Hyper-Achieving: How To Succeed In Both Your Career And Your Life With Carla Reeves

November 18, 2022

Are you someone who is striving to achieve a work-life balance? Someone who wants to achieve professional success without compromising important relationships? Someone who aims to be fulfilled in both your career and your life? Then this podcast is for you. Today, Carla Reeves discusses what being a hyper-achiever is and how you can achieve a work-life balance! Carla is a trusted advisor that has been coaching entrepreneurs and ambitious leaders by calling out their blind spots, challenging their thinking, and expanding their perspectives. Don’t miss the chance to hear great insights on elevating your career while enhancing your relationships and being present in your life.

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Hyper-Achieving: How To Succeed In Both Your Career And Your Life With Carla Reeves

We are going to be talking to Carla Reeves about what a hyper-achiever means. Let me tell you a little bit about Carla. She is known for her compassionate, direct, and truth-telling candor. For over a decade, ambitious leaders have been relying on Carla to call out their blind spots, challenge their thinking, and expand their perspective. Carla believes in ditching the illusion that life will be great someday in the future and teaches leaders how to wake up their thinking to create and live a juicy, rich, and meaningful life every day. The reason why I wanted to talk to Carla is because so many of us hyper-achievers are focused in our work that we are literally letting life pass by. I want you to be fulfilled in both your life and your career, and she’s also going to give us a great insight on the whole work-life balance thing. She’s going to give us some tips and tricks on how to enhance those relationships and be present. You know that when you are happy at work and at home, and then when you are happy at home, you are happy at work, so they go hand-in-hand. Go ahead and stay tuned for my conversation with Carla.

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Carla, thank you so much for being on the show. I appreciate you being here. I know you and I had a conversation previously, and I would like to start by defining what is a hyper-achiever. Thank you so much for having me on. Hyper-achiever is someone who tends to have an incredible amount of drive and energy, a lot of passion for what they do, and they get often get stuck in the achievement vortex. It’s like we are driven by achievement and so we often find ourselves checking that next box of achievement and running after the next achievement without necessarily looking to see if that’s leading where we want to go. Often, we are missing our life along the way and waiting for that someday. I’m guilty as charged with a hyper-achiever. One of the things that I always ponder within myself is why do I feel this constant burning desire to always do more, to do big or do better, and you can’t turn it off? When I need to relax, I physically need to make myself stop thinking about the to-do list because there are always things to do. How do we start by identifying that and then start changing that? I want to reiterate that it’s a strength. There’s a strength inside of this and it’s probably gotten you, me, and many others a great amount of success. It’s not that we want to get rid of that, but instead of running you, we want to make sure that we are in the lead of it and using that strength to our advantage instead of running it in autopilot usually what happens. I will take you back to my story, but I spent half my life checking those boxes that I thought were going to lead to that happy and successful life. I woke up one day in a huge change in my life and realized that those boxes, while they all looked good on the outside, weren’t making me feel good. I wasn’t feeling that success. I thought it was taking me to, and I had to stop and look and redefine where I was headed and what success means. I had a couple of conversations talking to people in Corporate America, and we had 30 minutes to look at what they are doing and make sure their priorities aligned with what they want. I asked both of them or several of them, “Do you feel like you are surviving your life or are you building a life?” All of them, in so many words, said, “I haven’t lifted my head to see if the emotions I’m making are leading to the life I want to be living.” I think that’s it in a nutshell, and that’s what I had to do in my own life is pause to look is are these to-do lists leading and creating the life that I want. My husband and I are both big achievers. On the weekend, we get up and we look at the to-do list and it’s like, “We’ve got to do all these things.” By the time we are done, there’s nothing left over for us to go downtown and enjoy something. I mentioned to you earlier that we are going to New York because I told him I’m like, “We never do anything. We never like get away for the weekend.” We are going to New York to see Phantom of the Opera, and I’m so excited. To your point, we are always so busy on the to-do list and we are almost letting life pass us by, and we are literally on autopilot. What are some things that we can do then to stop being so overwhelmed to lift our heads up and start being present specifically in our lives and relationships? There are so many things. The first and most impactful thing is to start to look at what I call your survival model, but it’s basically behaviors and ways of thinking that are outdated. They once helped you and helped you to survive an environment probably when you were very young. Sometimes that can look like a child who maybe is the oldest kid in the family and took on a tremendous amount of responsibility at a very young age and finds themselves now. I have coached people like this that they are still taking on that much responsibility. They become over-responsible. As it was a skill, they learned and they got, probably got a lot of accolades and a lot of success from it. Now at their stage in their career, that over-responsibility is a detriment to themselves and even to their careers or their families. It’s stopping to look and question your behaviors and thinking to see if they match and align with the life you want to create now. That’s the most powerful place people can look because it’s not adding anything to your to-do list, and it’s addressing the root of the issue. No matter what you do or no matter what time management and strategies you apply, if you don’t address those roots, they will circumvent your best efforts over and over again.

