Guest: Corrie LoGiudice
- Keynote Speaker, High Performance Coach, and Author of The Five Overwhelm Culprits™
- CEO & Founder of Corrie Lo & Co
- http://www.linkedin.com/in/iamcorrielo
- Take the Overwhelm Culprit Quiz: https://corrielo.com/overwhelmculprit
TRANSCRIPT:
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: Today I want to talk about something every woman physician I know has felt, but maybe we haven’t named it outright. Most of us are not burned out, not yet, but most of us are certainly overwhelmed. We are still seeing patients, still running the meeting, and still answering messages after dinner, remembering all the camp forms, the follow-up calls, the birthday gifts, and everything on the grocery list.
We are overfunctioning, and overfunctioning leads eventually to just barely functioning. The word burnout itself doesn’t feel like it fits. Saying it out loud can feel like failure, like you might be ready to quit, and maybe you are. But I think what is actually happening for many of us is overwhelm: chronic, unchecked, invisible overwhelm.
Today I want to dig into what is actually causing it and, more importantly, what prevents it from becoming something we can’t come back from. That’s why I’ve invited Corrie LoGiudice to be our guest. She is a coach and keynote speaker, and she has been featured on TEDx, Forbes, and Business Insider. She is also the author of The Five Overwhelm Culprits. She helps high-achieving women find the hidden causes of overwhelm, and she has named five of them that I believe map directly onto the lives of the women listening to this show. Welcome, Corrie. I’m so glad you’re here.
Corrie LoGiudice: Thank you for having me.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: First, tell us who you are and who you wrote this book for.
Corrie LoGiudice: I wrote this book for myself 10 years ago. But I’m sure many of your listeners will hear themselves in my story, because so many working women in a variety of industries are all going through the same thing.
My story started with a really expensive piece of paper that said I could draw well. I got my degree in fine art, which meant I graduated college with no job prospects, so I found myself waiting tables. This really upset my father, who had helped bankroll said piece of paper. At one point he said, “Instead of waiting tables, why don’t you come work for the family business? You can start as a graphic designer, see how you like it, see where it takes you.”
So I joined the family business. My family has a very large electronics distribution company in the northeastern United States. I expected it to be a part-time, temporary thing. I blinked, and 15 years later I was running it as senior vice president. I never expected to be in that kind of role. I’m a fourth-generation entrepreneur, and I was the third generation running that business. I loved what I did. I was always the youngest person in the room and always the only woman.
My story really started when I experienced five years of more trauma than most people experience in a lifetime, while still having to show up and lead every day. It ranged from a miscarriage, to leaving an abusive marriage, to a very high-conflict divorce. Then, when all the dust had settled, I lost my post-divorce partner to suicide, and I was the one who found him. All of this was going on while I needed to show up as a leader in my family’s business and as a single mom of a five-month-old. How exactly do you balance all of that?
At the time, I was working with a therapist who saw what I was accomplishing, even with all of these high-pressure crises around me. She asked, “Corrie, have you ever considered becoming a coach?” I thought she was nuts. But when I asked her to explain, she told me flat out, “I have a lot of patients who can’t do what you’re doing. If you could figure out how you’re doing it and teach it to people, you could have a massive impact on the world.”
It wasn’t until after the suicide loss that I decided to step down and start my own business. I looked at what I did through the divorce and applied it to my suicide loss, and I realized it was five things. I wanted to see if addressing those same five things again would give me the same result. It did work. Around the time I did my TEDx talk, I came up with this concept called the five overwhelm culprits, and I’ve been coaching and speaking on it ever since.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: Wow. So you are your own business model.
Corrie LoGiudice: I was the case study.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: I love it. Take me back to when that framework really started to come together. What did an ordinary day look like for you then?
Corrie LoGiudice: For context, I live in the New York City metropolitan area, on Long Island. It should technically be a 35-minute ride from Manhattan, but because of traffic I was commuting two hours each way, four hours a day, to get to my full-time job.
