We also chat about her revolutionary approach to self-care, the 5 dimensions of self-care, and what we typically get wrong about self-care.

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Summer:
This episode of eat the rules is brought to you by you on fire you on fire is the online group coaching program that I run that gives you a step by step way of building up your self worth beyond your appearance. With personalized coaching from me incredible community support and lifetime access to the program so that you can get free from body shame and live life on your own terms. Get details on what’s included and sign up for the next cycle at summer innanen.com forward slash you on fire, I’d love to have you in that group. This is eat the rules, a podcast about body image self worth, anti dieting, and intersectional feminism. I am your host summer Innanen. a professionally trained coach specializing in body image self worth and confidence and the best selling author of body image remix. If you’re ready to break free of societal standards and stop living behind the number on your scale, then you have come to the right place. Welcome to the show.

This is episode 273. And I’m joined by Taylor Elise Morrison, author of inner workout, we’re talking about how she went from being terrible at self-care to now helping others to truly care for themselves. If you’ve ever struggled with self-care, you’re gonna want to really listen to this episode, we’re chatting about her revolutionary approach to self-care, the five dimensions of self-care and what we typically get wrong about self-care, you can find the links mentioned at summer innanen.com forward slash 273. I want to give a shout out to whoever left this wonderful review. If you’re like me, and you’ve been trying to heal from a lifetime of disordered eating, you must listen to this podcast. Recovery is hard enough when we hear endless, conflicting messages from health care professionals. But even when we resolve to stop restriction, there is a long road to heal from our diet related trauma. Summers helping me learn to truly accept my body and to stop all the unhealthy ways I’ve tried to do this in the past. It’s deep, difficult reprogramming work, but she seems to really get it especially I love that she’s addressing the added body image difficulties we are facing during the pandemic, this review was left in 2021. Thank goodness, we’re not really talking about that as much. I know it’s still going on. But it’s not the acute phase that it was back then that you so much for leaving that review. I really really appreciate it, you can do me a huge favor by going to Apple podcasts search for eat the rules, then click to leave a review. You can also get the free 10 Day body confidence makeover at summer innanen.com. Forward slash freebies with 10 steps to take right now to feel better in your body. And if you are a professional or a provider who works with people who may also have body image struggles, get the free body image coaching roadmap at summer innanen.com forward slash roadmap. This is the final episode of season nine of this podcast, I think it’s been nine years Happy anniversary to me. So this final episode of this season. Next season, we’ll be back in probably September, October, late September. Maybe in the meantime, I’m going to be replaying some of the best of body image series episodes throughout summertime. So I hope that you really enjoy those. And I’m going to be sending a survey out regarding the podcast, I want to get your feedback, just so that I can make sure that I’m giving you content that you want. So I’m going to link to that in the information for this episode. So if you go to whatever platform you’re using to listen to this and you find like the entire description for the episode, I’ll put the link in there to go to the survey. And if you’re on my email list, then you’ll see it there. And if you see it on social media, if you follow me on social media, I’ll be posting it there too. And if you just have any feedback that you just want to like DM me, or send through email, then please feel free to do that. Obviously, I’m not going to make every change that I receive, because I sort of have an idea of how things are going to be a little different next year. But I would love to know what topics you want to hear more about, so that I can tailor that to you. And I just want to say I really appreciate all of you listening over this past year. It means a lot to me. And I’m super excited about this interview because I think we could all use a different way of thinking about self-care and that’s what Taylor is talking about here. So Taylor Elise Morrison turned being bad at self-care and being firmly convinced of every human’s potential into a career. She’s the founder of the media company in her workout and the author of a book by the same name recently named one of fortune 10s, innovators shaping the future of health Taylor is tired of aspirational wellness as usual. Instead, she builds businesses content and experiences that make wellbeing and personal development more accessible. Let’s get started with the show.

Hi, Taylor, welcome to the show.

Taylor:
Hi, thanks for having me summer.

Summer:
I’m excited to have you here. And as I said, I really love your perspective on self-care. As I said to you, before we started recording a lot of your your your take on self-care and the way that you’ve laid it out and, and something I didn’t mention to you before was just like in taking the self assessment tool, the self assessment, I did the online self assessment that you have. And I was like, wow, none of these questions are like what I expected you were going to be asking it was, it was like so much more about your relationship with yourself, which we’ll get to. And so yeah, so I just wanted to mention that because I was it made me more excited about interviewing you about this, because I was like, Oh, this is really this is like not what I expected at all. This was really cool. So where we usually start is, I would love for you to tell our listeners. Yeah, just like what inspired you to want to help people with self-care to want to talk about self-care? Like, what was your own journey like with that?