NWB 34 | Work Life Balance — Work Life Balance: No matter what you do or no matter what time management strategies you apply, if you don’t address those roots, they will circumvent your best efforts over and over again.

You and I both attended Landmark Forum years ago. For me, it was in 2007. Landmark Forum is like a three-day intensive therapy. That identifies how you are working now based on your childhood or the past. For someone who might be an overachiever or hyper-achiever, what are some attributes or traits that you may have been able to identify while coaching those people in the corporate world? Over-responsible for sure is when I see time and time again pleaser. The overpleasing, overgiving and overworking are other extensions of it. Things I see over and over again is this burden that they carry and I carry it myself of I have to make everybody else happy. I have to put everybody else before me, and if I don’t, my relationships or my career is going to fall apart. It’s very emotionally rooted and that’s where challenging your ideas, beliefs, and rules you created for yourself comes into play. Sometimes that takes, a coach like yourself or I or somebody else to help you see those because sometimes they are like blind spots. One of the things that I always recommend for people to do is when you are trying to work on yourself. Specifically, you’re getting promoted in your career and you are trying to figure out what your blind spots are. Talk to people you’ve already worked with because they can tell you your strengths and weaknesses. You are going to talk to someone that you like and trust and you’ve worked with before, but identifying those blind spots is important. For me as a child, I remember coming home and telling my dad, “I got an A on my exam.” He would say, “Why didn’t you get an A+?” That carried through and still to this day, he does that with my kids and his grandkids and stuff like that. It would be, “I got a promotion or I got a job.” He’s like, “Did you ask for a raise?” “I got a promotion.” “Did you look for something better?” He was trying to help in trying to push and encourage us, but it ultimately came out as nothing I do is good enough because he always kept asking, “Why not more?” Is that an example you think that falls into that bucket? One hundred percent. I find so often when I’m coaching someone that they are behaving as an adult in their life now as if they were that little 8 or 9-year-old waiting for dad’s approval finally. Those are exactly the behaviors. I always felt like I had this little monster on my shoulder that was always telling me, “You need to be working.” I let it drive me for years. The way I started putting pause there, interrupting that was to start to say do I. “Do I need to be working?” I would look and discern for myself, “Is that old habitual voice or is there something I’m neglecting that does need to get done or is there not?” I can step away at 5:00. The other voice I had, always saying was like, “If you get a little bit more done, you are going to feel better,” and it’s so convincing. I started to realize that was a lie. That is not true because if I work into the night after 5:00, 6:00, and 7:00, and I’m neglecting these other important priorities in my life, I don’t feel better. I have learned as an entrepreneur for so many years that to-do list does not get done. It’s continuously growing. You mentioned previously that some people could use their job to maybe hide from their relationships. What do you mean by that and what can someone do if they fall into that particular bucket? I want to say that they don’t necessarily know they are doing it. It’s not like we intentionally go hide like I was doing it. It was never my intention to hide from my relationships. If you had asked me, I would have told you, “No, I wasn’t doing that.” Years ago, I was working with a coach and I was saying that I wanted to create this extraordinary marriage. He had me track my time and I came back a call later with my tail between my legs because when I looked at how I was spending my time, my husband was getting the breadcrumbs of my time at best. I had to look at what are the barriers. Why am I doing that? Why am I constantly sucked into my work even though I say this is a priority in my life? I think for women, we know how to be successful in business often. We know how to be successful in our work. We know how to measure our success in our work. There’s a lot of knowing there. When it comes to our more intimate life, sometimes, we don’t have as much control over there