BTT EP 7
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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 iced beverage because it's hot out there, y'all, and let's hop into part one.
And here in part one, I wanna talk about the concept of doing it anyway. It's like taking messy action, taking imperfect action. Like, if you are coming up with lots and lots of ideas every time you take a shower, it's like a whole parallel universe download of things you can be doing, a business you can be creating, an offer you can make, a product or a thing you can create.
You can even take the capitalism, the money [00:01:00] out of it, but, you know, you're always downloading ideas and you're passionate about them and they bring you joy. And at some point, one gets to be a little bit tired of pushing those ideas down, ignoring them, stuffing them down, and getting back into the nine-to-five, getting back into the regular, status quo daily life.
And sometimes you're itching to really get at that idea and make it a reality. Like, see your dream, your vision to fruition. It's a natural thing to want. Humans are creative beings. Humans are some of the only animals in the world who create, who make tools, who, who envision reality beyond what is actually before the eyes.
And so it's natural to really have, a deep desire to create something, to take something that is living in your mind, and bring it [00:02:00] into the world. And so when that desire starts to take over, again, that's where doing it anyway comes into play because there's a lot of things happening.
When you decide, okay, I am going to, let's say you wanna make a perfume. And you've been dabbling with your oils and you've been researching and doing things and you maybe even made a perfume oil or two and you're like, "I wanna expand into this and really focus in on it and maybe even test it out with some of my friends, see if they like it.
And hmm, who knows, maybe even sell these if that's something that might be possible," right? So you have this idea, this vision, this desire, and you're even developing these skills to create a perfume. But say you work at a standard corporate job. You work nine to five, you're tired. Your nine to five is probably beyond the actual hours of [00:03:00] nine to five.
And you want to bring this thing into existence. And so what that takes is a complete shift, a complete 180 into what you perceive as your normal, right? And pursuing something that you have never pursued before or have only done minimally, starting to expand into, like really stepping into embodying the person who creates this thing, it, it takes a mindset shift.
And with that mindset shift, there's a lot of things brewing below, like the self-doubt, right? Am I gonna be able to do this? Is this something I'm even really passionate about for real?" And beyond the self-doubt, there's just the fear of the unknown.
Like, what if I really put myself out there as the person who creates perfume and it fails miserably? Or what if I put myself out there and it succeeds and, it gets [00:04:00] lots of eyes on it? You might have even like a fear of being perceived that shows up. And so that's where the mantra of do it anyway comes into play.
Because if you wanna do this thing, you, you-- There, there's so much unknown, right? And there's so much risk as well. And shifting from that one identity in this example of being the corporate nine-to-five person who goes to work and comes home and, I don't know, maybe hangs out with the family on the weekend, maybe has their own family at home.
The identity shift can be quite jarring. It can be a lot. Again, there's all this unknown around it, and there's trying to figure out where you fit in the social order of things or in the status quo that has been developed. Like, is your mother giving you the side eye about this perfum-- Like, "Here's her perfume thing again," you know?
Is that happening, or are you getting support in the change that you are making or in the thing that you're creating, or [00:05:00] in what you're becoming, who you're becoming? And, a lot of times we can see before we even see whether or not we will get that support that we need, that encouragement we need.
And if we sense that it's not there, it can make doing the thing even harder. And so doing it anyway is about taking tiny steps, one step at a time, to keep going, to keep experimenting, to keep trying it out, to keep trying it on. For me personally, life is about experimentation. It's about trying things.
And it's one of the only ways to know, what your shtick is, what your thing is, what your gift is, what your talent is, and these all can be plural and are plural probably as well. And, so you try all of these things to figure out what really fits, what really feels right, what you can sustain, what might just be a passion for now .
And so it's all about doing it anyway to figure out more [00:06:00] about yourself, about who you are, and also, bringing this creative vision into the world at the same time. And especially if you are going on that path of doing it anyway, in order to make a living for yourself, that's like an honorable thing as well.
