Welcome to stand out from the crowd.
I'm Darine and if you are anything like me, you have probably been through a few unexpected twists on your journey.
My plan “A” was to be a diplomat, but life had other plans leading me to become an impact entrepreneur and champion for women's leadership.
Sometimes life has a funny way of throwing us curveballs, right?
I have always wondered why fit in when you were born to stand out. In this podcast, I sit down with remarkable women leaders who have embraced their unique path, defied expectations, and created lasting impact.
We dive into their stories, explore their mindset, their resilience, and the strategies that helped them succeed even when left through stones in their path.
Whether it's insights on personal growth, strategies to amplify your visibility, or tips to boost your well-being and overall productivity, you will find the inspiration you need to unlock your full potential.
Join me for conversations that will empower you to stand out in your career, in your life, and in everything that you do.
Because listen, here, we don't just follow the crowd.
We stand out.
Michelle Niemeyer is a speaker, coach, and former attorney who teaches professionals how to bend time so they can stay sharp, productive, and profitable without burning out.
After finding her way to burnout and back in her own high-performing legal career, Michelle created the art of bending time, a framework that helps people connect the dots across work, life, and purpose to magnetize success and reclaim their joy.
She helps businesses retain top talent, boost development, and keep their people energized and engaged, all while making the magic happen.
Michelle, welcome to the Standout Podcast.
How are you doing today?
I'm great.
Thank you, Darine.
So I have read through your story, and you have quite an interesting journey.
And this is something that I love on this podcast, is discovering the amazing journey of women leaders who dared, you know, to break the mold and challenge the status quo.
And so from law to coaching, can you share with us what led you to that transition?
Because it's kind of a big transition.
It's a huge transition, and to this day, a lot of people look at that and go, why would you leave law, right?
I spent three years after my college years preparing to be a lawyer.
I worked as a lawyer for 33 years.
And it's a very, very difficult profession.
It's a profession that takes everything it can get from you.
And I had a period, and this was a long time ago now, around 2013, roughly, where I became extremely, extremely burned out.
For a long time, I hadn't loved being a lawyer.
There are things about being a lawyer that I really enjoyed.
But in the whole holistic sense of my life, I wasn't getting a lot that I needed.
And so I started doing a lot of volunteer work, which turned into almost like a second full-time job for me.
And that culminated in a political race, which I ran for an office here in Miami.
And so it was almost like I was working full-time as a lawyer and full-time in volunteer leadership positions in the city where I live.
And ultimately, I got very, very, very burned out at the end of it.
And I didn't realize that at the time. I hadn't really taken the time to look at what was happening.
But the experience of burnout made me resentful about my job.
It made me feel like I was giving everything and not getting anything back.
And it made me really numb to the good parts.
So I remember I had a very good friend at the time who was looking at, kind of from the outside in at what was happening with me and saying, I just don't understand.
You need to be grateful.
And I was like, grateful for what? I wasn't able to see the things to be grateful for.
And I think that's one thing that people don't recognize about burnout is that, first of all, when you're in it, you don't know that's what it is.
You just feel like you don't like your life anymore.
You don't like what you do.
You don't necessarily appreciate the people around you or the good things that are happening. And it takes stepping back to be able to get back to that place again.
Coming back to your burnout story.
And I think what you are saying is very important.
Resentment, lack of appreciation.
Did you experience any physical symptoms that you ignore?
Oh, yeah, lots of them.
And I didn't know at the time.
So physical symptoms.
I don't know if they were symptoms of burnout per se, but they were symptoms of what I later learned was probably the early stages of an autoimmune disease.
And I absolutely believe that chronic stress, which is part of what contributes to burnout, is contributing to people having autoimmune diseases.
So when you live with chronic stress, you have inflammation in your body.
It messes with your microbiome.
There's all kinds of things that now they're learning connect to autoimmune diseases and why a particular disease gets triggered in one person and another one in another person and in a third person, maybe they're fine and they don't have any problem at all.
I don't know. But that, I believe, is what was going on.
So you asked about symptoms.
Starting in my 20s, I had joint pain.
I had what I now understand is probably a constant level of inflammation that was chronic.
Was it related to the stress of being a lawyer?
