Rekindle: Ep 1 - Embracing the Solstice

Hello, gorgeous, and welcome to the very first episode of Wreaking More Joy. I’m Janette Dalgliesh, and I’m here to talk to women about this incredible pain, the very real, very common pain that we feel, when it feels like we have fallen out of love with our important work in the world. No matter what we think our purpose is, no matter how well we’ve expressed it in the past or how much it still might be mysterious to us, there can often come a moment where we realize that we’ve been dragging ourselves to work every day. We don’t feel a love for it anymore, we don’t have the passion, and it can come with a whole side serve of self judgment. So what I’m about with my work and the reason I use the term ‘wreaking more joy’ is bringing back the joy, not forcing ourselves to twist into a pretzel to fit some somebody else’s notion of joy, but finding our own sweet spot and rekindling the romance with our working lives. So that’s what this first season of this podcast is going to be about, rekindling that romance. We’re gonna take it one tiny step at a time. But first, I want to talk about the nature of this moment; because often it’s a really gradual slow unfolding, not a sudden flash of insight out of the blue, but it’s like a build up. It builds and builds and builds until suddenly there’s this moment where where we feel, “I’m still showing up. I’m still doing my work, I’m still being useful, I’m still doing a good job, but it just doesn’t feel the way it used to. Something’s gone.” So this podcast is about that moment and how to change it. We’ll talk about what it is, we’ll talk about what it isn’t. We’ll talk about how people arrive there, and why I think it’s so important that we leave aside any sense of self blame or criticism or shame or guilt or any of those other things which often go hand in hand with it. And because this episode is arriving at the December Solstice, which is a threshold moment in our year, I want to invite us to a quality that rarely, if ever, gets enough airtime in professional life, but more on that in a minute. So I want to acknowledge that there’s a particular flavour to this phase of life, when we notice that the spark or the passion is has drifted away. One clue is the thing you once loved now feels really heavy - it kinda weighs on your bones and feels heavy when you think about it, or parts of it feel heavy. So for example, you might have one part, which is the standing at the easel or the working with a client, that feels really light. But the rest of it, dealing with all the rest of it feels really heavy and hard and difficult. Or the calling itself that was so inspiring once upon a time now just feels like obligation. “I know I’m here to contribute, and I’m here to contribute in this way and to look after my people, but I feel like I’m going through the motions and I’m showing up because I said I would, not because I’m excited to do it”. Or the meaning and the importance of your purpose might still be there, but you’re just not enjoying it anymore; it’s more like you have to drag yourself to your desk or your podium or your easel or your surgical table like a zombie escapee from the Walking Dead. It’s no fun. And you might even be feeling some guilt or some shame around this, for two reasons. First of all, you know that there are a whole lot of people out there who would kill to have your life. There are so many people who have not had the opportunities that you’ve had, and it feels terrible to be feeling so ungrateful or so disenchanted by your own work, when you know that there are people out there who would absolutely love to have what you have, It’s completely reasonable that you feel that way, but it’s not useful. Or you might be feeling this sense of shame and guilt because you invested so much. And maybe those who support you as well, family members, colleagues, whoever it might be, have supported you so much, in getting to where you’ve got to. And it would seem awful, and seem like an ungrateful waste, to discard everything, to let go of all of that training and all of that time and energy and money that was put into it. It can make you feel very frozen and immobile, and that makes it really difficult to know what to do next. And I know, because I talk to people all the time about this. I know that doctors feel it, that artists feel it, that lawyers feel it, that entrepreneurs feel it, that politicians and poets and social workers and scientists and artists all feel it as well; that we all have these moments where we step up to our purpose, and then something seems to go wrong somewhere. It doesn’t happen to everybody, but it happens to so many of us. Thanks for reading Wreaking More Joy! This post is public so feel free to share it with someone you think might need it today. And almost always, the first reaction is to go, “oh my god, what’s wrong with me??” I’m here to tell you there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not broken. You’re not ungrateful. You’re not weak. You haven’t lost your edge. What might really be going on is there’s something inside you that is ready to evolve; something inside you that’s ready to evolve into a slightly different direction, an expansion - we don’t know what yet. And evolution begins not with an action, and it doesn’t begin with more pushing or more pressure or more stress. It begins with a pause, a moment to regroup. That’s what we’re gonna talk about today in a moment. But I wanna also reflect on something and remind you that this stage that you might find yourself in, this doesn’t arrive out of laziness or a lack of dedication. It really doesn’t. It tends to show up in most cases because of the opposite. It shows up because women get to this point after we’ve been carrying too much, after we’ve been holding things together for too long, after we’ve spent a long time being exceptionally competent all the time, operating at 120, 150% all the time, or taking responsibility so thoroughly and so consistently that there are no gaps, no opportunity for recovering or recharging or re-energizing ourselves. And we do it so thoroughly that the people around us forget to ask if we’re okay. And we can also get here because many many many workplaces and many professional cultures, including ones we might have designed inside our own businesses, were not designed for us. And I’m laughing about that one because this definitely falls into the category of #askmehowIknow. So if you run your own business, you are most likely the CEO and the worker, especially if you’re a solopreneur. And unless you’re very lucky, your business, like most workplaces, has been unconsciously designed around the assumption that the worker, which is also you, has no caregiving duties, no emotional load, no menstrual cycle, no complexity, and no actual needs. And, of course, that is ridiculous. A woman can lose her spark, lose her sense of passion and purpose in her work, not because she failed, but because she succeeded too well. She succeeded so well for so long that she forgot to bring herself along for the ride. She forgot to accommodate herself. And if you recognize yourself in that … ooof, that’s hard. I offer you a deep breath and a moment of compassion and a reminder that you are not alone in this. So before we go any further, I want to explain a little about the title of this podcast. It’s called wreaking more joy, and I chose the word wreaking very deliberately. It means to cause - to cause something to happen. And it’s usually used to indicate that it causes harm. So we might hear it in the phrase “wreaking havoc” or “wreaking vengeance on somebody”. It carries this energy of being proactive, disruptive, and potentially dangerous. And the reason I use it in this context is that women’s joy IS dangerous, politically speaking. A woman who is grounded in joy is much harder to manipulate, is much less likely to accept being treated poorly, takes her place in the world with far more confidence, remembers that she is sovereign, not decorative,… This is a public episode. 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