Graced to Lead

Ep. 9: From Frazzled to Calm - Strategies for Intentional Living with Leighann Marquiss

• Belinda Gaston • Season 1 • Episode 9

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Ever feel like your to-do list is running your life? Special guest Leighann Marquiss joins us to offer her invaluable wisdom on moving from a state of constant busyness to one of calm and intentional living. We promise you'll walk away with practical strategies to identify when your schedule is overwhelming and actionable steps to regain control. Leighann sheds light on how societal and personal pressures often lead to frantic lifestyles, and provides key indicators, like memory lapses and stress, that show when it's time to reassess your commitments.

Navigate the maze of workplace stress with us as we explore the crucial distinction between good and bad stress. Leighann shares her expertise on how aligning your responsibilities with your natural strengths can prevent burnout and resentment. Using relatable examples like the rewarding yet taxing endeavor of house flipping, we discuss recognizing signs of detrimental stress, such as chronic fatigue. By understanding and managing these stressors, you'll learn how to transform your busyness into more productive and fulfilling activities.

For all the working moms out there, this episode is especially for you. Discover the power of intentional decision-making to avoid the trap of overcommitment. Leanne offers practical advice on assessing your skills and passions before saying yes to additional responsibilities, ensuring you contribute effectively without feeling resentful. Dive into the importance of waiting and seeking divine guidance before committing to new tasks. By the end of this episode, you'll have a roadmap to balance your priorities, avoid overextension, and shift from frazzled to calm, purposeful living. Join us on this transformative journey to becoming a better leader, God's way!

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Belinda Gaston:

Welcome to the Graced to Lead podcast.

Belinda Gaston:

I'm Belinda Gaston, your host, and listen. If you are a Christian woman who leads at work, in your own business or even in ministry, you are in the right place here. You'll find practical advice and encouragement as you lead through real conversations that will challenge and inspire you. So join me on this journey to becoming better leaders God's way. Are you ready? Let the journey begin. Welcome to the Graced to Lead podcast. I'm Belinda Gaston, your host, and I am excited about today's episode. Today we're going to talk about something that I think we all deal with, and that is busyness. But first I want to introduce to you our guest, and that is Leighann Marquiss.

Belinda Gaston:

Leighann is a relentless hope chaser. She's a survivor of childhood trauma, child loss and having a child with chronic illness. She inspires others by using her story to show how to find glimmers of hope in the midst of tragedy. She is addicted to transformation and feeds it by flipping houses and life coaching stressed out people and listen. I am one of the stressed out people that she's coached in the past, so I can attest that Leighann knows what she is doing. She sees potential everywhere she looks and she lives with her husband and three children in Western Pennsylvania. She's the author of Showing Heart, the true story of how one boy defiled the odds. Let's welcome Leighann Marquiss to the show. Leighann welcome.

Leighann Marquiss:

Thank you, Belinda. I'm so happy to be speaking with you today.

Belinda Gaston:

Thank you. Thank you, busyness. I know that, as leaders and women who are leading, we're multiple hats. We're balancing motherhood, some of us balancing being a wife, being a friend, leading in our organizations or our ministries or our businesses. We're cousins, we're sisters, we're everything, and sometimes life gets so hectic that you can barely even keep your head on straight. It's like I don't even know where to start, and that can cause a lot of things, and so today we're going to talk about that.

Belinda Gaston:

Leighann is our resident expert here. So go ahead, as I always say, and grab your notebooks, grab your journals, grab your digital note-taking devices, because we are going to talk about how we go from busyness to living with intention in a space of calm. All right, so, Leighann, welcome to the show again. Let's just jump right in. I just said how important it is, how people feel often that being busy is a normal part of leadership. It's just kind of, as a leader, you're busy. So I want you to start by talking to us about why busyness is even something we should think about, why it's important. Why should we be even thinking about our busyness?

Leighann Marquiss:

Yeah. So I think, right off the bat, I would say that I don't know many people who aren't busy. Even retired people try to keep themselves busy. It's just something in our society. Tired people try to keep themselves busy. It's just something in our society. That word is just ubiquitous. It is Everybody is busy with something.