Was it related to sitting all day and hardly getting any movement?
I don't know what, you know, I know the overall, the things I did over time and I feel better at 60 than I did at 27. I'm not exaggerating.
And tell us why and how is this happening? We want to know, right?
Like, how do you, how do you feel better at 60 than you did in your 20s and 30s?
And, you know, I believe it's because, first of all, as a young person, I didn't drink water.
Pretty much ever. I lived on Coke, Diet Coke and coffee.
My God.
Coffee in the morning, Diet Coke in the afternoon. And then I went out for happy hour, right?
So it was coffee or Diet Coke or alcohol, all of which are dehydrating.
None of them is water.
You're getting water from your food.
You're getting water from, you know, there's liquid in those things.
But in the end, they're not hydrating and they're not helping to cleanse toxins out of your body or the things that water does for you.
That was part of it.
Part of it was a job that had me sitting most of the day every day and getting up once in a while when I went to get my Diet Coke or my coffee out of the kitchen at the office, right?
I exercised, but the exercise I did was abusive to my body. I was a runner.
So I ran half marathons a couple of times. I ran 10 mile races. I ran a lot of 10Ks.
There was a period of time where I was running about six to eight miles every morning.
And, you know, that was beating up on my joints. And I didn't do other exercise.
So I was getting very inflexible while I was doing that.
Um, at times I swam. I ended up having to have back surgery when I was 32.
Oh!
I ruptured a disc in my back and I had to have surgery on that.
And then I had knee issues and I had, I had a torn meniscus and had surgery on my knee.
You know, so all these things were, in my opinion, they were symptoms of the way that I was abusing myself by not hydrating properly, not exercising properly.
Not eating a good variety of foods for a long time.
And then when I was about 49, I had this event, which really scared me.
I went to the hospital because I thought I had appendicitis.
And it turned out they thought it was gallstones.
And so they originally, they saw this, this pattern of liver enzyme elevation, which they thought was gallstones.
They did an ultrasound and couldn't find any gallstones, but they said, well, you know, sometimes we can't see the gallstones.
So I was never much of a believer in going to the doctor.
I really don't like the medical industry and some of the things that they do.
And so I just was like, okay, I can figure this out.
I'll lose weight, eat better, exercise more, all that. And I did that.
And I became a beach body coach.
The coaches were essentially a sales force.
And they gave you a discount and you made money if you sold their programs.
And I did it for the accountability.
I did it because I knew that if I was selling the program, I would do the program.
And it was the first exposure I ever had to any kind of personal development.
And it also got me into a much better level of knowledge and really habit of eating right, drinking water, exercising regularly.
And I lost 35 pounds that year and I felt great and everything was good.
And I was, I thought I had taken care of this.
And then I went to the doctor and we did blood testing.
And the numbers that were elevated at the hospital were twice as high as they had been at the hospital.
Even though I felt fine, there was no pain, all the symptoms were gone.
And that led me to becoming diagnosed with an autoimmune liver disease called primary biliary cholangitis, PBC.
It's very rare.
When I was diagnosed, I was told about eight in 100,000 people get this. Lucky me.
Now it's up to about 22 in 100,000.
And I think that's because of the quality of blood testing that people are getting in their regular checkups.
They're finding this without people having symptoms or any kind of problems.
And learning about that really scared me because when I went online and I looked at what it said, I was seeing things like 10 year lifespan.
And liver transplant, right?
Very scary stuff.
And so I did a lot of research and then I went to a, I went to a nutritional health coaching school for almost a year and got certified as a health coach.
Not because I ever intended to be a coach, but because I wanted to learn about this to change what I was doing and to do whatever I could to address autoimmunity.
Because the medical doctor's take on autoimmunity is essentially, there's no cure for this.
We have this drug we can give you and maybe it'll work, maybe it won't.
And what we can hope for is that it stops causing damage. But what's been damaged will probably stay the same.
So hope is not a good strategy.
Yeah, so ultimately what I did was I said, okay, I'm not sure I really believe all that. I significantly changed my lifestyle, how I ate, how I moved my body, my stress management, all the rest of it. And over the course of about five years, I got my, my labs are totally normal.
They're actually in the lower end of the normal range, which is awesome.
