What does the flamingo have to do with self-love, a podcast, or Nadja? So many questions…I know. I get them regularly, I mean every single day regularly. And in today’s episode, I’ll answer all of them.

Let me give you a hint – it has much to do with you. All I can reveal here is that the flamingo is not only a part of my branding and lives in my digital home (check it out at www.nadjahagen.com), but it has a deeper meaning. A meaning that is very relevant to you and me. Listen to today’s episode and find out what you can learn from the flamingo.

Listen to the full episode here:

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https://www.buzzsprout.com/2307122/14599900

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Full Episode Transcript:

Nadja Hagen [00:00:14]:
Are you ready to go from am I good enough to is this good for me? Welcome to the self love sessions podcast. I’m your hostess, Natje Hagen, and I’m the self love coach for ambitious women recovering from people pleasing and starting to love the heck out of themselves. The most important relationship is the one you have with yourself. It sets the tone for all other relationships in your life and your overall quality of life. It’s worth cultivating. In the self love sessions podcast, I share nuggets of wisdom on setting healthy boundaries, prioritizing your needs without shame and guilt, and building relationships that enrich your whole dang life, starting with the one you have with yourself. Let’s dive into today’s episode. Welcome to the 4th episode of the self love sessions podcast.

Nadja Hagen [00:01:17]:
Today’s episode title is, what has the flamingo to do with it? And you might ask yourself, what has a flamingo to do with self love, with a podcast, and with Nadia? I know I know so many questions, and I’m here to answer them all in today’s episode. I get these questions regularly. I would say on a daily basis. So that inspired me to do today’s podcast episode. Because there is a meaning behind the flamingo. But let me start from the beginning. When you visit my website, if you don’t know it yet, it’s www.natyahagen.com. Then you will see flamingos everywhere spread over my whole digital home.

Nadja Hagen [00:02:04]:
It’s not that I’m a huge flamingo maniac. No. I’m not. I like them and I especially like their color. The flamingo color, the coral combined with the blue doesn’t only match my branding colors, but it’s just beautiful. And it’s so colorful, and it gives me so much joy looking at these colors. But that is not the reason for the flamingos. There is a deeper meaning behind this.

Nadja Hagen [00:02:31]:
Did you know that flamingos actually lose their pink when they have babies? The reason behind this is that they care so much for their baby that they lose their pink. That they don’t have enough capacity to care for themselves anymore. And they give all their pink, all the nutrition, all the good stuff, all the love, all the care, all the energy to their babies which leads to them losing their pink. And the same happens to women so often. Not only when we become mothers that we care so much for our little ones, but also when we care for everyone else except ourselves. We care for our family, we care for the elder in our family, we care for the work we do and we give so much until nothing is left. And then we, as the flamingo, lose our pink. What does it actually mean to lose our pink? Let me specify this a bit.

Nadja Hagen [00:03:36]:
Losing our pink does not only mean on an energetic level that we lose our spark, our radiance and sometimes also our lust for life. It also means that we don’t care for us as much as we used to or as much as we want to. It means that we put ourselves on the back burner. This can look like not finding the time to exercise or to do our yoga sessions. This can also look like eating fast food or eating something that we can quickly grab while we run to the next thing we have to do. That means not taking the time and the effort to prepare healthy and delicious meals for ourselves. We do this for our families. We do this probably for our kids.

Nadja Hagen [00:04:29]:
But quite often, we don’t do it for ourselves. This is something that I mean with we lose our pink. It starts with a self care that we no longer do and is followed by us feeling stressed, feeling overwhelmed, feeling constantly on the run, which is a very stressful experience. And it can go so far that even if we have 5 minutes to calm down and be present in the moment and enjoy this moment, that we internally feel like being in a hurry. It further means that we don’t take the time that we need and that would do us good to invest in relationships that matter to us. So when I became a mom, of course, I went to play dates for my daughter. And it was nice to socialize and meet with other moms. But we were always in the context of supervising kids and taking care of them.

Nadja Hagen [00:05:32]:
What I didn’t do anymore was meeting another mom or a friend or a mom friend just for fun, just for us, without any children around, without anybody else to be taken care of. And it showed. When you no longer take the time for things that matter to you because you are so busy, your to do list is so full, then you are on the best way to lose your pink. Another sign is that we can feel resentful. Resentful for all the things that we deny ourselves, but also resentful for all the good things we do for others and nobody does for us. It can come with a feeling of isolation and loneliness even though we might never be alone. And I know all the moms out there know exactly what I mean here. But this can also happen without any children.

