BTT EP 6
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[00:00:00] Welcome to Between the Tabs. This is the moodboard podcast where creativity, growth, business, and the real life happening between it all happens. I'm your host, Kleidi Jeen, and we're gonna talk about the stuff that lives between work and who you are, and we're gonna do it in four parts. So go ahead, grab your latte, make sure it's got the oat milk in it, and let's hop into part one, shall we?
Now, no is a complete sentence. No is a full sentence. No, period. Just say no. These are often things that we hear or see on social media, for example, as advice when it comes to boundaries. A lot of people love to tell their friends or anybody who is struggling with boundaries and enacting them for themselves, they like to say no is a complete sentence.
And [00:01:00] while no period is a complete sentence, it's not necessarily an accessible thing for someone, especially if they have been people-pleasing their whole lives long, so like decades long, in order to feel safe, in order to feel a sense of belonging, in order to feel like they are doing the things that they're supposed to do in a friendship or a relationship with someone they care about, someone in their family.
If for that whole relationship long or those whole relationships long, they've bent over backwards, they have said the automatic yes, they've committed to things and did whatever they could to see them through or did whatever they could at the last minute to get out of those commitments if they were exhausted.
If those are the types of things that they have been doing to show up in a relationship and show that they care, [00:02:00] no as a complete sentence is not something that is accessible. It's like going from zero to 100 miles per hour in like under three seconds. It's just not something that can easily happen.
There has to be some middle ground. There has to be a pathway or steps that a person takes to go from automatic yes to no, full stop, and that's even if they want to go to no, full stop. I mean, how many of you are out there feeling like you are in a really- loving and reciprocal and power sharing relationship with someone, if they are saying no to you, full stop, no, full understanding of what the no is about, they just say no and they move on.
If you're receiving that in a relationship that you care about, does that feel like [00:03:00] closeness? Does that feel like a reciprocal relationship? Does that feel like something that you actually want to be a part of? Especially if you value showing care in your relationships, and you would never do a full stop no, because with that care comes a little bit of understanding, a little bit of, I don't wanna say an explanation, because we can get into overexplaining, and that does the opposite of what we want when we are upholding our boundaries. But maybe, for example, something like, "No, I'm not able to today.
I'm really exhausted." Or, "No, I have to go pick my son up, so I'm not gonna be able to do that." If you are in a relationship that you care about, it should feel easy and comfortable to share information with that person without having to overexplain,
So if your boundary is literally about you not having enough spoons, not having enough energy to go out that night with your friend, or to help [00:04:00] your cousin move, that morning, or to do the barbecue, or whatever it is, if you're in a good, healthy relationship, you sharing why you are saying no should not be problematic.
So no is a complete sentence is absolutely true and absolutely applicable for certain types of relationships. Like, if you're at work, if there's a stranger on the street, asking you for money and you don't have it or something like that, yes, absolutely no is a complete sentence.
Or if you do find yourself in relationship with someone who you're starting to see as someone you might not want to continue relationship with- Yeah, of course, no is a complete sentence.
I find it hard to have a caring, healthy, reciprocal, power-sharing relationship at play in practice [00:05:00] when you're throwing out nos as a complete sentence and moving on to the next thing. It comes off as cold, as uncaring, as unwilling to share, as unwilling to be vulnerable and be open in the relationship that you are valuing as one that you want to keep and one that you want to deepen.
So if, of course, the relationship, again, is not a relationship you want to keep, is not a relationship you want to deepen, to explore further, to become closer, then yeah, sure, absolutely no is a complete sentence. And I'd love to know what you think about this because this seems to be a really polarizing thing
And I think some people are actually building walls in a relationship as opposed to enacting boundaries. Boundaries allow us to protect ourselves and our limits while also continuing to engage in the sharing and the deepening of a relationship and [00:06:00] the closeness of a relationship.
Boundaries don't necessarily have to close us off or compartmentalize who we are in relationship to those that we care about. If we're doing that, we're creating walls. And so a lot of times I think when people are, no is a complete sentencing all over their relationships, they might be creating walls instead of creating pathways to deepen or create closeness in a relationship.
