Ep 5: Do less harm, take less shit, be more you
Today I’m offering up a motto to live by: Do less harm, take less shit, be more you.
In this episode I’m breaking down:
why ‘do no harm’ is unrealistic
how acknowledging that we do harm opens space for repair
unlearning how we’ve been taught to show up as less than our full selves
why more you is always better
bringing you into your business and work
Let’s dive in.
Links, resources & mentions
Fiona Sutherland - The Mindful Dietitian
Barbara J Love’s framework for liberatory consciousness
James-Olivia Chu Hillman @inquisitive_human
Episode Transcript
Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. Today I'm flying solo. And I want to talk to you about a little phrase or you could even call it a mantra, if you're into that kind of thing, that I have been both sharing and internalizing, or at the very least repeating to myself often, 'do less harm, take less shit, be more you'.
What do I mean by this? And why do I think it's a really great way to show up in life and business? Well, when you want to show up in your values in your business, part of it, of course, is knowing your values, it's getting clear on that. And it's specific actions that we can take to fulfill our values to use them as guides as tools. But there's also the stuff around it. So how we show up, and how we act and what we think about that. So how we, I suppose navigate inside our heads, if you like to hang out there like I do in your own head, not in my head, get out of my head, I've got enough of my own thoughts in there. How we navigate particularly fear, and the ideas that can get us stuck in not showing up. So this is my little antidote to that, and it's a little riff on something I actually heard a similar kind of sentiment on the Brene Brown podcast Unlocking Us where the person was talking about, but I think it was like, take no, sorry, do no harm, of course, because that's the Hippocratic Oath for doctors and nurses that this was a nurse talking about it. And I think take less shit. And I don't think she said be more you. Maybe it just was do no harm, take less shit. And I was like, I like that, I liked it. And I thought we could reframe it a little bit. And I'll explain as I kind of why I made those slight changes to the first part and also what I mean by the whole phrase.
So let's begin, let's start with the first part, do less harm. So it would be great if we could do no harm, but it's just not bloody realistic. And when we try and operate under the kind of mindset or through that thought of do no harm, it can get us stuck. It can get us worried about doing the right thing or the wrong thing. about doing things before we kind of you know, have all the information and truth time if you are anything like the average perfectionist seeking overthinking paralysis analysis over analyzing dietitian that I come across regularly and perhaps am recovering from myself. then you don't need any more things getting stuck in your head to stop you from taking action to get you stuck in that space. So when we think of doing no harm, it's bloody impossible. We are humans working with other humans. And we will inevitably do harm. Hopefully not with intent. But it will happen because we're all learning and unlearning particularly we're humans working with other humans within a supremacy based capitalist patriarchy society or culture that has programmed us to act in ways that enact harm. And we're all unlearning from that. And through that unlearning, it's not a destination, you know, we'll never be there, it's going to be a lifelong process for all of us. And to think that we're going to get to a point where we do no harm is just unrealistic.
So you know, we're humans, we have our own stuff. And we work with other humans with their own stuff. And stuff is included, but not limited to impact of lived experience, and also including our bias. So our social cultural bias, you know, if you're a non diet dietitian, you've probably been working on and still work on your anti fat bias that we all have that's programmed into us, or socialized into us. And I've been working in the non diet sphere. since the mid 2000s. Or starting to you know, of course, I started out as a classic splinter-arseing dietitian (hat tip to the mindful dietitian, Fiona Sutherland for that excellent phrase), you know, when we're kind of straddling both worlds, but I've been working in this space for a long time working on on these things, and they still come up because it's a conscious effort to add a conscious thought to reprogram to challenge that bias. So it's always coming up. And for the clients that we work with the humans we work with, they can have internalized bias around their bodies and around being fat. And I'm using the term fat as a reclaimed word not as a culturally sanctioned derogatory term. So just to put that out there. We also have our own internalized bias as a woman, somebody socialized to be a woman, then I have internalized bias around that, because I live in a patriarchy and you probably have your own internalized bias as well. We also have our social programming around all those things.
