Landy Peek (00:00)
Welcome to the Landy Peak podcast. I'm your host and friend, Landy Peak, and I am thrilled to have you join me. In each episode, we will explore what makes life truly fulfilling, happiness, deep connections, and self-discovery. Together we'll uncover that happiness is not a destination, but a way of living. Now let's dive into today's episode.
Landy Peek (00:31)
Hey there and welcome back to the Landy Peak Podcast. This is your host and friend, Landy Peak. And today we're diving into a question that so many women, especially in midlife, have you ever asked yourself, why don't I have time for myself?
Why don't I have time to do the things I wanna do? Why don't I have time to just sit and do nothing?
Where did the adventures go? The deep connections that I had in my 20s or younger. The happiness. We used to dream about the things that we do, the places we go, the friendships we nurture, the relationships we'd be in.
but somewhere along the way.
We got lost in the chaos between responsibilities, caregiving, and the mental load we carry daily. For many of us, it feels like there's no space left for us. So today, we're talking about why that happens, and more importantly, how we take our time, our joy, and our sense of self back.
because we are not just here to survive. I want to repeat that for you. You, my lovely dear, are not on earth to survive. You are here to live. You are here to experience life, not just go through it. So if you feel like you're going through the motions, but not actually living life, today's episode is a
just for you. So let's get into it.
it seems obvious, it may not be so obvious to everybody in our lives. We carry a huge mental load that for many of us is crippling. We have the invisible to-do lists in our heads that never stop. Grocery shopping, kids appointments, work deadlines, remembering birthdays, making sure everyone else is taken care of.
Endless.
And guess what? When our brains are overloaded, the first thing to go is us. Because it's easy.
Our needs go, our rest goes, our joy goes, because we're not disappointing anyone else except for ourselves when we put ourselves on the back burner. When we just say, I'll get to that or I'll come last. It's okay. I mean, how many times have you been praised for taking care of someone else?
We were taught that our worth is in our productivity, in our service, and our ability to handle it all. No one ever sat us down, at least no one ever sat me down, and said, hey, your needs matter just as much as everyone else's.
I got rewarded for making things go smooth, for making it easy, for thinking ahead, for anticipating needs before they were even expressed. Got a lot of good accolades in that, it worked.
So we get stuck in the pattern of over-giving. And then we feel guilty if we even try to think about doing something for us.
Somewhere along the line, we've stopped prioritizing deep connections. And I think it's more than just stopping prioritizing.
I think a lot of our deep connections, if we look at how friendships are created, friendships are, especially in our youth, are created by proximity.
I've seen this a lot with my kiddos, especially in the younger grades, where the friendships shift depending on what they're doing. Who's in their class? Who's in the after school activities? The proximity of being in the same place doing the same thing creates those friendships. And if you think about our entire childhood, our friendships were really because we're going through the same experience.
And even if you look at adults, our friendships come from the same experiences, right? We're friends with people at work, because we're in proximity to those people at work. We're doing the same things. Our friendships as parents are with the people that have kids the same ages, because they're going through the same things. Friendships and deep connections were easy when we were younger, because as a collective,
We were going through the same experiences for years. So if you think about the friends that you had in elementary school that you may have kept all the way through high school, things got disrupted in college, but then you also made amazing friends in college because again, you're living with them, you're going to the same classes with them, right? You have this proximity, you have the same life experience.
That's when friendships felt effortless. We also had less of a mental load and responsibilities when you're younger. You could sit for hours talking about everything and nothing.
And now you're trying to figure out how to fit a friendship in a schedule.
You're trying to fit a friendship.
around everything else in life.
And it takes prioritizing to really fit in those friendships. We're at a stage of life where friendships often fall to the bottom of the priority list.
Work, family, exhaustion comes first.
Between work, family, and exhaustion, making time for meaningful connection feels impossible at times. Just trying to schedule phone calls with my best friend who does not live near me gets to be tricky, as we're both looking at work schedules and kids' schedules, and I don't want to do it when my kids are around because then I'm constantly going to be interrupted. I want to just have that free-flowing conversation.
hard to fit it in. And then you look at how many of our interactions are because we're in that proximity and for looking at the amount of hours that we spend together in class or if you happen to be in a workspace where you get to spend time, not just like passing each other in the hall, but spend time with each other, you can build deeper relationships more quickly. But if we're trying to
create new deep friendships on shallow events or times where we see people infrequently, it gets hard.
