Landy Peek (00:33)
Hello, hello, and welcome back to the Landy Peak podcast. I'm your host and friend, Landy Peak.
we're getting a lot of new listeners. So I want to say welcome and thank you for listening. Little bit background around me. I am a pelvic health occupational therapist and a somatic therapist. I'm also a mom of two who has spent years learning what it really means to hold it all together and what it costs you on the inside.
Outside of work. I love spending time with horses, my chickens and really moments in nature that help ground me and remind me that life isn't only about doing more. I want you to picture a woman standing in her kitchen. The kids are yelling. Lunch boxes are half packed, forgotten plates stacked on the counter, dishes.
filling the sink. It's chaos. And the old her would be losing it right now. But this version, she's okay. She's not losing it. And she's not disconnecting from herself or the world. She's not even really stressed. And it's not because everything is under control. It's absolute chaos.
And it's not because she's performing calm, pretending, holding it all together. It's because something in her has started to shift. And that woman, that woman was me.
And that moment taught me the single biggest truth. Regulation isn't calm. It's all about capacity. And capacity, I've talked about capacity before, but capacity is the real work behind sustainable leadership.
Today, I wanna talk about what happens when highly capable women like us keep giving, managing and performing while our own systems are quietly screaming for attention.
I work with women who hold it all together. Let me just even rephrase that. I work with women who hold it all. They hold it all. The ones who get asked for help, who are relied on to give help, but are rarely offered it. The ones who are praised for being calm, capable, and high achieving, while they're secretly unraveling inside.
And I was one of them. And if you're here today, I'm guessing a part of you has felt that same tension. The ache behind the smile, the exhaustion behind the accomplishment, the subtle dread that if you let go for even a moment, everything might fall apart.
This is burnout and burnout doesn't always look dramatic. I crashed and burned. I hit a max where I needed space and a break. But before I crashed and burned,
What burnout started to look like in me was over-functioning. It looked like being fine while my system was quietly disintegrating.
And here's the nervous system truth that I wish more women knew. Regulation isn't calm. It's capacity. And when we think about capacity, we think that we can do more, but that's not it at all. Calm can be a mask. We put it on, we disconnect. We aren't really in touch with anything anymore. But capacity.
The way I'm thinking about it means that you can feel the full range of what's here. The full range of joy, of grief, of excitement without collapsing or shutting yourself down. Capacity is what lets you lead and live without running yourself dry. How many times have you said yes? When every
of your being is scream and no. You dread it. You don't want to do it, but it's expected. So you do it. You might disappoint people. So you do it. How many times have you ignored your own needs? Like say to eat or go to the bathroom to make someone else's life easier.
That quiet tension that you feel, that invisible effort that nobody seems to acknowledge or even notice, that's burnout in disguise.
I remember a moment that changed everything for me. I was managing schedules, calming everyone else, anticipating every emotional spike before it happened, while completely ignoring my own needs, my own exhaustion, ignoring my need for a break.
thought that this was strength. I thought that this was competence. I thought that this is what I was supposed to do. But what it was, was silent exhaustion. And I didn't pick up on the symptoms early enough. Highly capable women like us carry patterns that look like mastery, but are really survival strategies. We've perfected over the years. For me, I would people please.
say yes when I wanted to say no. I softened my truth so I didn't rock the boat. I was over accommodating to keep the peace even when it cost me sleep, my energy and myself. I would contain my emotions, keeping my feelings on a tight leash so no one else had to feel discomfort. I never cried when anybody could see me.
I swallowed my frustration before it ever left my lips. I became the emotional buffer for the room.
I absorbed everyone else's feelings while ignoring my own.
And then I would go into hyperindependence, handling everything because somewhere along the way, I learned that meeting people, it was risky. I didn't delegate because I couldn't risk being let down. And it just felt so much easier to do it myself than to try to explain how to do it and what I needed.
I carried the weight alone because it felt easier than trusting someone else with it and then having to clean up the mess.
These patterns were celebrated as competence, praised as strength. my gosh, you're like super mom. You've got it all together. But they were slowly disconnecting me from my own vitality. And over time, I realized that highly capable women carry several patterns in a very archetypal way.
And once women have recognized which archetype they are showing up as, how their nervous system is reacting to life, interacting with life, it was truly transformative. And it's not a way to label you, but instead to illuminate where your energy has been quietly draining. Let me show you what I mean. So,
The one who holds it all. This archetype.
