Season 2, Episode 4: How to Stop Saying Yes When You Really Want to Say No

Hi there you beautiful souls. This is Allowed, the conscious leadership and personal growth podcast, your personal, on-demand self-discovery session to help you shift your mindset and change your life. I am your coach, Dr. Caneel Joyce.

Last week, you covered 100% responsibility here and you learned about insatiable curiosity, how to turn that on and how this will help you break out of ruts and change the habits that are no longer serving you. Earlier in the season, you also learned about how to be fully present so that you can feel fully alive.

Today, you will put these concepts together in an extremely beneficial and luxurious way. It’s meaningful because it will help you to spark true and lasting change in your life in ways that will impact you and everyone and everything that you touch and beyond. It will also help you to keep yourself grounded in presence, which, as you now know, is the one superpower that all great leaders have in common.

Last season, you began your journey into being more aligned with your authentic self, which means keeping in integrity with your true essence. You started to create clear agreements with others in your work life and your home life.

I’ve received so many messages from you telling me how life-changing it has been incorporating methods like this, methods like RC, methods like creating effective shared commitments and shared agreements into your businesses and also into your home lives. You’re already beginning to see the big payoffs of utilizing these conscious leadership tools and commitments. 

What I’ve noticed is, and I apply all of this to myself, it is my lifestyle, it is beyond my life, it’s my lifelong commitment and journey, and I’ve personally noticed and I’ve heard from you that, in using these kinds of clear agreements to keep in integrity with yourself and with others and your relationships, that many of you are still experiencing some burnout.

There’s a distinction between using a tool and really embracing the inner work involved in allowing the tool to do its work.

I want you to find some gentleness here. Many of you are finding that you need to still renegotiate agreements with others almost as quickly as you make them and that your whole body yeses tend to sway dramatically with your mood.

What that tells me is perhaps you didn’t have a whole body yes to your agreements to begin with. Maybe you’re not quite clear yet on what does a whole body yes really feel like? Maybe you’re not quite committed to saying, “I am only going to say yes when I have a whole body yes.” I can almost hear the protests right now coming from that small, scared part of you. Wait a second. Am I really allowed to only say yes to things to which I have a whole body yes?

We’re going to get to that.

Self Care Goes Beyond Bubble Baths

Today’s episode will help you to completely stop that burnout cycle, to stop the wishy-washy indecisiveness, to stop the daily re-negotiations with yourself and others and all of that overriding and stagnation you do with your own feelings, to stop the bottle-necking, to stop the overwhelm, the condemnation, the guilt, the confusion, all of the drag on your energy and your creativity that come from not being quite willing yet to be in full integrity with your whole body yes.

What I want you to realize by the end of this episode is that, in order to be in integrity with others, you must first be in integrity with yourself. In fact, if you focus 90% of your life on just getting into integrity with yourself, it will be so of service to others you will not believe it.

Why?

Because you actually matter. You actually matter. You can’t show up and serve others to your best ability if you haven’t been practicing a particular form of self-care, which is being in integrity with yourself.

Being in integrity with yourself is one of the most important ways to keep a healthy and happy mindset and ultimately to have a healthy, fulfilling exuberant life full of creativity for as long as you are on the planet and beyond. Now, getting into the daily practice of creating clear agreements with yourself for the day is a hugely beneficial exercise of self-care.

Hugely.

Again, self-care does not need to look like a bubble bath. Getting into integrity with yourself with clear agreements each and every day also helps to avoid dramatic and crisis-type situations where you get way far out of integrity with yourself and it actually causes harm, usually unintentionally.

I’ve been there. I got really sick and was in a lot of physical and emotional pain because I was not paying attention to my own self needs, my own body’s signals, my own deepest desire and, honestly, my actual essence, my own zone of genius.

I was trying to override it and I wasn’t allowing myself to just accept who I really am and what I really wanted without … it wasn’t like I willed to be who I was, but this got me out of alignment with my true self and my body got out of alignment at the same time. I was completely out of integrity.

Practicing setting and creating clear boundaries and staying in integrity with those boundaries and those commitments, making these clear agreements with yourself internally, all of this will help you when its time to use the skill out in the world with other people and in external situations. Again, the work always begins right here at home with you. You are never in the wrong place if you are dealing with the here and now inside of you.

