Celia Alario‘s work in social change movements almost burnt her out. Did she quit? No. She turned her experience into breakthroughs. Celia is a kindred spirit. Kind, funny, and incredibly accomplished, she went through a major life shift into serving as a coach for her clients. This shift took her experience in social change movements to now support those in those movements to prevent burnout. She does a whole lot more including the incredible Vision to Voice public speaking academy. Listen and leave a comment: what dreams does this ignite for you?
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Eliminating Burnout To Achieve Success With Celia Alario
The Ripple Effect Washing Away Burnout
I talked with Celia Alario. This was an awesome conversation. We had to cut it off at some point because there was so much there. She’s a coach now, but she has decades of experience in doing PR and marketing for social impact climate justice in various arenas. I’m going to read what she wrote for me. She said she’s a transformational coach, supporting clients and experiencing greater vitality, joy, and authentic expression. She helps social impact change agents and do-gooders, maintain balance and optimal wellbeing, even while speaking truth to power.
We get into this in the episode and I’ll say, when we’re doing this work in the world, something that she says she’s recovering from is activist burnout. She’s very familiar with what these people are going through. I’ll leave it there and I’ll let you listen to the episode. I will see you on the other side.
I’m here with Celia Alario. Welcome to the show. It’s great to have you.
It’s fun to be with you.
Looking Back
We had a great conversation last time. Our prep conversation is supposed to be twenty minutes. It ended up being one hour because we had so much to talk about. Tell us where you are now in the world.
I’m based in Moab, Utah, which is in Southeastern Utah. It’s a small little purple county and otherwise red state. It’s an unusual spot because of its exquisite, arresting beauty, big wilderness, and lots of national parks. This is where Arches and Canyonlands National Park are, but it’s also something that is very international and vibrant because we get about three million visitors a year coming through. We’re a permanent town of probably about 7,000 residents. This is where I escaped LA to live.
I know you do some different work now, but you have a background in media, and I forget if you did PR but I was fascinated by your real commitment to social and environmental change. You have some great language about that, on your website and in the work you do. Tell us a little bit about where you were before you transformed into what you’re doing now.
I did a lot of social justice climate and environmental justice communications. That meant training spokespeople, doing PR marketing, and eventually social media for social change. It was wonderful. I got to work with amazing folks and I still work with a lot of those types of folks. It was across the gamut. The main work I did was in radical social change movement sectors. I also worked with authors, filmmakers, and creatives of different types. It took a toll on me. I experienced all sorts of health challenges, which now looking back, I realize people refer to things as, oh, it’s activist burnout, or an autoimmune condition, or these various things. A lot of it was being emotionally unregulated and taking on what it took to be on those front lines.
Working for peace and working at places where the rubber meets the road. The points of destruction, the points of injustice, intervening, and being present to amazing people who had things to say and that were important. Often people were disproportionately left out of conversations. Those were the people I was striving to get onto television news and get into print, but I didn’t do it in a balanced way. That price that I paid for that is what inspired me then to become a health and wellness coach and to start to blend these things together.
Boundaries And Schedules
It sounds like you do a lot of that work for people who are in various ongoing fights for justice, peace, and climate change. It’s funny, my wife is in that world a lot. I spend some time there. My understanding is that especially in talking about any of these missions, any of these movements, whether it’s a racial justice, climate justice, the work is ongoing, unfortunately, and yet the people who are in it, like we’re humans, we can’t be in this endless summer of effort and yet there’s always something to do. There’s always some new initiative. There’s always a new issue, a new bill, or a new something to work on. I’m curious, moving into the transition a little bit, what was missing for you that you saw as now essential to bring to the people who are doing this work?
This is such a great question and it’s definitely something I’m still discovering about myself and with my clients. I think some of it is boundaries and edges. A lot of times we work to our own edge, which might be physical exhaustion, as opposed to some type of math that has us working to a certain point and then stopping and taking space. I see that math plays out in a couple of different ways. Some of it is literally in our work planning. People don’t schedule time to be creative, rest, or play.
People don’t schedule time for spontaneous opportunities to happen. This is something some of the best entrepreneurs in business do, is they recognize that if they have 10% or 15% of their time, that is unscheduled. That’s not wasteful, it’s opportunistic. It’s allowing for what happens when you’re in the flow and something magical occurs.
