Changeology
The Changeology podcast explores the art, science, psychology, and philosophy behind making big, bold, badass life changes.
Inspiring. Empowering. A little weird.
Changeology
Turning Toxic Success Into Sustainable Success…Without Sacrifice, with Nicky Lowe
In this episode of the Changeology podcast, I talk with Nicky Lowe, award-winning executive coach, leadership development expert, and host of the Wisdom for Working Mums podcast.
Nicky shares her deeply personal story of burnout, what sustainable success actually looks like, and how high-achieving women actually CAN navigate work, motherhood, and well-being–without sacrificing their identity.
Nicky shares her experience of pushing through exhaustion until her body literally began to shut down, and offers an inspiring (if cautionary) reminder of the power of rest and tuning into our bodies.
If you're in a season of overwhelm or feeling the quiet nudge that something needs to change, this conversation will help you learn to pause, recalibrate, and rethink your definition of success.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
🌟 The somatic signals of burnout—and why your body often knows what’s up before your brain does
🌟 How high-achieving women fall into “toxic success” and what it really costs us
🌟 The concept of sustainable, feel-good success and how to create it (yes, it’s a thing!)
🌟 Practical non-negotiables (including NGAs: Non-Guilt Agreements) for working mothers and leaders
Connect with Nicky here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/luminate/
https://www.instagram.com/nickyloweleadership/
https://luminate-group.co.uk/podcasts/
The REAL Change Kickstart is a 45-day 1:1 coaching intensive designed to help you:
- Identify the behaviors keeping you stuck
- Unlearn what is no longer serving you
- Create new patterns that align with what you truly want
Interested in longer-term support for making a significant change? You can apply to work with Meg here.
Want to learn more about the art, science, philosophy, and psychology of making significant life changes? Sign up HERE for my weekly newsletter and have the Changeology podcast delivered straight into your inbox!
Connect with Meg on--
Nicky Lowe: Changeology Podcast
@0:00 - Meg Trucano
Welcome to the Changeology Podcast, Nikki.
@0:10 - Nicky Lowe
It's an absolute pleasure to be here. When you reached out to invite me, I was firstly, I was over the moon that you were launching this out into the world, and I'm really honored that you invited me on as a guest.
@0:20 - Meg Trucano
So thank you. Oh, thank you for joining me. I had such a wonderful time for context for our listeners.
Nikki and I were connected through Emily's Parks, who's my coach.
@0:31 - Nicky Lowe
She's from the same neck of the woods as you are over the pond in the U.S.
@0:38 - Meg Trucano
I guested on the podcast that you host wisdom for working moms. And I think we talked a lot about self trust in different contexts like motherhood, et cetera.
@0:48 - Nicky Lowe
There's a really awesome conversation. So I'm glad that we get to continue that conversation today. Absolutely. We too.
@0:57 - Meg Trucano
Okay. Well, and FYI, we will think that episode down below so that everybody can listen to it, but as I began to kind of prep for this episode and learn more about your backstory and your experience with burnout, which is so often a trigger for change, right?
The more I realized, we just had to talk to you about it. So could you describe your experience with burnout and how that experience motivated you make a change?
@1:26 - Nicky Lowe
Yeah, and it's interesting because when I kind of look at the bread crumbs like that join the dots and kind of lead the pathway, my first experience with burnout was probably prior to the one that we talked about.
So I think I became a breath away from burnout probably 20 years ago, and I can loop back to that.
But the real experience that brought burnout into my life was 12 years ago, just after having my first burn and
and when he was about a year old I just remember playing on the floor with him and literally not having the energy to get up off the floor and it was incredibly scary because I was like oh there is nothing in the tank and it wasn't like tiredness it's just energetically there was nothing left in my system and I remember going to the doctor and kind of going something's not right and they did a load of blood tests and these blood tests came back fine and they said no you're just a new mum all new mums are tired so I was like oh god I just must be really weak in comparison to other mums because they seem to be just be getting on with it and here's me you know really struggling and so I just did what I had done really well up and to that point in my life done deep used my willpower and was like we'll just push through but I just became more and more and well to the point where I knew in every cell of my body
@3:00 - Meg Trucano
I think wasn't right and went back and had further tests and exactly the same thing came back.