Taylor:
Yeah, I am always really upfront, I just recorded an Instagram story about this yesterday, like, I come to this work, because I am not naturally good at self-care. I am like a recovering perfectionist or recovering like workaholic. And my tendency is to prioritize like achieving and caring for other people over myself. And the experience that I had was that I, I kept getting to this point of burnout. And at the time, I was doing like what we would think of as self-care often like I would journal or I would go get a massage or do my nails or something. But I would still be getting burned out. And it’s like there was this disconnect between the self-care tasks that I was completing. And the feeling of being cared for, in my case, the feeling of not being cared for. And so as I started exploring, okay, well, what does it look like to structure my life in a way that I’m not constantly getting burned out, and that I am feeling cared for in my daily life? That was where it all began. And I started talking about the journey. And then people were like, wait, I’m having similar problems, or I’m asking myself similar questions. And then inner workout, the company was kind of born out of that. And then, years later, now, there’s like a buck and I get to work with people doing this. It’s so strange. Sometimes I kind of like laugh that, me this person who is not naturally good at self-care, like gets to do this for my life’s work. And I’m so grateful, because it keeps me accountable.

Summer:
Yeah, yeah, totally. And one of the things I appreciate it, too, is just like, you acknowledge, like, your, like, the privileges that you have, that allow you to be able to, like, do certain things, and sort of just saying how, like, a lot of like, influencers are sometimes you know, like experts and whatnot, like, don’t acknowledge that and don’t sort of, you know, say like, this is easier for me, because we have, like, I don’t have children, and I have health insurance and like, these other pieces. And so I thought that that was like that, to me really resonated, I was like, oh, it’s sure relief to hear people actually, you know, like, say, like, this is my situation. And so this is why, you know, I was able to, I was also able to do these things. And that’s not to say like, it’s not possible for others, but just having that out there so that people don’t feel bad when they’re not maybe not able to have access or be able to do the same things.

Taylor:
Yeah, like, people can definitely still practice self-care, but it’s gonna look different. And that really came out of a place of like, somewhat frustration of reading different kinds of books and being like, Oh, this is not at all reflective of my experience. And yet this person is writing it as if every single person in the world can relate to it. And I didn’t want to write a book like that.

Summer:
Yeah, yeah. That’s great. And so you say that self expertise is the new self-care. So can you speak to that?

Taylor:
Yeah, well, it’s really funny. So my mom before she had me her first career was as an English teacher. And I feel like I got some of that because a lot of my work I feel like I want to get really clear on like definitions and what we mean when we say things. So the way that I talked about self-care as listening within and responding in the most loving way possible, really frame self-care as a converse. Session not like a to do list of tasks that we’re supposed to check off. And then it also frames you as being the expert in your care, which I think is so important. What I see when we talk about, like, I’ll call it mainstream self-care, is a lot of times other people external to you are saying you should wake up at this time, you should eat these foods, you shouldn’t move your body in this way, you should do these tasks in this order. And if you’re not doing this skincare routine, or this movement practice, then you’re doing it wrong in some way, in some people are more explicit in in the kind of the shame of not doing it that way than others. For others, it’s a little bit more like implied that I’ve got it all together. And there’s a lot of problems with that, like some of the things we were talking about just now with privilege. But it’s also it’s taking you away from your own wisdom, in the expertise that you have, in your experience. We as humans are dynamic beings, who are part of the natural world as much as we try to remove ourselves from the world and forget that we are part of nature. And so we’re going to be changing and evolving. And if we’re relying on quote unquote, experts outside of ourselves to tell us what to do, it’s actually making it harder for us to be in our bodies to be in relationship with ourselves in relationship with the world around us.

Summer:
Yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah. And you talked about, like, how you were a high achiever, and like you had self-care, and it was like tasks. And I think that a lot of people listening to this are wired as more perfectionist, high achievers as well, because that really intersects with, you know, body image struggles and things like that. But it’s really hard to like, switch over like, like, how, I mean, how did you sort of make that mental shift from going from like, seeing it as like tasks? So really seeing it as like that communication in that like relationship with yourself? You know what I mean?

