factory settings. One could do that if one wanted to, but it's a miserable way to live because you're always at odds with yourself. And so instead, it might be thinking about like, all right this is, this is the body that I have.
This is the life that I have. This is, these are what I'm working with. And daily tending is more about supporting ourselves. If I know that something is challenging for me, then I have to think about how to make it work for me. So I've been writing a book for an embarrassing long time, and I write.
Like thousands and thousands of words a week, four tons. For coaching programs, for emails for all, I'm writing constantly. Writing a book is really hard for me, pushes a lot of buttons. I have this opportunity to either beat myself up or be in a place of self-acceptance like, Hey, this is hard for you.
So if this is something you actually want to do, you need to find a way to make it work for you. Self-acceptance, isn't this cap on your growth, but it's this acknowledgement that you are, who you are. And if you want what you want, it's got to go through you. Instead of pushing you to the side and being like here's the rules.
This is like the five-step plan. And you say okay, it turns out what I need to write my book is for my little sister to literally sit next to me for several hours a week and holds me accountable to myself. Pour me hot chocolate and like telling me I'm such a good writer. That's what it is, will the book get written?
Yes, there's we don't have to, it goes back to being so strict with ourselves. Like we don't have to do things in this, nobody says like you have to write a book by yourself in a room and it's like very Spartan way with no music, just you and your muse.
Like self-acceptance implores us to work with what we have to get to where we want to go. And not only from my perspective, not only does that put a cap on our self-improvement or, our growth, but it superpowers it. And it's just so funny to me although people say it to me all the time, too, I don't want to accept myself because then I'll just relax into it.
Yes. What a way to be in relationship with yourself. You want to be able to relax into your relationship with yourself. That goes to show you're having all your relationships like that. I don't want to relax into it because something bad might happen. That person might divorce me, die, walk out the door, you're not going to have any of those problems in your relationship with yourself. You're really stuck with yourself. What is that, that deep seated message of unworthiness there that we don't deserve to be loved and cared for and taken care of the way that we are. We always have to be striving to, to deserve that.
And I get why people feel that way. But it's a brutal way to run your life, a benevolent leader would not do that would not believe that.
And it's a process, right? Working to walk that one back and you can start by, by even saying it's okay, there's, let's just say, there's no rules about breakfast just for today. What would I want to eat? Do I want you to Turkey sandwich? Do I want to run some of those? Those choices off of autopilot and really asking yourself, what would I like to eat right now at this meal that we call breakfast, which is, we have an idea in our head of what that should look like, but that's totally arbitrary.
Nancy: Yeah. That, yeah. And that again, goes to the depth of self care and self trust. That is where everything starts from that. If then I can make decisions because my first tendency is to be, oh, I want to write a book. Let me go look outside for all the rules on how to write a book instead of how would writing a book, how do I want to write a book?
What does that look like for me? I immediately go to look for it.
Mara: Yeah. Oh, me too. The other day I was talking to my sister about it because I was writing and I was like, all of a sudden I was like, this needs like a theoretical underpinning and I felt totally intimidated. But then in the middle of the night I remembered I have my master's in social work.
Like I know how to have a theoretical underpinnings. And then she was like cracking up. She was like, yeah. I be like, yeah, you do have the ability. All right. That you already know the theories that you're already working from and your work. And then I came all the way around to it again, and I was like, yeah.
And I can include that, but also I don't have to base my work on somebody else's work. I can just do my own work. She was happy to be on this process with me. But now it's really like that whole art yeah. Giving ourselves that permission and it, it is so funny. Because there are rules. Look, if you want to look outside of yourself, there's always going to be somebody who's going to tell you.
There's always going to be somebody lined up that you can pay to tell you. And I think that getting support is excellent. But we need to run everything through our own filtration system too, it's okay. Mara said that. Is that true for me? Maybe not. Does that work for me?
Maybe not. Maybe I really need to have eat the same thing for breakfast every single day, because that's what helps me, my decision-making process. Doesn't zap me of my decision-making abilities for the rest of the day. It's like I eat berries and cereal for breakfast and that's it.
I don't want to have to think about it. Great. If that's what works for you. That's what works for you? I think that's the piece. It's like these things work in relationship with each other when we are not islands. And also we are the sovereign leaders of our lives, right?
Nancy: Yeah. Thank you so much for this conversation.
It was so amazing. Where can people find you? And what do you have in the works? If anything,
Mara: you can find me at https://www.maraglatzel.com/. You can hang out with me on Instagram. My handle is Mara Glatzel. I have a. Free five-day self-care class called Revive, which you can sign up for on my site, which is pretty fun.
I'll read the prompts to you every day for five days and yeah, just, I'd love to hear from you if you're listening to this and this resonated with you, reach out and yeah. Come hang out with me
Nancy: .Her Instagram is fabulous. She definitely walks the talk, and shows it on display on Instagram, which is really inspiring.
Mara: Thank you so much for having me. I really had so much fun here.
Nancy: Mara gave me so much to think about, especially the idea that self-trust is inconvenient. That is something we don't talk about enough. As we prioritize ourselves, as we build self loyalty, it can build more anxiety. It's important to know and give ourselves some grace around that.
When we start honoring our needs, we can get pushback that causes anxiety. If we aren't careful, we will see that anxiety as a negative thing and start engaging in old familiar patterns, meaning prioritizing everyone else in order to decrease the anxiety. But when we know, oh, that practicing self loyalty initially will increase anxiety.
We can notice that and say, oh my gosh, wow, this is uncomfortable. I'm feeling stressed and anxious. And I'm just going to sit here for as long as I can and notice. Practicing self loyalty is hard, but the more we care for ourselves, the less suffering we have.
If you don’t do it, who will? If you’re not hustling, pushing, and keeping it all together yourself, nothing will get done.
Look, you don’t need me to tell you that. You tell yourself every day. There’s that voice inside your head constantly pushing you to do more, be more, and get closer to perfect.
And there are all the people--your family, friends, and random people on the street--who congratulate you on how productive you are.
Mixed messages, am I right?
I know I’m right because I’ve dealt with high-functioning anxiety too. I know what it’s like to relish the accolades that come your way one minute and shame yourself for being so tired and overwhelmed the next.
And, I’ve been working with women like you living with hidden anxiety every day for over 20 years as a coach and counselor.
I wrote The Happier Approach to give you a framework for dealing with your anxiety and start living happier.
The Happier Approach will help you understand the voices in your head and what to do with them. It’s not another woo-woo self-help book that asks you to think positively and live your best life. It’s a practical guidebook for getting out of survival mode and finding a genuinely happy and productive life.
Know someone who has High Functioning Anxiety and a VERY LOUD Monger. The Happier Approach makes a great gift.
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