And it constitutes an existential crisis for marketers, copywriters, and business coaches worldwide.

Ask any of these professional hustlers hired to package freedom and they’ll tell you that you can’t. No one wants that shit.

No one lies awake in bed at two in the morning, riding the fading buzz of three too many glasses of wine, fretting about if only I were more free….

Except that they do.

Proof positive? During a questionnaire experiment that I opened up recently on my website where I asked people what they were struggling with and how they most desired to feel in their lives, 100% of respondents listed “free.”

100%. All of them. Every last one.

We can conclude one thing: everyone wants freedom, but no one exactly knows what it looks like.

Will money set you free?

Will this designer handbag?

A different job? No job? Moving to the south of France to run a bed and breakfast?

Getting married? Getting divorced?

Will you be free when you write your new York Times best selling novel, or when you lose the thirty pounds?

When you appear on the cover of Vogue?

When you’ve saved a million dollars in your retirement fund? Two million? Seven?

This is why marketers don’t want to sell you freedom. They want to sell you a thing, and tell you that it will make you free.

Much easier to control your buying behavior that way, and to steer your impulses.

But since everyone wants freedom and nobody knows how to define it, it’s imperative that we explore it and discover its shape and texture for ourselves.

For me, freedom started within my own body. I was lucky — or maybe just stubborn and frustrated and angry and afraid — enough to stumble my way into a bodywork modality that allowed me to relax my jaw, to breathe a little easier, to get comfortable inside my own skin.

And, funny, when the constraints inside my body released, I didn’t have a lot of tolerance left for those inside my life.

I don’t think I ever would have left the corporate world if it hadn’t been for this experience.

Maybe I would have tried in fits and spurts to start my own business, to do my own thing. But I know for DAMN sure, I wouldn’t have stuck with it like I have, through the lows and then the lows that were even lower than those, and then the deepest darkest pits of despair and self doubt and fear and uncertainty.

It was the personal, physical experience, the actual felt sense of freedom inside my own body that fortified my capacity to push onward, to design my own guns and then stick to them with tenacity.

When times were tough and I wondered if I could ever actually have a realistic business on my own that would support my life, there were always the voices of reason whispering — or, more often, full on shouting — that I could get a “real” job.

(P.S. When can we stop referring to traditionally white collar corporate work as “real” jobs thereby inferring that all other manner of earning an income is, what, a “fake” job? Now, please? )

I don’t care how much positive thinking or how many mantras or how much number crunching happened around my circumstances. No amount of rah-rah personal development nor sheer practicality could do what an experience of freedom could: keep me relentless committed to my goals. No backsies.

This is why I created The Space Lab. Very nearly everything I come across spanning the realms of psychology, personal growth, health and fitness are prescriptive.

They tell you what to do.

Some of it is helpful. Much of it is confusing. All of it is a system, or systems within systems.

The Space Lab is not structured in such a way. The Space Lab is a video series that creates the framework for you to explore how you move within your own skin.

Not to tell you how you SHOULD move, but to ask questions of your biology:

Can you move like this?

If not, why not?

What would it be like if you could?

How does it feel when your neck moves freely, when your breath flows into your lungs like water filling a glass, when the constrictions fade away?

What do you have to let go of to be in this state, and is it worth it?

How do you move in your body, and how do you want to move?

Because how you move your body is how you move through life. I’m not talking literal translation here. I’m talking about the quality of your movement, which is something rarely, or never, talked about in classes on stretching or fitness.

I’m talking about the pliability of your tissue, the level of relaxation in your spine (yes, your poor spine, so burdened by the mental construct of being a “column” when its true function is more like that of a spring or a slinky).

Do you walk lightly across a room, full of softness and wonder? Or are your steps heavy and stiff, weighed down by obligation?

It has been my experience that changing how you move your body has profound implications on stripping away the layers of shoulds, the commitments that don’t serve, the social contracts that burden.

It reveals the truth of you in glaring, fluorescent light — undeniable and raw.

It’ll give you more direction in life than a thousand Google searches for advice on following your passion ever could.

It’s not for the faint of soul.

But if it’s for you, if you’ve tried all the other ways, if you still find yourself flailing your fists against the walls of a too-small life…

I offer up The Space Lab as a guidebook upon your journey.

The post For The People Who Find Themselves Up At Midnight Googling “What’s My Life Purpose…” appeared first on Sukie Baxter.

If you’re flailing against the walls of your life, begging for release.

If you’re angry that you tried so hard and did all the right things and followed the rules set forth, and still you’re locked in a prison.

If that prison is of your own making, yet you can’t find your way out.

For all the times you’ve thought, “If only I could….” only to discover that owning the handbag / juicing ever day / getting skinny / getting rich / getting the house, the husband, the designer sofa never made you feel any happier or more secure.

Let me introduce you to The Space Lab, a video practice suite that introduces you to you.

Because you haven’t lost your way. You’ve lost your SELF.

The post Stretch Your Body. Expand Your Mind. appeared first on Sukie Baxter.

Every passer by snags a bill, one by one, liberating them from your frozen fingers without eye contact, no glance of gratitude, the presence of the money assumed, as though they were entitled to it — not an unexpected bonus, but rather just compensation for the very fact of your existence.

Eventually, you run out of cash, but those strangers aren’t short on expectation. When you stop ponying up the free dough, their entitled fingers clutch at whatever else they can snag — a necklace, gold earrings, your hair, your attention and affection, your time, energy, emotions….your soul.

The world will take from you, if you let it. And you will let it.

The dents and dings of the world are obligations — the shoulds, the musts, they crush your soul and your body, they diminish your desire and cramp your heart.

People seem to think that owning space is something you do “out there,” barreling forth, flag in hand, piercing the earth with its standard and staking claim to your territory.

But this is an empty act when the space within you is dented and dinged like a crushed tin can, smashed under the weight of external obligation.

Your shoulders crunched, chin ducked to protect your vulnerable throat.

Ribs clenched, diaphragm constrained, voice box confined.

Knees tightened to pull your sensitive feet off this overwhelming earth, as though you could draw yourself up, up and out of your body and just leave it all behind.

If you give parts of yourself away consistently, people are going to keep expecting that you’ll do that. And they’ll reach for more even when you say no. And they’ll become angry and belligerent when suddenly you refuse.

If you don’t actively stop people from taking, they’ll keep taking.

I can’t tell you how to own your space. It looks different for everyone. Owning your space is a simple — but not easy — act of being yourself.

I can’t tell you how to be yourself. Nobody knows how to do that, except you.

What I can do is guide you to places beneath the programming and conditioning, to deep levels in your biology, releasing the tension of obligation, until the you at your core is free to emerge.

It’s a process of uncovering, of peeling back layers, of gently blowing oxygen into the crunched and damaged corners of your body and soul, inflating them, opening them, easing them.

It’s dissolving the tension in your body, loosening the muscles that ache and bind and constrain.

It’s freeing the tendrils of desire in your heart, infusing their longing throughout every cell in your body.

A lot of personal development focuses on how to think or act or behave, teaching habits, mantras, even foods you should eat.

Those prompts from other people about how to live your life, those are costumes, put on like children’s dress up. And like costumes, they’re assembled from random findings, second hand clothes, ill fitting, the sleeves a bit too short, the shoulders a touch too tight, the unraveling hem dragging in the mud.

