724. You Can't Actually Find Clarity in a Rush

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19:05

Lesley Logan opens a two-part series on slowing down, because rushing may feel productive but it rarely gets you where you actually want to go. She explains how constant rushing flips the nervous system into a survival response, and what it really cost her to pause OPC's growth for two years because Profitable Pilates' growth needed her more.


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In this episode you will learn about:

  • The real difference between movement and forward momentum.
  • Knowing when a pause is strategic and when it is avoidance.
  • Why you cannot hear your intuition when you are moving too fast.
  • Why rushing makes you say yes to things you would have declined.
  • Setting five-minute buffer gaps between every meeting this week.


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Episode Transcript:

Lesley Logan 0:00  

Rest is never supposed to be a reward. I see way too many women using rest or a day off or a spa day as a reward for hard work. Nope, you actually are always worthy of rest, always, all the time, no matter what.


Lesley Logan 0:12  

Welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast where we talk about taking messy action, knowing that perfect is boring. I'm Lesley Logan, Pilates instructor and fitness business coach. I've trained thousands of people around the world and the number one thing I see stopping people from achieving anything is self-doubt. My friends, action brings clarity and it's the antidote to fear. Each week, my guest will bring bold, executable, intrinsic and targeted steps that you can use to put yourself first and Be It Till You See It. It's a practice, not a perfect. Let's get started. 


Lesley Logan 0:54  

Hello, Be It babe. How are you? Welcome back to the Be It Till You See It podcast. Of course, now I have vocal fry. I was talking just fine a moment ago, but here we are, and that's because we are not perfect around here. Welcome if it's your first time listening to us. Thank you for being here. This week we're going to talk about slowing down and actually how that can speed things up. And I'm just really excited for us to dive into this topic. We are doing these topics because you asked for them. So beitpod.com/questions is where you send your wins in for us to chat about and celebrate you on Fridays, but your topics, your guest requests, things like that those are all things that I look at and determine for who we invite on the pod and what these little series are for. And I love hearing how they help you. I also just want to say I really appreciate when you share our podcast. It means the world to me. It really, really does. Brightens my day every time I hear about it. So just know that I appreciate even just texting this to a friend who needs to hear it. You know, we can't Be It Till We See It alone. This is not how it works. So we have two episodes on this topic about slowing down, and the overall message, the too-long-didn't-listen, is that how it actually speeds things up. And I am someone who wants to move a mile a minute, so this is definitely a Be It Till You See It. For me, it's something I'm constantly practicing. I'm constantly having to be reminded. I'm recording this in June. You're hearing it in August, and I was telling the team an hour ago we have to get moving on that because the launch date for that is October 1st. Lesley, it is the end of June. There is plenty of time. Is there though? But really, really. So if you have ever spent an entire day going from one task to the other? Just you feel like a hummingbird, but then you get to 5 p.m. and you look at your to-do list and you actually did everything but what you wanted to do. Yeah, you don't only end the day exhausted, end the day stressed out because you did all this stuff, but you didn't move the needle forward. And this is something that I see happen when I coach a lot of Pilates studios because people love to make a list. My Pilates studio owners love to make a list. I see this a lot when I coach Pilates studio owners and teachers. They make a long list of things that they want to get done that they need to do, and then they do none of that, right? And then they be like, "I did all these things," or they make a laundry list of things and they do all of them, but they actually didn't move the needle forward because none of those things actually move the needle forward. That was just what Brad calls the whirlwind, just doing the whirlwind, right? And there is a massive difference between getting stuff done, movement of things, and momentum of things. If you ever watch my cousin Benny, there is this scene in this episode where they get stuck in the mud and they're spinning the wheels, right? And so there is movement happening, but they're not getting enough momentum.