I had an infant at the time that I never got to see. I didn’t see him at all in the morning, and I’d see him for about an hour in the evening when I got home. The most I ever got to see him was through my home security camera. I used to check in on him while he was playing with our au pair, during my lunch break.
We like to say we work a 40-hour week, but I was an executive, so it was really more like 60 to 80 hours, plus the 20-hour weekly commute, plus all the other responsibilities I had at home as a single mom doing everything by myself: house cleaning, errands, all of it. When I actually did the math on my life, I had less than an hour a day to myself before I had to wake up and do the whole thing again.
I lived like this for years, until what I call my pivotal life moment, which was the suicide loss. Those are the moments in life where everything after is different than before, and you can’t ever go back. There are really two ways you become motivated to make a major change. The first is the easy one: you just decide to make it. The second is when life forces it on you. For me, the suicide loss was definitely that.
At that point I started looking at the math on my life and how much time I had with the people I really loved, most importantly my son. I started making changes that ultimately led to the lifestyle I’m living today. But that took eight years. It was a long road from that kind of lifestyle to what I’m living and teaching now.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: In your book you write something that was the first thing I underlined: “I was living a life where my actions were directly conflicting with the values most important to me.” I coach primarily around values, so I’m curious: how did you finally see that?
Corrie LoGiudice: I had been consuming every professional development book and podcast I could find to make use of that 20-hour weekly commute. I felt awful that I wasn’t with my kids, so I figured if I was going to waste time in a car, I at least wanted to be learning.
I was exploring different businesses I could do if I stepped down from my family’s business, and I came across the podcast Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn. His whole thing is make money in your sleep, which was very appealing to me as a single mom of an infant. He had an exercise in one of his books that I’ve since adapted. I first used it to figure out what was next for me, but now I feature it in my keynotes and workshops. It’s also in the book. I call it the five-year vision.
It’s extremely simple, and it’s all aligned to values. First, you choose your top four personal values. Using myself as the case study, mine were family, health, career, and travel. Then you imagine you’re at an airport five years from today, and you run into someone you realistically haven’t seen in that time, someone who would be super stoked to see you. “Hey, Corrie, what have you been up to for the last five years?”
It’s a visualization exercise, because from there you brain-dump, under those four values, all the amazing things that happened to you in those five years. The important part is that what you envision is what you want, not things other people around you have told you that you should want. It needs to come from a place of authenticity. And it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make sense, if it’s wild, or if it’s even possible.
Under family, I wrote that I wanted to be remarried with two more kids and another on the way. For anybody keeping track, I was a single mom of a five-month-old writing that in five years I’d be remarried with four kids. The math doesn’t math. But spoiler alert: it actually happened. During the pandemic I went from being a single mom of one to a married mom of four in a year. My husband and I were both remarried, both coming from divorces. I gained two stepsons, and we had a daughter together, which rounded out my four.
The reason that story matters, and why it’s tied to values, is that it made clear why I was spinning my wheels with my commute and that hour to myself every day. When I looked at it through my values, family was important to me, and I was with my family every day in my family’s business. What I wasn’t clear on at that point was my why. The five-year vision helped me find it. The reason I wanted the family business was the freedom and flexibility of being an entrepreneur, which my father and everybody modeled for me and my brother growing up. I wanted that for my own family. But by spending all my time at the business, I was missing out on my time with my son. That one exercise, aligned to values, was pivotal for figuring out the steps I needed to take to get from there to here.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: I love this concept of inherited values, the inherited vision of what it’s supposed to be. As women and as doctors, my listeners learn how to be the “good doctor” from all that’s been modeled before them. Even today, they look around and see other people’s lives, also in complete states of overwhelm, just like theirs. So it becomes normalized. This tool would let them re-envision what it could be without all that other noise.
Corrie LoGiudice: Yes, it’s very helpful. One example that could help your listeners in the medical field: my husband is a laboratory technician and has worked in hospitals and labs his entire life. When we first met, and we talked about the five-year vision and values, he had always envisioned that he’d be stuck in a lab. That was just the way it was, with all the overwhelm that comes with it.