The best entrepreneurs recognize that if they give even a small amount of time to unscheduled and simply let whatever happens, something magical occurs.
You can take full advantage of that and suck all the nectar out of the moment and the opportunity. The other thing that happens is if you work until you can’t go anymore, that might work in your twenties or that might work if you have the privilege of a certain type of constitution, but for most of us, you’re eventually going to hit a point where physically, emotionally, spiritually, you run out of steam and oftentimes the recovery from that is a little more intense than we thought that it would be.
In a very simple example and this started to happen to me in my late 30s, a lot of different creative projects going on that’s, you know, we’re working towards building a life, a family, a business. It would be 11:00. I’d be like, “I have this thing I want to build online or this painting I want to make,” or whatever. The thing that helped me, and I talk to my wife about this a lot is I could stay up for 3 hours doing this, go to bed at 2:00 in the morning and have it done, or I could go to bed now and get it done in 30 minutes tomorrow. Be rested, not lose the entire day, be zoned out, or whatever.
Communication And Creativity
I want to go back to something you said. I was meeting with a client. This was the topic of conversation because when we’re committed to change in the world. We get excited by the possibilities. There are lots of things that we can do. Our calendars fill up. We have started to reach this capacity. We had the same discovery this morning in the meeting, that unscheduled time. I forget where I heard this, but it’s all over the place now, to let your brain go into default mode, to be bored in a way because there’s a great TED Talk on being bored. When she talks about the default mode where you’re not solving a problem. You’re not focused on a thing. Maybe you’re out on a walk or in the shower, all these places where you aren’t doing anything else, that’s where you’re right brain.
This is neuroscience. What happens is your right brain starts to mush these ideas that aren’t connected together that’s when you come up with new ideas or better ideas. The thing that we discovered that was fascinating was, that there were things that the client could do that would make her feel good that she was going to say no to in service of her health, her wellness, and the greater impact of the work. I’m curious where you’ve seen this in action.
This comes up a lot in a bunch of different realms of the people that I’m working with now, the main focus of our coaching is around communications, where communications, wellbeing, and leadership intersect. In the little sweet spot of that Venn Diagram is where I’m playing with my clients. This comes up a lot of different ways, but one of the things that I was thinking about was people somehow think that they can be creative on demand. It’s one thing to sit down and do data entry on demand or to do something like copy edit something where there’s a certain way that your brain is working and there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. In the end, you either spelled the word right or you didn’t. You did the math or you didn’t.
That’s not how creativity, and also even how some finding of our inner authenticity and agency happens. I don’t think you can say, “I’m going to be authentic and build up my bravery right now. Start the clock and do it, and then quickly transition into a Zoom meeting.” Flexibility is important. The other thing that happens that’s interesting is that you were saying we’re animals, right? part of what happens to us, and this is a survival mechanism because it’s something to celebrate, is that in times of crisis, in times of trauma, in times of scarcity, and whether that scarcity is how many hours I have to paint my painting or how many minutes I’m going to get on CNN, those moments of crisis and challenge shut down the communication center of our brain. That’s cool.
If I’m running from a saber-toothed tiger that wants to have me for lunch, I don’t need to write a sonnet. I need to run like heck. My brain is going to free that up. For all of us, we can dip into and celebrate the lineage of our animal bodies that have made it so that we could be here safely to then have the privilege of a challenge about, “What the heck is going on with my Calendly? How am I going to do my creative work?” To understand our humanity, I think is important to recognize that any perceived threat, trauma, or scarcity is going to work counter to someone’s ability to communicate.
I saw this for years, training spokespeople. I had no idea what was happening. I watched smart people who were great in practice, shut down as soon as we were on live radio. We didn’t understand exactly what was happening. Now I understand the brain science behind it because it was part of what I learned in the health coaching certification program that I went through. I feel blessed now to have some science behind the thousands of people that I have watched with this phenomenon. Part of what you’re literally doing is cross-training.
If you want to be awesome in a certain part of your work, the crosstraining for that is your care, leisure, rest, pleasure, and joy. It’s almost non-negotiable. In the same way, elite athletes realize they need to stretch, hydrate, and cross-train. We have to cross-train with aspects that, according to some ways of looking at work might seem like goofing off.