Today, you’re going to learn how to put on your own oxygen mask before helping others with theirs. You are going to learn that you are allowed, you are allowed to take personal inventory and to make clear agreements that serve you and trust that this integrity will be of service to all things.

Today, I will guide you through a quick journaling session to go through your current commitments that you have with yourself and to help you see if you are in integrity with those agreements, or if it’s time to adjust them.

I want to give you a quick heads up about this week’s Allowed insider bonus material first. If you go to allowedpodcast.com and sign up there, you will have instant access to our exclusive free bonus audio that is released with each episode.

This week, I’m giving you a quick morning and evening journaling guide. I will literally guide you through it. You wake up, you turn it on, I will be there with you. It is the easiest thing in the world. That will take you five minutes, tops. This is something that you can do on your own each and every day to find alignment with yourself. I really suggest that you listen to these journal prompts every day for the next two weeks and see what a difference they can make in your overall state of being. I am so excited for you to go on that journey.

Habits like this journaling exercise I’m going to give you are great as a combined morning routine and evening routine. These types of habits support you in being present and creating clear agreements with your so that you can easefully live in integrity each and every day.

Integrity is a place of great ease where you are no longer fighting yourself and you’re no longer swimming upstream with life. Self-care habits help you to own the role of leader in your own life. They are literally an exercise for your personal power.

Journaling helps you to unpack the day or the week or life events that you are going through in a healthy way to build self-awareness, to cultivate a growth mindset and to avoid overwhelm, stagnation and burnout. You’ll get that absolutely free right now when you sign up to be an, Allowed insider at allowedpodcast.com.

What is Integrity? How do you know if you’re living a life with Integrity?

Now, what is integrity? What is integrity? What does it feel like?

We discuss this a lot in season one, so please do go back and listen to get more details on this. I will give you a list of episodes I suggest you dive into at the end of today’s episode, but for now I’m going to give you just a quick overview of what integrity is because it’s a really core concept in what we’re discussing today and truly is the basis of everything we cover here on this podcast.

What is integrity? Integrity means that what we say we’ll do, we’ll do. How do we know? We know because we do it, we know because we have no resistance to doing it, we know because, when we think about doing it, we have a whole body yes to it.

There’s no tension, doubt, fear. Well, there might be some fear, but it’s above the line fear. There might be the fear of I’m stepping into something new, but it’s not I’m afraid, I don’t really want to do this. They feel pretty different, right?

Integrity comes from a strong, centered, aligned place that comes from the center of your body and it shoots right on down to the earth. When you’re in integrity, you will literally feel the strength of your spine, the strength and integrity of your ribs, your ribs are holding you together, they’re holding your internal organs without cramping down.

You’ll feel the alignment of your pelvis, you’ll feel the weight in your feet, you’ll feel energy coming back up from the earth, you’ll feel energy flowing through up your back, up your neck, out of your head. Now that may sound a little extreme, but I just want you to check and see, when’s the last agreement that you made where you didn’t really want to do it, or where you broke an agreement that perhaps you regretted making to begin with?

How did that feel? Pretty different than energy flowing up and down and through you, right? Not quite in alignment, maybe a little twisted, cramped somewhere.

Are you out of integrity? What does being out of integrity look and feel like?

You can check right now. Are you feeling in integrity with what you’re doing in this very moment? Are you rushing, trying to be somewhere that you’re not feeling behind? You’re feeling like you should be doing something else. Maybe you want to be doing something else, or you want to be doing this a different way than you are. Maybe you’re feeling a little distracted, like you’re not quite here.

All of that non-present stuff where you’re trying to be, or thinking about someplace other than here and now, all is a good suggestion that you don’t have a whole body yes to what is true here and now. Would you be willing to just feel into, okay, what is here and now? What do I actually want? If I could just not judge it, what do I actually want?

Giving yourself those things is the next step in integrity. The very first step is, would I be willing to actually feel it? Once we feel it, we can be with that. That’s the here and now. That’s the place integrity starts. It starts from the center of you.

What are the consequences of a lack of integrity and clear agreements? 