What I want for you is to be done with costumes, to design a way of walking through the world that not only works for you, but emanates from you.

A way of living that allows you to fully occupy the space within your own skin, space that is inherently yours by the very fact that you are here on this earth.

This is what The Space Lab is all about.

Learn more >>

The post The World Will Take From You If You Let It. And You Will Let It. appeared first on Sukie Baxter.

And then you see The Thing. You know, that thing. It doesn’t matter what it is — a photograph, a long-unopened box sealed with yellowing tape, and artifact from another life in another time when you were another person.

And suddenly the two hour project of cleaning your closet is transformed into prolonged ramble down your memory rabbit hole.

The rock music converts to melancholy tunes reverberating from the past. The coffee transforms into wine. The crisp sunlight of noon fuzzes into the hazy caress of twilight.

Hours later, emotionally spent, you clamber across piles of closet jetsam, slipping under your sheets, with some solid escapist fiction because you just. can’t. anymore.

That closet cleaning project that should have taken a mere couple of hours is now a monumental affair spanning weeks or months. And sure, when it’s done, deliverance. All the relief and openness and joy and freedom.

Creative projects are often like this. Kitchen remodels, living room redecoration, website redesign, paintings, book writing, art making — they all seem to take much longer than planned.

What seems so crisp and well-defined in your mind turns out to be a tangle of loose threads and lost directions.

If only you could push print on your brain, it would all slide out of your interior clear and unclouded. Unfortunately, creativity is conveying dream logic that makes every kind of sense in the nethermost hours of sleep, but whose sequencing evaporates upon articulation.

This is how it went with my signature program, The Space Lab. This endeavor that I aspired to release into the world a year ago, she had her own ideas and timeline for growth. Like a plant sprouting out of the earth, I had no power over her speed of germination other than to hover over her and plead, “Grow, grow.”

But, alas, she is here. I am not in the habit of assigning gendered pronouns to inanimate objects — really. But The Space Lab was born female, tempestuous and fierce.

The Space Lab is a warrior of freedom. For all her wild energy, she moves slowly and with the subtlety of magic, infusing the most profound spaces of your body and soul with life until you find yourself, almost without realizing what has happened, transformed — alive.

She started as something completely different, a program designed to change posture. And that she still is, but also so much more.

When I originally released the content within this program, I didn’t know how it would land. I didn’t know the impact it would have. It was cooked spaghetti tossed against a wall to test which noodles would stick.

The response from my small initial group was beyond expectation, or even hope.

“This works.”

“I feel better.”

“I’m in love with these videos.”

And one woman asked: But how? Why does this work? It seems so subtle.

In a world addicted to extremity in all things, framed by a culture that employs brutality in the name of results, how could something so soft, so quiet, something as transparent as the breeze, how could it harness the ferocity of a hurricane?

I didn’t know for sure, but a tiny inkling deep in my brain tickled my awareness. I stalked it relentlessly until exposed in the spotlight of knowledge, it confessed its truth.

Time and speed are the genius of The Space Lab. Somewhat ironically, in our rush to hasten, well, just about everything, we’ve effectively impeded our own progress.

In our hurry for haste, we find ourselves stuck, ever circling on the banks of a crevasse with no bridge to the other side, scurrying around like rats chasing a constantly rolling wheel of cheese we can’t catch while simultaneously never moving forward, really.

And the upshot of all this frenetic movement isn’t well-being. It isn’t even health, or productivity, and it certainly isn’t happiness.

It’s exhaustion. Burnout. Anxiety. Despair.

It’s tears at midnight. It’s bile rising in your gut at the screech of a Monday alarm, text messages to friends that grant tiny vents to the volcano roiling beneath your placid facade.

It’s pain, aches, stiff spines and sore joints — the stuff you shrug off as aging, or a result of “too much sitting.”

It’s the death of desire, and, after, the bloody massacre of dreams.

It’s the demolition of hope.

We are hurrying and scurrying, looking for something — for purpose, for connection, for validation of our existence. We’re looking for that thing that will make us feel actually alive.

We look for it in foods and fad diets, in coffee laden with butter, in clothes and purses and jewelry, in Instagram-worthy vacations. We look for the tangible markers of a life well-lived, trophies catalogued and exhibited for the world to see on social media.

And yet, paradoxically, it’s not by speeding up that we find our wholeness, but in slowing down, in moving with intention and awareness, in actually feeling ourselves move through the world. Actually sensing the state of being alive.

And that’s not something that can be bought or acquired from outside you. It happens from within. It happens in your nervous system.

As per the work of psychologist Peter Levine, the nervous system of a normal and healthy organism vacillates between activation and rest, sometimes many times a day.

The key here is that you have both sides of the equation — the activation, and the discharge, or rest. Most of us don’t get that second part. Most of us exist in chronic activation, frayed wires throwing sparks, charring everything around us, afraid to rest or let down or slow down because gotta get that (ever moving, impossible to catch) cheese.

You’re at capacity. You’re over capacity. You can’t handle more. More results in an electrical fire, impossible to extinguish until it extinguishes you.

And it tears you down. It tears and your thoughts and emotions, and later your muscles and bones and organs. It literally — literally — frays your nerves.

The Space Lab gives you back that natural, normal swing. It eases the activation in your system. It untangles the years of psychological bondage ingrained in your muscles and dissolves the rubble of past trauma littering your soul.

It gives you options. New space. Not space outside you — space inside you.

The Space Lab lets you breathe again.

That’s why it’s called The Space Lab. It’s not about space out there — it’s about the space in here, in your heart, in your mind. Space to breathe, to stretch out and get comfortable in your own skin.

It’s about popping out the dents and dings of life, uncrumpling the puckers and creases, shaking out the shriveled corners, gently, gently.

Fanning life back into your soul.

And, like any creative project, this requires time and space.

Learn more here.

A somewhat lengthy Post script that could probably be its own blog post but isn’t because i decided it should just stay here.

I’m supposed to sell you on this program — that’s what they say. I’m supposed to tell you about the features and benefits and how it will solve all your problems.

It will relieve all your pain! And make your posture perfect! And you’ll be the kickiest-assest leader at your organization and make all the monies! And your dog will stop digging holes in the back yard and your cat will be instantly toilet trained!

Just kidding. Everyone knows you can’t train a cat to do anything.

Anyway, this societal demand has kept me from releasing my work — at least, this aspect of my work — into the wider world for a long, long time. Because the honest truth is that this work doesn’t solve your problems. It’s not a silver bullet or a magic wand (though I do keep a sparkly one of those in my office for extra difficult emergency cases).

I am of the opinion that this dynamic in and of itself is a huge, huge issue right now that affects our lives in many insidious ways.

We are conditioned — primed and readied — to look for and expect instant solutions. This is predatory behavior, and it negates your sovereignty and internal wisdom. If I condition you to expect instant solutions, and then I magically produce one, you will be triggered to buy whatever I’m selling.

I seek to disrupt this conditioning. True healing doesn’t happen in an instant. This expectation is not only unrealistic, it’s downright harmful to our bodies and our psyches.

The Space Lab will not instantly solve your problems. You will likely notice some instant changes.