So, what we're taught how we're taught to show up or not show up our cultural norms, and that can be, you know, the wider culture that we're all exposed to plus our own personal family of origin cultures, religious beliefs, all of those things, trauma, as non diet dietitians or any health professional, really, we come across people, other humans with trauma, and we may have our own trauma that we are managing, and that we are healing from or that we are learning to, you know, work with or work despite of. We also, of course, have the lovely Biggie of systemic oppression, that we are all, the water we are all swimming in, which pops up consciously and subconsciously, within interactions. And of course, for some people, holding more marginalized identities you can get that intersection of stuff (the technical term!). So we all have that. So basically, the best we can hope for is to do less harm, to come with a curiosity, to come with an openness to be respectful to come particularly with an openness for repair, because we will do harm, it is how we repair and whether we repair that will be the, you know, have the biggest impact because it's not about intention, it is about that impact. So we'll do less harm, and we'll do a lot more repair, maybe I should add that into version 2.0. So we can listen, we can learn, we can analyze, we can use things like Barbara J. Loves, framework for liberatory consciousness, to analyze and to go through a whole process and then we can take action. And so we can do better. You know, the great quote by Maya Angelou know better do better, I'm pretty confident that in between those two steps, they were considering that we would do a lot more work than just take action straight away. So we can do less harm. So this is the first part of it, we can set aside the idea that we will do no harm, we can accept that we will do harm, and we can do less harm, we can go on with our eyes open, we can make conscious choices, we can be curious, we can be learning, we can be unlearning. And most importantly, we can be repairing if harm does occur, we can learn we can learn from it so that we in fact, do better. Not just speak that whole kind of concept. So that's do less harm.
Take no, or take less shit, take no shit would be great too. But that's kind of unrealistic. Because again, we're dealing with our social programming that perhaps has taught us that we should be taking a little bit of shit, so unlearning that to take less shit. So it's about stopping worrying what other people are thinking of you, stopping the quest, stopping that questioning of whether you're enough, if you're enough. And again, if you're a non diet dietitian, and you work with clients around their body and their relationship with food, I imagine like me, when you work with clients, you are giving them the tools and giving them resources to know that they're enough that they're worthy that they were born worthy. And that they were born to be enough that there's nothing they can say and do nothing they can eat or not eat that will change that fact. And I'll let you in on a little secret. It's true for you too. You're already enough. No matter what you do, no matter what you don't do. No matter even if you do harm to other people, you are still enough. We can absolutely you know, show up as better humans but your enough, your humanity is not up for negotiation. It doesn't hinge on anything else. So know that you're enough and you can take action in that space, there have been enough of being worthy. We can stop worrying about cultural expectations, or at least start working towards stopping worrying because again, it's unrealistic to think we'll get to a point where we can act with pure, you know, without any consideration because we're social beings, humans are built to be connected and some of that awareness of other people can be really helpful because it can help us to stop and pause, it's when it keeps us in that inaction, when it keeps us in that place of fear or shame. That is when we need to start taking less shit around that area. So taking less shit, possibly my favorite of the three, actually no my favorites coming up number three. So put your work into the world. Be the dietitian you want to be (and I'll pop a link in the show notes to the episode on that being a dietitian you want to be), run the business that you want to run. It's your business, it's your life, be who you want to be show up how you want to show up, make the difference that you want to make, create the world you want to live in. And that you want future generations to live in. Take less shit, be more you.