and it feels uncomfortable. I have had to learn how to surrender some of that. Need to have a plan and be organized. Need to know how much time it’s going to take. When you take all of those things into relationship, whatever relationship it is, it sucks the life out. There’s no space for spontaneity or being present when your mind is constantly thinking like how long is it’s going to take and all the things I have to do. That was a huge barrier in my marriage because I wasn’t being present when I was there. You said a lot there, as far as being present in your marriage. When you finally identified that, what are some things that you started to change so that your work didn’t overtake your life even though it was unintentional. What are some action items that you physically started doing so that you can start changing that around? There is so much here, but I had to start challenging. I had a hard time relaxing and most hyper-achievers do. You even said that. Even would say like I don’t want to relax. I don’t enjoy relaxing. I enjoy productivity, but I knew something was off and wasn’t right. I had to almost force myself to create pockets in my day of relaxation because I knew intellectually that that’s what I needed. I was too wound up all the time, living life on the edge of my seat and a little tense in my tummy, and I knew something had to change. I had to initially force myself to do it, knowing that and telling myself that this is productive and that this space away and rest for my brain is only going to fuel my work, my business, and the rest of my life. I had to force myself, and then I started to reap the rewards and started to realize that I do enjoy it. I come back to my work with far more creativity, inspiration, and presence to be with my clients too. I have heard that when people say, “I want to work until 8:00 or 9:00 at night because you are being more “productive.” After so many hours of you working, your brain gets tired and you are not nearly as productive after your eight-hour day. You are probably half as productive in the next 2 or 3 hours. Taking that time to, first of all, exercise. Things like meditation and sleep are huge things, and I’m guilty of like, “I’m going to work late into the night,” and then I end up with five hours of sleep and then I’m exhausted the next day. I’m like, “Why did I stay up late working?” I’m sure you’ve done some of that too. One hundred percent. One thing you said is that period of the day where you find yourself busy but not accomplishing or being effective. I would notice that at 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon, I’d be doing stuff on my computer, but I wasn’t doing anything or accomplishing anything because I’d reached that point of brain exhaustion. That’s a good pocket of time to step outside, take a little walk, or go in your garden. It doesn’t have to be big. The message is you can start to do things and make some simple changes in your life in tiny little pockets that over time start to ripple. Now, I may work at night and I may not work during the day because I set my own schedule, so I have flexibility there. I still love to work a lot, but I work now with much like a higher quality of energy than I did because I’m investing my energy and my productivity in all areas of my life instead of one. “You can start to make some simple changes in your life in tiny little pockets that, over time, start to ripple.” – Carla Reeves Click To Tweet Another thing that we talked about is being able to clean up your life from the inside out. Is that something we have been talking about, or is that different? A little bit. That ties back to my story when I was checking the boxes trying to make the outside life. It looked good, but inside I was empty. I knew there had to be a different way of doing life. I started coming back to myself and cleaning up my thinking and what are the thoughts I’m allowing in my mind all day, every day. How is my thinking impacting the quality of my life? How are those old beliefs and outdated ideas impacting my actions? It was cleaning up that inside that then starts to ripple to your actions and the way you perceive what’s happening in your life. How do you think someone in the corporate world that is working a lot and that has to work a lot? Let’s say a lawyer. Lawyers are known for working many hours or even medical students. They are required to work crazy amount of hours. When your schedule at work is out of your hands, can they even do this type of cleaning from the inside out? You can. You have to have a