@3:06 - Nicky Lowe
So I started thinking, do you know what? I've got, I must have a rare disease that nobody knows of or can't detect because I know something's not right.
And I ended up going and finding an amazing woman had some private tests done with her. And it came back that I'd got what at the tying was called a genome fatigue, it's no longer called that, it's called HPA axis dysregulation.
But I'd effectively burnt out my adrenal system, I'd been using adrenaline cortisol just to power through. And it was a real shock to me because I, you know, I'd been a coach at that point for quite a few years, I'd been nearly a decade, I'd been a coach, I thought I was really self aware, thought I was doing all the right things to look after myself, like I was eating really healthily, I thought I was getting really good sleep, I was, you know, doing yoga, all the things that, you know, on the surface.
would go, this, this shouldn't be happening. So I became fiercely curious because I was like, if I can't figure out why it's happened, I can't stop that happening again because it literally blindsided me.
So I've really spent the last kind of over a decade now really getting curious about like, what is burnout, what the contributing factors.
And to begin with, I looked at it from what I would call the psycho biological, so like the individual factors of like what's going on in my system, like what from a genetics perspective from a kind of a hormone perspective and looking at all of that, which was really interesting.
But on that journey, I became aware of what I call the psychosocial factors. So all of those, it's like the water we're swimming as a mother, as a woman who has ambitions, know, all of that stuff.
And I started to become, it's almost like when you start to see it, you can't see it.
@4:55 - Meg Trucano
that's really what led me on that journey. Okay, okay, so what? When you kind of started identifying various factors that might have contributed, what were some of the first things that you kind of addressed and how did that unfold?
@5:12 - Nicky Lowe
Yeah, so I suppose one of the first ones was just the concept of rest. So I'd mistakenly thought that rest was sleep.
And was like, I'm getting good quality sleep. You know, at that point, I was lucky with my firstborn that he was sleeping through the night.
So I had assumed it was sleep. I was like, well, I'm getting sleep. So there's no reason I should burn out.
But what I realized was I just hadn't been able to build rest into my life or even acknowledge that it was useful.
I was somebody that was, I suppose you could type a like on the go. And if I wasn't on the go, was sleeping.
So I started to, I started to get into this concept. was an amazing lady Karen Brody. that wrote a book called Daring to Rest and how actually in our society it takes my courage to lean into rest because you know I culturally we're not kind of honoured or rewarded for doing that so the first part was like I had to surrender to rest because that was part of my recovery but just noticing how difficult that was and starting to become aware of my my tendencies.
So that was one part of it and another part of it was just noticing kind of my hyper independence so recognising you know I knew logically that it takes a village to raise a child but I was like realising that actually it takes a village to raise a mother and I'd lost my mum before becoming a mum and I totally underestimated the grief that that would bring up but also the needing that eternal line for me to lean into not just my kind of son to lean into me as a mother but where do I
in into. So that was a huge part of that. And what else? I think the first year of his life was actually looking back really traumatic, not just I had a very high risk pregnancy, I had a traumatic birth and then he was in and out of hospital the first year of his life and realizing that actually I had a high capacity for stress.
So I was really good at disassociating for my stress. It's always been somebody, you put me in a stressful situation, you're the kind of person I want around.
You're all people would want me around, you know, I stay calm, I can kind of be really resourceful. So on the surface, I was looking like I was coping with it really, really well.
But what I realized was I was storing a lot of stress in my body that kind of had to somewhere and the burnout was the kind of wake up call to that.
So I suppose what I learned was somatic awareness and really having practiced this to tune into my body because I can live a little way away from it.
very in my head so I can disassociate from it and I was like oh no it was there and I just didn't pay attention to it.
@8:08 - Meg Trucano
Yeah yeah and like that my children are adopted but the whole first year of their lives I very much felt that they had they had so many they were premature but they had so many run-ins with like gosh these one of them stopped breathing one of them like had a terrible alert reaction we had ambulances we had like several ambulance runs before they were even one year old and and this just like constant vigilance and stress that that that accumulates in your system and yeah you people would say to me all the time like oh my god you're handling this really well and I had like a little thought in the back of my head no I'm not yeah I am trying to survive day to day but that yeah as you said that accumulates in your body.
