161. Anticipating Problems
How much of your time do you spend anticipating problems?
Focusing on what could go wrong?
Catastrophizing about all the terrible what ifs?
You are probably an expert at anticipating problems.
And for good reason.
Knowing what could go badly is a useful skill.
It can save you heartache.
It can prevent disasters big and small.
It can be the difference between “That was great!” and “That was a nightmare and I should have seen it coming.”
But it’s not the ONLY skill you need to build a wildly delicious life.
And if you don’t know how (and when) to STOP imagining worst case scenarios, you’re going to be miserable.
Just like too much salt can ruin a dish, too much problem focus can ruin your ability to ENJOY your life and PURSUE your dreams.
Join me this week to learn more about the habit of anticipating problems, when to employ it, when (and how!) to turn it off, and what you can do instead to make your life, relationships, and career super satisfying.
My small group coaching program, Satisfied AF, is officially open for enrollment! Click here to schedule a consult call for Satisfied AF and we can figure out what’s not working in your life and career as well as how to transform it into something that delights you.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why most of us are experts at anticipating problems.
How anticipating problems becomes a stumbling block.
Why you need to learn how to turn off the default pattern of anticipating problems.
The value of developing the ability to anticipate wins.
How to build the skill to CHOOSE when to engage in the habit of anticipating problems and when to SHIFT to enjoyment or anticipating delights instead.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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35. The Pleasure Gloss: The Secret to Creating a Career You Love
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about anticipating problems.
The Satisfied AF podcast is the place to learn how to create a life and career that’s wildly delicious. Want a steamier sex life? We’ve got you. Want a more satisfying career? We’ll cover that too. And you can be sure we’ll spend lots of time talking about how to build connected, fun relationships that can handle life’s ups and downs. No matter what goals you’re working on, this show will help you create a one of a kind life that is just right for you. Join me, life and career coach Kori Linn and each week I’ll give you lots of practical tips, tools, and proven strategies to help you create all the satisfaction your heart desires.
Hello, hello, hello. Happy Wednesday. I am very excited because in one day I will be going to San Francisco to go to Stompede, which is an LGBTQ+ country dancing extravaganza. I don’t know if it counts as a conference, I think probably it is a conference.
Anyways, I’ve never been before, but I have been to a similar event in Seattle. It’s called the Rain Country Hoedown or the Emerald City Hoedown, I don’t know. It’s called The Hoedown. And as many of y’all know, when I lived in Seattle I used to go country dancing every week at an LGBTQ+ group and it was so fun. It was sort of the light of my life. And it was one of the things I was really sad to let go of when I moved to Sacramento.
So this is pretty exciting that tomorrow I will be heading on over to San Francisco for a weekend of dancing classes, dancing events, and some of my favorite dancing folks from Seattle will come down to go to the event as well, so I’ll see friends. So it’s pretty exciting. So that’s what I’m up to. And I hope you have a really fun week and weekend planned as well.
Okay, let’s get into our conversation for this week. This week we’re talking about the idea of anticipating problems. So something that I’ve noticed is that a lot of my clients are very good at anticipating problems and it can be very difficult for them to stop anticipating problems. I think this makes a lot of sense because I think a lot of us were rewarded as children and young adults, and even in adulthood we’ve been rewarded for anticipating problems.
I actually remember I used to, when I was in college, work at the coffee shop, Caribou Coffee. And I remember one of the training materials talked about one of our core things was anticipating needs. And it’s funny because I was just looking it up before I recorded this podcast to see if it’s still part of what they teach because, obviously, I was in college like a million years ago.
And I couldn’t find it, but it was like one of the things. Like Caribou Coffee, it’s a fast-paced environment, people are coming in, they’re ordering. And so one of the things that the management wanted us to learn to do was to anticipate the needs, both of the customers and also of the stores. And when you can anticipate needs, you can often solve problems before they become problems, right? You can preemptively figure things out and create more of a streamlined, smooth experience. And that can be really valuable.
And I think that’s why a lot of people do spend their time and energy anticipating problems and thinking about what can go wrong, because there can be value in doing that. So I want to be really clear that it can be a valuable activity.
