PP 236: Leading from the Yin-side Out with Lea Bayles

Website: https://www.leabayles.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/LeaBayles

Transcription not yet cleaned up, but thanks for checking it out!

Welcome back to another episode of the positive productivity Podcast. I am so happy that you are here to join us today and I’m thrilled to hear introduce you to our guest, Lea Bayles. We as the founder of Lea Bayles coaching. And I’m thrilled that she’s here to teach us about leading from the inside out. Leah, welcome.

Lea Bayles: Hi, Kim. Thanks so much. It’s a great pleasure to be here.

Oh, great pleasure to have you, Lea. Can you share a bit of your backstory with us and lead into leading from the inside out.

Lea Bayles: Well, I was thinking a little bit ago about a quote by E. Cummings. It takes great courage to grow up and become who we really are. And I love that quote, that’s like one of the passions that I have is letting my own life be a chance to grow into who I really am becoming that more and more and helping other people do that, as we each have this enormous, extraordinary potential for becoming more and more and sometimes in the process of that, we burn our out or wear ourselves out. So one of my passions is to help people, professionals, entrepreneurs, especially grow into who they really are, emerge into that next step, grow into their potential, but without burning ourselves out without depleting ourselves, which I’ve major times done to myself, but with a sense of ease and a sense of flow, and a sense of connecting to what it really is inside ourselves that’s wanting to emerge.

I know a thing, or two or 15 about burning myself out. I just got to be totally honest there. How did you get on this journey? What brought you to having this passion?

Lea Bayles: Well, in many ways, it’s been something that’s been lifelong. I had several times in my life when I was young when I came close to dying. I had a weird immune disorder when I was really… when I was born. With an immune deficiency, and so I was in and out of hospitals almost died a few times.

And then as a teenager, I was with friends playing at a river and fell in to the river and was swept downstream and left my body and was watching from above. And so that experience and the times in my life when I’ve realized how close death can be, and times when I’ve been connected with people that I’ve deeply loved, and I’ve been with them through their death process, and really has given me the gift of realizing how precious and how fragile this life is. And that I think has given me my whole life and ability or, or perhaps the longing to live in that place where I’m open to what really matters to me and the power Power of remembering that this life is so precious and so fleeting. And so it’s always been something that’s there that sort of fueled my quest.

Lea Bayles: And then when I was in my early 30s, I had three young daughters. I was in graduate school, I was babysitting for other people’s children. I was volunteering at the local grade school for my oldest daughter. And I had the sense that I could do everything for everybody. And I pushed and I pushed and I pushed myself until I had a really serious immune system collapse. And it turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. And it was one of the best things that ever happened to me because it’s sent me on a journey of learning to heal myself and to rebuild my life from the inside out. And it helped me see a really dangerous pattern in my life of pushing and struggling to get Had to achieve. And that that feeling of pushing for perfection. And it also helped me see a toxic imbalance in our culture.

I’m so intrigued already, because I feel like you’re talking to the me of the last decade, because I’ve gone through that same pushing, pushing, pushing. Yeah. Sorry, I interrupted you. I’m so rude.

Lea Bayles: No, you didn’t. And I’m really happy to hear I mean, not happy to hear that you’ve had that but interested to hear that you had a similar experience? Because when I started healing myself, I had this really strong knowing that my path was not to go from doctor to doctor to find a cure. I did go through tests because at first, the doctors weren’t sure I was gonna live.

I was diagnosed with pericarditis, which is inflammation of the lining of the heart, and I had some organ failure and, you know, couldn’t sit up and In bed long enough to read a book to my three year old twins for a while, and you know, it’s just absolutely exhausted. You know, for a while the doctors weren’t sure I was going to live. So they did a number of tests for potentially very scary things. But as soon as those things were ruled out, I had this very strong knowing that my path was to learn to heal from the inside out. And not to go to doctors for cures, but to find a different path, a different way of living my life, and of being in my body.

