Own Your Time with Katie Williams
I’m joined this week by Katie Williams on Own Your Time.
In today’s episode I’m going to be chatting with Katie Williams.
Katie is a stress management expert, therapist, coach and yoga teacher. She helps driven women to balance ambition and wellbeing, so that they can access presence, focus, calm and contentment in all areas of their lives.
In this episode we cover:
Katie shares her journey of self-discovery, including transitioning from a high-stress corporate job in London to finding balance in Glasgow.
Discussion on the challenges of managing stress, the societal pressure to be "busy," and the impact of stress on time perception.
Katie explains her approach to teaching clients how to embrace relaxation without guilt and introduces her Stress to Still masterclass.
We explore ways to make time for self-care, manage stress responses, and shift the mindset from "busy" to "intentional."
Read the transcript:
Please note - this podcast episode was transcribed by an AI tool, there may be some typos or errors.
00:00 Welcome to Own Your Time, a podcast for small business owners. Get ready to harness your most precious asset, your time, with intention, enabling you to create a life that drives in simplicity, ease, and joy.
00:15 I'm your host, Sarah Stewart, Glasgow-based time management coach. My approach combines the wisdom of traditional time management strategies with the transformative power of mindfulness.
00:28 My commitment is to help you get more time for the things that really matter. If you're ready to ditch the hustle culture and overwhelm and instead embrace peaceful productivity, you're in the right place.
00:42 In today's episode I'm chatting with Katie Williams. Katie is a stress management expert, therapist, coach and yoga teacher. She helps driven women to balance ambition and well-being so that they can access presence, focus, calm and contentment in all areas of their lives.
01:06 Let's get into it. Welcome Katie, thanks for joining me on on your time. How are you? Good, thank you. I'm really happy to be here and you're making me want to laugh already so yeah it's going to be fun I think I hope so yeah I think the work that you do is fascinating so I'm like excited to explore
01:27 it with you and do you maybe want to start by telling the listeners a little bit about you and your business yeah sure so I am possibly miss a it's like a therapist but I'm also a coach and a yoga teacher and basically I combine all three of those approaches to help women who are high-achieving, ambitious
01:51 and stressed so that they can enjoy, I guess, better work-life balance and so that they can actually switch off when they're with their loved ones instead of thinking constantly about work.
02:04 Yeah, which is such an important work, and I know it will, you know, a lot of my audience will relate to that as well, And what, tell me a little bit about your background and what sort of led you into this work?
02:21 So, for some reason, it's taken me, so I've worked for myself for three years. I qualified as a therapist towards the end of 2021 and I started my business then.
02:32 For some reason, it's taken me all of that time to really hone in on what I help people do and the type and person that I help and I don't know why it's taking me that long because I'm basically helping me of I would say I'm I always go back to before I moved to Glasgow for this so when I was in London
02:52 I moved to Glasgow in 2015 before that I was in London so I think of myself now as helping me of pretty much 10 years ago and not that I have completely changed or I still element that I struggle with when it comes to stress and to switching off.
03:09 But yeah, and basically helping myself 10 years ago, I was in a really busy corporate role. I worked really late.
03:17 The key point around that being that I didn't necessarily have to, but I thought I had to at the time.
03:23 I was always super busy, I was always out, I was always doing things. And it was all too much, but I didn't actually know, until I started to get a little bit older, maybe in time at 30's by that point and really started to feel the effect of just being constantly on.
03:45 And so that's why I'm helping people now because this is the journey that I've been through pretty much since I left London is working out like how can I change the way that I relate to doing and being so that I can enjoy my life more, switch off more easily, which is always still sometimes a challenge
04:07 and just feel like I have a life that isn't completely solely centered around and focused on work. Yeah, and what sort of like a particular moment in time that you had that that realization, like, talk to me about that shift and realising that where you were wasn't working.
04:33 I think I had, I think that it came to me in fits and starts over the course of a couple of years.
04:40 So I was in London. I was working long hours. I was with some day at the time who was from Scotland and he wanted to move back here.
