Soul Joy: Ditch Burnout and Fall in Love with Life

From Stuck Energy to Practicing Abundance

• Dr. Julie Merriman

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After years of overworking and living in fear, I found myself on a transformative journey that completely redefined my outlook on life. In this episode of SoulJoy, I'm excited to share how embracing an abundance mindset revolutionized my approach to holistic wellness. You'll hear about my shift from a scarcity-driven mindset to one where recognizing my inherent worth and setting healthy boundaries became paramount. This discussion is particularly crucial for professional helpers who often grapple with burnout, compassion fatigue, and vicarious trauma. My story serves as a beacon, illustrating that believing there's enough for everyone can lead to a healthier, more fulfilling existence.

Moreover, we'll dive into the concept of an abundance mindset and ways to cultivate your unique version of it. I'll guide you through the process of defining and visualizing abundance, even suggesting the creation of a mandala as a practical tool. This week, I invite you to explore and define your own abundance mindset and unique message to share with the world, reinforcing that your distinct brand holds incredible value. Don't forget to subscribe to my email list for a helpful PDF and to support the podcast by leaving reviews. Thank you for tuning in, and take care!

Speaker 1:

Hey y'all, I'm Dr Julie Merriman and welcome to SoulJoy. In today's episode we're going to chat about practicing abundance. So to reach holistic, sustainable self-care we call wellness, you have to believe in abundance. All right, friend. Thank you so much for dropping by today to hang out with me while we record this episode. I think it's episode 13. Yeah, that's great. Things are rolling. I love that. So I really appreciate the time you take to tune in and listen to this podcast. It means the world to me. Thank you, thank you so very much, and I want to turn to my just real quick home chat.

Speaker 1:

So in the Merriman house, I work from home. I do this podcast, I write, but I also I'm a professor at a university. I work from home. I mean, I'm an online professor, which is awesome, because for years I drove over close to a couple hundred miles a day to get to the school where I taught, and it's a long drive and at night I'm old, I can't see anymore. I knew I had to find something online because I could not continue to make that drive. But the dilemma I'm having is that I would love to hire a housekeeper, but I just cannot justify it in my head because I'm home all day Now if I were gone eight hours a day, that's a dilemma that I'm going round and round about. So we'll see how that turns out, but right now I'm probably just I don't know I'm probably going to do it myself. So enough about that. That's where. That's where that's my dilemma for the week. Am I going to hire a housekeeper or not? Cause y'all, I don't know about you, but when I I love to turn on an audio book and pop in my earbuds and get and just clean, it's almost therapeutic for me. So, oh, listen to that. Okay, I've talked myself out of it. I don't need a housekeeper. That's my therapy, all right. So I'm glad you're here today and let's see, I just want to remind y'all that this podcast is designed for professional helpers podcast is designed for professional helpers. I want to help prevent and overcome the occupational hazards of this great career that we've chosen, specifically burnout, compassion, fatigue and vicarious trauma. And we can define professional helpers in a lot of ways. It can be everyone from a medical doctor to a school teacher, to a masseuse and everyone in between.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so today let's talk about practicing abundance. I want to go back to probably 1999. And y'all, I mean, that was back when I was really building up for this crash and burn. That happened, I guess, in the early 2000s, mid 2000s. Anyway, I was not practicing abundance, y'all. If I'm honest, man, I didn't know anything about it. That was not a course that we had in my master's program, learning to be a counselor. No one talked about abundance. And if anyone did kind of go that way, it was like ooh, that's new age, all that woo-woo stuff. And I mean, anyway, let's just say I arrived to 1999 with zero skills to practice abundance and let me tell y'all it was obvious I lived in fear of losing everything.

Speaker 1:

I overworked, I overcommitted, I mean I I would say yes to things that I knew I didn't want to do, and then I'd wake up with dread that I had to do the damn things. I overbooked with my clients. I let them own my calendar. I did not set set times. If someone called begging for an appointment, I would either come in early, stay late most often just not take my lunch coming early, stay late, most often, just not take my lunch. I feared charging decent fees because I didn't believe I was worth it. And again, I did not take lunches and a lot of times I worked through dinner Y'all. An average of a 15 hour work day was the norm.

