Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Stacey M show. I want to start today's episode with a question. Is a thirty minute conversation, text message, email, whatever it might be, worth a week's recovery? Sorry, I've spaced it out way too much. Like honestly, a week-long recovery or sometimes it can even be like a month. You know, the replaying, the conversation, the overthinking. Sorry, Jim, there's going to be a lot of pauses in this. Facing is like really bad. Oh, dear. Really hope you edit this stuff out because I assume that you do. The frustration, the anxiety. The conversations you have in the shower after that conversation is already over. So I want to mention a story, which I can't actually remember who told me this, but when I told my kids, my kids had already known it, the kids already knew it. I'm just going to hit pause. and effectively i'm not going to be telling probably it's a shortened version of what the story is it's not due to disrespect it's just for um getting the key point across so effectively there are these two monks there's a junior monk and a senior monk and they're walking along and then they come across a stream and a lady is trying to cross this stream and um my understanding is that monks are not meant to have contact with females or something similar to that and the senior monk can see that this lady needs to cross the stream and she helps her she carries her across uh sorry he helps her and he carries her across and then he comes back over and then they continue walking on an hour later the the junior monk um says to the senior monk you touched that woman an hour ago where we're not meant to be able to touch females like you know that that's not part of our faith that's that's not what we're meant to do and the senior monk responded and said look I put her down an hour ago why have not you so that so have that in your mind if i can find the um filled out version i will but effectively it's saying that this guy this younger monk had been playing that conversation over and over in his head for the past hour while the senior monk is carrying on his day and recently when i went to fiji It was these situations that I had in discussions with friends. And, you know, it was like our first or second day. And I think I had like three of these conversations in such that short period of time, which is why I thought today's podcast should be on this topic. So every interaction that you're having with a person might be leaving you emotionally exhausted. So that conversation, that text message, the email, whatever it might be, it might have been for like a very short period of time. But the recovery from that conversation lasted days, weeks, months, sometimes even years. So I want to ask you again because I think this is really important to work through with today. Is that a thirty-minute conversation, that email, that lunch, whatever it might be, worthwhile the recovery it takes to recover from that interaction? Because maybe you have never thought about it in that way. You might have just thought, this is how it is. I have to put up with it. I have no options. But to be honest, until recently, it's not something that I probably had really considered either. But I'm very much more mindful. That is a terrible English sentence. That sentence is also terrible English. Oh, my goodness. But it is something that I'm definitely more aware of now. So most of my life I like to think I was pretty good at writing at calculating costs. I am a lawyer by trade, which most of you already know. I own, still own multiple businesses. Sorry, still a really big gap. You know, calculating costs of things is part of what I do. I can tell you the cost of a bad legal decision if you don't want to follow the advice. I my team can tell you the cost of staying in on the wrong mortgage because I have the mortgage broken business as well. The cost of delaying an important decision, perhaps. But what I realise is that most of us are terrible at calculating the costs that don't involve a dollar figure, that don't arrive on a bank statement. And that's the emotional cost. And that is just as important as what that dollar figure could be for something else. It's also the mental cost, what what you are taking what is stopping you hang on just delete that part i can't think of what i'm trying to say jim the the cost in energy the recovery costs what are these conversations stopping you from doing because you're too mentally spent on trying to maintain these relationships that you probably don't even need to maintain um and generally These can be the most expensive costs of all because of you not being able to spend your energy on other important things because you're too emotionally drained from dealing with the conversation that you're probably having on repeat multiple times per week. And as I said, I've been a lot more mindful of things recently and, you know, this is a lesson that I have definitely learnt Most people know that I was diagnosed with stage three cancer before Christmas and it really showed me who my, you know, my friends were, who my, the people are that I can rely on. Sorry, super long pause again. I think when life gets hard, you find out who and what matters in your life. Not the people who say that they care, but those people who actually show you that they care. Not the people who have been in your life the longest, but the people who actually show up and do the things and who are there for you. Sorry, I really should have fixed up the spacing in this. I know there are times in my life where I thought certain people would be there and... They won't. And was a heartbroken of it? Of it. My goodness, my English is terrible today. Was a heartbroken because of it? um no not really because people had been in my years oh my goodness people had been in my life for years um disappeared and then some friendships you know went all the way back to