But what it really does — and its true intention — is give you space and perspective. Even if I could change everything for you in a moment, would it really be to your benefit?

Lottery winners frequently tear through their winnings, winding up just about where they were at before the windfall.

If I picked you up and air dropped you into a random location somewhere on earth, no matter how amazing the place, you’d have no idea where you were, no context for your location.

Same goes for if I took you inside a building while you were asleep. You’d wake up having zero clue where the doors and exits were.

Sudden changes like these are disorienting. It’s hard to recognize yourself. You have to know how you arrived at a location so that you know how to come and go at will, and that takes time. (And space.)

The Space Lab gives it to you. It grants you room for your own genius to arise, to solve your problems.

If you had a huge tangled knot to untie, you wouldn’t even attempt it with both ends of the rope pulled taught. You’d feed in some slack so that you could pick apart the tangled threads, easing a bit of space in here and there until you can slide this loop under that one and voila, the knot comes free.

But it’s impossible when the ends are pulled tight. You’ll never get it undone.

And yet, this is how we approach our problems — with effort, and force, and aggression. With a “more is more” approach. With demands for before and after picture perfect results.

Which is exhausting, if you ask me.

So, if you’re tired, and run down, and burnt out, and stiff and achy and sore, if you know things need to change but you’re not quite sure what or how, if you don’t know what you want but you do know this sure as hell isn’t it, if you need some space and perspective…..

Let me introduce you to The Space Lab. She’ll be elated to meet you.

The post The Creative Process Is a Recalcitrant Mule. (P.S. The Space Lab Has Landed.) appeared first on Sukie Baxter.

Squeezed between “answer the 8,762 emails in my inbox” and “deliver completed manuscript of book to agent,” you’ll generally find a few so-called me things.

Like, get a pedicure.

Book a massage.

Go to yoga class.

Guzzle a bottle of cabernet.

Okay, maybe not that last one. You wouldn’t put that on a list.

(After all, who wants the whole internet to know that they’re knocking back bottles of wine every night just to hold it together? I joke.)

Anyway, your list — mental or otherwise — probably has a few of these items on it. Maybe they’ve been there for months or years without actual completion. Maybe you’ve got a weekly date with your favorite meat tenderizer — err, massage therapist.

Maybe you don’t even like massages but you think you should get one, because self care and all that.

You might even have a little guilt about doing these activities. Guilt when you’re not doing them because you know you have to take care of yourself.

Guilt when you are doing them, because, well, you should be working.

Isn’t that the rub? (Pun intended, of course.) Taking care of yourself makes you feel like crap because of internalized expectations of productivity.

There are two fundamental causes that make self care seem like cotton candy.

The first is that, culturally, we’ve relegated self care to the realm of women. Massages? Pedicures? Manicures? Getting your hair done?

Men do these things, sure. But predominantly, these activities are seen as “girlie,” designed to manufacture some ornamental feminine ideal.

And “women’s things” are made cute or ineffectual, painted pink and dolled up to be delicate, fragile, silly….frivolous.

The second cause is that we exist, in our capitalistic society (which does not respect the borders of our sovereign nation, the United States of America, but snakes its tentacles into the global economy), beneath the Culture of Productivity (aka The Evil Empire).

The Culture of Productivity states that you shall at all moments of your waking life be producing something of value, whether it provides value for your employer (work efforts), your family (cooking, cleaning, chauffering of children, etc), your relationship (emotional labor) or your culture (which usually includes performing some unachievable perfect ideal).

The Culture of Productivity ingrains in you a preference for doing over being.

Which makes anything closely resembling self care look from the outside and feel from the inside like frivolity in its finest form.

But why does it matter if self care is frivolous? So what? Shouldn’t we all just gut it out and work harder, nose to the grindstone and all that?

What about old fashioned work ethic?

Let me introduce you to the creative’s dilemma….

If you are reading this, you are likely creative. I run with a creative crowd.

Creatives, well, make things. Creatives are the wizards of our society, coaxing dissimilar thoughts, feelings and commonplace elements of our reality to coalesce into liquid gold.

And you, as a member of the relentlessly creative, don’t do this because you want to. You do it because it’s part of your cellular make up. Creating — art, works of literature, business ventures, humanitarian relief efforts, healing modalities, programs, collaborations, and so on — is something you can’t not do, as truly as you can’t not breathe.

About that dilemma I mentioned…. a problem arises when relentless creatives are thrust into a culture of productivity. Creatives produce, all right. But creativity doesn’t happen on demand.

Creativity requires space. It requires time to foment, for the alchemical reactions to materialize.

You can’t make chemistry happen. You don’t smash elements into one another and demand that they combine.

In fact, some substances, when combined in large amounts, won’t mix. You must move ever so slowly, adding one substance to another drop by drop, carefully.

Anyone who has ever made simple mayonnaise knows this is true.

Creativity is much the same. You introduce the raw ingredients into a space. You allow them to mingle, to mix, to dance a sensual tango with one another.

And the sum of the parts is often more than the parts themselves.

The upshot is that creativity requires time. It requires space.

Sure, you can hammer out a few works quickly, forcibly ejecting them out of your cells and your soul, ripping them from your very core.

But the emotional exhaustive backlash that rebounds will knock you flat. This is a state that we so blithely refer to as: burnout.

This demon possesses other names. Exhaustion, writer’s block, existential crisis are among them.

Returning to self care for a moment: we are made to feel that taking time for our selves, for our souls, time to repose, to stew our creative cauldrons, that that time is wasted.

And maybe it is….for someone else. Because that time is time not spent amassing someone else’s fortune, or caring for someone else’s emotional hygiene, or performing a pretty and ornamental role that makes the rest of society feel all warm and fuzzy.

Self care time is time that you’re not showing up for the edification of someone else.

But beyond that, self care has been made to feel like silly stuff, “crap that men don’t have to care about,” as Laura Belgray puts it.

Self care is so much more than that. Self care is not about pretty nails and up-dos (or maybe just a really, really small percent of it is). Self care is about self nourishment.

About creating space, knocking down walls and barriers. It’s about healing wounds and building bridges. It’s about systems and structures that allow you to function as a more whole, resilient person in the future.

Resilience is really where it’s at. In my book, self care is about building neural resilience.

A person entrapped in the Culture of Productivity runs in what’s called high sympathetic activation — a state of constant fight or flight. Of course, running is rarely an option, and even if you did, you couldn’t escape the greater financial and legal system that obligates you to your overwhelming responsibilities.

Fighting isn’t really valid, either. What exactly would you fight?

You do see people try, through legal channels, or sometimes through media.

Most often, people get stuck in the third option — freeze. Freeze is a state of just being, existing, numbness.

Often their bodies reflect this with stiff joints and muscles that don’t move or bend or stretch (and we wonder why we hurt more and more as we get older).

Your sympathetic branch of your autonomic nervous system, when activated, also causes tunnel vision. Imagine you’re a rabbit being chased by a wolf. Are you going to stop and notice the beautiful poppies in the field you’re frantically tearing through in fear of your life?

No.

Sympathetic activation — fight or flight — is the enemy of creativity.

What we term creative burnout — or any of the other names this demon masquerades under — is really a state of chronic activation.

