130. Pep Talk: Give Yourself What You Need
Have you been ignoring your own needs while taking care of everyone else's? In this special pep talk episode, I explore the powerful practice of identifying what you truly need and then giving it to yourself. Whether it's physical rest, emotional support, or simply permission to want what you want, learning to honor your own signals can transform how you show up in your business and life.
I share my recent experience of getting sick after spring break and how I had to adjust my expectations, workouts, and schedule to give myself what I needed during recovery. This practice isn't about selfishness—it's about awareness, acceptance, and generosity toward yourself, which ultimately benefits everything you do.
The inspiration for this episode came from a listener who shared her beautiful practice of apologizing to herself for the ways she'd been unkind to her own spirit. I explore how we can all become more attuned to our needs, whether they're big or small, internal or external, and how giving ourselves what we need builds our internal resources and supports our goals rather than detracting from them.
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What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
How to recognize the three key components of giving yourself what you need: awareness, acceptance, and generosity.
Why we often become immune to our body's signals and how to start noticing them again.
How to practice giving yourself what you need in small, daily ways that don't require much time.
Ways to identify when you need less of something rather than more of something.
The difference between needs and wants, and why you deserve to honor both.
How building this practice strengthens your internal resources and improves how you show up in your business.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Hey designer, you're listening to episode 130. This is a short pep talk episode about giving yourself what you need. Maybe it's more of something, maybe it's less of something, maybe it's something you need to ask of another person, or maybe it's something internal you give yourself. We'll dive into what exactly this means for you, how you might be missing your own signals, and I'll be sharing examples from my own life as well as from the podcast listener who inspired this episode.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place.
I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello designer, welcome back to the podcast. I'm excited to record this one. It is a pep talk. I haven't done one in a really long time, and it was inspired by a podcast listener who emailed me a while ago sharing this insight that she had had while she was going about her day. And as I read that email, what really came through for me was learning to know what you need to support yourself as the CEO and also as the human behind the business, and then giving it to yourself and the profound impact that can have on your well-being and of course, how you show up in your business and in the world.
This week in particular felt like the perfect time to bring you this topic. I think I mentioned this at the intro to last week's episode, and I have just been kind of dragging. At the end of our spring break trip, although it was amazing, I did get sick, and the entire week was just not myself. And I'm still, you know, feel like I'm cresting over it, but there's still these like lingering pieces of it. And last week, I just could really notice diving back into work, like my focus, my energy, it was just not at the usual level.
And I really had to lean into this practice of giving myself what I needed, meeting myself where I was, and then of course, balancing that with my commitments and the things that I wanted to move forward that week. And in giving myself what I needed, I was still able to accomplish, not all, but most of what I really truly needed to do, and then let go of some things that were things that I wanted to do, but not absolutely necessary.
And as we go through this episode, I'll share some more examples from my own personal life, as well as share that example provided by the listener. When I consider the concept of giving yourself what you need, I really see it as a practice, meaning it evolves with you. And it falls into three categories: awareness, acceptance, and generosity.
Of course, first you just need to know what it is that you need. That is an awareness practice in and of itself. So much of what I teach comes back to awareness because once we understand ourselves, the, you know, the limiting beliefs, the goals that we want, how we want to run our business, becomes so much more clear. And so this is just another awareness practice.
We also have to lean into acceptance because sometimes we don't like the answer to what it is that we need. So, allowing what we need to be as it is. And then generosity, because in asking ourselves, what do I need? It's an act of giving. And most of us are not practiced at giving to ourselves. We're very practiced at giving to others, but then we give the leftovers to ourselves or don't give anything at all.
And one of the things that I have noticed consistently, and certainly I noticed this looking back at past versions of myself and now clients that I work with, it's so easy to become immune to the numerous signals our body sends. Whether that's through physical sensations, like we need sleep, we need food, we need movement, or the sensations and the vibrations that clue us into our own internal emotional world. Those pings that we feel in our body or the tightness that indicates, hey, there's an emotional thing going on that I need to pay attention to.
