Gloria Lee - Your Most Important Relationship

Wendy Manganaro: 0:00

Hi everyone. My name's Wendy Manganaro and I am the Host of the Wellness and Wealth podcast. I'm so happy to have you find us. And if you could take a moment and hit that subscribe button, I'd really appreciate it. This is the podcast where we believe when you show up better for yourself as a woman business owner, you show up better for your business. So sit back, relax. And learn from the practical to the woo-hoo, how to best take care of you. Have a great day. Stay blessed. And leave a review when you're done listening to the show, thanks so much.

Wendy: 0:38

Hi everyone, Our topic today is your most important relationship and joining us is Dr. Gloria Lee and I'm going to reader bio and then we'll get right into it. Dr. Gloria Lee is a psychologist, clinical director at Brentwood Counseling Center, Amazon bestselling and award-winning author, professor, and counseling psychology clinical supervisor. And trainer for therapist and graduate students sought after speaker, consultant, and advocate for social justice and mental health for over 24 years. Dr. Lee has been an authority on relationships and personal development. She has worked with thousands of individuals, couples, families, and organizations in approving improving their relational and mental health. Dr. Lee. Passionate about all things, relationships and beliefs, that healthy relationships contribute to healthy people in mind, body and spirit, in healthy societies. So welcome. Thank you for doing the show with me today.

Dr. Gloria Lee: 1:34

Oh, thank you for having me. Such an honor.

Wendy: 1:36

Yeah. I'm so excited. The audience is gonna hear this we had talked, and actually this will air right around Valentine's Day cuz we're talking about relationships and so I know that it's almost Valentine's Day, so what people think we're talking about and what we're gonna talk about it is a little twist. I think this is really super important because even if we weren't talking about entrepreneurs, healthy relationships start with this relationship. So, the question is, who is your most important relationship with?

Dr. Gloria Lee: 2:05

Well, drum roll please, your most important relationship is with yourself. Okay. It's with yourself because you are the one who has to live with yourself for the rest of your life. And your relationship with yourself dictates how you do everything in life, how you do all your relationships with family, friends, colleagues, clients, how you function at work. So you can either keep going for the long game or the alternative is overextend yourself and burnout over time. It also impacts how you serve your clients, both as a role model and also as an entrepreneur. So I believe that it is imperative that we take care of ourselves first and nurture this relationship with ourselves. One thing I wanna say about our relationship with ourselves, when women in particular hear this, they often think, oh, that's very selfish, taking care of yourself. I would like to off the bat, let everyone know that self-care and your relationship with yourself is never selfish. In fact, is the most selfless thing you could do. Because when we nurture ourselves and take good care of ourselves, we become the best versions of ourselves, and we are therefore better for everyone else around us. So in a nutshell, that's our most important relatationship.

Wendy: 3:30

I'm so glad you said the difference between self-care and selfishness because I think for many women, including myself that was a hard lesson for me to learn. Things from saying no to, to no, I need some time, or whatever that is, that whatever my self-care looks like, depending on where I'm at in my life or anybody else. It's a really hard thing because I think we've been taught our whole lives to not be selfish.

Dr. Gloria Lee: 3:56

Yeah. And honestly, this is, a societal thing that females in particular are taught to be selfless and to serve everyone else around us, but we never have this kind of conversation with men And so, there is that double standard unfortunately. And I think this is about re-educating ourselves to know that, wait a minute, there's something really off here. And when I work with women in particular, when we are not taking care of ourselves. We're actually not very fun to be around and we negatively impact the people around us, so it's not a bad thing at all. And I want us to start shifting our mindset and know that, hey, we've all drank the Kool-Aid and now we're figuring out the consequences of why. That if we don't have this relationship with ourselves and really take care of ourselves, we pay for it and everyone else around us pay for it, and our business pays for it as well.

Wendy: 4:54

I can't agree more with that. So let me ask you this, when it comes to self-care and you mentioned others around us start to realize when we're not in self-care because of how we're acting and reacting. What are some of those signs. Because I know if I haven't, even eating, my son will be like, oh, have you eaten today? Because all of a sudden, not as nice as I usually am if I've, taken a time to even do something as simple as eating during the day.