It might seem unproductive. It’s like, “I’m not producing the thing I’m producing. I’m not dealing with the issue that’s right in front of me.” As I was saying before, “Sleep is a keystone.” One of my guests who was on the podcast before talked about that as a keystone habit, as a habit that unlocks potential in maybe the other things that feel more productive. I love the idea of cross-training. You said something that I want to see if there’s something there because it’s interesting.
Urgency
There’s this idea of scarcity time and effort. What I’ve seen is it’s almost like the curse of the creative mind is that we can see these big imaginative visions, these big pictures, and the work that you’re doing. I imagine people can and have spent time codifying and writing down, “What is our vision for the planet, for justice and the world? What do we want it to look like?” We’re aware that we’re humans. We only have so much time so we better hurry up. What would you say in response to someone with that urgency and thinking?
Urgency is an addiction, and I don’t know if it’s as addictive as sugar, which is probably up there in the top five things, but it’s right there. It’s close. There’s a quote, and I wish I could remember who said it right now, but it was like, “Everything is happening fast. Everything is urgent, which is why we must go slowly.” I don’t know where that comes from, but it’s a proverb that I heard that resonated with me. I think that the reality is that experience activates our nervous system and it doesn’t usually serve us. If there’s a crisis, if you’re a first responder and you’re in the wilderness. It’s great that you have the ability to activate because things are urgent.
Everything happens so fast right now. We must learn to go slowly.
If a lion is chasing you, run.
I don’t want to downplay the existential threats of our time because people who are looking around and feeling a sense of urgency are not wrong. There are a lot of things happening at the time, bound things that are happening, challenges and injustices that we face, and challenges for threats to the planet. It’s not that you are illogical or irrational, it’s that response doesn’t always serve you. The emotional regulation work, the breath work, the pleasure and joy work or offerings that we give to ourselves, rest. Those things truly matter. They are the fitness work. They are the preparation that helps us. What I’ll always say to a client is, you could do another run-through of the presentation, or you could go have a walk with your dog, go be with your beloveds, get in the bath.
I will always vote for those other things because I think that those are the things that are preparing us on a level that we don’t always think about. A lot of people focus so much on preparing their content. When I work with clients, I think about content, but also their style of presentation and then mindset or heartset or intention, that aspect of it. To me, they deserve higher billing than they get. Everyone says content is king and people are going to rework their talk seventeen times, but they don’t always think about, “What are the values I’m conveying? What is the larger vision? Why am I even talking in the first place? What’s motivating? What’s the big why?” Those are these huge untapped wellsprings of power, strength, and energy that when you consider them as much as you consider what’s on slide four of your deck, you get results that are irresistible to the people you’re presenting and talking with.
I think that we lose sight of that. A lot of that is a response to things that are happening in society that teach us that what we say might matter more than how we say it. There’s that great Michael Angelo quote, “People might not remember what you said or what you did, but they’ll remember how you made them feel.” That’s what we’re after. I try to work with clients a lot on vibe as much as we work on content.
I can think of many talks that I’ve seen. There are tons of interesting content out there, but the ones that stand out are the people who feel grounded and present. Speaking purely tactically as someone who is occasionally in front of people, I can imagine one of the fears is I’ve got to have the content down. I’ve got to make sure everything’s perfect. What I hear you saying is you do this very important foundational work, A) To create a whole person instead of this content robot so that it comes off better. I imagine, and a little bit from experience, if I’m clear on my values, the purpose, I’m rested and I’ve taken care of myself. If and or when things do go wrong, the recording pauses or the slides go wrong, I have a foundation of clarity of what’s important in my work and my life.
I’m not going to get thrown off of that it’s okay if things don’t go right. I probably talk about this more than almost anything. I love practicing jiujitsu. As you progress in the practice, it’s not that I feel infinitely confident going into training or into these matches, but in a way I do. I know that I’m there to learn. I know that I’m there to progress. Now that I’m a slightly upper-level belt, I’m there to even teach a little bit. Things go wrong all the time. I get tapped by some new guy, or things don’t quite go the way I wanted in the role.
Individual Shifts
That’s okay because that outcome is not my goal. My goal is to show up. My goal is to live my values. I’m drawing that comparison because I compare jiujitsu to everything. You even used the word like you’re training. People are in training. Rest and restoration are part of that training. In the work that you do, what is the impact that you hope to see in the world?