So, Nikki, in your work as kind of founder and executive coach and development expert, your zone of genius lies at the intersection of female leadership, working moms, well-being.
So I kind of want to know why this trifecta of experience, like how, what is so compelling about these topics for you?
@9:25 - Nicky Lowe
It's really interesting because if you'd asked me 10 years ago, I wouldn't have been able to articulate that, so I think it's come from this real lived experience.
So my background was, I found myself, I started my career in the corporate world, working for a technology company, a Silicon Valley technology company, but I was based here in the UK, and found myself in my mid 20s and senior leadership roles, kind of, completely as an accidental leader.
Like, I was like, I really don't know that they've promoted me well beyond my capability here, but I seem to be recognised and rewarded for that so I had this sense that there might be something I was doing right but I didn't understand it at the time so I thought I just need to learn about leadership.
I need to know what the hell leadership is, what a good leader does and how I become one and I think that set off that kind of journey of leadership and it led me to training coaching as a leader so I was managing cross-cultural teams and coaching was a big part of my leadership style and that really planted the seed for the coaching piece so 20 years ago I left corporate and retrained as an exec coach and started to work with leaders so that was the leadership piece and so that was one piece of the puzzle and before having my children that was the main piece of my career and then adding kind of having children and then my own experience of oh my god how tough this is somebody that wants to and I'd
My mum was an amazing mum and she was a stay-at-home mum and so that was the only role model I had in my head of what good motherhood was and very quickly I realized that actually my the career part of me is still really important and I wanted 10 to that and having that struggle about well how do I do that like the the role set that I have is is is not allowing me to do that ease and I was carrying so much more mothers than I needed than was functional and so that was the piece around well leadership motherhood like how do we navigate the leadership pipeline and the motherhood or parenting pipeline and then this piece around the burnout and trying to understand well what is well-being and trying to get a sense of what well-being is and how nuanced that is for women because of you know we cycle we have hormones the the
the different physical journey that we might go on. So that was where the female wellbeing piece came in around actually female leaders, if we add in motherhood and we're trying to feel well in our journey, like how do we make that work?
So those three of them merge, I suppose my own journey from where my own passions are but equally in the coaching conversations I have with my clients, it's around those areas that people struggle when that intersection happens.
@12:31 - Meg Trucano
Yeah, yeah, So one of the threads that seems to run through all of those areas is this notion of success, right?
And I know in my work, a lot of times the fear that holds people back from making a big change is the fear that they won't be successful in that change or be successful in sort of sustaining it.
You know, they fear they, you know, won't be successful at the new job that they take or maybe the book they want to write won't sell or something.
And they want this change, right? But if they're going to put the effort into it, they want it to be successful after all of that.
So success is something that, as a culture, as a working individual, we kind of know, unquote, on a collective level.
You know, you see it kind of thing. But I always really challenge my clients to examine what they really believe success is for them and what it requires of them to attain it.
So for you, personally, what is success?
@13:33 - Nicky Lowe
Great question, because I think I've been on a massive journey throughout my life with this. I think, you know, as a young woman, I was really driven to be successful.
So one of my core drivers is I really want to be competent and I want people to see me as being competent.
So I think I did the whole, I'm going to be really academic and do really well academically. And that was kind of the measure of success.
then it was kind of when I graduated, go and get the good job, whatever that kind of meant. And check that kind
career box. And so when I found myself in this, in, you know, in my tech career, you know, I was ticking all the boxes of success.
Like I had, you know, the global job, the massive salary, the stocks, the shares, the company car, we brought a house in the countryside like I was but I was like literally on the inside.
I, it was like my soul was being sucked out. And I kept going, I'll just do another year, I'll figure out what it is that I actually want to do because I was at that point, you know, when I said actually looking back 20 years ago, I was the break away from burnout.
I was what I would call in misalignment burnout, like my core values just weren't being aligned with the work I was doing, but it became this real tension about but I'm being successful.
I can't gaslit myself for a long while. If only I work harder, this will become easier and then I'll enjoy it more or
@15:00 - Meg Trucano
why can't I just be grateful for like all that I've got and I hear that all the time.