But where I think we run into a problem with this activity is for some people it’s very hard to turn this feature off. They’ve been so rewarded for anticipating problems that they can’t stop doing it. Or the problems they come up with are so scary, they can’t stop thinking about them.
So it’s interesting because when we think about anticipating problems, there are, of course, problems that we can solve and take action on and problems that we can’t solve or take action on. As an example, if I’m afraid of running late, if I’m anticipating the potential problem of being late to something, I can set an alarm on my phone.
But if I’m anticipating something I don’t have control over, like a natural disaster, I can prepare my household. I could make plans to leave town if a natural disaster looks like it’s going to be coming to where I live, but I can’t control the weather. I can’t control what the Earth’s tectonic plates are doing. So some things are treatable, they’re within our realm of control and other things are not.
So one thing I want to be very clear about is that I actually think that the ability to anticipate problems is really powerful. And I’m not arguing that you should stop doing it entirely. But I think that anticipating problems is one skill, and it’s not the only skill that you need to be able to have a satisfying life, a satisfying career, satisfying relationships, et cetera.
If all you can do is anticipate problems, then you’re going to spend a lot of time probably feeling unhappy, feeling angry, feeling afraid, feeling a lot of those feelings that we don’t like so much. I mean, they are part of life, so they’re going to happen either way, but they’re maybe not the favorite feelings.
Whereas when we have the ability to engage in anticipating problems and then the ability to stop engaging in it once its usefulness has been spent, then we can really enjoy our lives so much more. So there’s a lot of crossover with what we’re talking about today and with my concept of useful content. And there’s a full podcast episode on that, so you can listen to it if you want.
The short version of it right here is that inside of our worries, there is often useful content. And we can pull the useful content out, separate it from the worrying activity, and then take action on it. So when it comes to anticipating problems, it’s kind of the same thing, right? If your brain is thinking of 37 things that could go wrong, there is probably useful information in there and some of those are actionable. You might want to take action on them.
You anticipate a problem, and then you put something in place so that that problem never comes to pass or so that if it does come to pass, you’re prepared for it. But then we need to develop the ability to turn that shit off. And if anything, I think it’s actually super fun and delicious to develop the opposite ability, which is the ability to anticipate delights. The ability to anticipate celebrations. The ability to anticipate yumminess, wins, satisfaction, right?
So many of us are spending so much of our time and so much of our imagination only thinking about what could go badly, what could go wrong, how we could be hurt, how we could be disappointed, how the things we want aren’t possible. And so few of us are spending time thinking about what could be amazing, what could be delicious, like how can we create that?
It’s interesting, because I think there’s actually another distinction here. I think we spend a lot of time anticipating problems, and I do you think a lot of us also spend time fantasizing. So I’m not talking about fantasizing exactly, because I think fantasizing is thinking like, oh, it would be better if. Wouldn’t it be nice if? I think fantasizing is a way that we escape from our current reality. And, listen, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s just different, right?
Whereas I think anticipating delights is almost sort of more planning, right? Because when we’re anticipating problems, a lot of times we’re doing that so we can set things up so that they can go better. So when we anticipate delights, it’s like how do we set the delights up so that they can actually happen?
How do we run our lives? How do we run our careers? How do we make our choices from a place of like, ooh, delightful things could happen and I want to prepare for them and welcome them in and set my life up so that my life has space for them?
As is often the case, what I’m also talking about here is living a full spectrum life, right? Like we talk about in order to create wild satisfaction and delight, we need the ability to feel our feelings, because the feelings of satisfaction and delight are going to take place in our body where our feelings live.
And we also need the ability to feel negative emotions, like disappointment, because sometimes when we go after things, we’re not going to get them or we’re not going to get them on the first try. So we need to be able to tolerate and allow it to make space for that full spectrum of human emotion. And I think that’s also true with the skill of anticipation.
Being able to anticipate problems is a beautiful thing. But if all you’re doing is that, then you’re not experiencing the full spectrum of what that skill set can offer you. You’re not experiencing the spectrum of planning for delight and setting your life up to make sense for it.
As an example, a lot of people, when they think about a career, they think about like what’s the safe option in case something goes wrong? Or maybe I should stay in this place where I’ve been because it’s the known quantity. Versus if you anticipate that you have the ability to be successful in a lot of different ways, and of course you do, what else might you go after? What else might you try?
