From Corporate Burnout to Self-Care with Laura Jane Layton & Manon on The Healers Café

email and text, you know, so I don’t have I can just respond like, I’m off for the night, done. And so how do you set those boundaries to take care of yourself and stop that negative chatter like, Oh, if I don’t get this done on time, I might get fired. Or if I don’t have all of this, my ducks in a row, the other managers are gonna think I don’t deserve to be here. And that’s all negative self talk, you know. Or some people call it imposter syndrome. Sometimes call it the inner critic. I call it my bully because, you know, and I can, I’m going to just this one. I know it’s not about your podcast, but when I was raped many years ago, that was a one time incident. How many times did I replay in my mind over and over and over? And it’s like, how do you get that thought out of your mind? And it’s like that forever? So that was an exaggeration, but that same repattering pattern, I can’t even say it happens in all sites, of ways that we’re doing our own bully and if our best friend was to trip, what would we say? You’re an idiot? You’re so clumsy? No, we’d say it’s okay. Come on, let’s go. I’ll give you a hand. I’ll help you out. Why do we not do that for ourselves? We are the only thing that keeps us going. There’s no outside force. There’s no outside anything else. And when we ignore our own personal needs, we’re letting ourselves down. That’s the bully in our our life is ourselves.

Manon Bolliger  05:36

So, yeah, so, so why don’t we work through that process a little bit like, so what comes first? Like, how does a person become, you know? Because you could say, well, I’m, you know, Oh, I like to succeed. I like to make sure my work is good. Sure, I’m a bit of a perfectionist, but, you know, it’s, it’s how I operate. And, you know, I’m proud of it, and I feel good. How do you distinguish when it’s truly like a bully voice, when you become aware that this is not in your best self interest, and then certainly not a self care thing? Like, how did you become aware of that.

Laura Jane Layton  06:21

So I started paying attention to how I talked to other people and how the thoughts were in my head. You know that that dialog back and forth and go, I don’t talk to other people like this. So why do I talk to me like this? And I know we know ourselves 24 hours a day, every second of those hours, and we know all our ups and downs, and you pretty much only see the highlight reels of everybody else. You know those basketball games that all the perfect shots. You don’t see the bloopers, and we know our bloopers, and so we are. There’s that piece of shame, that thing that kind of holds us back. It’s like, I’m not as good as them, because you only see your bloopers. And that’s built in, you know? That is our the thing that we got from ancient years ago that says, protect yourself. If you don’t know where the cyber Tooth Tiger is, you’re going to get eaten. And so we have that natural thing to grab onto, those negatives for protection. I don’t need to know where the saber tooth tigers are. If someone tells me I’m ugly, why do I have to even think another second of that? I wonder if I really look bad today. Oh, my gosh. Oh, you know, you go to the grocery store out of a really quick run and you’re going someone’s wondering who let her out of the house. She didn’t even comb her hair. She’s got holy pants on her weirdly, weird sweats. Well, it’s yourself second guessing yourself as you’re walking and doing things, wondering what everybody else is thinking. But guess what? They’re thinking of themselves. So I started consciously changing the words I used. So instead of saying I can’t have that, like I’m on a diabetic so I have certain things I avoid. I can have it. I can have it. I choose not to, because I don’t want the consequences of it. And so giving yourself those little, tiny word changes starts freeing up that shame. My favorite one is, I’m sorry. It’s like I used to say sorry to the wall. I’d turn a corner and bump into it and go, sorry. That is a person who didn’t even want to exist because there was shame everywhere she went, even to inanimate objects. And so I started saying things like, Thank you, or, you know, walk into a meeting, think about this. You’re on a call, you’re calling a customer service rep, and you’re art, you’re complaining about the service, and then they go, Oh, I’m so sorry that happened to you. You know that sounds nice, right? But what if they said, thank you for bringing that to our attention. We can take care of that. Just look at the different feel that has, and when you can say thank you to yourself, thank you all for keeping me up, right? You know, find the positive and find that way of switching those around. And as there’s times where right in the middle of a conversation and go, wait, I’m rephrasing that, and I’ll come back with, how do I say that in a positive way, a way that is building somebody or something up and myself, or am I tearing it down? It’s our words and like we just have to change teeny, tiny things, and it takes a lot of frack. Is, I’ve been trying it for years, and I’m getting there.

Manon Bolliger  10:04

And so with your health, I mean, you little, it looks like you had heart surgery. So did it? Is that the wake up call? Is that, or you went, Whoa, or, or, how did it, had it become clear that you had to do Bolliger, you had to look at your language, you had to do a bit of self care, self love.

Laura Jane Layton  10:27

I let the car completely collapse. I didn’t take it to the shop. I didn’t do anything. I just kept filling her up and driving her, and that’s what I did. I let myself go because getting to the office and getting back was more important than stopping and getting an oil change. And we need things for our bodies to take care of them, and if we don’t do it, nobody else will. It’s only your responsibility or my responsibility. It’s, it’s an inside job. You can’t do it on the outside. I can be mended on the outside, but only prevention is from the inside, yeah.