04:50 and so part of the reason for my agreeing to do that was that I was hoping that I would be able to have a slightly slower pace of life and so that's something that I did get when I moved here but with that came a whole load of stuff all the things that had been avoiding by being mega busy for the previous
05:11 10 years of my life which I didn't know that I was avoiding because it was all happening unconsciously. As soon as I was still when I got here, I didn't have to stay late at work, had no pals, as people would say like no mate whatsoever.
05:27 I'm suddenly I was kind of left to my own mind, and that's where I started struggling with my mental health, realising that actually there were probably things that I needed to face and work through.
05:40 And the weird thing is there's no big skeletons in my closet, no crazy things in my past, but I'd been purposely pushing down.
05:49 I had never really learned to cope with being an emotional being, being a human being, and I just kind of suppressed it through busyness.
06:01 And so that I think was the starting point when I moved here, and I wasn't constantly entertained, that was the starting point of of realising that I'd been using work to keep my mind busy and avoid feeling, yeah essentially.
06:17 Which a lot of people do. I mean, I don't know what the stats would be around that, but like, there's so many ways that people numb their feelings, isn't there?
06:27 And talk to me a little bit more about the word busy. So I'm not a fan of the word busy.
06:36 I think you're probably similar to me, but tell me a little bit more about yeah your thoughts on the word busy and maybe what started to then shift your thinking.
06:48 So I used to be constantly busy, I used to describe myself as constantly busy, I used to you know if I was invited to something I would overly just define so I can't I'm so busy I'm doing this, this, this, this and this.
07:02 And then I think it's around 2021, I had this coach who really hated the word busy and I think it robbed off on me from that.
07:11 She spoke instead about having a full schedule or a full day or a full week. And I really like that because it, to me, it implies choice when we're thinking about having a full day or a full week.
07:27 She would also talk about the same coach at the same time as kind of saying that let's change your language around busyness.
07:35 It was also that thing about going on holiday and when people say I'm really jealous, overly justifying how much you need the holiday.
07:43 I'm so desperate. I'm so tired. It's a desperate for holiday. I really need it and it's that thing of like, and I've done it, but now when I think back to those times where I used to do that, I feel embarrassed, because I'm like there's absolutely no need to justify having time off and it comes from
08:02 the same place of like I need to justify my existence by talking about how productive I am and if I do take breaks I really need to make sure that everybody knows that I massively deserve it and it's not this is this is an issue that we're all dealing with it's not necessarily a personal thing I read
08:24 something actually that I was going to share with you in a book by, do you know the mountain is used by Brianna Weast?
08:30 Yes. Okay. So there's a bit in there when I first read it I was like, oh man, she talks about how we self sabotage and she says that being busy is one of the ways that we do that.
08:45 She says a very common way that people sabotage is by distracting themselves to the point with being completely phased out of their lives.
08:54 People who are constantly busy are running up from themselves. Nobody is busy unless they want to be busy, and you'll know that because so many people with extremely hectic schedules would never describe themselves that way.
09:08 This is because being busy is not a virtue. It only signals to others that you do not know how to manage your time or your tasks.
09:18 Being busy communicates importance. It often makes you seem a little untouchable to others. It also overwhelms the body so that it can only focus on the tasks at hand.
09:30 Being busy is the ultimate way to destruct ourselves from what's really wrong. God, yep. So I remember reading that and just being like, yeah, thanks very much.
09:43 That was me, and it still is me at times, but she just really hits the nail on the head of that, being phased out of our own lives by our busyness, distracting ourselves.
09:56 It's not signaling a virtuous signaling that we basically don't know how to manage our time my past. And that is a really tough pill to swallow.
10:06 When we feel like we're trying our best, when we're constantly doing things, and that still doesn't feel like enough, it can feel really hard to admit, but we have a big part to play in that.
10:19 Yeah. I had quite a hectic week last week, and I had a conversation with my coach and talked around how I was feeling and this would have been on the Monday at the start of what was quite a full schedule, but it was full through my own doing.