Leighann Marquiss:

I think the idea of busyness isn't a bad one, necessarily. I think it's what we do with our time. And if we're being intentional you know you pick that word intentional and I like that word because there are so many outside sources who want our attention, want our time, want our resources, and time is something that we can't get back. We can, you know we can make more money and you know other resources. Maybe we can get them back, but time is something we can't get back. So what we're doing with our time is really important.

Leighann Marquiss:

So again, just that idea of are we doing what we're doing with intention? Are we letting life happen to us or do we have a strategic plan for how we want to spend our days? There's that saying that how we spend our days is how we spend our life, and that's so true. We look back and we think, oh gosh, I just spent how many hours surfing the internet when I could have been just feeding my mind in better ways? Or maybe there's people who are volunteering and they I have a friend who says she has like a balloon hand, like it just kind of raises up like a Mylar balloon when, when people ask for volunteers but she doesn't necessarily want to volunteer she just feels like she's supposed to volunteer so she raises her hand. So, yeah, it's not if we could be doing something, but if we should be doing something. I'm sure we've talked about that, belinda. And so, again, just having people think about if they're doing things that they should be doing with their time, they should be doing with their time.

Belinda Gaston:

Thank you. I'm glad you mentioned are we spending our time doing what we should be doing? Because a lot of times people, I believe, do things out of obligation. It's like the volunteer you mentioned. We feel sometimes as if we are leaders, then we should be the ones doing the things, and what I think I hear you saying is that may not necessarily be the case. So let's talk about signs that you're too busy. We're asking the question are we doing what we should be doing? And some people may say I'm doing everything I should be doing. All the things that I'm doing are things that I should be doing, but they still feel frazzled, they feel overwhelmed, they're maybe paralyzed in some areas. But what are the signs that perhaps you're too busy, perhaps busyness is an issue for you? What are the signs that leaders have when they're too busy?

Leighann Marquiss:

Yeah, I think that one sign is you are forgetting things right, like your memory is going. That's a huge sign of stress and like a bad type of stress. So we can talk about that too good stress and bad stress but when you are under a tremendous amount of stress and your body's just producing cortisol and things inside of itself biologically that's going on your brain will shut down and only focus on survival things and you'll start to forget the things that you know. It's the people who are like I have to write everything down or I'm going to forget to do that, and I have been there at different times in my life, especially with my children's illnesses. That is a sign that you are doing way too much in a bad way.

Leighann Marquiss:

Chronic fatigue again. Your body's just shutting down, it's going into a state of freeze, it's just overwhelmed. It can't keep up. Maybe resentment is creeping in. So that's again.

Leighann Marquiss:

Should we be doing something and could we be doing something? We're raising our hands for things or maybe we're tasked with something that really is not the way our brain functions. And you know, there's all of these different kind of paradigms that people come up with about the workplace and who's a lion and a beaver and a where are you on the Myers-Briggs. But there's some validity to that, because there are ways that people work most effectively, just the way they're wired. So if you're tapped with something that maybe you're not wired that way, it will take you eight hours to do something that maybe somebody else. It takes them two hours right. So just knowing and being aware that these things are happening, like you know, there's a couple of things I mentioned, especially the resentment piece. Something's off, something's out of alignment and needs to be addressed so that the right person is doing the job, or so that maybe it's that you're doing the right job there, but there's something else that you've picked up or something else in your life that's just out of whack, that now is impacting the thing that you should be doing.

Leighann Marquiss:

And I think people just feel that, they feel angst, they feel frustration, they feel overwhelmed, just that feeling of being overwhelmed, like I don't know. I've talked to other women and I've said do you ever just wish you would get into a car accident so that you could spend a couple of days in the hospital as a rest, as a time of rest? And they're like how do you know that? And I'm like. Well, because that's a sign of being overstressed. Right, you're overextended. So if you are daydreaming about somehow getting in your car and driving off into the horizon, you can't because you've got all of these people and things relying on you. That's probably a bad type of busyness, with a negative type of busyness.

