Annie Croner:
Welcome to the Whole Assistant Podcast, where assistants come to embrace their badassery and discover how to show up more strategically for their careers, their executives, and most importantly, themselves. I'm your coach, Annie Croner. Join us as we dive into the skills, strategies, and mindset that will help you unleash your full potential. Let's go. Welcome back to the Whole Assistant Podcast. Today I'm going to be talking about something that is near and dear to my heart. And it's a skill that I have used time and again that rarely ever gets talked about. And that skill is the ability to create safety within yourself.
Annie Croner:
This is such an important thing because without it, we tend to look outside of ourselves for safety. We tend to be really externally focused. And I have to say that this year has been one of tremendous growth for me. I have navigated a divorce this year, and what's so fascinating about that was that my word of the year was expansion. Before this divorce process started, before we even decided to get divorced. And it is impressive just how much I've had to let go of with that word as my word of the year. So many things have shifted. So many things have have changed for me this year, and what One of the key components to navigating this with such grace and such strength is my ability to create safety within myself.
Annie Croner:
So I've been developing this skill over the last five or six years, or probably even before that to a certain point. But it is such a good skill to master and hone. And so I just wanted to hop on today and share a little bit about this skill of creating safety within yourself. Now, I'm by no means advocating that you stay in a terrible situation just because you're safe within yourself. In fact, self trust would indicate that we stay in touch with ourselves and know when to leave, when to stay, when to really look outside and to make a shift or a move. Okay, so the point of self trust and safety within yourselves is that you create that resilience. You create those pieces that will help support you and help you navigate and make decisions that will be best for you now and well into the future. So I just want to name that because some people are like, oh, you're creating safety within yourself so you can be in an unsafe environment.
Annie Croner:
That is not what I'm advocating for here at all. So I want to start out talking today around why creating safety in yourself is so important. So, first of all, whenever we're safe within ourselves, we have our own back. Just in the same way we would have a best friend's back or somebody that you really love having their back. And I don't think we ever think about having our own back because we are so focused on taking care of those around us, our exec executives. We've got family at home taking care of them, maybe an aging parent taking care of them. We have been taught or socialized. Most of us are women in this industry.
Annie Croner:
We have been taught and socialized to take care of everyone else around us. And that's a beautiful thing. And oftentimes we can abandon ourselves in that process. So when we talk about creating safety within yourselves, it is important that we view it from a place of having your own back. And we want to show up for ourselves like we would our best friend or anybody else that we love and care about. Another benefit to creating safety in yourself is increased resilience so you don't beat yourself up. And we aren't judging our emotions as harshly. Whenever we are creating safety in ourselves.
Annie Croner:
You're choosing to show up from a place of compassion and understanding. Now, I'm not saying that we let ourselves off the hook. Whenever I am having a conversation with my best friend and I say something off color or offbeat or out of line, my best friends, I've got two of them, will point those things out to me. So I'm not saying that we don't point those things out to ourselves and that we aren't very honest with ourselves. In fact, I believe the opposite is true. I think that we need to be super honest with ourselves in order to create safety, because it's in that honesty that we can be very real with ourselves as well. And the resilience that creating safety in yourself can build. I've experienced so much this year because there again, I navigated a divorce.
Annie Croner:
I'm now on the other side of that. I am living my best life. I love being on my own. I love having my boys in my new apartment. It's really great. And creating safety in myself helped me move through the shame, the embarrassment, the grief much easier because I wasn't judging those emotions. What happens when we judge those emotions is they tend to linger and they tend to grow bigger and we tend to exacerbate the issue whenever we judge ourselves. So there's the actual emotion that we're feeling, and then we have judgment on top of that emotion.
Annie Croner:
I very easily could have judged myself for experiencing shame. I could have judged myself for experiencing embarrassment. I could have judged myself for experiencing that grief. I chose not to. So when I was processing through those Emotions I was going through the pure emotion. And what's really fascinating about that, when you're able to allow yourself to release the judgment of the emotion and just experience the emotion itself, we can move through those emotions a lot faster. But we actually have to get curious about them. We actually have to sit with them.
Annie Croner:
We actually have to experience them in order to move through them. And creating a safe space within yourself to be able to do that is the only way that this happens and is also the primary way in which we create resilience and in ourselves. And also we get on track faster. We get back on track faster. I love this idea of creating safety in ourselves because whenever we make a mistake at work, we're less likely to spin out. We're able to experience the emotion. We're able to experience the shame or frustration or embarrassment in that moment and then move through it faster and then on to the next thing. What often happens, and I know because I see this with my clients sometimes, is we spin out and we're like, oh my gosh, this happened.
