139. Creating Satisfaction
Satisfaction is not something that just happens to you.
It’s not something that arrives as a side effect of achieving a big goal.
It’s not the reward you get when you make good choices.
Satisfaction is a skill.
It’s a habit.
It’s a perspective, and the more you practice it, the better you get at it.
When you tell yourself you’ll be satisfied later, after you get the promotion, the partner, the perfect house, you’re not building satisfaction, you’re putting it off.
You’re delaying learning the skillset and practicing it until things are different.
But once things are different, you’re not satisfied, because you haven’t developed the skill and habit of being satisfied. You do not know how to embody satisfaction. You only know how to chase it.
It’s kind of like the difference between casual dating and marriage.
It can be really fun to chase the hot person. Building a relationship with them, loving them, living with them, navigating conflict with them - that’s a different skill.
It takes patience and commitment, willingness to be wrong, willingness to try again when things go off the rails. It takes staying rather than chasing the next shiny thing.
So, too, with satisfaction.
Chasing satisfaction is easy.
Creating satisfaction is harder, but it’s also deeply, deeply rewarding.
And that’s what I’m teaching you how to do on this week’s podcast episode.
Join us.
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WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
What satisfaction is.
How to develop emotional fluency.
The first step to creating more satisfaction in your life and career.
What hedonic adaptation means, and why we need to gain awareness around it.
The power of using satisfaction as fuel for making the changes you want.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about creating satisfaction.
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, happy Wednesday. I have something so fun to share with y’all. So, in my small group coaching program, Satisfied As Fuck, we have a Slack. And in Slack we have a channel called celebrations, wins and delights where my clients post things that are going well, things they want to notice and revel and savor. And I had a post in there recently that I just love and am fully obsessed with. And so I asked the client if I could share it with y’all. And the client said yes, so I’m going to read it to you.
One of the things the client mentions is thought work. So thought work is what we’re all doing and talking about all the time here. Like when we say thought work, what we mean is the part of coaching where we work on our thoughts and where we change our thoughts and learn new perspectives and stuff like that. So I just wanted to give you that context so that when you hear that part, you’ll understand what it means.
And just so y’all know, I am sharing this with permission from my client. So here’s what the client wrote. “I’m celebrating the evolution of my romantic life with my husband. I started thought work several years into my marriage. I was in a really bad place with my marriage at the time. With the addition of kids into our lives I was extremely resentful of my partner and how much more of the household and childcare labor I was doing and how little he seemed to think of my needs and my life.
Holidays like Mother’s Day and our anniversary threw me into a place of unspeakable anger towards him and despair, either because he did nothing to recognize it or make my life easier, Mother’s Day, or because I was so angry at him I didn’t see anything to celebrate, anniversary. And every time someone reminded me of it or sent us a card or a gift, I was so upset. Also, I avoided sex and I started to believe I just wasn’t sexual anymore because when I’m that constantly angry, my body just isn’t into it.
I was looking at apartment and divorce websites. I learned from coaching that I had a lot of social conditioning around being in this relationship that was making me absolutely miserable. From the conditioning that says I’m not supposed to “be bossy.” To the conditioning that says I’m supposed to take care of everyone, to the conditioning that sex is a reward I grant for good behavior, to the fact that I was a closeted bisexual person, and I was worried that I shouldn’t have picked a person of this gender at all because, “all men are bad.”
But coaching made this huge, monumental difference in this part of my life. I was able to start small and gradually offload more of the invisible labor to my husband, who to my surprise, adapted to it. I stopped doing the kids’ laundry. I stopped doing dishes. I stopped doing trash. I bill him for half of every fucking child item I buy now. Every time the kids and I go out to eat, every pair of kid shorts I buy, every cough drop, everything. We keep a spreadsheet for it, and I think it’s the most goddamn romantic thing that’s ever happened to me.
Every time I enter a cell with a dollar amount, my brain is like, victory. When I have an issue with how he’s handling or not handling something, I bring it up almost instantly. I don’t get nearly as upset as I used to as a result. I learned that enjoying pleasure, laughing at a joke, or giving someone a hug does not mean “I forgive” something. And thus it is unnecessary for me to give my husband the silent treatment or withhold sex to “punish” him.
I also learned that what I used to think was sexy 16 years ago when we met is no longer sexy to me. I think I had social conditioning to believe I wanted to feel dominated. But my brain lost this conditioning at some point, and I learned that I’m not “not sexual.” It’s just that I don’t want that kind of thing anymore. Instead, I learned that now I want to cuddle like Disney animals for an extended period before anything happens in an environment without children, calmly, sweetly, and that that is a requirement for me.
I also realized I am done being the one to have to deal with pregnancy prevention. Taking hormones isn’t good for my body. That’s up to him now. I also came out to my husband. Could it have all gone south? Sure. I think part of it was getting over the fear that asking for what I need or being completely myself would destroy everything by being willing to deal with that consequence should it arise.
Seeing him adapt to every single thing I asked of him almost immediately, albeit sometimes not well or gracefully, it renewed my faith in our relationship, and it made me actually feel loved. For the first time in 12 years I wanted to celebrate our anniversary this year. I feel I have so many tools to work with now when it comes to my relationship.”
Y’all, the fucking power in that. It makes me want to cry. It gives me chills. This is why I do this work because there are so many people out there living a life that they’re not that into, that doesn’t feel satisfying to them, that they think they have to keep living or they have to keep living it the way they’ve been living it. And they feel miserable, and they feel trapped, and things feel really fucking hard and terrible.
