Embracing Vulnerability: When Inspiration Runs Dry

Music.

And welcome to Change Your Relationship with Food, the podcast hosted by me, Kyla Holley. With many years' experience as an eating disorder and bariatric therapist, I know exactly what it takes to help you break free from your diet history and develop a more healthy relationship with food. Please follow this podcast to make sure you don't miss a thing.

Just a quick word before we start. I'm very excited to tell you that we are a nominee in the Women in Podcasting Awards, I would be so grateful if you could just take five minutes to just cast a vote for us. We're under the psychology section, but I will put a link in the episode notes today that will take you straight through it. It's just five minutes. It costs you nothing to do, and it would make a huge difference to the show.

It would enable us to get more guests on, to spend more money advertising, to make the content better. So please, five minutes of your time. I'd be so grateful. Thanks so much. Let's get on with the show today.

Today might be a little different. We will have to see what happens. I normally record my podcasts on a Thursday and they get released the following Tuesday. So I'm well ahead of time. This week, it's Monday. So the podcast is going to be released tomorrow. And normally on the lead up to the recording on a Thursday, I have lots of ideas going around in my head, lots of different subjects I could cover.

And it's a matter of sort of reading up and choosing which subject that I think might be the best to cover this week. And then the first thing I do is sit down on my computer and do some notes. So normally I produce probably half an A4 page of type notes, just little dot points to keep me on track, to make sure that I get everything said that I want to say and that it has hopefully some logical order.

So that's what I normally do. Now, last week, I thought and I thought and I thought and every idea I came up with, I thought, I've kind of half covered that or I've fully covered that. Or I came up with a few ideas that I thought, nah, that's nonsense. Why am I even thinking of that? that. And here we are and it's Monday and I haven't managed to come up with anything that I actually want to talk about. And I'm sitting here in my office. I'll just sort of describe where I am.

I have a home office and this is where I do my podcasts. I normally shut the door because I have two great big hairy dogs that if somebody comes to the door at home, they'll go crazy and start barking. So I normally shut the door to kind of get rid of potential sound hazards. And then, as I say, I have my little plan and I talk into the microphone. But today, here I am. I'm sitting here with no piece of paper in front of me at all.

No plan about what I'm going to say. And I've been mulling this over even last night in bed, lying there thinking, should I just not do one this week? Just have a week off where I just don't produce a podcast. And of course, that crossed my mind. If you've got nothing clever ever to say, say nothing at all. But then the more I began to think about it, the more I thought, well, hold on. Is this the podcast?

Is the fact that I'm kind of lost for an idea this week and I'm directionless and I don't quite know what to do, is that the podcast? Is that the point of it? What do we do on those times when we don't know what to do? Do we just disappear, which is what my plan A was, just disappear, just don't do anything this week, just don't produce a podcast. That was one option. But then I thought, well, hold on, how can I somehow relate this back to us as humans?

And also, ideally, because it's the name of the podcast, relate it back to our relationship with food. And then I thought, well, it is relatable because a lot of the people that come to see me, they're just in this position in that they feel like they've said everything, they've done everything, they've tried everything. They're at a loss as to what to do next. And they're in that kind of rut where they're thinking, if I don't know what to do, perhaps I should just do nothing.

And I sort of describe it almost as a paralysis. analysis, you know, if you're not sure what to do, you just do nothing because it's safer almost to do nothing than to do something that might be wrong. And this shows up in a lot of areas of our life when you think about it. So rather than doubt myself and maybe disappear for a week, I thought I'll sit down at the microphone and see what comes out.

And I'll also ask myself, what do I do in this situation when someone comes to see me and they sit down and they say, I'm all out of ideas, I've tried everything, what would I say to them? And I suppose I would say, that's okay. It's as simple as that. It's okay. You don't always have to be the one with the plan. You don't always have to be the clever one.