Annie Croner:
And we spin out for a long period of time. We don't cap it like five minutes. We spin out for days. Sometimes, whenever we make a mistake or whenever something goes sideways with our executive or whatever, we tend to spin out on those things. And creating safety in yourself will get you back on track faster than beating yourself up. And look, I understand that this whole idea of beating ourselves up, because I think a lot of us think, and I've seen this in my clients too, and I used to think the same way by default on autopilot. And that way is, if I'm hard on myself, then maybe my executive won't be hard on me. If I'm hard on myself, then maybe everyone else around me will recognize that and they will show leniency.
Annie Croner:
That's not actually what happens. And I think also more often than not, everyone else has moved on and worst here still self flagellating. And it's just really not a helpful, useful thing to do. Now, I'm not saying that we also don't want to take the learnings from any situation, that we don't want to take what we will do differently next time and implement that. We totally do. But we can do that in a much faster, more efficient way if that self judgment piece is not there and we're actually allowing ourselves to experience a broad range of human emotion as we go through those human emotions. Okay? Another benefit to creating safety in yourself is that it helps us release perfectionism. So first of all perfectionism is a funny thing because perfection is a moving target.
Annie Croner:
And depending on who you're asking, perfection is going to look different for everyone. So I think when I say it's helpful in releasing perfectionism, what I mean by that is that you're less likely to obsess over things being different, to obsess over an outcome that didn't happen, to obsess over what could have been but wasn't. That is not our current reality. So I just want to bring that to your awareness too. Releasing perfectionism is also going to be helpful for your productivity and for getting things done and accomplished and off your plate. So really creating safety in yourself and knowing that you're going to have your back and also recognizing and realizing that oftentimes there is no one right answer, there is no one right way, there is no one right way to execute. I of course in certain situations there are right things to do. There are best practices in our industry.
Annie Croner:
I'm not saying that there aren't. But obsessing over what those best practices are is not going to be helpful in becoming more effective and efficient in your role. Also, creating safety in yourself helps us take risks. I'm a big fan of taking risks. And here's the deal. If you know that you'll be there for yourself no matter what, you are more likely to bet on yourself. And I bet on myself so much over the last man seven years since I started my brand, the whole assistant. And even as an executive assistant, I bet on myself a lot.
Annie Croner:
And even through this divorce, I bet on myself a lot. It can be such a challenge. But that self trust piece and developing that and creating safety in yourself are going to be imperative to actually taking risks. And taking risks is also going to be vital to to your success and living a full, abundant, extraordinary life. So we definitely want to work on this safety piece because if you know that you've got your own back, regardless of whether or not you succeed or fail, you are more likely to take those risks. And what's really fascinating about risk, and I will share with you from my own personal experience, I have totally bombed before. I've totally failed before in front of everyone. I and I have surprised myself in more ways than I thought possible.
Annie Croner:
I've set out to do something that I thought for sure I was gonna fail at and I actually got closer to success or I had some level of success that I didn't expect. So what I love about this is that when you create that self trust piece, that safety piece in yourself and you know that you're gonna have your back regardless of the outcome and you're gonna allow yourself to experience the shame and embarrassment and move on from just leads to so much more success too because you're trying new things, you're putting yourself out there in new ways, you're taking risks, you're asking your executive for a raise, you're advocating for a promotion, you're advocating for a title change. Whatever it is, it will serve you and it will propel your career forward. Instead of playing it safe, which we can get stuck in, we can get stuck when we play it safe sometimes. And I know I mentioned this throughout this podcast episode so far, but creating safety in yourself also improves self trust. When you understand that you are the primary person creating safety for yourself, you get to decide what is acceptable for you instead of looking outside of yourself, looking at your ecosystem and your work and being like this is acceptable for everyone here. There's something that feels off for me here and looking outside of yourself and downplaying or overriding your inner knowing. That self trust piece, if we can tap into that and we can look at what's going on for us and name it, there may be a values misalignment, something like that.
Annie Croner:
You may need to look for a role outside of your current position in order to find that alignment for you. So that self trust piece is going to be really beneficial. And creating safety in yourself to explore those options and to there again have your back regardless of the outcome will also improve your self trust and help you make moves that will be best for you regardless of who you are surrounded by. Okay, I also just want to share a little bit about the nervous system because obviously when we're taking risks, our nervous system can be activated. And especially for me this year I have done many things that have been very scary from the divorce to I'm reworking my business right now. I've got a few announcements to share with you all in the coming weeks. And and I upended my business too. So I've had to return to myself and I just have had to take some deep breaths and remind my body, remind my nervous system that I am okay within myself, that I am a safe bet and that I have my own back regardless of how this plays out.