She carries everyone else's burden. She's the pattern breaker. She's the one that holds the trauma for the entire family. She's the one who takes on her kids' wounds. And she makes sure that her husband has his lunch packed.
Life runs so smoothly for everyone else under her watch. She rarely asks for help.
Imagine someone juggling plate after plate in the kitchen, right? Making sure everybody's fed. Every plate is perfect. This kid has this food and it's separated from this food because of course they can't touch. And this kid has the right plate and the right fork and the right cup because they need the certain colors. Everyone is fed. Everything went smoothly. But she hasn't even had a bite to eat.
That's her daily reality. And then there's the one who went quiet. She retreats inward. Her needs and emotions are suppressed to maintain the peace, to avoid rocking the boat.
She's the one that you can feel the stillness. But underneath, tension builds like a storm waiting to break.
She doesn't honor herself anymore.
The one who makes it okay. This is the woman who smooths over the tension, who in the family dynamic system makes sure that everybody's okay, nobody's upset, always going to the people that are upset, making amends. She reassures
She prioritizes others' comfort above her own. She's the fixer. She's the mediator. The one who makes the chaos seem manageable.
all while her own feelings get filed away, unseen. And then there's the one who fades away. She sacrifices her presence, her energy, her desire. Her world keeps functioning, but she slowly disappears from it.
She's in every room, but never fully in herself. I've seen so many moms in this role where they've given up all of them, their desires, their dreams, the things that they want to make their kids' lives great.
but she's lost herself and then her kids graduate school and she's there and I don't even know who I am anymore. Each of these archetypes is a survival strategy. It shows how your nervous system has learned to cope and how your energy has been quietly stretched beyond its limits because the truth is regulation isn't calm.
It's capacity. And when you reclaim your capacity, you reclaim yourself. Because capacity is the ability to ride the waves, to deal with the ups and downs. It's not stretching yourself thinner and thinner. But here's the thing most of us never stop to notice. Just how much caring all of this takes from you. How many of our
days are spent keeping everyone else's world running smoothly while our own batteries quietly drain.
This was still me. And I was the first one to go. My own needs. I'm the last one to get a haircut. I'm the last one to eat. I'm the last one to go shopping for clothes. I'm the last one to pick whatever we watch on TV. Because I was keeping everything smooth. And what I realized was I was missing out on everything. I never got seen.
I was taken advantage of in my own family. And not intentionally. None of my family was doing this on purpose or to be mean. I set this up.
So how often do we mistake staying composed and calm for actually being okay?
This is where the hidden cost really shows up. And it doesn't always announce itself with a dramatic collapse.
More often, it whispers in exhaustion and tension in that constant quiet wait that says, I'm doing so much. I don't know how I'm gonna do it. I don't know how I can keep going. And the voice that says, I can't do this anymore. And then you dry your tears and you get up and do it anyway.
And the killer thing is no one is noticing. No one notices the pain. No one notices the exhaustion. No one notices unless there's a hiccup. And then sometimes you're getting flack because there was a hiccup.
And that brings us to the cost, the hidden cost of over-functioning, the slow, subtle, and often invisible burnout that creeps into the lives of highly capable women.
You carry everyone else's energy. We've seen this so many times, especially if you're a mom. You are carrying everyone's energy in the entire household. We've all felt it, where if you've had a bad day, if you're pissed off, my gosh, even the dog's having a bad day.
And somewhere along the way, we have learned to measure your worth. You have learned to measure your worth by how much you can manage without complaints, without failing, without dropping anything that you're juggling. You smooth over conflict effortlessly. You anticipate the needs and you keep the emotional temperature of everybody.
And sometimes you succeed, but satisfaction is very fleeting. There's always another task, always another expectation, another crisis. It's like you're battery powering everybody else in the household's devices, except no one ever plugs you in. This is hidden burnout.
This is slow, subtle, and dangerous. And here's the truth. You don't have to hit a breaking point to be running on empty. Exhaustion creeps in quietly day after day as you keep holding it all together without a pause. And for highly capable women, this isn't just a habit. It becomes
part of who we think we are. It becomes our identity. Our identity is so wrapped up in being the strong one, the capable one, the one everybody depends on, the one that gets it done, the one who never complains, never falters, never lets anyone down. We pride ourselves in this.
But the moments, the moment that you stumble, even for a second, even just in your own mind, shame shows up. And that inner little voice says, see, you're failing, you're weak, you don't got it, you're not good enough, you're never gonna be good enough.
