by Sande Smith | Aug 21, 2024 | leadership & racial justice
6 Things You Can Do Right Now to Reignite Your Inner Fire
Are you wanting to live more fully? To align your life with your deepest values and have that energy fill you and radiate out? So many of us have this desire and yet we struggle with burnout.
The constant pressure to perform, excel, meet the demands of work, family, and our aspirations can leave us exhausted. The burden becomes overwhelming, and burnout begins to creep in, making us believe that the demands will never end.
According to WebMD, burnout is “a form of exhaustion caused by constantly feeling swamped. It happens when we experience too much emotional, physical, and mental fatigue for too long. In many cases, burnout is related to one’s job. But burnout can also happen in other areas of your life and affect your health.”
Being burnt out robs you of your radiance. It dims your light. So, how do you stoke your fire without burning out?
These are six practices that I have found to make a real difference. They have changed my life, and I’ve seen them transform my clients’ lives as well.
1. Awareness of Your Fire
The first step is becoming aware of your inner fire. How is it burning right now? Is it blazing, flickering, or barely a spark? On a scale from 0 to 10, with 10 being fully ignited and 0 being completely extinguished, where do you place your fire?
This awareness is crucial in understanding when to fuel your fire and when to ease off to avoid burnout. For a practical tool to track your excitement and energy levels, try this excitement tracker.
2. Use Your Breath
Focusing on your breath is a powerful and simple tool you can use to reconnect and rekindle your energy. For a long time, I thought that I should stoke the fire with food, but I’ve learned that while food can be comforting, it can also weigh me down and extinguish my fire. Breathing, on the other hand, helps me tune into myself and assess where my fire is. Take moments throughout your day to pause and breathe deeply, noticing how your body responds.
3. Feel Your Body
Do you know how to feel and listen to your body? Through working with Kelsey Blackwell, a Black woman who is a somatic coach, I learned a powerful centering practice that I do almost every day. It has helped me to experience myself as three-dimensional through connecting me with my length, my width and my depth. Check out her free 5 Practices to Come Home to Your Body workbook for simple practices to begin feeling your body, your power and your inner fire.
4. Embrace the Space Between
Judy Brown, a poet and leadership coach, speaks beautifully about stoking the fire in her poem Fire. She writes:
“What makes a fire burn
is space between the logs,
a breathing space.
Too much of a good thing,
too many logs
packed in too tight
can douse the flames
almost as surely
as a pail of water would.
So building fires
requires attention
to the spaces in between,
as much as to the wood.”
We need space to rest. In a world that often pushes for more, more, more, it’s essential to create gaps in our lives. Take a minute and stop. Stop looking outside yourself. Pause to connect with yourself. Pause to listen, then make time to write, to draw, to capture what you hear.
5. Nurture Your Creativity
By cultivating a creative practice and taking a daily pause, you make space for discovery and remind yourself that you’re worth pausing for.
Allow the sacred energy of juicy play and artfulness to infuse your life. This can take many forms, depending on what resonates with you and what you can commit to. Start with dedicating 15 minutes a day to journal, draw, paint, sing, dance, or write.
6. Be Curious
As you track and notice your energy, try to observe yourself with curiosity, rather than judgment. What nourishes and stokes your fire? What depletes it? Judging tends to drain us, while observing with curiosity fuels us and creates spaciousness.
These six tools can help you live your passion without burning out. In a world that constantly demands more, give yourself permission to pause, create, observe yourself without judgment and feed your inner fire with what energizes and lights you up.
by Sande Smith | Jul 20, 2024 | leadership & racial justice
Three actions you can take to make shifts and create change in your life.
In that time, I’ve had the privilege of coaching 50 incredible individuals—Black women and non-binary folks, leaders seeking to reclaim their creative spark, executive directors, people seeking new opportunities, and those navigating life transitions.
While I’ve learned a lot, three things stand out for me:
1. Listening Deeply Matters Most
While my coaching tools are important, listening deeply and with humble curiosity is even more crucial. When I listen without knowing the answer or what I will say next, my listening creates spaciousness in which the other person can hear themselves.
Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen says in her book Kitchen Table Wisdom:
“Listening is the oldest and perhaps the most powerful tool of healing. It is often through the quality of our listening and not the wisdom of our words that we are able to effect the most profound changes in the people around us. When we listen, we offer with our attention an opportunity for wholeness. Our listening creates sanctuary for the homeless parts within the other person. That which has been denied, unloved, devalued by themselves and by others. That which is hidden.”
Through deep spacious listening that slows down time, I hear my client express parts of themselves that they may not have heard before. So often, we are moving so quickly, we do not listen to ourselves.
Sometimes, I will repeat verbatim a phrase they have said, or share what I perceive as the essence of their words. Through this reflective process, they have the opportunity to challenge me, challenge themselves, make new connections, and reclaim their own wisdom and authority.