Taylor:
Yeah, I mean, the first thing I would say is that it takes time, like, this is like, half a decade into this work for myself. So it’s easy for me to sit here and be like, yeah, just listen to yourself and respond to love. But it took, it took time for me to get here. I think that was a lot of permission granting, like giving myself permission to do things and to care for myself in a way that would look different than other people, even people that I might admire in some ways. It was permission granting that I can trust myself to know what I need in any given day. So some things for me, like I have realized now for a lot of reasons that moving my body in the morning is just good for my mental health. It fundamentally changes the way that I approach my day. So at this point, like, what 80% of the time, I’m going to move my body in the morning, but I give myself a lot of freedom to decide what that looks like. Are we just stretching today? Are we like lifting some weights? Are we doing a dance cardio situation, and that is still in some ways a task, but it really feels like an honoring of myself, where I have seen what happens if I don’t move my body in the morning. I fairly recently got diagnosed with ADHD. And so like there’s certain aspects of knowing that this happens at this part of my day that then sets dominoes for the rest of my day that if I don’t have I can be like very distracted and unmoored. So it’s not to say that there is never any structure. But there is a lot of room to play within the structure. And there’s a lot of room to question. Okay. For example, I’m based in Chicago, it was randomly like 70 degrees yesterday. Now, my structure might need to shift from what I needed in the winter when it was dark at 4pm. So there’s a lot of room to move and play and to evolve instead of before the mentality that I had was checklist. The checklist can never change. You just gotta keep rinsing and repeating.

Summer:
Right, yeah. And then you feel guilty or you feel like a failure or you feel like you’re not doing enough or it’s not right if you if you’re not achieving it in a certain way. So it’s like keeping it really flexible. And so what are the you talk about, like five different dimensions, I would love for you to just quickly describe those if you are able to do that, because I again, that was another area that I was like, Oh, wow, like, that’s a really interesting one. I have not thought about that when I think about self-care before. Yeah.

Taylor:
And whenever someone says that I’m like, Yes, this is what I want. Like I self-care and being in conversation with yourself really touches on almost every aspect of your life. But I think the world that we lived it live in likes to commercialize it so much and make it seem like the separate thing. You have to do or pay for when really, it’s so integrated. So this was one of the big paradigm shifts for me was to realize, oh, there are a lot of aspects of me, it’s not just about me relating to my physical body, I’m a whole being I am a multi dimensional being. So these five dimensions of well being are inspired by this yogic concept called the Kosha, as the first is the physical dimension, which is about the way you talk to you and about your body being in conversation with your body. And then there’s the energetic dimension that looks at the way energy moves in and through your life. And part of that is looking at how you breathe, then there is the mental and emotional dimension, that’s one dimension, it looks at how you’re using your brain, it looks at how you are able to process and express your emotions. And that dimension is supported by sleep, because sleep can definitely change the way you’re able to use your brain. Yeah, I had a rough night’s rest two nights ago, and I really felt it, I was like, What is going on, I am a different person right now. Then there’s the wisdom dimension. And that looks at your relationship to your inner wisdom that gets back to some of the self expertise that we were talking about. So looking at your ability to be present, to hear from your wisdom, and then to do something about it by taking aligned action. And then the final piece is bliss, which, before I started this work, I always thought of bliss as kind of being disconnected or outside of myself. But now I think of bliss as the state of really deep connection, connection to yourself, like the truest expression of who you are connection to community and connection to something bigger than you. And so as we’re looking at these five dimensions, and these sub dimensions, it allows us to be really intentional about how we’re caring for ourselves to make sure that we’re caring for all of ourselves, and also noticing that certain parts of ourselves might need more or less care, depending on the season of life that we’re in.

Summer:
Yeah, it’s so good. Like, I mean, I’ve never really thought about it in such a, like a broad, holistic sense before, I think most of us really think about self-care in terms of looking after our mental and our physical needs, like and that’s kind of where it and even the mental side of it, I think a lot of us think about, we don’t really connect it to like how we’re speaking to ourselves, or like the energy that we’re, you know, taking in and like, and things like that, like, it’s just, I mean, to me, I was just like, wow, this is so much more than I had really considered. And yet it makes so much sense to consider all of these things. And I think what’s great about it, too, is that it actually makes it seem like less of a task and more of like almost like a way of being in terms of like how you’re showing up for yourself every day instead of like, okay, I need to do these things to like, look after my physical health or look after my mental health.