Enter neural resilience.

A resilient nervous system can take on activation, deal with the immediate circumstances, and discharge back into a neutral state of relaxation.

In fact, this pendulum swing from activation to relaxation is your natural state of being. This is normal. Chronic activation (aka The Culture of Productivity) is abnormal.

We can only sustain the Culture of Productivity because we’ve converted human beings from living creatures into disposable resources. The Culture of Productivity exists to squeeze you like an orange, extracting your potent essence, only to discard the eviscerated skin and flesh.

There is always another orange behind you, ready to step in when you’re all used up.

This is what I seek to disrupt. This is what taking back our space is all about.

I believe that when our nervous systems are balanced and healthy, when we fully own our space, this is the place from which we can not only embody our own vast potential, but also change the whole damn world.

Because a healthy nervous system isn’t weighed down by the detritus of past trauma. It’s not closed off to the feelings and experiences of others.

A healthy nervous system receives information without being triggered, set off, blown up, exhausted or overwhelmed by it. A healthy nervous system perceives the world around it, all the colors and textures and nuances. A healthy nervous system can get around its own blocks to see the world form others’ points of view.

And a healthy nervous system can create. It can weave new products from disparate elements. It can shapeshift matter and time, twist reality into new constructs, bend and warp the fabric of the universe to encounter improbable solutions.

A healthy nervous system is not just a happy being — it’s an alchemist.

YOU are an alchemist. Or you can be, once you take back your space and truly own it.

P.S. Twelve years ago, I began working one on one with people and their aching bodies. Immediately, I noticed a powerful change happening inside people simultaneous with their external improvements in flexibility. I saw them brighten, stand taller and fully arrive in their bodies. I saw them take back their identities and their lives. I didn’t know what was happening — I thought it was magic.

And in a way, it is magic.

Years later, I created a movement program designed to go deeper into these changes and tested it with a small group of people. The feedback was phenomenal, but when one person said she couldn’t believe the changes and asked why such subtle movement made such a huge impact, I didn’t really have a good answer. I just knew that it worked.

But now I do. I now know that moving through the body is slow and subtle ways makes immeasurable impact both to a person’s physical range of motion and also to their mental and emotional flexibility because it regulates the nervous system.

It dissolves those frozen, congealed places inside your muscles and bones and ligaments — and your heart. Like magic, it gives you the power to observe the forces that shape you against your will, and when you see them, you can resist them.

This program is reborn, and today marks its first release in two years. I call it The Space Lab — explorations in taking up space. I’ll be doing a more formal release later this week, but if you feel so called, you can learn more about it here.

The post Why Does Self Care Feel Frivolous? appeared first on Sukie Baxter.

You’re running because, well, that’s what we all do. That’s what a person with good work ethic does, and the person who has a dream, or a vision. The person who not only wants to make things happen, but must.

Must because it’s part of their internal make-up. Must because they’re fed up. Because change needs to happen.

This needs to happen.

It’s the running that gets you there.

When you hear interviews with the people who have made it, the ones you admire, the ones with the platforms and the audience and the product sales and the god damn clout, they talk about the running — the long nights, the weary mornings, the thin margins.

Running gets things done. But….

Say I asked you to run a marathon. And it’s tomorrow. And you haven’t trained. For, like, two years.

Crazy, right? You’d say no way. (I hope.)

You would know that your body needs to build up the capacity to run that kind of distance. You would know that your lungs had to build up their oxygen capacity, that your muscles had to get stronger, that your heart needed an improved ability to circulate blood.

That running without training could actually be detrimental to your health. It could, in fact, kill you.

So why are you running the daily rat race without any training? Without developing your capacity to absorb the regular and consistent shocks of a frenetic life without disrupting your inner physiology?

Because it isn’t done. No one talks about it.

We’re all just somehow supposed to have the internal capacity to handle ever-increasing amounts of daily frenzy without losing our shit.

Well, look around you. How’s that working out?

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

A few days ago, I was watching a video about horse training, looking for tips to help me wrangle my mustang, who continues to be simultaneously my greatest joy, and my biggest frustration.

Something clicked.

The guy in the video started talking about horses and their nervous systems. Specifically, he referenced the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems.

And what he said coalesced disparate knowledge floating among various regions of my brain into one cohesive concept.

Horses get easily frightened. They’re prey animals; their survival relies on their ability to sense danger and run immediately, if not sooner. They’ll fight if they’re out of options, but they’re poorly equipped for battle.

For a rider, this instinct is a big problem. Because “danger” can be the guy on a neon-orange mountain bike who popped out of the bushes just a little too suddenly and frightened the horse.

Or a plastic bag blowing on the ground.

Or a loud, sudden noise.

Or…. (so many things).

You can’t possibly desensitize your horse to every damn thing. You don’t know the future and you don’t know what kind of stuff will come up.

And more to the point — as this horse trainer elucidated — once the stimulus occurs and your horse spooks, there’s really nothing you can do to fix the situation in that moment, aside from regaining control and hopefully not dying.

What you do instead is train them to move between activation and relaxation. You stimulate their nervous system, and then you soothe it. Take the horse up, bring him back down.

And what you’ll notice is the horse starts coming back to you. He startles when the neighboring horses gallop in their pasture, but he doesn’t run.

He tenses when you accidentally brush his body in an unexpected way, but he doesn’t move his feet.

Through this process, the trainer expands the horse’s window of tolerance — i.e. his capacity for frenzy.

Just like your lungs expand to take in and better utilize oxygen when you practice running.

And the horse also recovers faster.

Just like the heart rate of a fit person will drop more rapidly after an intense bout of exercise.

After some time — the amount of time will, of course, differ for every horse because, biodiversity — the horse can observe something scary without losing his shit (or his rider).

But at the moment of stimulus, it’s too late to engage the training. The training absolutely must occur before the frightening event, or the horse’s nervous system isn’t able to handle the stress and he loses it.

I’ve seen this happen with Shelby multiple times in the year that I’ve had him. Something is too much for him; it terrifies him and he checks out. His reaction is usually a blind bolt toward the nearest exit.

Imagine this same thing happening inside your head. Stress builds, your (untrained) nervous system gets activated, but it’s too much stimulus for your system to handle.

Your brain is a wild horse bolting for the horizon.

How the hell are you going to harness that?

Let’s ask a different question: what if you never got stressed beyond your ability to handle things?

Trust me, it’s far easier to catch a horse that isn’t bolting in the opposite direction.

In fact, I used to know a kung fu master who would run up mountains for conditioning. He wisely counseled me: if you never lose your breath, you don’t have to catch it.

Or, if your horse never bolts, you don’t have to chase him.

Put another way, if you expand your capacity for stress — your ability to handle unexpected change, overwhelming deadlines or sheer volume of creative demand — you won’t have to take weeks to recover.

You won’t have to run after your poor, wearied brain and coax it back to the barn because it’ll never leave in the first place.

This is exactly what Somato-Sensory Attention Training is about — it’s not just body awareness, it’s actually working to expand your resilience. To make you more able to handle life’s ins and outs without getting bent out of shape.

Check it out here >>

The post You Wouldn’t Run a Race Without Training, So Why Are You Running Through Life Without Conditioning Your Brain? appeared first on Sukie Baxter.