So this is just something I throw out there to think about because, well, first of all, it's about figuring out where you want this relationship to go. If it's a coworker, maybe you don't want it to go much further, but you want it to be cordial and you wanna have a generally nice and easy time at work.
So no is a complete sentence might work very well in that context, and sometimes you might make it a little bit flexible because, there's areas where you find that sharing doesn't [00:07:00] jeopardize your safety or your limits, and it also creates closeness, and so you might share a little bit more or you might, take in a little bit more from the coworker.
But, absolutely no is a complete sentence might apply in very many situations there as well. If it's a friend, like a lifelong friend or, a family member who you are close with and care about and generally have a good time with and a good relationship with, no is a complete sentence might not apply very well in those types of relationships where you do want to have, again, reciprocity and equal power sharing and deepness and closeness, and you want to continue doing that.
No is a complete sentence often creates a wall where we want to actually create a boundary, and we want to do it with care.
So again, adding that sentence of why might actually be more useful and helpful in [00:08:00] facilitating the closeness in a relationship than putting out the no with the wall and compartmentalizing the relationship with that person. So obviously up for you to decide how that works for you, but I really think it's important to highlight, that no as a complete sentence does not always apply as a healthy boundary, depending on what type of relationship that you're working with.
The goal often when we want to protect our limits, when we need to protect our energy, when we need to protect our time, if we have lots on our plate, we want to likely still show care for that person we're in relationship with.
We still wanna show up for that person as they show up for us. And so the goal with boundaries isn't necessarily to care less or to become colder, and no as a complete sentence often is a cold response [00:09:00] that shuts off, that blocks the relationship. So it's not necessarily about oversharing or over-explaining, but if there is care, if that other person in the relationship is also showing care- They're also showing up for you.
Sharing a bit of understanding as to why that no is there is often helpful in maintaining the healthy relationship. So again, tell me what you think. Tell me how you feel. Tell me how this has applied to you in your life, in your relationships. I'm keen to know. And for me personally, actually, as a person who really expresses care in their relationships, I'm a Scorpio, so whoever I'm friends with, like I am loyal.
The few friends that I have are real friends, and we do show up for each [00:10:00] other as we can. Even in this crazy timeline, where things are super busy, the world is going crazy. The people who I consider friends, like we are showing up for each other, we are checking in on each other, and there's only a few people, in my life like that.
So for me, it just doesn't feel right, it doesn't feel caring, it doesn't feel genuine to simply throw out a no and keep it moving and move on to the next thing, or shut it down or be quiet. Like, that's not a flex for me in the relationships I care about.
Where that applies for me is if somebody on the street, a stranger is bothering me and they don't seem safe or something like that. Those are situations where I say a nice solid no and keep it moving. Or in instances where I have worked with others in an office setting, There were definitely people who, as I mentioned before, who I [00:11:00] navigated either not sharing much of myself with them because it didn't feel right, it didn't feel safe, it didn't feel genuine for me to do that, and so the no as a complete sentence absolutely applied.
And there are situations where, I navigated that line of the solid no and maybe a little bit of, a little bit more sharing where it felt okay to share, where I wasn't sharing too much of my- myself, but sharing enough to maintain a cordial relationship with them. And so, yeah, no is absolutely grammatically a complete sentence, but it absolutely in some situations where we care about those relationships, it builds walls as opposed to flexing healthy boundaries where we want to keep the care in the relationship.
And if this is something that resonates for you, I wanna let you know that I am hosting live a workshop [00:12:00] called the Good Girl Glitch, where we get into all of this, and I approach this somatically through the nervous system so that if you are automatically saying yes all the time, or even if you're automatically saying no all the time, i'm giving you tools to help you pause before you answer and check in with yourself, with your nervous system to see what feels right and move from there.
And we also get into the cultural aspects of this, the conditioning behind how we approach boundaries, especially from a more nuanced cultural stance within Black and brown communities, for example, communities where closeness matters within our friendships, within our families, within our local communities, because boundaries are often approached as we see on social media and, just on the internet in general.