If you were willing to anticipate that things could go well, not that you won’t have to work hard, not that it won’t be a challenge, but just that multiple things could be possible for you, what different decisions might you make and what might you go after?
To be able to imagine what could go wrong, again, this is a very powerful skill. This is an important skill in creating a wildly delicious life. But if it’s the only room in your house you visit, that’s very limited and it’s probably not very fun.
So let’s circle back to something I said earlier. A lot of us, like me when I worked at Caribou Coffee as a 19 year old, have been rewarded for our ability to anticipate problems. We’ve been rewarded for spending time and energy thinking through what could go wrong. So it makes sense that that would be something we’ve developed skill in. It makes sense that that would be something that we do over and over even when no one’s rewarding us anymore.
It even makes sense that we might overdo it because when there’s something in our life that we have received reward for, our brain learns that and it has kind of a dopamine circuit that kind of pushes us to do those activities again so that it can get the chemical release that it got before.
I’m a lay person, but I have read several books about the science of addiction and the science of dopamine and the way it drives behavior. And so I think that makes sense that that could be at play here.
And I’ve also learned about the pleasure gloss, which is when we do something and then something pleasant happens, we have this associative connection that can create pleasure even just thinking about doing the thing, even if we no longer or in that moment aren’t getting the reward, right? So the example is if a runner looks at their running shoes, they can get a runner’s high, even if they’re not running, right?
So if you think about anticipating problems and you’ve been praised for that in the past or you had a good situation because of that in the past where you saved yourself some heartache or trouble, you may get kind of a pleasurable feeling. And it may kind of create this compelled feeling to keep doing that again.
So if we want to develop the opposite ability, we need to create a reward for that as well, right? If we want to be able to anticipate delight, which is the opposite of anticipating a problem, but also if we just want to be able to sit on the couch on a Tuesday for like 30 minutes – For so many people I know, they want rest, they want relaxation, they want downtime. And it’s also very difficult to experience that, it’s very difficult to be present for it.
And I’m not totally sure, but I suspect that maybe they haven’t been rewarded for doing that. And if anything, maybe they’ve been punished or had teachings in their childhood about that being a waste of time. We also live in a culture that’s very obsessed with productivity and spending 30 minutes on the couch on a Tuesday is not a productivity-oriented behavior.
So you’re not going to get that sort of cultural reward of doing a good job. And there may also be some kind of internalized guilt or shame about wasting time or being lazy, any of that kind of messaging.
But again, so many people I know would love to just be able to relax on the couch or be able to go out to dinner with their significant other, or be able to go to the dentist on a Tuesday because that’s what needs to happen so their teeth stay in their face, right? And we want to be able to feel good about that.
Satisfaction, living a satisfying as fuck life and career is about achieving your big goals. It is about making choices that delight you, that bring you closer to who you are and what kind of life you want to live. And it’s also about being able to enjoy your moment-to-moment without feeling constantly terrorized by your brain for the decisions you’re making.
So if we want to be able to relax, if we want to be able to rest, if we want to be able to live deliciously, we need that ability to turn off the problem anticipation and turn on presence. And if you want that ability, I just think a really fun and straightforward way to get it is to use that reward system, is to use praise.
This is why I’m always talking about anything you want to do more of, let’s praise it. Let’s celebrate it. Let’s revel in it. Let’s delight about it. Let’s do it privately inside our own heads. Let’s do it singing little fun songs about how we’re doing a good job in our houses. Let’s do it publicly in comments on Instagram on posts to tell everyone what it is we’re doing so we can celebrate and delight and create that positive momentum and that reward circuitry.
So I want you to spend a minute and think about what do you want your life to be like? And I keep saying on a Tuesday, even though I know this is coming out on a Wednesday, so we can switch to Wednesday. What do you want your life to be like on a Wednesday? What do you want to be part of it?
And, again, we can really appreciate and respect that ability that you have to anticipate problems, but what other skills are going to be required to get you there? If you want to write a novel, anticipating problems is great. You can think about it like, well, I want to write a novel. Maybe I still need to make money and pay rent, so I’m going to need a job. Maybe I need to do these other activities after work, so maybe I need to write the novel before work.