What’s exciting about the work that I do in terms of impact is that we’re looking at the impacts that happen in the individuals. Part of the reason why I left the whole soup to-nuts of public relations and media and all of that work that I was doing, there were a couple of reasons, but I could have stayed pitching reporters doing larger level marketing and strategy. I started to look back. I had a big birthday a number of years ago, and I looked back and thought about my legacy. Part of what I recognized was that a lot of the issues that I work on, flip-flop back and forth, depending on how election seasons go, or who owns an entity. We work on something, we protect a wild area, then the company that owns that, sells it to a military hunter, takes it over, they do a partnership, or they sell it to somebody else.
The work that I was doing felt like a little bit of being a zombie warrior. We would temporarily make gains in these areas for justice or to protect these places, but it was never done. The work was never permanently done. The work that was however permanently impactful and could not be changed by who won the next election was the individual transformations that happened inside the spokespeople that I was training. When people ta pto that purpose that you’re talking about. Purpose as a noun and a verb. You’re being on purpose. It’s an action in and of itself. When they tap into their values and their big why, and they find their authentic voice, they get over whatever they’ve made up, whatever old story or old agreements are keeping them small or keeping them quiet, and they find that authentic voice, they’re speaking truth to power.
They’re doing it in a way that feels good to them, and that their audiences find irresistible. Those things could not be changed by 51% voting for council person so-and-so or president-elect. That was what the shift was for me if I could make the biggest impact in the world, it was going to be in walking alongside these folks who have important things to say, whose perspectives are exquisitely vital in these times, supporting them in being able to hone their voice and creating, as we do as coaches, new stories, little experiments, changes in agreements that we might play with to try to notice and transform whatever’s holding back the transformation that folks want.
That was the big reason for me that this made more sense than anything else because those are the kinds of things that I could count. Acres of forest saved, how many whales were protected, how many people were spared in a war or genocide. Those were numbers that I couldn’t count over time and say, “This has been my life in activism, unfortunately.” Those individual shifts, those matter. They’re irreversible.
It’s hard to walk when you connect with something like that. It’s hard to walk back. Something you said, which I want to highlight is that some of the work and some of the decisions around how to do the work become easier when you’re connected. I have a purpose statement, but it’s not just, “That’s my work,” but it’s also my kids, my family, how I show up for myself. I have a little workshop that I run with people. One of the things that inevitably happens is that there’s some decision that they’re struggling with, but when they have a, have the words or the name or the three values or whatever it is, it’s easier to say, “Let’s look at these decisions through that lens. I’m really connected to this.”
Beingness
This decision that felt hard before, what would the person who is living this purpose say at this moment? I love James Clear’s Atomic Habits. I love what he says about identity-based habits. It’s almost the same thing where you’re like, “Once I’ve decided the person that I’m going to be in my legacy and my future,” I’ll ask them, “What would you do in this situation?” They’re going to say, “The thing you’re thinking about doesn’t even matter. You should go do this.” You’re like, “It’s easy now.” Have you seen that also in your work?
Part of what we’re talking about is that we live in a culture, and this is white supremacy at work. This is capitalism at work, but patriarchy at work. We live in a culture that holds up the doing over the being. What we are relearning together and helping our clients to understand is that our beingness matters what do you, what do I mean by that? A state of being. It’s how you think and how you feel. It’s your overall well-being versus your health might be a state of the body, but your well-being and the well-being of the planet and your community is that state of being. When we allow ourselves to recognize that there’s more than the big lie that all there is the doing, and that the measuring of our success, the metrics should be all around the doing the outputs and the outcomes versus the larger, then there’s freedom suddenly to reimagine what success looks like.
It’s not just the results that you walked into a meeting trying to get, or that you are working on a political campaign. It’s that beingness. I talk about this a lot with clients, if you can stay true to what you set out as a goal for your being, the way you wanted to behave, your ground of being in the matter, if you can stay true to that, then there’s a win there for you. This was first articulated to me. I have to give some love and props to the Social Entrepreneurs Academy that I was a part of. The tagline is, “Stay true. Get paid. Do good.”