And suddenly the very strength that has carried you for years, it starts to feel like a trap. When we mistake calm for regulation, we push ourselves harder and harder to keep the mask in place. Meanwhile, our capacity to actually hold and handle all of the emotions, all of the things that are thrown at us, shrinks. The goal isn't to look composed.
The goal isn't to be calm, although that is what we've been taught. The goal is to have enough capacity to navigate the chaos without it costing you your health or your identity or your sanity.
And it doesn't have to be this way.
You don't have to collapse. You don't have to burn out to finally have your aha moment to figure out how to do more than just survive.
you can stop carrying it all alone and you can stop pretending you're holding it all together. And that's the only path that there is. There is a way to come back to yourself and to reclaim the life that's been waiting for you underneath the exhaustion. So I want you to imagine your life as a house. As a kid growing up,
My parents always bought fixer uppers. We always bought the ugliest house in the neighborhood and then they'd fix it up and it would be the prettiest house in the neighborhood and then we'd move. So I'm very familiar with this. For years, pretend that you're this house and you've been running room to room, fixing the leaks, the toilet, silencing the smoke alarms, cleaning up the messes. Everything is superficial. You're jumping from one thing to the next thing to the next thing that is
coming out at you from this rundown house.
You've never looked at the foundation. You've never even seen what the foundation is like. And you've never stopped to think if that foundation needs to be rebuilt. Well, in us, our foundation is our nervous system, our body, and our identity. And until we start looking at what's going on with our nervous system, with your body and your own inner identity,
you're going to keep running from leak to leak to leak, trying to fix. And until you rebuild, all the fixes that are happening on surface level are temporary. It's why when you sign up for a course and you have somebody directing you and supporting you, you can keep it going, right? You go on a diet and you're holding it together until, until what? You're holding it together until you're too tired.
until the stress gets heavy, until something comes up, until you go on vacation, until the kids are out of school, until it's a holiday, right? And then you lose whatever you just built. That's fixing on the surface level. It hasn't sunk into your nervous system, your identity and your body.
We haven't gone deep enough. And that's why you read the books, but it doesn't change your life. You do the therapy and you're still struggling. You've worked with the coaches, you've done the diets, you've done all the health things, you've done it all. And you're still not where you wanna be.
because we need to reconnect you with your body to be able to feel fully without collapsing. Because if your nervous system doesn't have the capacity to hold the anger, the grief, even the joy, it overwhelms the system and we shut down. You can reclaim your identity, your energy, your voice.
You can learn that your worth isn't measured by how you hold it together. You can cultivate true safety within yourself rather than trying to orchestrate endless calm, creating perfection and controlling. Cause a lot of us have lived on control. As long as we can control, anticipate, be ready, we can keep safe. We can be okay.
The world is not going to fall apart.
But we really start to lose it inside when we feel like we can't control it anymore.
And that's because we don't have real safety because real safety builds capacity and capacity is what makes leadership, motherhood and creativity sustainable.
It's being present in the moment. It's being able to feel your feelings fully without needing to numb them, disconnect, scroll on social media, mindlessly watch Netflix, eat, drink. It's being able to experience life without guilt because guilt because you have it too good and someone else doesn't or guilt because you're not doing enough.
or guilt that's tied around to anything that you're experiencing. It's allowing yourself to breathe in the chaos. Now that, that is freedom. That is magnetic energy.
It's honestly the energy that draws people in. It draws in opportunities and alignment to you. Not because you're over-functioning or performing calm, but because you're fully present, fully embodied, fully yourself. That energy is visible. It's felt before it's even seen.
Have you ever experienced that person that you walk into the room and you're like, my gosh, I just love being with them. There's just something about them that feels good, that feels safe, that feels fun, that feels loving. That's the magnetic energy.
That is how we step into sovereignty without losing our competence. Because we're so afraid if we let something go, the world's gonna crumble.
And when you cultivate capacity instead of just calm, you stop pouring from an empty cup.
And you start leading, you start creating, and you start connecting from a place of fullness. And that is magnetic. That is real power. That is the kind of presence that transforms how you move through life and how life responds to you.
I love the image of being a thermometer versus a thermostat. Most of us go through life being a thermometer. We're constantly reacting to everyone else's energy. This was me.
A thermometer simply reflects the room. It measures, takes the temperature of everyone and everything around it.
And it changes as the outside world changes.