So anticipating those problems and then resolving them, that’s really powerful. But what else do you need in place to write that novel? You probably need the ability to think highly of yourself and to praise yourself when you actually sit down to write. And, again, that opposite of anticipating problems is anticipating delights in a very straightforward way, right?
So yes, it might be super fun to fantasize about seeing your name on the best sellers list. And I encourage you to relish in that fantasy, that’s super fun. And also, alongside that, can you anticipate other delights? And specifically, if you want to actually get the goal done, I think it can be really powerful to anticipate what I’m going to call process delights.
Can you anticipate the delight of a first draft? Not just anticipate it and think about it, but use that anticipation to set yourself up well, to achieve the first draft? The same way like when I have anticipated the problem of being late, I don’t just anticipate it and then worry about it. I anticipate it, I notice it, I think of a solution, which is setting an alarm and then I implement the solution so I can let that worry go. And that thing is now held. It’s now taken care of. It’s now being managed by a structure or a system that I set up.
If you do this, your life will change. If you begin to anticipate what is needed to make the changes you want to make in your life, and then you set yourself up with little plans, processes, systems to support that and if you praise the small progress you make along the way, you will get there. Things will change.
First, they’ll change bit by bit. These little tiny, incremental, barely perceptible shifts, but over time those will add up and big changes will happen too and your life will amaze you. It will surprise you with where you’ve gone. And I know this because I see it over and over again in my clients’ lives. And I also know this because I have seen it in my life and now I am years and years out from having made lots of these tiny little changes and I have a really magical life.
It’s not a perfect life. It is a very satisfying life. It’s a life where I do the things I talk about with you all the time on the podcast, not perfectly. I’m not here to be a perfect example of how to use these tools. I’m here to be hilariously flawed and just trying and sometimes barely holding on by a fingertip, and still making insane progress when you can look at the big picture.
So many of the changes I’ve made in my life and in my business and in my relationships, there have been big swing moments, right? Like when I quit Expedia, that was a big swing moment. But the real successes have been the tiny incremental things I’ve done day after day after day after day after day, moment after moment.
Quitting Expedia didn’t launch my business. Quitting Expedia just meant I walked away from a lot of income and then I had to fucking do a bunch of little teeny things to build a new income. And I did a bunch of little teeny things, and let’s be honest, a lot of them either didn’t work or didn’t work right away. And then I had to do a bunch of more teeny things and cry a lot.
And then eventually, I built something really beautiful. And then there were a lot of things about it I didn’t like. And then I had to make a bunch of more incremental changes and nudge it and nudge it and nudge it and cry a lot and praise myself and praise myself and cry a lot and nudge it. And now I have this really incredible business.
And I have really incredible relationships. And I live in a really incredible house in an incredible city where things are imperfect, but they are good. And I have a lot of tools to manage all the things that come up, of which there are many. I’ve been really good at anticipating problems for a really long time, probably just like you because, again, I was rewarded for that and I was often punished for the opposite.
I was rewarded for anticipating what could go wrong and addressing it ahead of time. And when I didn’t worry about what could go wrong and then things did go wrong, a lot of times somebody was like, why didn’t you realize that was going to happen? Which is so funny that we say that to kids because how would they know? Of course they don’t know. Their brains are still developing and they don’t yet have the data to understand what is a logical consequence and what is not.
But anyways, we’re adults now and now we have new skills. But you may have this circuitry in your brain that’s decades and decades old that says it’s so important and valuable to anticipate problems and that not doing that is dangerous and bad. And I think it’s time for us to just upgrade that software, upgrade those lessons because as much as they’re well meaning, they’re often really robbing us of the ability to enjoy our lives in the day to day moments and in the big moments when amazing things happen.
And if we’re doing anything at this podcast, what we’re doing is helping you enjoy your day to day moments and enjoy it when the big things happen. And make the big things happen because a lot of big things aren’t just going to happen. So if we want them to happen, we often have to build them ourselves.
And those are the things that we’re doing here. We’re building them ourselves and then we’re finding out ways to enjoy the process of building them and to enjoy the actual having of them.
