January Reset Day 1: Take Stock

Welcome to the executive coach for moms podcast where we support women who are attempting to find balance and joy while simultaneously leading people at work and at home. I'm your host, Leanna Laskey McGrath, former tech exec turned full time mom, recovering perfectionist and workaholic and certified executive coach. 

Hi, everyone. Welcome to this special bonus episode of the January reset. The January Reset for High Achieving Women is a 5 day transformative program to support ambitious women in starting the new year off strong with a renewed sense of purpose, actionable goals, and a plan to thrive both personally and professionally. I do this every year, and this year, I decided to do it on LinkedIn live and to then share the recording here on the podcast so that everybody in the world can listen to it and benefit from what I'm teaching. If you would like to receive the associated worksheets, there's a worksheet for each day to help you in your practice to setting you up for an intentional year to create the kind of life and career that you want to this year, then just go to the show notes, and you can sign up for it. So I hope you will join me all week long. I know that it will help to set you up for an amazing year. And now onto today's episode.

Hi, everyone. Welcome. It is so great to see all of you here. Okay. Well, we're gonna go ahead and jump right in because I have a lot to share in 30 minutes, and I wanna make sure that we make the most of it. 

So, today is the first day of the January Reset 2025. The January Reset is something that I started last year, so this is the 2nd year that I'm doing it. And last year, it was more behind a registration. So a lot of women joined, and we had a small group where we met throughout the month of January. And I shared some things. I did some lessons, and then, we kind of just spent the month together just starting the year off really strong, and from a great place. And so I wanted to do that again this year, but this year, I wanted to make it open more widely, more broadly, and so that's why I'm doing these live streams. And this is my first time ever live streaming. I have a goal in 2025 to trying new things and trying things that feel a little bit scary for me. So I am doing that today. So welcome. Thanks so much for being a part of my very first live stream. 

I'm gonna go ahead and jump right in. Thank you for being here. You are in the right place if you are a high achiever, if you tend to have very, very high expectations of yourself and you are constantly achieving and succeeding, and you're kind of almost addicted to that success and really, continuing to drive and prove yourself.

If you have a lot on your plate, if you are, like, the responsible one in your family, maybe you were in your family of origin, and maybe you are now. But you just have a lot on your plate, and you just feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. You are definitely in the right place. You're in the right place if you feel like you can never stop. So you feel like you're constantly going and going and going, and it's kind of like maybe, you know, each day is just a marathon or a sprint to the end, and then you get up and do it all over again. You feel like you never have time to stop and check-in with yourself and take stock of what's going on in your life. You might be afraid to even find out, like, know what you'll find out if you do stop. And you kind of feel like the world might just stop turning if you stop. And you rarely take time for yourself because of that, because you have so much on your plate, because you love to achieve and succeed, and because you feel like you can never stop, you are never really taking time for yourself. That's like self care. What is that? You hear this term and and it feels very far away. It feels very out of reach to you. And, you're so focused on meeting everyone else's needs that it's sometimes almost easier just to pretend that you don't even have any needs, to be quite honest. So if any or all of those apply to you, you are in the right place.

And I just wanna introduce myself because I know some of you who are here, we know each other really well or we go back really far. And some of you who are here are brand new to me, and we have never interacted. And so I just want to tell you a little bit about myself real quick before I jump in so you know, like, why should you listen to me? Who am I to be talking about all of this today? 

So I'm Leanna. I am a mom. I'm a business owner. I'm a podcast host. I am the host of the podcast, the Executive Coach for Moms podcast, and the founder of the Executive Mom Reset. And I am also a recovering perfectionist and workaholic.

So for me, I have spent the majority of my life working and working really hard and working all the time. 60 to 80 hour work weeks were the norm for me. And then I had a baby and kinda felt like, oh, how am I gonna do this? I don't know how to balance all of this, and I don't really know how to show up at work in the way that I used to and also figure out how to be a parent and do this new job that I have created for myself now. So I that is kind of what led me to create the executive mom reset. And it's a coaching program where I help executive moms learn how to kind of balance all of it and how to enjoy both their career and their life and everything else, that's going on so that at the end of our lives, when we get to the end, we can really feel like we don't have regrets about how we spent our time. I think that feels really important to me. I am a certified coach. I focus on executive coaching, life coaching, and career coaching mainly. And I'm also a former EdTech startup exec, so I have been leading a couple different companies in the past. My background is in customer success and higher education, and I've led multiple companies from early stage start up to acquisition and on through beyond that. 