It used to flow so easily, as natural as breathing.

And then, something happened.

What started as a seedling — an idea, a side project, an artistic endeavor — grew into a message, an enterprise, a movement.

And that creation — formed entirely out of the substance of your thoughts dovetailed with soulful devotion — needs you. Its daily care and feeding requires your focus and attention and energy to corral the ongoing frenzy of running a high profile venture.

Decisions must be made. Fires dampened. Deals concocted and contracts penned. Who knew creativity could get so technical?

All this technicality and just the dailiness of running your creative venture has the paradoxical effect of siphoning your creative resources.

That’s a problem. Because no creativity? Means no growth.

And the last thing you want to do is coast.

This is a challenge a lot of change-makers, devoted actors, artists and craftsmen, thought-leaders, or influential founders and CEOs experience because, in a way, success comes pre-installed with its own glass ceiling.

Here’s the dilemma: you get to a place in your work where you’ve generated significant thought leadership and the infrastructure that goes with it, so now you’re running that infrastructure and trying to be a visionary at the same time.

The stress and frenzy materially and energetically suspend your creativity.

I call this inevitable hurdle: Creative Gridlock.

It’s the tension between sustaining what you’ve already built while simultaneously reaching for new levels of growth, and those who experience it are often committed to a cause or vision greater than themselves.

Let’s talk nerdy to each other….

The everyday frenzy of success is a form of neural activation.

And when your nervous system is activated, you’re primarily functioning from fight or flight, which is to say you’re in reactive mode.

There’s not a lot of time to contemplate the beauty of fall foliage when a tiger is in full pursuit. And let’s face it, we want to pretend we’re all evolved and intellectual now, but we still have that primordial survival software installed and operational.

So, there may not be a literal tiger with fangs poised for the kill, but only your neocortex knows that. The rest of your brain is running the same software it always has, and that chronic frenzy? Might as well be a predator about to pounce.

The “fight or flight” response is part of the sympathetic branch of your autonomic nervous system. Autonomic means it’s involuntary — you can’t consciously turn it on or off.

The sympathetic branch has a counterpart: the parasympathetic branch, which is responsible for rest and relaxation.

In a normal system, they have an inverse relationship, meaning they’re not both active at the same time. The healthy nervous system swings, as a pendulum would, between activation and relaxation in a nice undulating wave.

Why is this important for creativity and what the hell does it have to do with running anything, from a high-profile venture down to a local charity race?

I’m so glad you asked.

Back to that fall foliage…. you’re not looking at it when you’re running away from the saber-toothed tiger. Your focus is singular: escape.

I had a Spanish teacher in college who admonished our class, on repeat, “Nada surge de la nada,” or, “Nothing forms in a vacuum.” She meant that the literature we studied didn’t sprout fully formed from the minds of the authors; it had context — cultural context.

Creativity requires data. New information is its rocket fuel. Without it, your brain can’t ignite the chemical reactions of innovation. That chemistry is impossible without the inputs.

When the sympathetic branch of your nervous system is active, you go all tunnel vision and you don’t assimilate information from the environment around you. That means your creativity has no context — you’re in the proverbial vacuum.

Have you ever seen Olympic swimming? I love watching them flip underwater and push off the edge of the pool, rocketing through the water.

That’s what context does for your creativity — gives it a launch pad. Without that new information, it’s like trying to generate forward movement while floating in the middle of the ocean.

Sure, you can do it, but it’s a lot more work and you’re fighting against the waves.

A balanced, regulated nervous system is receptive to the subtle information around it, which gives rise to those all-important gut feelings that direct you toward opportunity and away from cliff edges.

Nervous systems (read: people) that function under a never-ending slew of demands can become overwhelmed and eventually disregulated.

The constant activation of ongoing and accumulated stress pushes you way up high outside of what’s called the “window of tolerance,” which leaves you functioning in a perpetual state of frazzle.

The window of tolerance is a neural bandwidth within which you function optimally, and it’s different for each person.

If a stimulus exceeds this window in either intensity (traumatic event) or length of exposure (chronic stress), you can get pushed above your tolerance threshold.

And then you lose perception. You’re disoriented, you get dissociated and you’re not present, so you can’t take in information.

You literally become blind to the environment that’s around you and time moves really fast because you’re mind’s not here in the moment.

All of which is death to creativity. Not to mention that you feel like complete crap in this kind of state.

(And let’s not even talk about its effect on relationships.)

Success culture tells you that muscling through is THE only ANTIDOTE to stagnation, BUT THE PROBLEM WITH CREATIVE gridlock IS THAT THE HARDER YOU WORK, THE MORE FROZEN YOUR INSPIRATION BECOMES.

Chronic neural activation locks you into the same loops of thinking, doing and perceiving. And you can’t see anything outside of those loops because you begin to react out of past conditioning rather than responding from a place of choice.

Neural activation causes you to freeze up, disconnect and even avoid triggering stimulus. It can provoke you into actions that maintain your status quo because your biology is focused purely on survival — getting through this moment alone.

But there is a way to vanquish Creative Gridlock.

And no, you don’t have to move to a mountain top to do it.

The problem with maintaining the infrastructure of success is that even if you take time off to decompress, the frenzy just builds while you’re away.

Listen, I love self care as much as the next person. Massages and facials, mani-pedi breaks and vacations on the beach are all lovely.

But when you come back, even if someone was able to cover for you in your absence, the frenzy awaits and it murders all the creative juice you built up on your break in its sleep.

The way to transcend the glass ceiling of Creative Gridlock isn’t to work harder. It isn’t to escape.

It’s to increase resilience.

Resilience is your ability to absorb shock — or frenzy — and spring back, like a trampoline, without warping or snapping completely.

And this is my work.

It’s body focused. Because, working through the body, we can restore the natural rhythm of your nervous system while simultaneously expanding your window of tolerance.

The wider your window, the more you can handle, like increasing the voltage you can run through your system.

(Not literally. Please refrain from sticking fingers in outlets. My work is powerful, but it won’t save you from electrocution.)

Together, we explore movement patterns looking for stuck or frozen or armored areas that are blocking and buffering your experience of the world, like rocks interrupting the flow of a river.

And we dissolve that armoring.

We peel away tension that literally and figuratively holds you back, siphoning mental and physical energy.

We de-mechanize your body and your brain, restoring you to your organic nature and form, creating the potential for new movements and new thought patterns to take shape.

We unwind old programming that perpetuates in your muscles and tissues and bones. We unclench your jaw, liberate your shoulders and free your body to express.

It’s almost like a meditation practice that follows you everywhere, because we’re not just changing what you’re doing; we’re changing how you move and breathe and occupy your skin.

We’re changing who you’re being.

And when you move through the world differently, not only do you perceive it differently — taking in previously invisible information — but it also responds back to you differently.

This work allows you to handle change easier, absorb shock better, manage a greater workload, and expand your capacity for frenzy.

In short, it helps you grow your leadership without sacrificing your soul in the process.

And, maybe most importantly, it brings you back to yourself.

This is my work, and if it speaks to you, then I’d love to work with you.

I’m now offering private, in-person training intensives where I teach you the tools of neural regulation so that you can vanquish Creative Gridlock, increase your capacity for centered living and return home to yourself.

