As business owners, sometimes it’s hard to remember to block out free time for ourselves and just RELAX. To figure out how to solve this problem, I sat down with Joy Evanns, the “Say No Like A Pro” mentor.Joy Evanns is the author of Saying YES to LESS. A recovering perfectionist, Joy travels the world to support high achieving women who are tired of feeling drained and spread too thin. She helps them discover where to find time for long vacations, guilt-free lazy afternoons, and quality time with their families. By learning to set boundaries and say YES to LESS in her own life and in her former career as a graphic designer for clients such as Nike & Adidas, she eliminated resent from her relationships, increased her income, and healed chronic asthma and back pain. She is an award-winning author and her second book, Achieve MORE by saying YES to LESS, is due out November, 2017. 
Listen in as Joy & Bella delve into how business owners can carve out more free time for themselves by discussing:
- What it means to say YES to LESS & NO like a PRO
- The importance of setting boundaries, and how you can stick to them
- How business owners can take vacations and not feel guilty!
Get your free gift From Joy: “5 Strategies for HOW to Achieve MORE By Saying YES to LESS” To get this, Text the word STRATEGIES to 444999. Follow the instructions and the strategies will be sent to you via email.
Learn more about Joy on her website: joyevanns.com
Transcript:
Bella:
This is episode 73 of Bella in Your Business. Welcome to Bella in Your Business, where Bella will discuss anything and everything about your pet sitting business to help you land on target. So get ready, Bella’s got your chute. Let’s jump. Welcome to Bella in Your Business. My name is Bella Vasta, your host, and today I have Joy Evanns, author of Saying Yes to Less. She’s admittedly a recovering perfectionist. Joy travels the world to support high-achieving women who are tired of feeling drained and spread too thin. Can I get an amen from some of our listeners right now? She helps people discover where to find their long vacations, guilt-free lazy afternoons, and quality time with their friends and family. By learning to set boundaries and saying yes to less in her own life and her former career as a graphic designer for clients such as Nike and Adidas, she eliminated resentment from her relationships, increased her income, and healed—this is important, you guys, for anyone listening—chronic asthma and back pain. She is an award-winning author and her second book, Achieve More by Saying Yes, is due out in November. Welcome to the show, Joy.
Joy:
Thank you, Bella, for having me.
Bella:
Fantastic. Why don’t you go ahead and fill in those gaps for me? How did you become who you are today?
Joy:
So I grew up in a family of achievers. My dad started out as a psychologist and eventually through his career was a CEO of several multimillion-dollar companies. My mom started out as a school teacher and worked her way up to being a superintendent of schools. My sister used to be this little bratty girl who I now fortunately like a lot more, who’s now a doctor of chiropractic and she has a couple of offices with a bunch of people that work for her. Why am I telling you this? It’s because who we are is kind of defined by the environment that we grow up in. And so no surprise, I was an achiever too. I was the president of student council by the time I was in fifth grade kind of thing. The pressure to perform underneath that expectation was really difficult and challenging for me though. So I was highly critical of myself. I put a lot of pressure on myself to do more, to be more, to have more. And no surprise that I took that into my career as a graphic designer. I took clients that weren’t a fit for me. I did a lot of things that wound up leaving me drained. I said yes to last-minute requests, yes to rush work without getting paid for it, like a lot of things that really left me feeling drained and feeling kind of at the end of the day. And that took a toll for me. The toll, a lot of it was physical. I was fatigued. I felt empty. I had chronic back pain and I got to a place where it really wasn’t working for me. And I called what I did gift-wrapping garbage.
Bella:
Oh my goodness.
Joy:
I say this because a lot of my clients made products in China. And my job was to package them all up and make them pretty so that people would buy them. And I didn’t feel really good and aligned with the choices that I was making. So I was sitting on my bed one day, getting ready to go gift-wrap garbage, and I heard this voice in my head that came through like clear as day. And the voice was basically, “If you don’t do something different, you’re going to get sick again.” What I haven’t told you is that I grew up with asthma, really bad asthma. I mean, I was on all kinds of medications and still had terrible symptoms. Nobody knew how to get them to go away. And in the previous few years before this, I had worked really hard on learning a whole bunch of holistic modalities purely for the sake of healing myself. And I had gotten to the point where I was actually off the medication and symptom-free—like something that nobody thought was possible. So there was no way that I was going back to that. So I decided I was gonna make a change, and I got mentoring and I learned how to say no to things that weren’t a fit for me, and I started changing the rules with clients about what was a reasonable expectation and what wasn’t, and changing things with my family even. The end result was I didn’t have any more resentment in my relationships, I made more money, I had a lot more energy, and I had a lot more joy and aliveness in everything that I was doing. This eventually led to me transitioning careers and supporting high-achieving women who are in a similar situation—stressed out and anxious and overwhelmed and tired and sick of being there and wanting to step into something different. The techniques and skills that I had learned along the way, particularly in resolving asthma and then in transitioning to creating boundaries and so forth, that’s what I’m now using unexpectedly with clients now.