We talked about what integrity is and what it feels like to be in integrity and out of integrity, but I just want to give you a preview of some of the less pleasant side effects of being out of integrity, hopefully to really motivate you to be willing to find it for yourself because there’s no greater gift that you can give yourself or the planet or the universe than you being in integrity. I just want to help you feel the discomfort of being out of integrity.

When we’re out of integrity, long term side effects include burnout, stress, overwhelm, getting super triggered, being reactive, getting sick often, chronic illness, insomnia, chronic escapism type behavior, all different forms of self-harm, body pains and aches, tension, just general anxiety and lack of liveliness.

When we’re chronically out of integrity, we get so detached from even what do I even want? I don’t even know how to answer that question. I don’t even know how to know what I want. That is a pretty good sign that you’ve been out of integrity for a long time.

I want to just give you a big hug and just tell you that’s okay.

Welcome to the human race.

Would you be willing to feel the cost of being out of integrity? Broken relationship with self, broken relationships with others, general life is harder than it needs to be, or you’ve told yourself life just is hard and I have to deal with it. I am not in judgment of that. I just am coming from love and that’s exactly where I want you to come from for yourself.

Can you love yourself fully, the parts that are in integrity and the parts that are out of integrity? Know that you’re on a journey and sometimes things are in our blind spot and sometimes they’re in our awareness.

What is a Whole Body Yes?

Now, my invitation to you today is to step with me as your guide into a space of greater awareness. In awareness, we find ease. With ease, we can relax into finding where center is. We’re going to find where center is today and center is where integrity comes from. I also want to talk about whole body yes. I’ve mentioned this concept a couple of times today.

Whole body yes simply means I have a yes coming from my gut. My body says yes, my heart, my emotions say yes, my head and my thoughts say yes, my logic says yes and also my spirit says yes, my soul says yes. I feel called.

When I don’t have a yes in every one of those places together, that just means I have a no. In my world, if I don’t have a whole body yes, I have a no.

I may wish I had a yes. Some part of me may wish. I really wish I wanted to say yes to this. I really wish I wanted to say yes to waking up at 5:00 AM and working with a personal trainer each day, because wouldn’t that be amazing if I was that kind of person and I had that kind of strong body?

But I don’t. Right now I don’t. My head might say yes, but I know if I sign up for that program, on some level, because my heart doesn’t say yes, it doesn’t make my heart sing or my spirit sing, I’m eventually going to flake out on that. Knowing me, it wouldn’t take long. I have ease about that. I may have a whole body yes to being in vibrant physical condition, but that particular way of getting there would be out of integrity for me to agree to to do for myself.

If I agreed to it with, say, a trainer, I also would probably quickly break integrity. When I showed up, I might be impatient, annoyed, reactive, bored, whatever.

What it feels like when I have a whole body yes, for me an example would be, “Do you want to go hiking today?” Yes. Whole body yes. “Do you want to go dancing?” Yes. Those are my things. I 100% want to do that. “Want to go on a yoga retreat?” 100%. Every part of me, I’m like, “How can I stop everything and sign myself up?” 100% yes. That’s my whole body.

Why is this useful? It’s useful because the number one reason we fall out of integrity with ourselves and with others is because we didn’t have a whole body yes to begin with. I can quickly and easily navigate life. I can actually come from the best parts of myself without having to analyze it, think through it, justify it, plan it, do a whole bunch of decision analysis paralysis.

I can just say that I’ve got this one decision rule, which is, if I don’t have a whole body yes, I have a no. Sometimes, honestly, you might find yourself being perplexed at why in the world would I have a no to this thing? Those are the most exciting ones to say no to.

You don’t know where it’s going to go, but I’m telling you, this thing is magic and you will be shocked at what good things begin to unfold around you without any effort on your part. It is crazy. It is crazy. Against all logic. I mean, this is really the ultimate manifesting tool.

One way that you can use this is I want you to just, say, look at your calendar. What’s on your calendar for the next day, week, month?

Is there anything there that you feel any little bit of tension about anywhere? Maybe you have a thought, I’m not sure this really makes sense, or just emotionally you feel down, your energy goes down, or your gut, you feel a little tension, you feel a little level of version, your body is saying no, a little crampy somewhere, or your spirit is calling you another direction.