I call this work Somato-Sensory Attention Training (yes, it’s a chewy mouthful). You can learn more about the work, about the intensives, and about how you can sign up for one, should you wish, here >>

The post The Biology of Creative Gridlock: Why Success Causes Stagnation appeared first on Sukie Baxter.

I was all, like, “Uh, me, no, I just do this bodywork thing, you know, healing work, uh, yeah, entrepreneur? No.”

But, of course, when you exchange a service for legal currency (or illegal currency, I guess), that’s what you have: a business. Which makes you an entrepreneur.

It’s not like I set out to be one, but rather my interests and studies and many small decisions along the way led me there.

Leadership is kind of the same way. No one goes through college saying, “I’m going to be a leader,” when parents and professors ask what they want to do with their liberal arts degrees.

When people at parties ask you what you do, you typically don’t pull back your shoulders in pride and tell them, “I’m a leader.”

Leadership is something that sort of happens. You have an idea, or a passion. You make art, you perform, you write jokes. Leaders are people who do things, and as a result of those things, a crowd gathers.

Day after day, year after year, you plug away at the small metrics. You launch the projects, sell the widgets, make of the art and perform to one person, then five, and then five hundred.

You craft and plan and troubleshoot and overcome. You strategize, you get scared, you call your mom in the middle of the night because you have no idea how you’re going to pull it off. (Mom always knows how to get shit done.)

Until, one day, you’re there. Your garage enterprise, initiated beneath the condescending stares of neighbors and eye rolls of parents who believe you’ll have to “face reality someday,” is a thriving, international enterprise with cashflow that boggles the minds of mere mortals.

Your art has garnered celebrity. A kagillian Instagram followers, a gallery show in NYC, a critically acclaimed documentary, speaking engagements galore.

“You’re so inspiring!” people shout at you (thankfully keeping the underwear throwing to a minimum). They love your work. They hang on your every word. They want to know what you think about everything, from current events to the best toilet paper brand.

Congratulations, you are now a leader.

Like it or not, people need you. They need your voice. They need your opinions. And most of all, they need your direction.

Maybe you didn’t think it would be like this. Maybe you just wanted to do your thing and be successful at it. Pay the bills. Eat real food. Move out of your parents’ attic. Live in a place with functioning heat in the winter.

But suddenly you’re at the helm, and everyone’s looking to you to steer this ship toward the vast visionary horizon.

Employees need to know what projects to launch. Art fans need to peer through your unique cultural lens. Your voice, like it or not, has weight. You matter.

So, how do you lead when leadership wasn’t exactly the goal?

In this age of “authenticity” (read: performing perfection), leadership has taken on a twisted aspect. We, the people, expect our leaders to inspire us to reach new heights. We expect vulnerability, but only the right type. Give us the gory details, but spare the TMI.

We want our leaders to have opinions, but crucify them when they change their minds. We crucify them for their opinions, too.

Entrepreneurs, executives and CEOs get slightly less public flack for this because, sadly, we expect those at the top to be ruthless killers stalking the almighty dollar, so corruption is assumed (I’ll be writing more on this in the coming weeks because, ick.) They still get a hefty dose, though.

Thought leaders face the public stocks on a near constant basis. Because being a thought leader requires having a damn opinion.

Do you know how many years I spent not having opinions? I didn’t know it at the time. I thought of myself as a strong, whip-smart woman making it on her own blood, sweat and tears (emphasis on the blood…. and the tears).

I had made myself permeable to the world, ghostwriting my personality to fit the exteriors of others until the daggers of insult would pass through my transparent flesh, leaving organs unharmed.

No overt opinions means nothing for criticism to anchor onto.

It’s dangerous to take a stand. It’s damn right terrifying to say: I believe this.

It’s like highlighting yourself with a neon bullseye in the middle of a black-lit paintball gun gallery.

How do you step out from, “Oh no, I’m just in my corner over here doing my small thing,” to thought leader?

Being a leader makes you a target. And if you didn’t exactly set out to be one in the first place, when you turn around and see the massive crowd of humans following in your wake, you might get scared.

Because before? You had nothing to lose. Gambling it all was fun and adventurous. Failure just meant maintaining status quo. But now, your dreams — and your success — are at stake.

You might pull back, shrink, make yourself — and your thought leadership — smaller.

You might not articulate quite as many opinions (what if I piss someone off?).

You might not make as much art (what if that success was just a fluke?).

You might not act on that next big, world-changing business idea (can I really risk everything I’ve achieved on this lark?).

You might hide at the top of your ivory tower, insulating yourself between layers of assistants and managers (what if these employees find out that I really have no idea what I’m doing?).

But that’s the last thing the world needs from you. You got here not because you clawed your way ferociously to the top, but because people saw value in you, in your ideas, in your vision. (Okay, okay, sometimes the claws came out, too. We do what we have to do.)

Because you — brilliant you — had the ability to create something from nothing. To take thoughts and transmute them into real, tangible things, things that the rest of us can see and touch and interact with.

And we need those things.

So how do you overcome this sticking point? This place where you are a leader, but you don’t necessarily know how to be one?

Conventional leadership advice — stuffy corporate guidance like “understand your leadership style” and “be a role model” — will fail the heartfelt thought leader. Because what this looks like isn’t actual leadership, but rather some contrived approximation: performing leadership.

And if you perform leadership, your followers will perform followship. That means the whole stinking dynamic is empty. The second a newer, flashier, fancier leader with better fashion sense pops on the scene, bye bye followers.

Also, this kind of performance zaps your energy. It’s exhausting to try to show up in a way that’s not real. That means you’ve got less time and energy to stay in your creative flow. And as a person who creates from thoughts, your creative flow is not some luxury, but downright essential.

Creativity is your lifeblood. You can’t grow into your next iteration if you can’t tap your creativity.

So, how to lead, then?

Leadership doesn’t have to be complicated. They want you to think it’s hard. They want you to think only a few people can do it, that you need “expert advice” to lead. That there’s some exclusive club of those who know how it works, and that you need All The Books to edumacate you.

It’s not hard. There’s really only one thing you need to know to be a rock solid leader. One. Thing.

Ready for the golden secret? Here you have it….

Make people feel safe.

That’s it. Make them feel safe and they’ll follow you through the very gates of Hell and back.

Listen: everyone’s searching for a way to be free. And freedom means being yourself — uninhibited, unrestricted.

Ironically, all this leadership training mumbo jumbo is aimed at extracting the highest levels of creativity, innovation and productivity — from yourself, from your team, from your employees, even your clients.

The more layers of “doing” you put on leadership, the more strategies you pile on, the more rules and mandates and structures and musts and how-tos, the more the effort shows.

It shows in tension. It shows in what we might call inauthenticity. It shows because it’s not real.

And we know real. We are programmed to read for real. When you’re disingenuous, even with good intention, everyone’s nervous system gets an uptick in activation.

Humans perceive incongruity as threat. We might not (probably don’t) consciously know it, but it’s happening, simmering beneath the placid surface.

That uptick in the nervous system? Closes us off. All of us — you included. It diminishes your capacity for emotional regulation and flexibility, for connection, empathy and intuition.

Maybe only slightly. Possibly profoundly.

