Welcome to another episode of the "Your Blank What Now" podcast with Marci Nettles. I am thrilled to have you join us today for an inspiring story that could help you navigate through challenging times and make pivotal decisions in your life.
Many people find themselves at a crossroads, facing difficult situations that feel like breakdowns. Hearing how others have navigated their struggles can provide a roadmap for your own journey.
Introduction
Today, I'm excited to introduce you to an exceptional guest, Tracy Inscore.
Tracy has practiced land use and environmental law in California for the past 15 years. Alongside her legal career, she works part-time at one of the fastest-growing law firms in the U.S. Tracy is also a holistic energy practitioner specializing in burnout prevention and recovery for fellow lawyers, as well as providing support for law students and recent graduates. Her unique blend of legal expertise and intuitive healing allows her to bridge these two worlds in a way that no one else can.
From Overachiever to Burnout
Tracy's story is one of transformation. She describes herself as a stereotypical overachiever, always striving for success and the outward markers that come with it. She excelled in law school and was a star associate at her firm, but these achievements were out of alignment with her true self.
Growing up in Southern California in the 80s and 90s, Tracy's parents were part of a high-control religious group. Her childhood was marked by her father's extreme temper and the church's promotion of harsh physical punishment. This environment created a sense of unpredictability and the need for hypervigilance in Tracy.
At 14, her parents divorced, and she left high school shortly after, testing out due to boredom. Tracy started working and attending junior college at 16, developing a strong sense of independence and achieving success academically. This early need for control and achievement set the stage for burnout later in life.
Striving for Control and Success
Tracy's academic success provided a way to ensure her needs were met and to gain control over her life. This positive reinforcement led to a pattern of overachieving, which later contributed to severe burnout. As a new law school graduate, Tracy found herself in a high-stress job that felt misaligned with her true self. Despite outward success, she struggled with severe depression, binge drinking, and health issues, as her body signaled that something was wrong.
Coping Mechanisms and Control
Tracy's early life experiences shaped her coping mechanisms. Control became a central theme, manifesting in various ways, including academic achievement and later in her career. Her desire for control also led to rigid self-control, over-exercising, and extreme dieting. These behaviors were part of a larger pattern of striving for control in a chaotic environment.
Early Career and Motivation
Tracy's decision to become a lawyer was influenced by her love for writing and her recognition of her strengths. The trauma she experienced as a child played a significant role in this decision. Her upbringing taught her to question everything and become a critical thinker, skills that served her well in law.
Seeing her mother struggle financially after her parents' divorce also motivated Tracy to ensure she was financially stable and independent. This drive was rooted in a fear-based vow to never rely on anyone else for financial security.
The Role of Critical Thinking
Critical thinking has been a crucial skill for Tracy, both in her legal career and in her personal life. She emphasizes the importance of combining critical thinking with intuition and heart-centered awareness. Tracy believes that true critical thinking involves being open to different perspectives and questioning societal norms.
Navigating Society's Pressures
In today's society, many people follow groupthink, afraid to stand out or be different. Tracy encourages others to embrace their individuality and think for themselves. She highlights the importance of questioning and critical thinking in understanding one's own truth and making informed decisions.
Finding Alignment in Your Life and Career
Discovering Your True Self
In our modern world, many people struggle to maintain their true identity amidst the fear of speaking their minds and their truths. This can lead to a sense of losing oneself. It's essential to pause and reflect on whether your current situation feels right to you. Ask yourself, "Does this resonate with my true self?" If the answer is no, delve deeper and question why it doesn't feel right and whether there might be another truth that aligns better with who you are.
Taking Responsibility for Your Life
We all bear the responsibility of our choices. With great freedom comes great responsibility, and it's crucial to choose your own consequences wisely. Life can be both beautiful and challenging, and each decision we make has its own set of consequences. As you navigate through life, it's important to select the challenges that align with your values and aspirations.
The Legal Career Journey
For those in high-stress professions, like law, the journey can be particularly taxing. One guest shared their experience of being an attorney for 16 years, starting their career during a recession, and taking any job available just to pay the bills. This led to working in areas they weren't passionate about, contributing to feelings of misalignment and burnout. However, they realized the importance of aligning their career with their values and purpose, even if it meant making significant changes.
Understanding Burnout
Burnout is a chronic state of mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual depletion that can't be fixed by a good night's sleep or self-care. It's a state where even after rest, the exhaustion persists. Recognized by the World Health Organization as an occupational phenomenon, burnout isn't limited to the workplace—it can affect caregivers, homeschooling parents, and more. It's often characterized by feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, disengagement, and a loss of interest.