Find something in your life that’s like that. Now you can ask yourself, okay, since I don’t have a whole body yes to that, what would give me a whole body yes? This is where it gets so creative and fun. What would it take for me to turn this thing into a whole body yes?

Sometimes you might find it, and this is where I suggest you start, just deleting it. What if I say no to this? I re-negotiate this agreement and I completely, I just say, “I am not going to attend that meeting or that event,” or whatever. If you start there and say, “Okay, do I have a whole body yes to the no, a complete no?” You might find I actually still kind of want to do it on some level.

Now, what would it take for it to be a whole body yes? Would you like to have the meeting in a different place? Is there somebody that you’d like to be there? Is it the right length of time? Is it the right format? Would you like to wear a costume when you attend? Would you like to have snacks? What is it that would give you a whole body yes? Is it a completely different agenda?

Now this is where you can really allow the magic of life to flow through you if you really can just step into that trust and just take this dare on as an experiment. If you re-negotiate the agreement and you create one that you really have a whole body yes for where you’re like, “Yes, yes, yes, I want it,” you will be amazed at how much your whole body yes is of service to everyone else involved.

You will be amazed. Sometimes it means everyone will be really happy about it. Sometimes it means it creates just the right level of discomfort for something that was stuck to get decided upon and move forward.

I’ve even had situations where I’ve been facilitating an offsite and I can tell that one of the executives is just really checked out and doesn’t want to be there. I say, “Do you have a whole body yes for being here right now?” “No, I don’t. I really I’m antsy. I want to go on a run.” Or, “I want to take a nap,” or, “I have other things I want to attend to.” Okay, cool. I trust that.

Go ahead. Then they leave, then all of a sudden everything gets figured out, they come back, it’s exactly as they wanted it, there was no friction left. I mean, I’m guessing this sounds a bit insane, but, you guys, it is. It is. This thing is magic. Whole body yes.

I want you to just entertain this. Next time you have a decision to make or a non-decision where you’re automatically just saying yes to things, I want you to just check and say, do I have a whole body yes? If not, would I be willing to just say no?

If not, what would it take for this to look like a whole body yes? You will get very fluent and quick when you begin practicing this.

If this is still all super feeling too abstract, or maybe unrealistic, over your head, just wherever you are, find a surface like a tabletop, a desk, you can even use your steering wheel if you’re in the car at a stop sign. I want you to practice this. Take your two hands and I want you to push it down and away from you.

Hands on top of that surface and push it down and away. I want you to practice saying no. No. If you’re watching the video, you can see me do this live. Now you’re going to push up from the bottom of the table and you’re going to pull it toward you and I want you to say yes. Yes.

That feeling of pushing away that we did first, that’s the feeling of aversion, that’s the feeling of avoidance. I don’t want it. I want it away. That’s the feeling of no. The feeling of yes is when we pull it toward us. That’s the feeling of attraction. Yes. I hope that helps to get it into your body.

There’s so many different ways to learn about these things. I found it’s really, really useful to try it on with a few different learning styles at least.

If you are a more visual learner, then at allowedpodcast.com you will find other handouts and things like that from other episodes that can help illustrate this more. Please go check that out.

What is a Clear Agreement?

 All right. The final piece here, we talked about integrity, we talked about whole body yes as being basically a precondition for being in integrity and now we’ve got our third concept that we’re going to weave together, which is clear agreements.

We’ve talked before about clear agreements, but just to make it really, really clear, a clear agreement is one where it is unambiguously defined, super, super clear who will do what by when and how will we all know that it actually happened? It’s very objective. It’s something where there’d be no argument whatsoever about if the thing happened or not. So often we make agreements that are fuzzy, vague or unclear.

How many times have you left a meeting and everyone was talking about, “We’ve got to do this?” Well, who’s doing it and when? What does it look like really? What are they actually doing? Will we even know if it got done? Then, three months later, weren’t we saying that we were going to do this? Yeah, but there was never a clear agreement to begin with.

This is really important in the context of working with others and being in family systems that have integrity where you are able to work together and coordinate your efforts. It’s also really important to create clear agreements with ourselves.