Lea Bayles: And so I had this extraordinary journey, really over a couple of decades all together, of studying with some wonderful master healers and teachers and learned about energy medicine and Mind Body healing and, you know, just so many wonderful opportunities with that. And as I began to get even a little bit better I was invited to speak to different support groups, and began realizing how many people had similar experiences from which they never have recovered. And so I was really glad to have in myself, the knowing that there was a different way.

And as I began recovering, I went back to graduate school, a different program, got my master’s in psychology with the emphasis on Mind Body healing, and began working with individuals and with groups work through a large medical integrative medicine clinic had the opportunity to help set that up, and to create a wellness program for employees and a three County area for this hospital system.

Lea Bayles: And so learning ways to make these ancient teachings and the modern Mind Body healing practices. very accessible, easier for people because most people want you to have the opportunity To go study in retreat centers and with various teachers, so I created a career or a career created me, I’m not really sure but in mind body healing, from my own experience of learning to do that,

that’s a really fascinating point that you just brought up about, you created a career or the career created you. Because I can see the same in my own life. I don’t know if I created this career or if the career created me, because I burnt myself out. And then realize just how important the Positive Productivity brand was.

Lea Bayles: I love that. Yeah. And so it feels to me like in that way with UN for me, one of the worst things feels like one of the worst things could happen, you know, a collapse where I couldn’t take care of my kids or do anything, you know, turned out to be one of the best things. And my sense is, it’s like our inner self, our soul self, calls us back into alignment, you know, through the challenges as well as through the joys And that when we embrace that, it brings us back into a path where we’re more and more aligned with who we really are and what we’re really here to do.

I can absolutely see that. So, when I started my business in 2012, the reason I actually started my business was because my husband had been repeatedly losing his job. And we finally took that as I finally took it as a hint from God that he was not supposed to be working in a job. He was supposed to be pursuing his dream. And coincidentally, he was down to the last three years that he could use his veterans benefits to get his college degree. And he could do a three year program. I mean, it was all just very coincidental that that’s exactly when it happened. So he did that and we needed extra income. So I started the business and it all just aligned. But with that said, I was doing it out of income. And that’s how I got into my own burnout. just pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, having three more kids on top of the two that I already had before I started the business since I started the business five years ago. But as I said, just that constant pushing to try to be more, do more, make more, and I would have to say make more like five more times. But I’d never did because I wasn’t passionate about what I was doing. So finally came that big crash. I was broken, broken. And it all became really clear and that Yeah, the sometimes the worst times happen for the best reasons.

Lea Bayles: Absolutely.

As long as we have the perspective that you did, you know, we’re not taking the victim place. We’re not wallowing in it too long. We’ll get to all of for a while, but not too long. And then we like okay. Where does this redirect me? Where what’s my opportunity in this? And you so obviously did that Kim, in that process both for yourself and for your husband,

Lea Bayles: I felt like I woke up. And even when you’ve got a house full of children, you know, a lot of people say, Oh, I can’t possibly shift my job, I can’t possibly do what I really want to do, because these people are dependent on me. And I love that you did it even in that situation.

Well, that’s something that my husband has taught me a lot about, is he’s been through the worst. I mean, we’ve had our own struggles. Don’t get me wrong. We’ve had plenty of struggles in the seven years that we’ve been together. But I don’t know that I’ve besides the introduction episode of the positive productivity podcast, I don’t know that I’ve ever shared that just less than a year before we met. He was homeless and living out of his car in Fargo, North Dakota in the middle of winter. So no matter how bad things get around here, he doesn’t put it in My face but he says sweet is not, you know, we can endure anything. Wow, I’ve lived in my car, I know we can deal with whatever we were dealing with. But after that massive shift happened, we haven’t had to deal with that. We haven’t had the 34 cent weekend, you know, trying to see how far we can stretch a bag of rice. And yes, listeners. I mean, we’ve really gone through that. We’ve had cars repoed and our utilities disconnected. But we’ve gotten through just because the mindset was there. We can survive without water. It’s impossible or you know, it’s hard to think about but we can do it and we can get by on one car instead of two or no cars instead of one. We can do it but we have to know that we can do it first. And sometimes that’s where a lot of the failure comes from. Yeah.