Once he got really clear on what his life vision looked like, he ended up aligned with a healthcare company where he now does remote service work. He goes in and out of various labs and isn’t tied to one. It gives him the freedom and flexibility we wanted for our family, to do things like school pickup. It was very different from what he’d been modeled through his education and the healthcare system. It let him think outside the box and have the clarity to see which job opportunities would align his skills with the lifestyle he ultimately wanted.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: One of my questions was about the most valuable tool, and this sounds like it’s been immensely valuable for more than just you.
Corrie LoGiudice: Definitely. Clarity is key. Clarity is the foundation for everything.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: And that’s the first culprit, right? As physicians, we spend a significant part of our lives and careers on a straight track: college, then med school, then residency, then fellowship. Then all of a sudden those guardrails disappear. There’s a tumultuous time right at the end of that track, and maybe into mid-career, where I feel like the clarity goes away. From your insight, how would you recommend someone at that phase, who’s been guided their whole career, go about building their own guardrails and boundaries?
Corrie LoGiudice: What you just described makes complete sense to me. You set the goal of becoming a physician. You’re in school for so long to achieve it, then you go through residency. By the time you’re actually in it, you’ve finally achieved your goal, and you never thought about what comes after. You’re still in motion because you’re still on the same path, but you haven’t defined what’s next.
I’d recommend the five-year vision exercise, because it can help you see where you want to be. And this is what one-on-one coaching is: figuring out where you are today, where you want to be, and what’s getting in the way. I like the five-year vision because it makes it a lot easier to backwards engineer. If I want to be there, I need to start here. But you have to have that dream vision, and know your values, what you’re working toward, and why it’s important.
Also know that it changes. Your goal could have been to become a physician, but now that you’ve achieved it, what do you want to do with it? What impact do you want to have? What lives do you want to impact? What systems? And what’s the reason for doing it? I like five years versus a decade because it’s long enough to be future-focused but short enough to be actionable.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: In your book, you say that getting clarity on your mission makes the whole system more manageable. In medicine, we may be purpose-driven, have our five-year vision, and know what we want, and the system we work in makes that really challenging. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the term moral injury. Some of us are asked to do, or not do, things we know aren’t what’s best for the patient. What’s your insight on how having that strong clarity and that why holds up in that situation?
Corrie LoGiudice: I’d say it definitely still holds, because you have to work within the constraints of the system, and people still need your care and what you have to offer. From there, I think you have two choices. Do you want to have a part in changing the system? In that case, the path of being a physician may not be the path to do that. It might be a leadership or executive role, where you can impact things from the top down. Or you can go the other route, which is making your patients as comfortable as you possibly can within the systems and restraints you have, working with the hand you’ve been dealt.
Some people will say, “This isn’t for me, I’m going to change it from the inside out.” Others will say, “That’s going to take 15 years. I could help people by doing this instead,” and they’ll focus on that second path. Really, it’s a matter of your personal tolerance and threshold for what’s happening, what’s within your control to change, and what actions you’re willing to put behind it.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: That’s where I spend a lot of time coaching: living in alignment inside the system we’re dealt. I want to move into confidence, one of the other culprits. The women I work with are some of the most credentialed people in any room, but their confidence drops when it’s time to lead, speak up, negotiate, or ask for what they want. Why do you think that is?
Corrie LoGiudice: There’s so much data to back this up, and I talk about it a lot in my book, but a big part of it is how women are raised as little girls versus little boys. You can be the most credentialed person in the room, but as little girls we’re taught by society that it’s more important to be nice than to challenge something. Even the words people use: a little boy is driven and motivated, and a little girl is bossy. We internalize these things. When we finally reach the point in our own leadership where we are the most credentialed person in the room, it doesn’t feel safe to demonstrate it, because of everything that happened to us throughout childhood and young adulthood.
It also depends on the workplace. I come from a very male-dominated industry, electronics. There was no one who looked like me in the room, so it wasn’t as safe for me to speak up in certain ways. People took my ideas and credited them as their own. People commented on my appearance instead of my ideas.
