Welcome. This is A Glimpse Inside. I’m Wendy Perrotti, and today we are beginning our four-part Relationship Rescue Series with some relationship advice from the trenches. I’m here today with Paula Jean Burns, the creative genius and founder of Purpose Works, a company focused on creating tools and resources for those seeking a journey of self-discovery, self-expression and legacy creation. She’s the author of Purpose Pages, an absolutely gorgeous interactive journal.
In 2017, Paula Jean opened RockPaperSistas, a name that I absolutely love, an artisan gallery located on the iconic green in Guilford, Connecticut where her own art is also on display.
As is always the case in our series opener, I know this girl in real life. So many of our conversations end up being about relationships and so I thought it would be really fun to kick off this series with us sharing some of our personal experiences with you today. So I kind of wants us to shine a light on where things go wrong for all of us in relationships and what you can do to make even the most challenging moments better.
Hello, Paula Jean.
Hello girl.
How are you?
I’m great, I’m tickled to be here with you today.
I’m so excited to have you on the show. All right. So here’s what we’re going to do. I want to start with a broad stroke. You’re all about purpose and legacy creation. Where do you see the ties between that and relationships?
Yeah. A good thought to ponder, right? So we’ll get into the nitty-gritty of it, but did you realize that most of us, when we hit that middle-age time frame in our lives, have no legacy? Have you not thought about legacy planning? I’m not talking about the financial kind, because most of us do that at some point in time. We either have companies that have 401ks that are doing that for us, or we squirrel money away. I’m talking about that legacy of who you are, what defines, and how are you defined? How are people going to remember you? We haven’t thought about it and we haven’t taken any action on it.
I will tell you and share with you that it was riveting when I realized that in my own life, and that it’s not that difficult and it’s not that big of a stretch to begin to create and to think about the legacy you want to leave when we’re no longer here, but it’s completely tied to relationships. See, in order for us to survive as humans on this little planet earth, really, I should say, in order for us to thrive, we’ve got to have a connection, and therein lies the secret sauce to creating a legacy.
You know, I could not agree with you more and I know we’ve talked a little bit about this in a couple of different ways over the years that we’ve been friends. That piece about legacy, you know, how we show up in life, I think we’re wired. Obviously, we’re wired to be working on this sort of default mode, right? The things that we do over and over, the repetition in our lives sort of builds on itself, and we create those neural pathways that keep us moving in the same direction.
We don’t realize that we’re operating in default. We don’t realize that we’re not showing up as who we think we are. Our behaviors are often not in line with what our value is, what our missions are, and not because we’re doing anything wrong. Just because we’re in the business of going about our lives in a day to day way.
The moment I think that you start to understand, “How am I showing up every day? How am I with my kids? How am I with my colleagues? How am I with my boss? How am I when I go get a coffee at Starbucks? How am I showing up in my day to day life?” We start to get intentional about that piece, and I think it affects not just our relationships, but this thing that you’re calling legacy.
Absolutely and part of that stems from or sits in our very transactional world. We’re very transactionally driven.
What can I do to get something? How can I do this to get that? How can I show up to gain something?
When that paradigm has shifted, it’s a game-changer.
When that paradigm has shifted, it’s a game-changer. Unfortunately, most of the time, that shift occurs around a real pain point. Something that causes us to pause, and I mean pause hard. Whether it’s a loss of a loved one or a loss of a job, it usually revolves around a loss or a pain point because we are living transactionally, and I never really quite understood that until I reached that pivot, that pain point, and I caught myself being very transactional. Everything that I was doing was for the moment gain, and everything else was, “Someday. Someday. Someday we’ll do that. Someday we’ll go here.” And I realized that somedays don’t happen.
That’s so true.
That it’s the moments that you live wholeheartedly, as Brené Brown, says, “all in.” That creates the breadcrumbs and the string of memories that are really what’s most coveted and most precious at the end of our days. So how you live those moments ties to how you thrive, which is the relationship and when you start to see it that way, then you can start to see that those little moments are the precious thing, and that time that you take to be kind to someone or to really have a conversation and look eyeball to eyeball, those are the pieces that will create the legacy that you are going to cherish as you mature in age, in life. Because let’s face it, we’re not taking any of this shit with us.
Right on, sister.