Taylor:
Yeah, I love that description of it as a way of being Yeah, it’s like, you have a relationship with yourself, whether or not you’re intentionally cultivating it, whether or not it is a positive relationship. And the way that I’m talking about self-care is an invitation for you to be intentional in how you’re relating to yourself. And that’s so important.

Summer:
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, because when I like when in the self assessment tool that you have, which I will, like, you know, link to in the, in the show notes you talk about, like, it was like, I can’t remember the exact phrase you use, but it was like you appreciate your body or you just need to speak to kindly about your body. And I was just like, wow, like, I don’t think I’ve ever considered like putting that in sort of a self-care bucket. But it actually makes a lot of sense that the way that you speak to yourself, and obviously like, that intersects with the work I do related to your body, so that really popped out to me, I was like, Oh, this was really, I was like, Oh, that’s really cool that you incorporated that in there, too, as part of that self-care practice was like, you know, incorporating self acceptance into it.

Taylor:
Yeah. Because like, when you think about caring, like how you express care to someone that you love, like your romantic partner, your good friend, your parents, whoever it is, like, you consider how you talk to them. Like, do you write them a love note or a love song? Or are you annoyed at them and you say something really mean that you have to take back like, so it can be really separate in the conversation. But then when you think about it, you’re like, oh, yeah, I do express care to other people based on how I talk to them. So I can express care to myself by considering how I talk to myself.

Summer:
Yeah, absolutely. And so I’m curious to know, like for somebody embarking on making some changes, like what do you think this might be a question that you’re like, well, it’s to it. There’s a lot to it, but like, what do you think the biggest change that most people need to make is like, is it in like the way that they’re just thinking about it isn’t like the question that they sort have asked themselves like what’s kind of like the biggest change that you think people need to make to really shift to like self expertise and like really look at like caring themselves caring for themselves?

Taylor:
Yeah, I think the simplest way to do it is to bring it back to that definition of self-care. The starting point for people is figuring out how you hear from yourself the listening within. So are you the person who hears from yourself by journaling? Are you someone who’s like really embodied and you do a body scan? Like there are some people like this, who will do a body scan, and they’ll be like, I’m really tighten my hips. Because I had this conversation with my boss, and I’m holding on to this emotion in my hips. And for some people listening, you’re like, that is not me. That is not my story. And other people are like, oh, yeah, that just happened to me yesterday. So that might be a way that you hear from yourself, but figuring out, like, what is that entry point into the conversation that you’re having with yourself? And by entry point, I both mean, how you best hear from yourself. But also, when you’re better able to do that? Are you a morning person? Are you an afternoon person? Is it better for you on the weekends, all of these different things to consider. So for everyone, starting with the listening within, and for some people that will be the work for you for a while, is just to learn how to hear from yourself. Like not even worrying about what you do with it, but just to be able to hear the way that your being is speaking to yourself, maybe the work for you for a while. For other people, you’re like, Oh, I got that. And then you move into the loving response. And again, that word loving is important. Because I would guess that many of the people listening, we’re used to doing things out of obligation, we’re used to just getting things done, so we can check the box and achieve. But going back to this idea, we’re talking about self-care. We don’t want to do things just out of obligation that and we want to do things out of care and intention. So finding the loving way to give yourself what you need. And that doesn’t mean that it’s always going to be some sunshine and roses. Sometimes the loving response is something that feels a little bit uncomfortable in the moment. But it is setting us up for success in the long term. So yeah, if you’re looking for a starting point, I would just say like, how am I listening within? How do I hear for myself? How can I set up a way to do that consistently? And then how can I get better at doing loving responses without the perfectionism without the legalism? I need to do it exactly this way in order for it to be right.

Summer:
Yeah, that’s so good. And so what’s your advice for someone who’s like, okay, that really sounds that sounds so good. And I feel so guilty, like doing these things, because I have all these other priorities. Like, I’ve got to look after my kids or I have to go to work or like, it’s like, how do you and obviously, like, you must have sort of experienced that yourself. Because you talk about being like a workaholic and a high achiever. It’s like, how do you kind of, like, let yourself off the hook in one area in order to prioritize yourself?

