136. Changing Your Mind
When previously made agreements no longer suit you, what do you do?
When your relationship with a new client feels like sandpaper and you know they’d be better served by someone else.
When you begin to suspect you might be poly.
When the way you divvy up household chores no longer sits right with you.
When longstanding habits in your friendship circle stop feeling fun.
When you want to revisit the way you share finances in your marriage.
What do you do?
Do you do anything?
Do you tell yourself, this is just the way it is?
Do you tell yourself, you should have seen this coming?
Do you tell yourself, there’s nothing you can do about it now?
But there is something you can do about it now.
You can change your mind.
You can ask for a new agreement.
You can renegotiate the terms.
You’re allowed to make new choices.
And making new choices does NOT mean you’re flaky, unreliable, or inconsistent.
It means you’re ALIVE.
It means you are allowed to grow and change and want different things.
Commitment and follow through are sexy AF.
But blind commitment and follow through, just because a past version of you said yes?
That’s not excellence. That’s putting your past choices above your current desires.
Don’t misinterpret me. I’m not saying to give up when shit gets hard. I’m saying you’re allowed to revisit past decisions and agreements to decide if they still work for you.
You're allowed to change your mind about what feels good to you.
You're allowed to change your mind about what your boundaries are.
You're allowed to change your mind about what kind of life you want to have or what it means to be successful.
Tune in this week to learn why giving yourself permission to change your mind is a powerful skill and how to employ it to create more satisfaction and delight in your life and career.
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WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why giving yourself permission to change your mind is important.
How to be intentional about any kind of shift you want to make in your life.
Why the skill of learning to pivot can be so powerful.
What cognitive dissonance means, and why it can feel uncomfortable.
How changing your mind helps you get to know yourself better.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
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If there are topics y’all want me to talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here!
How to Be an Adult in Relationships by David Richo
The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about changing your mind.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hello, hello, hello, and happy Wednesday. How are you doing today? I'm doing pretty well. I have been waking up super early, like before my alarm clock, not on purpose. And a little bit sometimes I'm annoyed because I don't always get to bed early enough for that to be enough sleep. But it's also kind of fun to just naturally wake up.
And it's hot now in Sacramento, but when I wake up super early like that, I'm able to get out and get a nice pretty long walk in while it's still cool. And so that's really delicious. I've been enjoying that lately. For a period of time I was waking up early like that and then being annoyed and being like, okay, let's go back to sleep so we can get more sleep. I'm a big fan of sleep, you probably know if you've been listening to the podcast for a while.
But because it's gotten so warm the last few times it's happened, well actually not when it happens, but later in the day I would be like, oh, if I had gotten up when my body first woke up, I could have gotten a cool walk in instead of a warm walk. And so one thing I've been trying to do is consider going to bed a little earlier, because then hopefully I can get enough sleep and still get to enjoy waking up early and taking these early walks.
But even if I am not able to fall asleep earlier, I could also just choose to go with the wake up time that I have and trust that my body is smart and knows how to get enough sleep. But I think it is a great example of what we're going to talk about this week, which is changing your mind.
And basically the teaching I want to offer you is that you're allowed to change your mind. And that may be like a duh for you, but I'm guessing that for some of you, that may feel a little like, “What? I am?” So there's this book I think I've mentioned before called How To Be An Adult by David Richo, it's been a really helpful book for me.
Alex actually got it for me for Christmas the first year we were together, and she even wrote a note. She was like, “Don't be offended by the title. It's a great book, it's been really impactful for my life.” And so I was like, “Okay, thank you.” And then I read part of it and there's a lot of teachings in there that I've found to be really powerful and have really changed how I think about myself and how I think about coaching my clients.
But one of the things he teaches is that adults are allowed to change their mind. And I really love this teaching because I think so often people think being an adult, or being a good person, or having good follow through means you're not allowed to change your mind.
And I will say I do place a high significance on doing what I say I'll do like. I love having excellent follow through. I do exercise commitment a lot to choose the things I'm going to do and stick with them. And I think that's a beautiful thing to be able to do.
