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.

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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, becomes less willing to make herself smaller.

And here’s the thing.

Joy is not the icing on the cake. It is the fuel for our purpose. It is the stabilizer for our courage, and it is very, very rarely accessed through striving. Rather, it is accessed through allowing enough space for you to fully feel yourself again, to fully feel your feelings, and also by reducing or removing the causes of depletion and burnout.

Now I would love to say that depletion and burnout comes from the outside world, from workplace structures, capitalism, patriarchy, and all the rest of the wonky crapola that we were born into. And it is certainly true that those forces exist. They are real, and we have to navigate them every waking moment of every day.

But they’ve also been installed in us. You didn’t arrive on the planet with these concepts in your head. You acquired them from childhood experiences, from family and cultural influences, and from the systems of oppression around you. They speak to us through our inner dialogue all day long.

I call them the brain weasels.

They’re like bitey little creatures with sharp teeth and claws that can draw blood, metaphorically speaking. They show up as these chattering little internal voices that go nanananananananah … You should be coping better. Others manage. Why can’t you? You’re not doing enough, or you’re not doing it well enough, or don’t rest yet you haven’t earned it, or don’t celebrate yet you haven’t fully earned it.

These voices are not actually ours. And we kind of know this. We intellectually know this. It doesn’t mean they don’t still have an impact.

These are the echoes of every school system that we went to that prized achievement over humanity, or the professional cultures that confuse exhaustion with dedication - if you’re not showing up eighty hours a week, then then you must not want the job - or the toxic performance reviews that we have to do, and the generations of women who came before us who were expected to serve quietly without wanting anything for themselves.

I literally left a local women’s chamber of commerce organization recently because they decided to hold a celebration of ‘unsung heroes’. And the main virtue of these ‘unsung heroes’ in the working community of my local town was that they went above and beyond the call of duty without asking for credit.

I’m like, that is literally the opposite of what we should be doing! We should not be encouraging young women to sacrifice themselves on the altar of excellence, and not ask for credit for their own work.

So this stuff is real, and it exists in the systems. Here’s the most important piece I wanna share with you.

Thanks for reading Wreaking More Joy! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Brain weasels, these chattering voices in our heads, they do not respond to force, and they do not respond to logic.

They don’t care how good your numbers look or that you desperately need a pee when you haven’t finished that email, or that you have countless lives that you’ve saved, or that you have contributed to the liberation of so many people.

They don’t care about that, the brain weasels. They don’t care.

They only soften and begin to behave themselves when we offer something that they were not designed to understand; and that is compassion.

At this point, some people might be tempted to say, “compassion is soft and weak and useless; this is a working life, not a spiritual retreat.”

To which I say, NO.

Compassion is not soft and not indulgent. It is infrastructure. It is the minimum viable support system that you need, for a sustained and meaningful life. It is a superpower when it is wielded with skill.

And one of its load-bearing beams is stillness.

Stillness is not collapse. It is not quitting. It is not checking out.

It is a condition that allows your nervous system to reset, to stop bracing itself long enough to tell you the truth. It is the still, quiet moment in which you might be able to hear that evolution that is calling your name.

Not so that you can immediately take a whole bunch of action and change everything in your world, but so that you can quietly listen, and quietly let it start to blow on the embers that are still in your heart for your purpose in the world.

So in this first episode, I’m gonna invite us to tap into the energy of the December solstice. This is going to air at the moment of the December solstice, and there’s a reason for this.

That solstice represents a moment of stillness.

We get one in June, one in December. In December, for the Northern Hemisphere, this is the moment of longest night. It is the winter solstice, and it is this turning point of the season.

And like any turning point, it represents movement in one direction, then a moment of stillness and movement back in the other direction.

Meanwhile, down here in the Southern Hemisphere, it’s the reverse. We get the summer solstice, longest day. But the same phenomenon happens where there is a building - the days get longer and longer and longer - and then there is a pause, and the days get shorter and shorter and shorter.

So what the solstice represents is this pause and turning point, pause and change of direction. It’s a moment for reflection.

We are here to make our working lives feel like home again. Not perfect, not effortless; just dignified, meaningful, aligned, sustainable, joy filled, and anchored in who you truly are.

So over the coming weeks in this first season of about 10 episodes, which I’m calling Rekindle, we will explore how to rebuild joy in practice, not as a performance, but as a lived embodied experience.

And we will also talk about the fact that joy is not spiritual bypassing. It is not toxic positivity.

One of the things I love about joy, and, again, we’ll talk about this in another episode at length, but joy can coexist with even the most painful other emotions. I was very privileged to walk beside my father in the last week of his life just before he died in 2010. And there were moments of such profound joy seeded within that process. It was extremely painful, but joy could coexist there.