The master coach that I worked with was fantastic. This was part of the teaching that she offered to me that transformed my life and transformed the way that I ended up serving my clients as an organization called Move the Crowd. We’ll give some love to them. I was involved with them at the very beginning, a long time ago. Roa who was the woman who was my coach. She was the first person who helped me to create that distinction, but it’s a big part of the liberation that’s available in coaching.
I love that. It reminds me a little bit of the Ikigai Philosophy, that sweet spot of, “I object and reject this. Do what you love and it’ll all work out.” No, it’s find something that you love doing and that you’re good at and that you can get paid for, and that the world needs, if you can find that sweet spot. I have not studied the philosophy in any deep way. Maybe this is in there. I hear you adding this level of, and at the same time, do this in all the areas of your life. If you examine your life through that lens, or your being through that lens, but you said, “It landed for me. We put this doing above being.” I hope it’s obvious to the people who are reading. If it’s not, it’s this idea that like, things have to be productive meeting with this person saying, “I’ve got this time during the day and somebody needs it. I can do it so I will do it.”
I’m like, “You don’t maybe have that time during that day because maybe that time is reserved for your restoration because you’re at capacity and output but a the end of the day, you don’t have any down cycles.” My background is in computers. This is funny. We used to joke about it. In college, I was a computer assistant. People would call. We’d go to their rooms and try to figure out what was wrong with their computer. Many times we turn it off, let it rest for about 30 minutes, and then turn it back on. Even with these complex data purposes, these productive doing machines, they need to rest. It’s not humans. We all need a minute to restore our battery, to come back fresh and we’ll do better work for that.
I want to toss it into the mix. The client that I was with coaching before I came to you is on point with what was happening. The experiment that we created together was to take the approach to the places where he is putting into his schedule, things like his workout, his writing time, his time offline, hanging out with friends, or what have you, and apply the same principle that he would to somebody who was important unless it was a major emergency, he would never cancel on that person. What had happened was he was putting things into his schedule, but wherever he needed to push and make accommodations for others, he would cancel on himself. He was out of integrity, out of agreement with himself on such a regular basis that he felt like he was having a lived experience, that he wasn’t trustworthy.
That is such an important thing you said out of integrity and out of agreement with yourself I feel like this is something that, especially highly successful people, especially people who are in organizational movement work, will happen because we have these agreements, “I’m going to go work out. I’m going to go outside. I’m going to do this thing.” Those things get pushed aside for the work, for the doing. I feel like that’s such a beautiful way of putting that.
For some people, it’s hard to do that leveling up to being in that way with themselves. The game becomes, “Think of somebody who you would never cancel on unless it was urgent. When you book this for yourself with you imagine, and for the next week until I see you again, and we coach again, treat that meeting as if it’s a meeting with that other person. If you can’t pull it off and you still cancel, notice the dialogue. What was the argument that got you to give that time up over and over for yourself? That’s a good data point. Bring that back. Let’s coach around that inner conversation.” That’s part of what some of the work ends up being. I understand that for those of us who are in service, this is our growing edge.
All the things I’m saying need to be prefaced with mad love and respect for people, whether it’s moms, parents, teachers, caregivers, people who do social justice, transformational work, politicians, and civil servants. I have the deepest respect for people for whom this is a problem. Any bad habit left unchecked the ramifications of this on your wellness, not just the wellness of you in the workplace, your livelihood, and your community, but your inner wellness, your inner relationship to self will suffer. Noticing these things and being vigilant about interventions to address them are essential. I’m tipping my hat because I’ve been there. I know how hard that is. I think it’s something that’s habitual in those of us who imagine ourselves to be in service to a greater unfolding.
Heart’s Desire Matrix
That’s a beautiful way to bring this to a close. As a final thought, there is somebody out there who’s reading who maybe went, “Maybe that is me.” It feels hard to get off that. You’ve set a momentum. You’ve set a pace. You’ve committed to this schedule. You’ve maybe overcommitted or you’re at capacity. I think for a lot of people it can also feel like it’s a vicious cycle.