Have you ever felt that? Where somebody else comes in and they're in a really bad mood or your kid's totally tantrum and you went from having a really good day where you felt really good to all of a sudden you feel awful. That's because you're a thermometer. You're reading off of everyone and you have to change you to try to make it okay for everyone else, including you.
This is how burnout starts. Instead, instead think about being a thermostat. A thermostat sets the tone. You decide the temperature of your space. You create boundaries. You create presence. You create energy that others feel without draining yourself.
Calm is optional when you're the thermostat.
But capacity doesn't mean calm because we want to be able to react in a way that is appropriate for the situation.
You want to be able to feel the incredible joy of hearing that somebody that you love just had a baby or just got married. You want to be able to celebrate at the highest capacity.
You also want to rage for someone that you feel has experienced something that you need to rage over.
to feel the grief.
because they're all on a continuum. We can't feel the utmost positive feelings without having the capacity to feel the negative. And when we really close down so that we can't feel the negative, we also lose the ability to feel the positive.
If you ever have felt an antidepressant, it keeps you level in the middle. That's the goal. But you lose the end range and we want the end range.
We've adopted calm as a mask, but safety is the true goal. But we're not talking about safety. We're not talking about, you feel safe in yourself? Do you feel safe in your voice? Because you can be a leader and share your thoughts when you feel safe within yourself because you no longer worry about the internet trolls and what your parents are gonna say and whatever in high school that you're afraid that they might judge you now because they judged you then.
When you have safety in your system, you're safe to be you. And that's when your message gets to be heard.
When you cultivate safety in your nervous system, you can feel fully. And that might include anger, joy, grief, excitement, without any shame, and without shutting down, without collapsing. Have you ever felt had something really good happen to you? so example, this used to be me.
I remember going to Hawaii with my husband and we were having a phenomenal time. It was coming to the end and it was so good, it was too good. So I picked a fight, not intentionally, not consciously, but I picked a fight.
Why? Because I couldn't, I didn't have the capacity to handle the good, good, good. So I had to counterbalance it with a little bit of bad.
The ability to fully feel it all without the shame, without shutting down, without collapsing, that is magnetic energy. That is sovereignty. That is the energy that draws life, connection and opportunity to you. Not because you over function or perform calm. We're really good at that.
but because you are fully present, fully embodied and fully yourself. Life is waves. It is. You have the ups and you also have the downs that crash over you, the good things and the bad things that, my gosh, knock you off your feet. The goal isn't to stay level. The goal is to have the capacity to ride the waves, to navigate the highs, the lows and the in-betweens.
while feeling clear, with grace, with presence, without the need to shift away from that uncomfortable feeling.
And that, that is what sustainable leadership looks like. That is what living fully feels like. You can still get things done. You can still lead, parent, and create. Because we're afraid we're going to lose that. If I just let go of my grip, if I stop white-knuckling it, the world is going to fall apart. I know this. At a deep core level, right? This was me. But guess what? When I opened my fingers, I stopped white-knuckling.
I gave up some control. Most of the control. My world didn't stop. Nothing came crashing down.
Some things didn't get done.
Some things, not as smooth as I would have made them.
But I started doing things from choice, not from survival. And the really cool thing is, while I thought the world would collapse, I actually gave my family more opportunity for their own independence.
When I stopped doing everything for my kids and my husband, they started doing it for themselves without me asking and pressuring and pushing. And yes, that first little bit of like, my gosh, aren't you gonna pack my lunch? No, I'm not. They did it. And they also had some natural consequences when it didn't get done. And guess what? Then they did it again. And the really cool thing is,
I saw my kids really step into a higher level of independence I wasn't expecting, then starting to ask to do more.
Things got done, not necessarily in the way I wanted. My husband still loads the dishwasher in a way I don't like, but guess what? The dishes are done. And I have space and freedom to do more. You start to live from sovereignty, not overdrive.
from being fully human, not just highly capable. And honestly, that's the beauty of it. When you step into this way of being, it's not about doing more or pushing harder. Really good at that. We've learned that. The hard thing is to really live from presence.
about allowing your system to support you rather than draining you.
And that's when the clarity comes in. When you begin to notice the moments, the spaces, the small details that show you what your life has been missing, but also what you need. The creativity comes in because you have more space to be creative, to have fun. It gets easier.
And that's when we get to reflect into the places and practices that restore capacity and let us feel fully alive.
