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Staying Focused on What Matters Year-Round
Have you ever wondered why almost all the health and wellness information you see out there is so white, cis able-bodied and het? I know I have. And as a queer black registered dietitian, I gotta tell you, I'm not into it. I believe health and happiness should be accessible to everyone. That is precisely why I wrote Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation and why I host Body Liberation for All.
The road to health and happiness has a couple of extra steps for chronically stressed people, like queer folks and folks of color. But don't worry, my guests and I have got you covered. If you're ready to live the most fierce, liberated, and joyful version of your life, you are in the right place.
This Episode we chat about...
Setting intentions that are personally meaningful
Evaluation our relationship with productivity and wellbeing
Auditing your life for joy
Listen along on Spotify:
This transcript was generated with the help of AI. Thank you to our clients for supporting us as we strive to improve accessibility and pay equitable wages for things like human transcription.
Hello, welcome to our first solo episode of the year. As promised, I will be doing solo episodes this year so that you and I have more time together to dig a little deeper with some of my core themes, which includes the belief that stress is one of the greatest threats to our health of our time, and that marginalized people are the most vulnerable to chronic stress because homophobia, racism, ableism, all of the things, transphobia, these are chronic stressors that can have a really negative impact on our health.
"Stress is one of the greatest threats to health of our time"
My focus is always going to be things that can positively impact your health but not exacerbate your stress at the same time. I love to have guests on the show, so we're definitely not getting rid of that element. I do have some special guests in mind for the show this year, so those will still be coming, but you and I are going to be spending a lot more time together on the show from now going forward.
In line with the understanding that chronic stress is the enemy to our health, most wellness outlets are really not concerned about your liberation and are not open to massive paradigm shifts, like considering the possibility that toxic capitalism undermines your wellbeing, and we have to reevaluate our relationship with productivity and striving to be better in order to really be well and to reevaluate what wellbeing looks like to us.
You'll notice that frequently wellbeing is just a reframe for ready to be super productive in the work place. It’s not really about what is meaningful to the individual and certainly not inclusive of other cultures or other world views outside of this belief that you are here to be productive - you must always be doing in order to be a valid expression of humanity.
If you want for your wellness to be liberatory, a really important thing to do is to question where your assumptions come from and whether or not these assumptions are still serving you. When everywhere you look, everyone is saying the same thing, it isn't natural for you to think to question things that seem like a given.
A perfect example of that is New Year's resolutions and all of the mindset that comes with and the thoughts that are at the foundation of the belief that we need to be fixed.
I'm here to challenge that and posit that you do not need to be fixed. Anything that we imagine to be an indicator of a flaw when we're looking at our own bodies oftentimes is a sign that something is wrong, and our socialization prevents us from seeing that.
So what do I mean by that. I had a conversation with someone about this recently, but it comes up all the time with friends, family, and clients. The person I was speaking to said ‘I'm doing everything I'm supposed to do, but I still feel so unwell. I feel so tired, so run down’ . Everything that they were being told by the coaches, they were going to, the physicians, they were going to kept focusing on what else they could be doing to make themself feel more, well for them to recapture the energy level that they had before, which is what this person was missing. The question was what should you be doing to get back to where you were before? But my question was, is there a possibility that you are doing more than enough and that your feelings of burn out, tiredness and exhaustion are not indicators that you're not doing enough, but actually a warning that you're doing way too much. Could it be in this case that your feelings of fatigue, your feelings of malaise, are linked to the fact that you do not feel you have permission to slow down, you don't feel it is safe to slow down?
And I don't know the details of your life. Maybe it isn't. This is what I want us to focus on this year instead of the typical New Year's resolutions that encourage you to strive, that operate off the assumption that something is wrong with you, that you're deeply flawed. What I want us to look at is the possibility that we are doing too much and in the new year doing less could increase our wellbeing.
"What if the secret to bringing more wellness into your life this year is doing less not more?
How are you going to evaluate this before you start setting intentions? Before you think about goals? First, do an audit of your life. This doesn't have to be very time consuming. You really wanna tap into what your body is telling you as you're going through these questions.
