22. The joy of Topknot, and finding the right support
Happy Sunday Team Joy! ☀️
It is my pleasure to share Claire Shorall, fellow Rice Alum, co-founder and CEO of Topknot and overall generally kind, inspiring human with you. Claire is leading and building a company to support women on their personal development journeys in a consistent, accessible, and affordable way. I am a member of Topknot and have found carving out 1 hour a week to show up for myself through Topknot community time, surprisingly effective in identifying small but meaningful ways to make my life feel more aligned. I asked her to share how she thinks about support and how she has used Topknot on her own journey with you. Without further ado…
Since it’s Virgo Season and my birthday is imminent, I will proudly claim my tendency towards perfectionism and my dogged pursuit of improvement. My life’s philosophy is ‘love is hard work made visible’.
I’ve always found joy in the process of the building phase. I’m a startup founder and long-time distance runner, so I’m used to putting in the often-invisible work every day. It’s not that I’m not driving toward an outcome—I always have ambitious goals—but that I know that from the top of the mountain, what I will see is the next peak. Finding joy and meaning in the day-to-day helps me deal with the unknown.
Being a letterwinner on Team Overachiever is not a solo endeavor. In my efforts to be industrious across a range of domains, I’ve always enlisted support to unlock my potential, whether that be coaching, mentorship, or tapping a good friend for advice. Lately, however, I’ve been thinking about where I want a more structured support offering versus where I, given time and space, can do the heavy lifting myself.
My reflections have been in service of answering two key questions:
How am I being intentional about the support I need during different seasons of my life?
What does it look like to cultivate a practice of supporting myself?
Both of these questions are predicated on the belief that I can ultimately figure things out on my own. I reject the idea that there is a “right” way to do things or a path that works for everyone. This is why I’ve always eschewed most advice in favor of coaching, which acts more like a guide on the side. Super supportive, but non-prescriptive, it’s a paradigm so powerful that I started a company, Topknot, to bring it to more people.
As a chronic overachiever, the personal-development-driven-by-you coaching model we use at Topknot has helped me listen to my inner voice. I’ve started questioning my impulse to always push harder and move faster in favor of what I need right now. And, I’ve built trust with my own intuition.
🏃🏻♀️Not so fast (literally)
Badass picture of Claire running her first competitive race in 12 years.
One concrete place I’ve always wanted to literally go faster is in running. The metrics, the moment of race day, and lining up among your competition tap into my deepest overachiever drive. I used to run competitively and this summer, for the first time in 12 years, I had the opportunity to race 5000 meters on the track. I wanted to perform well, so I thought about enlisting the help of a professional running coach. But the luxury of having someone oversee your training does not come cheap. I knew I would have to budget a few hundred dollars per month, all in the hopes of propelling me to faster times.
Before I could commit, I decided to take a beat. This was a consequential decision, both for my finances and time. I told myself that if I felt the same excitement about hiring a coach in a few days, I would move forward. And, as anticipated by my more rational self, my enthusiasm abated.
I recognized that my slow recovery from COVID didn’t make this the best moment to work with someone who could push me to another level once healthy. The type of running I needed to focus on this summer was regaining strength and getting into a routine, not sharpening my skills. A hard pill to swallow for someone who cares deeply about performance, but an important realization that saved me money, time, and health.
Driving my growth, with help
Despite foregoing a running coach, I wasn’t flailing. In fact, I have a lot of confidence in my ability to create a program for myself — I’ve been doing so ever since I left college. I know my body and what volume and intensity works well for me.
But it’s one thing to be good at cobbling together a plan; it’s another to move through it intentionally.
That’s where choosing not to work with a professional meant being purposeful about adding other coaching-like structures to my training. Beyond following my written out schedule and meeting with friends to run, I’ve put aside an hour per week to grapple with big picture questions like:
How does my training fit in with other priorities in my life?
How do I want to feel during this training block?
What do I hope to learn about myself during this time?
Asking and answering these questions shifted me away from a version of success that historically looked like checking off workouts like items on a to-do list; they uncovered some negative behaviors like downplaying the importance of this race because I knew the time wouldn’t be fast; and, they allowed me to see the purpose of my training in a new light. Different from an athletic coach, it still moved my running forward in ways that weren’t about pace.
Seeking intentional support
I’ve found an hour every week to press pause, reflect and explore, then move forward how I want to with Topknot, the aforementioned company I’m building. Topknot is a life coaching alternative where a combination of community and technology come together to create a supportive experience where I truly learn about myself.
Topknot is not professional life coaching, but it provides many of the same benefits. This makes Topknot a good entry point for people new to personal development or an easy-to-access supplemental space for processing for the experienced.
It’s also more low key than professional life coaching in a few key ways: cost, time to start, and overall commitment. I’m beginning to recognize that this lowered intensity is a good thing. Perhaps defying my star chart in the process, using Topknot instead of a professional athletic coach allowed me to put running in perspective while not pouring excess resources into before I was ready. And it turns out that it’s really working for me, not just for running, but for thinking about other priorities like work-life balance.
Through my work with Topknot, I’ve unlocked a habit of choosing myself in a way that’s purposeful and feels on my own-terms. And, when I’m ready to put my foot on the gas again, I trust that I’ll know what I need, whether that’s a running coach, a self-guided program, or something else entirely.
The Topknot team is graciously offering friends of Team Joy the ability to try Topknot for free (and then get their first month for only $10 with code TEAMJOY10). Learn more here.
If you know someone who would benefit from Topknot time, share this with them!
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