@15:05 - Nicky Lowe
Yeah and so that was really damaging to me and what led me to leave in the end was I'd known for a number of years that I wanted to do something different but I had no idea what and I was stuck in this big salary I was a corporate prisoner you know I'd got all the trappings of success but I'd got a very poor quality of life and so I was I need to figure out like what it is I'm good at how I can take that out into the world and also be paid well for it because I built this lifestyle around this kind of income and I went out and thought I'll go and hire an occupational psychologist and thought that would give me the answers and it didn't and then I went and hired an exec coach and it was transformational and that woman I still in contact with that we worked together now kind of 20 years later and what it enabled me to do is get really clear on what my values were
were and are, what was really important to me and helped me to really get a sense of why I was feeling the way I was and it wasn't about blaming myself.
And so I knew the path to what I was hoping true success was going to be. But I still put, I can exit strategy, was like, right, need two years to retrain as a coach, launch my business, get my business set up, then I'll leave my corporate job.
And it was about three months after I'd finished this coaching programme because I could feel myself what I now know burning out still because I was like, I'm conscientious, I'm still going to put 150% into something.
But I was pouring energy into something that wasn't giving it back to me. So, you know, it wasn't sustainable.
So I booked a holiday with my partner, now my husband now, but it was my partner back at the time when we booked a two week holiday to the Maldives and I thought, I'll just get away, I'll just replenish.
And obviously the Maldives is everything you would imagine, you know, just it's idyllic, it's like paradise on earth and we were a week into that two-week holiday and I got a call from my brother to say that my mum had died really suddenly really unexpectedly and I had 24 hours before I could get a flight home and I remember just sitting looking out into this kind of paradise just going, what am I doing with my life?
Like seriously, what am I doing with my life? I know that what I'm doing is making me unhappy. I've got a pretty good idea of what would make me happy and yet I'm still not allowing myself like the fear or the, if you talk about the, the, I'm walking from, in a quote unquote, success to start again, start from nothing.
But I literally, my body, when you cannot go back to that life, like I literally, in those when I go back and hand in my notice and and it wasn't it wasn't even logical it was a very visceral response and I think what that taught me was toxic success and you know all of those external pieces of it's not in alignment it is toxic and it was it felt incredibly toxic I'd become a person I didn't like I was living a life I didn't like I I you know we talk about self trust I was constantly gaslighting myself not trusting my instincts about what was lighting me up what I was enjoying so I'd lost confidence in my ability to navigate my own life and that I always talk about that before I left the Maldives literally the world kept turning on on its axis it shifted on its axis so it's still turning but literally my whole world aligned in a different way and it was I I became allergic to toxic success it was like if it caught
costs me, my soul, if it costs me, myself true, then that self trust, not worth it. And so I redefined what success meant, and it was about does it feel good?
Is this sustainable? And the feel good is quite nuanced, because, you know, I will do stuff that feels hard, that doesn't necessarily feel good as in, oh my God, this is challenging me step outside my comfort zone, but I know it's true and replenishing ultimately.
And so I redefined success as sustainable feel good success.
@19:40 - Meg Trucano
Okay, sustainable feel good success. Okay, I love that. And I love that feel good success can be like an internal dialogue, and it's something that evolves over time, right?
Like, so it's something that you do at the beginning of your coaching career, begin of your journey toward living the sustainable success can look quite different, right?
From what it is today, right? feels good today? Something that may have felt good to you 10 years ago, maybe not so much now.
@20:13 - Nicky Lowe
Yeah.
@20:14 - Meg Trucano
But I know this is one of those things that you talk about a lot with your clients and this idea of like sacrificing for success.
Like you said, you sacrificed your soul, sacrificed your energy, you sacrificed all these other things. So you work with women in your work to find that sweet spot of success without sacrifice, which is sort of challenging this idea that something has to give in order for success to happen.
So in your work, what do clients tend to think that they need to sacrifice the most?
@20:49 - Nicky Lowe
Such a great question. And I think this is such a powerful kind of conversation to get into. there was so many layers to it.