Lesley Logan 3:22  

They're not going anywhere, right? They're stuck in the mud, and so, hi, I see you, and we're just gonna acknowledge that all of us do that, and if we get honest with ourselves, we're gonna break down while just doing movement, just rushing around, checking things off is actually negatively affecting the growth we want to have, and how taking some breaks, some pauses, slowing down shifts us into a gear that can actually create true progress. Right? I remember years and years ago I was with this girl, and she had this whole speech that there's power in the pause. There is power in the pause. Right? Sometimes, just taking a break and getting a 30,000-foot view is what exactly you need. Otherwise, you're just on the hamster wheel. Maybe there's another wheel to get on, right? So I do understand. I want to just say I do understand this idea that if I slow down, I fall behind because I was a runner. So just so you know, professional runner for a long time, and if you do slow down, people do pass you up, right? But that's not how life is. Life is not an actual race because you are your own path. You're doing your own thing, right? And so, I do think at some point in your life there is time to rush and hustle and get as much information as you can. And then there is a time in our life where we really do need to honor the information. Take time to get that, you know. Especially as I am someone over 40, I've really discovered that if I just take a few pauses, if I don't rush from one task to the next, if I, as I said in another series, go for a walk around the block, I actually get some really great ideas. I get to listen to my intuition. I get to hear my inner voice, and it's really helpful. But I also the complete opposite of that is that in my brain, I am 43 years old, and I do want to be retired soon. And I feel like every day is a countdown to that, which is seriously crazy because there, if I were to take how many days between now and when I want to retire, there's probably thousands. So in reality, I could slow down, but I do understand that feeling of that clock ticking, and I think together, Be It babes, we need to reframe that. We need to reframe that pauses as strategic decision-making time and not a weakness, not a laziness, not a procrastination, because there is a difference between a pause and a procrastination, right? So I will say I definitely had to get hit over the head a few times with this idea. Really had to get hit over the head a few times with this idea. It's a lesson that's just taken me a little longer than I like to admit about slowing down. 


Lesley Logan 5:55  

Okay, so I don't know if a lot of you know this, but I started Agency, Profitable Pilates, membership program at the same time that I kind of started OPC, and you know, I thought they're two different things. I could do this. I have the time, and the reality is, is marketing the two, sure, but actually sustainably operating both was not happening, and I was rushing to do it because I thought, "Oh my god, if I don't get this done, some other person's going to take my idea, and I need to get this going." And I also had, I will say, I was loving traveling a lot and really wanting to get rid of some of my clients, so I needed both to take off so that I could let go of some of my regular teaching, so I can enjoy traveling and just run these two businesses. I thought it's just going to happen in three weeks, and it didn't. Of course, it didn't happen. And in fact, it took a little bit longer. And there came to a point where I actually had to pause OPC's growth because Profitable Pilates' growth needed me more.


Lesley Logan 6:54  

It was taking off, and if I kept trying to split my time evenly, I would have actually caused Profitable Pilates to not grow and to in fact not help the people and not have the impact I wanted to make. And so I had to hit pause on something, and it was really hard. I had to choose between two babies, one of which I love gets really hard. I actually love them both so much, and one of them is more scalable than the other, and one of them can impact more people than the other in different ways, and but I had to do it, and it was so hard because I will say, OPC, those two years of purposely slowing down its growth still is something we are dealing with today. You know, I'm really proud of what we do. We have a great membership. We have a great community, but there was information I didn't get in those two years because I had to slow it down. So I share that with you because I actually don't want you rushing around to feel like you're accomplishing something, only to end up missing out on the information you could be gathering, so you could make better decisions for where you're going to grow, right? For all you're going to do. So that is why you know we have to actually understand when we go into that rush mode that feels like it's productive. We are not operating from a place of not just authenticity but control, right? And so it does feel like everything matters so much because we actually are grasping for control. But when you are actually in charge of how fast you go and the pauses you're going to take and the scenic route you're going to look at or the thing you're going to take a deeper look at, you are in the more control that way. So it's important. So as we talked about in past solo episodes, your nervous system is very much part of this, and if you are constantly rushing, it's not just a time-management issue. It can actually be a survival response, and that survival response actually puts us in that lizard brain where we actually don't see a lot of stuff as being helping hand, right? So our nervous system, when you're constantly rushing, your brain activates a low-grade survival response. Adrenaline makes you hyper-focus on immediate micro-tasks. You check your email, you cross off trivial to-do items while taking you away from seeing the big picture. You cannot see it when you're in this space, right? 