They're approached from, a Western culture, [00:13:00] patriarchal, hyper-individualistic standpoint. And so in the Good Girl Glitch, we're gonna get into a completely different cultural view of boundaries and how we can practice care within our relationships and within our communities, but also with honoring our limits without sacrificing ourselves for the sake of care.
I'll place the link in the show notes. Hopefully you sign up. The early bird price is only 22 euros, and then it goes up to 47 euros from there.
And that brings us to part two of this episode of Between the Tabs. And here, I just wanna share with you a little bit of an update about my website relaunch. So at the beginning of this month, this is May, it was supposed to be April 30th, but I had to postpone by four days. But on May 4th, May the fourth be with you, I relaunched my website.[00:14:00]
And for the two weeks prior to that relaunch, I worked my butt off. So what I'm doing actually is building, rebuilding, and in many ways building from scratch, the foundation of my business, the foundation of Soft Sundae. And I believe I touched upon this in an earlier episode where I kind of started from the middle with this business, and that led me to grappling and using lots of energy and finding myself gaining momentum and then having to completely come to a standstill several times because I didn't have a solid foundation for my business.
So since January of this year, 2026, I have started from scratch, even with, reorganizing my files and Google documents and, saving emails and grouping [00:15:00] emails, into different folders like, I started from super, super scratch with reorganizing my business and starting to build the foundation.
And so that started in January with phase one of reorganizing the back end and, outlining my offers and offer ladder and just the whole kind of ecosystem of Soft Sundae. And the second phase of that was my website relaunch. And the third phase coming up, there's four phases for this foundation building, and the third phase, by the way, coming up, is going to be the launching of my group, boundaries course.
And so that's what you see that I'm slowly and softly and gently and very excitedly building up to now that the website is relaunched. That second phase, there were so many moving parts and so many things to straighten out and to redo and to, and to make [00:16:00] better.
I repositioned my business and my services. reorganized what the messaging would be around everything. And so the offers that I had that existed, the low-ticket offers and the lead magnets, everything had to be repositioned. The whole website, all the messaging had to be redone.
And so I did that, from the homepage to the services page to the about page. One of my favorite parts of the new website is my sharing of my own story on the about page by... I think I did it by four chapters. I'm really impressed with how I was able to tell my own story in kind of a fun and juicy way.
So take a look at that, at the about page of Soft Sundae and read my story. Read my story. With the actual relaunch that happened May 4th, and it's relaunched with a scavenger hunt, I was so excited about [00:17:00] creating this scavenger hunt for the relaunch. I just thought that everybody would take advantage of this and be excited about it as well.
But that I know of, I don't know if no one actually did the scavenger hunt or if they started it and didn't complete it. I have no idea if it was too hard. I still need to put feelers out and do a survey to see what was going on with that. But, nobody that I know of participated in the scavenger hunt.
Or if they did, they did not submit the opt-in form to get the prize at the end. So that's something that I need to work on. I have some ideas. First of all, the scavenger hunt that I created was more fantasy fiction. I guess people now would equate it to more like Hunger Games, but I'm old school, so, like, Willow or Lord of the Rings kind of thing, you know, elves, things like that.
This is what was exciting me and getting me happy to do the scavenger hunt. But I think this might have [00:18:00] alienated the people who I generally attract. So my target audience for Soft Sundae is creatives and creatives who are doing- Like web design and, creative writing or even like education in a creative way.
People who are marketing experts or designers, fashion designers or jewelry designers, things like that. These are the type of people who I generally attract. And so I'm thinking that the offshoot into this very niche fantasy fiction type of scavenger hunt might have been just too jarring and too different from what the people who I generally attract want.
And so I am not giving up on the scavenger hunt because honestly, for me, it's a banging idea. I was so joyful and giddy and excited when I created it. And so what I think I'm gonna do is bring it more into the theme of Soft Sundae. So Soft [00:19:00] Sundae, ice cream, ice cream sundae, ice cream shop. Maybe what I'll do is, change up the theming from this like fantasy fiction creature who is searching for the Hall of Voices and instead changing up to something more relatable like the cute girl who works at the ice cream shop and this super cute guy comes in and, you know, the story may go from there.