Belinda Gaston:

Wow, and so some of the signs. I mean I feel like I may have experienced one of these at least at any point in my leadership journey. But forgetfulness, resentment, chronic fatigue are all signs of busyness and I think you laying that out helps put people, put it in perspective for people and for our listeners. I really kind of want to talk a little bit more about what you just said about the good stress, bad stress. So you know, if you are feeling any of these things that Leighann just talked about and you're thinking, boy, I'm really stressed out you already know that there's something off. The reality is we can't get rid of all stress in our lives. So can you talk, Leighann, about good stress versus bad stress?

Leighann Marquiss:

Yeah, like I said, I think we're all busy and I don't think business is necessarily a bad thing as long as we're doing the right things with our time. But I think where it breaks down is somebody like we're talking about, who has raised their hand for too many things or just has too much on their plate and doesn't understand the idea of. I remember your question from before about who has raised their hand for too many things or just has too much on their plate and doesn't understand the idea of. You know, I remember your question from before now, in terms of leadership and how we can do a you know what's a bad busy and how do we get out of that busy. And the idea of just eliminating, delegating, streamlining. You know there's ways that we can do what we're doing in a better way. So that can you know.

Leighann Marquiss:

Taking, taking that feeling of overwhelm, the drowning I need to go on vacation to get away from my life All of all of those feelings definitely bad stress. When I think of good stress, you know the other things that happen in our body are so cortisol would be when we're under stress. You also can have adrenaline and that's something that we know when we go into fight or flight. You know your, your body produces this burst of adrenaline to get you to run faster than you normally would, from the bear that's chasing you, let's say. And so when somebody is doing a project that just lights them up, for example, I flip houses. That's one of the hats that I wear and I love taking a house that no one wants to live in, and a lot of times it's actually uninhabitable. The latest house that I have doesn't have a functioning bathroom, so nobody can live in this house if an investor doesn't buy it. And I'm taking a house that is deplorable, I'm renovating it and rejuvenating it and redeeming it and then making it into something that somebody wants to make memories in Super fulfilling.

Leighann Marquiss:

But if you know anybody who's done a renovation, it can be super stressful. I've never had one where a problem doesn't come up. You watch the HGTV show. They open the wall and there's a bee's nest or there's rodents, or there's termites, or there's not a tube, old wiring that needs replaced. There's always something you find in a house sometimes multiple things that you haven't budgeted for or you didn't know was there. So that can be really stressful and just the timeline of getting it done can be stressful, right?

Leighann Marquiss:

So when I talk about what I do, some people are like oh my gosh, I would never want to do that over and over and over again. I just don't even want to do it once. But for me, there's so much joy in it that it's a good stress. But for me, there's so much joy in it that it's a good stress, like it is the coming together of a project that's just really fulfilling. And could I sustain that all year round? No, I could not. And that's the idea of if you are in the corporate world and you are taking on project after project after project where you're working 12 hour days, 365, that's not sustainable. Our body can't live in that adrenaline state without having health impact all of the time. So the good stress, I think, is when you are working towards something that you are called to do, that lights you up, that brings you joy, that is feeding your soul. But there are seasons of it that are stressful, even in motherhood. If we were in the infant stage for 20 years, we probably couldn't do it.

Belinda Gaston:

You know that would be unsustainable. Right.

Leighann Marquiss:

Right.

Belinda Gaston:

Right, right and and I liked Leighann, thank you for sharing and I liked the idea of thinking about what's sustainable as well. When you and I met, I was in a place where I had recently had my youngest child and was feeling just overwhelmed with making decisions at work, with this new dynamic in my household, and I was volunteering at church and feeling like, okay, I need to figure out what's next. And I reached out to you and said, okay, I need someone figure out what's next. And I reached out to you and said, okay, I need someone to kind of bounce some ideas about, I need someone to help me kind of think through, make sure that I'm thinking logically about what's next. And then, when we began our sessions, what it turned into?

Belinda Gaston:

Our conversations turned into less about what's next and more about what's sustainable and the why behind it, and I think that's something that I'd like for you to expound on a little bit in the why, when we were busy with all the things, you said listen, there is good stress, there's bad stress, and you gave us examples of that. You've talked about how all busyness is not bad busyness and you also shared when you're feeling forgetful or chronic fatigue or other feelings that lead you to think, man, something's got to change. We rarely think about, well, why? How did I get myself in this position in the first place? And I think that was what came up in our time together. That was really important. What came up in our time together, that was really important. So can you tell our listeners why? The how you get to the busyness is just as important as understanding your busyness.