Dr. Gloria Lee: 5:21

Yeah, absolutely. And so I think you've brought up such a good point that so much of our day, especially as an entrepreneur, is, towards serving other people. We turn outward to serve other people, and oftentimes we forget to turn inward to serve ourselves and to know what's happening. So if I was to say, what are some of the key signs to look for that you're. Taking care of yourself or having that relationship with yourself. Now, you don't have to have all of these signs, but I want you to just really pay attention to the signs that I'm gonna be telling you and note to yourself how many and which ones apply to you. Okay? So it could include things like, you start feeling anxious about things that you never were anxious about before. You start feeling more irritable or short with other people. You start doubting your abilities that, oh, I'm not good enough for this. Or you start getting an imposter syndrome, you can start overeating or oversleeping like mindlessly, overeating, sleeping, what much more than you usually do, yet still feeling tired when you wake up, you could start, feeling a lack of motivation, lack of energy. Some people feel apathetic, that they stop caring about things that they used to care about. And you might stop doing activities that you used to, you might start isolating yourself more. Missing deadlines at work or missing important meetings, being forgetful, missing work with more sick days. That's another sign. You'll find that you may be fighting a little bit more with people at work or at home, like with your partner with your kids. May be also more numbing tendencies, and what I mean by this, you may be like vegging out more in front of the screen, drinking or using substances more procrastinating. So it's all part of your body and your mind telling you it's too much. I'm not taking care of myself. And here are some, SureTel signs to slow down and take inventory of what's going on.

Wendy: 7:31

So I'm just curious as, and as you're talking about this, because I think it leads to that question. In your professional opinion, what you've seen has the pandemic made this worse or better for people to take care of themselves?

Dr. Gloria Lee: 7:44

Way worse, I would say, because during the pandemic there's number one, the pandemic itself, the uncertainties of it, especially at the beginning when we were anxious about it, we didn't know anything about it, and everyone was a little paranoid. You're walking down the street and someone comes to towards you and you'll cross the street just in case, right? We're wiping down all our foods. We're, isolating ourselves. We're not allowed out. whatever that was there prior to the pandemic. The pandemic exasperated and amplified. So I would say in my practice, if I saw people with anxiety, depression, burnout, or, um, other symptoms, in a given year, it would be so condensed that I would see, cases like this every week instead of every month. Let's say.

Wendy: 8:31

And do you think that now, and cuz I've, I feel like we went from the pandemic to half of the society going, let's go back to normal. Like it never ever happened to that extent of speed and go. And then the other half is I don't ever want to go back to that normal. It has caused some people to shelter and stay sheltered, and I know there's a balance in between, but I see this polarizing viewpoint to the point of and they're still not taking care of themselves in that polarizing viewpoint.

Dr. Gloria Lee: 9:01

Yeah, absolutely. And for those of us who thinks, let's go back to normal and let's do everything again, our normal has changed. It'll never be the same again, and for a long time it won't be the same. Everything has changed. There's things that we need to talk about, like even the workplace now. A lot of workplaces have a hybrid model, for example, and people got so used to working from home, they're not, wanting to go into the office anymore and. they've come to realize that we don't like the toxic environment at work, for example, and we wanna stay home more, or for some, the work-life balance and therefore all the people who are, quitting their jobs, the great resignation. And so it is affecting us, like it or not, and some who have been isolated for a long time, they're still suffer. And for those who are trying to get back to normal, it's actually not quite normal. And not only that, but there's this thing called ambiguous loss or ambiguous grief where there's so much lost during this time that we can't put a finger on it, but we all feel it collectively because it happened to all of us. Not only loss of human lives, but also loss of our freedom of a sense of safety, of knowingness, of being together. So many losses that I can talk about. Loss of homes for some people cuz they couldn't keep their jobs. They had to take care of loved ones or they lost loved ones, kids being at home instead of school. So being socially isolated and really struggling, so many losses that we actually have to look at and take account of and grieve through and process through it so that we can have some sort of, of normalcy again, instead of just brushing aside that none of this happened and we're going back to normal now.