10:45 It was very much on me and I'm normally really good at managing my time as you would hope. And for some reason, I obviously have, you know, I just said yes to too many things or whatever, and my schedule was very full.
11:07 And I've immediately taken a lesson from that, and I do not want to feel that way again, and I've already now looked out my calendar until the end of the year and blocked out some white space that will be just for me and yeah really sort of taking some action because it does not feel good.
11:28 I think when you're used to maybe the like the spaciousness that I'm probably more used to and then faced with that hectic week yeah it wasn't nice.
11:39 Yeah I think that the thing for me was that I would have sworn blind that I needed to be that the I would have sworn blind that the things that I was doing were 100% necessary.
11:52 So I didn't even have the perspective that you have which is to say okay I've created this situation. I have said yesterday too many things.
12:00 I was living under the impression that it was just what life was like and I had to be doing all the things that I was doing and I didn't.
12:11 Yeah. I absolutely didn't. I just I just wanted to be busy so I could not think yeah I mean think being alone with your thoughts is hard I it was just maybe must have been last week at some point I was talking to someone around oh that's what it was I'd been at a send bath and so although it was a full
12:38 schedule a lot of the stuff was nice stuff but it was just very a full week. So I was at this sign bath and I really enjoy it and I can lie at peace and just enjoy the vibrations and the noise and so on.
12:57 Whereas some of the people I were with could not, they really struggled. And it was sort of a case of them counting down like it's surely when at the end, I was surely that's that's nearly there and pretty much from the start, they've really struggled to sort of just be and be in the silence with their
13:16 own thoughts. Yeah, I definitely see that with a lot of my clients, even if we're doing things like breathwork or just sticking being with yourself.
13:26 There's a narrative and I think partly it's stressing for people because there's an assumption that they shouldn't have a mind that's chattering busy.
13:38 Oh, I should, I had someone say to me the day, oh, you know, meditation, that's just like clearing your mind.
13:44 And I was like, that's not how I be meditation at all. Like, I view it as like, sometimes you can meditate and have an incredibly busy mind.
13:52 And part of meditation is accepting, oh, well, noticing I've got busy mind today. That's fine. But also, So I think it can be the flavor of the thoughts, the what's the theme, is it always I've got this sort of what that to do, I shouldn't be doing this, you know, we've got a lot going on, that can often
14:11 be, or remember this and you're like, oh, I wish I could just write that down, but no, I'm supposed to be meditating, so it's supposed to be relaxing.
14:19 That's I think the thing that a lot of people don't realise is that all that is is an expression of the state of your nervous system.
14:28 It's not about you, but if you're getting a lot of thoughts of what you need to be doing, what you should be doing, what you haven't done, that's about your other system today rather than anything that's necessarily a reflection of the truth.
14:44 Yeah. Nice. one of the things that you'd shared in when we were chatting before was around perception of time which is something that really fascinates me and you've said that stress has a massive impact on how we perceive our time.
15:09 Do want to share a little bit more about that? Yeah, so I was actually, so I wanted to check my own facts on this because I had it in my mind because I've read a lot on this that stress makes time appear like it's going faster.
15:26 So I was checking some of this and there's actually conflicting research. It's really interesting. So the agreement is, the general agreement is stress affects our perception of time.
15:38 That's that's a fact and everybody is happy to say that. There is some research that says it makes time feel like it's going more slowly and some that says it makes time feel like it's going more quickly.
15:50 Interesting. What appears to be the case is that acute stress makes time appear like it's going more slowly because obviously we're in a when something really stressful is happening right in front of us like fear based stress or sympathetic nervous system kicks in that vital flight response but when
16:14 that happens our ability to perceive what's going on around us becomes greater or people's eyes dilates so we can take in more like we're basically aware of much more and so that can make it feel like it's happening more slowly.
16:31 But there seems to be a difference between that kind of acute stress and what most people that I work with are dealing with, which is chronic stress.