commitment. You have to have something that you want that’s bigger than all the reasons and excuses that are going to come up because they are there. For me, it’s always been like I had some mission that led me to do that inner work. Some mission that I was on, it was to figure out how to be a happy mom, to have a great marriage, or to work differently. I have been working on working differently in a different state of mind and physical being, so I’m not so stressed all the time. There has to be a desire, but if there’s a desire, I think absolutely. I think that it can happen in small pockets like we are talking about of time if you start to look at your day. I have been doing a little bit of work inside a company and one of the leaders got on one of the calls and said, “The company is not going to set these boundaries for you. You have to be willing to set them yourself.” That’s key is where is your health and your well-being on the priority list because the company isn’t going to establish that for you? It can look like not checking your email for the first 30 minutes of your day and centering yourself and doing a little movement. Like you said, exercise or meditation. Stepping away from your desk at lunch. You are not required to sit there through lunch and your mind may be telling you that you have to, but you have to challenge that. What time are you stepping away at night, and when you do, are you setting work down? Are you taking that with you so then you are not present with your family? You feel guilty for that and it ripples. I have a standing desk now, which is one of the things that I make sure because sometimes I’m like, “I have been sitting for so long. My desk.” Now I have an alarm at 2:00 every day. I stand for at least an hour, sometimes longer. They say sitting is a new smoking. Sitting is so bad for you to be there for so many hours. It’s important to have, like you said. Go outside. Take a lap around the yard or whatever because movement is that important. I love that you said the alarm on your phone. That’s a great little strategy. Something else that is poignant is my client’s journal with me online. Journaling is a tool we have talked about, but that’s a great tool. I have a few clients who get a worksheet and it asks a question like, “At the end of the day, what were the highlights of your day?” These are very productive and high-achieving women. I will tell you that work items never show up on that list. It’s like it was a moment when I was snuggling with my child on the couch, laughing in the kitchen with my husband, or I was playing cards. It’s always these simple little things. If we can make more time for those simple little things, add those to your to-do list. Put them on your to-do list so that they become part of your productivity because they are productive. They are some of the most productive things we can be doing. Some people have a morning and evening routine, so you can incorporate it. As far as creating deep, rich, and fulfilling lives, I know we have already been talking about some of that, but what are some changes that you’ve seen in your clients create so that they are able to create that fulfilling life? I had a client a number of years ago. She had told her story on my podcast. I know she’s okay telling the story. When I met her, she came into coaching and she said, “Help me get to retirement.” Retirement was two years away. I told her, “I’m not okay with that.” If I help her survive until retirement, in her mind it’s like, “I will be able to relax and put my priorities as number one.” At the time, she wasn’t spending the time in the relationship she wanted, with her elderly mom or her teenage son. She was head of HR, running a huge department responsible for lots of things and wanted to leave a legacy, and she didn’t feel she could do both. I told her, “If you don’t break these cycles right where you are, you won’t know how to do it when you retire. You’ll fill your life with other things because you’ve never built that muscle.” We worked hard and challenged that. She was one that had that over responsibility. Once she could see what was driving her and that it was outdated, it wasn’t necessary anymore, and it was preventing her from elevating her team so that she could leave a legacy. She started to address that and make some changes over time that allowed her to start to take a lunch and leave at a reasonable hour, elevate her personal relationships, and set her team up to leave. She’s retired now and knows how to cultivate that in her life, and so that’s what it is.