But these are your tools. These qualities and abilities are actually what make a good leader — the ability to connect and relate and grow.

The ability to take in and assimilate information. The more threatened a person (or animal) feels, the less broad their focus becomes. You become threat-centric, perceiving only the fires that need to be put out right now, only the immediate perils to your survival.

This state of being amputates your vision. It impinges the messages from your gut. You lose those intuitive hunches, those creative bursts of inspiration, the world-changing insights.

And you lose your followers. Because if they’re in that threat-state also, they also don’t have access to those creative bursts. They can’t be fully themselves, fully open and uninhibited. They can’t — not won’t — give you their all.

And they’ll keep looking for a place to be free. They’ll stay for a while, but ultimately, they’ll move along to look beneath more promising rocks.

You can’t kindle true movements by performing leadership. That’s not what got you here in the first place, and it certainly won’t take you any higher.

It might maintain your current status. It might keep you safely where you are. And if you’re happy here, if this is all you ever wanted and more, if you can’t possibly imagine anything bigger or different or new for yourself or the world, that’s completely fine.

But if innovation and disruption are your breakfast cereal, if you genuinely want to amplify your creative impact on the world, if now that you’ve found yourself in a leadership role you discover you’ve got something important to say, then:

Make people feel safe.

That’s all you have to do. That’s the only thing.

For more on this, read Lessons From a Living Legend: Leadership Is Not a Hierarchy.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Leadership for People Who Didn’t Set Out to Be Leaders appeared first on Sukie Baxter.

But even when I lived in Spain many, many moons (and gyrations around the sun) ago, I mostly found myself amongst a relatively large group of other Americans. We had Spanish friends, of course, but typically I had at least one and often up to ten or fifteen fellow country-people around me to reinforce cultural norms.

Not that I was aware of this dynamic at the time, of course.

These past two weeks found me once more in bright sun of Andalusia, only this time I constituted a distinct minority of one in a group of about forty people. Not a single other person came from the States.

And this was a fantastic opportunity because, in reality, Spain wasn’t the only available location for completing this specific training. My motivation for traversing the globe in the name of education was a compilation of several things, but up toward the top of the list? Was the environment.

Environment is key. You know that pile of junk that’s been camping in the corner of your spare bedroom for the past three years? The one that’s become all but invisible to you because it’s been there so long?

You don’t notice it anymore because you’ve become desensitized to it — it’s normal. There are roughly a zillion triggers like these in your everyday life, triggers that shape your daily behavior but exist completely below your conscious awareness.

Maybe every time you see that pile of junk, your shoulders tighten almost imperceptibly because you hate clutter, or you sigh a deep huff of resentment at your teenager who refuses to get rid of stuff she doesn’t use anymore.

But you don’t notice these reactions, because they’re habituated.

You can become so conditioned to regular triggers, normalized beliefs and the pace of life that you simply cease to notice them at all, until they’re removed completely.

And that’s why I went to Spain — to get out of my normal, everyday environment. To look back at my life through a defogged lens, like standing outside the forest to get a clear view of those trees.

And this is what I saw in Spain: a culture that takes actual coffee breaks, that looks each other in the eyes when they’re eating at the same table, a culture that has no trouble closing their stores for several hours in the afternoon to eat some lunch and take a siesta even though — horror of horrors! — they’re losing sales by doing so.

I saw a culture that builds restoration into their lives. And by contrast, I also saw my own culture in the starkest of clarity — a culture that belittles those who dare to slow down.

Our complete absence of triggers to settle, let down and relax in our daily lives has been an observation of mine for a long time. There are infinite stimuli spurring us into activation and movement, but nothing has been built into our fast-paced lives that helps us come back to center.

Which is a problem.

It’s a basic law of nature that if something swings one direction for a while, it will return to swing the other way.

This pendulum dance is how we maintain what’s called in fancy-schmancy science talk homeostasis.

Homeostasis is a balance. Your body is constantly working to preserve it. But, just like standing on one foot, it’s not a static place. There are millions of tiny micro-adjustments happening in every moment to keep you upright. Balance — or homeostasis – is actually a process of coming into and out of your center, over and over again.

Contracted a virus? Your body will activate a fever to help burn it off. Sprained an ankle? Swelling and inflammation bring healing blood and plasma to the area. Weak bones? Little osteoblast cells get busy laying down calcium.

Problems arise when your body’s own inherent healing processes are either insufficient or disrupted.

And that’s what’s happening in our work culture — a culture that promotes action at all costs in the name of productivity, a culture that frowns on taking lunch breaks that involve eating without working, that promotes opening your laptop after the kids go to bed, that wants you to respond to every text within three minutes, that won’t let you shut off your phone. Even while you’re (supposed to be) sleeping.

Here’s a quick lesson in physiology….

Your nervous system has two branches: the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. The sympathetic branch has to do with action. You might correlate it with the fight or flight response. When something motivates you to move — run, fight, kill an animal for food — this is the branch of the nervous system that takes care of all that.

On the flip side, your parasympathetic system is responsible for rest and relaxation. It’s related to processes in your body that aren’t under your control, like digestion.

A healthy person naturally swings between these two systems. Something — anything — motivates you to take action. It can be as simple as the phone ringing. You pick it up (action) and talk to the person on the other end. The conversation is over and you hang up.

This is a micro-example. You typically hear about this pendulum swing in a much bigger context, usually centered around a traumatic or life threatening experience.

A bear comes out of the woods and moves to swipe at you, so you turn tail and run. Fortunately, you dropped your backpack and the bear is now happily picnicking on your lunch while you’re safely catching your breath several miles down the trail.

All of this is a normal swing of stimulus motivating action followed by rest and recovery.

Only, we’re not swinging.

We’re not allowed to swing.

We’re boxed in by a rigid culture that prioritizes productivity over well-being.

I’ll sleep when I’m dead, and all that.

But here’s the thing…. if you don’t have a normal activation-deactivation cycle of the nervous system, the systems themselves become disregulated. Normally the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the nervous system have an inverse response. The more active one branch becomes, the less active the other one can be.

However, in neural disregulation, both branches can be active at the same time. Have you ever met someone who seemed super chill, but randomly flew off the handle at the smallest thing?

That’s a symptom of this kind of disregulation. In fact, this might sound really familiar. You might recognize it as a very common trait of soldiers who return from war suffering the effects of PTSD.

Is it any wonder, then, that so many of us feel like the walking dead?

Because your phone is pinging constantly, email alerts are flying all over your screen, you’ve got seventeen meetings on the calendar today and twice as many tomorrow, you’ve got to pick up your kids from swim practice and remember to feed them (and yourself) and somehow also get work done.

Enter burnout.

And something psychologists call dissociation. Basically, everything feels like too much all the time, you’re overwhelmed, time is racing past and you just. can’t. handle. it.

But you have to. Bills gotta get paid. Kids have to eat.

And so you galvanize. You soldier on. You suck it up, work harder and “get real” about life. Because you just have to get through this, you know?

And maybe things will get better when. When you get that dream client, when your company goes public, when you can finally buy that vacation home on the beach. You keep hoping that, someday, you’re going to reach that magical level where you can finally exhale.

So you’re making it through life, getting the dishes done, making the bed and maybe even winning at work.

