You’re listening to The Work Of Becoming podcast! My name is Dr. Karin Nordin. I am your host as well as a behavior change expert and self-proclaimed tornado girl. I spent years of my life struggling to change before I finally got my PhD and learned the psychological tools that I needed to actually make those changes happen. Now, I’m bringing you five-minute sneak peeks of how I’m applying the real science of self-help to my life. Let’s get started!
Hello, and welcome to The Work Of Becoming podcast! This is the first episode where I have included my brand new little jingle at the beginning, so I hope you like it. I had gotten a lot of feedback that normally when I started these podcasts it was very abrupt and that some of you who were binging episodes couldn’t really tell the difference between each episode, so I wanted to make that switch. I will tell you that it is exactly 33 seconds long, so if you don’t want to hear my little ditty at the beginning, you can go ahead and just skip to 32 seconds every single time. Okay, with that business aside, let’s talk about today’s episode.
So, today, I am gonna introduce a series that I’m gonna be doing over the next couple of weeks (I guess, for you all it will be a couple of weeks) that’s really going to be about a series of changes that I‘ve made in my routine and in my life. So, I’m recording this in March of 2023, obviously, and right now, I am currently on a social media hiatus, and that’s one of the changes, among many, that I’m gonna talk about in the coming episodes. But the reason that I’m on this hiatus is because — and you might have heard me talk about this before, but I’m gonna explain it again.
In the first eight weeks of this year, I truly felt like I was walking uphill through mud. Everything felt hard. My routine was off. I was staying up late. I had workout resistance times, like, eight million. I wasn’t eating well. I was watching a ton of TV, which I don’t even do, and I just felt like my life was not in alignment with my values at all. And I asked myself, I sat down, and I was like, “Okay, Karin, what is going on here?” Just very gently, very compassionately, “What’s up?” And the realization that I came to was that I was really stressed out.
Body Brain Alliance is a growing business. It is growing rapidly. It has been growing rapidly for two years at this point, and there are other things in my life that I’m hoping to change in the next couple of years that will only make things more stressful. And as my stress had been growing and growing and growing, I wasn’t really including more support.
One of the things that I preach all the time inside of Change Academy workshops, and if you’re a member, you know you’ve heard me say these before, is that as the difficulty of your tasks increase, as the difficulty of your life increases, as you add more to your plate, you need to add more support, otherwise you cannot have any hope of those things actually working. So, if you want to add five habits to your plate, okay, what are you gonna do to support yourself better so that you can take on that additional load?
So, I had, over the past year and a half, really increased the amount of responsibility I had, the amount of money we’re dealing with at BBA, the stress, and yet I had not taken time to follow my own advice and increase the level of support that I was offering myself. And this was around the time that I started preparing the Stress Management Workshop for Change Academy.
And so, we recently hired two PhD-level researchers to come in and really do big research dumps for us before Change Academy to make sure that we are up to date on, not only sort of the pinnacle studies, but also the latest science. And so, they had brought to me these research dumps, and when I saw them, and I was looking through the research, and I was like, “Wow, I’m really not doing a lot in my routine in order to cultivate resilience and coping and in order to support myself through those moments where shit’s hitting the fan.”
And it also totally reframed my experience with stress management because my whole life I’ve been told, and I’m sure you’ve been told — I heard this a lot from the people who came to the Change Academy workshop last month — is that we’re constantly told to reduce stress, but the stressors in my life (my business, my dog, my partner, my habits), those are the things that make my life meaningful. I have no desire to reduce my stress. I want to increase my coping.
So, I had that moment, I had a heart-to-heart, come to Jesus with myself, whatever you want to call it, and I was like, “You know what, I am gonna embark on a 30-day journey in order to overhaul my routine and create a life that supports the level of stress that I am dealing with and the stressful things that are also giving my life meaning.” So, over the next few episodes, I’m not exactly sure how many it’ll turn out to be because I’m obviously gonna record them right now, I am going to go in depth on several changes that I made, why I made them, and give you some tips and tricks as well for how you might want to change things up on your end. I hope you enjoy!
PS: if you are on a journey to become a better you, and you want to learn the tools and techniques that will actually help change your life, make sure you check out my Change Academy Membership. Each month, we do a 1.5-hour workshop on a different psychological topic, but we also provide resources like journal prompts, worksheets, and trackers. We host community events and more. If you’re struggling to close the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it, this membership was built for you. Go to www.karinn4.sg-host.com/change-academy to learn more!