And throughout our busy lives and the pace at which we all tend to move, it's easy to stop paying attention. It's easy to not even notice yourself. And then there's the case too, of as we build this awareness of what is happening for us, sometimes we're noticing those signals, but we choose to ignore them. And that might be because you haven't learned it's okay to give yourself what you need, that you haven't learned to believe or had the opportunity to experience the evidence of you giving yourself what you need is actually beneficial, not to the detriment of your goals, to other people, whatever it may be, right? You have to believe that you have the time and resources to give yourself what you need and that there will be a benefit to that.
And as I mentioned before, often we're taught that others' needs always should come before ours. And so we're checking in with everyone else's needs or signals, except our own. By checking in with ourselves throughout the day, at the start of the week, at the end of the week, whenever it is, by asking, what is it that I need? We begin to know and understand ourselves and these signals. And we show ourselves that it's safe and necessary and beneficial to honor those signals.
For me last week, the answer to this question of, what is it that I need, was very much physical. I needed to reduce the intensity of my workouts. I needed my husband to handle a very drawn-out bedtime so that I could get myself to sleep earlier than normal. I needed to chunk my work in a different way to adjust for that kind of foggy feeling I was experiencing. And of course, I experienced some resistance to those answers of, what is it that I need here?
And I also knew that trying to force through in the way that I would normally operate, which doesn't feel like a force, but just kind of the way that I typically run my week, it was not going to work for me. And so I needed to make a change. So those are some examples of physical changes of what I needed. Sometimes it's an emotional need. And this was what the podcast listener that I mentioned wrote in about. One of the things that they shared was, was this great insight of when someone's mean to us, we demand an apology and rightfully so.
But in my experience, so much of our unhappiness is a result, not of other people being mean to us, but of us being mean to ourselves. And so she offered herself an apology. She was righting kind of the emotional wrong. And she gave me all these beautiful examples. I'll share just a few of them. She said, "I'm sorry I've expected you to be perfect instead of human." "I'm sorry I blamed you for something that wasn't your fault." "I'm sorry I called you stupid because you made a mistake and didn't magically know something you hadn't yet had the opportunity to learn."
So there was a hurt that was the emotional need, and she answered that through apology. And you know, she said that after doing this, it felt so freeing. And I know a lot of times when I offer this question of, what is it that you need? The resistance or objection comes to time. But things like this don't even really take time. This can just happen while you're driving in the car. So I really want you to start asking yourself, what is it that I need? And how could I give that to myself?
When you answer that question, how could I give this to myself? We have to lead with the belief that it is possible. That's going to help us open up to creative ideas, to ways that we could give ourselves what we need, maybe not the exact way that we originally thought, but in some other way that maybe is even better. So lead with the belief that it's possible to give yourself what you want, that you can benefit from this, that it is not going to take from you or the business and play with this.
I was thinking of other examples too of what could be the question of, what do I need right now? It doesn't have to be a huge, huge response of like, I need a vacation to Hawaii. And maybe that is what you need. But I want you to think about how do I honor this on a day-to-day basis, too? And of course, giving yourself plenty of water. That could be one. Or a latte from your favorite cafe. I know last week I let myself just have more coffee because I needed it. Maybe it's to rest. Maybe you sit down for a few minutes. Or maybe it's really just you want to get that thing done and so you just do it.
Maybe you need a hug from your kid or a snuggle from your pet or a walk around the block. Or maybe it's listening to some Taylor Swift instead of another business podcast. Also, that was me last week. Maybe it was praise. Did you know that you can tell yourself good job? Tell yourself, thank you for doing that. That was amazing. That was hard. And you know what? You did it. Good job.
Maybe what you need is care and understanding from yourself, from other people. Saying even just to yourself, like, yes, this feels hard right now and I've got this. Maybe it is that you just need to stop kicking the can down the road and make a decision so you can get rid of that mental load. Maybe it's getting some additional support, hiring someone in your business, or even in your home. Giving yourself what you need can be big, it can be small, it can be internal, it can be external.
