EP 100: Celebrating 100 Episodes: Behind the Scenes of the Unburdened Leader

Have you ever done something steadily, week in and week out, for a period of time?

What did you learn about yourself and the world around you in the process? Was there anything that came up that surprised you?

Putting in consistent reps and hundreds of hours towards something inevitably shapes and changes you, and producing this show has been no different for me.

Today I’m celebrating the 100th episode of The Unburdened Leader by sharing some behind-the-scenes stories, learnings, and reflections from starting a podcast in a pandemic to the pillars and themes of the show that have stood out over time.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

How unburdened leaders shape healing and growth through vulnerability and a willingness to be uncomfortable
How wrestling with perfectionism in the beginning has eased into taking actual pleasure in the process of working on the show
The positive impact of finding certainty anchors in the rhythms of production
How good questions beget good questions, and how that guides who I want to have on the show

Learn more about Rebecca:

Resources:

Transcript:

Rebecca Ching: Have you ever done something steadily, week in and week out over time? How has putting in consistent reps and hundreds of hours towards something shaped you and changed you? What did you learn about yourself and the world around you? What surprised you in the process?

I am so excited to share that today marks a special milestone for The Unburdened Leader as we celebrate producing 100 episodes! Thank you for listening to this podcast. I know you have so many choices on how to spend your time and what to give your attention to. It truly means a lot. Today, I’m gonna share some behind-the-scenes stories, learnings, and reflections as I explore how putting in the reps to make this podcast shaped and changed me.

[Inspirational Music]

I’m Rebecca Ching, and you’re listening to The Unburdened Leader, the show that goes deep with humans who navigate life’s challenges and lead in their own ways. Our goal is to learn how they address the burdens they carry, how they learn from them and become better and more impactful leaders of themselves and others.

[Inspirational Music]

Hello, hello! Thank you so much for listening today! This is a special episode as I mark the 100th episode of The Unburdened Leader! [Crowd Cheering] Thank you so much to all who listen to this show and a special shoutout to those of you who’ve been with me from the beginning. Along with my producers at Yellow House Media, your patience, support, and enthusiasm for this show continue to help me be a better writer, a better human, a better manager of my time, and improve how I approach interviews, and ask questions so my guests can shine, and listeners can meaningfully connect with their incredible hearts and stories of unburdened leadership from their lived experiences.

2:04

Now, [Laughs] this milestone moment felt so far away when planning this podcast with my producers in October of 2019. Little did I know I would be dropping the trailer for my podcast when the world was shutting down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I recorded my first few dozen interviews with my whole family around me, schooling and working from home. [Laughs] Looking back, I shake my head and wonder what I was thinking. You know, the dogs were always barking and no doubt, you’ve heard them on the podcast. Days and nights rolled into each other during those initial months while we tried to make sense of all that’s happening in our lives and the world, all the while tackling learning the vast medium of podcasting. [Laughs] No biggie!

A hundred episodes later, the themes that stand out in the show reflect the heart and pillars of unburdened leadership. We highlight and talk about trauma-informed practices and leadership, the power of shame resilience, the necessity of bold boundaries, the freedom of Self leadership, and the necessity of befriending grief. I learned and continue to learn so much about myself and the world by developing and facilitating conversations on The Unburdened Leader podcast, and as I reflect on this milestone, I want to share with you some essential learnings and reflections that stood out to me.

All right, but first, I want to talk about the name of this podcast. After all of these episodes, what encompasses an unburdened leader, and is there really such a thing? So I want to give you some backstory first before I answer.

3:57

Now, I named the podcast The Unburdened Leader to reflect my passion for Internal Family Systems and how this lens examines how burdens impact how we lead, live, create, and connect. Dick Schwartz, the founder of IFS, defines a burden as: “Extreme ideas or feelings that parts of our inner system carry and in turn impact how we live our lives. These burdens pile on our inner system when we feel overwhelmed and disconnected in the face of a traumatic or toxic person or event.”

I knew I wanted to facilitate conversations through this lens and its intersection with leadership, mental health, and culture. I want to address, at least for me, I’ve been noodling this over the years, but the show’s title implies — I hope that it doesn’t, but just in case it might, I want to make clear that if the show’s title implies there’s such a thing as an unburdened leader, like it’s something to achieve and check the box on, no. No one is 100% unburdened who is walking this earth, no one. A different kind of title would be like The Unburdening Leader podcast or The Leader Working on Their Burdens Continually podcast maybe better reflects or is maybe a more accurate sentiment of this show, but they really don’t flow.

So, as I say to my clients and really anyone I know, we will be unburdening until we breathe our last breath, and I hope all of us will be less burdened as we move forward in life. Carrying fewer burdens does not mean we don’t feel deep grief and pain at times. It just means we respond aligned to our values and connect to our inner world and those around us when hard things happen.

When I’m thinking about this show and its title, I didn’t want to add to the polarities and toxicity out there, and unburdened leaders help participate in the healing and growth of themselves and those around them instead of adding to the collective burdens weighing the world down.