And I've also reversed the liver damage that showed on something they call a fiber scan.
They could measure whether there's damage.
And I went from stage two to stage zero.
So I was able to change a lot. And, and that really had everything to do with a lot of different things.
I mean, it wasn't just food and exercise. Like I said, it was stress management.
It was, I got rid of chemicals out of my environment that I never would have imagined, you know, changing my cleaning products, changing, you know, my personal care products, all kinds of things to try to reduce everywhere.
I could get chemicals out of my life. I have done that to try to eliminate it.
And I don't know how many of those things have been effective or not, but I, like I said, I feel better at 60 than I did at 20 something.
And, you know, I think it all is cumulative.
That's very interesting. You mentioned stress management a couple of times.
And stress is one of the key, if it's not the main cause of all the disease that we experience in our time.
And as part of stress is time, right?
Time, what we always need to perform, to be productive, to provide results, and we all have the same 24 hours, right?
Some people are better at managing time than others.
And so from your experience, and I would like to learn more about the process, you developed the art of bending time, so can you walk us through the process of, you know, experiencing all of this.
You know, finding the solution, reversing your autoimmune disease and deciding that, okay, you know what, I need to focus on time management in order to lower the stress and create a framework out of this idea and experience.
And let me tell you, the reason that this is about time is because I went backwards sort of in my head.
And I said, I find myself in this place now where I am no longer a lawyer, but the last five years of being a lawyer, I actually loved my job and I was enjoying what I was doing and I was getting the best out of it again.
And I made a choice to shift. It wasn't because law wasn't working out.
It was because I knew that I could make so much bigger of an impact doing what I'm doing now and have more of what I love doing what I'm doing now than I could in practicing law.
And that's the cornerstone of everything I teach people.
So I sat back and I said, okay, who was I when I was that burned out person who didn't know I was burned out and who started realizing I needed some kind of help, but I didn't know what it was yet.
And I realized that there was a point in time in about 2013, I purchased a time management course and I did it because I thought that was the problem, was time.
The problem wasn't time as much as the problem was my relationship to time and to deadlines and to expectations and to other people's priorities and to, and, and, and, right?
So I created this program when I realized that all of this personal development stuff that I had learned had given me this ability to see time differently and to use time differently in a way that's almost magical.
And that's where the art of bending time comes from, from learning how to maximize the impact of the time that we have and to then expand our opportunities and our impact because we're using time differently and we're living our lives in a different way.
There is a topic that I would like to discuss with you something that I'm not knowledgeable at all that I have heard about.
It's when it comes to women, we know that time and energy oftentimes is impacted by our cycle. Most of us, including myself, we don't know how, the why, and even though I know that, and I'm being aware that aligning my cycle and my phases with my energy allows me to be more productive and to manage my time better, this is something that I don't know, I don't understand, and so I don't do it, right?
So can you tell us more about the relationship between our cycle as a woman, the energy, and how we can use that to make a better use of our time?
Okay. And I got to share with you because this all went on during the same amount of the same process.
I am now thankfully free of that cycle.
But when I first experienced burnout and the things that happened in the early stages of my autoimmune disease, I was not.
So, but the concept applies regardless of whether it's your cycle, whether it's your daily circadian rhythms.
One of the things that I have my clients do is an energy assessment.
Essentially, I have them journal for a period of time. I usually have them do it for a week, but if you're wanting to do it for this purpose, it would be at least a month, probably two, where you would literally keep track of what you're doing and when and how you feel.
And as you do that, patterns emerge and you start realizing, okay, early in the morning, I'm very focused.
If I want to get a lot done, I want to really 100% focus on a project that I need flow state and I need to be uninterrupted and I need to be really on.
Although I am not an early morning person, I'll set my alarm early and do that work early in the morning.
Because for some reason, I have a really great ability to focus early in the morning.
And then there's a point where, you know, I am less focused and if I take that moment when I'm less focused and I take that time and I go off and I have a walk and I get a cup of coffee and I get some sunshine and I come back, I can be more focused again.
And, you know, mid-afternoon is a dead time for me.
There's a point where I'm just useless.
But if I go for a walk during that timeframe and I take 45 minutes and I go for a long walk outside and I, you know, I clear my head, I think about what's going on.