Wendy: 10:50

And all of those things that you talked about, dealing with loss and coming back to what our new quote unquote normal is, and within that still learning what self-care looks like, as you're talking about, because you're saying like, To brush it off means that we're not paying attention to how we feel or what we think. And so, I would assume would be part of the self-care is learning how to deal with that without brushing it off.

Dr. Gloria Lee: 11:16

Absolutely. And I think Wendy going back to the self-care part during the pandemic, most of us all the women that I've worked with anyway, have overextended ourselves, taking care of everyone else and trying to take care of ourselves and still working and taking care of our kids are now, who are now home, and especially young kids where you have to do schooling with and there's no act after school activities anymore. So you gotta do that and work on top of that and everything else. And trying to take care of yourself at the same time, because we're going through it ourselves as well. But something's gotta give over time. And I find that there's almost like this delayed grief reaction or delayed, burnout almost, that now that things are back to normal, we could breathe a little, but we're not okay. And we don't notice that. So I actually have, a lot of clients these days who come, who's talking about, I just feel this kind of blah feeling. I can't shake it. I don't know what's happening. And I don't know. And when we talk about what happened during the pandemic, then they realize, oh my gosh, wow I didn't take care of myself. I forgot about myself throughout this time. And I was just go, go, go, go, go. And still feeling anxious and uncertain like everybody else, but almost ignoring that because we had to be on, we still had to keep going. And this is for females in particular that I found this is happening more with.

Wendy: 12:43

I could completely understand that. So, I'm interested too, in what you do because, and I think as a whole, mental health, anybody who's worked in mental health, medical field, like how do you take care of yourself because that, I'm sure during the pandemic, like you said, everybody's going through it at the same time, and I feel like the medical world in general, anybody who deals with mental health or medical, health and wellness really probably you still need to take care of you as you're really, that's your job is that you're taking care of others. I mean, that's literally your job.

Dr. Gloria Lee: 13:20

Yes. And so for me, self-care was a must during the pandemic in particular, I did some extra work taking care of first responders. So, doctors, nurses, people on the frontline, paramedics, whoever, and they were burning out, they were not okay. They had to hold it in and suck it up and still go to work. And they were scared cuz they didn't know what was going on with the pandemic, especially the first few months. And they thought when they went to work they might catch covid and never see their families again. And they had no one to debrief this with yet. They had to hold a brave face and still enter into the workforce. So for me to not on top of everyone else that I was working with to care for people in the mental health field and in the health field in general. I had to take care of myself cuz I knew that in order to serve others, I had to really turn inward, daily and serve myself first. So this is what I do and I did and I still do every day. This is what I called the three A's. So I just wanted to give all the listeners this. So the three A's are this attune, attach and a attend. So attune, attach, attend. I'll go through each one with you. So attune. So tune into yourself every day. I do this three times a day. First thing in the morning, I pair it with my meal. So it makes it easy like a habit. I tune into myself and I notice what's happening in my body right now. What's happening to me? How am I feeling right now? Okay. I might have had a tired morning because I was just on the go and didn't have a chance to take inventory and rest. I could be having a lot of energy just because I've been helping a lot of people. So just really noticing what's happening. That's the tuning part. And then the next one, the attach to ask yourself, how am I actually doing? And what am I feeling right now? We often ask other people this, but we forget to ask ourselves this question, so how am I doing? What am I feeling? Am I okay? Okay. And the last question is to attend, to make sure that you're actually taking care of your own needs as well. So after asking myself, how am I doing? How am I feeling? If I'm like, just tired I gave it my all this morning and I don't have much left. What do I need to do for myself right now to fill my bucket again? And it might be as simple as go. Take a walk around the block during your lunch hour, do some stretches, deep breathing, or remind yourself that you deserve to have a break tonight or when you get home. Don't do anything. Go do something fun. So whatever it is, those are the three things I've always, done for myself. Attune, attach and attend. I teach all my clients this and it really is a simple little practice that we can do every day and it doesn't take much time.