Taylor:
Yeah, that’s such a rich question. So I think the first part is to consider that like, caring for yourself, especially this way that I’m talking about it not just caring for yourself by like spending money, but caring by for yourself by getting to know yourself is somewhat countercultural. So it’s gonna feel weird, because there are going to be plenty of your people in your life who like don’t get it, or are maybe a little jealous that they’re not doing that for themselves. So just acknowledging the reality that like, yeah, this feels a little weird, because it’s probably not how you were brought up, it’s probably not what you’ve seen, rewarded. And also, if you’re serious about caring for yourself, and your people, and going after the things that you want for the long term, practicing self-care is one of the best things that you can do. Because if you want to have a sustainable impact, you have to be able to sustain the pace of life that you’re going at. In for many of us, we set up our lives at a pace that isn’t sustainable. And then we like get burned out, and we tap out. And maybe you’re not the best mom or the best worker or the best romantic partner, and then you ease back in. But wouldn’t it be so much easier if you didn’t have to have that, like, hit the brakes, emergency situation, and you could just continue to show up at a pace that allows you to show up with excellence but do it from a place of ease. That’s what I’m always aspiring to. So that’s more like kind of conceptual, in terms of like tactical what you can do. Start with the time that you have point blank, like one of my favorite practices my one of the people that I learned meditation from Dr. It’s I Yvonne, she talks about a one minute meditation, where you spend the first 20 seconds fixing your posture because a lot of times we’re slouched, we’re doing whatever you spend the next 20 seconds being aware of your breath and you forget spend the final 20 seconds doing a quick body scan. Everyone, I guarantee you, you have a minute at some point in your day where you could do that really quickly. And you’re not going to judge yourself and be like, well, it should have been a 30 minute meditation, you’re going to celebrate yourself, because you just spent one minute caring for yourself. The biggest barrier that I see to people not doing this is that they have an idea that their self-care only counts if they follow someone else’s method. If they spend enough time, if they blah, blah, blah, blah, get rid of that if and just celebrate the fact that you did something for yourself.

Summer:
Yeah, like one minute, right. And I actually was thinking about that yesterday, because you talk about the like, like the silence for 90 seconds. And I was like, on I was walking outside. And I was like, just like silence for 90 seconds. Okay, I did it. Because I’m normally like always listening to something like I always have something, you know, going or I’m like, looking at the lake or like, my son’s with me. And so it was, yeah, it was just like, I was like, okay, like, it is like literally just, you know, one minute, 90 seconds. Like, that’s actually what I appreciated about a lot of the stuff in your book is that it isn’t, you know, with these overwhelming massive changes, I mean, obviously, I think if you do a lot of them overtime, like it will gradually create bigger shifts in your life. But yeah, the tools aren’t necessarily like, doesn’t require you to like completely color code your schedule with like a new version of you, that is not true to the amount of time that you actually have.

Taylor:
Yeah, because that’s how we can get burned out on self-care. Like, you think that you need to change everything about how you’re interacting with yourself, and how you’re showing up in a day. And maybe you get super excited about it for a week, or two weeks or a month. And then all of a sudden, you’re like, This doesn’t fit my life. And then you stop altogether. I would so much rather you start with like a little opening, and then see if there’s space to expand, then overwhelm yourself and then be burnout on your life and be burned out on these things that are supposed to help you feel cared for. Yeah, totally.

Summer:
One of the other things you talk about is that self-care doesn’t mean solo care. And I think like even just in our conversation right now, it’s still feels very much like solo care. So like, what’s missing from that? And like, how do we go beyond that?