Only, underneath it all, you feel empty and anxious and terribly fearful because this can’t really be all there is to life.

Can it?

And maybe sometimes you even feel a tad guilty about your dissatisfaction. Because, on paper, life looks damn skippy. You’re making the dollar bills, you’ve got a great place to live, you even took a sun-drenched vacation last fall and have the Instagram likes to prove it.

So why all the emptiness?

First of all, let me just tell you that you’re not broken, greedy or a bad person. In fact, you’re not dysfunctional at all. With high levels of stimulation, it’s entirely normal to feel chronic, low-grade anxiety or unease.

Dissociation is, like I said, a state of detachment. Part of detachment is not feeling yourself — not your emotions, but also not your sensations.

When you can’t feel yourself, you can’t self locate. This is neurological fact.* You require ever increasing stimulus in order to feel anything at all.

This produces anxiety, because you’re sensorially lost to yourself. And because your system is incapable of normalizing, you follow the externally guided urge to fill that hole.

You might shop. Or engage in causal sex. Or overeat. Or get addicted to extreme sports. Or become a workaholic, letting perfectionism ru(i)n your life.

In some way, you keep pushing into extremity in order to feel alive again.

So who is this burnout really serving? It’s serving corporations who profit from wringing the maximum labor out of you.

It serves shareholders who reap the financial rewards of your sleepless nights.

It profits marketers who want to sell you shiny objects to fix that gaping hole inside your guts.

It profits a diet industry that’s making bank off of telling you that your inherent urge to self regulate is a moral flaw.

And this is what I noticed when I was in Spain — the slow unwinding of my own nervous system. The space that was created for respiration and inspiration. The broadening of focus, the ability to step back and see the bigger picture.

I noticed I wasn’t on my phone. That I went to dinner and hours flew by. That the waiters were shooing us out of the restaurant half an hour past closing, ushering us over to the bar where we continued chatting over chamomile tea (we party hard, I know).

I don’t know what we’re going to do about toxic work culture, but I do know this: success and achievement don’t have to be dependent on workaholism and burnout.

In fact, I’d argue that you can never achieve true success from the mentality of grinding harder because eventually you’re going to get to the place of grinding yourself away.

And you are your own greatest resource. Without you, you’ve got nothing.

Ending overwhelm and dissociation aren’t optional if you want to finally land in that place of centered fulfillment — living the kind of rich life that’s not just about money in the bank, but also personal satisfaction.

And I’m not talking about the fleeting and effervescent hit of happy that comes from buying a new outfit or eating at the trendiest restaurant.

I’m talking Yoda-esque existentialism, happy no matter what, able to handle whatever the world throws at you, confident that you’ve got what it takes to change the world kind of fulfillment.

All it takes? Is finding your way back to yourself. The only (and best) way I know to do this is by working through the body.

You can start right now.

*Famed neurologist Oliver Sacks details this in his story titled The Disembodied Lady, from the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

The post Why Our Work Culture Makes Burnout Inevitable appeared first on Sukie Baxter.

His distaste for confinement is only natural. A horse’s primary strategy for self defense is flight. Given a threat, Shelby has been conditioned — indeed, as his entire herd was for hundreds of years — to run first and ask questions later.

When restrained by walls that prevent him from both seeing threats approach and escaping imminent peril, it makes sense that he’d balk.

And yet….he follows me. He follows me into a dark, clanking metal box on wheels that transports him through the world. He follows me over wooden bridges that make suspect hollow thuds under his hooves. He follows me into mud puddles of unknown depths that could be harboring crocodiles for all he knows.

And he follows me through that dark aisle way into the arena. He stays close, even when I drop his rope and walk away. When he hears a strange noise, his ears twist toward me for leadership.

And I always tell him the same thing: It’s okay. I’m here, I’ve got you.

Shelby has me thinking about leadership a lot lately. In our little herd of two, I’m the responsible one. I call the shots, I make the rules, but I’m not the dictator.

What images does the word leadership evoke in your mind? What if we compound that word into leadership training, leadership skills or leadership development?

For me, it’s blue and white corporatized stock photos of smiling men in suits, maybe shaking hands. I see Helvetica and bulleted lists for “how to be an effective leader,” “ten qualities that make a great leader” and “how to motivate people.”

But when I think about what leadership actually looks like — I mean, in practice, not in theory and not in some kind of hypothetical, antiseptic corporate figment — it looks a lot more like the relationship I’ve built with this beautiful creature.

It’s a relationship built on trust, on safety, dignity and mutual respect. I remain steady. I see that his needs get met. And in return, he trusts me to nudge him beyond his comfort zone.

Not because I say so.

Not because I’m more powerful than him.

Not because there are consequences.

Not because he’ll face rejection, isolation or social shaming if he refuses (and yes, horses are highly social creatures).

True leadership isn’t a mandate. It’s a relationship.

It’s not giving orders from on high and watching them scuttle off to fulfill your requests. It’s not shaping them into a mold you created, carving away all the awkward bits that don’t fit.

Leadership, when done correctly, builds mutual respect, and thus safety.

A creature — even a human creature — that feels psychologically and emotionally safe is much more likely to take risks, to tiptoe to the edges of its comfort zone and peer into the abyss.

It’s not telling others what to do, or even directing them. It’s walking beside them, assuring that you’ve got them. You’re there. You know it’s scary, and you’re in it with them and you’re taking care of them.

True leadership doesn’t shape people to what you want them to be. It develops people — or creatures — into the best possible versions of themselves, without pinching, confining, controlling or wheedling.

Let me ask you, how much less traumatized would people be if our leaders behaved in this way?

And how much less would you feel like you were getting it wrong, like you weren’t good enough or talented enough or smart enough?

Because let’s face it, leadership that mandates from on high forces you to perform a role in order to gain acceptance. It requires not that you cultivate your strengths and skills and allow yourself to flourish, but that you crudely jam your being into a pre-formed mold made to fit everyone, and thus suiting no one at all.

And that makes you feel like you don’t measure up.

Enter, anxiety, fear and imposter complex.

Often, I don’t think these pervasive feelings of worry and insecurity are so much stemming from individual psychology as they are from a culture that negates safety.

A culture who prizes a top-down leadership model — a hierarchy.

How much less traumatizing would our workplaces be if leaders were taught to partner rather than dictate?

If leadership looked more like gaining the confidence of a wild animal, fraught with fear and poised to run rather than the Soup Nazi, ready to punish you at the slightest shimmy of wrongness?

How much happier would the world be if our leaders — our executives and hedge fund managers and diplomats and politicians — learned to recognize the signs of threat in a person’s nervous system?

If they were taught how to guide someone through a stressful situation without triggering or overwhelming them entirely?

If they did their OWN trauma work — bringing unseen behavioral programming into the light to illuminate perpetual patterns?

If our leaders centered their nervous systems, if they were present in their bodies, how much less traumatizing a place would the world be?

Let me leave you with this:

If you are a leader, it’s not your job to demand results. It’s your responsibility to cultivate safety, dignity and respect. Results will take care of themselves.

And sometimes, that process starts with doing your own work.

The post Lessons From a Living Legend: Leadership Is Not A Hierarchy appeared first on Sukie Baxter.