Lesley Logan 8:59  

Another example of being in survival mode is so. I'm sure you don't know this, but I'll tell you. If your head becomes more forward of your spine, right, like you start to be one of those people whose heads are forward, you see those people at their parts. You start to see people coming at you as an attack and not a helping hand. So if you are in this rushing mode, if you're in the survival response in your nervous system, you are actually not seeing people going, "Hey, I'd love to do this with you," or "Let's collaborate with this" as help. You could not receive it like that. You actually see it as someone trying to get something from you, someone trying to slow you down, someone trying to take your thing, and so you actually perceive some helping hands as something that's going to be a negative or an attack on you, right? And so when we go through that, it just actually means we probably definitely not going to go as fast as we want because it's hard to go anywhere fast alone, right? Well, they say if you want to go fast, you go alone. If you want to go far, you go together. But the reality is, is like I actually do think that you can go far and fast with help of others. My Pilates loves, when you rush a movement. You actually never fully get everything out of a movement, right? In order to rush it, something has to let go. So either letting go the connections of muscles, or you're not fully extending your legs and footwork and fully closing the springs. You're kind of just operating in the middle, and that is movement.


Lesley Logan 10:43  

And so it's like I'm doing something. There might even be a burn, but you're actually not actually getting the full openness of the hips, the full reach through the feet, the full expression of the exercise. Where the benefits are actually, Jay would always say the Pilates happens the last two inches, right? So you got to finish. You got to close. You have to do a full expression. So it's important that we're not just going so fast and using momentum because while it does feel like we are doing something, we are actually not getting the benefits of the something that we are doing. So if you are my constant doer, mover, working all the time, you're likely unable to have clarity in what it is you're doing because you can't find clarity in rush, right? When you are speeding down the freeway, do you see all the signs? No, they're blur. I remember we were doing something, and Brad was going faster than we should, and he missed the exit, and it cost us so many minutes because we missed the exit. If we had just been going at the speed that we were supposed to be going, we wouldn't have, right, and so when you're rushing, you cannot have clarity. You cannot catch the subtle things that are going, "Hey, look it over here," or "What's going on here," or "Maybe this is a turning you have to have." So that mental noise just becomes this level 10, and that intuition, which we talked about in the past solo episodes, the reason why we have a hard time hearing our intuition is we're just moving too fast to even hear it, right? Because it's often like a whisper. It's often there, "Hey, hi." Your intuition's not yelling at you, right? Your intuition's when you're ready. I'm just right here to let you know that that's the right turn I want you to take. And you know, the other thing is, is if you're ending each day exhausted, if you are my listeners who are in my age group or older, ending your day exhausted does not make it easier for you to do the other things you want to do. Doesn't make it easier for you to show up for yourself for your movement practices. It doesn't make it easier for you to sleep well at night. You're causing so much stress and cortisol. It affects how you sleep. It affects how your body is shaped, right? What's going on with how you digest food? All of that. All because we're just rushing, rushing, rushing. So we actually say yes to things that, if we had just taken time to really fully think about, we would have said no to. I find there's two parts because of the ADHD that I have. My brain goes three steps ahead, so it's always a little faster, and I cut people off and I make assumptions. And it's not because I'm a rude asshole; just because my brain's like, "I'm three steps ahead. I know what you're going to say." In other times, my ADHD works in this amazing place where I can just get into focus mode, and I can do a lot in a little bit of time. And the problem with focus modes and ADHD is you never get to plan when they're going to happen. But what I have found is, if I am taking time to pause for the day to make sure I'm aware of what I'm supposed to be working on, I'm aware of where we're trying to go and grow. It allows me to enjoy those focus modes when they happen, and to at least have awareness when I'm actually in a rush state. Oh, I'm trying to rush this right now. I'm trying to push this through. It never feels good, right? It feels like it's harder work to do. Yeah. So what we need, right? Because now that I we're all in the band, I agree. We go okay, so I just need to hit pause. Yeah, but it's first you have to have the courage to hit pause. So first, just having, I think I need to hit pause is a great place to be, right? Because that's your first breakthrough to many breakthroughs.