school and they had faded in to the background um yet people who had only been in my life for a short period of time showed up in extraordinary ways so Was there a mourning process? Maybe slightly, but because of those other people showing it in my life, I kind of went, okay, that's what it is. I'm not wasting any more energy on this. I'm going to let those friendships go. You know, I was receiving messages from people. I was receiving phone calls from people. I was having people get food delivered to me and, like, even cook me, like, home-cooked meals. You know, people were showing up to support me, taking me to appointments or just purely checking in to – to to see how it was did i need help did they did i need um you know running to appointments or picking the kids up from school or groceries and you know just simply being present And it was really in those moments that taught me something I probably hadn't really understood before because I probably wasn't ready. And I had measured a lot of my relationships by history, not impact. And I think that's a big difference. I had assumed like most of us would have that just because somebody had been in your life for a long period of time, that they automatically deserved a permanent place in it. But history and value aren't always the same thing. The length of a relationship and quality of the relationship also aren't the same thing. And we have different seasons and I think difficult seasons have a way of revealing that. The past few years, and especially recently when I was diagnosed with cancer, I did a bit of an audit. And, you know, that was both on friendships or friendships and family as well. And it wasn't because I was angry. I don't have time or energy to waste on being angry anymore. It wasn't that I wanted to cut everybody off because I was having a bad day or anything, but it was because for the first time I started paying attention to the cost of maintaining those relationships either with friends or with family. I started to consider who left me feeling supported, who left me feeling drained. Who brought peace to the relationship and who brought chaos? Who added amazing energy to my life? And who did I require to recover from? What relationships were absolutely draining me that I had to recover from maintaining that relationship or those relationships because there is a difference and I think there's a really big difference. And I guess I probably wasn't surprised, but I was obviously more mindful of it. And when I started to ask myself that question, it didn't just apply to relationships, both with friends and family. I was applying it to relationships. to everything. So I was applying it to my calendar, making sure that that wasn't energetically draining me. I was applying it to my commitments, making sure that I wasn't committing to things that I didn't really want to do. My obligations, which is, you know, why I had sold one of my legal practices, because I needed... needed a little bit of freedom i suppose it was starting to drain on me because i was so incredibly busy and there was other obviously other circumstances to it but um you know But then I even had to apply it to what my definition of success was, because I think even that was based on what other people's definition of success was, right? Like that's a really subjective thing to ask, what's your definition of success, because we all measure that differently. um you know and as i mentioned i had sold a legal practice it was just on ten years it was incredibly successful um you know the the team is amazing i built up an amazing um client base who had trusted me for all of those years it had a really strong reputation i'm just realizing i don't think i've actually said on my podcast that i had some one of my legal practices um but you know it had won multiple awards over that time frame uh the growth was amazing you know started small grew and then i realized you know the growth that it had i needed to drop it back a little bit. We stopped doing, being everything to everyone, I suppose, and just really focused down on the areas of law that we wanted to. And there was literally no reason why I probably commercially needed to sell. But It was at the time where I was diagnosed with cancer. Mentally, I was probably done with a lot of things. I had enough on my plate with trying to deal with cancer without trying to, you know, run all these different businesses. But selling that legal practice, and there's obviously a lot more to it than this, but I carried a lot of guilt. um about it in in all different sorts of ways and you know when something becomes successful we tell ourselves that we should be grateful which i completely am grateful for that business um you know when something is working we tell ourselves that we should keep going with whatever that thing is when other people depend on us we tell ourselves that we don't get a chance to change our minds we we just have to keep going and then when i received that cancer diagnosis just before christmas um i knew i couldn't keep going on how i had been been going on and i don't know if that's for the first time i was probably for the first serious time i stopped asking myself Can I do this? It's okay. One more day. One more day. You know, just don't think too far ahead. Just, you know, wake up, rinse and repeat type thing. But I really had to think of what is it costing me to keep having these different businesses um what is it costing my health my my relationships and everything and when I asked myself that question um it was a very different question to what I had asked myself uh in the past what old Stacey would have done and I think um The truth is many of us are carrying things that we no longer need to carry. We're carrying things because of an obligation or because it's familiar. And as I've mentioned before, those things could be relationships that we have with people. It