Start to notice what it is that you need and practice giving it to yourself. And just to be clear too, it's not always that you need more of something either. Sometimes it's that you need less. For me, that was less social media. It was, I don't know, maybe about a month ago or something, I got a new phone. And you know when you get a new phone, all of your apps get signed out of. And I thought, you know what? I've been kind of thinking about like, do I want to be on Instagram as much as I am? And even that wasn't that much, but it still just kind of felt like too much. So I just decided I'm not going to sign into Instagram on my phone anymore. And I'm only going to sign into it when I need to check something or want to help share something or there's a specific reason I'm going on there.
And sometimes that specific reason is entertainment. So that's fine too. But that was just giving myself something I needed, and it was really simple. Maybe it's less second-guessing for yourself, which drains your time and energy. So this is just another way to look at this question of, what do I need less of? How could that fulfill a need?
And in this pep talk, I've been talking about it from this angle of, what do I need, but you could easily swap that for, what do I want? And practice giving that to yourself as well. Because you don't have to wait until it's a need. You could just want it and give it to yourself, and give yourself permission to want what you want. And if you like that idea of permission slips and you want to work on that, check out episode 61, Write Your Own Permission Slip.
As you give this a go, try it out throughout the day. Maybe set a reminder on your phone. You could put a post-it on your computer. Your needs are going to change, even hour to hour. So just keep asking yourself, what is it that I need? How could I give myself that? Make a practice of checking in and seeing what you hear. Practice giving yourself what you need. It feels good and builds your internal resources too, so that you can be the person that you want to be and show up in the world, in your community, in your business, in a way that really is supportive of you and supports your goals.
I'm excited to hear about what you think about this topic, the ways that you test it out on yourself, what you hear, what you find, what happens when you give yourself what you need. Next week, I'll be back with a brand new episode. And if you're like the listener who emailed me, maybe you have a question or a topic you'd love me to cover, or you want to tell me the results of putting into practice today's episode, you can always feel free to send me a message. You can reply to one of my emails. You can send me a DM on Instagram. I still do check it, even though it's not on my phone.
And you can also leave a review. That's like a double whammy. I get to hear from you, and it helps the podcast grow and get in front of new designers. Whatever way you do it, I do want you to know I love hearing from you. It is one of the things that inspires me to keep going with this podcast. The listener who wrote in with this example that prompted this episode, she said in her email, she's like, I don't know, I don't want this to be weird, but I'm just going to send this. And I thought, yeah, probably some of you think that too. So just know, I do really enjoy communicating with you and hearing what you're taking away from this podcast. All right. Until we talk next Wednesday, I am wishing you a beautiful week.
Thanks for joining me for this week's episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit DesiCreswell.com, where you’ll get immediate access to a variety of free resources to help you take what you learn on the podcast and put it into action. And if you love what you’re hearing, be sure to rate, review, and follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I’ll talk to you next week.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place.
I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello designer, welcome back to the podcast. I'm excited to record this one. It is a pep talk. I haven't done one in a really long time, and it was inspired by a podcast listener who emailed me a while ago sharing this insight that she had had while she was going about her day. And as I read that email, what really came through for me was learning to know what you need to support yourself as the CEO and also as the human behind the business, and then giving it to yourself and the profound impact that can have on your well-being and of course, how you show up in your business and in the world.
This week in particular felt like the perfect time to bring you this topic. I think I mentioned this at the intro to last week's episode, and I have just been kind of dragging. At the end of our spring break trip, although it was amazing, I did get sick, and the entire week was just not myself. And I'm still, you know, feel like I'm cresting over it, but there's still these like lingering pieces of it. And last week, I just could really notice diving back into work, like my focus, my energy, it was just not at the usual level.
And I really had to lean into this practice of giving myself what I needed, meeting myself where I was, and then of course, balancing that with my commitments and the things that I wanted to move forward that week. And in giving myself what I needed, I was still able to accomplish, not all, but most of what I really truly needed to do, and then let go of some things that were things that I wanted to do, but not absolutely necessary.