The best way to manage this is, first and foremost, to identify that as a woman in a leadership position, you need to validate yourself and not look for external validation. So many women default to external validation, and it makes sense. We’re within two generations of women being able to work, make their own money, own a home, and have credit. Many people in the workplace with us come from a time when women didn’t have those rights. In our mothers’ and grandmothers’ generation, you did need external validation to know you were making people happy, that you were a good housewife, that you’d be safe and secure and someone would take care of you. We don’t need that now. We have our own credentials, we make our own money, we’re in our own places of power. So it’s about learning to own that instead of looking for it externally.
There are a lot of great ways to do this. One of the first things I recommend to most of my coaching clients is a confidence log. Any time you get a compliment, whether it’s an email saying “great job on that pitch” or “great way to handle that patient,” put it in a file. When you’re feeling really down about yourself, look through that file. I do this as a speaker. I have days where I come off the stage thinking I bombed, and I go through my audience surveys. They tell me the truth about what actually happened. Even if it’s not the best feedback, there are hundreds of other responses showing I had an impact.
So what ways do you have available to start collecting proof, so you can start sourcing confidence from within? That’s the first place I’d start. You’re right that they’re credentialed. You don’t need anything more at this point. You belong in the room. You worked hard to get there.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: It’s a funny thing, because we spend our whole lives striving for that next piece of paper, that next thing. I actually have a little sticky note on my computer that reminds me I have already earned it. Sometimes you need something on the outside reminding you that the only one you need to prove it to is yourself.
Corrie LoGiudice: I love the sticky note idea, because sometimes you need something on the outside. Anchors are excellent for that. An anchor could be a pop-up reminder on your phone, on a regular basis, affirming something specific about yourself. I have my vision board on my computer and phone screen, plus a mantra or whatever I’m working toward that year. I see it all the time. Sticky notes on your computer are an excellent way to affirm yourself.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: In the book you talk about confidence reps, which I coach on all the time as well. What have you seen this tool do for the women you coach?
Corrie LoGiudice: It gets you out of thinking about doing something. So many women talk about it all day, or think it through and strategize to build up the confidence to do the thing, and in the meantime they avoid doing it. The only way you get more confident is by doing the thing, which is why I call it confidence reps. Whatever you’re not confident about, take some small, tiny action toward it. With time, that’s what makes you feel safe to take bigger actions and more risk. The actions grow your risk tolerance.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: Do you have an example from your own life? What have you had to do confidence reps for?
Corrie LoGiudice: A great example is going from being an executive to being a speaker. A big part of the speaking industry is putting yourself out there with outbound pitches. When you’re first starting out, it can be really scary to send a couple of emails, get a no back, and think, “I’m terrible at this, I’m never going to get a sale.” But you don’t realize it’s a numbers game. There was a point in my career where I had a tough time sending 10 emails because I was so afraid the messaging would be wrong or offend somebody. Now my team and I send out hundreds of connections and points of contact a month to generate speaking engagements. They’re authentic, and we’re trying to build my network by doing it.
When I first started, it was scary. Now I’m not as scared, because I’m confident in who I am, what I have to offer, and the messaging we’re putting out. We learned what works and what doesn’t through all the failures when we started. If I didn’t get any responses from the first 10, what do I need to change in the message? If something worked, let’s add to it and try one more little thing. You’re constantly improving. You’re never failing. You’re collecting data on what to change the next time.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: It goes back to that internal and external validation. The no is not a sign that you aren’t good. It’s information about how to change and iterate for the next thing. But you have to have that internal validation skill built up.
Corrie LoGiudice: That’s why you have to start with the internal first. One of the ways to build internal validation is through repetition. Eventually you’re not even going to think about it anymore. You’re just going to do it.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: I want to move into community, another one of the culprits. For me personally, community is one of the regular habits I used to pull myself out of overwhelm. In medicine, like many professions, we have a built-in community in school and training. It’s proximity, it’s all near us. Then we become attendings, we have kids, and the juggle of kids and career is so much that the community dissolves. What would you tell a woman about rebuilding community when she’s let it go for years?