This isn't meant to pick every part of your life apart. It's meant to get at what immediately comes to mind, because these are the things that are most pressing or bugging you that you haven't given yourself permission to change. As you're doing your life audit one of the questions that I want you to ask yourself is what do you feel right now in your life in general? What are a few words that capture how you're feeling?
I know for me, when I did the exercise at the start of the month, there was overwhelm, grief, gratitude, and inspired. In some areas of my life I've really been feeling aligned, like I am living my mission through my business. I'm living my mission in so many areas, but the overwhelm is coming from still juggling a nine to five, and my business, which is far more meaningful to me, far more inspiring and the grief comes from the managing loss and a lot of shifts and a lot of changes at the end of 2022.
I lost my last grandparent. That was a trigger for a lot of reevaluation. Looking at all of the wonderful things she did with her life, all of the caretaking, all the ways in which you can see the through line in her life is that of love, caretaking, selflessness, and also of great understanding of how to nurture and take care of herself even though she was raised in a time when no one was being encouraged to do that, not in a mainstream way anyway, at a time that everyone assigned female at birth was being told you're here to serve. I didn't ever see any messaging even in the early eighties and nineties, that that could also mean you should take care of yourself.
I now offer inclusive wellness solutions for individuals and organizations. If you like myself, believe that health and happiness should be accessible to everyone, and you're looking for someone to help you make your programs more inclusive, or you're looking for an inclusive wellness specialist to come in with solutions tailored to your team's needs, then visit daliakinsey.com.
The link is in the show notes to learn more about how we can work together.
Another excellent question to ask yourself is what are you doing now on a regular basis that every time you do it, you're filled with dread? Every time you see it on your calendar, you feel like, ugh, this again. Now, what does that do for you? Why is it still on your list? For me, it’s the 9-5. Monday rolls around and all of the energy that I had to work all day on Saturday, doing things that are meaningful to me, that light me up, that energy, has disappeared.
So why am I still doing that? What is it doing for me? Well, it's giving me a feeling of stability so I don't have to be super thirsty as the business grows and I can continue making decisions that are aligned instead of accidentally recreating all of the toxicity and all of the negative overworking patterns that came from the 9 to 5, which is what most of us are used to. A lot of people do this, they'll recreate the same things that were killing them in corporate. They'll recreate it in their own business, like pointless meetings or things that don't really move the needle forward, but give you a sense of being busy, especially if your sense of worth is connected to productivity, that's an easy trap to fall into.
After you establish why are you still doing this thing that makes you feel zapped, that makes you feel full of dread then you can question, can you get rid of it? If that doesn't feel feasible at this time, can you reframe it? Instead of thinking, oh, I have to do this, could you start thinking more in terms of I get to do this and it is enabling me to do dot, dot, dot.
So the fact that I'm able to do this job, the schedule, the amount of days I have off, the amount of leave I've accrued, it is pretty easy for me to continue operating and growing my business while having that sense of stability and security and while working to strengthen my mindset and my belief in the sustainability of something that isn't as regimented or structured as a nine to five.
The next question, once you've thought about, can you reframe it, if you're able to do the reframe, but it still feels sticky, ask yourself, what change can you make to make it feel more aligned? So something that I've shifted in my days at work, I use a portion of my break to do something that feels aligned, whether it's something that's more aligned personally, like using some of my free time to touch bases with a friend and reinvest in relationships that nourish me or whether it's using the lunch break, a portion of the lunch break to get fresh air, to give space for fresh ideas to come up related to a future blog post, related to a future article, whatever. Getting that fresh air, getting a walk every day, that really makes me feel so much more grounded throughout the day, and it feels like part of the day is dedicated to me that the entire business day doesn't just go into some pointless abyss.
And on those rainy days when I don't feel like getting outside, I spend time doing something aligned in my office so that again, it breaks up that sense that, oh, my entire day went to something that doesn't light me up and doesn't feel meaningful to me. I only do meaningful things when I get out of this wretched place.