And as we go through this episode, I'll share some more examples from my own personal life, as well as share that example provided by the listener. When I consider the concept of giving yourself what you need, I really see it as a practice, meaning it evolves with you. And it falls into three categories: awareness, acceptance, and generosity.
Of course, first you just need to know what it is that you need. That is an awareness practice in and of itself. So much of what I teach comes back to awareness because once we understand ourselves, the, you know, the limiting beliefs, the goals that we want, how we want to run our business, becomes so much more clear. And so this is just another awareness practice.
We also have to lean into acceptance because sometimes we don't like the answer to what it is that we need. So, allowing what we need to be as it is. And then generosity, because in asking ourselves, what do I need? It's an act of giving. And most of us are not practiced at giving to ourselves. We're very practiced at giving to others, but then we give the leftovers to ourselves or don't give anything at all.
And one of the things that I have noticed consistently, and certainly I noticed this looking back at past versions of myself and now clients that I work with, it's so easy to become immune to the numerous signals our body sends. Whether that's through physical sensations, like we need sleep, we need food, we need movement, or the sensations and the vibrations that clue us into our own internal emotional world. Those pings that we feel in our body or the tightness that indicates, hey, there's an emotional thing going on that I need to pay attention to.
And throughout our busy lives and the pace at which we all tend to move, it's easy to stop paying attention. It's easy to not even notice yourself. And then there's the case too, of as we build this awareness of what is happening for us, sometimes we're noticing those signals, but we choose to ignore them. And that might be because you haven't learned it's okay to give yourself what you need, that you haven't learned to believe or had the opportunity to experience the evidence of you giving yourself what you need is actually beneficial, not to the detriment of your goals, to other people, whatever it may be, right? You have to believe that you have the time and resources to give yourself what you need and that there will be a benefit to that.
And as I mentioned before, often we're taught that others' needs always should come before ours. And so we're checking in with everyone else's needs or signals, except our own. By checking in with ourselves throughout the day, at the start of the week, at the end of the week, whenever it is, by asking, what is it that I need? We begin to know and understand ourselves and these signals. And we show ourselves that it's safe and necessary and beneficial to honor those signals.
For me last week, the answer to this question of, what is it that I need, was very much physical. I needed to reduce the intensity of my workouts. I needed my husband to handle a very drawn-out bedtime so that I could get myself to sleep earlier than normal. I needed to chunk my work in a different way to adjust for that kind of foggy feeling I was experiencing. And of course, I experienced some resistance to those answers of, what is it that I need here?
And I also knew that trying to force through in the way that I would normally operate, which doesn't feel like a force, but just kind of the way that I typically run my week, it was not going to work for me. And so I needed to make a change. So those are some examples of physical changes of what I needed. Sometimes it's an emotional need. And this was what the podcast listener that I mentioned wrote in about. One of the things that they shared was, was this great insight of when someone's mean to us, we demand an apology and rightfully so.
But in my experience, so much of our unhappiness is a result, not of other people being mean to us, but of us being mean to ourselves. And so she offered herself an apology. She was righting kind of the emotional wrong. And she gave me all these beautiful examples. I'll share just a few of them. She said, "I'm sorry I've expected you to be perfect instead of human." "I'm sorry I blamed you for something that wasn't your fault." "I'm sorry I called you stupid because you made a mistake and didn't magically know something you hadn't yet had the opportunity to learn."
So there was a hurt that was the emotional need, and she answered that through apology. And you know, she said that after doing this, it felt so freeing. And I know a lot of times when I offer this question of, what is it that you need? The resistance or objection comes to time. But things like this don't even really take time. This can just happen while you're driving in the car. So I really want you to start asking yourself, what is it that I need? And how could I give that to myself?
When you answer that question, how could I give this to myself? We have to lead with the belief that it is possible. That's going to help us open up to creative ideas, to ways that we could give ourselves what we need, maybe not the exact way that we originally thought, but in some other way that maybe is even better. So lead with the belief that it's possible to give yourself what you want, that you can benefit from this, that it is not going to take from you or the business and play with this.