Leighann Marquiss:

Yeah, I think the first thing I think of is expectations, just not just societal expectations but our own expectations, and some of that is maybe some messaging we've picked up in childhood. You know, maybe something was modeled for us, I just think of generationally women have been busy and kids follow their parents right. So if we are a bad busy, our kids are going to be a bad busy most likely, and they're not going to pick up on that. So it could be something we picked up from childhood. It could be something we picked up from movies or books or whatever. But expectation and mindset has so much impact on what we do we don't realize it, but we really think something that makes us feel something. We think the feeling comes first, but usually it's a mindset issue. It might be a two-second thought that makes us feel a certain way, that then makes us do something, and that's just the path of cognitive behavior therapy. If you go to a licensed therapist or if you go to a licensed, certified life coach, that's what we basically deal with is CBT and it's that idea of we think, feel, do, and a lot of people don't take the time to slow down long enough to identify what they are thinking behind the feeling and behind the behavior. So I think examples are so good, so you know real life examples. But the idea of volunteering and this idea of I just I know our whole audience isn't PTA, but aren't parents, but the PTA. They're really wanting us to do so many things these days and I think these women are amazing. They're making our schools a great environment.

Leighann Marquiss:

But if you're a working mom with multiple children and you're also volunteering somewhere else, volunteering at the school might not be the right thing for you. It might be, that might be where you want to spend your time, but for some of us that's not where we can spend our time and we might feel obligated to do that because the expectation is there and just realizing why, you know not even why, is a great answer, but really the outcome. What outcome am I looking for and why am I raising my hand for this? Is this my skill set? Is this my passion? If I'm doing it out of obligation, it's probably not going to turn out very well in my mind. It may turn out well for school or whoever you're volunteering for, and the other thing is, if this isn't my calling, I may be stepping in the way of somebody else who's calling it is, and they might thrive at this and they may find community in a place where now I've taken their spot and I don't really want to be there.

Leighann Marquiss:

So I do think it's important, before we say yes to something, to just, you know, take a deep breath, take 24 hours, take, take seven days, if you want to, before raising your hand. Something for me, because I like, if I'm involved in something, I really like it to be effective and good quality and excellent, right. So it's very hard for me to take a back seat if I'm involved because I want to make sure the project comes out well. What I'm trying to say in a nice way is I'm a little bit of a control freak, so I just, you know, I like that. I tend to want to know the big picture, and if you want to know the big picture, you're usually somebody who's going to see multiple facets of the project. So I want to have my hands and stuff not necessarily doing it, but I like to know what's going on and I can't do that for every single space, you know.

Leighann Marquiss:

So I have to really choose and say, okay, where am I called to do this?

Leighann Marquiss:

What am I in my spirit, being asked to do, being asked to do and what's really my talents, right, what have I been gifted with and where should I be using them? And then go all in there and not spread myself too thin, and then I can do things excellently. I can do it without resentment because I don't feel like I'm doing it, because somebody else wants me to do it. I think that there's a time to be gracious and considerate. Certainly, I do things for my family because it's the right thing to do, or you know, I'm not saying be a jerk, but I am saying we don't have to volunteer for every single thing. We don't have to put our hat in the ring for every single project at work or everything that comes up. We will do better and serve our employers better, our family better, our communities better if we do it from a place of. This is my talent, my passion, and I feel like I have the time to do this right now.

Belinda Gaston:

That's good. Leanna, you said a couple of things. One, the idea of what we pass to others, and again, not everyone who's listening is a parent, but there's someone watching all of us. There's always someone watching, especially for Christian women who lead. There's always someone watching and modeling themselves after you. Whether you realize it or not, you have some sort of influence on someone, and so what behavior are we modeling? If we've set this example of bad busyness, then that's what we're modeling for others and, ultimately, the things that we are called to do is not really about us. It's about what God wants to do through us for the people he has assigned to us, and so I appreciate that.