Corrie LoGiudice: Start by identifying what you need now. A lot of people think, “I used to have a really strong community in medical school. We went through school together, we all became attendings, and now no one’s in touch.” That makes sense, because your lives changed. You graduated, and the circumstances are completely different.
What I usually recommend is this: whatever your biggest challenge is at the moment, find a community going through that challenge. For me, following my suicide loss, that meant finding a suicide loss support group. Someone who has lost a loved one to cancer has a very different experience from someone who has lost a loved one to suicide. There are so many different feelings, never mind the grief. You’re angry at the person, and there’s a lot that’s very complicated and different from other types of loss. Finding people going through the same thing as you, at the same time, is why things like masterminds can be great. Whether you’re looking to advance in your career or your business, finding peers going through the same thing is very helpful. So identify the core challenge you’re navigating, then find the community doing that thing now.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: I can see this. In medicine we have specific groups for leadership, specific groups for women, and online we have the physician moms’ groups. It all makes sense. I think one of the challenges is bringing it down into the everyday, something closer to you that can start to drive your daily life in a more aligned direction.
Corrie LoGiudice: You bring up another very relevant point, especially for women who are so strapped for time. You spend so many hours at the hospital, and then you’re a working mom with kids taking up your time, so sometimes you feel like community has to be in person. That’s not necessarily the case. You can build just as authentic and strong connections virtually as you can in person. Take the time to find those places, whether it’s a Facebook group, a LinkedIn group, or an association that holds virtual meetings and events for its members. It doesn’t always have to be in person, so don’t let that be a reason for not finding your people.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: A hundred percent. A lot of people listening need this to become more of a priority, because as women, I feel our longevity is tied to our connection with other beings in this world.
I want to move into conditioning. If you want to start with an overview of that culprit, I’ll ask specific questions after, because so much conditioning happens to doctors along the way.
Corrie LoGiudice: For context, for everybody listening who hasn’t read my book or isn’t familiar with the culprits: the conditioning culprit refers to your physical and mental health and wellness. How are you conditioning your mind and your body? This is usually the first thing to go out the window for working women, because we’re conditioned to take care of other people before ourselves. It’s almost biological.
Another way to look at it: when you’re depleted, physically and mentally, you become the bottleneck in every system you’re in, whether that’s the hospital, your practice, or home. You can’t be at 100% for everybody when you’re functioning at 25%. So it’s really important to take care of your physical and mental health.
What I look at with people is very basic. How are you keeping yourself hydrated? How much sleep are you getting? Are you moving your body, exercising or at least walking every day? What does your nutrition look like? Are you pounding power bars all day, or actually eating real food? Those little decisions make a big impact.
Last but not least is your mental health. What are you building into your day to protect it? So many of us, and this was definitely true for me as a working mom, have no downtime built in to mentally decompress. In leadership especially, that space is necessary, because otherwise you can’t subconsciously think through problems. Your brain needs that space to have the capacity to problem-solve.
I find it fascinating that really famous CEOs and founders do this. Bill Gates takes a week to sit in a cabin and read books. What working mom wouldn’t love to be by herself in a cabin reading books? He specifically cites some of Microsoft’s biggest innovations as coming out of that time. So how are we, as working moms and professionals, building purposeful solitude into our own days so we can be creative and come up with solutions? If we don’t have that space, our brain can’t do what it needs to do. It’s a computer with too many tabs open. You have to close some tabs for it to run more efficiently. Conditioning your mind is just as important as conditioning your body. They go hand in hand.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: It comes back to that phrase we hear all the time: put your own oxygen mask on first. Having gone through this, I think you hear it and might believe it, but you don’t really believe it’s true until you’ve created it and experienced it. It’s so much more true than you knew.