I was thinking of other examples too of what could be the question of, what do I need right now? It doesn't have to be a huge, huge response of like, I need a vacation to Hawaii. And maybe that is what you need. But I want you to think about how do I honor this on a day-to-day basis, too? And of course, giving yourself plenty of water. That could be one. Or a latte from your favorite cafe. I know last week I let myself just have more coffee because I needed it. Maybe it's to rest. Maybe you sit down for a few minutes. Or maybe it's really just you want to get that thing done and so you just do it.
Maybe you need a hug from your kid or a snuggle from your pet or a walk around the block. Or maybe it's listening to some Taylor Swift instead of another business podcast. Also, that was me last week. Maybe it was praise. Did you know that you can tell yourself good job? Tell yourself, thank you for doing that. That was amazing. That was hard. And you know what? You did it. Good job.
Maybe what you need is care and understanding from yourself, from other people. Saying even just to yourself, like, yes, this feels hard right now and I've got this. Maybe it is that you just need to stop kicking the can down the road and make a decision so you can get rid of that mental load. Maybe it's getting some additional support, hiring someone in your business, or even in your home. Giving yourself what you need can be big, it can be small, it can be internal, it can be external.
Start to notice what it is that you need and practice giving it to yourself. And just to be clear too, it's not always that you need more of something either. Sometimes it's that you need less. For me, that was less social media. It was, I don't know, maybe about a month ago or something, I got a new phone. And you know when you get a new phone, all of your apps get signed out of. And I thought, you know what? I've been kind of thinking about like, do I want to be on Instagram as much as I am? And even that wasn't that much, but it still just kind of felt like too much. So I just decided I'm not going to sign into Instagram on my phone anymore. And I'm only going to sign into it when I need to check something or want to help share something or there's a specific reason I'm going on there.
And sometimes that specific reason is entertainment. So that's fine too. But that was just giving myself something I needed, and it was really simple. Maybe it's less second-guessing for yourself, which drains your time and energy. So this is just another way to look at this question of, what do I need less of? How could that fulfill a need?
And in this pep talk, I've been talking about it from this angle of, what do I need, but you could easily swap that for, what do I want? And practice giving that to yourself as well. Because you don't have to wait until it's a need. You could just want it and give it to yourself, and give yourself permission to want what you want. And if you like that idea of permission slips and you want to work on that, check out episode 61, Write Your Own Permission Slip.
As you give this a go, try it out throughout the day. Maybe set a reminder on your phone. You could put a post-it on your computer. Your needs are going to change, even hour to hour. So just keep asking yourself, what is it that I need? How could I give myself that? Make a practice of checking in and seeing what you hear. Practice giving yourself what you need. It feels good and builds your internal resources too, so that you can be the person that you want to be and show up in the world, in your community, in your business, in a way that really is supportive of you and supports your goals.
I'm excited to hear about what you think about this topic, the ways that you test it out on yourself, what you hear, what you find, what happens when you give yourself what you need. Next week, I'll be back with a brand new episode. And if you're like the listener who emailed me, maybe you have a question or a topic you'd love me to cover, or you want to tell me the results of putting into practice today's episode, you can always feel free to send me a message. You can reply to one of my emails. You can send me a DM on Instagram. I still do check it, even though it's not on my phone.
And you can also leave a review. That's like a double whammy. I get to hear from you, and it helps the podcast grow and get in front of new designers. Whatever way you do it, I do want you to know I love hearing from you. It is one of the things that inspires me to keep going with this podcast. The listener who wrote in with this example that prompted this episode, she said in her email, she's like, I don't know, I don't want this to be weird, but I'm just going to send this. And I thought, yeah, probably some of you think that too. So just know, I do really enjoy communicating with you and hearing what you're taking away from this podcast. All right. Until we talk next Wednesday, I am wishing you a beautiful week.
Thanks for joining me for this week's episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit DesiCreswell.com, where you’ll get immediate access to a variety of free resources to help you take what you learn on the podcast and put it into action. And if you love what you’re hearing, be sure to rate, review, and follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I’ll talk to you next week.
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