Bella:
You know, the asthma thing is really interesting. I know there are a lot of pet sitters and dog walkers out there—they’re in my forums and they talk about having fibromyalgia and arthritis. And at the taping of this right now, we are entering into fall. I think this is actually going to come out in the winter. But regardless of when you’re listening, the colder weather seems to really get a lot of these chronic illnesses, diseases, pains, really in flaring mode. So I could only imagine how many people are saying, “Girl, how did you do that? Tell me more about that.” Like how did the change of your lifestyle essentially change your medical condition?
Joy:
The easiest way to describe it is there’s a lot of stress in your body in a lot of different ways. We have a lot of environmental stress that we put on ourselves based on the foods that we eat and the electromagnetic fields that we expose ourselves to with our cell phones and our Wi-Fi things. If you sleep by the refrigerator, all different kinds of things impact your immune system—your body’s ability to regulate itself. Our biology was not designed to handle all of this technology and so forth. And then you throw on top of that the emotional stuff. If you’re not sleeping well or taking care of yourself—all of those implications—and then whatever beliefs you have about your health or whether it’s possible to heal something. There’s this whole mesh of all these different things, food sensitivities, everything that can play into somebody’s health. One of the trainings that I did, I had to actually document how many different modalities I tried. So I’m very familiar with a lot of natural healing methods. I tried over 40 different things in this whole process of healing myself. And I would not say that where I am right now is absolutely perfect. What I know is that we all have these pressure points where we have a weakness in our body. For some people it might be their back. They get under a lot of stress and their back goes out. For some people it might be breathing. For me, if I’m not being the best version of me, it’s going to show up and I’m going to start having breathing symptoms. I kind of need to look around and see what’s happening and what choices I’m making to recognize, okay, where am I not making space for myself here? Where is it too small for me to breathe?
Bella:
That’s incredible. It speaks a lot to just being in tune with your body. And you’re absolutely right. I know the most common thing that came to my mind is when you’re sitting at the desk all day long, it’s like your shoulders and neck and you just like—and then that gives you headaches and then that makes you feel bad. And then you just want to eat sugar and carbs and make bad choices and lay in bed and you become lazy. And then it just keeps spiraling, you know? I hear you, girl, and I’ve had a similar experience with that just by starting to work out every day and having a morning routine, which I’m sure is part of what we’re going to talk about today. So tell me more about how you had this epiphany, you were going along in your job, gift-wrapping garbage as you say, and what was that enough-is-enough moment? What did you start to do to try to start to fix it? Because I’m sure that people are listening to this right now and they’re like, yeah, you know what, that’s great you guys, but I don’t have a magic wand. I can’t just all of a sudden start changing it. So Joy, what advice would you give to someone who is in a chronic pain situation that wants to start changing their life? How can they start making that move to get out of it?
Joy:
I think the biggest thing is certainly I would advise somebody to pay attention to your physical symptoms and get support on a physical level. What I know from my own journey and from journeys of my clients is that a lot of physical symptoms are instigated by psychological issues and our stress level, and the things that cause us emotional pain oftentimes show up in our bodies. So when we’re just looking at, “My back hurts,” and not like, “Okay, where am I giving too much and not receiving enough? Where am I not feeling supported? Where am I feeling brokenhearted about something that’s happened?” or “sad about something that’s happening in a relationship?”—those kinds of things are going to show up in our bodies in different ways. Everybody processes things differently. But I like to say that when we have difficult emotions and we don’t process them, we like to put them in our imaginary backpack that we carry. And it’s kind of like the backpack just gets heavier and heavier and heavier until we actually deal with those things. We’re not off the hook until we actually sit in our present with what’s actually happening in our body.