I have found this process of reflection often yields surprise and wonder in their eyes. “Yes,” they say, “I said that,” or well, “it’s really more like this,” and then they refine the expression of what they are thinking, feeling, wanting. We both listen, moved by the new knowing that is emerging. And then I encourage them to document this wisdom in their journal.
2. The Importance of Naming the Change
When I first started doing coaching, I would notice and celebrate the shifts my clients were making but I didn’t always articulate those shifts. Over the past year, I’ve made a special point of sharing—often in writing—midway through the coaching engagement, the shifts I’ve noticed.
I invite my client to let me know how that lands with them. What are they noticing? What’s different about how they’re thinking, feeling, and acting since we started working together?
I have learned that naming these changes fuels continued transformation.
3. Transformation Happens Between Sessions
We knead bread dough, then let it rest, for the rising happens in between the kneading. Something similar happens between sessions.
For instance, a client may notice they’re having trouble slowing down to listen to colleagues because they’re so worried about getting everything done. They want to be present, but they’re not sure how.
So, the action for that person may be to engage in a practice, such as doing a body scan once a day to notice how they’re feeling, notice where there’s tightness, and then taking a breath to soften that area.
If they get in the habit of doing the practice when they’re alone, they may find that when they’re in the company of other people, they find it more possible to breathe, soften the tightness in their body, and return their attention to the person they’re listening to.
I invite you to bring these lessons into your own life.
These three small actions can spur and support your own journey of change and transformation:
Practice Deep Listening: Spend a few minutes each day listening deeply to another person. Gently rest your attention on their words, tone of voice, and their movements while just being curious. Refrain from trying to fix or solve and notice the impact it has on your connection.
Name Your Changes: Take a couple moments to reflect on your last week. What’s different about how you’re thinking, feeling, acting? No matter how small the change, take note and acknowledge it, trusting that this recognition will fuel your motivation and your continued unfolding.
Create Space for Transformation: Identify a small practice that helps you slow down and be present, like a daily body scan or a pause to look around your environment and gaze on something that pleases you. Observe how this practice supports your ability to be more present with yourself and those you interact with.
by Sande Smith | Jun 4, 2024 | client challenges
A practice is a doing that supports a new way of being.
People come to me for coaching because they are burned out, stretched thin and wanting to realign their lives with what they value most. Or they are seeking greater clarity and confidence in actualizing the potential they know they have. They want to change and shift some aspect of their lives.
To make a lasting change in our lives requires an intentional practice.
Why is a practice so important? Because it gives us a way to pause, and notice with new eyes. Having an intentional practice provides us with a way to interrupt old patterns.
This practice can take many forms, depending on what resonates with you and what you can commit to. I recommend small steps, starting with practices you can do in 15 minutes or less. This helps builds new habits while addressing the fear and pressure of not having enough time.
What kinds of things might you do to support yourself in a practice? You might write, or you might journal. You might walk. You might breathe. You might do yoga. What keeps these things from just being things you do? What takes them into the realm of practice? It’s the separation from outcome.
Practice Implies Curiosity
You are learning what you love. It’s a safe space that you create, that’s private, where you can allow yourself freedom from demands and judgment. For example you could have a sound practice, where you are just making noises with your voice or an instrument. You enter into a mindset of curiosity.
Let your judge take the backseat. Practice is a space for discovery and learning, making visible to yourself what matters to you.
At minimum you need a practice that supports pausing. I also recommend cultivating a reflection and a creative practice. Here are three practices you can explore.
Pausing Practice
A pausing practice can be breath. Simply three breaths in which you’re paying attention to the breath, in which you’re fully present.
A pausing practice can also be checking in with yourself, noticing the sensations in your body, where you’re hot, cool, constricted, relaxed. You could pause and look around the room you’re in, and notice the objects you see, the sounds you hear.
The pause gives a little space to interrupt the ongoing loop of doing, doing, doing without stopping. Here are some more pausing exercises you can try.
Reflection Practice
The reflecting process gives you an opportunity to get to know yourself, to look at how you are approaching things and ask questions that give you a new perspective.
There’s a process called recapitulation in which you spend a couple of minutes before you go to bed where you replay the day in your mind as if you’re watching a movie.
What I like about this practice is that it gets you to look at the day as a whole instead of ruminating on specific things that happened. You pull back and you look at the whole day and ask yourself what are you noticing.
You can also use this practice after meetings or important events – what happened, what did I notice, what did I feel, what did I think, what was hard, what was easy, what are my takeaways.
A reflection practice allows you distance from the details. You can ask yourself is there something I might do differently? Is there another way to approach this? Or YES, I want to do more of this!
Creative Practice
And then, there’s creative practice. What in the world is that? Creative practice is magic. What I have found is creative practice is a cauldron where you make something from nothing – you take bits and pieces and you put something together.
This can be words that you cut up from a magazine or book and put together in a new way, it can be images, it can be drawings of your own. You’re entering into a conversation with something that wasn’t there before.
My creative practice takes the form of visual journaling. That means I write, paint, draw, I glue things down and make images. And those images be ugly and messy and gorgeous and odd and surprising – it doesn’t matter. They are created in a space of not knowing.
