Me Time ✨

Happy Sunday, everybody. My name is Jean Nichols. I'm excited to be here today. I'm pulling a JC as I'm taking my live stream from the car. I haven't been out here for a couple weeks. I've been traveling and so I apologize that I've missed you. I love being here with all of you. And as I'm waiting for people to join on in on this beautiful Sunday for a little me time, I want to give a little shout out. Hi, Steph. Happy Sunday. I want to give a little shout out to our fellow Cadre member, JC, who just completed his 40th, 40, 40th marathon.

I am approaching marathons five and six. Hello, Katherine. Happy Sunday. So in my brain, I can't comprehend 40 marathons. And if you miss what I just said because you just joined in, I'm giving a shout out on this beautiful Sunday to my good friend, fellow Cadre member, JC. He does thin space and a bunch of other bold followership. I always have a hard time saying that word. He just completed his 40th marathon and I'm in awe and inspired. We can all do really hard things. And so, my name is Jean Nichols.

I'm really excited to be here. I am a certified coach. I do life coaching. I do professional coaching. I have been a consultant for a long time. I do change management and business strategy work, a lot of team building. I'm a Reiki master, sound therapist, breath worker, and a spin instructor. So we wear a lot of hats. And so on Sundays, I have really tried hard to create space so that Sundays are kind of my unstructured day, my unplanned day. Today. Today, as a part of my unstructured, I actually have to get structured.

I'm headed to the spin studio that I co own and I'm teaching a spin class shortly. Good morning. And it's Father's Day. So to all the fathers that are out there, happy Father's Day. To all of you that have fathers that are living, I hope that you get to see them or talk to them. And for those of you similar to me whose fathers have passed, I hope that you can honor your father in a way that feels good to you. So on Sundays, when I talk about me time, I was thinking about it today. So I also similar to JC, I am training for marathon, not one, but two this year.

I decided that in the last year and a half, I lost both my mom and dad and they were very significant to me. So I decided that I would do the world six marathons in honor of them and do all of them for charity. And so I did the New York City marathon last year, two weeks after my mom had passed away. And I am doing the Berlin marathon. It's the 50th anniversary of the Berlin marathon. So think about that. My brother pointed this out to me recently. The 50th anniversary means that when this marathon started in Berlin, the wall was still up.

And so 50 years later, look how far they've come. And I'm also doing the Chicago marathon. I'm running one for Alzheimer's. That's what my father passed away from. And I. I'm running the Berlin marathon for Crohn's and colitis, because I have a number of friends and family members that are impacted by a variety of Crohn's and colitis issues, intestinal issues that have significantly impacted them. And so, on my run today, it was, you know, interesting and hard. I did a six and a half mile run. Wouldn't say I'm a runner, but I can run.

I'm not gonna say I'm fast, but I start and I finish. And about halfway, I had a walk. Because sometimes running, for me, brings up a lot of emotion. And it's Father's day. And I was asked earlier today how I wanted to celebrate Father's day. Did I want to go see my dad's grave? Did I want to do something else in honor of him? And I was very taken aback because I wasn't prepared for the question. So my run today, I started to feel, like, all that emotion, right? And, you know, sometimes when we're taking a time out for ourselves and we're just doing something strictly for ourselves, we don't know what's gonna come up.

We don't know what is gonna be in that day, in that moment. And so I walked about halfway through my run for just a few minutes so I could catch my breath again and feel whatever emotion I was feeling and allow it to come out. And it's funny, because in the past, if I would do a run like that and I would feel that emotion come up, I would get really upset with myself, like, push through it. Jean, you just gotta push through everything, right? That's what we do. We are designed to maybe pack it down and just push through.

And so this last year, year and a half, I've been very intentional and really mindful of trying to allow Sunday to just kind of be Sunday and allow myself to feel whatever I feel in that moment and know that that is exactly what I need to do. And that's really hard, right? It's hard for us to sit in that space, and it's hard for us to take that time for ourselves, because many of us are caregivers, caretakers. Many of us want to be seen as strong. And being vulnerable and authentic in the moment can sometimes be seen as a sign of weakness.

