Me Time ✨

Hello, everybody. Happy Sunday. Jean here, calling in from Minneapolis on this beautiful Sunday. Just gonna give everybody a second to come on in. Hello, speak wonder. So great to see you. Hello, Jules. People are coming in and my little stream is popping off quickly. So if I don't see you or don't respond to you while we're chatting, I'll go back in and look. Hello, Jules. Nice to see you. I'm so excited to be here today. It's my last Sunday in Minneapolis, and then I fly out of town on Tuesday.

I just taught a spin class at cycle bar in uptown, so I'm a little sweaty. It's Minnesota weather, so for me, I'm a hot person. It's getting a little chilly. You can see the seasons are changing. That's all good, right? We need change to happen. We may not always like change, but change is where we grow. Change is where we evolve, changes where we settle. So today I mentioned when JC was live that I would talk about the taper. I would talk about slowing down and the reason why. So I've mentioned before I'm training for a marathon.

I'm actually training to do two back to back. And isn't falling Minnesota fun? Yeah, I agree, Jules. And the first marathon that I'm doing is a marathon in Berlin. It's actually the 50th anniversary of the Berlin marathon. So if you think about that and just pause for a second, 50 years ago, the Berlin Wall was up. And 50 years later, so when they started this marathon, they could only run through half of the city. They couldn't run through the other half. They didn't get to see the whole space.

And eventually the wall came down. And eventually the marathon now tracks on the whole city. So you get to see both sides of Berlin, where at one time that was impossible. And this is the 50th anniversary of that particular marathon, so I didn't plan it that way. I think the universe sometimes helps guide us to get to the destinations that we're meant to be at. And so here we go. And the reason I talk about taper is. And slowing down is it's really hard, right? So in a marathon training program, you have weeks where you just build up and build and build, and sometimes you take a step back to go a step forward.

And what I mean by that is one week you might run a certain mileage. If I say a number, people sometimes freak out. But let's just pretend the first week you run 1 mile, and the second week you run a half a mile. And then the third week you run 2 miles. And then the fourth week, you run a mile and a half. So it's almost like you go forward to expand, and then you come backwards so that you can be stronger to go forward again. And at the end of marathon training, there are two weeks where you don't run long distances and you don't run a lot of miles.

Excuse me. And many people, including myself, kind of start to freak out a little bit during that period of time. It's a time where your body has been stressed and pushed to hydrate and be nourished and to sleep. And in this two week period of time, I feel like my body has literally crashed. And not in a bad way. I have slept a ton, I have eaten a lot, I have hydrated a lot. I haven't worked out as much. 2 miles. I will not say the kilometers because it just makes the numbers sound so much bigger.

So I'm sticking with miles. And between then, there's this big, long period of pause. And I'm gonna ask you guys, how good are you when you are forced to pause? And maybe sometimes we're forced to pause, or maybe we just take a pause, whatever that is. It's hard. For whatever reasons, we are designed to go, go, go. And we put ourselves into a capsule of stress all the time. Yeah, Jules, so. So we put ourselves inside a capsule of stress. If we don't see sometimes every minute of every day booked on a calendar, or if we don't feel like we're checking on off enough things on our to do list, then we try to do more the next day.

And we pile on, and we pile on. And so we sit inside this capsule of pressure. And when that pressure isn't there anymore, it's almost as if we're floating. We don't know what to do. So inside this space of tapering mode, two weeks of time where I'm not running the same amount of miles, and I get in my head and I wonder if my body's going to be okay. Will my muscles be okay? I haven't been challenging them. And every coach that trains, any marathon runner, any triathlete, anybody looking to run their first five k, they will always invite you to take a pause before the big day so that your body can refresh your mind, can refresh, you can refuel so that you can perform at your best.

And here's the deal. You still might show up that day, and you still might not perform your best, you might not have a great day. And that is part of the magic, because everything that I've done until right now has gotten me prepared be, gotten me to be prepared for whatever comes next. So I have people asking me every day, how am I ready? How am I going to do? And my answer is always, I'm going to start and I'm going to finish. And my goal is to cross across, to finish across the finish line. Speakwonder says, we are conditioned to feel lazy.

It popped away, but I'll go back and take it out. But, yeah, it's, we're conditioned to feel lazy if we're not doing things all the time. But if you go to different countries, and it's part of why I'm excited to go to Berlin and part of why I like to travel outside the United States. There's so many cultures that have such a different appreciation for time. Gatherings, togetherness, food, all in different ways than what we do here. And I celebrate that. I love that. I love to see what new idea, what new cultural trait I can bring home and try to keep alive in my memory and in my day for as long as possible.

Because eventually we're going to go back to our same patterns. But in this time of retreating, this time of tapering, I simply invite you to allow yourselves to step outside the pressure cooker and to allow yourself to step inside a pause. And maybe it's on a Sunday, maybe you go online today and you decide that you're ready to go on a vacation or a retreat. It's funny. If you talk to anybody on vacation, you know, if you take five days off, let's just pretend you take five days off. The first two days, inevitably, it's as if you're still remembering that you're back at home, worried that you're not doing enough.

And by the last day, however many days you're gone, you're like, oh, I wish I just had one more day. Because you spent the first day or two still checking boxes. So I do invite you. If you have the means to book a trip, book a trip. If you don't, maybe there's a way to go camping. Maybe there's a way to unplug all your computers, turn off all your phones and hide them for 24 hours or an entire weekend, if that's available to you, so that you can allow yourself to step outside the pressure cooker and see how your body feels and listen.

What does your body need? I am a person that runs cold, like, all the time. If it's sunny and 80 out. I'm living my best life. But I share that with you. Because when I take a pause, my body allows itself to reset. And it's not about hot or cold. It's about cozy. And the last two weeks, I've literally done the workouts that I needed to do. I teach spin classes, so I'm in there teaching the classes and riding my classes, but I've allowed my body to take a pause. And I'll kid you not, I'm nervous.

I'll say it only to you guys, I'm nervous. Not nervous whether or not I'll start and finish. I'm nervous about my body feeling strong enough that day because I've taken a pause. And I find that when I think that way, I have to take a pause on my own just right there to ask myself, why do I feel that by taking a break, it's going to not set me up for success versus what every statistic and what every training plan says is that it will set you up for success when you take that break. I encourage us to all invest in ourselves.

I encourage us to all find a pause, to taper, to take that time, to just reset. And when you feel the pressure cooker, because when we're inside the pressure cooker, we don't always feel it. When we are inside the pressure of life and work, we don't always feel it until one day it's too much. And so when you get to that point, allow yourself to step outside, allow yourself to step outside that pressure cooker to release all of that to do to doing checklisting yeses to everybody else and just say yes to yourself for a little bit of time and allow yourself to go inside the pause.

We'll call it the pause pod for lack of better terminologies. But my second invitation is how might we step into the pause pod before we need it? How might we just take that breath before our body says it's too much? So on Sunday of next week, I will phone in from a different country, a different space, and at this time in Minnesota, I will have already completed a marathon. And I'll share my story and I'll share with you a new city. I hope you have the best week. I'll see you online tomorrow for professional development day, and I will talk to you all soon.