A lot of times I don't listen to music.
I don't bring any kind of electronics except to have my phone on me just in case.
And I think and I walk and I see the water and I walk through the neighborhood and I can put things together in my head with that open space that I'm giving myself that might not have happened if I was doing busy work or looking at emails or on the phone.
So, you know, one of the things that I recommend to people, the first thing they do is do this assessment.
Look at your energy.
How does it flow?
When do you feel like you can focus?
When do you feel like you need to move your body?
When do you feel like you can't, you know, really like to me, the time that is a good time to plan to make phone calls is when you can't focus on the stuff where you need to be reading or writing or whatever because it's a different kind of energy.
And it's a different, you know, maybe you need that connection with another human at that point.
And that's a good time to make phone calls or it's a good time to send emails or things that are more interactive.
But you first can learn about that by doing this assessment where you're literally, look, you're just writing it down.
Just keep a log and it says time, what I'm doing, how I'm feeling and pay attention to it and see what comes out of that because everybody's different.
It's not going to be that everybody's more effective in the morning.
I know people who are more effective at night. I know people who are more effective in the middle of the day and it may be related to when you ate.
It may be related to when you woke up. It may be, you know, is it just your body's rhythms?
I don't know. You know, there are all kinds of theories about that, but the truth is we're all different.
Yeah, and it's about knowing yourself ultimately.
We are so used to keeping one requirement after the other, one deadline after the other, juggling family expectation, work expectation, life expectation, society expectation.
So it doesn't give us a lot of time actually to pause, breathe, take a deep breath and take the time to assess what we do, how we do it and when we do it.
So I think it's a great opportunity for us to almost force us, you know, to do what's right in order to be more productive, be a better professional, a better mom, a better spouse, a better whatever, right?
I think it also into the myth of work-life balance and you don't believe in it.
My opinion about work-life balance is that it's not just a myth, it's destructive. The concept of it is destructive.
Think about this.
You're a mom and you're a leader and you have responsibilities in your business and in your family and somehow you're supposed to take that and you're supposed to put work in one box over here and home in one box over here and they're not supposed to be connected.
That's ridiculous.
And it's ridiculous on a lot of levels.
One way it's ridiculous is it literally takes away your opportunities when you connect the dots. Think about the old boys club.
Do the old boys club members only have eight hours at work and then they leave and then they don't have any connection to work in the rest of their life?
No, they join the golf club or they join whatever organization and they network with people.
They make friends with those people.
They might go on vacations with them and their wives or whatever and that develops deep relationships and those deep relationships feed their business and they feed their home life satisfaction, right? Why is it that we're supposed to put our life in a box?
Our life as if our work is not.
I had a very interesting conversation with a gentleman who's in tech in California and he said he hates work.
The phrase work-life balance because it implies that there's no life in your work. That work is negative somehow.
Work is like a dead thing or a bad thing and then you go on with your life.
But the fact is we spend more than a third of our time at our work and we dedicate a vast majority of our adult lives to whatever that career is that we've chosen.
And for a lot of people, if they make that into, you know, they have a calling.
They have something that they really care about and they're doing work that contributes to the world in a way that matters to them.
That's incredible.
And that shouldn't be something that you're told to put a box around.
It should be something that's an important part of your entire life.
It's part of you.
Of course.
And then you're denying part of you.
You're denying the part that loves your family and loves the things that you enjoy outside of your office when you're not allowed to bring that into your office, so to speak and vice versa.
So, you know, you're going to be your best self and your most productive self and your most connected self when you are your whole self everywhere you go.
So that's why I think work-life balance is destructive because it literally takes away our opportunities that could exist when we have a whole life in all of our life.
And I do believe it does impact women more disproportionately because as part of my work, I read a lot of research and studies and it is proven that women have two lists, consciously or unconsciously.
We have, as you said, the box, the list of work and the list of social circle, right? So your life, but we don't mix the box.
We don't mix that.
So we keep the two lists separated, which gives us twice much more work, which like take opportunities away from us because we don't make that connection and we don't build those relationships that you talked about that men do.
Men have one list.
Work, friend, life, love is the same list.