Joy is not about denying the hard stuff. It is about finding the sparks of joy within whatever we are, wherever we’re at. Meeting you where you’re at and inviting you to more joy.

But today, because it’s the solstice, and because you get the benefit of this planetary energy wherever you’re when whenever you’re listening to it … (just because you’re listening to this in June or March or September or whenever you’re listening to it, the recording is getting this energy of the solstice!) … I’m gonna issue a very small, very specific invitation from today’s episode, and that is an invitation to let stillness rise up in you.

Imagine this mighty planetary pause between the seasons that we all share, whether we are north or south. We are all on the same rock hurtling through space, experiencing this moment where the seasons turn around.

And imagine that energy of the pause making its way into you as a gift and a blessing.

I’m gonna give you a very specific exercise to do. It doesn’t take long. Two to ten minutes, you get to choose.

And it might be radically new for you, or it might be something you’ve played with before and completely forgotten about. I’m gonna invite you to do it by allowing this solstice energy to flow through you.

Each day over the next seven days, I’m gonna invite you to do the following.

First of all, turn your phone to flight mode so you won’t be interrupted. Close down anything that’s gonna ping you or notify you in any way.

Find a quiet place to sit or lie down where you won’t be disturbed. Caveat: I know if you are a person who’s got small children in the house, this can be really difficult, so you will have to recruit somebody who is willing to take responsibility while you go and do this. Also, if you’re usually around people, it is perfectly fine to do this in the toilet; it is perfectly fine to do this to to jump in your car and drive five minutes down the road, park somewhere, I don’t know, at the back of a grocery store and do this in your car.

Set a timer on your phone with the gentlest possible tone, something that you know is going to bring you back to awareness so you can trust that you can let go for a little while, but make it gentle. We don’t want any adrenaline rush happening here, so no klaxons. Set it for two, five, or ten minutes, and start the timer.

For that time, allow the quality of stillness to rise up within you. If you want to imagine it rising up from the planet itself, that can be really helpful. That doesn’t work for everyone. And the idea is in this time, we’re doing nothing. There’s no music, no reading, no guided input, no meditation, no practice, just nothing, just stillness.

When the chime goes, you turn your phone back to normal mode and come back to your day.

Now please know you will have thoughts. Your brain is gonna give you a whole bunch of thoughts, and that’s totally fine.

Some of those thoughts will be brain weasels. Some of them will be things like, oh my god. I haven’t made that phone call yet, or, oh my god. I wonder what I’m gonna do about Mrs Kerfoop’s’ situation. That’s fine.

Those brain weasels are going to chatter. Let the stillness help you to take them a little less seriously. If they’re coming up with criticism, you know how to go, “oh, I see you! - you’re a brain weasel, I don’t have to take you seriously, you’re just a funny little creature that likes to run around with its bitey teeth!”

Some will be good ideas or solutions to problems. That’s fine.

I like to have a pencil and paper ready so that I can capture them if I need to, and you can interrupt the stillness just enough to jot down a dot point that you won’t forget, Because we don’t want our brains to be churning over, I must remember that, I must remember that, I must remember that.

We want to support your brain in having this moment of stillness.

Problem solving is not the agenda here, by the way, but sometimes when we stop the pushing and we really surrender to the doing-nothing, to the stillness, something wise taps us on the shoulder; we get some little ping of insight. That’s not why we’re doing it, but that is something that is often the result. Having pencil and paper handy is a good idea.

You may fall asleep, and that’s okay. Pick an alarm that can wake you up that, you know, will wake you up without making you startle; you don’t want that adrenaline rush.

The idea is just to do nothing and make it into something that feels almost sacred. You’re so devoted to this that you will do it regardless of whatever else is on your agenda for seven days. I’m not asking you for to do it for the rest of your life just for seven days.

So, gorgeous one, if the meaning and purpose is still there but the spark feels dim, if you’ve been holding things together for too long, if you’ve been pushing through because you care so much, please hear me on this.

You are not failing your work. You are not letting your purpose down.

It’s just that your work and the way you’ve been doing it has stopped feeding you as much as it could be.

And stillness is often the first place that nourishment begins, that this sense of nourishing yourself begins in this moment of stillness.

Thank you for being here with me at the beginning of this season, and at this turning point in the year, whether it’s literally at December solstice or you’re listening to this at some other time.

If you’d like to share your thoughts, your experiences, or your questions in the comments for this post, please do. I’d love to hear from you.

Until next time, please be gentle with yourself. Let the stillness do a little of this work for once, and I will see you in a week’s time.

PS if this has raised any issues for you and you need support, be sure to reach out and I’ll see how I can best help.

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