But I also think giving ourselves permission to change our minds and allowing ourselves to have that as something we can do is a really beautiful thing. And a really important thing because in life we're often trying things and doing stuff and getting new information. And sometimes we find out that some of the things we've gone after, or some of the ways we've been doing things aren't actually what we wanted or aren't going to work for us the way we thought they were going to.
And, for instance, it's like generally I'm a person who highly, highly privileges getting at least eight hours of sleep. That's really important to me, sleep is one of my biggest values. And also lately I've been kind of flexible and I've been like, oh, if my body's waking up naturally at this time, I'm actually going to choose that.
I'm going to change my mind about eight hours of sleep being the end all be all thing that must happen. Or eight hours of sleep opportunity because even when I privilege eight hours of sleep, I don't always get it, which is rude. But that's how life is sometimes.
And so it's been fun to shake things up like that and to just kind of orient myself a little differently. I also tend to think of myself as a person who likes to sleep in. I used to really identify as a night owl, I don't so much anymore. I think it was a combination of working at Expedia in an office setting where we were expected to be online at like 7:00, 7:30 in the morning. And then also partnering with Alex, she likes to go to bed earlier and get up a little earlier too.
So between those two things I've made a shift intentionally, but being able to sleep in has still been a really big part of my ideal life design, my satisfied as fuck life, especially like I don't take client calls until 10am or later. So I really give myself this wide grace period of time in the morning so that if I have a bad night of sleep, I can sleep later and stuff like that.
And, obviously, I still have that available to me. But it's been really interesting to change my mind on what I'm privileging and to realize that, for me at least, in the summer in Sacramento, when it gets pretty fucking hot pretty often, being able to have that cool morning walk actually is so important to me.
And so I'm able to change my priorities around and privilege that. And I'm able to do that without feeling bad, or feeling like, oh, I'm lagging on this other commitment. I think this is something I've really developed over the last few years. It is kind of a flexibility with myself and an understanding that I'm a dynamic person and my needs and preferences do shift.
And right now, even if I'm not getting maybe as much sleep as I was getting a couple months ago, I feel good in my body during the day. And I will try to get to bed a little earlier, but I also trust in my body's wisdom to be able to get the sleep it needs. And if it's waking up earlier than my alarm, I'm like, okay, it sounds like you're done for whatever reason.
I honestly just think it's a beautiful gift to be able to give myself. And I think it creates so much more space for, like I said, a deeply satisfying life because it allows me to think about what do I want to ensure happens on this day? And sometimes we aren't able to do everything we want to ensure happens in a day. And so being able to decide what's most important and shift those priorities, I think can be really, really valuable.
I was coaching someone recently, and I don't remember who it was but somebody, whoever you are, thank you. They were talking about how they're at a crossroads right now. And I wrote this note in my phone, I wrote every moment is a crossroads because the thing is, it's true. At any given moment, you can go any direction.
So again, you're allowed to change your mind. And it doesn't have to be a big life crossroads for you to be able to do that because every moment is a moment you can do that. And what I mean by that is like, first of all, you can just be thoughtful and intentional about making little shifts or big shifts as you need and want to to make your life easier, more fun, more delicious, whatever you're looking for. And also every moment is an opportunity to choose to be different.
And this is where we're going to get into a different part of changing your mind, right? There's changing your mind like what I already talked about, about like, oh, this was the priority and now I've shifted and that's the priority.
Or like, oh, I said I wanted to pursue this career and then I did it for five years. And now I want to change my mind and pursue a different career. Or like, oh, I really thought I wanted to be married, and then I got married and then I didn't actually like it. And so I'm changing my mind and choosing to separate from my partner.
Those aren't examples from my life necessarily, those are just examples of changing your mind that I think are kind of more dramatic and more like, oh, I made a commitment and now I'm shifting away from that, and kind of giving yourself permission to be able to do that. And to be able to decide moment by moment what makes sense for you.
But then there's also this subtle, very coachy way of like when we talk about thought work and we talk about coaching and all the tools that we teach and talk about on the podcast, we're also talking about changing your mind. Because we're literally talking about changing your thought patterns. But we're also talking about changing how you engage with your feelings. And also changing your actions, and then the outcomes you create for yourself in your life.