You said so much there. Let me think about this because I listened to a podcast not too long ago about the challenges people have when transitioning from the work-life to retirement life. I love the fact that you said to her that you were not okay with her surviving for the next two years because you are absolutely right. Once she got to the retirement, she wouldn’t know how to do it. The moral of the story is don’t put up with it. Don’t survive. Go back to being present and making those little changes we have been talking about so that you can enjoy your life. We have all heard it. Wherever you go, there you are. When you go to retirement, you are still going to be doing all the crazy making, and so address it now. The fear for her was that, “If I do this, I’m going to be less effective at work. I’m going to be a less effective leader. My legacy isn’t going to be as good,” and that was not true. That was the lie the brain was telling her, but she was able to elevate those things. Qhat I would say to your readers is you have to challenge that voice that says, “I’m going to lose this,” and look at what you are going to gain and look at the untruth of that because she elevated her leadership in making those changes. In your coaching, I find that a lot of our readers and I had sent out surveys when I asked them what some of their biggest challenges are. There are two things. The first one is, “I’m not good enough.” The second one is, “I’m not deserving,” and the third is the imposter syndrome. They are going to discover that I’m either 1 of those 2 things. Not good enough or not deserving. What do you tell your clients when they come to you with something like that? I believe that we all have those statements for one. We all have those feelings. I have all those things. We all live with those, but they are part of that survival model and they are like the, “I’m not good enough,” and, “I’m not deserving.” Those are the engine of the survival model. When you are living in a survival model, you are either trying to prove those things wrong or when things aren’t going right, you are collecting evidence for how they are true. It’s hard to sustain happiness or fulfillment when you are constantly in that model. We are either surviving and proving and trying to overcome something. Get out of that model is the answer because it’s a no-win game. It is. It keeps you and that’s what I was in. It’s exhausting because if things are working out in your life, you feel pretty good, but then when something goes awry or you don’t get the feedback you want, or you get some negative feedback, it sends you in a spin feeling like you have to do more, be better, work harder, and on and on. I got exhausted in that. It is an old, outdated model and we have to start looking at, “If we are going to build a life, who do I want to be? Instead of living under, “I’m not good enough.” Like, “Who do I want to be and what’s calling my life forward?” Start aligning your behaviors and actions to that, and that’s when life starts to change. It sounds easier than maybe it is because some of those feelings are emotional and painful. I totally agree with the emotional and the painful there. What are some concrete actions then that you think we could do? As you said, it’s easier said than done. For me, it’s always been writing like journaling. Writing is an incredible tool to empty the noise in your head because it gets noisy. We take out the trash in our homes every day. You have to take out the trash in your head. Journaling is a great way of getting it out, and then when you get it out, you can get a little bit of distance to say, “What’s running through my head on a regular basis? Is it helping me or is it hurting me? What can I do to start to change that?” “You have to take out the trash in your head. Journaling is a great way of getting it out.” – Carla Reeves Click To Tweet If you don’t feel like you can do it yourself in your writing, get some help to change those inner dialogues because they are with you 24/7, wreaking havoc, and they don’t need to be. You can learn to leverage your mind to move your life forward in a much more intentional way. Writing is a great way to step back and challenge those thoughts. Think about what it is you want and then ask yourself is, “What I’m thinking and doing moving me in that direction? If it’s not, what do I need to do to make some important changes?” I love the journaling piece and I’m going to bring you back to an exercise that we did at the Landmark Forum where you have your story in your head. Whatever trauma or story you have, the exercise was for you to write it down. They gave us 30 minutes to write down your story. There are 80 people in the room and everybody’s writing. At the end of the writing, you pair up with someone and you start reading your story to them. At first, everybody’s mad or intense, and then you read it over and over again until that story loses its power. At the end of the next 30 minutes, people are laughing and going, “I can’t believe. I have been so mad about the story, and then you let it go.” To your point, that’s what journaling does. It’s you are able to throw out the trash in your head by writing it down. I have had conversations with a couple of my friends where they write when something is off and the relationships or whatever. They go back to it the next day and they are like, “What was I thinking? That’s all the crazy that I got out of my head.” They were able to relax and let the situation go because it wasn’t as big as they thought it was. Does that resonate with you? On two different levels. I had a powerful experience with that exercise that I will never ever forget. I have my clients do that a lot. I have them do that actual exercise, but also on a smaller level of when you are upset. When you get upset or riled up about something, what are the facts and what’s the story you are telling yourself? As you described, those get collapsed and then we respond in our life from all that emotion and feeling. If you can separate the two, look at the facts, and choose how you want to respond to the facts, you will eliminate a lot of drama and suffering in your life. I have gotten better about asking my husband. Sometimes if he says something and I take it the wrong way, I’m like, “You said this and this is what I got from it. Is that what you meant?” He’s like, “No.” I do that too, and 99% of the time, he’s like, “Absolutely not,” and then we can address it and move on and it doesn’t destroy the whole day. It doesn’t fester. That’s the better word because I don’t know about men, but women tend to remunerate and you are constantly thinking about the same thing over and over. Have you addressed it? It’s like procrastination. You suffered because you have this anxiety over this one thing that’s looming over you. Had you done it, you would have avoided all that suffering. You eliminate a lot of that. Think of all the energy you harness by addressing those things more succinctly and quickly. That example of what I said with my husband also can apply to your corporate job. If someone at work says something to you and you take it the wrong way and it’s much better for you to be able to address it with the individual and have that open dialogue, whether it’s your boss or whomever. Instead of you thinking that they said X, Y, and Z about you, you are mad and need to blow it out of proportion when they didn’t mean anything by that. There’s this amazing podcast that’s called Hidden Brain, and all they do is talk to psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapists. One of the therapists on the show said, “I can give you a sure way method of reading someone’s mind.” They went through the whole episode and at the end she’s like, “Ask them.” It’s so true. If you want to read someone’s mind, ask them what they are thinking. In Landmark, they used to say we are meaning-making machines, and we are making things mean things all the time and it’s not true. It’s we are often wrong about what we think others are thinking.