Annie Croner:
And I've had to there again do some meditating and stuff like that to bring my nervous system back online as a result of taking all of this risk. Because of course there's going to be a physiological effect on our body whenever we're taking Risks, a calculated risk. And I'm also firm believer in returning to this like safe space. And so I envision myself in this bubble. I envision myself returning to myself, not looking outward for validation, but looking inward and also relying on God because I'm a faith filled person as well. But even there, even with my belief in God, I still have to trust that I can hear his voice. So regardless, self trust is huge in our ability to navigate life. And also this.
Annie Croner:
Creating this sense of safety within yourself and trusting that higher being is there with you and they've got your back as well and leaning on that can be really powerful. First, to your success, for your, for your ability to trust yourself and to know that you are okay regardless of the outcome of any situation. And last but not least, creating safety in yourself helps you take back your power. We inadvertently give away so much of our power every day. And here's something that is really cool that I just come to be truly aware of, especially throughout this very challenging and really awesome year. At the same time, when the only validation that matters is that which you give yourself, external validation becomes the cherry on top and ceases to become the whole meal. Many of us spend so much time and energy giving away our power by seeking outside validation to tell us something about ourselves when we have the full capability, the full ability to tell those things to ourselves regardless of what is going on outside of ourselves. Okay, so this is just something I really want us all to grasp a hold of.
Annie Croner:
When you are safe within yourself and you are able to validate yourself and you are able to be there for yourself, that is a primary voice that matters. And of course we want to seek outside wisdom. Of course we want to seek outside counsel. Of course I'm a coach, for goodness sake. I have a coach myself, I have a therapist, all of those things. But ultimately the decisions I make are the ones in which I'm making them for myself. The coach can't make those decisions for me. My therapist can't make those decisions for me.
Annie Croner:
I rely on their wisdom for sure. And ultimately I return back to myself and check it against my own spirit, check it against me to ensure that it is solid, sound advice for me before I implement anything. This is gonna be really profound for you too. And as you develop that self trust piece, as you create safety within yourself, it will grow and blossom and grow and blossom and it will manifest itself in new and interesting ways that will be just very rewarding and fulfilling. And this is a skill that I have learned over time. There again, I Had a stroke back in 2012, had very little self trust, was looking for external validation a lot more than I do today. And. And this way of operating, of creating safety in yourself is one of the biggest flexes that you can all make.
Annie Croner:
And it is one of the biggest benefits that I have experienced, especially this year, especially going through challenging things. That has really served and supported me and also helped me level up and also helped me grow through this season. And it can be challenging. Okay, so what does this actually look like in real time? And I've. I have created three examples I'm going to share with you guys today about what this can actually look like. And I see these examples in my clients. I've experienced these examples myself. So example number one is when you make a visible, awful mistake, everybody knows you made it.
Annie Croner:
And the way this looks when we make a mistake at work and we have not created that safety within ourselves is that we spiral. We give into shame. We played in our head for days wishing it could be different, but we know it can't be. Because in the past, that is how it looks when we have not created safety within ourselves. How it looks when we do create safety in ourselves is that we own the mistake. We recognize that we are human. We take the learnings of the situation and we move forward with integrity. That is what it looks like to create safety in ourselves.
Annie Croner:
Now, we may get to the owning it and the integrity piece, even if we don't not created the safety piece in ourselves. But you are going to move past that mistake a lot faster if you have safety within yourself. If you've got your own back, you are going to show up with so much more grace and compassion and take the learning and move past it faster so that you can be more effective in your role. Because let's be honest, if you're spinning out, you're not gonna be effective in your role. So much brain power is gonna go to that spinning out that you're gonna be taking away the brain power that could be better spent and utilized actually executing and kicking butt and being a badass. The second example I'm going to give is when your leader is upset and it's not that you've necessarily done anything wrong. It may just be that your leader is having a bad day, or it may be that that you pointed out something to your leader that they were unaware of before and now they have thoughts about that. So the way that most people handle this without creating safety in themselves is they tend to people please and they tend to personalize their executive's emotions, and they tend to make their executive's emotions mean something about them.
Annie Croner:
Now, if you create a safety in yourself, I have to say this is going to look like showing up to serve the work and not your executive. It's going to look like staying steady and being the calm in the storm. When your executive is up here riding the waves and having the thoughts and feelings, you're going to be a grounding force because you are safe within yourself. This is just a storm that will pass. You understand that your executive is feeling some things around the situation, and you show up clean to serve the work and your executive as well. But what I love about this is that we aren't getting up in our executive's brain business. We aren't getting up in their emotional state. And as someone who's a very empathetic person, this challenge, even for me to stay in my own emotional lane, sometimes because of, like, I'm invested and I'm emotionally invested too.