Belinda Gaston:

Leighann and that was one of my aha moments when you and I talked these years ago was that, wait, this busyness that I was dealing with, that was causing overwhelm for me, was passed down through generations for me? I came from a long line of busy women, and those women were busy for a variety of reasons. They were over I should say overly busy. It may have started out as survival. In the first generation that you know, this kind of trait pops up, turned into maybe a lack of confidence or lack of understanding their value and their purpose and even proving themselves. You know, feeling the need to prove themselves and all that got passed on from my mother and my grandmother, my great grandmother, and here I am overwhelmed, doing things that I probably shouldn't have been doing because of that generational piece. So I think that those two things that you pointed out were extremely important.

Belinda Gaston:

And then the last thing you said was giving space for others. I mean, Leighann, that's brilliant. I'm going back through this because, listeners, I want you to get this. If you are overly busy or taking on this bad stress because you're doing something you shouldn't be doing and God has assigned someone else for that role, you are in that person's way. So, essentially, you're blocking what God is trying to do through someone else because of your obligation, your need to lead that or be involved in that, or whatever the feeling is that causes you to believe that that's where you should be when you shouldn't. And so when we talk about, as Christian women, our faith being intertwined in our busyness, so to speak, that's one of those things that are why are you in someone's way? Oh, my gosh, Leighann, I can't leave from that for a second. Am I in someone's way? Am I in someone's way Because I just need to be. I feel obligated to be in this space.

Leighann Marquiss:

I feel like that's a Selah moment. Almost Am I in someone's way. Leighann.

Belinda Gaston:

Oh my goodness, Get out.

Leighann Marquiss:

Belinda, get out of the way, get out of someone's way and I will tell you and this is something that I've learned too is just that idea of the waiting. There's so many layers here, it is like an onion, oh my gosh. So many things I want to say about this One. Just that idea of are we popping our hand up because of the expectation and why do we feel like we need to meet that expectation? And you went back to that idea of worth, and I think there are so many women who are trying to prove their worth to the people around them. They want to be recognized for the things that they've been through, the things that they excel at. They want to feel like they're worth fighting for. They want to prove that they're worth fighting for, they want to prove that they're worth staying for.

Leighann Marquiss:

So many ideas of just the fear of abandonment, the fear of rejection, the fear of am I good enough? And I think those are things that a lot of us get from childhood and, you know, from many parenting situations. Kids take in messaging through their subconscious, and the subconscious does not have maturity, it does not have wisdom, it does not have a filter. So this is not something where we would vilify the generation above us. This is just a childlike mind taking in a message and misinterpreting it, and it's something that we don't understand, and some people never understand it because they don't take the time to unpack it.

Leighann Marquiss:

But just this idea of why am I raising my hand? Just why am I? Is this something that I am super, super passionate about? That when I see the email or I see the text or whatever it happens to be the announcement, my heart leaps for joy. Because if it doesn't leap for joy, then maybe that's when you're like you know what.

Leighann Marquiss:

Why, then, am I raising my hand? Is it because I feel the community needs it? Well, guess what? Maybe there's somebody else in the community that should do it. And I think waiting lets you a ask God what he thinks right and have a time to really say is this something you want me to do? And if you're still thinking about it and the Lord's still impressing it upon you, believe me, if the Lord is calling you to it, he's not going to let you forget it. So waiting to raise your hand doesn't mean that you're going to miss being able to be involved. I truly believe that. So, yeah, just that idea of there's many hands and feet. You know, in the body of Christ. There's many people in this world. Am I the one to fill this role In anything, in any spectrum?

Belinda Gaston:

That's good and that leads us to these tips. I wanted to ask you to give us some tips on how we can go from overwhelmed and frazzled and busy to calm and living with intentionality, but to wait, to wait and use that time while we wait, before we say our yes, to figure out why we are doing what we're doing. So the waiting is important. Praying and seeking God is important. Are there other tips, Leighann, you would give for?

Leighann Marquiss:

folks. Yeah, I think in terms of intentionality and just busyness and what we're filling our time with, I think the biggest thing I ask people is what are your three stresses?

