What You'll Discover In This Episode:
It’s Friday. You look down at your phone to see the time. 4:50pm. Yes! Only ten minutes until 5 o’clock - the time you promised yourself you’d quit working on that project that’s been consuming your days so you can go enjoy your weekend. The weekend you’ve been looking forward to for weeks. You’re going skiing with friends and are stoked for the trip!
You send the email and look down again. 4:56pm. Closer. You can almost feel the wind on your face as you glide down the mountainside, the pines whizzing by. The phone rings. Unknown number. You have four more minutes to work so you answer. It could be a potential client after all.
You immediately recognize the thick Texan accent. It’s Suzie, an existing client calling from her work phone. She proceeds to tell you that she finally got around to looking at the document you sent her a week ago and she found an error. A big error. 4:58pm. You apologize and consider telling her you’ll fix it first thing Monday. Instead, you say you’ll make the correction and have it back to her within the hour.
You hang up and sink back into your chair. 4:59pm. You stare at your phone for what feels like ten minutes and watch 4:59 turn to 5:00pm. You take a deep breath, open up Suzie’s digital file, find the right document, and get to work. You think to yourself, So what if I get up there an hour later. I’ve gotta do this. It was my fault anyway. Getting it right back to Suzie will show her what a hard worker I am and how much I value her as a client. I’ve gotta get it right. It will make her happy.
37 minutes later you write an email to Suzie and attach the document. Not just any email though. An email loaded with impeccable grammar, twice spell-checked words, a number of niceties, and yet another apology. A perfect email. An email that took you ten minutes to write… after work hours… on a Friday… when you could have been on the way to the mountain to see your friends.
Most business owners have allowed themselves to fall victim to such situations at one time or another, situations where they put others’ needs above their own and refuse to settle for less than perfection. Giving into such tendencies on the regular can wreak havoc on your personal life and create a business you’d rather escape from than run. Think you might allow codependent, perfectionist, and people-pleasing thoughts to dictate your choices and time more often than you find comfortable?
In this episode of Productivity Straight Talk, I sit down with Certified Life Coach Victoria Albina to discuss how to break free from codependent, perfectionist, and people-pleasing thought patterns that can make you feel anxious and stuck and how to transform such thoughts to improve your relationships and your business.
Episode Links & Resources:
About Guest:
Victoria Albina (she/her) is a Certified Life Coach, UCSF-trained Family Nurse Practitioner and Breathwork Meditation Guide with a passion for helping women realize that they are their own best healers, so they can break free from codependency, perfectionism and people-pleasing and reclaim their joy.
She is the host of the Feminist Wellness Podcast, holds a Masters degree in Public Health from Boston University School of Public Health and a BA in Latin American Studies from Oberlin College. Victoria has been working in health & wellness for over 20 years and lives on occupied Munsee Lenape territory in New York’s Hudson Valley.