Corrie LoGiudice: And the other part we touched on earlier is the term burnout. It isn’t really relatable, especially for high-performing women, because we function at such a high capacity even when we’re not taking care of ourselves. For a lot of working moms, this is one of their top culprits. There gets to be a point where your body gives out. Your body says, “Nope.” It puts you in the hospital and you’re forced onto leave. That’s the actual burnout portion of what we’re talking about.
I think you’re right that overwhelm is the better term. I’ve made this argument for a while, and I think I talked about it in Forbes: solving burnout is solving the wrong problem. If you solve for overwhelm, you avoid burnout altogether, because it’s unresolved overwhelm that causes your body to shut down and brings on all the burnout stuff.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: You’re speaking my love language now.
Corrie LoGiudice: It’s super important. You can’t leave that behind.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: There’s something you talk about, making commitments in your life that you felt you couldn’t break because you’d disappoint people you care about. This comes up in 100% of my client conversations, because we carry a significant amount of guilt. We give, give, give, and disappointing others weighs heavily on us. It’s one of the biggest barriers for women in medicine when we’re trying to set boundaries and say no. How do you work with that?
Corrie LoGiudice: I view boundaries as a performance strategy. I’d imagine what I do isn’t as important as what your listeners do. They’re literally saving lives every day, and I help people perform at a higher capacity. But either way, it took me a long time to get to the point where I viewed boundaries as a performance strategy, not something to feel guilty about.
You and I were talking about this before we hopped on this call, because we had to reschedule a bunch of times. One of my boundaries is that I take summers off. I do a summer sabbatical where I hang out with my kids. That was part of the design of my business, but it’s also in how I run it. I have sprint seasons: Q1 and Q2 are a sprint, and Q4 is a sprint. In between is Q3, where I rest, because if I’m going to sprint the whole rest of the year, I need that. This summer especially it was very important, because I came off a book launch at the end of May. Between January and May, through the launch and the speaking, I was on for everybody. I needed that time to bring my nervous system back down to normal so I could keep functioning later.
So I don’t feel guilt telling people what I need to protect my capacity. I’m really good at what I do, and I know I can’t deliver what people rely on me for, whether that’s my kids or a client, if I don’t have what I need to take care of myself. It’s a mindset shift: I’m good at what I do, and this is what I need to be good at what I do.
I also want to mention that when I was struggling with this, my therapist asked me, “If your daughter came to you with the same challenge and the same guilt, what would you want her to say?” The truth was, I would want her to set the boundary. But if I’m not setting the boundary, I’m not showing her it’s safe to. So I started modeling what I wanted my kids, and even the next generation, to feel okay doing. One positive is that Gen Z is awesome at boundaries. They say, “Nope, not doing it.” So there’s been a shift. It’s okay to ditch the guilt, but understand where the guilt is coming from first, so that you can rewire your thinking around it.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: I love the phrase “protect my capacity.” I’ve found in my mid-forties that knowing where the cap is, where that limit exists, is very relevant to how I function. And that limit is very different than it was 20 years ago. Recognizing that, and building in a buffer system like you’ve done, is so instrumental to success.
Corrie LoGiudice: Yes. I look at it this way: what would an athlete do in my situation? How are they protecting their mind and body? Look at the majority of really famous executives and CEOs, most of whom are men to begin with. What’s one of the first things they do in their routine? They say they get up and work out for an hour. If they’re taking care of themselves at that level, why should we feel guilty about it?
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: I love it. I want to move into consistency, because some of the things you said really landed for me in how I recovered from my overwhelm. You say that relief doesn’t have to be all or nothing, and that consistency comes from small, often boring actions repeated over time. I got to a point where it felt like I either keep going the way I’m going or I resign. It was very black and white. I tried to resign and it didn’t work, which worked out great in the end. What I realized was that incremental daily habits slowly turn the ship. How has this shown up in your life and for your clients?
Corrie LoGiudice: Lack of consistency becomes the culprit when you’re relying on your brain and your mental load to carry everything. The easiest way to become more consistent in whatever you’re working toward is to build tools, with intention, that relieve that mental load. Some of my favorites are habit stacking and SOPs, standard operating procedures. Even if you run your own practice, for example, what do your administration and patient onboarding look like? The more you standardize, so that not everybody is off doing their own version, the faster and easier it becomes for everyone, because you’re removing the need to think about it. There’s already a process.