So I think I'm gonna change up the story to make it more relatable, make it more fun, make it more digestible, and, relaunch the scavenger hunt with the new story. And so I'll see how that goes from there. I'm not giving up on the scavenger hunt.
And, the other thing is I created a resources shop for the first time.
This is something I have been dreaming of doing for a year because I've created various resources for the last two years. I have created so much, probably about, I don't know, 25 to 30 different freebies and low-ticket digital [00:20:00] products. And so for this website relaunch, I put six freebies and nine low-ticket items into the resources shop as well as two courses.
I have the Beaucoup Boundaries self-paced course coming up- I'm actually in the middle of recording that right now. And then I have a lovely, mini course basically about connecting to your creative purpose and creating an intention around showing up and taking action on it. It's a really lovely, really practical, and really inspirational, course.
Inspirational in how practical you can be with connecting to what your creative purpose is at the moment and expressing it. So it's something that has gotten really great feedback, so I put that course up as, as well in the resource shop. So I was expecting, especially with the new messaging, the new [00:21:00] positioning of Soft Sundae, that at least I would get maybe, I don't know, 10 sales or a mix of sales and freebie downloads from this website relaunch with my cute resources shop.
But I got one one freebie download. So thankful for that person who downloaded it, and I hope that he or she enjoys it, or they enjoy it. , But yeah, I just got the one conversion in the resource shop for the website relaunch. And overall, about 40 people visited the various pages of my website during that, I think it was a three-day relaunch period.
So I got 40 eyes on the website. So I was pretty excited about that. Yeah, it's not in the hundreds. There weren't, dozens of conversions, but I think what happened was really good in that I am finally putting myself out there, fully and with a solid foundation, [00:22:00] and with positioning and products and offers that I know I can sustain over a long period of time, over many years.
And so starting from scratch here after pivoting and pivoting and pivoting so many times over the last two to three years, I feel really good about the position that I'm in. And I know with this solid relaunch, that I'm just gonna grow, that Soft Sundae is just to grow from here because I've built a solid foundation.
Like, this was a really important part of my solid foundation. There's kind of an in-between this phase two relaunch and phase three launch of my group course, and that is finding a rhythm for content creation. And so I have been very, very intentional about Understanding my energetic capacity, what capacity I have to create in the first [00:23:00] place, and then trying things out a little bit at a time, stacking things slowly one thing at a time to create a rhythm that I can sustain for content creation.
Over the last few years, I have tried and failed, and tried and failed, and tried and failed so many times with content creation that I have a really good now understanding of how content creation and capacity worked together for me, and I am staying very intentional in that content creation plus capacity zone to figure this out for myself.
So the first thing I did was I started with the newsletter. I don't know if you've read the newsletter, Meringue. It's a newsletter about what creative trends are happening out there in the moment, like what's in the air creatively that everybody's doing, and then how you can take that trend on or not, [00:24:00] in a way that you are honoring your own energy and not burning out trying to follow this trend.
So that's what Meringue is about, and so I started with creating that and being able to create that consistently. I missed two, issues of Meringue because I was knee-deep, no, neck-deep in the website relaunch, so there was that. But other than those two missed issues, I've been able to consistently create that, and I feel pretty confident that I'll be able to sustain that with the capacity that I have.
And so the next thing that I put out, which came with the website relaunch, was this podcast and the blog, and so now I've added those two elements to my content creation. And for me, long form content is a little bit easier for me to sustain than short form content.
And so I'm gonna do this for another couple of weeks and develop the [00:25:00] right rhythm for myself for creating the newsletter, blog, and podcast for weekly episodes and posts. And then what comes next for me is Instagram posts and YouTube. I'm going to try to do this with the least energy output possible.
I have an idea, I have a plan of how I want to go about this. And so in the next couple of weeks, you should be seeing YouTube content coming out at least on a weekly basis, maybe bi-weekly, and Instagram content coming out at least on a weekly basis. But probably for these first couple of weeks that I launch Instagram content, it'll probably be a few times a week, and then slow down to once a week.