Lea Bayles: Well, it sounds like you also the two of you help each other support in being grateful for what you Have and building on that. And I think that’s a big piece.

Definitely a huge piece. Yeah,

Lea Bayles: yeah. Beautiful. Well, you asked me a question. I’m afraid I didn’t answer it very fully I kind of got sidetracked but it was like what I see as that toxic imbalance in our culture. And one of the teachings that I studied quite a bit is chicon which is tied in with Chinese medicine, acupuncture, I haven’t studied acupuncture but the branch of it which is chicon, the movement meditation, she is the energy the life force and cone is the skill so it’s the skill and working with energy. And central to that is the idea of the yin and the yang. You know, the big circle with the curved line and the yen is on one side and the Yang on the other and, and the yen is the receptive and the quiet and the inner and the Yang is the outer in the achievement. And forceful.

And so we can think of the Yang as the masculine, and the yen as the feminine. But this doesn’t mean male and female. Because we all need both. We have both. And chicon philosophy, the way of being, they’re both equally important. And we need both of them and they support each other. That’s part of the life energy, the life force is made of both.

Lea Bayles: But in our culture, we’re so focused on the Yang, on the doing and the achieving. And if we’re going to get ahead, we’ve got to push forward and we’ve got to really have that active kind of quality. And we minimize the importance of the interior and the intuitive and the inner knowing, we think of the outer authority is more important than the inner knowing. And we think of like, the love of power is more important than the power of love, which is the more yen quality

And so that imbalance of that leads us to the place where like you said, you were pushing and pushing. And it wasn’t even what really satisfied you on the inside. But you felt like for whatever reason, that was how you were supposed to push to get ahead, which is what we’re tired. But in Chicago, there’s this wonderful realization that before anything can happen, the yen the ENTER, the Enter reserves need to be replenished. So the concept that within each of us there is a deep well, of yen, and we must refill and replenish and keep that well replenished. And then the Yang, the action the outward naturally rises.

Lea Bayles: So that if we keep our that inner reserve really, really full and rich and alive, then we can more easily have creative action, the action or right action arises without having to be forced. But if we have a situation like I did in my early 30s, where I really depleted that inner reserve, then everything I do has to come from the place of being forced, and pushed. So I so loved finding that metaphor and that awareness of energy, because it’s a perfectly reflected what I had experienced to my own body in my life.

And so this commitment to replenishing that inner reserve, for men and for women that we need ways to do that, and then the right action, we need to take the creative solutions, the innovative ideas naturally arise. But without having that inner reserve replenished, everything has to be forced, and we get to feeling depleted and lonely and overwhelmed as we’re trying to achieve. Our dreams and our goals

while I’m having one of those moments where I knew this, but you know, you can hear it, you can digest it, or maybe you’re hinted at it numerous times, but it never just clicks and it just clicked. Thank you Lea.

Lea Bayles: That makes me really happy.

Kim Sutton: Going back to what you said earlier, yes, my husband and I do balance each other really well, when one of us is having a rough time. The other one is really great at getting us out of it. However, I’m seeing two different sides. And it’s not the yin and the yang with us right now. He is working outside of the home while he’s trying to build his dream. But it’s more out of necessity than out of desire. When there are other things that he could be doing,

Listeners I Episode 167 so that KIM sutton.com forward slash PMP 167 I talked about being stubborn. And there’s those times that we’re trying really hard to shove the circle peg into the square hole or the other way around. And that’s what we can be doing exactly with what Leah is talking about is we’re just trying to shove that circle pay into the square hole and we’re not listening to our body and what it’s telling us we need and that’s not good. It’s just not.

But anyway, as I am seeing him, like keep on doing what he’s not passionate about and struggling with just, he’s a manager at a retail shop, struggling with employees who are just totally not there. And his own physical ailments are getting worse. But I know that if he just gave himself the piece, yeah, that that would start improving. There’s a lot more to that, but I just know that That would happen. listeners, I’m not telling you that if you’re working a full time job right now to go quit your job, but allow yourself the opportunity to think about it. Right? What would it really take to step out?