Most of the time, other people are not even thinking about you. You are thinking that other people are thinking about you, but nobody’s thinking about you. It’s so true. I want to address what you said as far as putting meaning on things. For those readers, the Landmark Forum, you can look it up. They are still doing it. It’s a conference or three days of meetings, but to me it’s intense therapy and they are very structured on their whole process. One of the things that they are talking about all the time is a situation that happens to you. The facts happen, but then you make it mean, something completely maybe different, whether it’s good or bad meaning. Even like to the extreme like your spouse dies. You are putting the meaning on that there is so much pain and hurt there, when you’ve known along that the individual’s going to die. Not to minimize the fact that someone passed away, but the situation builds so big in your head. Whatever situation you have in life, it’s the meaning you attach to it that brings up all emotions. Landmark Forum is all about take the meaning out of it. It’s a situation. I was going through a bad divorce during that time. Every time I would get a letter from the lawyer saying, “You need to go to court,” I’d be like, “I have to go to court.” After Landmark, I would look at the letter and be like, “It’s just a letter.” Completely different. I came out of the Landmark Forum a completely different person. I don’t know if I came out of the forum differently, but I did the whole curriculum and it was absolutely life-altering and we attribute the marriage. We have to have those tools. It’s incredible. Did your husband do the Landmark Forum too? We met in the forum. He was a coach in the self-expression and leadership program. That’s where I met him. The cool thing about that is that you are both trying to do personal development. Whether you are working on your individual, your marriage, and then also your home and work life. The Landmark Forum can apply to anything. It is a fantastic organ organization. If anyone’s out there, google it. We have been talking for a little time now, but is there anything else that you think we are missing that we can highlight as far as you being present in your life, whether it’s your work life or your personal life? The thing I would leave people with is that misillusion that we need balance in order to have a great life. We have been taught this work-life balance in our culture, and everyone feels like they don’t have it, and then you feel like you are failing and never going to get there. The seeking balance is creating more problem than it is anything else. I would encourage people to look for alignment instead of balance. If you look at how I spend my time, I work a lot. I spend a lot of time working. I love my work. If you looked at the balance, it might be out of balance, but my priorities in my life are all taken care of and it’s more about quality than quantity. As I elevated the quality of the energy that I’m giving, these other important priorities like my children, my marriage, and my health, everything started to feel different. Even though I still love my work. I don’t think you need balance. I don’t think everything needs to be perfectly balanced because it never is. Certain seasons of our life require more of us in different areas. If you feel like the quality of your energy is being distributed to these other priorities, you can feel good even in a state of busy work, and you can feel like you are not neglecting these other parts. I could not agree with you more and that’s an enlightenment concept because you are right. Everybody at work, everybody’s like, “I don’t have work-life balance.” If we swap out that balance with alignment, it’s spot on. You are right. It is hurting more than helping because everybody is trying to achieve something that is not achievable. You then get resigned and you are like, “This is the way it is,” but it doesn’t have to be that way. That is a fantastic observation that you made. We have been talking for a bit, so could you give us maybe two tips? I know you’ve already given us a lot, but I like to leave readers with two more concrete tips on how they can apply the conversation to either their work or home life in this situation. I will give two. One is one we have already talked about, which is the journaling, but I’m going to reinforce it. For hyper-achievers and active minds, journaling is a great way to slow down your mind and that can ripple into everything. There are tons of resources out there. Start with a prompt but that can be incredible for your mind and the rest of your life. Two, it’s sitting down like we talked about to say, “Are the motions I’m making leading to the life I want to be living?” Looking at what are your priorities? Is the way you are spending your time and energy lining up to that? Don’t be surprised if it’s not because, for most of us, it wasn’t or isn’t. What’s one small thing you could start to adjust in your day? Whether it’s at 2:00 spinning your wheels hour, you get up and take a walk. Creating a no-agenda moment where you sit with your husband, spouse, or child, and you set down the agenda and be present to what you see, feel, and hear. That will be an incredible gift to you and everyone around you. Those are great tips and everything that we have been talking about. As you said, I’m going to go back to something that is in your bio where you live a juicy, rich, and meaningful life every day. Not do the I will be happy one thing because that doesn’t serve anyone It doesn’t mean that everything’s going great in your life all the time, but you can be present and engaged and feel like you are being intentional. It’s not having this perfect life but showing up powerfully to your life every day. You feel like you are in the lead instead of your to-do list running you. Also pausing to feel your feelings because otherwise, you are not feeling, you are avoiding. All of that avoidance is no good for being present. Even the question of what were my favorite moments of the day? Carla, thank you so much for this wonderful conversation. Any final words that you want to leave the readers with? Just take something that stood out to you in our conversation now and put it into action. Remember that it’s small steps over time that create these big larger changes that we want. Look for the little pockets in your day or the little moments where you do something slightly different that alters the rest of the day. “It's small steps over time that create these bigger changes that we want.” – Carla Reeves Click To Tweet Thank you so much for being on the show. I appreciate the conversation and you have given us a ton of value, so thank you. Thank you so much for having me and I can’t wait to have you on my podcast. Sounds good.