It can be for a lot of men and some men don't.
And really for all of us, the important thing is to be a whole human being and to be all of ourself wherever we go and to connect with people in the wholeness of our life in ways that can bring us information, that can bring us help, that can bring us opportunities.
And I'll give you a great example of this.
One of the people that I've worked with as a coach doubled his business in 12 weeks.
Part of his doubling his business in 12 weeks had to do with, I have an exercise where I literally make people proactively cross the lines between their home life and their work life.
And I have them share, we go through a big goal analysis and we do a personal goal and a career goal and then one other goal, whatever they choose.
And after we've gone through the analysis of those goals, we build a team around it.
And in the building a team part, let's say it's a personal goal.
I will say, now you've got this personal goal and your personal goal is you wanna take a year sabbatical and travel the world.
And you wanna meet some people who've done that so that you understand what it takes.
How do you save the money?
How do you get the visas?
How did you plan your trips?
Whatever those questions are you have.
And I have the person say, okay, this is a personal goal.
I want you to go to your office and talk to people at work about your personal goal.
Okay, do it in your work context.
Now, this gentleman owned an SEO optimization company.
He went to his clients. He worked for himself.
He didn't have an office, so to speak, that went beyond him, right?
But I said, then talk to your clients.
Ask them if they know somebody who can help you.
And he had a client in his case, his desire was to take off one day and get a modified camper van and travel.
He was in Australia and he wanted to travel the country, which is very common in Australia with his kids when his kids were at an age where they could homeschool them while they were traveling and seeing things.
And he had one client in that industry, a company that modified camper vans.
And he said, you know, I could ask this guy.
And I said, okay.
And I want you to ask him for advice and not just advice, but who does he know who's done this? It could wreck him, you know.
And he did that.
Now he had never told that man that this was his goal because he had felt that the man might feel he was looking for a discount.
And he said, you know, I charge this guy full price for my services and I don't want him to feel like I'm asking for a favor.
And I said, well, just tell him that.
Tell him you really appreciate his business and that you, you know, you're so interested in his industry because you and your wife have this goal.
And they did it. He told the man that.
The gentleman referred him five different customers who were part of his vertical, so to speak. People who are that guy's vendors and customers and made connections with people who could be mentors in this for him.
And, you know, it was part of the doubling of his business that happened in 12 weeks.
And it was because of the fact that he brought a personal goal into a conversation with an existing client. So, I mean, and that was, that conversation had never happened.
Once the guy knew that he was not just a service provider, but a service provider who was interested in what he did, the whole dynamic changed.
And you get to identify who are the people who can support you. I mean, help you support that dream of you.
Right. And when you make friends, you know, let's bring it back to an office context.
You have a goal.
It doesn't have to be a goal that looks like you're going to quit your job.
It can be a goal that I love to race sailboats.
For instance, I want to learn more about racing sailboats where I live, or I want to know more about hiking or camping or skiing or whatever the thing is, that's my personal thing that I love.
When I go into my office and I talk to people about that and say, who do you know that does this?
Maybe you make a friend with their cousin or their uncle or their brother or sister, and they've introduced you. And now you have a connection.
That's not just a collegial.
We work in the same place and we have a transactional relationship related to work.
Now we have an actual friend.
And that actual friend is going to mean more in a bigger picture sense.
It may mean that you're more likely to stay in that job when you're an employer and you encourage your people to have relationships that go deeper than that transactional.
We're in the same space because we work in the same company.
Then you've got people who feel connected in a deeper way and your retention improves.
Your recruitment improves because they like it there and they're happy there and they tell their friends versus, yeah, my job's okay, but I'm not sure I'd recommend the place.
It makes a big difference. And this is something we've lost when we've created this line in the sand called work life balance.
That's a great perspective.
Those are things that we know, but I never put it in the context of the work life balance.
It's very constructive and you just need to make the ask.
And it's sad because in some countries they're actually passing laws now about this where you're in France.
They have a law now in France that says that you can't call your employees outside of work hours.
Even if it's a non-related business? I don't know.
I mean, if you think about it, people are probably a little afraid. If they are a manager in a department and they call an employee outside of work hours, technically they're violating a workplace law now in France.
Is there a question of if it's work related or not?