So that's a little bit about me. And I wanna talk a little bit about just what you're gonna walk away with this week. So by participating in this program in the January reset and coming to these calls, and I will also have worksheets for each day that I will share with you. By doing all of this, I want you to know what you're gonna be walking away with; more clarity. More clear about what you want and what's most important to you. I think that, again, because we rarely take time to stop and check-in, it's kind of like, am I in the right place? Am I on the track that I want to be?

And so I just want you to have a little bit more clarity about what you want, what's most important to you, and also a clear vision for the year ahead. As you think about where you wanna be and what you want your life to look like, I want you to have a more clear vision about that and, also, figure out what is it that you need to do this year in 2025 to take steps toward that goal and vision that you have for your life. So we'll talk about a plan and how to get there. And I know that almost all of us love action, and so we will definitely get there in the first couple of days. We're gonna be doing some reflection and learning about what's going on in our lives.

Today is day 1. Today's focus is take stock. Every morning at 10 AM ET on LinkedIn, I will be live to talk about this. I will also have this going out on my podcast as well, just the audio of it. And then that way, if you wanna be listening on the go whenever you're on your drive home or out on a walk or something like that or doing your makeup or dishes or any of the things that you do where you could be listening, then I wanted to have that available as well so you can listen to me on.

What a great time. I love this time of year. I love the beginning of the new year because I feel like it just brings so much positive energy and optimism about the year ahead and the ability to make positive changes in our lives.

And before we jump in to today's lesson, I wanted to share a free gift that I have for you, for attending. If you would like to join me for a more personalized vision of 2025, then I am offering a 1 hour vision call. So this is where we'll go through and look at your vision for 2025. It's a nice strategy session. It's a full hour. We'll talk all about what you wanna accomplish this year, what's most important to you, and how I may be able to help support you.

So let's go ahead and jump into, today and each day, we're gonna have a question, a meta question. And I learned this in my coach training. I did my coach training back in 2017, and, honestly, it was completely life changing for me. I have also had a coach for the past 4 years, and I find coaching to be so so life changing. In my coach training program, we had 4 meta questions that really frame every coaching session and every inquiry, every opportunity that we have to check-in with ourselves.

And the first question that we always ask is, where are you now? So let's talk a little bit more about that. Let's dive into that. So where are you now?

So some questions to ask yourself. When you stop or and take a look at your life and you look around, what do you notice? And if we just kind of step back, and I know that this is hard because we just wanna go go go and get back to our email and make sure that we are triaging all the things that people need from us because we are so needed. But if you stop for a minute, step back, and look around, what do you notice?I do have a worksheet with all these questions on it that you that I'm happy to share with you after, and I'll show you how to access that.

So but I'm gonna go through some of the questions here to start to ponder on. And then whenever you notice these things, how do you feel about what you see? And I want to invite you just to consider that when you're looking at things, when you're looking at your life and how things are going, our tendency is to look at that with judgment. Our brains are wired for negativity. Our brains are wired to identify threats and bad things much more than to look at good things.

And so a lot of times, we will only see the quote, unquote bad things. So whenever you're looking at this, whenever you are taking stock of how things are going, I just wanna invite you to step away from judgment. Give yourself a little space and step into a different energy of curiosity. Curiosity is my favorite place to be. And the reason why and when you think about a judgment curiosity spectrum, over on the judgment end, you have got like, your mind is made up. It's closed. There is no opportunity for learning. There's no opportunity for anything new. It's just this is bad, and I know it, and it's done. And our brains love that because our brains love efficiency. And our brains love to just say, like, I know the answer, and I don't need to spend any more time exploring here. We know this is bad. Move on. Okay? So when you're there, there's just not a lot of opportunity. There's not a lot of space. 

If we move over more into the space of curiosity, when we are curious and in that space of curiosity, into that mindset, and and kind of looking at things with that vision, we have the opportunity to have a much more open and spacious kind of viewpoint. We can learn because we don't know the answer. We are genuinely curious about, what could be going on here? And whenever we do that, whenever we are open and we're just asking questions and being genuinely curious, then we can learn so much. And that is the place where we can make true change from. So if you are doing this exercise and you're looking at where are you now, what's going on in your life, your career, and, you know, what are you noticing? Then we can look at it with curiosity. And if there are things that you wanna change, that's the place to do it from. It's from the curiosity. Why do I wanna change that? You know, what don't I like about that? What would I wanna see different? But when we get into judgment, then, that just doesn't get us very far.