So what I want you to do today is, like I was talking about before, think about something you want to have in your life that’s not part of your life now. Either a thing you want to do or a thing you’re doing that you want to stop doing. And think about alongside anticipating the problems, what would happen if you begin rewarding yourself for taking the actions that you want to see more of, even if those actions start out super fucking small. And also anticipating delights, and then setting yourself up to have them.
And if you want to talk about things like this privately, regularly, and have a customized coaching experience to support you in getting exactly what you want in any area of your life, come sign up for a consult call with me. Let’s talk about what your goals and visions are. Let’s talk about how coaching can help you achieve them faster and in a more fun way. And let’s see if we’re a good fit to work together.
Thanks so much. Have a great week, I will see you next time.
Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. If you are ready to create a wildly delicious life and have way more fun than you ever thought possible, visit www.korilinn.com to see how I can help. See you next week.
The Satisfied AF podcast is the place to learn how to create a life and career that’s wildly delicious. Want a steamier sex life? We’ve got you. Want a more satisfying career? We’ll cover that too. And you can be sure we’ll spend lots of time talking about how to build connected, fun relationships that can handle life’s ups and downs. No matter what goals you’re working on, this show will help you create a one of a kind life that is just right for you. Join me, life and career coach Kori Linn and each week I’ll give you lots of practical tips, tools, and proven strategies to help you create all the satisfaction your heart desires.
Hello, hello, hello. Happy Wednesday. I am very excited because in one day I will be going to San Francisco to go to Stompede, which is an LGBTQ+ country dancing extravaganza. I don’t know if it counts as a conference, I think probably it is a conference.
Anyways, I’ve never been before, but I have been to a similar event in Seattle. It’s called the Rain Country Hoedown or the Emerald City Hoedown, I don’t know. It’s called The Hoedown. And as many of y’all know, when I lived in Seattle I used to go country dancing every week at an LGBTQ+ group and it was so fun. It was sort of the light of my life. And it was one of the things I was really sad to let go of when I moved to Sacramento.
So this is pretty exciting that tomorrow I will be heading on over to San Francisco for a weekend of dancing classes, dancing events, and some of my favorite dancing folks from Seattle will come down to go to the event as well, so I’ll see friends. So it’s pretty exciting. So that’s what I’m up to. And I hope you have a really fun week and weekend planned as well.
Okay, let’s get into our conversation for this week. This week we’re talking about the idea of anticipating problems. So something that I’ve noticed is that a lot of my clients are very good at anticipating problems and it can be very difficult for them to stop anticipating problems. I think this makes a lot of sense because I think a lot of us were rewarded as children and young adults, and even in adulthood we’ve been rewarded for anticipating problems.
I actually remember I used to, when I was in college, work at the coffee shop, Caribou Coffee. And I remember one of the training materials talked about one of our core things was anticipating needs. And it’s funny because I was just looking it up before I recorded this podcast to see if it’s still part of what they teach because, obviously, I was in college like a million years ago.
And I couldn’t find it, but it was like one of the things. Like Caribou Coffee, it’s a fast-paced environment, people are coming in, they’re ordering. And so one of the things that the management wanted us to learn to do was to anticipate the needs, both of the customers and also of the stores. And when you can anticipate needs, you can often solve problems before they become problems, right? You can preemptively figure things out and create more of a streamlined, smooth experience. And that can be really valuable.
And I think that’s why a lot of people do spend their time and energy anticipating problems and thinking about what can go wrong, because there can be value in doing that. So I want to be really clear that it can be a valuable activity.
But where I think we run into a problem with this activity is for some people it’s very hard to turn this feature off. They’ve been so rewarded for anticipating problems that they can’t stop doing it. Or the problems they come up with are so scary, they can’t stop thinking about them.
So it’s interesting because when we think about anticipating problems, there are, of course, problems that we can solve and take action on and problems that we can’t solve or take action on. As an example, if I’m afraid of running late, if I’m anticipating the potential problem of being late to something, I can set an alarm on my phone.
But if I’m anticipating something I don’t have control over, like a natural disaster, I can prepare my household. I could make plans to leave town if a natural disaster looks like it’s going to be coming to where I live, but I can’t control the weather. I can’t control what the Earth’s tectonic plates are doing. So some things are treatable, they’re within our realm of control and other things are not.