Nadja Hagen [00:06:29]:
It can definitely happen when you are so involved in your job and in your career that you are constantly surrounded by other people, but you are still feeling empty and lonely on the inside. Because true connection and true connectedness and vulnerability are missing. You are performing the whole time. You are doing something on purpose. You’re doing something that is geared towards an outcome. It is important. Don’t get me wrong here. There are times where we need to do this, so this is important.

Nadja Hagen [00:07:02]:
But it doesn’t fill our soul. It doesn’t nourish our hearts, and it doesn’t nourish our bodies and minds and spirits. We also need these times to make our pink pink again. And, you know, the interesting thing here is that as soon as the babies grow older, the flamingo regains its pink. Because the flamingo mom is no longer only the flamingo mom, she’s a flamingo on herself again. You can exchange the word mom for career woman, businesswoman, wife, family member, whatever is your context in which you struggle with balancing the needs of others with your own needs. From early childhood on, girls are conditioned to take care of everyone else and to be social. This is a thing that is much more emphasized with girls and women than it is with boys and men.

Nadja Hagen [00:08:04]:
But back to the flamingo. The flamingo regains her pink. When she has enough room, enough space, enough time and enough energy for herself, then she becomes pink again. Her wonderful, colorful, beautiful pink. And the same can happen to us female humans. When we take the time to put ourselves first, to fill our own cup first and then everything that is overflowing from our own cup, we give this to those around us, then we can still give a lot to the world and to the people that mean a lot to us while at the same time caring very well for ourselves. The first thing that is needed here is a mindset switch. It’s a common saying and you have probably heard it a couple of times already.

Nadja Hagen [00:09:00]:
You can only give from a full cup. It’s so simple, but there is so much wisdom in it. And I notice when I don’t have any patience anymore, when I’m chronically tired, these two things, they are sufficient for me not being able to show up as the real me. I feel like somebody else and it doesn’t feel good. When I had a night of super good sleep and I feel rejuvenated and recovered, then my patience is so much bigger and I have so much more to give to the world. You can’t give from an empty cup because empty is empty. There isn’t anything left to give. So the mindset shift that we need is self care is not a luxury.

Nadja Hagen [00:09:52]:
It’s essential. And it’s also a duty we have not only a duty towards ourself, but also a duty towards the world, towards God, towards the purpose that brought us here on earth. Because it becomes quite challenging to fulfill fulfill your purpose if you’re running on low batteries. Right? And, you know, proper self care doesn’t have to mean 2 hour long baths or a whole spa day. True self care can be as simple as taking a 5 minute break when we feel that we have to process emotions are when we noticed that everything is becoming just a little bit too much for us and we need a short break. Choose health care can also mean to vulnerability and honestly express how we feel and ask for what we need. Setting healthy boundaries is definitely a top priority on the sales care list because it protects what is important to you and draws a line to the things that you don’t want to have in your life. And that is a game changer in itself.

Nadja Hagen [00:11:06]:
Another mindset shift is that you can operate from your reserves for a certain amount of time. So we always have high pressure times in life. Maybe it’s a big launch that we are having, or maybe we have a couple of events like all of our 3 children have their birthday in the same month or whatever it is, but we always have certain periods in our lives where we have more pressure than we used to and more pressure than is actually sustainable on the long term. And we can handle this pretty well if it’s a defined time and if it’s not too long. So when you notice that your to do list is much longer than what you can actually achieve, then it’s time to restructure things. I know it’s so easy to say start to delegate things, but there are things that can’t be delegated. I know this. I’m completely aware of this.

Nadja Hagen [00:12:08]:
But what is always possible is to do less. Maybe the house isn’t as clean as it used to be. That’s okay. If you have your pink again in exchange for that, that’s definitely worth it. Maybe you are not having 2 play dates a week for your children and only one. That’s still good enough. When you have a corporate job, you don’t do the over hours every single day. You only do them when there is something really important that definitely needs to be done today.

Nadja Hagen [00:12:47]:
And then the next day, maybe you work a little bit less and balance out the over hours from yesterday. All this comes with very proper healthy boundaries. I’m aware of this and that’s why I’m here because this is one of my main topics to teach you how to set healthy, also known as balanced boundaries. But that’s a topic for another episode. For today, we stay with the pink and the flamingos. When you have noticed that you have lost your pink, you can definitely regain it. This is not a matter of a day or a week, and it usually depends on how long you have spent in a condition without pink. So if you’re exhausted for a whole year and you feel so drained and tired and you’re walking on your bones, then it might take a little bit longer.