And that brings us to number three which is be more you, now absolutely hat tip to the amazing @inquisitive_human (James-Olivia Chu Hillman). I first came across this phrase be more you, more you is better through their work, they talk about it in their posts on Instagram. And it just really spoke to my whole way of operating as a dietitian business coach, and also when I work as a non diet dietitian, which is actually positioning, you are positioning the client as the expert in themselves, bringing more of them into their lives, bringing more of them into their actions. So taking less shit, putting aside cultural and social programming and ideas and being more of them or bringing more of them. So how can you be more you, more you is always better. performing a version of yourself or who you think other people want you to be? It's bloody exhausting, it's unsustainable. You cannot...well you can of course give it a crack, if you want, and maybe have been. I mean, it's possibly one of the reasons so many dietitians go through that burnout. I mean, there's lots of things, there's values disconnect, but one of them is we're performing this idea of what a dietitian should be, and depending on the identities you hold, what a woman should be, what a person with other marginalized identities should be. And I can't speak to those because I don't hold any other than being a woman. But if you hold more than if you hold other marginalized identities, other actually, you know, better term for that which I heard recently that I felt resonated more was less resourced identities, which I think was a really good way of actually naming the problem there. Sorry, this is a bit of a tangent on language. But when we talk about marginalized, I mean, it's a lot better than some of the other terminology used. It talks about it talks to people being pushed to the margin, what I really thought what really resonated with me around that phrase of less resourced people or less resourced identities, shows that actually, this is a purposeful thing, you know, people's resources are being stripped and their humanity is being stripped from them. So sorry, that was a bit of a tangent, but that is something that I'm trying to integrate into my language a little bit more, which kind of comes back to the do less harm when we know when we come across new language, or when we get information or feedback from people around the language that we're using, we can do less harm by making changes there. Or we can do take less shit by really speaking to the truth of it, which is what I feel like that terminology of less resourced humans less resourced identities, speaks, sort of wraps words around is that actually this is purpose putting these people are being less resourced by our society, basically. So and when historically and currently and probably future for a little while yet, but hopefully, we can make change around that very thing.
So when I'm speaking to this idea of being more you, it's basically as it sounds, bring more you into your business into your work as a dietitian, you don't have to be this caricature of a dietitian, some sort of unfeeling, food police robot of a dietitian. You don't have to prescribe. I mean, you can if you want to, of course, but you don't have to. I mean, this is an invitation to question some of those things that hold you back from bringing you into your work, professional standards, which are all bullshit. But all of these things, it's an opportunity to question it and to look for the space where you can be more you where you can bring more of you into your work as a dietitian, maybe into the words you use, into the posts you make, into the way you talk about your job, you know, you don't, you can change the script, you can bring more you. Because the truth is that the humans you work with, they want to know the human that they are working with, the more we humanize ourselves and we humanize the human so which sounds like really silly, really obvious, but unfortunately, our culture and the supremacy culture that we live in it, it thrives off dehumanization, capitolo, cap capitalization, that's just putting big letters at the front of a word Laura. And capitalism, you know, it's all about extracting, exploiting and dehumanizing. That's how these structures these power structures thrive and work is by taking the human out, we can put the human back in, and it is an act of resistance to one recognize the humans that we are working with as bloody humans, but also recognize that we are humans and bring that into our work. And again, I know it sounds obvious, but we don't there's all these standards, professionalism, all this stuff that we use to dehumanize ourselves that our profession uses to dehumanize us that our you know, the the medical systems and the health system and the culture all around us uses to dehumanize us and we don't have to put up with that we don't have to continue to play that role. To play this version of ourselves. We can be, you can be more you, because hat tip to @inquisitive_human, more you is better Oh and James Olivia Chu Hillman is their name, I keep calling them 'the inquisitve human' but that's sort of, their tag and their handle on iG. So more you is better.
So, what do you say? Are you ready to pick up the baton, take up the challenge, do less harm, take less shit, be more you? I would love to hear your thoughts on this. And perhaps you might have a different riff on this or another idea of words around this or how this would play out in your work in your business or just in how you show up as a dietitian, or how you show up as a human being a human doing human things. So as always, I'm pretty keen to hear from you. I'd love to continue the conversation over on Instagram @dietitianvalues you can make a comment over there or send me a DM. if you feel called to do it please feel free to leave a review or share this podcast with your dietitian bestie who needs to also you know get this message or you can support each other in basically living to this - do less harm, take less shit, be more you. go out there my dietitian friends, let's change the world. Let's be dietitians with a difference. dietitians on a mission. Let's do less harm. Let's take less shit. Let's be more you. I'll be more me and you'll be more you. Okay, I'll chat to you soon. Bye for now.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