6:07

I also want to make clear, unburdened leaders commit to the ongoing process of unburdening the pain we carry, so these challenging experiences don’t shut down our capacity for vulnerability and discomfort, and we can stay present and in our bodies as we lead in all the spaces we show up. Now, for me, as someone who works towards becoming an unburdened leader, and I hope for you, you develop the capacity to deal with complicated feelings and experiences and those around you so you can keep moving forward.

I see hard conversations at the heart of unburdened leadership, too, and my guests over the last handful of years have repeatedly modeled this. The leaders we listen to on this show do not neglect to reflect on their inner life in service of the world around them because when they did, their world became very lonely, painful, and unsustainable, and they shared how they learned from these choices and made changes so they could, again, lead themselves and others differently.

So, when you think about the qualities of an unburdened leader, it’s more of like a dynamic practice, like a lifestyle. They move away from the tidy, quick-fix formulas and move towards their values, inner awareness, increased capacity for discomfort, and a deep commitment to lead with nuance, humility, and curiosity.

All right, so I gave a little backstory on the title of the show and why sometimes it gives me a little bit of rub, so I hope that helps clear it up. At least it makes me feel better explaining to you all.

All right, I also think it’s important to reflect, debrief (you all know I love a good debrief) how did I feel when I started this podcast and how do I feel working on it today, and when I reflected on that, holy cow.

8:06

I want to encourage you to reflect on your beginnings as I go through this, you know, where you are right now and when you started something that you’ve been working on for a while, because I know for me in the beginning I felt like a ball of twine inside. The protector of perfectionism ran roughshod over me as I overthought everything, particularly, no surprise, those random critics in my head and in my life that I knew would get loud if I showed up and did the thing, and they did. They all did, in my head and in my life.

But for a couple of years, I expressed that I wanted to do a podcast, and I had plans and ideas and stories and sketched things out and journaled and talked about it to people. I even had lists of really cool people I wanted to have on the show, and when I hired my producers, I felt excited until it came time to drop my trailer. I kept delaying and delaying. I mean, COVID was a great reason not to do this thing, right? [Laughs] But my producers looked me square in the eye over Zoom — I remember this moment as I was kind of waffling — and they just gently but firmly shook their heads and said, “No. Now is the time.” So they convinced me! I took a deep breath and finished what I needed to do so they could schedule the trailer. I haven’t looked back, and here we are celebrating 100 episodes!

You’ve heard this said in varied ways, right: dreams stay dreams without action, right? I have learned, though, making something big into small dreams and small actions helped me take action. Small, tangible commitments move us all into deep action. Today, I love the whole process. I may not like it, [Laughs] some aspects of it.

10:02

Even when I struggle with getting something done or figuring out what I want to say, I really have just grown to love this process, and I’m excited to develop more ways to connect with you, the listeners, and discuss how these Unburdened Leader conversations impact you. I’ve noticed I desire more interaction now with those of you listening to the show. So stay tuned!

[Inspirational Music]

Rebecca Ching: Leading is hard. Leading is also often controversial as you navigate staying aligned with your values, mission, and boundaries. Navigating the inevitable controversy can challenge your confidence, clarity, and calm. Now, I know you don’t mind making the hard decisions but sometimes the stakes seem higher and can bring up echoes of old doubts and insecurities when you need to feel rock solid about your plan and action. Finding a coach who understands the nuances of your business and helps you lead in our complex and polarized world can help you identify the blocks that keep you playing it safe and small.

Leading today is not a fancy title or fluffy bragging rights. It is brave and bold work to stay the course when the future is so unknown and the doubts and pains from the past keep showing up to shake things up. Internal emotional practices and systemic strategies are needed to keep the protector of cynicism at bay and foster a hope that is both actionable and aligned.

When the stakes are high and you don’t want to lose focus, when you want to navigate inevitable conflict between your ears and with those you lead, when time is of the essence and you want to make hard decisions with confidence and clarity, then Unburdened Leader Coaching is for you and where you deepen the capacity to tolerate the vulnerability of change, innovation, and doing things differently than you were taught.

To start your Unburdened Leader Coaching process with me go to www.rebeccaching.com and book a complementary connection call. I can’t wait to hear from you!

[Inspirational Music]

12:16

Rebecca Ching: Another reflection that really stands out and hits on some things I’ve talked about on this show is when I started this podcast, my schedule had no wiggle room to add anything to it. That was without taking into account the shelter-in-place situation we were in at the time. I have lived my life overbooked as far back as I can remember, and my producers gave me tight production boundaries and didn’t compromise on them, rightly so. And the rhythms of the deadlines, the writing, sending questions to guests, booking guests, writing my copy, just thinking about all that I want to do with this show kind of became these certainty anchors over the last few years, not just for this show, but in my life. And the certainty anchors of the show helped me clarify my priorities and how I use my time, because y’all, doing it all is so overrated.

Doing it all really isn’t a thing, right? It took me a while. I mean, it’s been a challenge making these shifts, but slowly, as I untangled from my overcommitments, I moved from squeezing the work this show needed into an overbooked schedule to gradually focusing on building regular certainty anchors into my schedule, which keeps me, for the most part, from overbooking. Now, life still lifes, and my schedule still feels too full, but the shifts, the certainty anchors, the rhythms of the podcast continue to create more space for me as I prioritize how I use my time.