If My Plate Could Talk: “Balancing Expectations And Honoring Your Capacity”

Kajrasphere. We are back, back together, spending some time, taking some deep breaths together, hopefully navigating all things life as well as you possibly can. Always remember the to do list is always going to be there. So don't overdo it. Don't measure yourself by whether or not you got everything done. There really is no such thing. There really isn't any such thing as a perfect week. Let the week have whatever it brings. But most importantly, welcome to if youf Plate Could Talk, where we spend time once a week looking at your metaphorical plate, your tangible plate, and that intersection between the way that we live and how we eat and our choices, our eating choices.

Really let us know what's going on. For those of you that know the ropes, come on in. Let me know where you are. I am actually in Spartanburg, South Carolina. I'll be here for the next couple of days in an event. So hello from South Carolina. And this is a great opportunity as well to kind of look at where your week is. If I had to wrap up the end of my week 1 to 10, 1 being the lowest, 10 being the highest, I would say it's been a solid eight. It has been a super busy week. Hello, Minnesota. But I feel like I have faced every week, hello, Vegas, or every part of the week as well as possible, which fits right in line with our focus for June in Cadre is balance.

We talked a little bit about this Wednesday, but I want to take it to a different place today. Anchoring, quote, quote by me. There is no healing and hustling towards perfection. Healing begins when we honor our capacity, not our expectation. Jackie, great that you're busy and refocused because that's also always important. Healing begins when we honor our capacity, not our expectations. Because your capacity, hello, Minnesota, could change right, at any given point based on what's going on in your life.

So I want to talk about something that I know most of us wrestle with. I'm saying most of us. I'm going to include myself in this is expectations, whether it's weight, stigma, health challenges, grief, dysregulated eating, our emotions, whatever the case may be, we often measure ourselves on this silent scale of how we think we should be doing. Tell me this. Pop in the chat and let me know what kind of expectations are you currently placing on yourself? And there's no shame, right or wrong. Are you in a place right now that you feel like your expectations of yourself are balanced?

Are you in a place where you recognize the expectations that you have towards yourself are not realistic or causing you shame or a lot of guilt. Let me know where you are and then I will move forward. I'll just give you a second. See, Andrea4172 says she's locking in for the remainder of the year. I can't wait to see what that means for you in your life. Unbalanced. Yeah, that happens. Balance, if you remember Wednesday or if you watched it, is a practice. It's a journey. So this is not about judging ourselves.

It is about being aware of. Is it realistic? Is it unrealistic? Is it unbalanced? Is it overwhelming? Am I putting more pressure on myself that it's truly helpful? So let's talk a little bit about the brain science behind expectations and how they shape self worth. So prefrontal cortex, that's responsible for all of our goal setting and it works alongside. I'm gonna move this a little bit. The limbic system system so that we know where our emotional memory is stored. We set goals or expectations, but sometimes we can set them from a place of pain, we can set them from a place of trauma or comparison.

And that hardwires our responses. So another part of your awareness is always going to be how do you recognize when you're in a situation where you are kind of beating yourself up into the right set of expectations or you have numbed yourself to the point that your expectations of yourself are uncharacteristically low because you're going through a hard time and you're having a difficult time coming out of it again, it's a continuum. There's nothing wrong with either part of that continuum. But that sweet spot that we want you to be in is going to be the space that is in the middle.

And then I want you to consider, what have you been eating lately? Have you been eating lately? Right, like that's key. When we are too hyper focused on our expectations or sometimes the expectations of others, we can go towards the end of not eating at all. If you're in a season right now where you're not eating or not eating enough, I really want you to see what it looks like to fill your plate a little bit more. Other times, our expectations of ourselves are so overwhelming and high and we're so hyper focused on our goals that we're eating too much.

We're gnawing that anxiousness and that overwhelm and stress. And again, how your body responds to the stressors and the to do list in your life is going to be unique to you and it can change at any given moment. I know that there have been times in the past in my life where stress put me towards one spectrum of constantly eating, trying to feel balanced. And then there are other times where I've had to really focus and go, hey Dr. Charisse, you need to put some food on your plate because you're not getting enough to sustain what you have.

So this is not about comparison, this is about awareness. This is about acknowledgment and, and really recognize. When you see a plate of food, is your brain seeing it as a test of willpower? When you have hunger cues, is your body hearing that as internal criticism? I shouldn't be hungry right now? Are you in a situation where you were going through something difficult and you're not eating, you're not connected to those hunger cues and then you're telling yourself it doesn't matter, I just can't.