So at a high level, think what can often happen is people can sacrifice working well so their professional success for living well their personal success so it's like well I will sacrifice my sleep or I will just you know um skip kind of having so much of a social life or and so it's I will sacrifice doing well in my career so I'll have the doing well in my career but I will I will tolerate stuff in my personal life to make that happen so that's it kind of like a a very 10,000 foot level but within that there becomes a cost of you know I've got to ignore those subtle signs those whispers in my body of oh you know I would have loved to have gone out with the girls for dinner tonight but I've got to work late and get that project over the line and that's okay because I'll you know I'll catch it with them next month and then next month comes and you do the same
and so there's like this slow erosion to begin with that you don't you don't notice it. So over time you you kind of just disconnect from that sense of life starting to feel a bit empty, but look I'm I'm hitting the targets and I'm kind of getting my professional identity fed and I'm getting a significant acknowledgement there.
But I think it can start to get really nuanced when we kind of go well okay then let's put these two back in balance so if we're going to put working while and living while back in balance and I think there's a whole conversation about well what is work life balance and does even exist because I know I came into this thinking I just need to get the balance right and I think I think the truth is and I've had to come to terms with this and really wrestle with it.
I don't think that is balance but I think there are things that we will. or consciously and intentionally get out of balance or get into imbalance for so there might be times like last week I was working away I was hosting the leadership retreat and I was away from my family and I it takes a lot for me to be away from my family but that is such purposeful work and lit me up professionally so much that I made that choice but what that's meant is this week I've been really intentional about the work that I've taken so I'm a lot more present and I can refill my cup and I can refill my family's cup so I went out of balance last week to kind of re-address that balance this week but it's not been perfectly in balance if that makes sense so there is there's a degree of an in there's probably degree of what people might term a sacrifice but there's always for me now there's non-negotiables that I just will not sacrifice so it's getting really clear on
and you know this narrative of we can have it all and I think for a little while I probably perpetuated that in an unhealthy way of yes you can be a career woman and have a family and it be amazing and I do genuinely believe that as a overall concept but then the nuance of what sits around that of okay so what support and resources do you have you know I have a clean I have an ironing lady I have all these things that enable that to be possible but if I didn't have there would be a different nuance around that so I think it all depends on the resources that you have what are the things that you are willing to to kind of trade off and there are some in there just completely non-negotiable for me so now it is around my well-being like I absolutely take care of my energy like I've you know like it's the most important thing so what is it that if I'm going to have an intense work week where do I need to pay
ancient to with my energy, what's going to fuel my energy, what extra support do I need to make that possible?
So I'm not sure that's answered your question absolutely directly because I think it is very nuanced but I think often it's this trade off between living while and working well and then thinking about, you know, as somebody that was very driven, very conscientious, I've got high self-efficacy so I feel like I've got high degree of personal power which means I take a lot of responsibility which means I can become overly responsible.
So there's a huge sacrifice that I've paid in that and now I tune in more to know if I'm going into hyper-independence, recognizing no I need to lean into more resources around me.
If I'm leaning too much into my personal power it's like no I am I'm beating myself up too much here, know, what else needs to come into play, who else needs to come.
I mean to play. So I think the sacrifice can often be that in a dialogue as well as like I'm I'm not being compassionate to myself.
I'm not being kind to myself. I'm I'm I'm not leaning into interdependence. So yeah, I've thrown a lot of this there in that conversation Meg, tell me what I'll take, right?
@26:24 - Meg Trucano
What's it sparking in you? Yeah, so oh, so many things. So getting getting back to one of the first things that you said about this, you know, work life balance and there's so much debate about whether it exists or not.
And I always think I don't have this prop with me right now. I usually do, but a pen, right?
And a lot of people think that if you hold a pen out and it's just this flat, that is balance, right?
That's not balance. That is rigidity. And I think work life balance or any kind of balance between any dimensions of your life is actually more of a teeter totter over time.
right? So you get these these like ups and downs and ebbs and flows and and at any one time it may look like and you know a tilted teeter totter but then if you look the next week it might be tilted the other way right?