Nadja Hagen [00:13:45]:
If it has only been a month where you feel drained and exhausted and everything was just a little bit too much, then you might pretty well recover within a week. But the important thing here is to not pressure anything because the last thing you need in this situation is pressure. You had enough of this. Give yourself the gift of time and give yourself patience and kindness along the way. Be brave enough to decide to do nothing If nothing feels like the right thing to do or not to do in this case. Just go for a walk just because the weather is awesome or just because you want to feel the fresh air on your skin. Don’t put pressure on yourself. The more you focus on yourself and on your pink and on your spark again, the more it will come.

Nadja Hagen [00:14:38]:
But it takes time. You know, a baby isn’t born in a week. We don’t lose £50 in just a month. Everything has a specific timeframe. And I know that there are so many people, especially coaches out there talking about quantum leaps, quantum jumps and collapsing timelines. But there are certain things that no matter what still need a specific time. You can quantum leap as much as you want. A baby still needs 9 months.

Nadja Hagen [00:15:10]:
So don’t fall into the trap that you can collapse every time frame for instant gratification. This is just not true. This is just a marketing lie. Don’t fall into that. Be aware of the time it takes to heal the time it takes to nourish yourself and the time it takes to regain your pink. And you won’t wake up one day and be pink all over again. That won’t happen either. You will wake up one day and you will have a little, little, little shiny shade of pink.

Nadja Hagen [00:15:43]:
You will probably not notice it at all. At least not in the beginning. But the next day, there will be a little, little, little bit more tiny piece of pink. And this accumulates over time until you have a slight shade of pink again. And this slight shade of pink will become more intense and darker pink and pinker pink over time as well. Until one day you notice wow, I feel pink again. Here I am back again. This is me.

Nadja Hagen [00:16:18]:
I’m back in my full power. I feel like me again. Thanks, God. But you won’t jump out of bed feeling this way. And it doesn’t take constant effort. It’s not something you have to work hard for. It’s the opposite. It’s something that you can let happen.

Nadja Hagen [00:16:39]:
Feel deep down inside. What is it what you actually need? When you’re tired, rest. When you feel overwhelmed, do something that calms your nervous system down. This can be a yoga session even if it’s only 10 minutes. It works wonders. I promise. I’ve tried it out so many times. It can be something like going out in a nature, going for a walk, or just touching your own skin, doing some breath work.

Nadja Hagen [00:17:10]:
There are so many super efficient tools to help you achieve this, And most of them don’t need a huge amount of time or effort. But what it needs is you becoming present with your own needs. You becoming present with what it is that you need right now and that were doing you good. And of course, it needs the proper boundaries to make the room, the time, the space and the energy for that. But again, that’s a topic for another episode. So coming back to my initial question, what has the flamingo to do with it? The flamingo is a symbol for what can happen when you care for everyone else except yourself. And it’s a symbol of women having the tendency to care a lot. To care a lot for their families, for their loved ones, for their work, for everything that’s purposeful for them.

Nadja Hagen [00:18:11]:
And unfortunately, quite often forget about themselves while doing so. But the flamingo is also a symbol for focusing back on yourself, for regaining your pink. It’s never too late. It’s a circle. When you have lost your pink, then you know you can regain it. There will be times in life where a lot is demanded of you. Maybe you have a sick family member you need to take care of. Maybe your business just needs more of you right now.

Nadja Hagen [00:18:43]:
And it might be that your pain gets a little bit lighter during all the pressure and all the busyness. But now you are aware of it and you can balance this out. And when things have slowed down, you can correct this and give back to you. If you had a very pressureful day, allow yourself on the next day to have a very relaxed, easy going day, so that you balance things out and that your pinks become so pinky pink again. I hope that today’s episode brought some ahas for you. And I also hope that it answered the question, what has the flamingo to do with it? And actually, what has the flamingo to do with you and me? Thank you for tuning in, and I talk to you in the next episode. Thank you for listening to today’s episode. If you found this valuable, please give a 5 star rating and tell other women that this show is worth listening to.

Nadja Hagen [00:19:52]:
I talk to you in the next episode.