385: Permission to Put It Down: Breaking Free from Unnecessary Labor

Transcripts are auto-generated.

Courtney Townley 0:01
I often tell my clients, it isn’t the weight of their body that’s creating their health problems, it’s the weight of their life. What the heck does that mean? Well, it means that a lot of us are carrying around a lot of unnecessary labor. We are doing a lot of work that isn’t our work to do, and it is creating a tremendous amount of stress, a tremendous amount of dis ease in our life, and that is creating a tremendous amount of health problems.

Courtney Townley 0:27
So in today’s episode, I am going to reveal why putting down what isn’t yours to carry isn’t selfish, and it just might be the most powerful health intervention available to you right now. Welcome to the grace and grit podcast made for women who want their healthiest years to be ahead of them, not behind them. Join your host Courtney Townley right now as she breaks down the fairy tale health story you have been chasing all of your life into sensible action steps and lasting change.

Courtney Townley 1:01
Hello, my friends and welcome to the Grace and Grit podcast. My name is Courtney Townley. I am the host of the show. I am so grateful that of all the podcasts you could have chosen to listen today, you’re here with me, and we are going to be talking a lot about unnecessary labor today, the invisible labor that can really wreak havoc on our health and happiness, especially at midlife. So I hope that sounds good to you, because that is the direction we are headed.

Courtney Townley 1:33
I do want to say something from the outset of the show. I’m really excited to tell you that we have decided to create some resources to help support what you’re learning on this show. We used to do this years ago, and then we kind of strayed from it, and now we’re circling back for lots of reasons, but if you enjoy what you hear on the show today, specifically about unnecessary labor, and you want to have something to help you, maybe consider how this might be affecting your own life, and just something that kind of gives you some cliff notes of what we’ve talked about here today, I would encourage you to head on over to graceandgrit.com/resources. Again, graceandgrit.com/resources, and you will get access to what we’re calling a Resource Library.

Courtney Townley 2:22
You will find the document for this show specifically all about unnecessary labor, but you’ll also find some other things that we’ve kind of put in there that we think that would would be useful to podcast listeners. And then every couple of weeks, we’ll be adding to this resource vault. So there’s no charge to you. It’s totally free, but we’re just looking for more ways to support the types of things that you are learning on this show. So I hope that sounds good to you, and I hope you’ll take advantage of it once again, graceandgrit.com/resources is where you want to go.

Courtney Townley 2:55
Okay, so we are going to dive into this conversation around unnecessary labor. And I want to share maybe a story with you from the outset here that might just help set the stage. I definitely in the early part of my life, I made a lot of decisions based on the standards and expectations that other people had for my life. And I mean, I did this up until, probably honestly, I was approaching my mid 30s and even my 40s.

Courtney Townley 3:28
And looking back, I can see, number one, how much delayed the things that I knew were right for my life, but it also brought in a tremendous amount of unnecessary stress and internal friction, because I wasn’t willing to make other people comfortable. I was trying to do everybody’s emotional labor, specifically around decisions that I knew in my heart of hearts were right for my life.

Courtney Townley 4:00
One of the examples that I think will kind of really make this clear is I was a personal trainer for 20 years. It’s how I made my bread and butter. I had a first personal training studio. That’s what I did. I was good at it. I loved it, and my clients loved, I think, working with me, but I knew about five years before I gave myself permission to transition into the work that I do now that I needed to make a shift. I didn’t know exactly what the shift was, but I had Inklings, like there were breadcrumbs showing me that I wanted to be having bigger conversations around health and wellness that I didn’t want to just be talking about diet and exercise, but I was so boxed in and attached to the expectation that other people had for my career and what it was supposed to look like that I delayed that decision for, like I said, five years. Years, which is crazy, right?