So when I say you're always allowed to change your mind, literally you can change your mind about like, you worked so hard to become a senior manager and now you actually fucking hate it. And you're allowed to choose something different, even if you put in so much effort to get here.
But also you're allowed to change your mind in that you have thought patterns and ways of thinking and ways of being that you've maybe had since you've been socialized like your whole life or maybe you've had them your whole adult life. And you're allowed to change your mind about those too.
You're allowed to change your mind about what's okay for you in your life. You're allowed to change your mind about what your boundaries are. You're allowed to change your mind about what kind of life you want to have or what it means to be successful. Maybe you're a person who is always, like I said, striving after a certain title. You're allowed to change your mind about that whether you've achieved the title or even if you haven't achieved it yet.
I think so often people think if you're going after something and you pivot before you get there, that you “gave up,” right? And first of all, nothing wrong with giving up, you're allowed to do it. But also, you're allowed to change your mind without having to put the label on yourself that you gave up.
Being able to pivot is an incredibly powerful skill and it can allow us to keep going when the way we're going hasn't been working. And also being able to stay the course is a powerful skill. But kind of what I want to pitch in this podcast is that one's not better than the other, because I do think we live in a culture, I live in a culture that kind of says staying the course is better. And pivoting is only appropriate or changing your mind is only appropriate in certain circumstances or scenarios, right?
And I don't agree with that. We live in this culture that says, oh, a relationship is successful if it lasts forever. But here's the thing, you're never going to know if your relationship lasts forever until one of you dies. And even then, it clearly doesn't last forever because our time here is finite and limited. And also, why is staying in something forever the success metric? Like what if you're not happy there? What if it has run its course? What if it's not what you thought it would be?
So I guess really, also, this podcast is about giving yourself permission to decide what success looks like for you, what a satisfied as fuck life and career looks like for you, and to change that definition as you get more information. And as you grow and change, because humans grow and change. We're not static. We're not the same for our whole lives.
So to go back to the idea about the crossroads, every moment is a crossroads because at every moment, at any moment, you can change and shift. Sometimes in our life, it does feel like a big life crossroads, like we really feel like we're at a place where we have to make a decision between two or more things. Or it's really top of mind that we're considering doing something different.
But at any moment, you can make a shift or a micro shift or a huge fucking shift, and everything can change dramatically or subtly. And that's always available to you. And maybe that feels like a lot of pressure, like, oh, that's always available. But I think it's good to know that you have a choice because I think so many people go through their life feeling like they're almost on a little railroad track just going where the track goes, right?
And the track is like you do good in school, and then you go to college, and then you get a job. And then you date someone and then you get married and then you buy a house. And obviously, you're allowed to do all of those things if those are the things you want to do. But you also don't have to do any of them. You get to define success your own way and you get to change at any moment that you want to.
Now, also though, a caveat, I will say sometimes when we get the things that we've worked really hard to get, it can feel very fucking uncomfortable to have those things. It can feel like cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is when there's a difference between what you believe to be true and what is true.
So if you believe you're a person who always has to work hard, but then you worked hard and worked hard and worked hard and then you created some big success for yourself and then you don't have to work hard, that may feel like cognitive dissonance to you. That may feel unfuckingcomfortable, right?
So in those moments, when you have achieved something really big that you set out to achieve, if you feel subtly uneasy, if you feel kind of just a tiny bit nauseous, if you feel like burning it all down and throwing it all away, that is a moment when even though you obviously always, always have the right to change your mind, that is a moment when I would invite you to pause.
And just kind of hang out for a minute to see if what's actually happening is that you've created something so big and so wonderful for yourself that it actually kind of feels maybe a little threatening to your nervous system. Or it's going to require some kind of self-concept upgrade because it's so different than what you're used to.
Okay, we talked recently about the idea of a happiness set point. So it's like your brain is comfortable with you kind of being a certain amount of happy, and you can go past that, right? But you kind of have to teach your brain to feel safe there and that that's okay. So this can happen in all kinds of scenarios. It can happen if someone works towards a really big financial milestone. It can happen if someone works towards a really big career milestone, like getting to a certain title. And it can happen in relationships.