Lea Bayles: You know, you mentioned listening to your body. And to me, that’s one of the really key pieces to all this, you know, we have the idea that we can just push ourselves all the time. And our culture, I think, teaches us that if we’re tired, have another cup of coffee, you know that our bodies are just supposed to just work like machines. And I think we often pay better attention and better care to our cars than we do to our bodies.

And so that listening to your body, befriending your body, our bodies are so brilliant. They’re always giving us feedback. They’re giving us feedback about what we need to be healthy, and they’re also giving us feedback to what our souls need. So when That we can listen that we can tune in. Ironically, when I was in grad school in my 30s, I was writing a paper on Mind Body healing, while I was ignoring the first principle of Mind Body healing, which is listen to your body, you know, so I got a little infection, I kept pushing, I was tired, I kept pushing, I pushed and pushed and pushed until my body knocked me over, and I couldn’t move. You know, so the more we can learn to listen early and respond to that, and maybe, you know, sometimes people are afraid to listen to their bodies because they think they’ll have to change everything.

Lea Bayles: But I think just just a little bit slyke people often tell me, oh, gosh, the times just changed. I’m tired so early, but it’s too early to go to bed. It’s like, well, if you’re tired, try going to bed early. You know, get a rest. Take a nap. You know, various things to respond to your body.

Yeah, who says it’s too early to go to bed? I mean, right. Yeah,

the clock. Yeah,

I have a few choice words I can say to the clock as I’ve gotten older, and you’re a mom of twins too, so maybe you can understand this. But I remember my mom used to send my sister and I to bed at 730 or eight o’clock, even as teenagers. She was saying this to her and say it’s bedtime. And we used to hate it. Like, but we’re not tired. I am finally understanding why it was because we exhausted her. She needed to go to bed. It didn’t. And I had a crazy thought several years ago of how can I sleep for maybe half hour hour blocks at a time, like do a 24 hour cycle of sleeping for an hour getting up for a couple hours, sleep for an hour and get up for a couple hours. Because I was trying to figure out how I could use every single minute of every day. And just push push, push, push, push Unfortunately, by the time everything blew up, I was only sleeping maximum four hours a day, most the time, it was two to three hours. Well, and not only had my body had enough, but my mind had had enough.

Yes, yes. That’s another example to me of that imbalance of the yin and the yang. Because, you know, the Yang is the daytime, the outward, and our culture says that’s what matters, and that the night and the dreaming and that whole dream world doesn’t matter. And so to reclaim both our sleep, but also what happens in our dreaming and our interior world, and our intuitive, you know, that whole realm is really important. And so, you know, it’s like, oh, just got to get the maximum done and, and behave as if I could be on the go all the time. forgetting that what we’re doing at night is also really important and it’s soul time. replenishing our body, but it’s also connecting us with dream time, and a deeper wisdom that is only accessible in that place with our eyes closed, where we enter other realms.

I didn’t realize until one of the first episodes of the podcast Actually, it was a conversation with Katie Henry, that sleep was necessary to cleanse toxins out of our body. I had no idea. And in full disclosure, when we recorded her episode, I was still going two to three hours of sleep a night. Listeners I was sharing with Leah before we pushed record that I had started recording podcasts in early spring of 2016. However, in the summer of 2016, I had just about a breakdown. And it was that breakdown that really told me that I needed to launch this not just for myself, but for everybody else. He was going through it. But listening to Katie talk about how there’s all these impurities that need to be taken care of. It had never occurred to me that during the day, we are doing that to our body. So it’s not just about rest. There’s so much more to sleep than just that.

Yes. So great. So was that was able to help you realize how important it was? Did you make a shift with that Kim?