Manon Bolliger  11:15

But so, so how do you so let’s say you will use your analogy with a car, so now you realize that you got to get an oil change, and you might have to pump one of those tires. Otherwise, you know you’re it’ll affect the steering and etc. So now you’re late to work. What happens in your mind?

Laura Jane Layton  11:38

I use this analogy. We stop at the gas station, and I don’t have time to fill up, so I put five cents in, and I jump back in the car and I start running, and guess what? You’re out of gas again. So I have to stop and get another five cents in, and then you get to get back on the road and go a little bit further. And if we don’t sit down and do a full setup, if we don’t give our time that moment to really recharge. We’re not making it, and we, as in a lot of corporate workaholics, we think we’re invincible because we we got this. Hey, look at you know, we live by our titles and expect everybody else to fall in line. It’s like, No, this is not how life should be. And it took that wake up call for me. I didn’t do it until I had to, like a lot of people say they don’t change their diet until after. I didn’t change my stress until after and it was like, okay, stress is the reason I overeat. Stress is the reason I don’t sleep. Stress is the stress was the reason for all of my other unhealthy habits. I didn’t have time to go to the gym, I didn’t have time to do anything, and so for me, I had to focus on that stress level of how do I get rid of it? Number one was to be friendly to myself.

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Manon Bolliger  14:19

Right so now that you know this, so you’re afterwards, right? So you’ve Are you still have your corporate job?

Laura Jane Layton  14:27

I did retire. I did. I did have it for many years after, but I have retired now,

Manon Bolliger  14:34

when you had it afterwards, right after the wake up call. And again, I’m going to go with your analogy with the car. So now you realize, okay, you’ve gotta do whatever was an oil change well. So now you would, I guess you would know that an oil change, so you’d plan it into your calendar, right? But let’s say can only be done during the week, and that’s when you’re at work. How? How do you then get to work? What’s the do you have to justify to anyone? Or is it, is it you that you just have to just say, Well, yeah, I’m, you know, half an hour late, but had to do it. Or, or, how do you talk to yourself about finding the time shifting that you know outside of like positivity, which I understand, you know, but how do you actually create the time, you know, in your schedule?

Laura Jane Layton  15:32

I have this thing that you put your me time on the calendar, and yes, I do understand that sometimes it’ll get trumped you don’t cancel. You reschedule, and it cannot be a month away. You reschedule for as soon as you can get it in. I started putting it on my calendar. I started putting I’m not in the office until 830 I am out of the office at five. I have a lunch break. Now, if I had to move those, that’s okay, but it gave the guard rails that somebody else saw. I put them as out of the office, you know. So when someone’s looking at your calendar to book a meeting, they’ll ask before they’ll book over something that says out of office. And so I took that time to say, I’m doing these things. And then had a heart to heart with my manager. Well, actually my however you call him, the person over me, supervisor, just says, I no longer, I’m going to do this. And if it’s going to be a problem, I can start looking for something else, you know, I’m one of my managers. This is when I was in the hospital and in recovery, when I wasn’t allowed to work. And then when I came back, I was told that was part time, you know, little hours. And he said, half of you is better than a whole somebody else, so we’ll take it. So it was like that validation that I overworked for nothing. I probably could have all these years been playing go home at five, but I didn’t,

Manon Bolliger  17:14

yeah, yeah. And I think it’s interesting, because I think often when you have self respect and self love. People have it for you, you know, they see it. Then they go, yeah, gosh, maybe I should take, you know, this time for myself. Or, you know, like, I think you can really affect people by being a really great example as well.

Laura Jane Layton  17:37

You know, you know, we wore the badge of honor of how many PTO days we had left. You know, I’ve got four years and 10 months built up. Take your PTO guys. Go enjoy your life. Work is going to be there.

Manon Bolliger  17:59

Well, so any other things you you could share to help people well, either recognize, like, what was the hardest part for you about all this,

Laura Jane Layton  18:14

identifying the places where I was weak at the time and paying attention and building them up. I didn’t take the time to exercise. I still take little time to exercise, but I do more than I ever did for 30 years in the corporate environment. You know? It’s like, where are those places where I could benefit? And so I started doing like lunch clubs with the people at work, or we’d go out and do the flow ropes, or go walking, or do something where we got away from the office. Or you’d walk in after one of those really pissy ass meetings, and just thought, I can’t take it. I gotta have some outside time and go sit by the tree or in the grass and just let yourself relax where before that, it was, bang, bang, bang, bang. That was a hard switch, because I felt obvious. I felt I mean, lazy, and so I had to change the word, you know, I had to. I went back to that Stephen Covey book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and said, I’m sharpening my saw. I can’t keep working with a Dole saw. And those moments were the time that I took. And so that one principle that I had read at least 20 years before my heart surgery came back and said, You are now going to sharpen your saw. And that’s what I did for the next several years in the corporate environment, is I got to go sharpen my saw. I got to take a moment. And nobody ever questioned it. Hmm, and it’s like, Oh, I could have been doing this all along. I thought that was taboo.