In fact, to blow myself up, when Alex and I started dating we were like ass over teakettle for each other, just absolutely obsessed, so in love. And then there was a point, I don't know maybe a year in, a year and a half in where I think I was at a thing where I was like, “This is so great,” but I felt uncomfortable. Like is it allowed to be this good? Do I deserve this, right?
But what's interesting is those weren't always the thoughts I was thinking that I was aware of. Sometimes I was just like, “This is boring,” right. So “this is boring” is actually really interesting because sometimes what “this is boring” means is this is more peaceful and more calm and more functional than what I'm used to and I don't know how to interact with that. I don't know how to relate to that. I don't know how to be with that.
Especially for people who are really used to striving, arriving can feel really weird. Well, the arriving part actually feels great, but it's the part after arriving, it's the being there part that can feel unsettling. So there's actually, if you think maybe this is you, there's a great book called The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. He calls this thing the upper limit problem.
And the idea, I haven’t read this book in years, but from what I remember the basic idea is if you move past your upper limit, like past what your upper limit of what you think is safe, okay, allowed, et cetera, you may feel so uncomfortable that you may sabotage and make yourself go back to the lower level.
So I just kind of wanted to throw this caveat in here, because here at the Love Your Job Before You Leave It community, here at Kori Linn Coaching, we are working to create satisfying as fuck lives and careers, which means we're making little shifts, but we're making big shifts, right? And so for a lot of you, you probably are going to begin to do things that are going to push you out of your comfort zone.
And you may wind up in that space of like, this is everything I said I ever wanted, but I'm having a really hard time tolerating it or I feel bored. So again, always, always allowed to change your mind whenever you want for whatever reason you want.
And also something to be mindful of is why are you changing your mind, right? Is it possible you're changing your mind because you've pushed yourself outside of your zone of what you can tolerate and you need a self-concept upgrade or some other kind of thought pattern upgrade in order to exist at this new level that you're at? Or is the new level you got to actually not as aligned to your desires as you thought it would be?
And so I think some of that also is like, what was motivating those goals? Were they actually your goals? Were they cultural goals? These can be clues in helping you figure out like, oh, am I just massively uncomfortable here because it's a higher level than I've ever been to? Or am I massively unhappy here because it's not actually where I want to be?
And there's no easy way for me to answer that for you on the podcast. Sorry about that. We could talk about it if you want to come work together one on one or in my small group, we could definitely talk it out together. But really, at the end of the day you're going to be the one who has to decide what the answer to that is.
The bad news is, you might get that wrong sometimes. But the good news is that's okay because even if you “get it wrong,” it's all going to be something that's going to help you get to know yourself better. And it's all going to be something that's going to help you love yourself more.
All right, y’all, that's what I have for you today. I give you permission, go out and change your mind and see what you want to change your mind about. What things could you change your mind about that would make your life just 1% or 10% or 100% or 1,000% more satisfying and delicious today?
And if you really want to go all the fuck in on creating that satisfying, delicious life, go over to my website and sign up for a consult call and let's talk about what's not working in your life and what you could change your mind about to make it much more wonderful.
All right, talk to you next week. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hello, hello, hello, and happy Wednesday. How are you doing today? I'm doing pretty well. I have been waking up super early, like before my alarm clock, not on purpose. And a little bit sometimes I'm annoyed because I don't always get to bed early enough for that to be enough sleep. But it's also kind of fun to just naturally wake up.
And it's hot now in Sacramento, but when I wake up super early like that, I'm able to get out and get a nice pretty long walk in while it's still cool. And so that's really delicious. I've been enjoying that lately. For a period of time I was waking up early like that and then being annoyed and being like, okay, let's go back to sleep so we can get more sleep. I'm a big fan of sleep, you probably know if you've been listening to the podcast for a while.
But because it's gotten so warm the last few times it's happened, well actually not when it happens, but later in the day I would be like, oh, if I had gotten up when my body first woke up, I could have gotten a cool walk in instead of a warm walk. And so one thing I've been trying to do is consider going to bed a little earlier, because then hopefully I can get enough sleep and still get to enjoy waking up early and taking these early walks.
But even if I am not able to fall asleep earlier, I could also just choose to go with the wake up time that I have and trust that my body is smart and knows how to get enough sleep. But I think it is a great example of what we're going to talk about this week, which is changing your mind.