So one thing I want to be very clear about is that I actually think that the ability to anticipate problems is really powerful. And I’m not arguing that you should stop doing it entirely. But I think that anticipating problems is one skill, and it’s not the only skill that you need to be able to have a satisfying life, a satisfying career, satisfying relationships, et cetera.
If all you can do is anticipate problems, then you’re going to spend a lot of time probably feeling unhappy, feeling angry, feeling afraid, feeling a lot of those feelings that we don’t like so much. I mean, they are part of life, so they’re going to happen either way, but they’re maybe not the favorite feelings.
Whereas when we have the ability to engage in anticipating problems and then the ability to stop engaging in it once its usefulness has been spent, then we can really enjoy our lives so much more. So there’s a lot of crossover with what we’re talking about today and with my concept of useful content. And there’s a full podcast episode on that, so you can listen to it if you want.
The short version of it right here is that inside of our worries, there is often useful content. And we can pull the useful content out, separate it from the worrying activity, and then take action on it. So when it comes to anticipating problems, it’s kind of the same thing, right? If your brain is thinking of 37 things that could go wrong, there is probably useful information in there and some of those are actionable. You might want to take action on them.
You anticipate a problem, and then you put something in place so that that problem never comes to pass or so that if it does come to pass, you’re prepared for it. But then we need to develop the ability to turn that shit off. And if anything, I think it’s actually super fun and delicious to develop the opposite ability, which is the ability to anticipate delights. The ability to anticipate celebrations. The ability to anticipate yumminess, wins, satisfaction, right?
So many of us are spending so much of our time and so much of our imagination only thinking about what could go badly, what could go wrong, how we could be hurt, how we could be disappointed, how the things we want aren’t possible. And so few of us are spending time thinking about what could be amazing, what could be delicious, like how can we create that?
It’s interesting, because I think there’s actually another distinction here. I think we spend a lot of time anticipating problems, and I do you think a lot of us also spend time fantasizing. So I’m not talking about fantasizing exactly, because I think fantasizing is thinking like, oh, it would be better if. Wouldn’t it be nice if? I think fantasizing is a way that we escape from our current reality. And, listen, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s just different, right?
Whereas I think anticipating delights is almost sort of more planning, right? Because when we’re anticipating problems, a lot of times we’re doing that so we can set things up so that they can go better. So when we anticipate delights, it’s like how do we set the delights up so that they can actually happen?
How do we run our lives? How do we run our careers? How do we make our choices from a place of like, ooh, delightful things could happen and I want to prepare for them and welcome them in and set my life up so that my life has space for them?
As is often the case, what I’m also talking about here is living a full spectrum life, right? Like we talk about in order to create wild satisfaction and delight, we need the ability to feel our feelings, because the feelings of satisfaction and delight are going to take place in our body where our feelings live.
And we also need the ability to feel negative emotions, like disappointment, because sometimes when we go after things, we’re not going to get them or we’re not going to get them on the first try. So we need to be able to tolerate and allow it to make space for that full spectrum of human emotion. And I think that’s also true with the skill of anticipation.
Being able to anticipate problems is a beautiful thing. But if all you’re doing is that, then you’re not experiencing the full spectrum of what that skill set can offer you. You’re not experiencing the spectrum of planning for delight and setting your life up to make sense for it.
As an example, a lot of people, when they think about a career, they think about like what’s the safe option in case something goes wrong? Or maybe I should stay in this place where I’ve been because it’s the known quantity. Versus if you anticipate that you have the ability to be successful in a lot of different ways, and of course you do, what else might you go after? What else might you try?
If you were willing to anticipate that things could go well, not that you won’t have to work hard, not that it won’t be a challenge, but just that multiple things could be possible for you, what different decisions might you make and what might you go after?
To be able to imagine what could go wrong, again, this is a very powerful skill. This is an important skill in creating a wildly delicious life. But if it’s the only room in your house you visit, that’s very limited and it’s probably not very fun.
So let’s circle back to something I said earlier. A lot of us, like me when I worked at Caribou Coffee as a 19 year old, have been rewarded for our ability to anticipate problems. We’ve been rewarded for spending time and energy thinking through what could go wrong. So it makes sense that that would be something we’ve developed skill in. It makes sense that that would be something that we do over and over even when no one’s rewarding us anymore.