But I I've changed my perspective, and I've learned to change my perspective to see those moments of vulnerability, those moments of authenticity, those moments where I don't have the mental capacity to hold any space for anyone else other than what I'm feeling in that moment as a sign of strength. And it's not easy to change that story, right? But I feel like now that I've taken more time to say, it's okay to take space for me, whether it's 15 minutes on a Cadre call once a day or three times a day, which would be 4% of your days.

So think about three Cadre calls. If they're 15 minutes a piece, that's 45 minutes. That's only 4% of your day that you're taking for yourself. But inside that window of time, when you take that time for you, that 4% of time allows you to process an emotion, to hold space for you to reset, reflect, maybe just laugh for 15 minutes about nothing. But those small moments of time that we take for ourselves are the single handedly strongest moments of our day. And maybe we don't do it every day. Maybe we just do it once a week, and that's okay.

But those are the strongest moments that we can take. Because in those moments, we can discover something beautiful about ourselves. We can discover a space where we don't have to be anything for anyone. We just get to be for ourselves. And I don't know about you. I don't know your thoughts when I say that out loud, how that hits with you or how you feel about that. But I have found, and I'm still learning through this one, that when I can do that, for me, what happens next is when someone else is running frazzled or crazy or trying to pack down an emotion.

I can recognize it in somebody else that I'm with, and I can share with them an example of when I took some time for me and how it helped me. And what I love about that is the opportunity to create a new connection with someone. And what that has allowed is for me to not always have to be the strongest person on my team. As I mentioned, I co own a spin studio. I'm a consultant. But at the end of the day, I'm a human first I'm Jean first. And then I wear 7000 different hats just like all of you. And when we can share the hat of our own authenticity, share a hat of when we had a moment with someone who we see as going through a moment, it creates a stronger human connection, but it also creates more strength within.

Because now we have the courage to say outside of ourselves what we're feeling, what we went through, what our experience was. And those connections are what bonds people. And those connections I found are what make me not feel so alone as I'm going through my own healing journey about anything. It could be a job loss. The number of people that have opened up to me in the last two weeks alone about having lost a job and not wanting to say that to anybody because they feel like they're failing has been significant.

But what I share back with them is I've gotten laid off. And they're like, you have? I'm like, yeah, what did you do? And then we start a conversation. We start a story. So then it's not so scary and it's not so lonely to be out there. So today on this little me time segment, I just wanted to share with you the opportunity to create space to move your body in a way that feels good to you. Maybe it's a walk, maybe it's a stretch. I'm horrible at stretching, but I feel like it's really good. I'm just not good at it requires me to slow down and breathe.

I find that when I move, it helps me to process. But what I'm learning is that I can process without always having to move. And that has been a really big learning for me because my default has been when I'm really sad, when I'm really upset is to go work out. And that helps me to think, it helps me to process. But what I'm learning also is that I can take a pause in the middle of a training run because I'm feeling so overwhelmed with emotion that it's okay for me to stop, to walk, to stretch, to look around, to see the flowers blooming around me, see the water moving in the river, and know that it's okay to just be.

I don't always have to move. So on Sunday, we explore me time. I'll share with you some of my journey. I'll share with you a little bit about my marathon training experiences. And I will hold space for you to offer in the chat anytime you need to, or whether in replay or live with me, an experience that you're having that you feel comfortable sharing or a way in which you celebrate time strictly for yourselves. So I'm gonna go and teach a spin class on Father's Day and honor my father by giving the gift of inspiration and motivation to a room full of people.

Because that's what my father would always do. So today I'm celebrating him by manifesting his loving, kind energy to give to some other people today. So I hope you have an amazing day. Tell me in the chat or comments while you're live or if you're on replay, what did you do for you today? Strictly for you, I'd love to know because I have a lot to learn on taking time for me and finding new ways to do that that aren't always about movement. And to my fellow Cadre JC out there, give them a shout out for having completed 40 marathons and a lot of them for charity.

He's raised a lot of money to cross those finishes finish lines. So I hope you all have a great day and I will talk to you all soon.