The Roots of Burnout
Burnout often stems from living out of alignment with your true purpose and values. It's like wearing clothes that don't fit—it's uncomfortable and exhausting. Many people live lives that no longer fit who they are today, holding onto past decisions and paths that don't align with their current selves. Factors such as childhood family dynamics, past trauma, nervous system dysregulation, subconscious blocks, societal programming, and the glorification of busyness all contribute to burnout.
Steps to Realignment
To determine if you're living in alignment, start with curiosity and openness. Ask yourself tough questions about your life purpose, mission, core values, and top priorities. This self-inquiry can help you identify areas where you might be out of alignment. For a more structured approach, consider using a resource like a free e-workbook that guides you through this process, helping you to inventory your life and make necessary adjustments.
Living in alignment with your true self is essential for maintaining your mental, emotional, and physical well-being. By reflecting on your values, purpose, and priorities, and making adjustments where necessary, you can create a life that fits you perfectly. Remember, it's never too late to realign and live authentically. If you're feeling out of alignment, take the time to explore your true self and make the changes needed to live a fulfilling and balanced life.
Discovering Emotional Freedom Techniques: A Journey to Overcoming Burnout
Finding What Fulfills You
What fulfills you? What do you enjoy? What brings joy and light to your eyes? It's essential to ask yourself these questions. What makes you smile so hard that your cheeks hurt? When you find that, you’ve discovered something truly significant.
The Road to EFT: Exploring Various Healing Methods
Before discovering EFT, I found myself in a dire state. It was affecting my physical health and overall well-being. I tried everything—traditional talk therapy, which I highly recommend, breathwork, meditation, and Reiki. I also tried anti-anxiety and antidepressant medications. Healing is like peeling an onion; each layer brings you closer to the core issue. All these methods helped, but they were stepping stones leading me to EFT. Initially, I was skeptical of EFT. It sounded too good to be true, almost too easy. Healing, in my mind, required hard work, time, and energy.
Breaking Free from Preconceptions
The skepticism stemmed from our programming that anything worthwhile demands effort. While some things indeed require hard work, not everything does. Being curious and open to new methods can lead to breakthroughs. Had I continued with methods that weren’t fully helping, I’d still be stuck.
What is EFT?
EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Techniques, also known as tapping. It involves tapping on specific meridian points in a sequence while focusing on particular emotions or traumatic memories. Rooted in traditional Chinese medicine, EFT operates on the premise that negative emotions result from energy blockages within the body. We are vibrational beings, and our emotions and experiences carry specific vibrations or frequencies. Our issues are stored in our tissues, meaning the body keeps score of our experiences.
Mind-Body Disconnect and the Power of EFT
Before EFT, I had developed cognitive strategies to deal with stress and past trauma. However, there was a mind-body disconnect. Interestingly, 80% of communication between the brain and body is from the body to the brain, while only 20% is the other way around. Yet, we often focus more on that 20%. EFT bridged this gap for me. It’s a somatic technique that calms the nervous system, allowing us to exit the chronic fight-or-flight state and access the prefrontal cortex, where creative problem-solving resides.
Understanding the Meridian System
Most are familiar with meridians through acupuncture, where needles are placed along these energy pathways. There are 12 main meridians, each corresponding to different body parts, facilitating the flow of life force energy or chi. Ancient practices like acupuncture identified these meridians, aligning with modern understandings of the nervous system. EFT involves light tapping on specific points in a sequence, engaging the body, nervous system, and subconscious mind. This process sends safety signals to the body, enabling emotional processing rather than suppression.
Disrupting Negative Patterns
Tapping acts as a pattern interrupt, deactivating the emotional charge of negative memories. We often add layers of emotions and thoughts to past events, creating a complex narrative. EFT helps to strip away these layers, allowing us to evaluate past events more objectively and without the visceral emotional response.
Discovering EFT: A Personal Experience
I discovered EFT on YouTube through The Tapping Solution, a great free resource. Initially skeptical, I tried it during a stressful period. On a scale from zero to ten, my stress was at an eight. After a few tapping sequences, I felt an immense relief. The issue that had been bothering me seemed distant and insignificant. This experience led me to delve deeper into EFT, eventually becoming a practitioner to help others.
The Role of Practitioners and Self-Practice
While many resources allow for self-practice, working with a practitioner provides added benefits. Practitioners help identify specific emotions and understand the interplay between the subconscious mind and the nervous system.