It even makes sense that we might overdo it because when there’s something in our life that we have received reward for, our brain learns that and it has kind of a dopamine circuit that kind of pushes us to do those activities again so that it can get the chemical release that it got before.
I’m a lay person, but I have read several books about the science of addiction and the science of dopamine and the way it drives behavior. And so I think that makes sense that that could be at play here.
And I’ve also learned about the pleasure gloss, which is when we do something and then something pleasant happens, we have this associative connection that can create pleasure even just thinking about doing the thing, even if we no longer or in that moment aren’t getting the reward, right? So the example is if a runner looks at their running shoes, they can get a runner’s high, even if they’re not running, right?
So if you think about anticipating problems and you’ve been praised for that in the past or you had a good situation because of that in the past where you saved yourself some heartache or trouble, you may get kind of a pleasurable feeling. And it may kind of create this compelled feeling to keep doing that again.
So if we want to develop the opposite ability, we need to create a reward for that as well, right? If we want to be able to anticipate delight, which is the opposite of anticipating a problem, but also if we just want to be able to sit on the couch on a Tuesday for like 30 minutes – For so many people I know, they want rest, they want relaxation, they want downtime. And it’s also very difficult to experience that, it’s very difficult to be present for it.
And I’m not totally sure, but I suspect that maybe they haven’t been rewarded for doing that. And if anything, maybe they’ve been punished or had teachings in their childhood about that being a waste of time. We also live in a culture that’s very obsessed with productivity and spending 30 minutes on the couch on a Tuesday is not a productivity-oriented behavior.
So you’re not going to get that sort of cultural reward of doing a good job. And there may also be some kind of internalized guilt or shame about wasting time or being lazy, any of that kind of messaging.
But again, so many people I know would love to just be able to relax on the couch or be able to go out to dinner with their significant other, or be able to go to the dentist on a Tuesday because that’s what needs to happen so their teeth stay in their face, right? And we want to be able to feel good about that.
Satisfaction, living a satisfying as fuck life and career is about achieving your big goals. It is about making choices that delight you, that bring you closer to who you are and what kind of life you want to live. And it’s also about being able to enjoy your moment-to-moment without feeling constantly terrorized by your brain for the decisions you’re making.
So if we want to be able to relax, if we want to be able to rest, if we want to be able to live deliciously, we need that ability to turn off the problem anticipation and turn on presence. And if you want that ability, I just think a really fun and straightforward way to get it is to use that reward system, is to use praise.
This is why I’m always talking about anything you want to do more of, let’s praise it. Let’s celebrate it. Let’s revel in it. Let’s delight about it. Let’s do it privately inside our own heads. Let’s do it singing little fun songs about how we’re doing a good job in our houses. Let’s do it publicly in comments on Instagram on posts to tell everyone what it is we’re doing so we can celebrate and delight and create that positive momentum and that reward circuitry.
So I want you to spend a minute and think about what do you want your life to be like? And I keep saying on a Tuesday, even though I know this is coming out on a Wednesday, so we can switch to Wednesday. What do you want your life to be like on a Wednesday? What do you want to be part of it?
And, again, we can really appreciate and respect that ability that you have to anticipate problems, but what other skills are going to be required to get you there? If you want to write a novel, anticipating problems is great. You can think about it like, well, I want to write a novel. Maybe I still need to make money and pay rent, so I’m going to need a job. Maybe I need to do these other activities after work, so maybe I need to write the novel before work.
So anticipating those problems and then resolving them, that’s really powerful. But what else do you need in place to write that novel? You probably need the ability to think highly of yourself and to praise yourself when you actually sit down to write. And, again, that opposite of anticipating problems is anticipating delights in a very straightforward way, right?
So yes, it might be super fun to fantasize about seeing your name on the best sellers list. And I encourage you to relish in that fantasy, that’s super fun. And also, alongside that, can you anticipate other delights? And specifically, if you want to actually get the goal done, I think it can be really powerful to anticipate what I’m going to call process delights.