Taylor:
Yeah. So self-care, in some ways, I think is an easier conversation for society to have, even if I don’t fully agree with the mainstream, like we are used to doing things by and for ourselves into prioritizing the individual. But that’s not actually how we’re wired to be as humans. And I also find that like, in this season, I am caring for myself pretty well. It is because I am so supported, that I have like rich friendships and people who can support me, I have a husband, who is sometimes my accountability partner, who will be like, Hey, you said you’re going to do this thing or like, Hey, have you eaten today, because again, with my ADHD, sometimes I hyper focus on something. And then I just totally forget, and I look up and it’s like 4pm, and I haven’t nourished my body. So I have people who can support me in making sure I’m doing the things that make me feel cared for. So that’s one way that like, people can just help me in the act of care. But even beyond that, like, the end goal of us caring for ourselves, is never just for ourselves. Like if I would sit down with any of the listeners like you, yes, you want to feel cared for you want to feel fulfilled in your life. And a lot of times, that’s because you want to have an impact, or because you want to feel more deeply connected to your loved ones and your family. And when we aren’t caring for ourselves, we’re not a lot of fun to be around, we’re probably not showing up the ways that we want to. And in order to get to that place of, again, coming back to the sustainability, we need to be willing to give in to receive. And what I found over time, is that so much of my work with clients or in workshops, is talking about to people about how we can get you support. And it generally is not that the support is not there, it’s that we are not willing to ask because we think that we are less than if we’re asking for support, we should be able to do everything on our own. And that’s like, that’s a huge lie. No one should be able to do everything on their own. And that’s not how we’re designed as humans. So I’m like I’m pausing here, because I get very passionate about this. But yeah, it’s impossible that you’d be able to do everything on your own.

Summer:
It’s just No, yeah, yeah. No, it’s so important, right? Because I think that like we’ve talked about this on this podcast before with other people too. It’s just, it is really hard to ask for help and it is it is really hard to feel like you’re almost like worthy and deserving of it like you feel like you’re or like being a burden on somebody like, it’s like, oh, I don’t want to put you out. But I think when we’re always on the other side of it, like when someone asks us for help, like, we’re always happy to give it because that’s how we care for other people. So it becomes this, like, you know, this circular thing, if we’re also engaging in that process of asking for help as well. Yeah.

Taylor:
And something that I’ll add, I said this recently on my podcast, and I’ve just been sitting with this, like, for a month of, especially for people who are perfectionist or have perfectionist tendencies, we think that like, by being a perfectionist, that is what will make people feel connected to us. And that might make people admire us or think that we have it all together. But people don’t actually connect with perfection. People can act when we are willing to share what’s going on underneath the surface. And whenever I’m hesitant to ask for help, because I feel like oh, they’re gonna think less of me, or Oh, bla bla, bla bla, I go back to that, like, No, I’m offering an opportunity to deepen a connection with this person. That wouldn’t be possible if I pretended my life was perfect.

Summer:
Oh, I love that reframe. That’s so good. It’s not even a reframe. It’s just the truth. But it’s like a different, you know, it’s a reframe within ourselves in order to engage in that process. That’s so good. And one of the things I wanted to ask you about, because I just noticed on your on your Instagram page that you had said in September that you were stepping away from social media. Like, I’m just curious to know, what made you decide to do that? And like, how has that been for you, especially with like launching a book? Like, what’s that been like for you? Yeah, so

Taylor:
I’ve had a fraught relationship with social media, I still, like personally show up on Instagram stories. I’m personally pretty active on LinkedIn, because I do a lot of work with organizations. And our workout will occasionally post in stories. But what I just realized is that I’m trying to say this as concisely as possible, I had a few observations. One was that, from like, a business perspective, we weren’t getting an ROI. So we are putting a lot of time effort, energy into resources on Instagram. But if people were connecting with us and buying from us, they tended to come from our newsletter. So it was like, oh, there’s a mismatch. I was like paying someone else to run in our workouts, Instagram, who was so good at community management, and was so good at the work that she did, but we weren’t getting those results. There’s also the other piece kind of ideologically, where I just think there’s a lot of content on this stuff in the world, on and on the stuff, I mean, self-care, personal development, there’s a lot of that in the world, it’s so easy for us to get that dopamine hit of oh, I liked it, I shared it, that’s means I did the work. And really, you didn’t do the work, you’d like to post about doing the work. So I would so much rather create spaces for people to do the work then just create like these little bite sized things that make you feel like you did something when you didn’t. And I also found that the most common complaint that I get from people is they feel like they don’t have time for self-care. But a lot of us are spending more time than we would like on social media. So we just kind of deep prioritized Instagram, when the book came out. For like two weeks before we did post more regularly, we’re talking about maybe like how, how we might do like one or two posts a week. But honestly, the business is like doing really well guys feel good not having to spend as much energy thinking about being on social media. And it feels a little bit more in alignment with values and with the, the way that I would love to people see people doing their inner work. So it’s a very personal choice. And I’ve had it where I will like take full breaks from Instagram and come back on. But it just felt nice to kind of say like, this isn’t our priority anymore. You’re welcome to follow us. We’ll occasionally show up here, but like, don’t count on us being here count us being in these other places.