Wendy: 16:11

Oh, I love it. And it is simple. And I like that you do it at mealtimes too, because it slows down you eating. So, can we talk us a second about giving yourself permission to actually do that? Because I think that's part of it, I love that what you're saying to do, but I think sometimes we get stuck on giving ourself permission to be able to do it. Yes. And I

Dr. Gloria Lee: 16:34

think before we even do those three a's it's really about changing our mindset. Our mindset that I allow myself permission to do this, that I can have fun, I can relax, and I could do these things and not feel bad about it because remember to take care of myself, my relationship with myself, that's good business because I'm taking care of my most important asset of my company, which is me. And so I must do this for my clients, for all the people that I serve. For all the people who depend on me. If I'm not good, I'm not good for anyone else. So this is really about changing our mindset, permission giving. I even have people put on post-it notes, what I'm giving myself permission for today, so it could be I give myself permission to be tired. I give myself permission to slow down a bit Today, I give myself permission to have my favorite cup of coffee and just do nothing for 15 minutes. But by having those physical reminders, those visual reminders to tell us that, oh, I forgot to do this, and I could do that right now, that's the permission giving and that is absolutely essential before we even go through the three A's.

Wendy: 17:47

I like that you said to even put physical reminders, and I had Theresa Maples on the show who created focus cards essentially they're for self-care They are not attached to a phone or an app. The way that she does it, and I think that's what you're saying is like sometimes it's okay to shut off. It's okay to physically do nothing. And I think for women, we find that hard and we go, when the baby's asleep between phone calls, this is the only time I have to do it. And we just keep running. So for you, for those who are in a space where, that's great, but how do I do that in my day if you've seen my day? And there's that idea of I don't really love the idea of time management. It's not something as far as like managing time. But I think that is the mindset itself is we don't have enough time to do it? Is that a mindset issue or do you think that it's a time issue? When I don't take care of myself, it's because I'm not making the time, but that's me.

Dr. Gloria Lee: 18:41

And most of us will use that I'm just gonna say it. I think most of us use that as an excuse. Because we make time for what's important to us. If we have time to surf the net, we have time to take care of ourselves. And what I suggested only takes a few minutes, maybe even seconds, 30 seconds. If you wanna do a quick version of it. And so it's really changing your mindset, permission giving that it's okay for me to do this. I see it like you are treating this person yourself as if you are talking to your best friend or to your child that you have enough time to check in with them and say to them, how's your day? How are you doing? Are you okay? You don't look Okay. What can I do for you? We will do that in a heartbeat. It doesn't take, that took me what, five seconds to say all that? It doesn't take much time. That's what we're doing with ourselves. Just checking in for 30 seconds and that's it. And if you're busy juggling five different things at the same time, you could actually do that in your mind. No one know that. You'll be talking to yourself. You could be doing this in the middle of the meeting right now, even as we're talking and to check in. How am I doing? And if it's, you know what? I'm really tired, but I'm gonna hang in there for this meeting. Take a deep breath. Okay. I'll be okay. I'll be okay. You see, I just attended to my needs right now and that took all of 30 seconds. That's it. So it's really about changing our mindset and permission giving that this is okay. But I also wanna, give us maybe one practical solution as well, because for a lot of women who are entrepreneurs, we juggle many different roles and we have different hats on. So one thing I would say is, To create definitive boundaries. Definitive boundaries between work and home. Having dedicated workspace that after I leave, let's say my home office here, may it be the kitchen table or the countertop or a room. I leave it for the day and that's it. I will take inventory of my symptoms for today. Do how many of those signs that I said, what am I feeling today? Am I okay? But also look at the ratio of my work hours versus doing things that are actually fun per day and per week? Do I have a schedule for my work that I stick to and I don't make exceptions for? but I do. I also schedule in activities each. So if I can do that and have the mind space to allow myself permission that I will work here and I will not feel guilty for neglecting my family or anything else. But when I do play with my friends or with my family, I will also allow my self permission to be present for that and not feel guilty during that time that, oh, I have all this other stuff to take care of it still. So to really be present and mindful.