Like, making money from some aspect of your creativity should not be minimized or like, oh, God, this person is you know, they have an idea and they're creating something. Okay. It doesn't have to be that way. It's honorable, it's reciprocal to create something and exchange it for something that you need, to be able to make a living from your creativity.
And so when making a living from that thing comes into play, there can also then come that layer of desperation, of reaching, of grasping, of clinging, as we use in the mindfulness world, of [00:07:00] clinging onto this thing and, really wanting it to happen.
And when we bring that desperation and that clinging into the equation, if we're, again, selling something, we're providing services, we're creating products to sell, we're getting out there, getting visible, showing up to share about and again to sell what it is that we're creating people can feel that desperation.
They can feel that, oh my gosh, I'm in survival mode. I have to have this. I'm clinging to, if I don't make money from this, oh my God, everything is gonna go crazy. That, that, that sense of scarcity can be felt. So I say all of this to say if you are taking those bold steps to put a vision out into the world, to make it a reality, to provide something that you think the world needs, and you're doing it messy, you're showing up no matter what, you're doing it anyway Make sure to [00:08:00] notice, when you're doing it, if you're clinging, if you're scraping, if you're really desperate for it to happen for survival or if this is something that brings you joy, if you are grounded in your truth and in your gifts and you know what it is you bring to the world and you are bringing it.
That slight difference matters in terms of the energy that is felt from the people who you are selling to and who you're sharing your products and your services with. So that's just one thing that I like to bring up and it's something that I personally stay aware of very often in, in my business and I've taken with this new iteration, this building from very foundational level of Soft Sundae, this is how I am approaching it, by standing in who I am and standing in the gifts and the services that I provide knowing, knowing that what I do, actually makes a difference [00:09:00] in people's lives.
I have the proof with people that I've worked with that, transformations that come from, uh, working with me one-on-one and even some of my digital products, like it's real. I really am showing up and helping and helping in a way that feels right for me. And I like to make moves in my business from this foundation, from this perspective because if I start to think about, "Oh my God, I, I, I'm ha- I have this business because I need money," and, "Oh my God," y- you know, if I start going into that, like my whole aura is covered with that energy and that's the energy that I'm putting out there, and I don't wanna put that out there.
So you think about how that works for you as well.
So now moving on to part two. As I record this here at the end of May, honey, it is hot as Hades here in Paris. It is May, and it is like [00:10:00] ninety degrees Fahrenheit, and, yeah. So it's hot in Paris, I'm looking, scrolling through threads, and people are really freaking out And, it's kind of funny because it's like, "What do I do in this heat?" Because there's, for the most part, there's no air conditioning.
People, some people, and some businesses have a portable air conditioner where you, roll this thing kind of like a generator into the room, and then you open the window to put this big tube out of the window so it's pulling the heat. It's I guess, a heat pump.
I don't know. I'm, this is not my area. And so it's pulling the heat out of the room and providing cool air, and so that's like the closest thing you'll find to air conditioning in most buildings here in Paris. So people are freaking out about how to stay cool, and also that's why with tourism in Paris, you come here around April and around September.
You don't really come here in the [00:11:00] summer, and there's, that's the reason because the heat is horrendous, and it will eat you alive, and it's very uncomfortable, and the city is, for the most part, not adaptable to that. And what I notice is that, Paris has more and more and more, expatriates and immigrants from Western countries like the US and the UK and things like that.
And so these people are getting on and like super complaining about the heat because there's no air conditioning. And what I learned a long time ago when I first moved here and had my son, so this is almost 10 years ago, when I experienced my first... well, second heat wave. I had experienced it before, but this is the first one where I had a child.
And so he was an infant, and we were in an Airbnb because we were between apartments at this time. And so there was this huge heat wave, and this [00:12:00] actually, this was in May. This was at the end of May of 2018 . Huge heat wave, really, really uncomfortable. Yeah. So we we're in this Airbnb with no air conditioning on the seventh floor. This is, the last floor. Usually, the Haussmannian buildings , the historical buildings here in Paris have six or seven floors, so this is the top floor. Hot as Hades. A whole infant, I don't know, he must have been five or six months so here's some things that you can do.