So very much staying, regulated and working within a sustainable capacity framework for myself because that's what Soft Sundae [00:26:00] provides for others. That's what this business is all about. So that's what's happening there. Long story, but yeah, website relaunch. Go see the website, softsundae.com.
I love it. I stand by it. Let me know what you think.
All right, that brings us to part three of Between the Tabs, episode six. And here is where I wanna get a little bit nerdy and a little bit intentional and a little bit deeper into this whole boundaries thing.
I've been doing a lot of research, a lot of pondering, a lot of work with clients, and a lot of work in my own life with boundaries over the last few years. And so one of the things that matters a lot to me is being the caring one in a relationship, being the caring one in a relationship and protecting that one who is the caring one in the [00:27:00] relationship.
Because for this person, I want them to be in a relationship with another caring person so that they are equally receiving and giving care as opposed to siphoning off all of their energy and care to someone like a narcissist, for example, who just will keep taking and taking and taking and not giving in the relationship.
And so my work is about opening up that niche part of relationship building and providing ways to protect the boundaries and the limits of that caring person in a way that their boundaries, their limits are protected, but also they still get to express that care.
They don't have to turn into a cold person in order to have boundaries. And so one of the neat things that I came up with was four general categories that that caring [00:28:00] person generally falls into, and so creating these four categories is a way to help people hone in on those elements of their care that leaves them open and susceptible to, over-committing, to saying yes all the time, and to open their eyes to where they're doing that so that they can find ways to adjust.
And a lot of my work is to help them adjust their boundaries and the way that they can express them to protect those parts of themselves, again, while also being able to express their care. So I'm just gonna go over those in part three. And so the first category is the fixer. The fixer. So you already know what that sounds like, right?
That's the person who senses the problem before the problem exists, and they start, like, right away on fixing the issue. They don't even ask themselves like, "Okay, do I have time or capacity or energy for this?" They don't even ask that. They see the problem [00:29:00] and their automatic response is to, "Okay, I need to solve this problem.
How do I solve this problem?" Right? So the fixer equates their version of care with taking action, with being useful, with being the person who handles everything. No questions have to even be asked, right? And the fixer is so good at that, that everybody starts to depend on them to be the fixer.
They know that this person is gonna show up, sense what the problems are. You don't even have to talk, and they're just gonna start right into taking action to make things right. So you might be that person.
And so the next category of a caring person in a relationship is the easy person.
This person is It's so easygoing, they go with the flow, they're never too much. It's like the person you want to always be around, like you wanna go to the bar with, to the club with because they're gonna... You know, whatever's going down, they're gonna just, go with it. If you wanna go on the dance floor, they're gonna be [00:30:00] right on the dance floor with you, right?
And so that person, if you're that kind of caring person, you often don't express what you need. You go with the flow. You go with what the other external gestures and indicators are. You're so flexible that whatever you actually need, you edit it in real time so that those needs change and morph or they go silent or go ignored so that you can go with the flow,
so what happens though is that type of caring person tends to disappear. Their... Who they are and, what their desires are, what their needs are, all of that tends to disappear when you're the easy one. It doesn't get acknowledged, right? And you might even find that the moment that you do try to express, okay, you know, actually I need some support in this area or, I really need this or I really need that.
When you try as the easy one to [00:31:00] even explain that to someone you're in relationship with, they're so used to you not having needs that when you try to express them, they still get walked over. The subject changes really quickly.
And so the next type of caring person in a relationship is the emotional guardian.
This is really applicable to a lot of the sensitive creatives that I work with. You feel everything. You don't just feel your own emotions, you feel the entire room. You get on a metro car and you know the exact like everything about everything going on that metro car.
You come into a room and you feel the exact energy of that room. This was really helpful for me, actually. As a yoga teacher, you go into a room and you can really sense what the energy is in the room and so you can adjust your yoga teaching to that energy. And so I was a very a very successful [00:32:00] yoga, , studio teacher because of being that emotional guardian, okay?