Once you see that maybe there’s a better way of doing things, you start to maybe judge yourself for not having done that for so long especially being middle age. I think I see this a lot where people are like, there’s a negative feeling that keeps them stuck because now we’re older and we’re learning about this stuff and we go, “I should have been doing this for the last 30 years and it feels too late.” It feels like, “I’m just going to push through. It’s 11:00. I’m going to go through until 2:00 because I’ve already screwed up.” What would you say to somebody who’s listening and maybe has heard a little bit of something for themselves in what you’ve said?
There’s something here about our own inner authority and the things that are the have-tos versus the get-tos or the want-tos. There’s an inventory to be done. I would start with people. Tracking your time is a good thing being able to understand like, how long does stuff take, particularly for me, as someone who is a solopreneur and somebody who is oftentimes a consultant. It’s important to have a sense of how long things take and how much time we want for things. I think that I would direct people toward a tool that I love and that I’ve been working with for many years with clients called the Heart’s Desire Matrix. It’s this tool where you get to look at the tasks and make a determination on a scale where one axis is, “I love it,” and the other is, “I’m good at it.”
To start to look at, “What are the things that I love and I’m good at? What are the things that I think I want to get better at, and I think I might love, I’m not sure, but I want to know for sure?” How do you start to have time and even move your tasks and professional responsibilities squarely over to that side of this XY axis? Imagine if you’ve got the four quadrants, you want to stay the heck away from neither, “Am I good at it, nor, “Do I love it.”
The most dangerous quadrant for me in the transformation that I’ve been making? Because people knew me as somebody who they could get to pitch their stories and do their media work, “I’m good at it, but I don’t love it anymore, or maybe I never did.” The freedom that comes from inventorying what’s on my calendar and what isn’t making it onto my calendar and how I feel about all of this, then we get to do the fun inner work with people as coaches of helping them get over whatever old beliefs or authority issues they’ve brought on themselves that have them thinking that they have to do a bunch of stuff that isn’t their heart’s desire. Where did that idea come from?
It’s, Khalil Braun who wrote the Prophet, I’m pretty sure he’s the person who said, “Work is love made visible.” You said a lot of things earlier. I want to go back and re-read this, all the different things where you talked about work and what if everything you were saying about work was now reimagined through this premise that if we decide to take on what he’s saying, that work is love made visible, then suddenly the way we think about all the stuff we’re doing could be different.
I’m the first one who could line up with a litany of systems in crises on planet Earth, and challenges that we all face the existential crises of our time. All of that to me would be even more evidence that we have to live our heart’s desire, more evidence that thinking about work as love made visible is the way that we’re going to feel the most rested, make the best decisions and level up in the ways that we want to. It’s almost like those are the lenses and we put those glasses on first and imagine, then you’ve got to talk yourself into the idea that that’s part of what is possible in your human condition. If you get there and then you see the world through those lenses, what happens to your calendar? What happens to your task list?
Thinking about work as love made visible can make us feel the most rested, allow us to make the best decisions, and level up in ways we want to.
Inquiry Of Love
There’s so much there. The thing that I’m taking away is the Heart’s Desire Matrix. I love that concept. It reminds me of some other things, but it’s totally its own thing, which I love about it. I haven’t heard of it, but this idea that you want to be in the quadrant of things you love and things that you’re good at. It’s dangerous. Especially in midlife, now we’re good at things and people want us to do them, but we might be ready to move on. Maybe that was in the upper quadrant before, but now it’s not that. That’s where I think coaches like you come in to reflect back and say, “Maybe you’ve grown, maybe you’re not there anymore and you need these other things.”
One of the things that I think I’m hearing in here that’s interesting is that if you’re talking about your matrix and you even said like, maybe there’s something that you want to try out and see if you can get better at it, see if it moves up in this direction. Similarly, this reminds me of The Passion Trap. I’m hoping that’s the name of her book. That’s the name of her TED Talk. This idea is that there might also be something that you are good at or capable of doing that maybe you could also find a way to love. Not that you have to keep going at it hard, but there’s maybe a mindset shift or a way of looking at it.
I see this with artists all the time where they just want to paint. They don’t want to do their day jobs. I had an artist that I was working with to shift her mindset about the intention and purpose of the work that she was doing. She does marketing and design work and was like, “I feel like I shouldn’t be doing this.” Once she shifted her mindset that this was serving her art, this was serving her creativity, this was serving her deeper purpose, it became much easier.