Speaker 1:

I was driven for some reason to prove something I'm not real sure what, but I think I needed to prove my worth and I didn't. When I graduated high school, I got married really young and that's a whole other book, if you will and this person was not particularly particularly nice. You don't make good choices at 16. But and I wasn't pregnant, I was just dumb. But instead of going to college after high school, I was told I was too stupid to go to college and I went to be a hairdresser not that that isn't an amazing field and it takes a really sharp cookie to be a hairdresser but in my mind I thought well, I can go do hair school. Anyway, by the time I found myself in college, I felt like I was behind and I always felt like I needed to prove something. And in 1999, I was still in that mindset and let me tell you, I was miserable. I was horrible to myself.

Speaker 1:

Nothing was ever good enough and I really think now that I know more about abundance and my energy centers, my chakras, the energy in my root chakra was stuck. It was very heavy and sticky was stuck. It was very heavy and sticky and a lot of work had to be done on that particular chakra for myself, fortunately through soul searching, a good therapist and a lot of energy. Thankfully, I no longer live this way, because when you're not practicing in abundance, fear rules your day. You don't believe you're enough. Whatever that might be, you're constantly trying to win approval.

Speaker 1:

So you might ask okay, dr J, what is abundance? Abundance y'all is believing you deserve to have what you desire. Now, you may not always get it, but your energy, your belief, is open to it. You believe there is enough for everyone. You're not fearful that I'm not going to get enough clients or I'm not going to have enough at the end of the week to make ends meet. You know there is enough to go around and this belief is the only way you can manifest abundance, because you not only need it for yourself y'all, but you want it for others. There's enough for everyone and for everything to go around.

Speaker 1:

You practice gratitude for the glass being half full. Now listen to that again. The glass is half full and there's gratitude in that. And I know, I know and I write about it in the book and we'll talk about it on other podcasts. But I know y'all have seen the research on gratitude and the neuroscience behind that and how really, y'all, that can be a game changer. And I'm not talking about caustic, positive psychology because, as I've talked before, we've got to hold space for discomfort and allow ourselves to feel the discomfort, not gloss over it.

Speaker 1:

But it's important that we practice gratitude and that we build those new neural pathways because, you know, our brain is built to find the negatives in life. That's how come we survive. That's why our ancestors survived. They were always on the lookout for the negative stuff. What's, how come we survive? That's why our ancestors survived. They were always on the lookout for the negative stuff. What's the danger? Where is it? So I can go protect myself? And we live in a completely different world. We need to not only, yes, take care of ourselves and hold space for the discomfort, but also rewire our brain to notice the gratitude. I guarantee you.

Speaker 1:

I've done lots of presentations nationally, internationally, locally, throughout my career and I take my you know the feedback that you get from the evaluations. I take the evaluations very seriously, as I do of my students at the end of each semester. But y'all, there was a time in life I could get 500 phenomenal over-the-top evaluations, but one person I've had people say, oh, you shouldn't have worn that dress, or oh, those earrings didn't't work, or just things like that. That would absolutely blow me out of the water and that's what I would perseverate on, not the 500 great reviews that I received. We are built that way, so it's really important that we practice gratitude and allow ourselves to see that glass half full. Build, rebuild those neural pathways.

Speaker 1:

See, you believe when you're practicing abundance, you believe your needs will be met. And your amygdala, that wonderful little lizard shape, little lizard-shaped, almond-shaped, lizard part of our brain, hears us believing this, senses us believing this, hears the linguistics, our words about believing this and thus sets about creating that reality for ourself. I mean, for those of us that are believers and are familiar with the Bible, it's even biblical where Jesus is talking about speaking the words. We want to happen, because that creates a reality. The amygdala is a very important part of our brain and it's listening to everything we're thinking, speaking and believing. So abundance starts with believing it can happen. And y'all this looks like taking lunch. Okay, you take lunch.

Speaker 1:

You say no to that client because you know, there'll be other spots, or perhaps it's a new client and maybe that's not your new client. Maybe that new client needs to be moved to another professional helper. You say no to commitments that don't bring you joy, because you know holistic self-care, y'all. It's about building a life we want to live in, and that means we've included things that bring us joy. Our life is not full of commitments that we don't want to keep. You set a work schedule and stick to it, and by that I mean professional helpers who work by calendars. You own your calendar. You say no to appointments outside of your set work hours. You charge a living wage Now, depending on what kind of professional helper you are. If you're a fireman, that looks very different from if you're a therapist or a physician and you charge a living wage.