16:40 Chronic low level, sometimes high level, sometimes stress. And apparently when anxiety is involved, which is how I imagine that type of stress versus that acute stress, it can make time feel like it's going faster.
16:57 And I was thinking about, everybody that comes to work with me will start off reporting saying something along the lines or there's too much to do in not enough time.
17:10 Like I've never had any kind come to me and say I've got a problem in that I've thought not enough stuff to do in loads of time.
17:17 That's literally never happened. So there's something around how our mindset dictates our perception of time as well. this feeling of never enough, too much to do, too much to do, when we're feeling like that all day, every day, to me, that's going to create a perception of time that there's never enough
17:39 , but it's moving too fast. Yeah. So, it definitely affects our perception of time. People might have different experiences, but anecdotally with the people that I work with, it's this, you know, reporting things like sort of looking up from the laptop at 7 p.m.
17:57 and going, oh my God, where is the day gone? Like what happened? And that I think is fed by the idea that if we just had enough time we could get all the things done.
18:15 And I think that is to get your head, if you can get your head into the idea that that is not true, it becomes much easier to let go of the idea that we should be getting everything done.
18:26 There will always be too much to do. Yeah, I completely agree with you there. And so, because one of the things that I had explored a little bit is there's a sense of as you get older, time goes faster than what it did when you were younger.
18:46 But I think that's to do with the fact that as we get older, we tend to be in more of a routine than what we do when we're younger.
18:54 So I think that then can impact our perception of time. And so if we then think about you know strategies then for time feeling more spacious and expanding our time, you'd also touched on, you know, we can achieve that by taking time for ourselves.
19:16 So I know that, you know, a lot of listeners and there will be a lot of people out there who struggle with that, you know, they, they always end up with themselves at the bottom of the priority list.
19:30 So how, how would, how do you help your clients start to sort of shift that? I think the first thing is going back to what I was saying before about just the first thing I think that any shift is about awareness, so understanding, I think we're so used to our own experience that we don't notice what
19:52 it is, so we don't question the thoughts that we have, we don't question what's driving our behaviour because we're like all this is just me.
20:00 But when we get wise to the narratives underneath our behaviour, I was going to share this video actually, which might illustrate it quite well.
20:09 I'm doing a book club at the moment with some clients around the gifts of imperfections by Brunei Brown, and in that she includes a passage by her friend, Min Twist, who talks about the book that she's written, it's called The Soul of Money, but this is about Enoughness, and she says, for me and for
20:31 many of us, I first working thought of a day as I didn't get enough sleep. The next one is I don't have enough time.
20:38 Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it.
20:46 And she kind of ends that paragraph by saying what begins as a simple expression of the horrid life or even the challenge life grows into great justification for an fulfilled life.
20:57 So it's about becoming aware. When I was reading that, I was like, this is it, we wake up already thinking, not enough.
21:06 And then we spend the day, we don't have enough money, we don't have enough time, we don't have enough of this or that.
21:13 And I think it's just starting to question those paradigms and that conditioning that we've kind of just been fed from the minute we are born and starting to even notice and question that, first of all, is a really good way to help you challenge the end point of that, which is never having enough time
21:36 for yourself or feeling like you never have enough time for yourself. It's just that awareness first, and then I think it's about being curious about why that has been the case for so long, like what is it that allows you to continue with that behaviour?
22:00 And then it's about thinking, well if I was going to give myself a bit more time, if I was going to carve out a little bit more time for myself, what would be the easiest way that I could do that?
22:10 Where is there the least resistance to that at the moment? And then slowly increasing that over time. Yeah, that's a great question.
22:21 Where's the least resistance? Yeah, and I think as well just challenging yourself, so if I do for example breathwork as clients in a session, I really like to play around with my do this in corporate workshops as well.
22:36 Doing a little breath work session and I'll do I'll time it for a certain amount of time and I'll ask everyone how long did that feel and they'll usually say five minutes, four minutes, five minutes and I love to tell them that was one minute, that was one minute of you focusing on your breath of silence
22:59 , of having an anchor of just being And so the opposite to what I was saying about time run out when we're stressed, moving quicker, when we're relaxed, it moves more slowly.