And basically the teaching I want to offer you is that you're allowed to change your mind. And that may be like a duh for you, but I'm guessing that for some of you, that may feel a little like, “What? I am?” So there's this book I think I've mentioned before called How To Be An Adult by David Richo, it's been a really helpful book for me.
Alex actually got it for me for Christmas the first year we were together, and she even wrote a note. She was like, “Don't be offended by the title. It's a great book, it's been really impactful for my life.” And so I was like, “Okay, thank you.” And then I read part of it and there's a lot of teachings in there that I've found to be really powerful and have really changed how I think about myself and how I think about coaching my clients.
But one of the things he teaches is that adults are allowed to change their mind. And I really love this teaching because I think so often people think being an adult, or being a good person, or having good follow through means you're not allowed to change your mind.
And I will say I do place a high significance on doing what I say I'll do like. I love having excellent follow through. I do exercise commitment a lot to choose the things I'm going to do and stick with them. And I think that's a beautiful thing to be able to do.
But I also think giving ourselves permission to change our minds and allowing ourselves to have that as something we can do is a really beautiful thing. And a really important thing because in life we're often trying things and doing stuff and getting new information. And sometimes we find out that some of the things we've gone after, or some of the ways we've been doing things aren't actually what we wanted or aren't going to work for us the way we thought they were going to.
And, for instance, it's like generally I'm a person who highly, highly privileges getting at least eight hours of sleep. That's really important to me, sleep is one of my biggest values. And also lately I've been kind of flexible and I've been like, oh, if my body's waking up naturally at this time, I'm actually going to choose that.
I'm going to change my mind about eight hours of sleep being the end all be all thing that must happen. Or eight hours of sleep opportunity because even when I privilege eight hours of sleep, I don't always get it, which is rude. But that's how life is sometimes.
And so it's been fun to shake things up like that and to just kind of orient myself a little differently. I also tend to think of myself as a person who likes to sleep in. I used to really identify as a night owl, I don't so much anymore. I think it was a combination of working at Expedia in an office setting where we were expected to be online at like 7:00, 7:30 in the morning. And then also partnering with Alex, she likes to go to bed earlier and get up a little earlier too.
So between those two things I've made a shift intentionally, but being able to sleep in has still been a really big part of my ideal life design, my satisfied as fuck life, especially like I don't take client calls until 10am or later. So I really give myself this wide grace period of time in the morning so that if I have a bad night of sleep, I can sleep later and stuff like that.
And, obviously, I still have that available to me. But it's been really interesting to change my mind on what I'm privileging and to realize that, for me at least, in the summer in Sacramento, when it gets pretty fucking hot pretty often, being able to have that cool morning walk actually is so important to me.
And so I'm able to change my priorities around and privilege that. And I'm able to do that without feeling bad, or feeling like, oh, I'm lagging on this other commitment. I think this is something I've really developed over the last few years. It is kind of a flexibility with myself and an understanding that I'm a dynamic person and my needs and preferences do shift.
And right now, even if I'm not getting maybe as much sleep as I was getting a couple months ago, I feel good in my body during the day. And I will try to get to bed a little earlier, but I also trust in my body's wisdom to be able to get the sleep it needs. And if it's waking up earlier than my alarm, I'm like, okay, it sounds like you're done for whatever reason.
I honestly just think it's a beautiful gift to be able to give myself. And I think it creates so much more space for, like I said, a deeply satisfying life because it allows me to think about what do I want to ensure happens on this day? And sometimes we aren't able to do everything we want to ensure happens in a day. And so being able to decide what's most important and shift those priorities, I think can be really, really valuable.
I was coaching someone recently, and I don't remember who it was but somebody, whoever you are, thank you. They were talking about how they're at a crossroads right now. And I wrote this note in my phone, I wrote every moment is a crossroads because the thing is, it's true. At any given moment, you can go any direction.
So again, you're allowed to change your mind. And it doesn't have to be a big life crossroads for you to be able to do that because every moment is a moment you can do that. And what I mean by that is like, first of all, you can just be thoughtful and intentional about making little shifts or big shifts as you need and want to to make your life easier, more fun, more delicious, whatever you're looking for. And also every moment is an opportunity to choose to be different.