Wendy: 21:39

I'm laughing, in my head as you're talking because I think it was, I've been in the process of learning self-care for a long time and I'm cracking up in my head because I think it was two years ago and I've been in business for myself for over 10 now. That I finally went in my calendar at the beginning of the year and wrote all the days off that I wanted because every time a thing would come up, I'd be like, I'm working on this holiday, because I would forget and somebody would schedule something and I'd be like, oh, they scheduled it. And it was because I didn't put the time in my calendar to be like, no, I don't wanna work those days. You work for yourself, You can choose your schedule. So I think it's really important that. Say that because I think we forget and we start to allow sometimes our clients to determine when we work as opposed to us determining when we work.

Dr. Gloria Lee: 22:26

Oh, absolutely. And if we allow our clients to start dictating when we work, they will expect us to reply to emails on Saturday evenings, right? Because that's what we're doing, right? And so we're shooting ourselves in the foot. And I think for entrepreneurs in particular, because we make up our own hours, we really need those boundaries. Mental boundaries, but also physical. And I can't stress that enough because when I work with entrepreneurs, that's the number one thing. I would ask them, what does your workday look like? What does your week look like? And they will say I work whenever and so when you actually create boundaries, You actually get more done, by the way, and research backs this up, that you get a lot more done because you know I gotta be done by five o'clock. Okay? I gotta really work at this. Whereas if I know that, oh, I'm gonna be home all day and I'm gonna work till midnight, then we tend to actually slow down and not get as productive. So I would say definitely do that. And I like how you talked about your calendar, because what I do. I will go through, I actually do it during the school year, from September, to June. and then actually in the summer is a little bit different, but I will go into the school year, block off all the days. I know my kids are outta school and I won't work those days. I will also block off holidays and vacation days. So that's done and then I block off. Now, not everybody has a luxury to do this. I learned this from one of my mentor colleagues. She blocks off one week per month just to be with herself and for self-care. And I thought, oh, this is so lovely that you're able to do that. So I've done that as well. And yes, I've cheated a little and done a little bit of work, but for the most part, I have the flexibility of just doing nothing because I've taken that time off and I scheduled it in. So I'm big believer of scheduling things in first and what is scheduled in usually gets done, including fun.

Wendy: 24:30

I have a group of listeners who just heard that and went one week off in my business, and they cannot even. I have done that, but there are people out there who are like, and I think that's, that goes right back to what you were talking about in the beginning is that giving yourself permission and knowing that it's not gonna all fall apart if that happens.

Dr. Gloria Lee: 24:50

No, and you know what? No one has the expectation of you to work like a machine except for you, by the way. And it's an unrealistic expectation. Your clients, when you go on vacation, they'll be like, okay, good for you. I'm so glad they're actually happy for you. And this is actually really great that you mentioned this, cuz I had a client who told me that when you go on vacation, I'm actually happy because I know you'll come back, refresh and you'll be better for me. And when he told me that, I'm like, wow, that was amazing that you just said that. And I had to remind myself of that we, are hardest on ourselves. We have these expectations on ourselves, and other people don't have the expectation of us. When one of our friends will go on vacation or our colleagues, we don't say, oh, how dare you. You should be working No but why do we think that about ourselves? And really challenge that double standard that we have, that why do we have one set of rules for us that we can't, can't, can't, can't, can't, and we should and ought and must but for others it's like, of course that makes so much sense and we're so much kinder to other people than ourselves.

Wendy: 25:53

Absolutely, and when I first started my business, I was like, I have to answer and because I did social media in the beginning, I say this on shows often there are no social media emergencies. If you work with a social media person, there is no social media emergencies. The negative comment your fans will take care of, but I didn't know that in the beginning, and I'd be like, oh my gosh, I have to work Saturday morning at three am And I'd get myself in a tizzy and half of my clients were either weren't even paying attention, didn't even know or they were like, yeah, I realized that I'm gonna have a negative comment. And to that point, we do this to ourselves and when we stop just saying, It's okay, then it's okay. And it's not a big deal. But yes, just so that anybody hearing, there's no social media emergencies, I promise you.

Dr. Gloria Lee: 26:40

Yes, exactly. If something goes out a day late for social media, whatever, nobody notices except for you.

Wendy: 26:46

Nobody notices except for you. And so those are those things where how I started to learn self-care was when I started to set those boundaries. But you're right about the harshest critic is ourself and I'm sure that you've seen this, is that we follow standards of what our parents have set. Because we were raised in it. Rather than what the standard is for who we are as an individual.