We know that deep connections are not just a nice to have. They're essential to our health and to our wellbeing and the longevity of our life. We are wired for connection.
And when we lose it, we lose part of ourselves. We show up differently with friends in a relaxed environment than we do as parents, than we even do as partners, and especially than we do as business people.
You and I are not meant to do this life alone. It's one of the reasons that I started this podcast so that we could have conversations, that we could share and say, you're not the only one.
We have been living life on autopilot. And I totally understand why. It's freaking overwhelming to have a career and have little kids. And mine are little. And so I'm just getting to the spot in the place where I have more freedom. But I still cannot like leave them on their own.
I mean, just this last weekend, my husband and I wanted to run some errands. And, you know, of course it's like, can't leave the kids alone, so we have to take them with us. And it is such a process. It's just the extra thought process of telling somebody to get their shoes on and can you remember your coat? And, you know, do we have a snack and a water and...
I don't want to go right now. I want to just walk out the door. I'm not to the stage yet where my husband and I can just walk out the door and leave the kids. I'm looking forward to it, but I'm not there.
It's way too easy to live on autopilot. It's way too easy to just survive life. It's way too easy to just go through life checking off boxes. I did that and it didn't make me happy. And honestly, when I look at that time in my life, that's not the time that I'm like, my gosh, that was so much fun. Do you remember when? mean, yeah, there's like the, look at the cute baby.
And that was a great experience, and I love being a mom.
But that time in my life isn't where I look back on. I look back on when I went on a therapy mission to Moldova and spent time working with people in a completely different culture who did not speak the same language. So there's so much richness there. I look back on the time that I backpacked Europe.
I look back on the experiences. And it's not to say that motherhood is not a good experience. Because it is. Because there are aspects of motherhood that I look back on. But my experience as a mom now is completely different than it was a few years ago when I was trudging through life. When I was just trying to survive. Now I'm looking for experiences. Now I'm creating.
experiences. Now I'm focused more on the experience and the connection than the how.
That changes everything for both me and my family. Have you ever looked up and thought, how did I get here? Like life is just one long checklist of responsibilities.
There was no room for excitement or adventures. It was survival.
We get stuck in our routines, going to work, home, repeat, maybe stopping at the grocery store. The things that used to make us feel alive, like travel, creativity, hobbies, fun, they get hard and feel heavy. We try really hard as a family to get out and do an adventure every weekend. But I gotta tell ya,
Sometimes leaving for the adventure is so frustrating and hard with kids literally wonder if it's worth it. And it is. Once we're on the road, once we're going out, once we've had the adventures, it is worth it. It's 100 % worth it. But my husband and I have to remind ourselves that it is worth it. When you have the kid, I don't wanna go anywhere today. I don't wanna get in the car. It is worth it.
It is worth it to make sure that we pack everything. It is worth it to take that extra energy. But it's too easy to say it's too much and not do it.
We tell ourselves we're going to do whatever it is someday.
But someday keeps getting further away. I'm gonna travel someday. I'm gonna go back and do my hobbies someday.
Someday just never comes because there's always something that's gonna block your way. There's always an excuse. There's always a life event that comes up. And then you're on autopilot doing the same thing day in and day out. And before we know it, we've forgotten what adventure even feels like.
how do we take our time and our happiness back?
I played with this a lot because as I've shared before, hit burnout. I perimenopause is definitely in there. Burnout was definitely in there, but really looked at, I checked off everything on my to-do list and I wasn't happy with my life because my someday wasn't there because here's the sneaky thing. I kept making new, bigger
goals.
When my business does this, then I will. But then when my business did that, I'm like, yeah, but I can push a little more. I can get a little more money. We can go on a bigger and better vacation if I had a little bit more money. My Sunday got pushed off.
So really what I did to take my time and my happiness back was to hit pause. But that's not feasible for everyone. And it was literally worst case scenario for me. And yes, I have grown and thrived and my family has thrived in this time where I've not been pushing myself hard to work. And it's not that I don't work.
Cause I do still have clients and I do have contracts with businesses so that I do support their clients. That's easy.
But the creative space that I really want to grow, needed time. I needed rest to allow myself to be creative.
I think the number one thing is to stop waiting for permission.
No one is coming to tell you that it's time to take care of yourself. I'll take that back. I'm here to tell you, it's time to take care of yourself.