And so it's this subtle give-and-take in different areas of your life and again connecting with the self-compassion piece of understanding that that's okay that you know this this aiming for every single aspect of your life being perfect every single moment of it is just first of all it's not realistic but it's also like not really that I don't know I always think it's not very interesting when you see someone who's like got it all together and you know no there's something going on on the inside right?
yeah yeah and so I'm glad to hear you say that you know work-life balance and getting these things kind of you know in line and balance
this out over time is important. But you also mentioned you're non-negotiable and you had mentioned a few things like you know managing your energy if you ever really stacked work a week etc.
Do you have any other kind of non-negotiable either from your own life or from your clients that you could share with the audience that might be helpful for them?
@28:23 - Nicky Lowe
Yeah and it will look very different for each kind of individual. But I think one of the things that I do with lot of my clients is create what we call an NGA.
So you've probably heard of it an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement. We create non-gilt agreements and NGA's because I think particularly as mothers we can swim in gilts.
Like I don't know who it was said that when we give birth they kind of push guilt back in after it's like to put it where the placenta was.
And I had underestimated that and As somebody, as I said, that's highly conscientious, I kind of felt that at every twist and turn, was something for me to feel guilty about, that I just wasn't enough, I wasn't doing enough, I wasn't being enough.
And if we're not careful, guilt can just swallow us up. And so the non-gilt agreement is getting clear on the dysfunctional guilt.
So guilt does serve a purpose and have a helpful purpose.
@29:25 - Meg Trucano
It's like, don't leave your child in a hot car all day.
@29:28 - Nicky Lowe
You know, you're going to feel guilty doing that. You know, that's a positive thing. know, we don't want to leave our child on their own in a hot car.
But most of the guilt that we experience as mothers is dysfunctional. And I think it's getting worse and worse with social media and that whole kind of perfect mother paradigm.
So I think that's one thing about like being really clear on what I am and what I'm not going to feel guilty about.
So for a long time, I felt guilty that I was career driven. And now I've just let that go.
Yes, I will feel guilty, know, I might be fine. away for my family for prolonged periods that are not necessary or if I'm away with work that isn't lighting me up like I'm just doing it for the money and it's not serving me or my family and lighting me up and feeling my cup up.
So it helps guide me and be more purposeful. So that's something that kind of the non-negotiable is getting rid of the dysfunctional guilt as much as possible.
@30:25 - Meg Trucano
It does pop up, it's like whack-a-mole.
@30:27 - Nicky Lowe
You go in and one and you're like, oh, there's another one. So it is ongoing work but just being very mindful of that is, you know, is this functional or dysfunctional?
If it's dysfunctional, you know, let's find a way to to let it go and just drop it and step over it.
So that's one thing. Another non-negotiable for me very much around, as I said right at the beginning, I can live a little bit away from my body and that will trip me up.
Like I am so in my head, so future orientated. So, you know, I'm achievement driven. If I'm not careful, I'm not where my feet are.
I'm not experiencing what my body needs to experience. So I've got non-negotiable practices that get me into my body so that I am more aware and I'm tuned into that stuff because not only does it guide me in terms of my decisions but it fuels me in terms of kind of staying present for my family and for my work.
So this thing's like I've got a seven minute practice that I do every morning and it is just if I haven't got seven minutes I'm always like I don't deserve to have a body so I've got a seven minute practice it's small and micro enough that I'm not going to go I haven't got time for that today that just gets me connected and starting the day in my body.
So yeah there's those kind of non-negotiable. For me you know eating healthily is another one so it's how do I create time and space in my in my week to feed and nourish myself and my family really really well.
Um, so I'll do things like batch cooking, like one of the things that I do over weekend is like, how can I batch cook and plumb with a week ahead?
@32:07 - Meg Trucano
Yeah, those are, those are really wonderful non-negotiables. have similar, similar non-negotiables. I, I have a morning ritual that I, I do, and I notice a huge difference between, you know, those days where you accidentally oversleep and you don't get to it, and the days that I am like really in it.
No question, it's, it's so helpful. Um, you know, I take my dog for a walk every day and that gets me outside.
That's a non-negotiable, non-negotiable is sleep. I am, like, as we were talking about before, I am in bed by 838-45 and that allows me to get up early and do my morning routine and things before the kids get up.