You have a fan in the bedroom. I found a cute not even bigger than my cellphone fan in one of these Japanese stores. Dang, I forgot the name of it. I might have to look it up and post it in the show notes. But I found a little bitty fan that could go right by the bedside, and so that really helped.
And then you have a damp towel that I was using to wipe my son's body [00:13:00] down every hour or so, so that he can stay cool. But you can, as an adult, keep a damp towel on your neck. You can have several of those stacked up in the freezer or the refrigerator so you can just change them out as you use them on your head and your neck, back of the knees, the crease of your arm or your the elbow crease.
Even the bottoms, the soles of your feet, you can put these towels there to help keep your body cool as if you're in a building. And a lot ... I see a lot of people walking around with the fans that do the water misting. So you have the water, you mist it, and then you have the battery operated fan to spray the mist towards you and cool you off.
I also use the Evian water mist that you can find at any pharmacy in Paris. So if you're out and about, you just mist the Evian water on you because the heat here is really dry. I'm from Louisiana, so I'm used to heat [00:14:00] that comes with humidity. And here the heat is just like,
It's like a magnifying glass directing the sun on you. It just feels like burn. You're burning if you are in the sun if you're outside here. So there's that. Find shade, of course. If you are inside in an apartment, here's some things to do with the windows. Usually, most Paris apartments have windows facing different directions.
If they don't, that's a problem. You're just gonna be hot. But if you have, windows facing different directions, all of the doors of all of the rooms are open. You open the windows, that are facing different directions so you can create a cross current of air flow to cool off the apartment and keep it cool A lot of times in the summer, bees and wasps like to come into your open window, so you wanna have some kind of a curtain or something over the window.
Or if you have the shutters, the metal or the [00:15:00] wooden shutters that you can close during the day when the sun is out, you go ahead and close those so the bees and the wasps don't get inside. It's, it's pretty serious, guys. Like, you have to really do a lot of things to to stay cool here. Also never, never ever have the blinds, the curtains, the shutters open when the sun is directly facing the window, of course.
But that cross current of wind is what saves you when you're inside. Of course, you have your fans going, too, but the cross current is, like, it's so genius. It's so genius. So luckily, the buildings here, especially if you are in a historic building, are really solid. There's lots of stone, so they stay pretty cool, especially if you're on the ground floor or the first...
You know, like, the rez-de-cha- rez-de-chaussée jusqu'à, uh, deuxième étage. Those floors are gonna be a lot cooler than once you start to... since heat rises, once you start to go up, it's a little bit more difficult to keep those apartments cool. So keep all of that in [00:16:00] mind if you're renting an Airbnb or a hotel to try to stay on the lower floors if you come during, the summer or when it's really hot because people are like, "What?
Why is it so hot?" And the last thing before we move into part three is drink hot beverages. This is something that, that I know of comes from the Mediterranean and North African countries, to drink hot tea, when it's hot outside.
There's something about that scientifically, biologically, that helps to keep your system cool. And yeah, so now you get all the nerdy down low of how to stay cool in a city that luckily has nice solid buildings, but unluckily does not have air conditioning for the most part.
So that brings us to part three, and here I am just getting a little bit experimental, with [00:17:00] my deep dive into boundaries and relational roles. And last week, if you haven't checked out last week's episode, go ahead and check it out. That is where I've brought up a few different roles that we often play when we are being kind in a relationship, and we tend to over-give and over-commit, and we tend to say yes on auto.
And so I had developed those different roles based on what I've experienced in life and some of the other research that, that I've been doing around what generally shows up when you're considering yourself as kind or nice and abandoning yourself or giving up parts of yourself in order to make sure that that kindness is perceived.