And this is where we're going to get into a different part of changing your mind, right? There's changing your mind like what I already talked about, about like, oh, this was the priority and now I've shifted and that's the priority.
Or like, oh, I said I wanted to pursue this career and then I did it for five years. And now I want to change my mind and pursue a different career. Or like, oh, I really thought I wanted to be married, and then I got married and then I didn't actually like it. And so I'm changing my mind and choosing to separate from my partner.
Those aren't examples from my life necessarily, those are just examples of changing your mind that I think are kind of more dramatic and more like, oh, I made a commitment and now I'm shifting away from that, and kind of giving yourself permission to be able to do that. And to be able to decide moment by moment what makes sense for you.
But then there's also this subtle, very coachy way of like when we talk about thought work and we talk about coaching and all the tools that we teach and talk about on the podcast, we're also talking about changing your mind. Because we're literally talking about changing your thought patterns. But we're also talking about changing how you engage with your feelings. And also changing your actions, and then the outcomes you create for yourself in your life.
So when I say you're always allowed to change your mind, literally you can change your mind about like, you worked so hard to become a senior manager and now you actually fucking hate it. And you're allowed to choose something different, even if you put in so much effort to get here.
But also you're allowed to change your mind in that you have thought patterns and ways of thinking and ways of being that you've maybe had since you've been socialized like your whole life or maybe you've had them your whole adult life. And you're allowed to change your mind about those too.
You're allowed to change your mind about what's okay for you in your life. You're allowed to change your mind about what your boundaries are. You're allowed to change your mind about what kind of life you want to have or what it means to be successful. Maybe you're a person who is always, like I said, striving after a certain title. You're allowed to change your mind about that whether you've achieved the title or even if you haven't achieved it yet.
I think so often people think if you're going after something and you pivot before you get there, that you “gave up,” right? And first of all, nothing wrong with giving up, you're allowed to do it. But also, you're allowed to change your mind without having to put the label on yourself that you gave up.
Being able to pivot is an incredibly powerful skill and it can allow us to keep going when the way we're going hasn't been working. And also being able to stay the course is a powerful skill. But kind of what I want to pitch in this podcast is that one's not better than the other, because I do think we live in a culture, I live in a culture that kind of says staying the course is better. And pivoting is only appropriate or changing your mind is only appropriate in certain circumstances or scenarios, right?
And I don't agree with that. We live in this culture that says, oh, a relationship is successful if it lasts forever. But here's the thing, you're never going to know if your relationship lasts forever until one of you dies. And even then, it clearly doesn't last forever because our time here is finite and limited. And also, why is staying in something forever the success metric? Like what if you're not happy there? What if it has run its course? What if it's not what you thought it would be?
So I guess really, also, this podcast is about giving yourself permission to decide what success looks like for you, what a satisfied as fuck life and career looks like for you, and to change that definition as you get more information. And as you grow and change, because humans grow and change. We're not static. We're not the same for our whole lives.
So to go back to the idea about the crossroads, every moment is a crossroads because at every moment, at any moment, you can change and shift. Sometimes in our life, it does feel like a big life crossroads, like we really feel like we're at a place where we have to make a decision between two or more things. Or it's really top of mind that we're considering doing something different.
But at any moment, you can make a shift or a micro shift or a huge fucking shift, and everything can change dramatically or subtly. And that's always available to you. And maybe that feels like a lot of pressure, like, oh, that's always available. But I think it's good to know that you have a choice because I think so many people go through their life feeling like they're almost on a little railroad track just going where the track goes, right?
And the track is like you do good in school, and then you go to college, and then you get a job. And then you date someone and then you get married and then you buy a house. And obviously, you're allowed to do all of those things if those are the things you want to do. But you also don't have to do any of them. You get to define success your own way and you get to change at any moment that you want to.
Now, also though, a caveat, I will say sometimes when we get the things that we've worked really hard to get, it can feel very fucking uncomfortable to have those things. It can feel like cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is when there's a difference between what you believe to be true and what is true.