Courtney Townley 5:03
And I will tell you that once I finally had the bravery, because that’s really what it took. I just had to be brave to start moving in the direction I really felt called to move in. I made a lot of people unhappy. My parents were confused, my clients were frustrated and sad because they enjoyed working with me in that on that level, it didn’t make sense to everybody, and man, did I wrestle with that hard, because I had all these stories in my head that I’m supposed to make everybody happy and everyone’s supposed to be okay with my decisions.

Courtney Townley 5:37
But I also realized the cost of trying to manage everyone’s emotional landscape around a decision that was really right for me, so I just decided to shelve everybody’s discomfort. That’s their work, not mine. I was just going to keep pursuing the path that I felt called to go down, and lo and behold, it was one of the best decisions I have ever made in my life, for my life, for my health, and also for my career.

Courtney Townley 6:06
So I don’t know who needs to maybe hear that story today, but I’m sure there’s someone listening who has been kind of just delaying, delaying delaying making a decision that you know is right for you, but you’re so afraid of people not supporting you or not understanding or not liking that you’re not doing it, and that, my friends, is unnecessary labor. It creates so much unnecessary work in our psychology and our physiology, and that creates kind of this wear and tear effect on our health.

Courtney Townley 6:41
Unnecessary labor, just to be very clear about it, is the labor that it kind of refers to, the voluntary, habitual tasks, responsibilities and emotional work that we take on as women. And of course, this can happen for men too, but this show is for midlife women. It’s the work that we take on that does not significantly contribute to our well being or our quality of life. It’s the extra effort and energy that we spend on activities like things that could be delegated to others. Okay, so let’s think about that one for a second.

Courtney Townley 7:20
So that would be like doing all the household chores despite living with other people who are perfectly capable of chipping in and they could share the responsibility, right? Not asking or requiring people to do that level of work is unnecessary labor for you, or taking on every school volunteer opportunity because no one else is going to do it right, right? Or there’s no one else available. There’s lots of ways we rationalize taking on that kind of work, even though your life is scheduled to the hilt. You don’t have a lot of resources on board. You know you shouldn’t be making another commitment, and yet you do, or maybe it’s being the only one in the family who schedules appointments, remembers birthdays or plans gatherings, that too can become unnecessary labor if it’s not bringing you joy, if it isn’t something that you are going to feel so good about that there’s No regrets and there’s no resentment, it’s unnecessary labor. Again, we can ask people to help us with those endeavors.

Courtney Townley 8:28
Unnecessary labor also looks like continuing to do things that don’t align with your current standards or priorities for your life. So maybe at midlife, you’re finding yourself maintaining a social calendar when you would like a really high level social calendar, when you would much rather have more quiet time and white space in your life, because that’s just who you’ve always been. You’ve always been the socializer. You’ve always been the social butterfly. Well, my friend, identities change, right?

Courtney Townley 8:59
So you have the choice to change your identity around that if it’s not, if it’s not bringing you health and happiness, or maybe you continue to attend events or gatherings that just no longer bring you joy. Maybe you’re someone who used to always go to concerts or the theater, or you would always fly across country to go to conferences for business, but now you’re in a season of life where that just feels like it’s draining you more than it’s restoring you.

Courtney Townley 9:28
Or maybe you participate in activities simply because you’ve always done them right. You’ve always played tennis on Saturdays. You’ve always, I don’t know, gone to some event, some extravagant event every year like this can look like a lot of different things, but again, if you’re feeling like there’s friction, you’re creating a lot of unnecessary labor around that thing, and maybe for a while. For now, I love that phrase. For now, you just give yourself permission to step away, step back, and see what comes of that. Yeah.

Courtney Townley 10:00
Unnecessary labor also looks like sort of the feeling that comes from internalized pressure from unrealistic standards, right, or standards that just were never yours to begin with, and that’s kind of the story that I shared at the beginning of this, but spending hours on your appearance to meet beauty standards that feel increasingly impossible and also being so frustrated because you don’t have time for the things that you really want to be doing that’s unnecessary labor, obsessively cleaning before people come to your home.