Summer:
Yeah, that’s so cool. No, I love it. Because I’m like, you know, in a similar position with, you know, having to use online marketing and social media is such a big aspect of that. And so I was like, Oh, I was like, I really want to ask you about that. And then I think other people benefit from hearing about it too. Just even really doesn’t even matter if you have like, you know, some sort of a public profile or a business but just within yourself, like in terms of, like you mentioned, you know, like the like, it’s not actually doing the work, you know, like reading stuff like consuming and I know that was something else that you talked about was like people who are kind of like self aware over achievers. So people who like know so much about personal development know so much about self-care, but let’s not actually integrate it into their lives and, and that’s something I talk about too, like we have this tendency to like consume information and it feels like we’re doing the work but it’s not actually like we’re not embodying it, it’s not actually changing anything. We just were just accumulating all this knowledge. And so yeah, I thought that was really relevant to what you just talked about, too.

Taylor:
Yeah, it’s all of this stuff stems from reminders that I tend to need. And then I see like, oh, yeah, other people probably need this permission and break to. And like, if anyone who is a business owner is listening, or anyone who is building like a public profile, I would just encourage you to be like, really honest with yourself about like, okay, what are the things that I’m measuring? And do these actually matter? Like, even before we got off of social media, we kind of stopped measuring followers, because like, that didn’t matter. And I feel like that’s a metaphor for a lot of things in our own inner work, where we can get so caught up on, can I meditate for 30 minutes, can I do XYZ? And it’s like, cool. But wouldn’t you rather, instead of saying I meditate for 30 minutes every day, wouldn’t you rather say, I mindfully respond to situations? Like that’s really the outcome that you’re trying to get from meditating? So why not focus on that instead of this thing that you can brag about?

Summer:
Right? Yeah, yeah. Oh, that’s so helpful. That’s great. So as we wrap things up here, like, you have this self assessment on your website, which takes about 10 minutes to complete. It’s like a series of 75 questions, and then you receive the report. And then the book is really like, I mean, you, you need the assessment to do the book, right? Like, because you could just read the book, of course, and then take what you want from it. But it really then guides you as to like, what areas of the book to focus on. And I loved the way you laid everything out. And like, so many great ideas and things like that, and like how to implement and it was really like useful, like something I could see like you going back to kind of over and over depending on like what your needs are in any given time. I hope I explained that correctly.

Taylor:
Yeah, you totally did, like the so the assessment totally free, you can do that as many times as you want. And it’s free. And then the book is like a really nice companion to the assessment. And I love how you said you saw it as something that you could come back to you because my editor when we were talking about this, she’s like, I want a really beautiful book that people could like put on their bedside. And if they opened it up on any page, there’d be something useful for them. And like hearing you describe the book, I’m like, Okay, we did it. We like met my editors goal.

Summer:
Yeah. 100%. You did? Yes, you did. So where can people find more of you then tailor?

Taylor:
Yeah, I feel like the best place is on the website and our workout.co There’s a link to the assessment and to the book right on the front page. And then I mentioned the newsletter. That’s where we’re like most active our podcast is seasonal now. So you’ll know if the podcast is in or out of season. If you’re on our newsletter. It’s called self-care Sundays. People love getting it and it’s just like a, an invitation for you to take a moment for yourself on a Sunday.

Summer:
Amazing. Thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure chatting with you today. And yeah, just like such great wisdom. So I appreciate everything that you that you’ve shared with us today. Rock on. Thank you so much. This was such a joy all right.

Taylor:
I hope you enjoyed that one. Thank you so much for being here. And thank you so much for listening to this season of the show. Hope you enjoyed it. I hope you have a wonderful summer enjoy listening to some of the replays they’re good ones. And I’ll be back with some new episodes in the fall. Thank you so much. Oh, you can find the links mentioned in this episode at summer innanen.com forward slash 273. Thank you for listening rock on. I’m Summer Innanen. And I want to thank you for listening today. You can follow me on Instagram and Facebook at summer Innanen. And if you haven’t yet, go to Apple podcasts search eat the rules and subscribe rate and review this show. I would be so grateful. Until next time, rock on.