Let me give a side note here. This will be a little bit more kind of free flowing. One of the most challenging dynamics when I am working with a client or even sometimes talking to friends is when we're not adequately nourished. Nothing in our life will feel balanced. When we're low on food and the blood sugar is dropping and we're disconnected from hunger cues or we don't have enough energy, we're not going to sleep well. We're also going to often feel anxious. Sometimes I'll be connected with individuals and then we get to the bottom of their anxiety and we go, wait a minute, this is not anxiety.

That's always about your outward stressors. Some of this anxiety is the fact that you are not giving your body enough food to settle and to rest. So fun fact. Did you know that if you're eating during the day is off balance, your sleep metabolism will parallel your eating metabolism. So if your eating is chaotic and it's not consistent, you're often going to feel that show up in your sleep. And dysregulated eating plus dysregulated sleep will equal imbalanced emotions, unbalanced emotions. And so those three things always correlate.

And then you can put yourself into a cycle of shame or guilt or burnout. So here's something that I want you to consider today. Our work is on a reframe. That's the tool. High expectations without self compassion will equal emotional exhaustion. So if you're still expecting yourself to operate here, not being compassionate and compassion can also be are you nourishing your needs and your self worth even if you don't feel like that's adequate high Expectations with self compassion is going to equal growth and grace.

And don't want you to tell me, but I want you to kind of take inventory for yourself. Are you in a place of growth and grace or are you in a place of emotional exhaustion? If you want to tell me, you can, but you do not have to. I will out myself. I will say I'm vacillating, right? There are parts of my week where I feel like, okay, I am operating through growth and grace, but then if I'm not careful, if I'm not intentional, it can swing very easily over into emotional exhaustion because I'm not paying attention enough attention to my capacity, right?

So when we talk about what does it mean to navigate, to go through your week, to look at the week ahead and really approach the week from a different mindset, I want you to start each morning. This is my challenge, my encouragement to you. I want you to start each morning before you get out of bed. I just want you to stop and notice, what's my capacity for today? How do I feel physically? How do I feel emotionally? How do I feel about having to be social and engage with people? And then to the best of your ability, craft your day and then eventually your week based on your capacity.

Not. It doesn't matter what I feel. I have all of these expectations now. Let's be real. That might actually be true for some of you, right? You have multiple expectations on your plate and it doesn't always give you the space that you need to honor your capacity. So here's what that looks like for you. You work through your responsibilities, but then you are more intentional about. I have the time, I have to take the time to take some things off of my plate every week. I encourage you to make two plates.

One is your metaphorical plate. What are the things that you're carrying? What are you worried about? What is your to do list? Like, right? What's stressing you out? All the things. And then what do you see on your tangible plate? But then the goal is always, what can you pause or take off this complaint? So growth and grace means that you're giving yourself permission to say, yes, I could do this today, Yes, I could do this this week. Yes, I need to reach out for this person, but I don't really have the capacity.

So I'm going to honor that capacity by rescheduling a task or giving yourself a longer amount of time to do something. But more than anything, I really want to encourage you to notice what you need from the start of the day. And really balance how much pressure you're placing on yourself. If you're someone who said your expectations feel very realistic to you right now, that is phenomenal. Keep them that way because they can move very quickly. If you're someone and you feel like they feel very unbalanced, they feel shaky, they feel overwhelming, then maybe take a minute or two after we're done and ask yourself, what's one thing that I could do that would help me move toward balance?

That help me practice that to help me walk towards balance? It's not an overnight dynamic. It's not a 1, 2 or 3. You do these things and then all of a sudden it's going to feel great. But it's a practice. Okay, next week we'll continue this conversation and I'll give you some tangible tools for balancing your expectation. But this week, I really just want you to continue to focus on awareness. What do I need to do to stay in a good place? If you're balance and expectations are great, or if you feel like things are off balance, really spend some time in going, what do I need to do?

Last thing that I want to say, There are moments where writing down our expectations toward ourself can be really valuable. Some of us place such high expectations on ourself and we don't always realize that you're expecting more out of yourself than anyone else is. You are the internal clock that's pushing you and wounding you up. So get it on paper. It doesn't have to take a long time, but what do I expect of me? And then maybe you look at that personally, professionally, in your relationships, in your family.

Just look at those different places and that will also help give you a little bit of insight. As always, I'm glad that you chose to come and be here live. If you're listening to this on replay, I'm glad you're here. Continue to comment. I always come back and check the comments to kind of see what the interaction is and what we need. And most of all, please share what you're receiving on Cadre with someone who doesn't know about it. There's a whole world of people that don't know that this is here, this really calm and grounding space where you just get what you need.

You don't get a lot of fluff. There are no commercials, there are no pictures that you feel like are going to overwhelm you. This is a safe place where all are welcome. And I look forward to seeing you all on Wednesday. Have a good one.