Episode 14: The Cart, the Toilet, and the Lie We Keep Telling Ourselves
A guy at Lowe's once offered to help me lift a toilet off a shelf. It was literally his job. I said no and hauled it onto the cart myself.
That story came up on the podcast this week with my guest Sheila Elaine, "The Grateful Goddess," and the second she said it out loud, I realized how many versions of that same moment I've lived. The cart someone offered to push. The box someone offered to carry. The project someone offered to take off my plate. Every time, some reflex in me says no, I've got it before I've even considered whether I actually want to carry it alone.
Sheila spent 20 years in advertising before she pivoted into coaching, and what she found, working with women in their 30s all the way up through her own generation, is that we've all been trained the same way: dedicate yourself to everyone else, prove your worth through how much you can handle, and treat rest like it's something you have to earn. She said something on the episode that I haven't stopped thinking about: receiving help makes you smart, not weak.
We talked through her 5-step Make Space Method, and here's the piece that landed hardest for me: it starts with stillness, but not the kind you're picturing. Stillness doesn't have to be meditation. It can be cooking. Gardening. Standing in the grocery store aisle actually deciding which olive oil you want instead of grabbing and running. It's anything that gets you out of your head and back into your body, because your body has been trying to tell you something the whole time you've been too busy to listen.
Then there's the step people resist most: knowing what and when to quit. Not just the obvious stuff (the habits, the addictions) but the commitments you said yes to from a place of wanting something to be true, that you're now white-knuckling through because everyone around you says "just push through." If it's coming from deep inner knowing and not impulse, Sheila's answer is simple: quitting is the right move.
We also got into why so many of us wait until we're completely depleted before we make a change, and why perimenopause, for so many women, becomes the moment the body finally screams it's your turn. Not because something's wrong with us. Because we've been running on "I can handle it" for so long that our own nervous system had to force the stop.
If any of this sounds familiar, if you're the one everyone relies on, and you're quietly exhausted, and some part of you keeps waiting for permission to slow down, this episode is for you. And if you're ready to actually figure out what's keeping you stuck instead of just managing around it, that's exactly what a Feel Good Strategy Session is for.
Listen to the full conversation with Sheila Elaine on the Feel Good Every Day podcast. And find more of Sheila's work, "The Grateful Goddess," at https://sheilaelaine.org/.