So you feel everything, all the tension, like everything in the room. And so with being able to feel all of that, when something goes wrong, when something destabilizes, when someone quirks out, you immediately adjust your energy to stabilize the room. You adjust your emotional intelligence to stabilize the room.
You have the empathy when the empathy is needed, so if you're in a group setting, in a meeting at work, for example, someone is being spoken over, or you can tell that there's one person who really wants to say something and they have not been able to say it, you'll stop the room.
You'll stop that extrovert from talking and say, "Hey, wait, I think this person needs to say something," to give them a chance to speak. So you have that empathy. And that drives you to being a leader sometimes because it's necessary [00:33:00] to balance out, to stabilize the emotional energy in the room.
But that means you're always on guard. You're always monitoring. You're hyper-aware of everything that's going on around you because you're always managing it, and so what that means that, is that you rarely get time to just be in yourself because you're always managing the environment, and that means you probably like a little bit of isolation more than the average person,
and so the last type of caring person, for these general categories is the loyal soldier. You stick around. You are loyal to the end, whatever it costs. And you equate that sticking around, that staying, that not quitting, that endurance, you equate that with love. And so that if you're not in a relationship where you're enduring the person's whatever it is, their insufferable [00:34:00] behavior, if you're not enduring that, then it feels like betrayal.
It feels like it's not right, that enduring, staying, staying without flinching a muscle is what it means to be a caring person in a relationship. So what that means is you're often overextended. You're often on the receiving end of behavior and actions that are exhausting, that drain your energy, that hurt your feelings.
And so it's like a form of self-abandonment, but it's one that you attach possibly a sense of pride to because you're staying strong enough to endure this type of relationship, right? And so that's the fourth type. So those are my four general types of caring in a relationship relationally, [00:35:00] and these are the four types that we're actually gonna go over in the Good Girl Glitch workshop.
So, Take a listen, see which one of these really resonates for you or if there's some overlap with a few of them. I know for me there's a little bit of overlap, but I definitely tend to be more of the emotional guardian. So you can also just, shoot me an email to let me know which one you are, or shoot me a DM in Instagram.
I have, like, zero posts there right now, but I do go in and check my DMs. Anyway, hopefully this was actually helpful for you. Again, we're gonna go deeper with this in the Good Girl Glitch, so go ahead and sign up for that so we can get into it live.
And so the last thing that I want to leave you with in part four of this episode is, it's Wednesday, right?
It's hump day. So I wanna leave you with a practice that's, helpful, kind of, good feeling possibly. And that [00:36:00] is something that really works well for me, and, I wanna use the word empowering, but I know that's been overused and sometimes just doesn't really mean anything, but I don't know.
I'm just gonna say it's a really empowering practice, and it's something I use with my clients and it really works for them as well. It's really helpful.
And that is a mirror practice, looking at yourself in the mirror, eye contact with yourself in the mirror for at least one full minute.
Yo, this practice, it's really like looking into your soul. It's so self-connecting. It's, a really great way to reconnect with yourself, not looking in the mi- in the mirror at your outfit or judging your skin or, oh, I need a little makeup here. Nothing like that.
No judgment. [00:37:00] Simply look in the mirror. Put the timer on for one minute. It'll go by so slow, especially the first time you do this. Look into your eyes as, the window of your soul for one full minute. Things will come up. Emotions will come up. Things will happen. I'm not gonna say what might happen because I don't want to lead you towards a particular expectation, but I do promise you that this is a really effective self-connection practice.
And so because it is, this is something really great to do if you start to get really busy, if you're feeling really stressed, if you're feeling anxious, this is a really great practice to do. Just stop Get up, go to your full-length mirror or the bathroom mirror , and look in your eyes, look into the windows of your soul for one full minute.
[00:38:00] And if you do that, please hit me back and let me know how it went. So that's my little gift for you, for part four for your Wednesday practice. I try to leave you with a little gift like that each week. We'll see if we can keep continuing there. But yes, that concludes this episode of Between the Tabs, and I will meet you next time that we are surfing for dopamine hits between the tabs, which means next Wednesday.
Bye.