But no one is actually gonna magically clear your schedule. I mean, send it to me and I'll hit delete. But honestly, no one is gonna show up at your door and say, here we go, let's go have fun. We all need those people. We had those people in our 20s because it was easy. Because they lived in the same dorm so they could show up and say, let's go.
Right now, it's you. You get to be the person to decide that you matter. You get to be the person that gets to say, let's go have an adventure. And it does take effort and energy, but it's worth it. You have to give yourself permission to prioritize your happiness because no one else will do it for you. They will keep taking, you will keep giving.
You will be sad and upset and drained and burned out. No one is going to come rescue you.
And I think that's the biggest takeaway is that it's one of those things you gotta do for yourself. And it's going against mainstream. It's saying, I'm gonna do things differently. It's saying, I'm gonna disappoint people and that's okay. Let them be disappointed.
It's stopping making excuses that really aren't excuses.
The next thing that you can do right now is shift the way you value your time. We respect the time we get paid for. Ooh, this is so big for me.
I see my value in how much I work and in how much I make. This has been one thing I've really had to work to shift.
The time that we spend working, the time that dedicate to others is highly valued in our society.
But what if? Just go with me here. What if we valued our personal time just as much? I think I'm kind of shifting to the opposite extreme right now where I value my personal time way more than I value my business time
I love the way I've created life right now.
And I value the time I have to just be, to experience, go on adventures. And it's harder for me to say, I'm going to go back and do a job while I work. The work that I do is fun. And I don't look at it as a value money-making thing.
I look at it as ways to connect to people. When I'm coaching other humans, it's this creating a connection. It's, yes, I'm supporting and giving, but it's in a way that is so fun. And I love seeing the transformations in people's lives.
I think that's where we need to be. Where things feel fun and easy.
where we don't dread doing work, but just like our hobbies, we enjoy it and we're balanced with it.
So what if we valued our personal time just as much as our professional time? What would that feel like for you? What could that even look like? What if we scheduled joy the way we schedule meetings?
scheduling in adventures, making sure we prioritize that time. What if we stopped seeing me time as a luxury and instead started seeing it as a non-negotiable? Because it is. You deserve time for yourself. As my kids say dot, as I say period. End of sentence.
I love my first grader. He's so funny. punctuation is just coming in with his emerging writing skills. And so when he came home, you know, he had that very definitive statements and tells me it and then goes dot instead of period. I love it. Now everybody in my household has picked it up. Dot.
You deserve time for yourself. Dot.
You do. And this is really where your creativity comes in. This is where your mental space comes in. This is how you combat burnout because it's big in the helping fields.
It's big in motherhood. It's big with caregivers.
You prioritizing yourself is essential to living life, not just surviving it.
And I think that's the biggest thing. I'm giving up on the thriving because that is so abstract, but I know what living is. I can see myself living life. I can see myself on adventures. What does thriving actually mean? I don't know. Different for every person, but living versus surviving. I feel that at a deeper level.
We need to reconnect more deeply because we had that when we were younger. It was easy because of proximity and now it's a lot more work. I hate having to look at a schedule to figure out when I'm going to call my best friend. I hate that I have to text with friends just to see when it works. Not,
And there's the difference, right? In the text that you get, hey, you wanna go grab coffee right now? And the text of, hey, I'd love to be able to connect and have a call with you. Does Thursday at three o'clock work for you? That's not fun. I miss the time to just call or text sporadically to do something.
That spontaneity is key for friendships. The proximity of doing something with someone a lot of hours of the week is key to friendships. It's why it was so easy when we're young and it's so hard right now. The other thing is, even at work, if we're surrounded by really awesome people, we might not be in the same life situations.
I have felt that strain on friendships, really good friendships, as maybe they have older kids or younger kids than I do, and it just gets hard, or no kids.
It's harder to connect. It's harder to find those times.
So if we focus on that reconnection, what if you made a plan? Call a friend, say yes to the next invite. this is freeing and fun. So I've done this a couple of times in my life where I set a certain time period and I'm saying yes to all of the invites. I typically do this when I'm new somewhere and we've moved a lot. So for the next six months, I'm saying yes to
all of the invites within reason, right? I mean, if I have something else going on, but it was, it's pushing yourself. When I want to say no to start saying yes, will all of those yeses develop into friendships? No. And that's okay. But you'll start to find the people that you connect with because it's a hell of a lot easier to say no. It feels easier to say no. I'm exhausted on the couch. Ugh.