Courtney Townley 10:30
Man, this is a hard one for me.

Courtney Townley 10:32
My mom, I always joke that her house is like a museum, and it’s funny, but it’s also frustrating. I love my mom’s house, but I feel like she set a standard that when I have people coming to stay with me, I feel like I have to completely renovate my home and do all of this unnecessary work that, quite frankly, no one’s really going to give a rip about. And I know there’s people listening to this show who are stuck in that as well. You do a lot of prep work that doesn’t like other people aren’t really going to recognize, and it’s not necessary, and it’s exhausting you, and it’s depleting you, and it’s causing you to not have time for the other things that you care about in your life, or maybe there’s relationships in your life that consistently drain you, and yet you’re telling yourself, well, if I was a good person, I would just keep spending time with this. I would keep working on this right that eventually can become unnecessary labor.

Courtney Townley 11:29
These are all things for you to decide, but I’m giving you a lot of examples, because we all have a lot of unnecessary labor that we are applying effort to in our life, and if we can reclaim some of those resources. From those efforts, our health and happiness improved dramatically. Maybe unnecessary labor for you looks like creating additional stress without proportional benefit. So maybe that’s something like constantly monitoring your adult children’s lives and offering unsolicited advice, right? Creates a tremendous amount of stress for you and for them and for the relationship, or maybe you’re trying to manage everyone’s emotions in family conflicts. I see so many women doing this, trying to create peace in the family, or at events, or where there’s just everyone has different opinions. That’s a lot of emotion. That’s a lot of unnecessary labor.

Courtney Townley 12:26
One other example I want to give you of unnecessary labor is maintaining systems that no longer serve their original purpose. So I see this show up a lot around the holidays. Women are trying to maintain traditions that are exhausting, that they actually do have a lot of resentment about, and yet, because they’ve always done it, they just keep doing it. Doesn’t need to happen. You get to change how you roll through the holidays at any time. Or maybe you’re the one who always organizes the holidays and the events and the vacations and the gatherings, right? Or maybe you’re someone who keeps so many things in your home because just in case or you might need them someday, that you spend all of your time and energy, all of your free time and energy, literally taking care of your stuff. That sucks. That’s a lot of unnecessary labor.

Courtney Townley 13:21
So what’s the health impact of unnecessary labor? Well, it’s a lot of things, right? Unnecessary labor, basically is utilizing resources. And I don’t know a lot of midlife women who have a lot of extra resources to be spending. Most of us are trying to figure out how to regain resources, and one of the ways that we can regain resources is by letting go of unnecessary labor. So when we have a high stress load, we have a lot of cortisol running rampant through our system that promotes inflammation, which, by the way, also losing estrogen and progesterone at midlife, also promotes inflammation. Chronic inflammation leads to disease, so removing unnecessary labor from our life is a way of unpacking unnecessary stress and radically improving our health.

Courtney Townley 14:17
What are some signs that we’re carrying unnecessary stress? Let’s talk about that or not unnecessary stress, but unnecessary labor. Well, you might have thought patterns, like, I’m the only one who can do this, right? It’s just easier if I do it myself. Saying no means that I’m letting other people down. If I don’t do this, no one else will. Everyone expects me to do this. Everyone expects me to handle this. I don’t deserve rest until I get all this stuff done right. Like, what’s your narrative that’s keeping you locked in and committed to this unnecessary labor, the quality of your thinking? Learning is definitely a big indicator around whether you’re going to put it down or keep carrying it. So first steps in putting it down, first steps in putting down unnecessary labor are number one. You have got to honor your actual resource availability, right?