23:10 And just saying, you can stop and breathe for 30 seconds, a few times throughout your day. And if you did that, what do you think about what aspect do you think that would have on your perception of your day?
23:24 It's this idea that I don't have time to do that. I don't have time to sit down for 20 minutes and meditate.
23:30 You don't need that, but you have to be really willing to challenge yourself and the own crap that our brains come up with when we are stressed out, because your brain will just feed you a load of rubbish and go out to do that at a time.
23:46 But it'll have 30 seconds. Yeah, it's not, I don't even have time to go to the Lou. Oh my god, I'm just thinking.
23:53 Yeah, that's, that's bad. I do hear a friend say, I've not been to a toilet all day, which which just seems crazy to me, the one thing that I get clients to do is like it's trying to then have an anchor to stack that new habit onto.
24:13 So the one that I tend to get them to do is when they're making a cup of tea or a coffee to actually just enjoy the process of making it rather than trying to multitask and run around and do other things like, you and it used to be me, and I would fill up the kettle and put that on, and then be rushing
24:34 off to go put a load in the laundry and then coming back to put the water in the cup, and whilst it was brewing, emptying the dishwasher and trying to be doing a gazillion things all the one time, whereas actually that's a great, because I would make a cup of tea a few times a day, that's a really nice
24:53 way just to build a bit of a pause and you're right it doesn't need to take long Yeah, I think as well like what you've just said there's reminded me of this idea of like us first in the morning so like we get up and I think I was writing a post about this the other day it used to be the case that like
25:14 my house all the appliances and my phone got more attention than my own body within the first half an hour of being away it gets like like if you've got kids to feed and animals to feed and yourself to feed it's like humans and animals before machines like and ideally you before anyone else although
25:31 I know that it's not always possible depending on if you have kids ages of kids if you look at like mine that would like the cat will just not let me do anything until he's got food so but yeah so like eat and drink something before you enter the dishwasher or put washing on, like you're more important
25:51 than the machines that are in your kitchen and it is that it's that it's challenging ourselves when we're in that space of like oh just make this cup of tea and I'll do 20 other things like you're not actually being more time efficient you think you are you think you are but you're not you're just making
26:11 yourself stressed and it's behaving like that is just is to me it's a going back to the nervousness and think it's a symptom of being stuck in a constant stress response it's not who you are as a person it's not your personality you are stuck in a stress response yeah permanently like I I would say,
26:37 I was going to say something wild though, 80% of the population, but that's wild, but quite a lot, it's because I speak, everybody I speak to is stuck in that state, so I have to have a skewed viewpoint, but yeah, it's kind of disidentifying a bit, I think, which works very well with what you do, that
26:58 mindfulness of like, this isn't me and separating and realizing you have a choice, rather than like, I just have to offer it in that way because this is how I am.
27:10 Yeah, and I think that it's the choice but that's hard because people, you know, there'll be a lot of people that believe they don't have a choice.
27:22 Yeah, yeah, and I think that I totally get that because I used to think the same thing. And people get angry because of course it feels like they're being criticized or it feels like, you know, if I have a choice, that means I could have changed this years ago.
27:38 So what have I been doing all this time? And it's not, I think the thing that I always say is that it's not about lane, but it is about responsibility and those are two very different words.
27:53 Like we are all responsible for our own lives. Yeah, that's powerful as well. The expanding on the sort of the feeling stress, but I know that you've got your master class that you have available to your audience, it's called stress to still and the premise of that is around helping people sort of take
28:21 that downtime and doing it without the guilt. Do you want to maybe tell me a little bit more about the training and you can maybe share where people can get access to that as well?
28:34 Sure. So it's really for people who are stuck in what I'm calling in, that training is always busy cycle. So it's about being the person that I was describing being a few years ago, constantly doing things.