So create yeses that feel okay. A lot of those with kids became, let's go to someone's house or somewhere that the kids can run and we can sit without a lot of energy.
We are not meant to live in isolation. Yet, so many of us feel lonelier than we ever have.
We need people who see us, who remind us of who we are.
And you get to be that person to create that. Be the first one. This has been my motto. Be the first one. I'm the first one to say hello. I'm the first one to get their name. I'm the first one to reach out. But it builds your village. Say yes and be the first one. Invite people out, even if it's hard. One of our favorite invites,
There's a place on the river that we live near and it's fairly shallow. Great place for kids to play. And we did a lot of invites where it's bring a picnic, bring your camp chairs, have the kids and swim stuff and they're gonna go play in the water. We're gonna sit and chat on the edge. Beautiful. It's so easy and so fun.
And I don't have to stress and struggle and my kids can be loud and crazy and I don't have to worry about anything. So find things that are easy to invite people to.
Build your own village. Make space for real conversations, not just small talk. It's too easy to be in a hurry and just kind of push past and, you know, do the small talk that's just the chit chat.
Even if you have to schedule it, which I hate, but I do, schedule those longer conversations. Block out an hour to talk to your friends. Even if it feels hard.
One of the biggest things I think that helped me the most in really bringing back who I wanted to be and the fun and the joy in my life was bringing back adventure. And they can be small or big. Adventure doesn't have to mean quitting your job and traveling the world unless you want to do it.
I think of Melissa, who was a podcast guest, who did travel the US in a van with her family. Incredible stories.
But that doesn't have to be what you do. It can be as simple as changing up your routine. Maybe taking a new route home, trying a dance class. I did this. I just started ballet this year again after who knows how many years. Going on a spontaneous trip. It can be an overnight weekend trip or just a day. Saying yes to something that excites you.
The key is to do things that make you feel alive, feel like you're actually living, not just surviving.
If life has been feeling dull, it's because you've been stuck in the same patterns. You've been on autopilot. And we need to break those patterns. We need to get you off of autopilot. We need to allow your system to feel things in a different way.
And you have to release the guilt.
Taking care of you, going on adventures, taking time to really deepen those connections, that's not selfish. It's essential. We've all heard the saying, you cannot pour from an empty cup or put your face mask on first, but you really can't keep running on empty and expecting to feel fulfilled. I was just talking to a friend about this, where her kiddos have felt
so much stress from her in the last couple of years because she's been drained and running on empty.
And she's going back to work. And she's so excited. This is the most excited I have heard her in a long time. And yeah, there's guilt about going back to work and having little kids, but having a happy mom is way more important and way more fulfilling for her kiddos than having a sad mom that's home all the time.
We need to be fulfilling ourselves so that we have the energy and excitement and love and passion that we can share with our kids. It's good for our kids, especially our daughters, to see us take this time. I don't want my daughter to grow up as a people-pleasing person who puts her needs last. I want her to put herself first.
It's a game changer.
I got really frustrated as I was building my business and looking at all these successful people. And what was their life like? Why were they successful? And all of these people that I was looking at and saying, I want a business like them, none of them had kids.
None of them had to share that energy. I created a business after I had kids. I never had the opportunity to create a business when it was just me and my energy and I could do whatever I needed to without worrying about somebody else, without having deadlines around. I have to put kids to bed or pick them up from school.
I saw and was so jealous and said to myself, my gosh, my business could be this, that or the other if that's why they're so successful. They could do things, but it's not being selfish. It's being able to prioritize your needs. It's being able to prioritize what you need.
to live life.
Because if you've been putting yourself last, it's time to rewrite the story. I don't want my kids to have my story. I don't want them to be one of the people that is such a great helper.
but is drowning inside.
I want them to live life. I don't want them to be selfish, but there's a lovely balance there where they get to really hold boundaries around themselves and have energy to give and being extremely kind, compassionate human beings. Your happiness matters just as much as anyone else. Your dreams matter just as much as anyone else. And I think
As women and moms, we're really good at putting other people's or our partner's dreams ahead of ourselves.
It's okay, I'm gonna put things on pause.
But you don't have to. You matter. Your dreams matter. What you want matters. And it's rewriting the script so that you can really honor that.
So here's my challenge for you. What's one thing, one small, simple thing that you can prioritize yourself this week? One thing that is just for you.