Not immediately because I’m one of the most stubborn people that you’ve ever met. However, when it finally got to the breaking point, that did help, but I also started watching a lot of Abraham Hicks seminars, thanks to a friend who recommended a whole channel on YouTube. And one of the things that Abraham kept on saying was taken care. And when you wake up and you’re in a bad mood, take a nap. Pardon my mouth when you feel like it’s all going to take a nap. Just give yourself a break. Yeah. And that really started it for me. And then I also started listening to Brendon Burchard a lot. And he’s a high performance coach. And I always thought high performance meant pushing, pushing, pushing, get it all done. But then when I went through high performance Academy, I realized No, high performance is about taking care of yourself. So that when you are performing, you’re at your peak level. And you’re able to think clearly and that really got that was what really got the gears going for me beautiful, was I started giving myself I couldn’t believe that when I gave myself six to eight hours of sleep, what normally would have taken the activities that were previously taking me eight hours started taking two because I had swapped the ratio of sleep and work.

Yeah, so you were working more it feels to me like from a place of connection inside and ease with yourself. And when we do that, we do get much more done. In a lot less time, and like that stubbornness that we most of us individually have, but it’s so reflected culturally, you know, the idea that we have to work so many hours to get it done and, and the more we push, and if we want to succeed, we’ve got to push and push to get it done. And, you know, that’s reinforced all over the place. So great people like Brendan and who are helping us remember? Yeah, the way we do it, we’re doing it from the inside with a different sense of our energy and an ourselves, then we can create more in the world with less effort.

Oh, absolutely. And at the end of my life, the corner office is not going to matter. Right. My husband, he’s so funny, he still thinks that it would be great if I had an office outside the home. I don’t want one. I really don’t care how big my offices. I just want to be here to enjoy the crayon and marker that’s on the walls from my kids. And I’m not good. To be here to enjoy that, for all the reasons that you just mentioned, if I’m not taking care of myself,

right, yeah. And as someone whose children are so have grown up now, you know, I know everyone says this, but it goes so quickly. And it’s so precious. So that’s wonderful that you’re working, you know, being able to be a successful entrepreneur, in the midst of your life with all your children and your cats and the things that you have going there. After I stayed home with my children for a few years, I like never wanted to go back again to a job where I was both, you know, had to punch in a time clock or worked for somebody else. I somehow being home with my kids that was so creative, and so able to be in flow. I think it ruined to me forever working again for anyone else in a really structured way. And it definitely spurred that desire in me to become an entrepreneur, to be able to be in control of my time, and to be able to create what I wanted with one

Oh yeah, there’s absolutely no, no way that I would be able to go back to a job.

I

know, I’m just No,

you’re talking about being able to become, you know, have that high performance from a different place makes me think of a wonderful teacher. It wasn’t someone I had studied with a lot, but his name was Baba Hari das. And he was the spiritual leader at a retreat center mount Madonna in California where I first took yoga therapy workshops, and then was co teaching them. And so I was there quite a few times. And this man was fascinating. At that point, he was in his mid 70s. And it was a very small man maybe weighed 100 pounds, and very slight, very quiet. And in a time when a lot of gurus wanted everyone to worship them, and they would have big cars and diamond rings and he just worked and ate and lived. Very simply just like everyone else in the community, and one night I was in the dining room sitting with a couple of young men who had been out all day long building a brick wall or rock wall, on the grounds of Mount Madonna. And they were laughing. They said, he is amazing. They said, we’re bigger or stronger. You know, we look like we’re bigger. We’re like, you know, a third his age, and we can’t keep up with him. They said he he’s out there working all day long. And he’s building rock walls. And he never seems to have effort. And they said he would pick up the biggest boulders poverty they call them. They said poverty would pick up the biggest boulders as if they weighed nothing, and to set them into place like they were feathers. And they said at the end of the day, we’re exhausted and he’s just calm and relaxed. They said he is working in a whole different way. He He is working with energy. And all of the great teachers I really admired. I realized they weren’t working with brute strength. They weren’t working with that Yang outward way. They were working from that inner power, that deep inner power. And that was so inspiring to me to see that if the Baba Ji and with a number of my teachers who are decades older than I, but who had this radiant lifeforce, because they were creating and achieving from that deep inner power. That has been my, my role model that has been, you know, what I’ve learned to do for myself and for my clients is be able to access that deep inner power and to work from that place. Not that I always do it, I find myself getting into that, you know, pushing through within like, Oh, yeah, that really doesn’t work so well. And it ages us and it wears us out into pleats us You know, but we have inside each one of us this extraordinary inner power that we can tap into. And I may never build a great big rock wall. But there are lots of things that I and you and everyone else in this world needs to accomplish, that we can learn to accomplish with way less effort, and lots more ease and joy.