And so now this week, still experimenting, still thinking about different roles, what popped up for me, , and it's some research that I've been doing for about six months now, is youngest daughter [00:18:00] or youngest child. Because I've been seeing so much information about the eldest daughter, I've been, secretly developing my own ideas and, I guess messaging really around the youngest daughter and what we experience and how we come of age and come into our own and how that differs from, say, if you're a middle child or you're, again, the eldest child, specifically the eldest daughter.
So thinking along those lines, I've been trying to come up with some of the roles or the patterns that kind of that baby girl energy brings to relationships and, to the way that they relate to others and the way they're seen as the youngest in their family and how that ends up playing out for them relationally in their lives on a day-to-day basis.
So here are a few things that have been coming up for me. And as the youngest, you go [00:19:00] into a room and you really can feel and thoroughly assess everything before anybody says anything. And, this is like when you're younger and you walk into a room to maybe ask for something or to maybe as a teenager, you know, like ask to go somewhere and you have got to really comprehend what's going on in the room before you make that ask.
Because it directed how you were gonna ask that thing, or even if you were gonna ask it. You knew, who was super irritated or who was bringing that nervous energy to the room, or who was on edge ready to start something, ready to pick a fight. Like, as the youngest, you can read those siblings and others in the room, super easy.
And you learned exactly what to do to smooth all of that over. So you could adjust yourself based on that emotional reading of the room. You know how to [00:20:00] adjust your tone to make it just right so that that one person doesn't pop off, but the irritated person is soothed and on and on. You know what kind of behavior, what kind of stance you need to take. Not too confident, or not too meek or timid.
You knew because your nervous system was learning, as the youngest, you knew how to keep, how to keep everything steady and copacetic and make everyone feel safe in the room. Okay, so that was what you learned. And then as you grew up, that means that you are always making sure that everyone else's nervous system in the room is regulated before yours is Right?
When you walk into a room as an adult, you use the same tactic in terms of, okay, it's like a superhero walks in the room and they know exactly what to do to disarm everybody and make it a safe space. But again, you're making it a safe space for each person, and your [00:21:00] need of safety, your need of nervous system regulation is set for dead last, if at all.
So if you're the youngest or even if you know how your youngest sibling or youngest sister operates, I need you to send me a DM on Instagram or something or on Threads and let me know if that one is on point or not. For me, in my experience, that one is definitely something that the youngest goes through.
And so another one is kind of, it's kind of the same. So this one is more flexible. This is the flexible identity. It's being the easy one, the easygoing one, being extremely adaptable. So if you were set on going to get a snow cone but then, your sister or your brother or whoever, they're like, "Oh, actually I wanna go get an ice cream," you're like, "You know what?
Okay, let's go get an ice cream." Low maintenance. You always get it. , You're always understanding. Again, [00:22:00] easygoing, the easy one. So it's about being super flexible as the youngest so you're not making waves. You're not disrupting the room. You're not causing everybody to look at you like you're crazy because you're the youngest one.
And there's also that power dynamic that if you are popping off as the youngest one, you know, everybody's older, so many people in the room might feel like they have the power or the control to shut you down, and you don't wanna experience that, right? So you learn how to be flexible super quickly to just keep things moving smoothly.
And so what that can show up like as an adult later, once you've moved out of the house, you don't even deal with these people in your family that much anymore on a daily basis at least. So now you're struggling with actually deciding on what it is you want. What it is you want has actually been something that you've ignored or put aside [00:23:00] so many times, so often for the other people in the family that you're actually having trouble figuring out what it is that you actually want.
In many situations from the mundane like choosing a dish at a restaurant to something big like, do I like camping or do I like travel? Or even bigger like what do I really wanna do with my life as a career? You, you have also maybe trouble as the flexible one with saying no or with saying, you know what?
That's just not gonna work for me. Because you're really, really afraid or you have really big anxiety around disappointing people. Because again, you learned when you were young, as the youngest with the power dynamic being everyone else around you has more power and more control, you don't wanna disappoint those people, so you take that with you into your adult life, right?