I absolutely love nature. Since I was a little girl, being in nature has been my regulation, has been my calm, has been my feel good. And so I keep coming back to the river, to the mountains, to the ocean. Nature has always been my refuge.
As I've really looked at it, it's not a metaphor, but moments I've truly lived.
As I sit by the river with my feet in, feeling the water move over my feet.
I could feel how fast my inner world had been spinning, tangled and exhausted.
I knew in the moments that I sat in the river and I craved it, I craved my time in the water, that I wanted this feeling all the time.
when I'm out hiking in the mountains.
I was able to hear the quiet that I'd honestly been avoiding. The silence that my body had been craving. I didn't realize how much I was craving silence. How much, if there was any silence, I'd have a song playing in my head. There was never any down space. But when I went hiking in the mountains, it was really present.
And I did have silence.
And as I sat by the ocean, I finally felt the space that I'd been missing, the expansion in my body, in my mind and in my life. And as I experienced these moments in nature, I wanted to figure out how, how can I bring this into my everyday existence, not just seek them out when I'm so overwhelmed.
And I did. And as we circle back to the kitchen, where the lunches are half made, the kids are sidetracked, plates are stacked, it's the mess. I used to see it as my responsibility alone.
And that was a sign that my system was screaming at me. I would get so frustrated, so upset, so angry that I would slam the dishwasher shut because I had to do it all.
I was the only one in the kitchen trying to corral kids, trying to get lunches packed, trying to do the dishes, and my husband, I don't know what he was doing, playing on his phone.
And what was really happening is I was so hyper independent, pushing myself, controlling everything that my husband was afraid to step in the kitchen. Because he knew if he did something quote unquote wrong, it would upset me more. Not that he was afraid of me,
He saw how delicately I was holding on, hanging on to the balance that he just knew that if he went in and tried to help, it would tip me over the edge.
It was those places that showed me what my life had been missing. And it was the capacity, not calm, not control. I had that. And I had the anxiety to go with it. But it was the capacity to be fully seen, to feel all the emotions, to rest fully without guilt and not have to have an excuse of why I wasn't doing something, to lead without collapsing.
to stop putting myself out in positions, trying to grow my business and my life and do all the things. And then I'd, as I started my business and I did my very first launch, I remember launching this program and I was on social media and the emails and trying to do all the things that my coaches were telling me to do. And I'd do them and then I'd go climb under the covers.
curl up because it had been too much. That's not capacity. That's not listening to my system. That's ignoring what my body's saying. And so I would rebound. I would push big and then I'd rebound and collapse and push big. It wasn't sustainable and it didn't get me where I wanted to go.
And if you've been the one everyone counts on, if you smiled while swallowing your exhaustion, if you've looked calm while your system was screaming, then you already know something has to change.
I'm going to tell you, you don't need more ways to hold it together. What you do need is a nervous system that can hold you.
that's magnetic per capacity. And here's the soft invitation. I created a quiz. That is the magnetic body code quiz. And it helps you figure out how your nervous system has been handling everything in your life. It's your archetype. And you get to discover which archetype you are, the ways that you are showing up in the world and
The first steps to reclaim your energy, your joy, and your sovereignty. Because regulation isn't calm. Regulation is capacity. And capacity isn't optional anymore.
So it turns survival into sovereignty and exhaustion into fully living.
I want to thank you so much for listening, for hanging out with me and being here. I want to tell you how much I think you are incredible. How just showing up and listening to a podcast shows that you want to change your life, that you're ready to do different things. I used to say big things, but it doesn't have to be big. We can have big goals.
And we'll reach those goals from a space where we can hold the good and the bad. And it's not holding at all. It's more riding the waves. It's not loading more on. You are smart and capable. We know this. But you're also loving and kind and vulnerable.
And you are changing this world by just showing up. It's your energy. It's your presence that people crave. And the more safe you feel in your own body, more safe you feel in your own energy. That's the key.
I love you and I like you. And I wish you all the happiness today, Kimbring.
Landy Peek (42:21)
Hey, before you go, just a little bit of legal. This podcast is designed for educational purposes only. It is not to replace
any expert advice from your doctors, therapists, coaches, or any other professional that you would work with. It's just a chat with a friend, me, where we get curious about ideas, thoughts, and things that are going on in our lives. And as we're talking about friends, if you know someone who would benefit from the conversation today, please share because I think the more that we open up these conversations, the more benefit we all get. So until next time, give yourself a big hug from me and stay curious.
Because that's the fun in this world.