We’re not.
You know, my mother, It’s funny that you say transactional. My mother always used to say, “You’re only as good as your last performance.” I think that for me, it made that performance, that transaction so critical, right? It was good or it was bad, and that informed what I would do next. I would sort of rest on my laurels or I would try to make it better, right? Fix the thing that I thought that I had done poorly. I think that for so many people, it creates that sort of yo-yo living, right, between, “I did a good thing.” “I did a bad thing.” “He’s good.” “He’s bad.” “She’s good.” “She’s bad.” When in fact, if we were to zoom out and look at our life in the long term. Over the whole thing, we see that all of those things meld into one life. They’re fluid. They don’t actually exist as separate interactions in our life, and yet we measure ourselves and other people based on those separate interactions, based on their most recent performance. And I think that’s where our relationships can get really muddy.
Absolutely. And the other side of that, being so micro-focused, is something that I experienced, which was I glossed over. I called myself at one point in time a professional plate spinner, because I had checked out of the equation and I just knew that I had to keep all the balls if you will. So I had a corporate job, to keep that plate spinning if you will. If you think of that image. And then I have kids, so spinning that plate. Now the job requires more time. Go back to the plate with the job, and on and on and on.
So what it did was it took me out of the equation. There was no focus on me. I didn’t have to worry about it. I didn’t have to think about it. Well, that’s all well and grand until you go out with your girlfriends and you sit down to have a glass of wine and the waitress comes around and she says, “And what will you have?” “I don’t know. I’ll have what she’s having.”
I had taken myself out of the act of living, basically. I was just kind of skimming along, and when you skim along in life, the nuggets, the things that are most brilliant and beautiful get skimmed along and skimmed over as well and it wasn’t until I came across a Rumi quote that caused me to pause on that, and Rumi says, “And you? When will you begin that long journey into yourself?” and I thought, “Aha. Being a professional plate spinner serves everybody else, but it doesn’t serve me, and I don’t have those deep, rich relationships. I have the ones that are kind of at an arm’s length out there.”
Right.
That doesn’t feel good.
When you lose yourself in that, we feel like we’re really serving relationships, but we’re really only doing that superficially.
In fact, that plate spinning, when it eats up your sense of self, right? When you lose yourself in that, we feel like we’re really serving relationships, but we’re really only doing that superficially. They’re not getting the full version of us, and we’re not able to engage fully in our relationships when we’re operating in that, as you said, transactional way. And it buries our sense of purpose.
To your point, it eliminates our opportunity to create a legacy. We’re not aware of how we’re showing up, and it makes our relationships anything from bland to outright superficial or contentious, depending on what’s going on in those relationships.
Absolutely and you can only give what you have. We’ve all heard that. I lived it, so I know that it’s true. I was everybody else’s best friend, never asking for what I would need. And that is a false relationship.
Yeah.
It doesn’t serve either side of that relationship. You can give and you can give, but that other person was missing the opportunity to also give, give back to me. So my relationships kind of stayed at a plateau. There’s only so much.
Okay. You know what? I was not even going to ask that question, but I’m going to make that the first question when we come back because that’s critical. We think about relationships as giving and getting, and that’s transactional, but our ability to receive as well as offer. There’s a nuanced difference there, and I think especially for women, we suck at receiving. We don’t know how to do it well, and so we give and give and give more, and it affects our sense of self-worth, and it certainly affects our relationships.
So we’re going to take a really quick break, and when we come back, I’d love to start with that question and then we’ll dig into some more of our stories. So we’ve been talking with Paula Jean Burns about her work on purpose. Actually, I like her work on purpose. Her work about purpose and legacy creation, and what she’s discovered about relationships along the way.
We’re going to take a really quick break, and when we come back, Paula Jean and I are going to be taking you into our relationship trenches with some of our personal stories, and as always we’ll be giving you tips and tools that you can start using today.
Paula Jean, what can our listeners do if they want to know more about you?
Sure. You certainly can reach out to my website, which is rockpapersistas.com. It’s a nice landing spot where I have the tools and resources and share in a very transparent way who I am, what my journey has been, and how I can be of service to others that are kind of in that muck and mire of life.
Cool and they can shop there too, right?
Absolutely.
I love shopping. All right. Stay with us. We will be right back.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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