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I don’t know about you, but I learned something new now because Carla’s insight on the whole work-life balance was incredible. Work-life balance is essentially unattainable, and we as human beings feel bad all the time because we don’t have that work-life balance, and she even used her hands as a scale. As that’s unachievable, we need to think about it from a different perspective. I think that insight was pretty huge. We also talked essentially about cleaning up your life from the inside out. Meaning that you have to reign in your work hours so that you spend time taking care of yourself. When you take care of yourself, then you are open to have authentic relationships with your loved ones and be present at the same time. I think that is essential in our lives, so that we are happy and fulfilled in our career and personal relationships. Carla gave us two great tips. The first tip is journaling. She said that when you journal, it slows down your brain and pretty much has a ripple effect on everything. It’s like emptying your trash can. There’s so much stuff in your head that when you journal, you ta you get all that stuff out of your head and you are able to decompress a little bit. That’s the way I look at journaling because I journal all the time. When you journal and you get out that craziness in there, then it’s almost like a release. Journaling is fantastic. Tip number two, she asks, “Are the motions you are making leading to a life you want to be living,” and look at what your priorities are. If you work 10 to 12 hours a day, that’s not healthy for you and certainly not healthy for your relationship. Should you be working 10 to 12 hours a day? Probably not. I’m almost positive that most employers are not going to be requiring you to work 10 to 12 hours a day. Look at your priorities and where you are spending your time. When you put both of those tips together, they make a difference in your life and you can apply those to your life right now. The last thing to do is to remind you to be brave, be bold, and take action.

Important Links

Carla Reeves
Podcast – Differently
Hidden Brain
https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/reevescarla/
https://www.Instagram.com/carlasreeves/

About Carla Reeves

Carla Reeves is known for her compassionate, direct and truth-telling candor. For over a decade, ambitious leaders have relied on Carla to call out their blind spots, challenge their thinking and expand their perspective. Carla believes in ditching the illusion that life will be great “someday” in the future and teaches leaders how to wake up their thinking to create and live a juicy, rich, meaningful everyday life, now.