Bella:
That’s so good. And I know that there’s a lot of people out there right now thinking, “Hmm.” So I would just start taking an inventory of your life and really writing things down and seeing like, when am I feeling certain ways and how does it make me feel? You can do that just like a food diary after you eat different foods, after you’re doing certain activities in your life, whether it’s working out all the way to drinking. Absolutely just really taking a conscious inventory of things. So we do all this to our bodies, we’re all stressed out, we’re not really paying attention, we’re not taking inventory, then we start trying to people-please everyone probably, right? And just saying yes to everything. So let’s talk about that. Like why are people saying yes to everything to begin with?
Joy:
I don’t know that it’s all people. I know that more women do this than men based on how we were raised. Culturally speaking, women are attuned to putting everybody else first, putting everybody else’s needs first, that it’s not okay to stop and rest until your body breaks down. Back to the pain idea—a lot of us have learned, and this was part of my family’s story, that the only time it was okay for you to rest was if you had a physical issue. And that stopped you from getting up and doing something. And that physical issue got people in my family, including me, a lot of attention. So if we have an attention need that’s not being met, it’s one way that we can ineffectively get that met. It’s a lot of self-sacrifice. We’ve learned how to self-sacrifice, and until we step out of that paradigm, we can’t actually say yes to less.
Bella:
Love that. Do you think that it’s only our society? Like do you think that’s the American society? Do you think that’s like a worldwide thing?
Joy:
I can’t really speak for a lot of different cultures. I know in Western civilization, that’s where I have my grounding. So I know that every country has kind of their different version of this. But I hear from people in the UK—mostly I work with English-speaking countries, so the UK and Australia and New Zealand, US and Canada—that, you know, we’re definitely in a similar boat, culturally speaking, related to how we kind of do things.
Bella:
Interesting. Very interesting. You guys, when we come back, we’re going to take a quick commercial break. We’re going to talk more about how do we say no without feeling guilty and ultimately how to say yes to less. We’ll be right back.
(Ad break omitted — content preserved as is.)
Bella:
And I’m back with Joy Evanns, and we’re talking everything about just slowing down, taking inventory of our life, and saying yes to less. So Joy, as we go back into this, tell me your thoughts about how do we say no without feeling guilty? Because I think that maybe one of the reasons why a lot of us say yes to things is because we feel guilty if we don’t.
Joy:
So there are two concepts here. First is the saying no, and the second piece is the feeling guilty part. So can I share with you first about the feeling guilty part? Because if we don’t understand how guilt works, we can get caught in the trap. I was taking this training with one of my mentors, Jay Forsett, and he totally lined this out. And I was like, whoa, okay, totally doing things differently now as a result. So I’m gonna share with you exactly what he shared with me, which is: we have a particular behavior. I’ll give you the example of my client, Diane, whose mom called her—it seemed like to her—50 times a week. And she was constantly interrupting her at work and on the weekends, and her mom was kind of an energy vampire, so to speak—someone who was a real drainer. So Diane did not feel good about talking to her. She didn’t even like to listen to the messages, and she definitely didn’t call her back. She felt guilty about not calling her back. So she had this behavior of not calling her back. The reason why she felt guilty about it was because she had a belief about what that behavior was. And the belief was, “I’m not a good daughter if I don’t call my mom back.” So when we have these two separate things, you have your belief over here and your behavior over here. There’s a big gap in between them when they’re not aligned with one another. And the gap in the middle is where the guilt sits. It’s kind of like the bridge between the belief and the behavior. So the guilt shows up as a way to punish ourselves for not having our belief in alignment with our behavior. And we do that for an indeterminate period of time. And the payoff of that is that we don’t have to change either the behavior or the belief. Now, if we take the behavior and the belief and we stick them into alignment—meaning I can be a good daughter and either not call my mom back or renegotiate whatever agreement we have—so either change the belief or change the behavior, renegotiate how she and her mom are interacting with one another. If you change either one of those things, you can now create an alignment between them. There’s no gap in between and thus there’s no bridge that’s necessary and no space for the guilt to live. So when she did that, she actually renegotiated with her mom that they would have a call on Fridays and her mom would have something to look forward to and she wouldn’t constantly be reaching out to need her. And then they actually had one day together every month. And that put Diane in a place where she could be in really good spirits and really loving and compassionate with her mom instead of overwhelmed because her mom had been like, “I want you, I want you, I want you,” every single day. So that’s kind of how the guilt works relative to whatever it is. Nobody can really guilt us. All they do is point to the gap between our beliefs and our behavior.