Maybe it's coffee with a friend. Maybe it's blocking off an hour for something that you love. I gotta tell you, I am such a happier person after I go to my dance class and after I go ride my horses. It's a big difference. Maybe it's planning a trip or finally signing up for that class that you've been thinking about. Even if it doesn't necessarily work for everyone else's schedules.
You can make it work. It's okay. Whatever it is, I'm gonna invite you to do it. Don't wait. Don't push it off. Your life is happening right now. And we forget that. Day in and day out, it's the same. And we forget that we're here on this earth to experience a life.
And we're not experiencing life by losing ourself on social media. We're not experiencing life by trudging through the day, feeling down and overwhelmed and exhausted. It's time for you to reclaim your life. It's time to live your life because it's happening. It's happening right now. And you can look for the connections. You can look for the adventure.
or you can let it pass you by.
I don't remember where I heard the analogy, but life is like where you're floating down a river. I've used the river analogy a lot in my practice because there's so much you can do with it. But if you imagine that you're floating down that river, you can be so focused instead of just relaxing and floating down. You can be focused on trying to paddle upstream because honestly,
Doesn't it feel better if you're working really hard? You're gonna be paddling upstream and really struggling, but it's gonna be worth it because we are told that upstream is where all our happiness is, because that's a destination. That's if we do this, then we can have. So we are paddling and struggling and going upstream.
our adventure, our fun, our joy. They're on the banks of the river. They're all downstream. We're passing them by. but we are working so hard to paddle upstream. We're not looking at the banks. We're not looking, oh, that's that thing that I've been wishing and hoping and praying for. It's downstream, just waiting for me. But I don't see it, because I'm too busy stuck in the struggle.
But what if, what if we just flipped and instead of struggling upstream, we are allowed ourselves to float downstream? It doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel good. It feels like we're lazy. We're wasting time. But here's the really cool thing. When you just allow yourself to float,
you can start looking at the banks of the river. You can start to see that there are those things. Things start connecting easier. Life becomes easier. Life becomes more fun. The different things that feel so serendipitous, connect in because you can see them, because you're floating downstream.
So I'm going to really invite you to play around with the idea. Are you paddling upstream just to paddle upstream?
Can you lift up your oars and let yourself just start floating down?
Start looking for the adventure. Start looking for the deep connection. Start living your life right now.
It doesn't have to be anything big. It doesn't have to take a lot of time. Find the fun. You get to choose. You get to choose if you look for the positive or you look for the negative every single day.
And when you feel the negative come in, look for something that makes you feel better. Each moment gets to be the choice. I don't like the way this feels. Can I find something that feels better? Light a candle that smells good. Turn on music, go for a walk. Sit in silence, call a friend. Right? There's so much that we can do. When life is feeling yucky, that we can flip the script and start feeling.
It's not good. We're just trying to feel better. Anything that's key.
So allow yourself.
to come back to the question.
Instead of where did the adventure go?
What adventures can I bring in? What deep connections can I bring in? What happiness can I bring in? Where can I shift my focus?
Take time to dream again about the places that you'll go, the things that you'll do, the friendships you'll nurture.
We got lost in the chaos, but that doesn't mean that we have to stay lost. It means that we get to choose. And today, I invite you to choose just a mini adventure.
If this episode resonates with you, please share it with friend. And if you had a friend share this with you, thank them. They thought about you. And that's really cool.
And I would love it if you subscribed, left a review, and connected with me. Let's keep this conversation going. And because I think it is so important to receive love from others, I want to tell you today, because I'm guessing nobody else has said it, you are smart today and every day.
You are fun and creative and funny and talented and worthy and deserving.
The world is a better place because you are in it.
I'm grateful that you're in my life.
I love you and I like you. And I wish you all the happiness and adventure today brings. We'll talk to you on the next episode.
Landy Peek (40:41)
Hey, before you go, just a little bit of legal. This podcast is designed for educational purposes only. It is not to replace any expert advice from your doctors, therapists, coaches, or any other professional that you would work with. It's just a chat with a friend, me, where we get curious about ideas, thoughts, and things that are going on in our lives. And as we're talking about friends, if you know someone who would benefit from the conversation today, please share.
Because I think the more that we open up these conversations, the more benefit we all get. So until next time, give yourself a big hug from me and stay curious because that's the fun in this world.