Dr. Gloria Lee: 27:06

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's sometimes it feels counterintuitive that if I take a break and go on vacation or take a day off here and there, my business is gonna be ruined cuz everyone depends on me. It's counterintuitive because we feel so much responsibility that we wanna be there all the time, but when we're there all the time and we don't rest our mind and our body. We actually burn out. We're not good for our business. We start, that's when those signs starts coming. We start forgetting things. We start getting irritable. We procrastinate and we don't catch our mistakes when we send out emails, things like that. So it's actually the best thing for us, and I would challenge all of us do this for a month and see what. And I've been practicing taking a week off, and I know not everybody has the luxury of doing that, but I've been doing that and, but also because I have structures in place where I will get all my social media done before going on my one week off and so on and so forth. But my business has not suffered. It has not suffered, and I just really wanna put it out there. It will be okay. You will be okay. Your business will be okay. And in fact, people will thank you for it because all of a sudden it's oh, you have this energy that I haven't seen for a while, or you feel so refreshed or, you have all these new ideas. And how did that come about? It was like, oh, when I was like, in France, looking at the Eiffel Tower, I thought of you and this is what came up.

Wendy: 28:32

I can't agree more with that and even if you can't do it for a week, learning how to do it for a day.

Dr. Gloria Lee: 28:37

For a day. If you could do it for a day, even half a day, even for an hour, whatever you can, and I know for sure you could do it at least for one day over the weekend. At least you have to. And can I just say one thing that's really important? If you don't do this over time, as you age, your body keeps the score. And eventually, if you mentally and emotionally don't do this for yourself physically, your body will say enough and it'll crap out on you. And that's when people start listening and say, okay, now it's time for me to take care of myself.

Wendy: 29:12

Exactly. And as you're talking, I remember I had an a coach that I, she's a lovely woman and she used to, A little bit different. She used to have a C E O day where she would just shut off from everybody and focus on her business, which was great. But she also had an explorer day every. Month where she would just pick a town, not know where she was going, drive there, find the coffee shop, find something bookshops to go, and she would just have an, she's like by myself, explore day. And she loved these days. And when she came back from them, she was like a whole new person every single time because she just was like, no, I'm gonna just go spend time doing what I like.

Dr. Gloria Lee: 29:52

Oh, absolutely. And, research has shown, because they've done these studies, these experiments in big companies like Google and other big companies like that, and, or they would. Have mandatory free time after lunch from, let's say one to 3:00 PM and you had to play, you couldn't work. So because they were finding before that there was a, big turnaround, people were not happy at work and conflicts and so on and so forth. So they thought, what's going on here? And when they implemented this playtime, this mandatory playtime, they found. There was less sick days taken less turnover. People had the best ideas that came up during this time because they were chatting with each other and free flowing, and they thought, my goodness, the creativity, the creative juices came out, and everyone, the morale, the camaraderie, all of that became better. So the, it's, as I said, it feels counterintuitive, but if you are already feeling all those signs that I'm talking about, there's no loss. in you just trying this for a little bit and see what happens.

Wendy: 31:04

Thank you so much this has been a great conversation. I'm sure our listeners got something out of this and yes, it was the Valentine's twist of really the most important relationship is with yourself because you're right, once we have that, then we can, we're more, we're better in relationships, we're better in our business, we're better in our family, and we're better in our community. Could you please tell everybody how to get in contact with you? I know you also have an offer and of course I'll have it all in the show notes, but if you could let people know, that would be great.

Dr. Gloria Lee: 31:34

Sure. I think you have my Facebook and Instagram handles and my website is drglorialee.com, so you could find all my information there as well. And I have a free gift for all your listeners. It's a one simple step in creating closeness and connection in your relationship.

Wendy: 31:51

Thank you so much for spending some time with us today. We appreciate it.

Dr. Gloria Lee: 31:56

You're welcome. My pleasure. Thank you.

Wendy: 31:58

And to my listeners, we will be back soon with another great show. Please subscribe, and of course leave a review if you liked what you heard. Thanks so much. Have a great week.