We don’t wonder what it costs the person holding everything together to keep holding it together. We just hand them something else to hold.

This week we’re talking about the strong ones and what they really need to survive.

Sometimes, we work so hard to protect ourselves, we inadvertently make it impossible to be anything more than safe.

Michael Singer refers to this as living a “thorn shaped life”. This week we’re talking about the most common barriers we construct to keep us safe…that actually keep us stuck.

Have you done too many hard things?
When your whole personality is about doing hard things, you spend most of your time in survival mode. Survival mode is great if you’re actually trying to survive something. But, for living and enjoying your life…not so much.

Too many hard things under your belt without enough rest, play, fun, and joy and your nervous system starts to go on the defensive. It builds spectacular, high achieving, results oriented, armor and narrows your life down to something defensible.

The conventional thought is that if you’re stressed, depleted, or carrying the weight of years spent performing at the edge of your capacity, the answer is to slow down. Meditate. Take a bath. Sit in silence. Breathe.

These are good tools and they can help. But, they are only part of the picture. Because the opposite of a nervous system locked in chronic stress is not calm.

It’s play.

The very skills that saved us can become the prison that prevents us from enjoying our actual lives.

This week, we’re talking about the architecture of the cycle breaker – what creates them, what saves them, and what returns them to themselves.

Whether from the relentless expectations of work, the endless responsibilities at home, or the deep seated desire to bring the “best version” of ourselves to everything we do – burnout is a big problem.

In our fast-paced, hyperconnected world, it has become an increasingly pervasive issue. So pervasive, in fact, that we seem to have gone deaf to its cry. Normalizing it as “just the way things are”, or worse – actually admiring it – worn like a badge of honor we’re almost proud to achieve.

But, ignoring burnout has consequences.

Did you know that a gathering of monarch butterflies is called a kaleidoscope?

Sara shares how community and connection are transforming the lives of achievers and survivors through Monarch.

Most of us think that hard work pays off. That for something to be worthwhile, it has to be a little bit of a challenge.

We devalue easy things, because learning how to do hard things…saved us. But, ease isn’t the absence of effort. Ease is what happens when your effort is finally aligned with who you really are.

Monarchs are the strongest, bravest, people in the world – but they almost never feel that way.

This week, Sara has written a love letter just for you – the one no one even thinks to check one.

Hello, hyper-independence.

This trait is among the most common I see in achievers and survivors. And it causes way more problems than it solves.

This week, we’re talking about how to replace this way of functioning with something that sustainably works.