So often we skip over the clarity because we think, well, it’s me. I don’t need to get clear on this. Then we chronically can feel out of integrity, like there’s something missing or there’s something that we’re doing wrong or like we have to keep pushing. It actually depends on your Enneagram type which of those thoughts you’re more likely to have when you’re not creating clear agreements with yourself.

That’s a topic for another day, but your personality is going to get involved in creating some lack of integrity when there’s a lack of clear agreement. Creating really, really clear agreements with yourself, what am I actually signing up for here for myself, is one of the best ways to free up energy.

Unclear agreements lead to energy leakage. It leads to subtle and sometimes not so subtle forms of drama that create friction and that drain our energy and our attention, our focus and our presence.

We can actually make it so easy to be in presence and to have high energy and to be magnetic and sexy and freaking awesome by creating clear agreements with ourself to which we have a whole body yes. It makes it so, so easy and exciting.

I’ll give you an example from my own life of places where I didn’t quite have clear agreements with myself and sometimes where I moved so far in the direction of overly rigid agreements thinking it was clear that I got out of integrity there too.

A great place to focus connected to today’s Allowed insider freebie is the morning routine. I’ve had all different kinds of morning routines throughout my years. Sometimes it’s elaborate and exquisite.

Between you and me, that was mostly before I had kids, but I would go walking around the hills of Berkeley and then I would go and get a really good cup of coffee and go to the flower store and then I would journal for a couple of hours. I mean, I can’t believe it. It was really productive though and wonderful. I had such a whole body yes to doing that.

Then, when my life shifted quite dramatically and I had a family and I had a job and the demands on my time were structured in a really, really different way, I felt very much out of integrity because I thought I still had a whole body yes for that former morning routine that worked really, really well.

However, there wasn’t a single day where I was willing to leave my babies behind and go do that same routine. It didn’t make sense. I would be arriving three hours later than expected at work, my children would be crying and hungry and not able to breastfeed, I would have my husband, the demands on him would feel really out of balance and he would need to get to where … this stuff sounds so obvious, but ultimately it was a choice. I wasn’t aware it was a choice. I was really below the line.

This is before I began doing any conscious leadership work. I thought it was all happening to me. I was like, “Hey, my morning routine keeps getting broken. I’m getting thwarted.” I wasn’t recognizing that I actually didn’t have a whole body yes to that agreement to begin with. I needed to clear that up.

The thing I tried first was I gave up completely on having any morning routine. I said, “Well, this is too frustrating to even try, so I just give up.” That led to a pretty non-present and reactive way of doing my mornings, which very quickly began to not feel good to me, but I kept it going for years where my mornings would be filled with a jolt of adrenaline and feeling hurried and caffeine and running around and not ever quite landing and feeling grounded until I would get to work, which meant that work was the only place I felt grounded.

That was not really of service to myself or actually probably to the people I worked with or to my family, but yet I never found the clear agreement that I wanted to keep with myself until I began doing this conscious leadership work and I became much more attuned to how much I am allowed to create an agreement to which I have a whole body yes. Then I began to play.

What would I have a whole body yes to?

I’ve done all different variations. At times I would get really, really prescriptive and I would have a checklist of 10 things I want to get done, get through this morning, which means I did my morning routine. Ultimately, that broke too, because I didn’t have a whole body yes to always sticking to it, because things would happen.

Now I know that my morning routine is I will do something to support my own presence. I have a whole toolkit of ways that I may do that. Right now it involves, I have lemon water, I make my coffee, I journal, I listen to music, I meditate.

Sometimes only one of those, but I count all of them as me doing and completing my morning routine, even if it’s I will be exquisitely present as I pour the hot water to make my coffee.

My clear agreement with myself now is not vague anymore. It’s clear.

One ingredient from that list, injecting presence into something that I make pleasant for myself and the making of it pleasant is on the inside, that means I did the morning routine and that’s my agreement to myself. I will always give myself that in the morning.

Why? It is of service. It stabilizes me. It brings more energy and life into me. I am able to give more to others when I do it that way. T

hat’s not the only reason. The reason is I trust that, when I’m in presence, it is of service to all things. I hope that clarifies a bit how clear agreements can be made and that there’s so much space and flexibility and that it is something that can change.

This whole body yes tool, think of it as your internal weather vane for how on course am I. How calm and peaceful really is this?