How EFT Affects the Nervous System and Subconscious Mind
The nervous system is our body's command center, controlling involuntary processes like breathing and heart rate through the autonomic nervous system. This system has two parts: the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) and the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest). In a fight-or-flight state, the amygdala is overstimulated, diverting blood from the prefrontal cortex, impairing problem-solving abilities. Our bodies can’t distinguish between real life-threatening situations and modern stressors like emails, leading to chronic stress responses.
Subconscious Mind and Chronic Stress
The subconscious mind, akin to a computer running in the background, records everything and influences current behavior and choices. Around 90% of our brain activity is subconscious. Chronic stress keeps us in a fight-or-flight state, leading to prolonged adrenaline and cortisol production. This stress impacts our behavior and choices, as the subconscious mind constantly communicates with the nervous system to perceive threats.
Early Childhood and Subconscious Programming
The foundation of our subconscious activity is formed from birth to about eight years old. Experiences during this period shape our subconscious responses. It’s essential to address these root emotions and events to understand current feelings and thoughts. Taking responsibility for these early experiences helps in reprogramming our subconscious mind.
The Role of the Amygdala
The amygdala, a part of the brain, controls the stress response by perceiving and reacting to danger. It plays a crucial role in activating the fight-or-flight state, essential for survival but problematic when triggered by non-life-threatening stressors.
Messages to My Younger Self
Reflecting on my journey, I would tell my younger self that it’s okay to be creative, empathic, and have big feelings. While my experiences shaped who I am today, embracing these aspects earlier would have saved me much heartache.
Embracing Difficulties and Learning from Experiences
Life is full of challenges and difficulties, but it's how we embrace and learn from them that truly matters. It's about making the decision to grow, change, and help others along the way. This message resonates deeply with the podcast's mission: learning from each other, helping each other, and preventing others from experiencing the same hardships we went through.
Preventing Burnout: Techniques and Tips
In our conversation, Tracy shared her expertise on preventing and managing burnout, particularly using Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT). EFT is a powerful self-healing tool designed to handle everyday acute stress, helping people take care of themselves before reaching a burnout point. Tracy emphasizes that all healing is self-healing, as we all possess the power within us to heal and shape our realities.
Self-Healing with EFT
Tracy's goal is to teach EFT so people can use it independently. As a practitioner, she assists clients through complex issues, especially trauma, by asking the right questions to help them get unstuck faster than if they were working alone. Tracy practices law part-time and uses EFT daily, making her relatable to her clients' struggles.
Resilience in High-Stress Professions
Many people think that if they're struggling in their current profession, they must change careers entirely. However, Tracy believes that by identifying stressors and utilizing EFT, individuals can preserve their well-being and prevent breakdowns, even in high-stress situations. Often, clients increase their resilience and change their interactions with others, allowing them to remain in their current positions while transforming their experiences.
Inner Reflection and Change
Tracy shared a story about her husband advising their son that if one's inner feelings don't match their outward demeanor, there's work to be done. This inner reflection is crucial in preventing burnout. Tracy advises starting with honest self-reflection, whether through journaling or talking to someone trusted. From there, incorporating EFT as a daily practice can be incredibly beneficial.
The Three-Part Process
Tracy's approach with clients involves a three-part process:
Taking the Edge Off: Addressing immediate crisis needs to enable deeper work.
Clearing Underlying Issues: Identifying and addressing habits or tendencies like people-pleasing and lack of boundaries.
Designing the Desired Life: Defining how one wants their life to look and clearing any obstacles preventing that vision.
Connecting with Tracy
For those interested in learning more or working with Tracy, she can be found on her website, tapoutburnout.com, Instagram, and LinkedIn, where she's most active. Tracy offers free 30-minute burnout strategy sessions to discuss individual situations and see if there's a good fit for collaboration.
Special Offers for WhatNow Tribe Listeners
Tracy is generously offering her free ebook, "Beat Burnout by Being Your True Self," along with a discounted session price for any WhatNow Tribe listener. To access these freebies, visit marciennettles.com/freebies and connect with Tracy.
Final Words of Empowerment
Tracy's final message to the tribe is a reminder of our inherent power. Despite efforts to diminish our sense of power, we can reclaim it. Remember how truly powerful you are and use that power to heal and shape your life.
Thank you, Tracy, for sharing your story and expertise. Your insights are invaluable in helping others navigate and overcome burnout.
- Marci
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