could be expectations, whether that's our own expectations or whether the expectations that other people have put on us are Similar to responsibilities, responsibilities that we have or we think we should have or other people have put on us. The guilt that we have in placing boundaries or making changes or doing whatever it is when we shouldn't be having guilt over those things. the obligations that we have on us yes i'll attend that pta meeting yes i'll you know run the mother's day or the father's day store yes yes yes yes we're over um committing um to many different things of our lives and i think we are also holding on to versions of ourselves that we have outgrown But we've carried them and we continue carrying them because they're familiar. We have carried them on for so long. And I think we mistake familiarity for alignment. We mistake history for purpose. We mistake survival for success. And I think one of the biggest lessons I got when I was diagnosed with cancer, it wasn't gratitude. It wasn't resilience. And I guess it wasn't even really perspective either. Instead, it was clarity, clarity about the things that matter and clarity about what doesn't matter. and clarity about the fact that my energy is limited each day doesn't matter how much energy that you think you have you have caps and for years i treated as if i had unlimited energy all the time i was super busy i was busy being busy. And I now treat my energy as it is one of my most valuable assets because it is. Because unlike money, there are times in your life where you simply cannot earn more of it. You are tapped out. And if you are using that energy all the time day in day out your body is probably going to have enough and getting that cancer diagnosis was exactly the wake-up call I needed to realize that I don't have all the energy in the world and I need to change my values but you know having said that cancer didn't take away my ambition I still want to have my businesses and you know there could be more in the I always have, and I still want to make that impact. But it changed what I was willing to sacrifice for it. I was no longer willing to work my absolute fucking ass off And sacrificing, you know, watching my daughters grow up or attending things or whatever it might be, that was no longer going to happen in my world. And I really think that this took me a long time to understand, which seems a bit silly now, but I obviously wasn't open to thinking about any of this any sooner than what had happened. And I used to think that success was also how much that I could carry, how much that I could handle, how much I could get done in a day, a week, a month, how much I could achieve. And today I think success is also knowing, though, about what to put down because it no longer serves you. What to stop tolerating within your life, both, you know, from a business perspective and from a personal perspective. What no longer deserves or who no longer deserves access to your time, your peace and your energy. So now I try to be much more conscious about what I say yes to. Before I say yes to something, I ask myself different questions. If I say yes to whatever this is, what is a recovery what is the emotional energetic recovery that I'm going to have to put in to recover from whatever it might be not what the financial recovery is but what that emotional recovery is what the mental recovery is going to be if I say yes to whatever that thing is and that comes back before any financial game or return on investment or whatever it is is that energetic recovery that is what my priority is now before i commit to everything because i commit to anything sorry because i think every relationship every action it has a cost every commitment has a cost Every obligation has a cost and that cost is the energy it's going to take you to do that thing, to have that relationship, to whatever it is. Every yes that you say is going to have that energetic cost and it's up to you to work out whether that cost is going to be worth it. And it shouldn't be from a money perspective or that that needs to be taken into account, but for me personally, It is no longer a question about money. It is a question of whether whatever this thing is, is worth paying for in my emotional energetic recovery. So I would like to leave you with a question that is pretty well starting to have a really big impact on my life. And it is, what in your life are you recovering from? So it might be a relationship. It could be a friendship. It could be an obligation. It could be a commitment. It might be an expectation. Oh, goodness me. I'm glad I started this podcast when I did. It's going for a lot longer than what I thought it was. It could even be a version of yourself that you have outgrown and that is okay. It's great that you've outgrown a version of yourself because that means that there's growth. But most importantly, whatever that thing is, is it worth the recovery? The emotional energetic recovery for whatever that thing or that relationship is. And just because that you can carry something doesn't mean that you should. And just because something has always been part of your life doesn't mean it deserves to be a part of your future. Okay. So thank you for joining me for today's episode. I really hope it has helped you. And please remember to share today's podcast because you never know somebody who may be needing a little bit of guidance. And remember to subscribe as well so you receive notifications every Wednesday that the podcast has been released. But I think that's probably it. That felt probably a little bit heavy. So make sure you do something kind today after you have listened or watched this. So go for a quick walk, go for a nice relaxing bath, have a nice cup of tea, do something because, yeah, I think this episode was a little bit heavy today. But, yeah, thank you as always and I will catch you next time. Bye. Thanks, Jim.