Can you anticipate the delight of a first draft? Not just anticipate it and think about it, but use that anticipation to set yourself up well, to achieve the first draft? The same way like when I have anticipated the problem of being late, I don’t just anticipate it and then worry about it. I anticipate it, I notice it, I think of a solution, which is setting an alarm and then I implement the solution so I can let that worry go. And that thing is now held. It’s now taken care of. It’s now being managed by a structure or a system that I set up.
If you do this, your life will change. If you begin to anticipate what is needed to make the changes you want to make in your life, and then you set yourself up with little plans, processes, systems to support that and if you praise the small progress you make along the way, you will get there. Things will change.
First, they’ll change bit by bit. These little tiny, incremental, barely perceptible shifts, but over time those will add up and big changes will happen too and your life will amaze you. It will surprise you with where you’ve gone. And I know this because I see it over and over again in my clients’ lives. And I also know this because I have seen it in my life and now I am years and years out from having made lots of these tiny little changes and I have a really magical life.
It’s not a perfect life. It is a very satisfying life. It’s a life where I do the things I talk about with you all the time on the podcast, not perfectly. I’m not here to be a perfect example of how to use these tools. I’m here to be hilariously flawed and just trying and sometimes barely holding on by a fingertip, and still making insane progress when you can look at the big picture.
So many of the changes I’ve made in my life and in my business and in my relationships, there have been big swing moments, right? Like when I quit Expedia, that was a big swing moment. But the real successes have been the tiny incremental things I’ve done day after day after day after day after day, moment after moment.
Quitting Expedia didn’t launch my business. Quitting Expedia just meant I walked away from a lot of income and then I had to fucking do a bunch of little teeny things to build a new income. And I did a bunch of little teeny things, and let’s be honest, a lot of them either didn’t work or didn’t work right away. And then I had to do a bunch of more teeny things and cry a lot.
And then eventually, I built something really beautiful. And then there were a lot of things about it I didn’t like. And then I had to make a bunch of more incremental changes and nudge it and nudge it and nudge it and cry a lot and praise myself and praise myself and cry a lot and nudge it. And now I have this really incredible business.
And I have really incredible relationships. And I live in a really incredible house in an incredible city where things are imperfect, but they are good. And I have a lot of tools to manage all the things that come up, of which there are many. I’ve been really good at anticipating problems for a really long time, probably just like you because, again, I was rewarded for that and I was often punished for the opposite.
I was rewarded for anticipating what could go wrong and addressing it ahead of time. And when I didn’t worry about what could go wrong and then things did go wrong, a lot of times somebody was like, why didn’t you realize that was going to happen? Which is so funny that we say that to kids because how would they know? Of course they don’t know. Their brains are still developing and they don’t yet have the data to understand what is a logical consequence and what is not.
But anyways, we’re adults now and now we have new skills. But you may have this circuitry in your brain that’s decades and decades old that says it’s so important and valuable to anticipate problems and that not doing that is dangerous and bad. And I think it’s time for us to just upgrade that software, upgrade those lessons because as much as they’re well meaning, they’re often really robbing us of the ability to enjoy our lives in the day to day moments and in the big moments when amazing things happen.
And if we’re doing anything at this podcast, what we’re doing is helping you enjoy your day to day moments and enjoy it when the big things happen. And make the big things happen because a lot of big things aren’t just going to happen. So if we want them to happen, we often have to build them ourselves.
And those are the things that we’re doing here. We’re building them ourselves and then we’re finding out ways to enjoy the process of building them and to enjoy the actual having of them.
So what I want you to do today is, like I was talking about before, think about something you want to have in your life that’s not part of your life now. Either a thing you want to do or a thing you’re doing that you want to stop doing. And think about alongside anticipating the problems, what would happen if you begin rewarding yourself for taking the actions that you want to see more of, even if those actions start out super fucking small. And also anticipating delights, and then setting yourself up to have them.
And if you want to talk about things like this privately, regularly, and have a customized coaching experience to support you in getting exactly what you want in any area of your life, come sign up for a consult call with me. Let’s talk about what your goals and visions are. Let’s talk about how coaching can help you achieve them faster and in a more fun way. And let’s see if we’re a good fit to work together.
Thanks so much. Have a great week, I will see you next time.
Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. If you are ready to create a wildly delicious life and have way more fun than you ever thought possible, visit www.korilinn.com to see how I can help. See you next week.
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