Leighann Marquiss:

If biggest stressors. I should say, if somebody comes to me, that's usually what I'll ask in the first session and that's usually what we will address first, because it really helps me identify and so the listeners can kind of, if they want to make their list, what are my three top stressors? It helps me identify maybe some blind spots or some messaging, like we're talking about those expectations, or messaging that we don't realize where we're doing things because of that messaging that we believe those thoughts that we have. It helps us identify those things.

Leighann Marquiss:

So you might say you might be going through a time where the stressor is something that you cannot control, like, say, a divorce or a death or job loss, like things that right outside circumstances are coming in and that is a really big stressor and you feel like you can't change it. Then that's when you would really work on mindset of acceptance, radical acceptance and resilience techniques we would bring in. If your top stressor is something like I just feel like I don't have enough time, I have so many things to do, I don't have enough time, then we're probably going to look at again how often are you raising your hand? How many things are you involved in? Are you able to delegate, are you able to eliminate, are you able to streamline things that would be more of time management and boundaries per se, right? So for me, looking at my top three stressors, that's going to identify what I need to work on.

Belinda Gaston:

That's a great tip and I think when and I would like to say to our listeners, this is something that you could actually do a few times a year as you're going through your leadership journey, because your top three stressors may change as life changes, yep, and so that's a really good activity, and so that's a really good activity.

Leighann Marquiss:

So anytime there's a season of, I'm going to say renewal but, like, for me, I'm a Girl Scout leader. I've been a Girl Scout leader for 12 years and every spring I kind of think of, okay, girl Scout year is coming to an end, I'm going to have to renew my membership. I should talk to my other leaders, like, what are they going to be doing? I need to think about myself, like what does next year look like and do I feel like next year I should be a Girl Scout leader? Right? So that would be the time that I would assess that, if you are volunteering at church, if there's a natural progression of, okay, they let volunteers take the summer off and then we would re-sign up for, like, september through, so it doesn't always happen in January, right. So it could be based on a school year. It could be based on, you know, just patterns at work of projects ending and something coming back up.

Leighann Marquiss:

Or I have a friend who, like their workplace, would have different certifications you could get. You could be like the office, ergonomics, you know, specialist and you could go around and help everybody with that. So there were different things she could take on at work that didn't really have to do with her job per se. Like her role, they were just extra things. There's people who take on stuff at work. If there's a fun run or a fundraiser that the job participates in every year and they have to put the team together and they've got to collect checks for it, that's something extra that you don't have to do for your job, but it's really helpful to the community and it's fun to do. So that has a natural kind of life cycle. And then the question is do I want to do this again so you can reassess whenever the life cycle of that particular activity or activities comes up again or when it's ending?

Belinda Gaston:

That's a great tip. Thank you, and for our listeners, if you are struggling in this space sometimes you know I'll also throw in. There's something that Leighann said earlier about time. Sometimes you actually have to take time to go through this exercise, which goes against the busyness. I know we have a lot of things to do, but sometimes you have to stop and say, okay, I need a day. I just need a day to sit and get these things out of my head and make my list or to assess what's actually happening with me. And one of the things that I'll share that helped me with this exercise with Leighann is having an accountability partner telling someone listen, this is what I'm going to do and this is why and I need you to hold me accountable for it really does help. Leighann, how do you think accountability plays in this process?

Leighann Marquiss:

I will say, as a life coach, I obviously think accountability is super important. But even as a life coach, I need other people to hold me accountable. I don't know many humans personally that can be disciplined in areas of their life that they struggle in and I just use this word struggle. I don't know if it's the best word for the feeling of being too busy, but there's a blind spot there. There's something there Like you're saying, like I think, to describe bad busyness. Most people know what bad busy is because they felt it, they know something's wrong, they know something needs to change, and so having accountability just relieves you of the idea of having to do it, do it all on your own. Community is super important and accountability is just an extension of that community. It's a smaller piece and whether it's a life coach or a friend or a pastor or, you know, a sister, a parent, telling somebody else I think helps, helps in some way keep you accountable. Writing it down, our brain helps us keep it accountable when we write it down, science shows us that. So, speaking these things aloud, there's just power in that. There just is. I think it's really important and I think what you said about it seems counterintuitive. I'm so busy, how am I going to have time to sit down and do this? But that goes back to the idea of being intentional. We cannot be intentional if we don't have a plan. We cannot be strategic if we don't even know what our strategy is.