Am I being battered around by really an internal swirl of just being in drama and not taking ownership? This can be a creative and curious experience where we learn and no one is wrong.

How Living a Life of Integrity Reduces Burnout 

In summary, let’s pull all of these concepts together, we know that being in integrity is a way to experience our life as whole beings who are fully alive. We trust that this is of service to ourselves and to all things.

We know that we are in integrity when we keep our agreements and when those agreements are clear. We also now know, and you now know, that when you have a whole body yes to an agreement, and I’m telling you it’s going to feel like electric when that’s true, whole body yes, then it is easy, it is easy and fun and life giving to keep those agreements.

We are so much less at risk of breaking the agreements because we had a whole body yes to begin with.

This really will help avoid burnout because we’re not burning ourself out with the drag and friction of fighting life, including the life that is within us.

We’re not swimming upstream anymore when we don’t want to. We may still be working hard, but it’s not hard. We may still be putting in a lot of effort and energy into keeping our agreements, but it’s not friction.

There’s something easy about exerting all of that effort that feels alive and sexy and whole. 

The more often you can check in with yourself and really be aware of my whole body yes, am I in integrity? Is there any tension anywhere? Is there a pinch? Is something feeling out of alignment?

Give yourself one second to check. If every other second you’re checking and you can be in presence with yourself at the same time as you’re in presence with life around you, you will free up so much energy and you will not believe the magic that unfolds.

You’ll be able to create better agreements with others that are more creative and generative and really unlock a lot more possibility.

You’ll be less indecisive and less affected by mood swings and external events and more in recognition of how much … you actually have control over so much more than you may know. You have such a bigger space to play creatively than you may know.

You can have this access to all of this greater possibility because you’re more centered in your true essence and your zone of genius. The whole key is this, I will be committed, I am committed to my whole body yes. When I don’t have a yes, I have a no.

Clear Agreements Assessment Journaling Exercise 

I’d like to guide you through a journaling exercise. This is very quick. If you happen to not be somewhere where you can do writing by hand, then you’re welcome to follow along, you can come back and listen later if you like.

This is something I’ve designed for you to be able to do while you’re on the move as well as if you’re sitting with pen and paper. I do have a preference for pen and paper when you do any kind of inner work type writing like journaling because it slows you down, it brings you more into your body and studies have shown that you really learn a lot better when you’re handwriting versus typing. Get yourself settled.

Let’s look at some of the agreements that you have with yourself. I want you to think of at least five and I’ll give you some categories to look at.

What are some agreements you have with yourself in terms of how you structure your day? Say, your wake up time and your bedtime. You may have some agreements there, you may realize I don’t have an agreement. Check and see, do I want one? You may find that your agreement is fuzzy and unclear or that it moves around a lot.

What about your meal times and break times? What are some agreements you have or don’t have with yourself around how you care for your physical body? Do you give it sunshine and light and exercise, movement? Do you give it pleasure? Do you give it nutritious and delicious food? Do you give all of your senses a chance to play and enjoy and be inspired?

Your visual sense, your auditory sense, your sense of touch, smell, and taste. Do you have clear agreements about who you spend your time with, how you spend your time, how you’d like to be treated for you to choose to spend time with someone and how you want to show up with them?

I want you to find some areas where you have made an agreement with yourself and maybe you’ll find I could make it more clear. What are some ways that you could make your agreements with yourself more clear?

Meaning it’s clear who will do what by when. How would it be known? How would it be objectively known? I think that this one around how you choose who to spend time with is one that can be really, really juicy here. Do you allow people into your online life, say social media, that you wouldn’t allow into your family room?

How do you choose? How do you choose how you want to interact with people at work, the person that you bring forward at work and the one that you don’t allow to show up? Imposter syndrome would fall into this category, right? Any kind of posturing or pretending.

Just see, where could I make my agreements with myself more clear? What would that look like? What would it look like for me to have a whole body yes to this agreement? That can really help you tune that dial so exquisitely perfectly.

If I’m really, really, really honest with myself, what do I have a whole body yes for in terms of an agreement? You can look at your relationships with your family members too, about this. Really how do I want that relationship to operate?