Courtney Townley 15:20
So you are not an infinite resource, just as you wouldn’t expect your phone to work without charging it. You cannot sustain function while you’re depleted. This doesn’t work that way. So recognizing that your energy, your mental bandwidth, your time, are precious limited resources, that helps to validate the need to protect and preserve those resources. So you have permission to save some of those resources for yourself. In fact, please do, but you will never save those resources for yourself any degree of them, if you are always drowning in unnecessary labor, I would also say another step to putting down what isn’t yours to carry is getting honest about what is yours and what isn’t so recognizing that taking on other people’s responsibilities is actually not serving you, but it’s also not serving them right? You’re not giving them the opportunity to rise up and take ownership of what is their responsibility.

Courtney Townley 16:31
When you’re constantly solving problems for others, you deny them the opportunity to develop their own capabilities and their own resilience. Your role, ladies, is not to manage everyone else’s life. It’s to live your own fully present. And man, we cannot be fully present when we are exhausted, depleted and burnt out. So what are you trying to carry right now that really isn’t yours. We do this a lot with our kids. I think we do this a lot with our maybe our parents or friends, where we just don’t want to see them uncomfortable or struggle in any way, and so we just burn ourselves out in an effort to try to make them happy and at peace and have all their problems go away, and we all know that that’s just baked in part of life, so we can be there to support them, cheer them on, be a shoulder to cry on, but doing their work is not helping you, and it’s definitely not helping them, not in the long run.

Courtney Townley 17:39
And then, of course, I would say a third part to this putting down unnecessary labor is learning how to maintain and set boundaries. And we’ve done a lot of podcasts on this show about boundaries. So you can just literally go to the podcast page on graceandgrit.com/podcast enter the word boundaries into the search engine if this is an area you struggle with, and you’ll find lots of episodes there to kind of talk you through that. But boundaries are really an act of devotion, not just to yourself, not just to your own self care, but to the relationships that you are in. I just taught a master class inside the rumble and rise community about boundaries, and we talked, I’m sorry, about relationships, and we talked a lot about boundaries, because boundaries help us to deepen relationships.

Courtney Townley 18:26
When you establish clear boundaries, you’re not pushing people away, not intentionally, right? What you’re actually doing is you’re creating the conditions for more authentic and sustainable connections. That’s what boundaries do. So by honoring your own limits and your own needs and communicating that you are modeling self respect to teach others how you want to be in relationship with them, that is a beautiful thing.

Courtney Townley 18:57
Boundaries allow you to show up more fully and genuinely in all of your connections, including the relationship that you have with yourself, because again, if you aren’t setting boundaries with other people and other responsibilities, you’re never going to have time to forge a healthy relationship with yourself. So the big takeaway here that I want you to hear from this episode is releasing unnecessary labor, deciding to put down what is not yours to carry is not selfish. It is essential for your health and well being. And every time you put down a task that isn’t necessary or isn’t yours, you’re making space for more vitality and joy and presence in your life and man does that have outward, reaching ripple effects?

Courtney Townley 19:49
So when you are more joyful, when you have more vitality, when you are more present in your life, the world benefits from that. The world. World does not benefit from you being exhausted and depleted.

Courtney Townley 20:03
So I don’t know who needed to hear that. I know this was a quick little episode. Today I’m going to try to do quicker episodes every other week so we can get back to every week of an episode, which I know it’s been a while since we’ve done that, but I hope it was enough to just get the wheels turning in terms of asking yourself the question, What am I carrying right now that isn’t mine, and what might I regain by putting that down again? I have a great resource for you on this. So head on over to graceandgrit.com/resources and just check out. Once you log into that resource library, you’re going to find a document that is basically the title of this podcast. It says Permission to Put It Down: Breaking Free from Unnecessary Labor, just so you have some reminders and pointers, because we all forget this stuff. We hear it once, and then we just go back to the way we’ve always done things. So sometimes it’s helpful to have a little something on hand so you can reference it. All right, my friends, I hope you have a wonderful day. I will talk to you soon. Take care.

Courtney Townley 21:12
Thank you for listening to the Grace and Grit podcast. It is time to mend the fabric of the female health story, and it starts with you taking radical responsibility for your own self care. You are worth the effort, and with a little grace and grit, anything is possible.