And it's not because you're weak, that you are, you're having trouble saying no, you're having [00:24:00] trouble disappointing people. It's not because you're weak. You see everybody saying to just say no and how easy it is for them, so you think something is wrong with you.
You think that you're weak. It's not that. It's just that you've been conditioned to be easygoing in order to make things work in your life when you were younger, when you were coming of age. And that actually isn't weakness, it's very high intelligence, high relational intelligence, and it's the ability to be very adaptive in almost any given situation.
So it's about turning that relational intelligence in on oneself to develop, or redevelop that self connection, that relationship with self to figure some of these things out for yourself. So again, let me know if that one resonates. If so, I can create more, offers and products around this.
I'm thinking of even doing a freebie related to this.
And so the last one that I'm thinking [00:25:00] about that I will hit you up with is the person, the youngest daughter or the baby girl, or the baby girl of the family, keeping that harmony. You are the mediator. So if one sister is popping off with the other brother or the parent and the other sibling have some kind of tension or a disagreement, you're the one who comes in the room and cracks the joke that disarms everybody and makes them laugh, right?
You're the one who brings the softness to the tense experiences in the home. You were the one kind of translating between people like, "Oh, you know, they actually didn't mean it that way. They were trying to say so and so." So you were translating, mediating, between members of your family, between your friends when you were little, trying to keep everything together, trying to keep the relationships intact, keeping the harmony.[00:26:00]
And so what that means later in life as an adult away from these school and home situations, is that when you try to set boundaries, if they seem too harsh or too abrupt, your nervous system goes off. It's like, this isn't safe, this isn't safe. If I say this, everything's gonna fall apart.
There's gonna be no harmony. We're gonna be all over the place. There's gonna be chaos because you're used to fixing that chaos, and you know exactly as the harmony keeper, what will set people off. And so you don't wanna say anything, even though it's a completely different person, like somebody you met and became friends with at work, even though they're not the sibling when you were younger who always went off no matter what, you know that if you remember, your body remembers that saying things in this way set people off.
So your nervous system goes into The [00:27:00] overexplaining, the maybe you set a boundary, you say no or you ask the person not to do this, but then you start backtracking. You overexplain so much, you soften the boundary so much that you actually take it away because you're, again, you're trying to keep the harmony.
So yeah, these are the three, the harmony keeper, the flexible one, and that emotional reader, the one who reads all the emotions in the room. These are some of the baby girl, relational patterns that in reflecting, again, in my own life and reading and learning more about how relationships and relational integrity works, these are three that came up for me.
So let me know if they resonated for you as well And let me know if you're the baby girl of the family. Shout out to the baby girls around.
And so that leads us to part four of episode seven, and it's Wednesday, [00:28:00] baby. It's hump day, so I wanna leave you with something nice to do.
It's warm outside. For some of us, it's hot as Hades outside. Go outside early in the morning or late in the evening when it's cooler. Go sit your butt on a patch of grass. Go lean against a tree. Like you can put a blanket down. You don't have to have your bare legs on the grass if it gets itchy.
Do some earthing, some grounding. Connecting with the earth for 10, 15 minutes, more if you can, helps to balance out so much. It even helps to heal deep wounds, like physical wounds of your body. It helps to rebalance the electromagnetic waves of your body. It helps to calm you down, and it's even really cool.
Like you touch the earth, and it's cool. Can you imagine? Like it's hot outside. [00:29:00] There's freaking liquid rock running around in a big, giant pool of the core of the Earth, the liquid hot magma, and you touch the earth, and it's cool to the touch, and you keep your hand there, and it warms up to your temperature.
It's like, it's like magic. So go experience that. Go connect with the Earth. We are earthlings as human beings. We don't live on any other planet, so it's really important to periodically make a real, like literal connection with your home base, with your home base to feel some sense of grounding, to feel that sense of belonging that you're always searching for.
Go, as they say, touch grass.
So that's, that brings us to the end of episode seven, and that also means I will meet you next time we're surfing for dopamine between the tabs, AKA next Wednesday.
Bye.