I don't know the intricacies of that law, but I know that now France has a law like you can't just text or email people or contact them outside of business hours.
I think it's a matter of also perspective and culture.
The culture of work in France is much more different than the culture of work in North America.
I live on both sides of the world.
I can speak to it. And so while it's much more acceptable and popular, I want to say in North America, in France, the perspective of having an employer contacting his or her employees outside of work could be very, very badly perceived.
But then, as you said, if you take it from a perspective of connecting and bridging the two words together, then it's an additional layer of holding us back from achieving our goals, our life objectives, and our purpose.
And there's a difference between a friendly communication and I need you to do X at 11 p.m. And that obviously is unacceptable and wrong.
I will say, I think for a lot of people, and this is where these kind of rules get weird, if I think of something right now, and right now is midnight, and I email that to someone, I'm not expecting that person to even see that email until they get to work the next day.
I know there are people who get bothered and offended because they think somebody shouldn't email.
But on the other hand, if that's when you think of something and you might forget it later, is it wrong? I don't think so.
What's wrong, and what I tell people all the time is, turn off the notifications.
If you're not at work, and you're with your family, or you're in bed asleep, your phone shouldn't even be near your room.
I put my phone on a charger in my office, and it's nowhere near me when I'm in bed asleep. Why?
Because I don't want to be interrupted. Sleep matters to me.
So, these are the kind of things that sometimes you want to do.
You want to make sure that you're protecting.
This is part of what I teach people in time management, is to protect those boundaries, protect your time when you're sleeping, or when you're with your family, and you want to pay attention to your kids, and you want to give them that undivided attention, or your spouse, or your friends.
You want to be present.
I like to say, be here now, right?
You want to be present and focused in the thing you're doing, no matter what that thing is, and when it is.
And then move on to the next thing, because multitasking isn't real.
We can't do that.
Our brain doesn't work that way.
Yeah, men and women.
I think it's important to say it again.
You know, we hear that a woman can multitask and not men, but actually, it's not true.
We are less.
Exactly, but in reality, same studies show that we are less effective at all the tasks when we are multitasking versus focusing on one task at the time, either we are a man or a woman.
So, yeah, very interesting.
So, to wrap up this conversation, Michelle, and this has been a wonderful conversation, what is the one thing, the one advice that you would give to someone who feels like they are constantly out of time?
Take a breath.
The first thing that people need to do is kind of step back, and when you feel like you're constantly out of time, you're probably running on adrenaline and cortisol, and you're not focused ever, because you are trying to multitask all the time, and so the first thing you need to do really is to step back to get perspective on what really matters, and then focus on that.
Let all the other stuff go, and take care of the things that matter most first, and that includes, and especially includes, those things that light you up and give you joy, because if you don't recognize what they are and proactively fit them into your day, and I'm not talking about big trips or whatever, I'm talking about little things like seeing the sunshine on the water when you're taking a walk or smelling the scent of the coffee in your cup in the morning or enjoying the time you're spending preparing a meal or the smell of your baby's head, right?
You want to be able to see those things, recognize them, take a moment, feel that fuel, because that fuels you, and that will stop you from ever being burned out.
When you have that ability, that's when you're burnout proof, is when you can proactively give yourself those little moments throughout your day.
Thank you, Michelle.
For the people who would like to connect with you and learn more about your work, where can they contact you?
Okay, one of the ways is there's going to be a link in your show notes, correct?
Yes.
And that link is going to give you access to tools that I have, including a meditation and journaling prompts about finding those sparks that give you joy, as well as a way to analyze your goals that we talked about.
And the other thing you could do if you're in North America, if you're in the US or Canada, and I believe Mexico, but I'm not sure, you can dial, you can text the word Clarity to 33777, and that will give you the same link.
It's going to go to the same place where you can sign up for those tools.
It's just a different way to get there.
Okay. And that information will be available in the episode description.
So thank you.
Yeah. Thank you, Michelle.
That was a pleasure having you and having this conversation with you.
And if you have any, for the listeners, the viewers, if you have any further questions, feel free to reach out to me or to Michelle, and we will be happy to answer them.
Michelle, thank you so much. Well, thank you.
It's been a pleasure.
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