Visual journaling means I allow my hand to take the lead, not my mind. It allows me to practice feeling a yes. Ah yes, I’m going to draw these lines. Oh yes, I’m going to draw these circles, and when I cut this picture out of the magazine, I’m going to glue it here – without knowing what the end product will look like.
Ultimately, I have found pausing, reflecting and creative practices to be nourishing.
In addition to interrupting old patterns, they feed our new way of being and support who we are becoming.
by Sande Smith | Jun 4, 2024 | creativity & joy
A free workbook download designed to help you connect with your inner voice.
I developed this mini workbook as a space for you to listen to your inner voice, and deepen your ability to connect to what you truly want.
Listening to your inner voice surfaces what’s been overlooked and buried.
This workbook helps you pause to hear that quiet whisper that resides in your heart, your gut, the tightness in your jaw or shoulders. Your inner voice values you, values truth, values time to be quiet. This is a practice rooted in self respect, care and love.
There are five prompts to help you connect to your inner voice. For each prompt, set a timer for 3 to 5 minutes and allow your hand to take dictation from your inner voice.
Your inner voice can sound smooth, soft and not so clear. And at other times, it can be very clear and strong. Your inner voice can sound and feel like your stomach clenching, tight and not available to anyone or anything. To soften the clenching, consciously breathe, and practice melting.
Allow yourself spaciousness. Not a lot needs to be said or written.
With just a few minutes set aside, you can connect with your inner voice. That’s why I developed this workbook as a tool for myself and my clients. To help with creating that space.
As I’ve listened to my inner voice, I’ve learned that it values order even though I wasn’t brought up to value order. It values organization and carefulness. It values dancing and fun and loud music; mystery and creativity and curiosity. My inner voice values life and values love.
What does your inner voice value?
Let yourself get quiet and soften. You are attuning to what’s deeper than you know how to pay attention to. Giving space for your inner voice to speak allows for greater awareness and alignment of actions with your intentions.
You can cultivate your inner voice by honoring it. By acknowledging that it exists and it’s valuable. Make space to hear what your inner voice is saying. Listen for the insight that lets you move forward with greater clarity and confidence.
by Sande Smith | Nov 21, 2023 | leadership & racial justice
Doing the internal and external work to create change.
There is a symbiotic relationship between inner and outer work that is essential for creating the change and shifts we desire to make.
What is the internal work?
Internal work is cultivating your mindset and beliefs. Do you practice BELIEVING that you can make a change?
I’m inspired by the work of Jo Boaler in her book called Limitless Mind: Learn, Lead and Live Without Barriers. She talks about the fact that many of us have internalized limiting beliefs about or capacity to learn math, science, art, writing and so many other things.
Some of the paradigm-shifting learning keys that she offers include:
- “The times when we are struggling and making mistakes are the best times for brain growth.”
- “When we change our beliefs, our bodies and our brains physically change as well.”
- “Speed of thinking is not a measure of aptitude. Learning is optimized when we approach ideas and life, with creativity and flexibility.”
Boaler gives examples of two of the world’s greatest mathematicians, Laurent Schwartz and Maryam Mirzakhani, who have both talked openly about how slow they are with math. Rather than speed, they value deep, slow thinking. What a contrast to the conditioning that speed and ease of learning indicates intelligence.
Inner work is:
- Reflection
- Having a creative practice
- Setting up boundaries
- Making space for yourself and setting time for yourself
- Noticing what’s going on in your body
- Pausing to hear and learn from your feelings instead of ignoring them
Spending time in the gap of unknowing – also called creative tension – is inner work.
Over the last couple years, I have learned that being in the gap of unknowing is one of the most POWERFUL things that we can do. Not rushing to make something happen while we’re in the gap – just being in the gap.
While we’re learning to be in the gap, I have found creative practice such as doodling, making a spread in my journal, pasting down images, to be helpful and soothing. Also, free writing and taking a walk. But maybe even more importantly, just being still. Lie on the floor and breathe. In the gap of unknowing, be willing and curious about what wants to emerge.
What is the external work?
External work is:
- Taking chances
- Building a support team
- Writing a letter
- Trying out a new technique
- Sharing with someone in a way that you haven’t before, telling a personal story, being vulnerable
- Setting goals and taking the steps toward the goals while noticing the obstacles and getting yourself to have conversations with the obstacles.
- Practicing new ways of dealing with feedback.
I recently learned a tool from Tara Mohr – that feedback tells you more about the person giving it than it does about yourself. So instead of focusing on what’s wrong with you, ask yourself what the feedback tells you about the person, their priorities, concerns, issues. Then ask yourself if the feedback is relevant to your goals and what you’re seeking to accomplish. And if it is, then ask yourself how to make use of the relevant aspects of the feedback.
This is a powerful reframe that gets us out of thinking about people pleasing and into thinking strategically about what we’re striving to accomplish and HOW we’re going to get there.