Speaker 1:

You believe in your worth and value and, sweet friend, you know your purpose and you follow that purpose with every fiber of your soul, with a passion and y'all. You stop comparing yourself and life to others, because there's no comparison. You are you, the world needs you and the world doesn't need a watered down version of you, because you've compared yourself to others and you've blocked some things that really are for you that bring you to your purpose. Comparison is a pathway to misery. Stay in your own lane. Focus on you Living an abundant life. Y'all is a mission and a calling and it's worth the effort.

Speaker 1:

So I just invite you. If anything I talked about when I was building up to my crash and burn, which I want to prevent any of y'all from going through, and, if you happen to be there, I want to give you tools to get back to the other side. But if anything I was talking about struck you, please, please, take the time to do this activity I'm about to share with you and I want all y'all to do this activity. This, it's just a good activity to take yourself through. I call it jumpstart your upscale, so that's the name of the activity, and let me just remind you before I go through the activity if you will sign up for my email list and right now I'm working on my new website and I'll have another spot for you just to click on to but for right now, if you go to wwwJulieMerrymanPhDcom and sign up for my seven day self-care challenge, which I think is a pretty good thing, but even if you don't do it, if you sign up for it. It will get you on my email list and then every week when I release the podcast, I will send you an email and it has a link to the podcast as well as these bonus PDFs. The activities I walk you through I also turn into a PDF. So, anyway, if you're interested, please sign up on my email list. So jumpstart your upscale. That's the activity for this week.

Speaker 1:

So here I want you to focus on you and your passions. That's that purpose and passion, and we all have purpose and passion. It may not be the same one throughout life. They may change, which is why doing this activity is valuable as well, because yours might be in a shift. But focus on that. Take some time to do some journaling and just think what is my purpose and what are my passions. I've got a full chapter on this in the book because I have some tools, excuse me, to help you a little deeper with it.

Speaker 1:

Um, but I also encourage you to adopt the mantra I am the only me. No one can do what I do like me. As I said a minute ago, the world needs you, a fully 100% you, not a watered down version, and I want you to learn to celebrate other successes. Now maybe you already do this. That's great. If it's something that you find yourself struggling with a little bit or feel a bit intimidated about, I really invite you to dig down. Maybe do a superpower model on that and see what the block might be. But celebrating other successes opens up the pathway for your own abundance and if you have a coach or a therapist, I encourage you to go over these things with them. Of course, if you don't, that's fine too. You can do it yourself. But I encourage you to talk with them about adopting strategies for internalizing the belief that you are enough, because often that lack of abundance comes from us not believing we're enough or deserving. Sit with them and work on discovering your authentic self and voice. Do some throat chakra work. Open up that throat chakra as well. Work with them on practicing CBT thought-stopping techniques. Maybe practice some confidence-building scenarios, some role-playing.

Speaker 1:

Find your unique voice, message and branding If you happen to be a professional helper, that is in your own private practice and turn your unique message into your unique brand. Now that could mean a lot of things to a lot of people. Doesn't mean necessarily for your private practice. What about your unique message for your life? What is the brand, your unique brand for your life? How exciting, how fun to dig down and really create that for yourself, for yourself.

Speaker 1:

So here's the prompts for this week. To answer, I want you to be the you that the world needs, because the world needs you. So in this, you need to define you. No one will ever do exactly what you do, the way you do it. What is your way? Comparing your life and practice to others prevents the ability to scale your life and your practice. In what ways do you feel that you're comparing yourself to others and what's under that? That's a good place to take that to a superpower model.

Speaker 1:

I think I already said that Embrace an abundance mindset, and I want you to define and describe that abundance mindset, really paint a picture here. You might even do a mandala around that. Whatever you have to offer, the world needs your version. So what is your version? Now, that might look a little bit like your branding, but you might be able to take that a different direction as well. What is your? What makes you unique? That unique message, that unique brand? Okay, so that's the activity for this week, and there's quite a few things there. Again, if you subscribe to my email. I'll get you the PDF of this to you. So let's see, that's it for today and I thank you for tuning in. Thank you for your time. Please subscribe to this podcast. Wherever you've listened to podcasts, please leave a review. Helps me reach more people and I'd love to hear from you. Take care of you.