Lesley Logan 13:56  

How many times have you had the most amazing ideas when you're in the shower, or you're on a walk, or you're checking out the moon or a sunrise, and all of a sudden you have this thing that hits you, right? Those are pauses, and notice they're not very long. We don't have to pause for five hours. Doesn't have to be a full day off. It could just be a pause. It could just literally the length of a breath, right? Or it could be five minutes, or it can be in between Zoom calls. You always plan for 10 minutes to go from one call to the next to make sure you've wrapped up your thoughts on the last call. Like self-reflection is one of the best ways to retain information from the things that you did. All that brain fog that people talk about, I think a lot of it is actually just rushing so much. I think I do believe that there is brain fog, but I think a lot of it is like we're not giving ourselves enough time between calls to reflect on what would just happen, what we have to do, and where we're going, so that then the next call starts, we could actually be present enough to take it in, right? So rest is also never supposed to be a reward. I see way too many women using rest or a day off or a spa as reward for hard work. Nope. You actually are always worthy of rest, always, all the time, no matter what, because rest is not. "Oh, I'm going to go and hit this rest stop over here on a long drive." Yes, you're new to those things. It's these little moments that happen throughout the day that allow you to feel like you, to feel like you are in charge. If you haven't read The Big Leap, I talk about all the time, but there's a whole chapter on time. There's Einstein time and there's Newtonian time. And if you listen to episode 400, I actually asked Gay Hendricks about this time chapter. And the reality is, is when we are in our genius zone, we are in our flow state. We can bend time, really, truly can. But a lot of us are rushing around and putting ourselves in Newtonian time, and that is not. You actually end up watching the time go by faster. Ever realized like minutes are long when you're holding a plank, but they're fast when you're just sitting on a phone call with your friends. Yeah, right. Because you don't want to be in the plank, but you do want to be on the phone call with your friends. Same thing. You can actually make time be in your control, but you have to hit pause, right? So, what I'd love for you to do over the next couple days before our second episode comes out, which is hopefully some wonderful ways to help you hit pause. I just want you to notice where you can put five-minute buffer gaps. Can you change any of the calls or meetings you have to have an extra five minutes in between? Can you text people? "I need like, hey, we know we have a call tomorrow at 10. I'll be there at 10:05." And in those five minutes, you are not allowed to pick up your phone or check your emails or anything. You get to go to the bathroom if you need a bio break. But I would also love for you just to take a look outside. Maybe go outside. Maybe smell a plant in your house, something that is not on a screen, and notice what feels good and how you feel before you go into your next call. That's your homework. Five-minute gap buffers, as many of them as you can between all of your meetings, and see what you love to do in those five minutes, not where it feels like, "Oh my god, this is the longest five minutes. I have to sit here and look at this wall." No, not that. Something that allows you to just, you almost look forward to it, right? You almost are like, "My god, I can't wait for this call to be over because I get my buffer." Like that's what I want. 


Lesley Logan 17:00  

All right, Be It babe, let me know questions you have. I would love to hear your rushing stories and what maybe you realized in self-reflecting that you missed out on. Here's the thing: the times in my life where I've rushed and missed out on some great opportunities because I just didn't hit pause long enough to think about it. Those things were not for me, right? What is for you will not pass you. But in reflecting on what I could have done differently, it meant that I didn't miss future opportunities, and I get to take advantage of them and use them in the best way. All right, thank you so much for listening to our podcast. Until next time, Be It Till You See It. 


Lesley Logan 17:49  

That's all I got for this episode of the Be It Till You See It Podcast. One thing that would help both myself and future listeners is for you to rate the show and leave a review and follow or subscribe for free wherever you listen to your podcast. Also, make sure to introduce yourself over at the Be It Pod on Instagram. I would love to know more about you. Share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Help us and others Be It Till You See It. Have an awesome day. Be It Till You See It is a production of The Bloom Podcast Network. If you want to leave us a message or a question that we might read on another episode, you can text us at +1-310-905-5534 or send a DM on Instagram @BeItPod.


Brad Crowell 18:32  

It's written, filmed, and recorded by your host, Lesley Logan, and me, Brad Crowell.


Lesley Logan 18:37  

It is transcribed, produced and edited by the epic team at Disenyo.co.


Brad Crowell 18:41  

Our theme music is by Ali at Apex Production Music and our branding by designer and artist, Gianfranco Cioffi.


Lesley Logan 18:48  

Special thanks to Melissa Solomon for creating our visuals.


Brad Crowell 18:52  

Also to Angelina Herico for adding all of our content to our website. And finally to Meridith Root for keeping us all on point and on time.



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