Nobody knows what fifty five feels like until they press the pedal, overshoot it, and pull back. That is how you learn to drive, and it is also how you learn to operate as a different version of yourself. This is a theme that has been surfacing with colleagues, friends, and clients lately, and the question underneath it is always the same. Once you can see the pattern you have been running, how do you know whether you are acting from a healthier place or sliding right back into it. The answer running through the whole conversation is that you cannot know from the outside of it. You build the gauge by moving. From there it goes into the exits we take and why we take them, what exhaustion is usually pointing back to, and what happens when the fear of doing it wrong turns into doing nothing at all.

🔥 In This Episode:

• Why seeing the pattern is not the same as knowing how to operate differently, and what actually closes that gap
• How to build the trust that you can catch yourself going too fast and slow down
• The question worth asking before you take a new exit, and how to tell whether you are being drawn or told
• What fatigue is often reporting back about a choice you already knew was off
• Why the fear of repeating an old pattern keeps people swinging between a hundred percent and zero

Shame is what sits underneath most of this. Every should, every replay of why you did it that way, is shame in tidier clothing, and there is nothing shameful about being in process. You get to paint your own lanes, and nobody else gets to paint them for you. Alignment cannot be assessed from the outside of it. Go touch the thing you have been circling, even for fifteen minutes, and let your body tell you what it is.

Connect with us:

• Instagram: @drsaranelsongray, @dr.marisa.nicole10, @theheartworkpodcast
• Email: hello@theheartworklife.com

Support the show

Marcia Erickson is a business and executive coach with ActionCOACH in the Quad Cities, and she spent twenty years in healthcare administration before this. Most of this conversation sits on delegation, and on why so many owners say they want a team that takes ownership and then cannot hand anything over.

Marcia's first answer is practical. She says leaders rarely describe what success actually looks like in a role, so we default to saying we will know it when we see it, and the team is left guessing. Then Sara and Marisa take it underneath the systems, into the beliefs driving the behavior.

Marcia talks about how a belief has no objectivity in it, and how we go collect every piece of evidence we can find to prove it right anyway. She is candid about her own version of that, including the years she could not put her own face on her own marketing.

🔥 In This Episode:

• What actually blocks delegation, and why it has more to do with what you believe about yourself than what your team can handle
• Why "I will know it when I see it" is not a standard, and what it costs your team when nobody says out loud what success looks like
• Marcia's test before she hands anything off, and what changes when the question becomes whether you can live with the outcome
• What real accountability looks like when your people report their own wins and misses instead of you pulling it out of them
• What it took for Marcia, an introvert, to put her own face on her own marketing, and what she still does to get through it

Marcia says coaching lands hardest when someone is in transition, because that is when we finally stop and take stock of things. The rest of the time we keep doing the thing. What she wants for people is that they get to be successful on their own terms and actually enjoy what they built. That starts with naming the standard you have never said out loud, and handing off the thing you keep telling yourself only you can do.

Connect with Marcia:
Email: marciaerickson@actioncoach.com
Website: https://exceledge.actioncoach.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/1Bak8WCSPZ/?mibextid=wwXIfr
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@actioncoachmarciaerickson4220

Connect with us:

• Instagram: @drsaranelsongray, @dr.marisa.nicole10, @theheartworkpodcast
• Email: hello@theheartworklife.com

Support the show

Marisa took Alex to Italy for ten days and it was his first time in Europe. Rome, Florence, the Amalfi Coast, and almost none of it planned, which she says is the whole reason she actually got to be there. What she keeps coming back to isn't the sites. It's that Alex got to see where her grandparents learned to make pasta and where her mom lived, and after a lifetime of her bringing pieces of that culture into their home in little ways, he finally understood her at a deeper level. Their love went deeper because he saw her in a new light. Then they came home to Iowa and she didn't pick her old pace back up. She stopped prepping six days out at the practice, stopped posting to teach anybody lessons, and started letting a priority be a priority when it's actually a priority, herself included.

🔥 In This Episode:

• What opens up when you stop trying to accomplish something on a trip and let yourself actually be there
• The difference between capturing a moment on your phone and letting it land in your own eyes, and what you give up when you choose the screen
• Why being seen by your partner in the place you come from does something no story about it ever could
• Why Marisa stopped preparing six days out in her practice, and what she means when she says a priority is a priority, and so is she
• How to carry your family's culture forward without it becoming something you shoulder alone

We look to travel for rest or adventure, and then we come home and talk about the views. What actually stays is what your heart got informed in while you were there. For Marisa and Alex, that was him understanding where she comes from and why she loves what she loves, and then wanting to build it into their life together. He's the one at the grocery store now buying mortadella and Italian sourdough. She isn't passing her family's culture down by herself anymore. Take whatever opened up in you somewhere else and let it change your regular week here.

Connect with us:

• Instagram: @drsaranelsongray, @dr.marisa.nicole10, @theheartworkpodcast
• Email: hello@theheartworklife.com

Support the show