Good. Hopefully that gave you some good material to at least kickstart your curiosity around, wow, there are agreements in so many areas of your life that perhaps you weren’t even consciously making or creating. The more you found there, the bigger and better journey, this is going to be ahead for you.

You can use this same process for agreements that you have in any area of your life, your financial life, your giving life, your creative life, your professional life, your career. You can bring this into your home and walk through your house and say, “Where do I have clarity about how I want to operate in this part of my home? What do I want this to look like for me?

Do I have a whole body yes to each and every item in my closet? What kind of agreement do I want to create with myself that I’d have a whole body yes for in terms of how I relate to these belongings of mine?

Which ones I want to keep, which ones I want to get rid of, which ones I want to throw away and which ones I never want to ever bring into my life again.” Opportunities abound for creating greater integrity and clarity so that your whole life is a whole body yes.

Thank you so much for entertaining that and seeing what’s there. We only have scratched the surface. If you’d like to go deeper and if you’re not already an Allowed insider, then you can go deeper right now with exclusive bonus content, a deeper self-guided journey.

Well, I’ll be guiding it, it’ll seem like I’m guiding it because you’ll hear my voice, but you’re the one downloading it, signing up and pushing play. Go to allowedpodcast.com to become an Allowed insider and today you will get a quick morning and evening journaling guide that will take you about five minutes tops. I will be guiding you through it.

It’s an audio track like our Allowed insiders most often are. This is something that you can do every day to keep yourself in alignment. 

Creating a habit like this journaling exercise is a great morning routine and an evening practice that helps you to stay in presence and to create a clear agreement with yourself so that you can be in integrity each and every day in full trust that, when you are in integrity, it is of service to all things.

This routine also will help you to unpack the day or the week or the life events that you’re finding yourself in and to go through them in a healthy self-aware way where you can avoid overwhelm, you can break out of stagnation and you can begin to heal from burnout. This audio guide is yours.

It’s absolutely free right now when you sign up to be an allowed insider at allowedpodcast.com.

I also want to quickly remind you to subscribe to this podcast right now if you aren’t already subscribed and be sure to share it with your friends and family and anyone else who may benefit from this valuable content too.

Bonus props if you put a link into Slack and share it with your team at work. I’ve heard that really gets the ball rolling to be in these types of conversations in the workplace, so I invite you to do that.

I would like to point you also to some additional resources here, some of these are really, really good, that relate to today’s content.

There are a few episodes from season one of Allowed that relate deeply to integrity, whole body yes, clear agreements, everything we talked about today.

All of these, by the way, will be linked-to in the show notes which you can access in your player and/or at allowedpodcast.com.

59 is creating clear agreements, episode 58 what is integrity? Episode 39 is a deep dive into the whole body yes, one of my favorites. 

I also will link to a recent episode of the Tim Ferris podcast where Diana Chapman guides Tim Ferris through understanding Whole Body Yes and really locating it in the body.

She talks also about taking radical responsibility and reducing drama in your life. Great episode, love Diana. She’s been on the show before a couple of times too and I’ll also link to her episodes which were episodes number 17 and 28. One of them, we talk a lot about conscious leadership at home, including in your romantic life. It’s steamy and good.

Please go check all of those out and you can get these in the show notes. Episode 36 of Allowed was getting back into integrity with clear agreements. Episode 48 was listening to your body to discover your zone of genius, which relates deeply, again, to that felt sense of integrity.

There are a few books that I love. We talked today about habits and the Allowed insider bonus for this week is guiding you through this new morning and evening routine journaling habit.

If you’re really interested in the topic of habits and you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend James Clear’s book on Atomic Habits. His blog is also excellent. The Power of Habit is written by Charles Duhigg and Mike Chamberlain and then The Genius Habit is by Ms. Laura Garnett.

That’s it for today. I can’t wait to see you back here next week for an even greater alignment with your true, authentic self. As you begin to try these things out, please leave notes in a review of what it did for you.

You can also share that with me directly if you like. My contact info is on website, caneel.com. Don’t forget, if you haven’t yet, to become an Allowed insider at allowedpodcast.com. Thank you for showing up for you here today.

You are your own leader of your own life and I’m so excited to see what you create. Bye-bye.