It’s not that, “This is my life’s work. I love in this way,” but there’s a way that she integrated it like we’re talking about so much is integrating the whole person so that they can live their purpose. I think we can acknowledge that not everyone has the privilege to go and do what they love forever. They may have to pay bills, do work, or pick up their kids or whatever it is. We can find these small ways of resing almost like what you were saying. Looking through a different lens to create a different connection to both work and play.
The two lenses maybe to leave people with is one that I needed for a lot of years for that I’m good at it, but I don’t love it anymore. Part of the Heart’s Desire Matrix was just because I can, it doesn’t mean I have to. That became a mantra for a while. One more is the fierce inquiry of love. Is there love here? Can there be love here? And what is here that’s unlike love? If I banish what is unlike love, is there something here still? A fierce inquiry about love and then the, “Just because I can, doesn’t mean I have to.”
For me, that combo platter was very helpful in making a pretty significant life shift, which, even though it’s all over my LinkedIn, I still get calls all the time. I love the idea of, “I hope someone gets a lot of media for the campaign they’re calling me about. I love what they’re doing, but I am not going to do that work. I refer out a lesser percentage than I used to, but where I’m going to is going to be to a time that when that it’s clear enough to me and I’ve said it enough from the shouted it from the mountaintops enough that when people call, they’re calling me for exactly the work that I want to be doing, not the work that used that I used to do.
Episode Wrap-up
I think I have to have you back to have a whole episode on that concept that when you’re going through transition, that’s one of the hardest things is people are still used to you as you were and getting to that place where people now see you the way that you see, because you knew where you were going, but it takes people out. I want to stop things here so that we don’t have a four-hour episode. I do want to have you back, we’ll talk about that after. In the meantime, if people got some inspiration if people are excited to work on some of this stuff with you, where can they find you?
It’s easy. Go to my website, CeliaAlario.com. If you scroll to the bottom and are interested in that Heart’s Desire Matrix, you can share your email and I’ll send you that. That’s one way to dive in to continue this inquiry. There’s both one-on-one coaching for health. One-on-one coaching for communication, and then a cohort academy that you can learn about there if you want to play with me and some other folks at this intersection that I was talking about. Thank you so much for this time and also for the folks that you’ve been bringing to our lives through the show. It’s a great array of people that you’re introducing us to it’s been great to be listening and have you in my earbuds when I’m out on the trails.
I appreciate that. I’m grateful for you being here. I’m a huge fan of the work you do in the world. I think it’s important, not just the work that you do, but also the kinds of people that you’re doing it with. We have multiple existential crises going on in the world right now, and sometimes the work we have to do is getting back to being human. I see that you doing that out in the world. Thank you so much for your time and your wisdom.
Thanks. This has been a pleasure.
Thanks for reading the episode. I’m going a little bit off the cuff, but I do want to make sure that I thank a few people, including Podetize who does our video editing, and audio editing, and make sure that these podcasts get out on time. You would not be listening to this if it weren’t for them. I want to acknowledge and appreciate them and my virtual assistant who helps me schedule all these things and get all these people on. I would want to acknowledge the team that helps make these possible. Thank you for reading and for making this possible. When you read, share it with your friends, like it, subscribe, and when you do all those things, it does make a difference. It helps us at least keep going. It helps our emotional well-being. Keep doing what you’re doing. I will see you next time.
Important Links
- Celia Alario
- Atomic Habits
- The Passion Trap
- https://www.Instagram.com/CeliaAlario
- https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/CeliaAlario
About Celia Alario
I’m a transformational coach supporting clients in experiencing greater vitality, joy and authentic expression. I help social impact change agents and do-gooders maintain balance and optimal well-being, even while speaking truth to power and deepening their thought leadership.
I’m committed to walking alongside clients who work for planetary health, justice, peace and a livable future as they dial in the being and doing skills to thrive across all dimensions of wellness. I believe that beloved community is a core pillar of well-being, along with food, mood, movement and rest, and I’m here to help clients strengthen that foundation. I come to coaching after more than two decades in fast-paced social impact and climate justice media, marketing and public relations consulting work.
My own health journey includes recovering from activist burnout, and managing complex post viral chronic autoimmune conditions, all through the fun of menopause. I love hula hooping, rock climbing, recharging in wild places, snuggling my dog and watching clients get amazing results!
