Pressing Pause Podcast episode 51 The podcast returns! Where I’ve been and what’s happening next

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Welcome to Pressing Pause, the podcast for overthinkers, brought to you by The Calm Mind Club where overthinkers can find calm, confidence and community.

I’m Gabrielle Treanor and I share ideas, inspiration and actions to empower you to worry less and enjoy life more.

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Hello and welcome to episode 51! It’s been a while but finally the podcast is back. And, as you may have noticed from the tweaked intro there have been a few changes since I last shared an episode. I’ll explain more in a moment.

First of all I want to say thank you for coming back. If you’re listening to this it means that you haven’t deleted Pressing Pause out of your life and you’re giving my first new episode in months a go and for that I am very grateful.

So, when I posted episode 50 on the 3rd April I announced the podcast was taking a break. In fact, that episode is all about how you can press pause in your own life and how you can benefit from doing so. I was feeling a bit worn out by the podcast schedule, which was my own devising, and I had a lot coming up in the next few weeks so I wasn’t sure how long I wanted to take a break for, just that I needed to. 

I certainly had no idea it would be nearly four months until I recorded a new episode! 

So I thought it would be an idea to share with you in this episode what I’ve been up to since you last heard from me, what overthinking challenges it’s brought up and what the plan is for Pressing Pause going forwards. Because it involves you! But more on that later.

One of the reasons I took a year to go from the idea of making a podcast to actually recording the first episode and putting it out there was my fear of committing to a posting schedule. I felt that once I started I needed to be consistent, to show up with a new episode every week, to make each episode the best possible and that I couldn’t deviate from this plan or take a break for several months. Because doing so would be flaky, it would show me to be unreliable and I’d be letting you down which is the absolute last thing I want to do.

So when I launched this podcast in March 2018 I was all in. I had planned and organised and I was committed and it was great! I was glad I had waited until it felt right. After 22 episodes I paused the podcast for a month and then dived back in, taking a break over Christmas and the new year but otherwise planning, writing, recording, editing, posting and sharing a new episode every week until I reached 50 episodes and passed the podcast’s first birthday. 

By that time I was feeling pretty worn out by the weekly episode schedule that I had created for myself. I wanted to keep sharing helpful ideas, tools and strategies to deal with your overthinking and I know you get benefit from these episodes because you very kindly tell me. But the time and brain power it takes to make these episodes – I know they’re only ten minutes or less and it’s just me talking but, believe me, I don’t just sit here and say whatever comes into my head! Several hours of research and writing goes into each episode as well as the recording, editing and getting it online. I’d love to have someone to help me with the post-recording part one day but for now it’s just me. 

But anyway, I was feeling under pressure because I was creating my biggest, most in-depth, most comprehensive course yet, called Worry Less for Life, and it was taking lots of time, energy and brain power. Plus I had my coaching clients, freelance writing assignments and various other work that needed my attention too. I didn’t want to become sporadic in posting episodes because that felt like it would be confusing for you.  

I realised that I’d been telling myself a story that I had to stick to the plan, that you’d all think me terrible if I changed it and that I’d ruin everything if I did. But that’s all it was, a story. I created the podcast, I decided the posting schedule and I could make changes if I chose to. I was in charge of what I did and how I felt, I had choices and I was the only one who could give me permission to switch up how I did things.

So, the best idea seemed to be to take a break and to pick it up again when things felt calmer.

Aha, that old chestnut, waiting for when the time is right, the planets are aligned and life is magically calm!

So of course it wasn’t a matter of just creating my three-month flagship course I had my lovely participants to take through the course! Which was brilliant, by the way and I’m getting excited at the thought of running it again in the near future.

As well as the course I also ran some in-person workshops and my first online workshop. That was fun too and I’ll definitely be doing that again. I’ve been working 1:1 with coaching clients which may be my most favourite thing of all because of the transformation you get to witness as you see someone move from feeling stuck, uncertain, lacking in confidence to feeling stronger, empowered and more confident to be who they want to be in the world. 

I joined in the 100dayproject on Instagram where I posted every single day for 100 days, it’s a long time, with my hashtag 100 reflections from my future self. And I wrote and read and talked and saw friends and family and did other life stuff too.

Every so often I wondered when I would get back onto the podcast, whether anyone would come back to listen to it. But when those thoughts felt like pressure, when I could hear myself thinking I ‘should’ get working on the podcast, I knew it wasn’t the right time. I didn’t want to record episodes out of obligation and you wouldn’t want to hear them because I doubt they’d be very useful! 