Bella:
And oftentimes the person who’s pointing at the gap shares the belief that we have. Right, and the guilt is something that we take on ourselves. It’s whether you choose to accept it or not. What I hear from your story is that the daughter reestablished expectations that her mother could have of her and her relationship and also probably gave her a little bit of choice in the matter so she didn’t feel completely dictated to but said, “Listen, this is what I can do. This is what I can’t do. How about we do this?”
Joy:
Exactly.
Bella:
That kind of goes to my next question for you, Joy. How does one figure out where those boundaries should be so they can create the right expectations that people should have of them?
Joy:
So it comes back to listening to our bodies again. We all have these experiences where we step into something and then we start to have these uncomfortable feelings, whatever that is. For some people, that’s like a twisting feeling in their stomach or like, it just feels like heaviness in their chest, or you just know like, I don’t want to do that. Most of us know when we don’t want to say yes to something, when it feels heavy or burdensome.
Bella:
I’d say maybe a lot of the times that’s when someone goes, “My gosh, this client wants this and they really don’t want to do this. What should I say to them? How should I do it?” And they’re struggling with, “I know where my boundary is, but I’m not sure how to assert that.”
Joy:
Absolutely.
Bella:
So I want all of our listeners right now thinking about our Facebook groups. And this is a perfect example of how you can utilize what Joy is saying in your life right now. You know that the boundary is there because you’re feeling icky about it and you don’t want to accept what someone is either believing about you or wanting you to do. And now we’ve got to figure out how to reshape those expectations. Am I on the right track, Joy?
Joy:
Absolutely. Can I share with you my favorite technique for how to do that?
Bella:
Yes, that’s what I want—the takeaways that people can actually do.
Joy:
Okay, perfect. So this technique is called the “I love you” sandwich.
Bella:
I love this.
Joy:
There are three parts to the “I love you” sandwich. There’s the piece of bread on the top, there’s the conjunction “and,” and then the meat of whatever it is that you’re delivering—the difficult news—in the middle. And then there’s an “I love you” statement at the end. Don’t be confused about the “I love you” statements—it’s a sentiment of love, not necessarily that you’re saying literally, “I love you.” You clearly wouldn’t say that necessarily to a client unless it was true. But in the case of your spouse or your kids, it could be “I love you.” Or it could be an acknowledgement or appreciative statement that gets people listening. That’s why we’re leading with that. The second piece of that is the meat. So we’re going to use the conjunction “and,” not “but.”
Bella:
Right, because “but” negates everything.
Joy:
Exactly. So it takes a lot of practice because we’re trained to say “but.” “I love you and I’m having a really difficult time because you haven’t left the key out in the way that we agreed that this would happen.” If someone’s trying to get into your house for whatever reason. And then the third piece is now you’re going to acknowledge and make a commitment statement about continuing the relationship. So this difficult thing is going on that you want to be changed and now you’re committed to staying in the relationship with them. You could say, “We really enjoy working with you, and how can we figure out how this doesn’t happen again?”
Bella:
Let’s work together. I love it. That’s great.
Joy:
So tell us in the final minutes here, how can people reach you and take a look at your books and just get all your goodness?
Joy:
The easiest thing to do where you’ll get actually my five strategies for how to achieve more by saying yes to less—and we’ll get you a fabulous offer for access to my book and everything—is to text the word STRATEGIES to 444-999. That’s STRATEGIES to 444-999. And all you do is put in your email address and your name and you’ll get those strategies in your email box. That’ll give you direct access to me as well as tips from me on how to say no like a pro and have a lot more love and joy and energy in your life based on making choices that are in alignment for you.
Bella:
That’s fantastic. So I want everyone just to have the takeaways of if you have an ailment in your body, start taking note of what’s going on in your surroundings and your environment. Start taking inventory. From that, also take inventory of your mental well-being in a way of choosing to say yes to the things you want to and don’t feel guilty saying no to the things you don’t want to. And definitely take Joy up on her offer and grab her strategies. I love that “I love you” sandwich, and you guys can take that away and use this as soon as you’re done listening to this podcast. So I know that you’ve loved this podcast. The best way you can say “I love it” is by liking and subscribing and leaving reviews on iTunes or Stitcher. And I want you guys to always remember to keep jumping.
For more information, free articles, free coaching sessions, and more, go to jumpconsulting.net and remember—Bella’s got your chute.