But these, these sort of grounding practices can sometimes feel a little indulgent, if that makes sense, and like contrary to this hustle go-go-go of being ambitious and career-driven and all of that, but really it is one of the keys to creating sustainable success over.
@33:13 - Nicky Lowe
Absolutely, you and I will well know often people come to those practices when they've hit the burnout wall or they've, you know, comes to it through a painful experience and I try and just talk about it as much as I can so that others don't have to hit that wall to realise, oh god, this is why they're important.
And sometimes, you know, unfortunately we do live in that hustle culture and if we're so much on the treadmill, people can hear it and understand it but still not able to kind of embody it and I totally get that.
I think having gone through that experience, I realised that I used to call these kind of the, I was being indulgent or I was being quite needy or over some kind of princess that needed this stuff.
I mean, yeah, no and I'm now like, no, if I want to have high performance, just like an athlete would have, know, the best nutrition, the best sleep, the best, it is part of high performance life.
If I want sustainable success and I'm somebody that gives a lot of energy out into the world, it's, you know, it's input versus output.
I've got to be putting this stuff in because I'm not going to put the output and yeah, I learned that the hard way.
So I have, you know, I call them micro initiatives like daily practices, weekly practices, monthly practices and they're just investments in myself that I'm now like, it's not indulgence, it's an investment.
@34:34 - Meg Trucano
Oh, I love that. I love that reframe. That's spectacular. So I'd love to hear from you as we wrap up this conversation.
What would you tell to pre burnout Do you have something to say to her?
@34:54 - Nicky Lowe
Oh, lots. know, my initial head goes to or just be kinder to yourself. But I know she wouldn't have listened to that.
So that's, you know, that's great hindsight. And it's still something I struggle with today. So I I have to learn, I've got a very well developed in a critic.
So self compassion on its own isn't I have to have fierce compassion. So the kindness is important, but also that no, this is, you know, this is a non-negotiable.
This is my boundary. So what I would tell the pre-burner Nikki is the power of her body that she's because I think I've underestimated and continue to be blown away by the power of the body, whether it be intuition, whether it be my gut instinct, whether it be just pure wisdom that the body holds.
think that's what I would tell her that, oh my gosh, you are, you're not even connected to a tenth of your power.
like you think it's all up here in the head and the willpower is the the greatest power in the world and I think I was just gonna you've you've completely underestimated where your real power is and if you can pay attention to her then my god you can do great things.
@36:18 - Meg Trucano
Oh I love that so much I love that okay and then finally what advice would you have for someone who is kind of looking to make a big change or they're on the cusp of a big change in their personal or professional life do you have any advice for those people?
@36:35 - Nicky Lowe
Yeah gosh massive amounts I think change can be most of one of the most vulnerable things and it brings up so much in us so the power and that vulnerability not not shying away from it but being able to sit with it to give you kind of the insight so lean into that vulnerability no matter how uncomfortable, how uncomfortable, how much discomfort
comes up, so holding the tension of that kind of discomfort. And then a big piece for me about change has been getting comfortable with not having all the answers, not knowing all about that need for it to be perfect.
So I would say the progress is what brings the power of, you know, just take small steps and you will learn and discover on the way where I thought my career was going to go.
It hasn't, it's gone to even better places because I allowed myself to take action. So I just remember kind of in my corporate career, the Silicon Valley company I worked for them, Mantra was to ask permissions to seek denial, just do it and we'll figure it out.
And I think that's something I would say with change is kind of you don't need to have all the internal permission to do it, trust your instinct.
And if it feels right, take the first next step and you'll figure it out and you'll learn more from taking that first step than sitting in your head trying to figure it all out.
@38:11 - Meg Trucano
Yeah, because it might be different. It might be better than you can.
@38:15 - Nicky Lowe
allowing for that possibility.
@38:18 - Meg Trucano
love that advice. And thank you so much, Nikki, for sharing your expertise and your story with us today. It's been super insightful for me.
And so I know our listeners will find it so valuable as well.
@38:30 - Nicky Lowe
thank you so much. It's a pleasure being with you.
@38:32 - Meg Trucano
Thank you for having me. Absolutely. And thank you for listening to this episode of Changeology. I'll see you in the next one.