And besides, there was one other project that I was really excited about, took up lots of my attention, and I knew before I did anything else I needed to make it happen. You may have spotted it in my new podcast intro, it’s the creation of The Calm Mind Club. 

Again, I had the idea for this long ago and kept mulling it over until I realised that I wanted to bring it to life and this was the time to do it. I had imagined creating a Club, not one of those cliquey, scary, intimidating clubs that I was never allowed in, but instead a Club that felt warm and inviting and safe and cosy and welcoming. The kind of virtual online Club where you could metaphorically curl up on a couch with a cuppa and feel right at home. 

I wanted it to be a place where there were no deadlines or end date, a place where I could share my knowledge and experience to help you deal with your overthinking on an ongoing basis. A safe, supportive space where you can take in information in a way that works for you whether it’s by listening, reading or watching, with workbooks, downloads, resources and practical exercises. 

A place where we can have live sessions to talk through the topic of that month and what’s coming up for you, where I can invite in super knowledgeable people to share their expertise with us to broaden the range of tools we have to care for our mental wellbeing. 

An online space where you can get access to my courses for free or at a huge discount because you’re a member. And I wanted it to be a Club with a community of people who know what it’s like to be an overthinker, who can empathise and support and cheer you on because they really get how you feel. 

So that’s what I’ve been spending a big chunk of my time and energy on these past few months – creating The Calm Mind Club. The doors only opened at the start of July so it’s still pretty new but it is already shaping up to be everything that I imagined and hoped it would be. 

Everything that happens in the Club stays in the site forever so when you join you get access to everything that’s gone before as well as all the good stuff to come of course. I’m in the Community every day and it is a great way to get access to me and everything I have to support you in dealing with your overthinking so that you can feel calmer, more confident and better able to not only cope with life but to really enjoy each day too.

So if you want to find out more about The Calm Mind Club you can simply go to thecalmmindclub.com. I’ll put the link in the show notes for this episode too.

So now let me tell you about my plans for this Pressing Pause podcast going forward. I’m ready and wanting to give it my energy and get recording. 

Now, how it worked for the past 50 episodes was that I thought of a topic, researched, wrote and talked about it. I want to do things differently now. To be absolutely sure that I’m focusing on what is of most importance to you, what is of most benefit to you, I want you to tell me what to talk about in these episodes. So I want you to send me your questions for me to answer on this podcast. 

Whatever your question is, I want to hear it. Perhaps it’s that any time you go to an event you feel incredibly nervous about what everyone is thinking of you, what you’re wearing, what you’re saying, how you’re walking, all of it and you want to know how to stop worrying about what everyone else in the room is thinking of you.

Or maybe you applied for a new job but you didn’t get it and you keep replaying the interview in your head, wondering what you did wrong, what you should have said or done differently, how much better everything would be now if you’d got the job and you want to know how to get past this and move on.

These are just a couple of examples, I want to hear your real questions. The challenges that you’re dealing with that you’d like my thoughts on. You can email me [email protected] or message me on Instagram where I’m @gabrielletreanor. And if you’d like your question to be anonymous just let me know and I’ll keep your name out of the episode. 

And, learning from the first year of this podcast I’m going to be less strict with my posting schedule. My plan is to post an episode every other Wednesday so they’re fortnightly rather than weekly. But, if for some reason I feel moved to share more or less frequently I will endeavour to allow myself to do that. I know that I won’t break the podcast by not being perfectly consistent and it’s quality not quantity that counts! If you subscribe to Pressing Pause on a podcast app like Apple Podcasts or Stitcher or Podbean it will let you know when there’s a new episode.

So, thank you so very much for coming back to Pressing Pause after the extended break, I really do appreciate you taking this time to listen and I really do want to know what you want me to talk about in future episodes so please send me your questions. 

And, as I mentioned before, if you want to find out more about The Calm Mind Club and see if it feels like the kind of online space you’d like to be a part of, go to thecalmmindclub.com. 

You can find the show notes for this and all episodes at gabrielletreanor.com/podcast along with lots of other resources and information on my courses and 1:1 coaching at gabrielletreanor.com. 

I’ll be back, I promise, in two weeks’ time!

Thanks for listening, until next time, lovely people.

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