Leighann Marquiss:

Now, gosh, probably, probably almost 10 years ago, I remember my mom called me in just to check in on me and I was so sick. I mean, I was just like barking like a dog, like I just had this awful cough. It wouldn't go away. And she said, well, why don't you go to the doctor? And it almost made me want to cry. I was so busy. I was like mom, I do not have time to go to the doctor. And she was like Leighann, if you go to the doctor, you're going to get better. And then you won't feel like you feel.

Leighann Marquiss:

And I think that translates to into that emotional sense and that emotional sense of being overwhelmed. I don't have time to stop and figure this out because then I'll be behind. But the idea is, if you take that time to stop, you will actually be spending your time more wisely, coming out of that strategy session, coming out of that planning session, because you're going to be able to understand what's going wrong. You're feeling that overwhelmed because something is wrong. So if you don't fix it, you will continue to feel in that state, no matter how long you run on the treadmill, because the to-do list is never going to be over, right? We're always going to have that to-do list, and so if we're not strategic and don't take that time, I just I think people think they don't have time to sit and do it, but when you do sit and do it, it just ends up making your time that much more effective.

Belinda Gaston:

That's great advice and I think that's a good place for us to kind of wrap up. Before we wrap up, I do want to ask if you have any final thoughts, if there's anything else you'd like to share with our listeners related to this topic of going from frazzled to calm and intentionality.

Leighann Marquiss:

Yeah, I think I said it earlier in the podcast, but I just want to reiterate that this all starts in our mind. It's a mindset issue, and if we can start with the idea that if we can get our mind calm, then it doesn't matter what's going on in our life, right, because our mind is where our peace sits. And when I say that, I'm not taking away the idea of spirituality, because I think, for us who are Christians, we know that when we are in alignment and we are quiet before the Lord, we can be peaceful in the midst of a storm. We can be peaceful in the midst of a storm. So, just understanding that we need to look at our thought processes and take the time to do that, it all stems from there.

Belinda Gaston:

That's a great way for us to end this. We are all seeking peace and I think when you get yourself to that space and you really get there it's hard for you to not want to continue to remain in that space. Leighann, this has been a really good conversation and, I think, necessary, and I believe our listeners if you've been following along and you've been taking your own notes you have gained some insight and perspective and we've just scratched the surface. So Leighann is a certified life coach and this is what she does. This is how she helps women and she has an amazing story. We haven't even talked about her life story. Maybe we can do that another time, but I encourage you to connect with her. If this has resonated with you in any way and you're needing some additional support, Leighann a great place to start and so, Leighann, I'll ask you to share how people can reach you, how they can find your resources, how they can get in touch with you.

Leighann Marquiss:

Yeah, absolutely. I think for coaching, the best place is my website, which is just my name L-E-I-G-H-A-N-N-M-A-R-Q-U-I-S-Scom, and they can book sessions through a calendar there, or they can get to know me a little bit more through my blog post and just kind of stuff on there. I'm also on Instagram. I don't post as much there, but they can always DM me through Instagram. Same name, Leon Marquis, on Instagram. And yeah, I am happy, always happy to connect with women who are looking to grow in their faith and in their lives and, honestly, just to be able to impact their communities better through getting you know, getting that calm in their minds.

Belinda Gaston:

Thank you, Leighann, and for our listeners, I will have Leighann information in the show notes with this episode so that you can reach out to her. Leighann, thank you so much. I know you're in the middle of a flip I think you just started a flip, right A house flip at the time and so I know that things are busy and that you have chosen to spend your time with the Graced to Lead podcast. So thank you for using your voice today. We so appreciate it.

Leighann Marquiss:

Of course. Thank you for having me, Belinda. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. You're one of my favorite people.

Belinda Gaston:

Mine too. You're one of my favorite people too. All right For our listeners. Thank you for listening and until we talk again, virtually, make sure that you like, subscribe and share the podcast episodes and we'll see you again next week on the Graced to Lead podcast. You.

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Belinda Gaston

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