One it's okay to be able to just say I don't know the answer to that question or I'm not sure about what I'm going to do next it's okay to do that stuff and we have to start to be. Kinder to ourselves and accept that these things happen sometimes we run out of ideas and then we have to go well okay this isn't who I normally am so how do I deal with that how do I deal with something outside my own normality? What do I do in those situations?

And that's where I find myself today. Part of me thinks, well, why would you just sit yourself in front of a microphone and just waffle on about your indecision and your vulnerability and the fact that you're not perfect and the fact that you hold yourself up here to be some sort of specialist in an area and yet suddenly you're stuck for ideas. It's not writer's block, is it? What is it? Talker's block? I don't know. Listener's block?

Podcast block? I don't know. I don't know if there's a name for this. And perhaps other podcasters do this as well. But after producing a podcast every single week. To now, this year, I'm suddenly at a loss as to what to talk about this week. And it's been an interesting experience just to give myself that freedom to say, that's okay. I don't have to produce something clever every week. I don't have to thrill everyone with my knowledge. I don't have to solve anybody's problems at all.

I can just sit here in front of the microphone phone and be honest and maybe a bit vulnerable and say, I don't know this week. I've got nothing to say to you. And this is the podcast. I'm not going to pull any rabbits out of hats. This is what we've got this week is me saying, I don't know. And also though, having the confidence to know that next week I probably will know and that this isn't forever. This is a temporary situation as all feelings and thoughts are. They're temporary.

The feelings and thoughts that you were having last week, they went away and they may have come back and they may have gone away again because all these things are temporary. They're not our constant state of being. If we're angry about something, we don't stay angry for five days solidly. It comes and and goes and comes and goes until eventually we're just not angry anymore about that thing.

You know, think of the things over your lifetime. Think of the love affairs that you've cried your heart out over. And now, years later, you're okay with it. It doesn't spike those emotions like it did at the time. But at the time, it was the worst thing you'd ever been through in your life and you you didn't see any way that you would recover.

Those times that you've been absolutely, unbelievably frustrated to the point of tears over a situation, but the situation's resolved itself and you've come out the other side and you kind of forget that level of frustration that you felt because it's over now. Time has moved on. The situation was temporary and those feelings were temporary.

Temporary anger sadness losing your way feeling disconnected all of these things are temporary situations that we find ourselves in and the situation I find myself in this week is also temporary and I know that next week something else will happen or a patient will say something to me and I'll say that's really interesting that you know in my mind I think that would make a really good podcast because that patient brought up a really important thing that probably

everyone thinks on some level. So maybe we should cover that one. Or I'll read something in a book and it will spark that little bit of interest in me. And I'll say, that would make a great podcast. I'll do that. Another thing I do occasionally is I meet people and I think, wow, what a great guest they would make. So sometimes the people that I meet inspire a different conversation and I invite them to come onto the podcast and chat to me about something.

All this is possible for the future and I absolutely am going to carry on because this is something I started on New Year's Day this year. The idea came to me and I'll tell you about New Year's Day because generally New Year's Day for all of us, we've got the day off work. We're normally at home with our family. And I woke up on New Year's Day. I think I made myself a cup of tea, moved into the lounge room, sat down on the sofa. And I thought, another year.

I suddenly hit this idea that I wasn't that inspired, to be honest. Normally, a new year is quite exciting to me. What's going to happen this year? What are we going to do? Where are we going to go? What challenges are out there? What am I going to achieve? What's going to be different? What's going to change? And it's quite an exciting time. But this particular new year, I sat there and I thought, I've done what I do for a long time now.

And I had nothing particularly of interest on the cards this year to look forward to. And I entered the year thinking, oh, another year of the same. I'm not sure that that thrills me. I'm not sure that that ignites anything in me. And I thought, I don't want to enter a year feeling that way. So what can I do? What can I do to mix it up?