So I just wanna share that caveat. That's for all of the questions throughout the week. I think that's a good lens to take a look at everything from.

So a few other questions. What's going well? And this is so important because I think that whenever we think about our vision for our lives, we only think about the things that we wanna change and bring into our lives, add to our lives, remove from our lives. But, also, what are the things that are already in our lives that we are happy about, that we're grateful for, that we want to make sure we keep. So that whenever we are making these changes and stepping into transformation, we are also taking some things along with us that we really like about our lives now. So please make sure to also think about that. So what's going well? What's not going so well? And let's be honest with ourselves about that as well. And what is the number one thing you'd like to change? 

I would like to show you the wellness wheel because I think that this is a great kind of framework or visual, if you're a visual person, to take a look at multiple areas of your life. And if you listen to my podcast, I talked about this last week. So, if you're here with me live, then here's a visual. So the wellness wheel has 6 to 8 components. There's not like this one and only wellness wheel. If you Google it, there are lots of different ones. But this is just one I picked because I like that it has words and pictures, for different learning styles. But the wellness wheel has 6 to 8 different components or different areas of our lives. And I think for us, high achieving women, one of the things that is helpful to notice is that work, occupational, is just one area, just one equal area of this wheel. There are also all these different areas. I actually was talking with one of my clients the other day who had listened to my podcast and had done this exercise. And she said, oh my gosh. I haven't thought about some of these other areas in a long time because for me, it's just been work and kids and work and kids. And there's so much more to life that I want to invite in and I wanna remember and focus on. I just haven't really thought about them since I have been moving up in my career and having more kids. 

So what I would invite you to do with the wellness wheel as an exercise, and this is also on the worksheet, take a look at each area and rate each area on a scale of 0 to 10 in terms of how things are going.

There's no there's not, like, a universal rating scale. It's subjective to you because what's most important to each person is different, and what people care about and how people would rate things is different. There's no right or wrong answer here. I know we love knowing what the right answer is and making sure we, we get that. 

And then, also, I would invite you to look at kind of the middle of it and kind of, like, if you step back and take a macro look, kind of the balance of it all. And, of course, nobody balances perfectly. This is never gonna be in perfect harmony. That is not the expectation. It's probably the expectation we have of ourselves, but I'm not trying to put any more expectations on ourselves because we already have enough.

Also, just how do you feel about the balance that you have? How do you feel that you're balancing all of these different areas? Or even if you say, you know what? Only 5 of these are important to me, you know, are the ones that I care about. How do you feel that you're balancing those 5?

Those are a couple of exercises, a couple of questions to ask yourself on day 1 of where am I now. 

I just wanna offer that the idea that I am right where I need to be. I was doing a meditation this morning, and it was just repeating this phrase. I am right where I need to be. I am right where I need to be. Even if I wanna make changes, even if there is another place that I believe is better for me, right now in this moment, I am right where I need to be, and I can make changes from this place if I so choose. But I think to me, like, this is really grounding to just remind myself that right where I am now is exactly where I need to be.

So that's what I wanted to make sure to share with you today. I, like I said, have a worksheet for you. And if you would like to receive that worksheet, I'll have a link in the show notes. But you can subscribe to the January reset, and then you'll get updates and reminders as well as the worksheets for each day. Then we'll have recordings of these, live streams as well.  If you're more of a visual person and you wanna see the slides, then you can.

If you would like to connect with me, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. And then, just a reminder that that vision call is available to you if you would like to have a chat and just go through. Maybe if you're more of a 1 on 1 person or you want some feedback, I love doing these kinds of calls. So I would love to talk to you, and I would invite you to participate in that.

Thank you all for joining me for the very first day of the January reset and my very first livestream ever in my life. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I hope this works.

I hope that it went to all the channels. I genuinely hope to see you tomorrow. All of the events are on LinkedIn, so you can go to my page and you can go into the events list. You will see all 5 events for this week.

So tomorrow, we're gonna work on our vision. So I hope to see you tomorrow at 10 AM. Thank you so much for joining me today, and I hope you all have a wonderful day. 

Thanks so much for tuning in to the executive coach for moms podcast. Please like, subscribe or follow the show so you'll be notified when the next episode is available. I hope you'll join me again next time. Take care.