Annie Croner:
But there is a line there. There is a line. And honestly, if you can remain calm, stay in your own power, create safety in yourself, then you get to allow your executive to do them without making it mean anything about you. The third and final example I'm going to give is one that I see all the time, and that is boundary setting. So you may need to set a boundary and you have this conversation with your executive or whoever it is you need to set the boundary with. And if you aren't safe within yourself, you're going to spin out on what other people are going to think about you. You're going to start second guessing your decision. You're going to create judgments around whether or not you're a good assistant.
Annie Croner:
If you set this boundary, if you are safe within yourself, you will approach the situation with clarity. We're going to let people think what they want to think. We're going to show up for ourselves in a way that feels good to us and to set the boundary because it needs to be set. And look, there are situations where a boundary may not be something that will be good for that specific position. There was a time in my life where I didn't mind working 24 7. I didn't mind being on call 24 7. And then I had babies, and then I had to go home and spend time with my babies. I wanted to be present with them.
Annie Croner:
And so it was just no longer a want match for me to work one of those roles where I'd be on call 24 7. So part of your boundaries are based on values. And there is no such thing as a 100% want match, meaning 100% alignment with in terms of expectations with regards to your role, your executive is going to expect things to be done a certain way, and you are going to want to do things another way. And for most of us, if you're in a healthy working environment with a healthy relationship with your executive, are able to navigate those just fine. Because we've got someone who is respectful and will understand the boundaries we need to set with our work and inner work. But some of us may need to look at making a shift, and the way that we do that is by creating safety in ourselves and relying on our own enoughness and not trying to prove anything to anybody. So those are three examples of ways that creating safety in yourself can help you show up differently in your role, in your position, and in life as a whole. So then how is it that we create safety in ourselves? So I'm going to give you now a framework for creating safety in yourself.
Annie Croner:
The first step of this process is to just notice. And the question that I would have you all ask in order to notice what is going on for you is, what is in my control here, what is in my control here? And always what is in your control are your thoughts, your feelings, your actions, how you choose to show up, that is always within your control. So then from there, we just want to recognize ways in which you are giving away your power. When you are giving away your power, if you feel resentment, that's a good indicator that you may be giving away your power in some way. If you feel out of control or like you have no control over the situation, that may be a way in which you are giving away your power. Because we always have a decision on how we want to show up. We always have a choice in how we decide to show up. This is really interesting.
Annie Croner:
I think that it's really profound to remember that you are deciding to wake up and go to work every single day. That is a decision you are making. Okay? And when I recognized that, I took back so much of my power because I'm like, oh my gosh, even on the days where I was working a really crappy job and like, wow, I don't want to go to work today. I'm not feeling it today, I chose to show up for myself. And so it's just a good way to take note. Are you giving away your power in any way? How can you take that power back? The second step is to redirect who or what am I allowing to live rent free in my brain? Choose to bring the focus back to your own agency. And I really want you to be aware, especially if you're in a really challenging situation right now, I want you to write out and journal about how you have agency in this situation and how you could potentially show up differently in order to exact that agency. And also there again I want to reiterate.
Annie Croner:
As I said in the beginning of this episode, I am never advocating for you to stay in a terrible environment. What would it look like for you to stand in your power and take back control and decide to look for a new job? If you're in a terrible situation, what would it look like for you to have a very direct and meaningful conversation with your executive or executives or even hr? What control do you have here and how can you really take that back? Now the last step is to reassure. So there again we're going to talk to ourselves like we would our best friend. And the question that I would have you ask when it comes to reassure is how can I be my own safe space here? How can I create safety for myself and know that I have my own back regardless? And how can I look at the data of the situation and decide on purpose how I want to show up for it? So that is all about creating safety in yourself. I hope you found it helpful. Please feel free to email me if you have any questions or concerns or have a story to share. I love stories. I love it when you all DM me on LinkedIn or pop me an email sharing about a story about how you created safety in yourself or about how you walked away from a bad situation.
Annie Croner:
I want to hear all those things. So please email me at [email protected] or DM me on LinkedIn and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Hey, before you go, don't forget to grab my free Strategic Planning Session guide. This stealthy playbook will help you and your executive find clarity on their priorities so you can make a greater impact. Go to wholeassistant.com/guide or click the link in the Show Notes to snag your copy. And if you're loving the podcast, please subscribe, leave a review and share with another assistant ready to level up. Thanks for listening and until next time, keep embracing your badassery.