Manon Bolliger  20:07

You do perpetuate the the problem, right? You know, it’s, uh, I mean, one thing is to get out of the victim mentality that it’s happening to you, which obviously that’s not how you I mean, maybe unconsciously you perceived that you had no choice. But really, when it comes down to it, we have lots of choice.

Laura Jane Layton  20:32

Yeah, we have so many choices, you know, yeah, weigh and measure the cost benefit analysis of I have a podcast on the cost benefit analysis of life. You know, do I eat this hamburger or do I not? And what is the cost benefit? And really, some of these benefits that we take are short term and not long term, and is that really what we want?

Manon Bolliger  20:59

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but that takes a moment, right?

Laura Jane Layton  21:02

It says it takes some self reflection. You can’t just go on autopilot. I call them my robot. Years I didn’t do anything, but

Manon Bolliger  21:14

and actually taking the time. I mean, you’re retired now, but when you did go back to work. Did you find yourself actually even more effective?

Laura Jane Layton  21:26

Yes, don’t. Is that so sad? You know, I was a I was able to really put effort into things, and I’m trying to think of how to explain it, just to clear your brain, less brain fog, less fatigue, less annoyance, and those are the areas that triggered for me when I was on in overdrive. I’m fatigued, I’m tired, I’m foggy, I just can’t concentrate. Those went away, and I was way more effective all those years. I could have been better,

Manon Bolliger  22:10

but it’s okay. We made it. There’s comparisons, right? With different countries that have, like, six week vacation. Some have two, you know, this kind of thing, or they have shorter days, or they have, you know, less, yeah, shorter days, or less days a week, or or all of this. And it seems that the more time you can balance with your life, the better you actually work at your work, right? So, you know, I mean, that is now true, right? So I think it, it, yeah, we’re sort of, if we pay attention to this, and more people pay attention to this, companies and all that, I think, you know, we could live a much more integrated life, you know, and avoid this because, I mean, part of it is, you thought that’s the norm, that’s what you should do, right? It’s, you know, it’s because that’s how people do it, you know, it’s, it’s around you, right? If you had one person doing it differently, and you’d be going, Gosh, you know, they’re, they seem really fit and happy and healthy, you’d probably be going, what are you doing differently?

Laura Jane Layton  23:22

I dished on the guys that left early. I was not nice. I cannot believe that they do not care about getting this done. I didn’t realize they were going to be more effective at it in the morning than staying late to get

Manon Bolliger  23:36

it done. Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m sure you didn’t right, because it’s, you know, again, what most people do. I mean, we take it for granted as being the normal thing. And you know, it’s, it’s usually wrong. It’s like, it’s usually the thinkers that, you know, the one the oddballs, the one that reflect, that are closer to getting it right than the the masses that follow, you know. And we’re definitely in a mass system, whether, like, corporate behavior is a mass system, you know, yes, which will change on mass when it changes, or as it’s changing, you know. But it, it does take people to recognize, you know, that there’s something not quite right, and be honest about it, right? Because it’s, it’s easy to hold on to a story, you know, like if you were instead, you were saying, Well, I worked really hard, and, yeah, sure, I had the heart thing, whatever, but you know, I was really better for the company than now, you know, for example, that’s not what you’re saying.

Laura Jane Layton  24:42

You know, it would have been nice, but, yeah, those early years, they did not have the best of me.

Manon Bolliger  24:50

No, no, but it’s interesting, right? And that’s okay, right? Like, you know, that’s it’s that kind of honesty that really makes people go. You know, on both ends, right? Like, yeah, if you’re the employee working for if you’re the one creating the corporate job. Like, it’s a good reminder, for sure, absolutely. So our time is actually coming to an end. Is there any last like, or how people get hold of you, or do you have a book, or you’re doing a podcast? Maybe you could.

Laura Jane Layton  25:24

I do have a podcast, and I do have a website that has some great blogs on it about self care, but my podcast is the Laura Jane Leighton show, so very easy, and my blog is on Laura, Jane layton.com, so there is, like, I have self care from the inside out, and a bunch of different things about body image, talking about being raped, and, you know, things like that. So it’s pretty transparent.

Manon Bolliger  25:55

Yeah, great. Okay. Well, thank you for spending some time

Laura Jane Layton  25:58

Well, thank you for having me.

Manon Bolliger  26:01

So the discussion with Laura, Jane, really, you know, symbolizes so much what everyone needs to do, whether it’s the corporate world, where we’re quite used to, you know, hearing this overwork mentality, that’s how everyone does it. But that mentality has its own place in in the professional world, in the you know, in any industry, whether it’s led by you or led by another, where you’re proving you, instead of really just coming to terms with balance and what feels right and self care. And again, as usual, it’s usually a big health event, like a heart attack, or we didn’t actually determine what it was, but it was a heart related issue in hospital and and then change comes in, and that’s when people realize that health actually matters, and we really need to start with that and then live our lives around, including health in our well being and in everything we do.

ENDING: 

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