I also love checklists, templates, apps, and habit trackers, anything that takes it out of your head and puts it on paper. The other important thing is that so many people design habit systems and routines with their very best day in mind. What you need to design for is the minimum viable thing you could do on a daily basis to stay consistent. Design it for your worst day, not your best. What you build for your worst days is ultimately what keeps you consistent. If you design for your lowest-capacity days, then when you have more capacity, you can be even more consistent, without putting that pressure on yourself, because you know the minimum action necessary to get the result you’re looking for.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: I love that. In medicine, we live in the world of process improvement and standardization, formularies, things that are very evidence-based. What I find is that we don’t translate that often enough, or well enough, into the operations of the rest of our lives. So the rest of your life becomes overwhelming.
Corrie LoGiudice: Definitely. So many of us don’t have systems for our household, and I don’t know why. It’s actually kind of funny. My husband bought me one of those Skylight calendars for Mother’s Day. At first I thought, we use Google Calendar, this is just a glorified Google Calendar. But they give you a five-month trial, so I tried it. It’s amazing, because it has built-in systems for everything from kids’ chore charts to meal planning. You can build your family an operating system in a gadget like that. It’s easier when it comes off the shelf, but you can also build things customized for you. That’s a big part of what I do with my coaching clients: given the way your brain works and your family functions, how do you build those systems in?
The other thing I want to acknowledge, which makes consistency more difficult, is neurodivergence, like ADHD. My family is very neurospicy, from me to my kids, everybody. So things have to be very black and white: system, checklist, get the dopamine hit, do it. We know how to design it so it works for us, but you have to figure out what works best for you.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: I love that. I think that’s a huge part of what my listeners and I need.
In your book you say that therapy helps with the past and coaching helps with the future. So many women don’t recognize when they need a coach. How does a woman decide which one she needs?
Corrie LoGiudice: That’s an excellent question. It depends on what you’re working toward. If you’re dealing with unresolved trauma, or you’re in a season of life where things are really challenging and you don’t know how you got here, you don’t have that level of clarity, and you’d be an excellent candidate for therapy. Therapy is about looking at repeating patterns, like thought patterns, and how you ultimately ended up where you are today, how your decisions impacted that. Once you know where you are today, it’s very easy for a coach to pick it up and help you figure out where you want to be five years from now, and what the roadblocks are to getting there. That’s essentially what a coach does.
I never knew the difference. My therapist was the one who taught me. She said, “I can help people get the clarity that I helped you get, but if you could help people figure out how to get from there to here, that’s a huge impact.” They’re very complementary.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: A couple of things to wrap up. If someone listening hears herself in any of these culprits and stories, where should she start?
Corrie LoGiudice: The best place to start is a free quiz on my website, the Overwhelm Culprit Quiz. It will help you identify which of the five culprits is your culprit of the moment. You get not only your result but two weeks’ worth of content specifically designed to help you navigate through that culprit, including coaching questions.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: Perfect. I’ll put that link in the show notes. The last question: what’s one thing she should do differently when she walks into the next room?
Corrie LoGiudice: Release all the guilt and shame. When you’re overwhelmed, so many people don’t talk about it because they’re afraid of how others will view them, and they carry a lot of guilt and shame around it. But when you start to view overwhelm as a sign that one of these five culprits is out of alignment, you’re just collecting data on it. There’s no reason to carry guilt or shame. You’ve received a sign that what was working before isn’t working right now. Something changed, and you need to adapt.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: I love that. That’s going to be our discharge instructions. I’m a hospitalist, so every day we’re discharging patients and writing their instructions. I think letting go of guilt and shame should be at the top of the list for this one.
Corrie LoGiudice: Yes.
Dr. Stephanie Yamout: Love it. Thank you so much for being here and for going through this.
Corrie LoGiudice: Thank you for having me.