Welcome to Humans Leading, the podcast for high-achieving women looking to live less stressed, more satisfying lives. Humans Leading is hosted by Dr. Jillian Bybee, a busy pediatric ICU physician, mom, coach, and creative who uses what she's learned from recovering from burnout twice to help women craft lives and careers they don't need a vacation from.
Join Dr. Bybee and her inspiring guests as they tackle essential topics such as perfectionism, limiting beliefs, stress management, what it means to be human, and more. Each episode is packed with actionable advice to empower you to prioritize your own wellbeing and create the life you truly desire.
If you're ready to start putting yourself on your own priority list and lead a more fulfilling life, tune in to Humans Leading and take the first step toward transformation.
The most frustrating part about rest isn’t learning that you need it. It’s realizing you might be the one blocking it.
Today, I’m bringing a quick, practical mini-episode inspired by a recent post I made on Instagram that hit a nerve: the person most often standing in the way of you taking a break is you.
If that made you feel called out, good. Not because you should feel bad about it, but because you have the power to change it.
On today’s episode, we dig into why guilt, perfectionism, and “I don’t have time” can sound like facts even when they’re just stories your brain creates and repeats.
Then I teach a simple 3-step framework I call The Shift that can help you navigate these thoughts and get you on the road to taking the break that you need.
If you’ve been waiting for permission to pause, consider this your sign.
If you’re ready to kickstart your journey (or your team's journey) to a less stressed life, I’m ready to help you! You can get in touch about 1:1 coaching or inviting me to facilitate a workshop for your group, get in touch via my website.
Hello, and welcome to Humans Leading, a podcast for overwhelmed people looking to live less stressed, more satisfying lives. I'm Dr. Jillian Bibe, a pediatric critical care medicine physician, mom, certified stress management coach, and wellness trainer who uses my personal experience with burnout recovery to help others do the same. This podcast is for anyone who is feeling frustrated or overwhelmed with their current way of living and looking for practical ways to make an impact in their lives today. If you're looking to feel less stressed, less stuck, and more fulfilled in your life, this is your podcast. I'm glad you're here. Recently I put a post up on Instagram saying, reminder, the person most often standing in the way of you taking a break is you. And I got such a response to that post that I thought I'd bring it here for you today on the podcast in an impromptu mini-episode recording. After I posted that, I got a host of DMs, texts, some comments on the post that said things like, How very dare you! I feel called out. Isn't that the truth? Ugh, oh my gosh. And while I appreciate those responses because I'm always
trying to provoke a little bit of truth telling, that's just who I am. I didn't want to leave you or those people with nothing to follow up on. I think one of the things that can happen when we see a post like this is we're like, ugh, that's the truth. I can't believe it. What am I gonna do? I'm such a bad person. And we start piling on. And while that's understandable because we're busy people with busy lives, it's not a very helpful way to be. It really puts us in a disenfranchised, disempowered place. And so what I'm always trying to do here on Humans Leading and all the rest of the work that I do is tell the truth about how life is and how hard it can be, but also give you some solutions. So that's what this is. The good news about if you're the person standing in the way of taking a break, you're the person with the key to taking a break. You just have to learn to give yourself the permission to do it. So you don't have to feel badly about the fact that you've been in your own way. You just have to acknowledge it and say, I can do something different. So recently I taught a workshop at the Women in Medicine Summit. And one of the things I taught was about mindset. So we're looking at three simple stress strategies. You can find those strategies in a prior episode, which I'll link in the show notes.
But the thing I added to this workshop was all about mindset. I think one of the things that we don't think about is the thoughts that we think can drain our energy. Beth Kempton, who's an author I love and recommend, wrote a book called Freedom Seeker. And one of the quotes in there was your energy is precious. The more you spend on things that don't make you feel free, the more drained you'll feel. And I'd be willing to bet if you've had this thought about being a bad person or feeling guilty for taking a break or any one of the number of unhelpful thoughts or beliefs we can have during our day, having those thoughts has made you feel drained because it makes you feel like you're caught in a cage. There's no way out of it. And so one of the things we need to learn to do is to harness the things that we think. Because as Florence Scovel Shin said, way back in the early 1900s, if you do not run your subconscious mind yourself, someone else will run it for you. And I think that's what happens for a lot of us, especially as high-achieving women, is people give us these thoughts. Society gives us these thoughts. You're a bad person, you're a bad mom. And they don't explicitly tell you, but they make you feel that way because everything in the culture programs us to be self-sacrificing women. And one of the highest compliments you can pay a mom is that she never thinks of herself and that she thinks of everybody else first. Those types of cultural tropes are not helpful. They're designed by the society to keep us feeling frantic, feeling stressed, and not really be in the agency that I want you to feel like you're in. One of the great things though is our reality is subjective. So just like we can think these bad thoughts like, I don't have time to take a break, or I don't need rest, or I have to do everything myself if I want it done right. What I always tell people is one of the fastest roads to burnout is to believe if I want it done right, I have to do it myself. I used to be one of those people that got me straight into burnout. So I'm here to challenge you a little bit to start to think differently, because when you think differently, you can create a different reality for yourself. If you have a more empowering thought, then you can start to build a future that feels more expansive, more easeful, and really the type of life that you want to be living.
