Episode 196: Are You a Lazy Overachiever? with Naketa Ren Thigpen
When was the last time we allowed ourselves to imagine life bigger, more beautiful? Bigger doesn’t mean more material. Bigger does it mean more Instagram followers. Bigger means as big and as bold and as beautiful as you need to feel peace.
Naketa Ren Thigpen is a relationship and balance advisor. This is an extraordinary woman who teaches how to be intentional, how to pay attention to which emotions are pulling at you, and how you might be able to release and expand. Her clients all honor the need to rest and recharge with room for relationship bliss just as much as the desire to dominate in their respective fields.
Finding balance as a lazy overachiever
Asking for it all might mean asking you to be a little lazy. It’s really the hardest thing for ambitious people to do – being still. But Naketa shares with us how carving out that space, being intentionally selfish and divorcing yourself from what doesn’t serve you can make you whole.
Intentional selfishness
The people Naketa wants to work with are those who recognize there’s a gap – or chasm – between the good and bliss in their life. She wants people to leave imprints on people that comes from wholeness, not generational curses. People can impact others with their trauma just as easily as their love.
“I mean being with yourself, looking at yourself in the mirror, the quiet that you're talking about, to feel all the mess, all the ugly, the tears, the awkward smiling that we do,” says Naketa.
“Drama lives in the body, but so does your joy, and if you're willing to get in touch, whatever awkward way that might be for you, for some it's a religion and some it's just a touch of sitting and hearing and feeling your heartbeat.”
Being intentionally selfish is giving yourself the space for that intimacy with yourself; it's giving yourself permission to "be lazy" and pause.
Adaptability is skill we have to drop sometimes
Old wounds tend to come up as we look to expand. There’s a deeper understanding in that when a child’s sense of safety and self are threatened or shattered at that young age it leads to this ability to be adaptable.
While it’s a useful tool to have, there comes a time when we need to figure out how to put it down because we don’t have to be adaptable in every situation.
Naketa says it is a gift to understand when and when not to be agile, when and when not to expand your boundary, and to hold more space for people who have earned it versus people who feel entitled to it because they’ve known you for so long, or you went to school together for example.
The cure to shame is vulnerability. The way that you get to grow through the pain that has tortured you and sent it with all the lava inside and burn your relationships and your possibilities is cured when you are vulnerable.
It’s going to be very messy to get to the root of what has really been impacting your life, your business, because it's going all the way through those early scripts which weren't actually created by you. They were created by the people around your parents, whoever your guardians were, and you absorbed them as a child.
Journey to healing
Naketa is a forever learner. With 12 years of her business to celebrate, she maintains licenses and credentials ranging from social work, and sexologist to psychotherapist. Prior to that, she worked in the emergency room specifically in trauma, sexual assault response, and bereavement – the list goes on. To say she wears a lot of hats is an understatement.
At her core, she really wanted to understand why humans do humans things. She needed clarity on why people are so prone to self-sabotage and pass on that sabotage through hurt to others.
“I grew up in a house of disfunction, of sexual abuse, violence, emotional abuse, verbal abuse, you. I did not wake up to affirmations of ‘you're the best, you're the greatest. This is what you can do.’ I woke up to my step-grandfather throwing my grandmother across the room. That was our alarm in the morning. So, you can imagine my nervous system was frayed as a child and I hid behind people pleasing and trying to fix it,” says Naketa.
She says she had all of the layers of everything broken you saw in all the movies that made you cry, except she didn't cry. She learned to compartmentalize. She could go into emergency rooms and sit on the floor with people who had been severely assaulted, and her heart could be so big with them because she understood but acknowledges she hadn't processed her pain.
She had love from women in her life, like her mother-in-law, who gave her a safe space to share experiences.
“When I decided to do be brave enough to do my own work … it was scary. It looked like three years of multi-week therapy and spiritual counselling,” says Naketa.
Divorcing yourself
Our parents and the people in our lives gave us their expectations; they poured their fears and projected on us. And at some point, all of that became ours. Their dream became either our bondage or it also became our dream. But where were we in the imagination?
There is a part of you that is completely unkind to yourself because you're not the version you planned to be, because life was life. Learning to pick out what’s yours and what is no longer serving you is powerful.
Get rid of expired expectations. Recognize that that’s not you. Divorce yourself from that.
Mentioned in this episode
Selfish: Permission to Pause, Live, Love and Laugh Your Way to Joy, by Naketa Ren Thigpen