And I began to think of ideas as I sat there on New Year's Day. And I thought, you know what? A lot of people are doing podcasts recently. I wonder if I could do a podcast. How would I go about that? And I remember going to my computer on New Year's Day and just Googling how to start a podcast, podcasting ideas, that sort of thing. And I got lost in this whole kind of depth of information like you do on the internet of how to set up a podcast.

And as the day went on, I thought, you know, this is quite interesting. This could be a new skill to learn. So I had to learn things like editing. I had to choose a recording platform. I had to choose a platform to actually host my podcast. cast. Then I had to think about things like, what did I want it to look like? What would the title be? And suddenly I was in this space of, oh, this is exciting. This is a new project.

So this all started off, I suppose, when I was in exactly the duplicate mood that I'm in today of kind of not knowing what to do next, not knowing where to go next. And on New Year's Day, a new project came to life.

And this has grown legs. It's something which I just expected to be something that I would find enjoyable, learning a new skill and being able to sit in front of a microphone and talk without going, um, too many times because then I have to go back and edit that stuff out and learning how to talk, learning how to just waffle on and say what I wanted to say was actually really liberating and really enjoyable.

And guess what? Other people thought so too. Our listening figures began to pick up quite dramatically. And the enthusiasm built when you know that you're sitting here recording something on your own in your office, and that potentially thousands of people are actually going to listen to you saying that thing, suddenly you become aware of this community that you're building. And this is something which now, what are we, August, mid-August, now has become very precious to me.

And part of me appearing today, even though I had absolutely nothing to say. Is my feeling of responsibility to you, this community that I've built. People that are sitting there going, oh, it's Tuesday. It's time for the Change Your Relationship with Food podcast. I wonder what's going to go on this week and what she's going to talk about. Is she going to have a guest? Is it just going to be her? What's she going to talk about? Is it going to be relevant? Is it going to be interesting to me?

All those things that I know that people out there are thinking about the podcast and to a certain extent, depending on me.

So now, I'd like to depend on you a little bit more, if I can, and ask you to put forward ideas as well. Help me out. Those times of vulnerability, today is the first one, but I'm sure this is the first of many. I'm going to get weeks where I run out of ideas. I'm going to get weeks where nothing much happens at work, nothing new comes up, and I might need your help to fill those gaps. I also invite you to come be a guest.

If you've got an interesting event that's happened in your life, an interesting journey that's happened with your body or with your relationship with food or kind of anything psychological or mental health wise, those are the things that need talking about. Your story might inspire thousands of other people. You might be able to talk to thousands of other people and share some little snippet of your life, which might be meaningful to others.

So please come on board. If there's something that you want to say, if there's some way that you want to engage, please just email me and we can start a conversation because this is my podcast. It's something I started for my own enjoyment, but I'm acutely aware that it's become your podcast as well. And if you're listening to this, thank you so much for being a member of this community.

And I really do mean that. I'm not one of these people that sits there in podcast land saying, I'm so excited that you're with me today. I'm not excited that you're with me today. I'm grateful, though, that you are with me today and that you are listening and that you are part of this little dream that started as a little acorn at the beginning of the year and has grown into something bigger.

So let's move past this week, this week of nothingness. I wonder what the show notes are going to say for today, because it's really a podcast of nothing. And sometimes nothing is absolutely okay. We all get those days of nothing. We just have to go, hey, this is one of those days.

And we have to turn a corner and keep going into tomorrow and hope that inspiration lands, which hopefully between today, Monday and Thursday, where I normally do my recordings, hopefully something Something exciting will land and I'll be back next week with some more of the usual content. Thanks so much. Hopefully, I will see you then.

Thank you so much for your company today. I would also love it if you could follow this podcast. It really does mean a lot to me. Also, we have a six-week online Change Your Relationship with Food course that you can take. Just visit www.acfeb.com and click on the ACFEB and me courses link. There's also a journal and a workbook available on Amazon, and you'll find that link in our bio. I really hope you can join me again next week. Goodbye. Music.