So I have a quick framework for this. It's called the shift. It's just three steps, and I'm going to take you through it now. Number one is to spot the story. So limiting beliefs or these unhelpful thoughts, like I don't have enough time, sound like facts. It sounds like clearly I don't have enough time. Or if I slow down, everything will fall apart. Or I'm a bad mom. Or any infinite number of things that sound like facts to us when our brain says it. If you hear one of these things that is mean but sounds like a fact, I want you to pause. That's step one. Just notice that that thought has come up. Step two is to loosen the grip. Instead of arguing with the thought or feeling bad and overtaken by the thought, just loosen the grip a little bit. Get some space from it. Some of that space happens when you pause and notice this is a thought that I'm having. And this can really take you from something like, I don't have any time, to I feel like I don't have any time. But maybe that's not true. When you hear one of these thoughts, one of the best things you can do is to question is that true? Is it really true? Or is this just a story? This step two is about possibility. What else could be true instead of the belief that you have right now? And then step three is to shift in action. Beliefs don't change because your thinking changes, they change because you actually do something differently. So if your belief is around time, i.e., I don't have enough time, but you've spotted it and you've thought, is that really true? Try taking just a micro break. Don't start with, I'm gonna set aside an hour for myself every day. Those types of large goals, while admirable, and I think everybody should be having time to themselves each day, those things set you up for failure. The things that set you up for success are starting small. So try taking a micro break. In my workshops that I teach, and then with my coaching clients, we define a micro break as something less than five minutes. So it could be a few seconds, just taking a few breaths. It could just be pausing before you move on to whatever you're doing. It really could be five minutes. And then over time, as you take these micro breaks, you have more time and more space. So again, in order to shift these thoughts, just three things. Bought them, loosen them by asking, are they really true? And then not only think of something that could be more helpful, but shift the action around it. So if you feel like you can't take a break, just take a little one and see what happens.
There's this concept of one degree turns from author and coach Martha Beck that I want to leave you with when we're talking about this. A one-degree turn is something she describes as if you were on a long plane journey going 10,000 miles and you were a passenger on the plane, if the pilot turned one degree every 500 miles, you would have no idea that the plane was turning. It would be such a minuscule turn that you would not notice. But at the end of that 10,000 miles, you would end up in a place that's completely different than where you set out to. And I really like this concept for our lives. It teaches us that if we make these small changes and we do them often. So in this case, if we notice our thoughts, we challenge them, and we get a little bit of space from them and prove them wrong, they have start to have less of a hold on us. And in the case of the Instagram post that we talked about in the beginning, if you're the person standing in the way of taking a break, you can do this framework in order to get yourself out and moving.
So today I did this for myself. I was in a reflection session with a lot of other women and a coach who I'm a member of her group. And at the end, it said, How are you going to thrive in the month of October? And I found my pen writing. I'm going to get outside as often as possible. And I looked outside and it was raining. And I work overnight tonight on the day that I'm recording this. And every part of me was like, ugh, I don't have enough energy or time to do that. And the weather is terrible. It'll feel awful. And all of these are just my brain making a story. So I did this practice in real time, challenged those thoughts, thought about what might be true, which was that I would feel better if I went outside. And I had just written down that I wanted to go outside more often and to move my body around. And so I logged off of the session, I put on all my rain gear, and I walked outside for 20 minutes. And then the best thing was, after I had done that, I felt so much better. And I came and recorded this impromptu podcast for you because I think this type of thing is the thing that we need to be sharing. It's not the fact that you time block an hour for yourself and you always stick to it. And if you don't stick to it, then we beat yourself up for it. The things that count are the little things. We just have to act like they count. We have to let them count. The little things in your life change. Those little 1% changes, little one degree turns, that's the thing that starts to move the needle from you being the barrier in your life to you being the driver of your life. So if you try this framework, I would love to hear from you. You can come over to Substack, leave a message there, let me know how it goes for you. I'd love to hear.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you got something out of it that will stick with you and help you live a less stressed, more satisfying life. Even if it's something small, these little things add up to big things over time. If you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you would rate and review the podcast on Apple or Spotify. I also invite you to subscribe to make sure that you get all the newest episodes as soon as they are released. And for bonus points, if there's something that really landed with you, I would love it if you could share with a friend or with your network. That's how you can help humans leading grow and reach a bigger audience. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next time.
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