28:49 It's for people who are very reliable, always get stuff done, they've always got people asking them to do stuff for them because they know they'll do it well, it's people that you know are really good friends, loyal, reliable, always there for their mates, essentially doing a lot of things for a lot
29:07 of people and including themselves when it comes to work and just don't know how to sit down and relax. When they do sit down and relax, that nagging feeling of the dishwasher or just going to do that quickly, and it doesn't feel fun to relax, it just feels like another thing that we're not able to do
29:28 , because it almost feels too stressful, which is because of that nervous system response, but that is what the training is about, very much links how we're feeling to the state that our nervous system is in, and it gives people a chance to look at the needs that they might have in their lives in terms
29:49 of physiological, emotional, practical needs that they might have and to identify where they're currently not being met and then how to meet them.
30:02 So it's a combination of looking at things on a practical level but also explaining how our nervous system state dictates how we're feeling and should hopefully give people a chance to just sit down and spend, it's just under an hour, spend an hour just thinking about how they're living their lives and
30:24 how they would like to be living them instead. Amazing. And they can find it on my Instagram bio, my Instagram is Katie Williams coaching and it's with a link in my going right there.
30:40 I think that I'm going to guess that most of the people listening to this will really benefit from going through your training as well.
30:50 So yeah, they can they can go and find you on Instagram. I'll make sure that all the links are in the show notes as well for the episode.
30:59 Is there anything else Katie that you want to share? I don't think so just for the for the free training the key element of it is watching it because what I've noticed is that lots of people sign up for it because they know they need to watch it but because they're in the estate of being always busy,
31:22 they then don't watch it. So I may have made an error making it an hour long but I know that the people that have watched it have broken it down until like maybe two half hour segments and taking notes and someone and really it's spent some time with and for themselves on it so I think that's probably
31:41 a really nice way to do it with a cup of tea, a little biscuit and just break it down into a cup of sections, make notes, be really geeky about it and I think that's a really good way to absorb the information and then tell me what you think.
31:55 Yes, yeah. I love to talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Okay. And so you've mentioned that we can find you on Instagram.
32:03 Do you want to talk about any of your other, like I, I know you write a sub stack, which I absolutely love.
32:10 Maybe you could share a little bit about that as well. I was doing it every week but I've had to cut it back every two weeks because there's a lot going on.
32:19 I love writing my Substack. It's so fun and I sometimes share some things about what's happening with me but I really just talk about some of the things that I know my clients are struggling with and just invite people to look at things in a certain different way.
32:36 I think that at one point I was getting really, really sick of Instagram and the fact that you have to be very loud and very extreme in order to stand out on there, and I neither own those things, like I wouldn't be able to be a therapist if I was loud and extreme and saying really insane things on social
32:58 media. So the substack is really just my way of being able to expand on certain subjects and look at them with a bit more nuance and discuss them a bit more openly rather than trying to shove them into an Instagram post.
33:13 So I'm assuming you'll share the link to that, it's called The Healthy Adult, but I would love it if people sign up to that because they'll get a bit more, I think, through there than they will just through Instagram.
33:28 Yeah, amazing. I love your writing, like you've got a great writing style, I really enjoy your letters. Okay, fantastic! I think that's probably a sin.
33:42 Anything anywhere else online that you are that you want to share? No, I think Instagram and Sub-staff are the main ones.
33:50 I'm on LinkedIn, but it's not really much going on there, so I wouldn't recommend. It'll just be boring. It's just rehashes in all the stuff I put on Instagram.
34:02 Yeah, okay, so Instagram with the sub-stack. Yeah, fantastic. Okay, well, thank you so much, Katie. It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for joining me.
34:11 Thank you for having me. It's really fun. Okay, bye for now. Bye. Thank you for joining me on another episode of On Your Time.
34:20 If you enjoyed today's episodes, don't forget to subscribe, write, write, or leave a review. You can also connect with me on social media for additional resources, community engagement and updates.
34:32 You'll find me on Instagram at sarahstewart.co.uk. Until next time, bye for now.