Yeah, have you I’m sure you’ve heard the expression work.

smarter, not harder. Hmm. I’m thinking that there needs to be a twist on that, for I was trying to come up with it while you were talking, which I know is not what I should be doing. I should be listening. I was listening, but how to work more mindfully instead of harder.

Yeah, all those guys working from the inside. Like, I love that you’re young that I’m gonna keep playing with that myself. Maybe you and I will. We’ll come up with a good phrase for that.

Yeah, cuz sometimes you have like this working binder not harder just doesn’t sound right.

Yeah, well, I think it’s good, I think like that often is referring to is like time management, which is important and, you know, focusing on the things that need to get done. And, you know, that’s to me a big part of productivity that I often have to focus on not getting distracted. So not working smarter, not harder as part of it. And I think like you’re saying, there’s a deeper, energetic way. And maybe you and I can come up with a great phrase that expresses that.

Oh, I would love that. listeners, if you have any ideas on what that phrase can be. I know Leah and I would both love to hear about it. But KIM

sutton.com forward slash

p p. 236. Yeah, it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast today. Can you share a little bit more about what you do in your work and where listeners can find you online?

Lea Bayles: Sure. I work one on one with individual clients. I also have some group programs I love speaking I present at conferences, wellness conferences, women’s conferences, speaking as one of my great joys, and I love to just going to the conferences and meeting people, hearing what people are doing in various fields. To connect with me, my website is Leah bales.com. That’s LA, ba why ls.com and I have a page of gifts. So I would love to offer you those if you go to Leah bales.com, forward slash gifts, g. f t s. One of the things there that I think might be of interest to people related to what we’re talking about is something called the unshakeable self care gift package. And this offers an approach to self care, especially for people who are busy, they’ve got a lot going they want to create a lot and sometimes it just feels like self care as well. One more thing on their to do list or you know, it’s just like too much to get to or you’ve got too much going. And my approach to self care is it’s not something the basic of self care isn’t that something you have to go do separate from your life, but it’s a way or being, it’s how to connect with your inner power all the time, and what your daily habits are, that you’re doing anyway. But the two can do in a way that replenish your interest serves and that make your life easier. And it helps you have that sense of radiant well being of really that sense of just feeling alive and juicy and strong in your body all the time. So check that out. Leah bales comm forward slash gifts and choose as many as you’d like. I would love that.

Well, yeah, thank you so much listeners, just in case you’re driving or you’re not able to write that down right now. You’ll be able to find the full transcript And the resources that we talked about and all the URLs that Leah has mentioned at good KIM sutton.com. forward slash p. p. 236. Leah, thank you so much for joining us today. I’ve really enjoyed every moment of it. Thank you. Oh, you’re so welcome. Do you have a last piece of parting advice, or a golden nugget that you can offer to listeners,

Lea Bayles: I would love for everyone to just take a few moments of kindness for yourself. One of the things I really noticed, that I used to do and that a lot of people I work with do is that sense of being harsh toward ourselves, expecting ourselves to be perfect, and, you know, like, noticing more, what’s not going well and what is going well, so I just invite you right now to take a few breaths of kindness for yourself. Just feel the graph that’s already flowing in and out and just allow it to be a breath of fresh kindness. So you’re breathing in kindness for yourself, just as you are. And you breathe out, you just feel that sense of kindness, spreading all through your body. The same kindness she would easily extend to a little child or a beloved pet or a dear friend. Just breathe in that same kindness to yourself. Let it flow right into your body. Let it spread throughout. Breath of kindness can go with you wherever you go. Thanks so very much.