It breaks it up and it reminds me my days really are my own, and I'm there because I choose to be there. It doesn't always feel like, oh, I'm making that choice. But the reality is I have made that decision. The exit plan is in motion. Everything is as I've designed it, so there's no reason for me to feel trapped every day.
So the question is what can I do during the day to remind myself that I am free to leave at any time, but I’m there for a reason. I have a mission. It's serving a purpose. Beyond that, start reevaluating you yeses. Have you committed to anything that's an ongoing commitment that you are tired of, burned out on? It's not lighting you up?
Can you, going forward, be a little slower with your yeses? Give yourself some room instead of agreeing to things right away, promise to check your calendar, evaluate your commitments, and get back to the person. Maybe promising to reevaluate when you have more bandwidth but just defaulting to no. That's something to consider if your plate is totally full.
"Remember, whenever you say yes to something, you are saying no to something else. There are only so many hours in the day, and whenever we mindlessly agree to something, we're pushing out an opportunity to do something else."
I hope as you take the time to reevaluate where your time and energy is going, you can see opportunities to make tweaks that will make your 2023 feel more relaxed, nourishing, and abundant, rather than setting rigid goals and resolutions.
What I find a lot more helpful is focusing on how I want to feel overall, what I want the shifts to be in my year, and then periodically auditing how I'm feeling, auditing my life to see what I could change to get more of that feeling that I was desiring back into my life. So my themes for 2023 are convenience, intuition, power.
I've set the intention to magnify my sense of power to keep focusing on ways in which I can feel more powerful, whether that is saying no, when no is the right answer for me, whether that is saying yes to things that are going to make me feel more grounded and present in my body. Growing my intuition by continually doing my mindful eating work and my spiritual work and listening to myself in business and in my personal life.
And the convenience factor is related to me getting to a point where I no longer have any interest in trying to save a couple of pennies in exchange for sacrificing time and energy. Generally everything is going to cost you. Even things that appear to be free or low cost, it generally means you're paying for it in time or in energy, or your physical effort.
I’ve noticed that especially in relation to travel I frequently in the past would opt to save small amounts of money and then end up spending so much more of my personal energy, giving up convenience. It just doesn't make any sense in my life at this point, the way I want to use my energy for things that are more meaningful, more scalable, and that impact more people.
I'm no longer willing to sacrifice my energy to save a couple of bucks, so I am going to be on the lookout for ways that I keep falling into that trap. That old pattern from my financial situation in my youth and as a child did dictate, yeah, if you have to choose between paying for this with time or paying with money, I frequently had to pay with time.
A perfect example would be tolerating long layover to save like $200 on a flight or something that made sense at a point in my life. It doesn't make sense anymore and it's not serving me anymore. So that's something that I'm going to be looking at because it's cutting into areas that are more meaningful for me, and it's something that needs to be reevaluated.
This is something that's going to come up again throughout the year. This is something I see across the board even in how some people are relating to food as adults. It's so heavily influenced by how they had to relate to food as children. So sometimes not having enough as a child continues to influence how you make decisions as an adult, even if your current circumstances no longer call for it. It's something to be aware of not something to beat ourselves up about.
So glad you were able to join me for this episode. I hope you will dig a little deeper with the workbook I've made for you. The link is in the show notes. Please feel free to reach out if you know there's something you really want for me to dig into this year. I'm always available through the site or you can just email me hello@daliakinsey.com. I frame my episodes based on what I see coming up for clients and for people around me. But it's even more helpful to hear directly from you.
All right, I'll see you next time.
Episode edited and produced by Unapologetic Amplified
Originally posted at https://daliakinsey.substack.com/p/intention-setting-a-gentle-alternative
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Imagine a world where wellness isn't one-size-fits-all but a colorful tapestry that celebrates every hue and curve of our diverse communities. That's where "Decolonizing Wellness" steps in. If you're ready to embark on a journey of self-acceptance and body liberation, this is your guidebook. Together, let's turn the page on outdated wellness narratives and step into a world where health and happiness are accessible to all.
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