So if you believe you're a person who always has to work hard, but then you worked hard and worked hard and worked hard and then you created some big success for yourself and then you don't have to work hard, that may feel like cognitive dissonance to you. That may feel unfuckingcomfortable, right?
So in those moments, when you have achieved something really big that you set out to achieve, if you feel subtly uneasy, if you feel kind of just a tiny bit nauseous, if you feel like burning it all down and throwing it all away, that is a moment when even though you obviously always, always have the right to change your mind, that is a moment when I would invite you to pause.
And just kind of hang out for a minute to see if what's actually happening is that you've created something so big and so wonderful for yourself that it actually kind of feels maybe a little threatening to your nervous system. Or it's going to require some kind of self-concept upgrade because it's so different than what you're used to.
Okay, we talked recently about the idea of a happiness set point. So it's like your brain is comfortable with you kind of being a certain amount of happy, and you can go past that, right? But you kind of have to teach your brain to feel safe there and that that's okay. So this can happen in all kinds of scenarios. It can happen if someone works towards a really big financial milestone. It can happen if someone works towards a really big career milestone, like getting to a certain title. And it can happen in relationships.
In fact, to blow myself up, when Alex and I started dating we were like ass over teakettle for each other, just absolutely obsessed, so in love. And then there was a point, I don't know maybe a year in, a year and a half in where I think I was at a thing where I was like, “This is so great,” but I felt uncomfortable. Like is it allowed to be this good? Do I deserve this, right?
But what's interesting is those weren't always the thoughts I was thinking that I was aware of. Sometimes I was just like, “This is boring,” right. So “this is boring” is actually really interesting because sometimes what “this is boring” means is this is more peaceful and more calm and more functional than what I'm used to and I don't know how to interact with that. I don't know how to relate to that. I don't know how to be with that.
Especially for people who are really used to striving, arriving can feel really weird. Well, the arriving part actually feels great, but it's the part after arriving, it's the being there part that can feel unsettling. So there's actually, if you think maybe this is you, there's a great book called The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. He calls this thing the upper limit problem.
And the idea, I haven’t read this book in years, but from what I remember the basic idea is if you move past your upper limit, like past what your upper limit of what you think is safe, okay, allowed, et cetera, you may feel so uncomfortable that you may sabotage and make yourself go back to the lower level.
So I just kind of wanted to throw this caveat in here, because here at the Love Your Job Before You Leave It community, here at Kori Linn Coaching, we are working to create satisfying as fuck lives and careers, which means we're making little shifts, but we're making big shifts, right? And so for a lot of you, you probably are going to begin to do things that are going to push you out of your comfort zone.
And you may wind up in that space of like, this is everything I said I ever wanted, but I'm having a really hard time tolerating it or I feel bored. So again, always, always allowed to change your mind whenever you want for whatever reason you want.
And also something to be mindful of is why are you changing your mind, right? Is it possible you're changing your mind because you've pushed yourself outside of your zone of what you can tolerate and you need a self-concept upgrade or some other kind of thought pattern upgrade in order to exist at this new level that you're at? Or is the new level you got to actually not as aligned to your desires as you thought it would be?
And so I think some of that also is like, what was motivating those goals? Were they actually your goals? Were they cultural goals? These can be clues in helping you figure out like, oh, am I just massively uncomfortable here because it's a higher level than I've ever been to? Or am I massively unhappy here because it's not actually where I want to be?
And there's no easy way for me to answer that for you on the podcast. Sorry about that. We could talk about it if you want to come work together one on one or in my small group, we could definitely talk it out together. But really, at the end of the day you're going to be the one who has to decide what the answer to that is.
The bad news is, you might get that wrong sometimes. But the good news is that's okay because even if you “get it wrong,” it's all going to be something that's going to help you get to know yourself better. And it's all going to be something that's going to help you love yourself more.
All right, y’all, that's what I have for you today. I give you permission, go out and change your mind and see what you want to change your mind about. What things could you change your mind about that would make your life just 1% or 10% or 100% or 1,000% more satisfying and delicious today?
And if you really want to go all the fuck in on creating that satisfying, delicious life, go over to my website and sign up for a consult call and let's talk about what's not working in your life and what you could change your mind about to make it much more wonderful.
All right, talk to you next week. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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