Episode 73: Say YES To LESS With Joy Evanns

As business owners, sometimes it's hard to remember to block out free time for ourselves and just RELAX. To figure out how to solve this problem, I sat down with Joy Evanns, the "Say No Like A Pro" mentor.Joy Evanns is the author of Saying YES to LESS.  A recovering perfectionist, Joy travels the world to support high achieving women who are tired of feeling drained and spread too thin. She helps them discover where to find time for long vacations, guilt-free lazy afternoons, and quality time with their families.  By learning to set boundaries and say YES to LESS in her own life and in her former career as a graphic designer for clients such as Nike & Adidas, she eliminated resent from her relationships, increased her income, and healed chronic asthma and back pain.  She is an award-winning author and her second book, Achieve MORE by saying YES to LESS, is due out November, 2017.  Listen in as Joy & Bella delve into how business owners can carve out more free time for themselves by discussing: What it means to say YES to LESS & NO like a PRO The importance of setting boundaries, and how you can stick to them How business owners can take vacations and not feel guilty!     Get your free gift From Joy: "5 Strategies for HOW to Achieve MORE By Saying YES to LESS"  To get this, Text the word STRATEGIES to 444999. Follow the instructions and the strategies will be sent to you via email. Learn more about Joy on her website: joyevanns.com Transcript: Bella:This is episode 73 of Bella in Your Business. Welcome to Bella in Your Business, where Bella will discuss anything and everything about your pet sitting business to help you land on target. So get ready, Bella's got your chute. Let's jump. Welcome to Bella in Your Business. My name is Bella Vasta, your host, and today I have Joy Evanns, author of Saying Yes to Less. She's admittedly a recovering perfectionist. Joy travels the world to support high-achieving women who are tired of feeling drained and spread too thin. Can I get an amen from some of our listeners right now? She helps people discover where to find their long vacations, guilt-free lazy afternoons, and quality time with their friends and family. By learning to set boundaries and saying yes to less in her own life and her former career as a graphic designer for clients such as Nike and Adidas, she eliminated resentment from her relationships, increased her income, and healed—this is important, you guys, for anyone listening—chronic asthma and back pain. She is an award-winning author and her second book, Achieve More by Saying Yes, is due out in November. Welcome to the show, Joy. Joy:Thank you, Bella, for having me. Bella:Fantastic. Why don't you go ahead and fill in those gaps for me? How did you become who you are today? Joy:So I grew up in a family of achievers. My dad started out as a psychologist and eventually through his career was a CEO of several multimillion-dollar companies. My mom started out as a school teacher and worked her way up to being a superintendent of schools. My sister used to be this little bratty girl who I now fortunately like a lot more, who’s now a doctor of chiropractic and she has a couple of offices with a bunch of people that work for her. Why am I telling you this? It's because who we are is kind of defined by the environment that we grow up in. And so no surprise, I was an achiever too. I was the president of student council by the time I was in fifth grade kind of thing. The pressure to perform underneath that expectation was really difficult and challenging for me though. So I was highly critical of myself. I put a lot of pressure on myself to do more, to be more, to have more. And no surprise that I took that into my career as a graphic designer. I took clients that weren't a fit for me. I did a lot of things that wound up leaving me drained. I said yes to last-minute requests, yes to rush work without getting paid for it, like a lot of things that really left me feeling drained and feeling kind of at the end of the day. And that took a toll for me. The toll, a lot of it was physical. I was fatigued. I felt empty. I had chronic back pain and I got to a place where it really wasn't working for me. And I called what I did gift-wrapping garbage. Bella:Oh my goodness. Joy:I say this because a lot of my clients made products in China. And my job was to package them all up and make them pretty so that people would buy them. And I didn't feel really good and aligned with the choices that I was making. So I was sitting on my bed one day, getting ready to go gift-wrap garbage, and I heard this voice in my head that came through like clear as day. And the voice was basically, “If you don't do something different, you're going to get sick again.” What I haven’t told you is that I grew up with asthma, really bad asthma. I mean, I was on all kinds of medications and still had terrible symptoms. Nobody knew how to get them to go away. And in the previous few years before this, I had worked really hard on learning a whole bunch of holistic modalities purely for the sake of healing myself. And I had gotten to the point where I was actually off the medication and symptom-free—like something that nobody thought was possible. So there was no way that I was going back to that. So I decided I was gonna make a change, and I got mentoring and I learned how to say no to things that weren't a fit for me, and I started changing the rules with clients about what was a reasonable expectation and what wasn't, and changing things with my family even. The end result was I didn't have any more resentment in my relationships, I made more money, I had a lot more energy, and I had a lot more joy and aliveness in everything that I was doing. This eventually led to me transitioning careers and supporting high-achieving women who are in a similar situation—stressed out and anxious and overwhelmed and tired and sick of being there and wanting to step into something different. The techniques and skills that I had learned along the way, particularly in resolving asthma and then in transitioning to creating boundaries and so forth, that's what I'm now using unexpectedly with clients now. Bella:You know, the asthma thing is really interesting. I know there are a lot of pet sitters and dog walkers out there—they're in my forums and they talk about having fibromyalgia and arthritis. And at the taping of this right now, we are entering into fall. I think this is actually going to come out in the winter. But regardless of when you're listening, the colder weather seems to really get a lot of these chronic illnesses, diseases, pains, really in flaring mode. So I could only imagine how many people are saying, “Girl, how did you do that? Tell me more about that.” Like how did the change of your lifestyle essentially change your medical condition? Joy:The easiest way to describe it is there's a lot of stress in your body in a lot of different ways. We have a lot of environmental stress that we put on ourselves based on the foods that we eat and the electromagnetic fields that we expose ourselves to with our cell phones and our Wi-Fi things. If you sleep by the refrigerator, all different kinds of things impact your immune system—your body's ability to regulate itself. Our biology was not designed to handle all of this technology and so forth. And then you throw on top of that the emotional stuff. If you're not sleeping well or taking care of yourself—all of those implications—and then whatever beliefs you have about your health or whether it's possible to heal something. There’s this whole mesh of all these different things, food sensitivities, everything that can play into somebody's health. One of the trainings that I did, I had to actually document how many different modalities I tried. So I'm very familiar with a lot of natural healing methods. I tried over 40 different things in this whole process of healing myself. And I would not say that where I am right now is absolutely perfect. What I know is that we all have these pressure points where we have a weakness in our body. For some people it might be their back. They get under a lot of stress and their back goes out. For some people it might be breathing. For me, if I'm not being the best version of me, it's going to show up and I'm going to start having breathing symptoms. I kind of need to look around and see what's happening and what choices I'm making to recognize, okay, where am I not making space for myself here? Where is it too small for me to breathe? Bella:That's incredible. It speaks a lot to just being in tune with your body. And you're absolutely right. I know the most common thing that came to my mind is when you're sitting at the desk all day long, it's like your shoulders and neck and you just like—and then that gives you headaches and then that makes you feel bad. And then you just want to eat sugar and carbs and make bad choices and lay in bed and you become lazy. And then it just keeps spiraling, you know? I hear you, girl, and I've had a similar experience with that just by starting to work out every day and having a morning routine, which I'm sure is part of what we're going to talk about today. So tell me more about how you had this epiphany, you were going along in your job, gift-wrapping garbage as you say, and what was that enough-is-enough moment? What did you start to do to try to start to fix it? Because I'm sure that people are listening to this right now and they're like, yeah, you know what, that’s great you guys, but I don't have a magic wand. I can't just all of a sudden start changing it. So Joy, what advice would you give to someone who is in a chronic pain situation that wants to start changing their life? How can they start making that move to get out of it?