The Summer You Finally Feel Like Yourself Again
It feels like every time summer arrives, it comes with some unspoken promises.
We look forward to more space. More ease. More time with the people who matter most.
Our calendars have a way of clearing… even just a bit. And the pressure lifts a little.
And somewhere in the planning of your summer - the trips, the weekends, the slower mornings - there's a piece of you that's hoping you can finally enjoy it this year.
And then summer actually arrives.
And you're physically there, doing all the things you can only do in summer.
You might be sitting at the pool. Attending a barbecue.
Or finally taking the vacation you planned for months. But something in you still can't quite settle.
You're there physically, but not fully. Almost like an out of body experience.
You're going through the motions of enjoyment without really feeling it in your bones.
It's not conscious, but it's as if you're scanning for the next thing that needs handling.
Waiting for the next shoe to drop. Noticing what still needs to be done even though nothing technically needs to be done right now.
And then, quietly, guilt creeps in. "I should be more grateful for what I have right now. Just be here now."
You have everything you wanted. Everything you planned for. And you still can't fully enjoy it.
The women who partner with me, are very familiar with this feeling.
When I first started working with Nancy P., she told me something that continues to stick with me. In part, because it encapsulates what so many women secretly share with me.
She was sitting at the pool on a beautiful sunny afternoon. Spending time with her child.
Genuinely wanting to be present. And completely unable to get there.
She'd done the work. She made significant mindset shifts. Did the therapy. Set real limits around how people can access her.
She wasn't someone who hadn't tried to be more present. And still, she just couldn't enjoy a truly lovely moment.
She described it this way: "I turn joyful activities into jobs and then use them as weapons against myself. Everything is a performance with a grade at the end."
She could see exactly what she was doing. She just couldn't understand why.
And that gap - between seeing it clearly and being able to change it - is truly one of the most exhausting things a high-achieving woman can experience. The depletion can be debilitating.
When we first spoke, Nancy told me she wondered if she was too far gone from her spirit to ever get it back.
She described what she was living as "death by 1000 cuts".
She knew she had the capability for her job. And yet, she wondered whether she had the capacity to enjoy her life anymore.
Why the tools haven't worked the way they should have.
If you've ever experienced a beautiful moment, trying to be present, but instead had the niggling thought that there must be something you need to be doing… you've probably already tried to fix it.
Mindfulness. Meditation. Journaling. Setting better limits. Saying no more often. Scheduling the rest.
And maybe in summers past, you've even tried to do less.
I'm going to take a guess that none of it fully held.
And every time it didn't hold, you absorbed a little more evidence that the problem was you. I get it, because that was me, too.
But I want to assure you this is not a you problem.
After more than a decade of working with women like Nancy, and honestly through my own experience too, here's what I've come to understand.
The inability to be present in joyful moments isn't a mindset problem. It isn't ingratitude. And it definitely isn't a failure of discipline.
It's what happens when a nervous system ties what we do - thinking, holding things together, getting things done - with who we are.
It's what happens when your inner system has been linked to performance for so long that stillness starts to feel like a threat.
I wonder how that might have looked for you. Our childhood doesn't need to look traumatic for this to have taken hold.
For many of the women I work with, the body learned early that being productive and indispensable was what kept them connected to the people who mattered.
Presence without purpose didn't make sense. Joy without a task attached felt unearned.
For me, it looked like reading the room and managing my mom's emotions so the boat wasn't rocked. Helping someone in need before I was asked, to ease their distress. Deferring to the strongest, most senior person in the room., so things keep rolling along without a glitch.
And so, even now, decades later, in a life we’ve carefully built and genuinely love… our bodies are still running that same program.
To a nervous system with that history, rest doesn't feel like a reward. It feels like a risk.
What actually has to happen first.
I've written in depth about this in my Complete Witnessing post, and if you haven't read it yet I'd encourage you to.
{Read the Complete Witnessing blog post here.]
What I want to name here is the piece most relevant to summer specifically.
Full presence requires safety.
And safety, for this particular woman, doesn't come from clearing the calendar. And it doesn't come from telling yourself "I'm safe. Look around me. Life's good."
It comes from something more foundational than that.
That shift happens when we begin to consistently receive what our nervous system has been waiting for since childhood.
The acknowledgment not just of what we did, but of what it cost us to do it.
The complete picture, witnessed fully.
When that signal starts arriving consistently - first from the work itself, and eventually from ourselves - something changes that, up until now, no protocol has been able to reach.
The body begins to believe it's safe to stop working and actually rest.
Not because the circumstances changed. Because the foundation did.
Nancy threw a pool party this summer.
A few weeks ago, Nancy sent me a message. Our work together had ended two weeks prior and she wanted to share some good news.
"I threw a pool party for my child and her classmates today. Just for fun. A massive play date.
I used to really enjoy throwing parties and somewhere along the way, that got lost.
It occurred to me as I was tidying up after everyone left that there was no way I would have been able to throw this party three months ago.
I had no energy to plan, to shop, to set up, to socialize with parents and play with the kids. I couldn't even sit in the pool with my family without feeling unhappy.
All of that is different now. I found my way back to this part of myself that had gotten buried under so much strain."
This is the same woman who only 8 weeks earlier wondered if she was too far gone from her spirit to ever find her way back.
She wasn't too far gone.
Her body was waiting for the right signal.
And that part of you that feels buried right now... it isn't gone either. It's waiting for the same thing.
What this summer could feel like.
The barbecues and the long weekends and the slower mornings are still ahead of you.
There's still time for this summer to feel different from the ones before it.
It won't be perfect. But this summer can genuinely be different in the way Nancy described - finding your way back to a part of yourself that got buried under so much strain.
That part of you isn't gone.
And you're not too far gone to find it.
If you'd like to understand more about what that foundation actually requires, and why the tools you've already tried haven't quite hit the mark, I'd encourage you to start with my Complete Witnessing post.
It's the piece that explains everything underneath this one.
[LINK — Complete Witnessing blog — 15 minute read, worth every minute]
And if you're ready to do more than just understand it - if you're ready to actually experience what it feels like to be fully present this summer - I'd love to talk.
In this with you,
Lisa
Lisa Bobyak founded Living Fully Balanced LLC because she got tired of watching brilliant women break themselves trying to maintain excellence, in part because she'd been one of them. For over a decade, she's worked with high-achieving, deeply attuned women who are doing everything right. Competent, disciplined, and highly self-aware. Armed with strategies, protocols, and solid habits. The level of their exhaustion doesn't match their effort to feel better.
If you're a high-achieving woman who's tired of working harder at your own wellbeing than you work at everything else... you don't have to break yourself to prove your worth.
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