And I want to be the voice that cuts through that and says, hey, it can be better. You can have a more enjoyable experience. You can have a more satisfying life. You can have a more interesting life. You can have a more delicious life. And yeah, it will require making some changes, but it often doesn’t require making the changes we think we’re going to have to make.
Like this person wrote that they were looking at divorce websites, and now they’re excited to celebrate their anniversary with the same person, right? So I think so often people are afraid to look at the things in their life that aren’t working because they think they’re going to have to burn it all down.
And listen, sometimes we do choose to burn it all down. And that’s okay and I can support you in that also. But sometimes what we actually choose is to be more of ourselves in our actual lives, to be more of ourselves at work, to be more of ourselves in relationships, to ask for what we actually want and to give other people the opportunity to get to know us and to be with us the way we want to have someone be with us.
And a lot of times other people just adapt, and it works, and we get what we want. And then we’re sitting around going, what the fuck? Was this always available? It’s magical. And that’s not to minimize the amount of work that this client has done because this client has done a lot of work.
This client has worked their ass off to create something really spectacular for themselves. And it was hard, right? And it did require questioning and unlearning a lot of socialization. And that can be very uncomfortable. And also, look at what’s possible when you’re willing to do that. It’s life changing. It’s abso-fucking-lutely life changing. And that leads into what we’re going to talk about today.
What we’re talking about today is creating satisfaction. And as you know, I have my small group called Satisfied As Fuck, and satisfaction is a big thing that we talk about all the time on the podcast, no matter what the topic is. But I kind of wanted to revisit the idea of what even is satisfaction? And how do you get more of it in your life and your career and everything else, your relationships, all the things.
And there are some other episodes, like we have an episode about how satisfaction is a habit. So that’s also a great re-listen if this really spikes your interest and you want to have more information about it. Also, Satisfied As Fuck is a great place for you to be if you’re interested in creating more satisfaction in your life, in your career, in your relationships, because that is what we work on there.
And we coach on everything in Satisfied As Fuck. So we coach on any topic you want, but through the lens of creating more satisfaction for you. But let’s get into it. What even is satisfaction? And how do we create more of it?
So I think for a lot of people, when you say the word satisfaction everyone’s like, oh yeah, I know about that. But when you actually are like, what even is it? People are like, oh, you know, and you feel it or like it’s kind of amorphous, right? It’s kind of mysterious. And I think for a lot of us, we’re trying to create satisfaction and it’s like getting Easter eggs and then we look inside them and we’re like, are you it? Is satisfaction in here? Is it in here?
We’re collecting all these things in life, like we’re collecting promotions and we’re collecting relationships and we’re buying a house and we’re always like, is this where it will be? It’s, I feel, like a little bit mysterious and so I want to take away some of that mystery today in a good way.
And so what I want to teach you is that satisfaction is a feeling. And there’s a few reasons why it’s really important to know that. Reason number one is feelings happen in your body, right? You feel feelings in your body, right? That is where they exist. And if you’ve seen that really famous Brené Brown Ted talk, she talks about how if you numb one emotion, you numb all emotions, right?
So for a lot of people, they’re chasing satisfaction but they’re never feeling it. And sometimes that’s because they don’t have the ability to feel emotions in their body because maybe they’ve been numbing emotions because they aren’t such a big fan of some of the emotions, right? Anger, shame, guilt, sadness, anxiety, those tend to be the ones that people might want to numb.
So the number one thing, the very first step if you’re going to create more satisfaction in your life, your career, your relationships, etc., is you’ve got to be able to feel feelings. And I realize that for some of us, feeling feelings in our body, like noticing the sensations, the emotional sensations in our body, that can feel really scary.
And if that doesn’t feel like a safe thing for you to do, don’t fucking do it. But maybe hire a trauma informed therapist who you can talk to about that because this is a really important skill set. But just because it’s important doesn’t mean you have to do it on your own. And it is totally valid that some people do not feel comfortable feeling feelings in their body due to a variety of experiences they’ve had.
But if you do feel comfortable feeling feelings in your body, then practicing feeling feelings in your body is going to be a way that you can get access to more satisfaction. The more you are able to feel emotions when they happen in your body, the more you will be able to feel satisfaction when it happens in your body.
And so one easy way that you can build this skill is to just take like 30 seconds, 10 seconds, five seconds, 90 seconds, something small, something under three minutes, once a day and just practice noticing emotional sensations in your body. So emotional sensations are sensations that are a feeling or tied to a feeling.
So for instance, if I’m excited my heart is beating really fast and my hands maybe kind of feel kind of tingly, right? And that might be a set of sensations. Now I could have those sensations maybe also if I ran or something, my heart would be really fast. So being able to tell the difference, like is this a physical sensation that’s happening for a physical reason? Or is this an emotional physical sensation? So that’s kind of what you want to tune into.
Or another one is if I feel ashamed I get a little bit nauseous, and my face gets hot. So those are the physical sensations associated with that emotional experience. Or if I feel joy, I get kind of like fluttery in my chest. That’s how it feels for me. So just taking a little bit of time on a regular basis, but in really teeny tiny little increments to just be like, oh yeah, what am I feeling in my body?
And at various times, like when you’re in a good mood and when you’re not in a good mood. So kind of like checking in with the full spectrum of human emotion and how that shows up in your physical body, that’s going to give you fluency so that when you do feel satisfied, you can connect to it. You can actually experience it, versus kind of missing it because you don’t have any awareness of that physical sensation.
Okay, another thing that’s really important to know when we think about creating satisfaction is that the human brain has a negativity bias, right? I’ve heard Dr. John Gottman talk about in a relationship you need to notice, I think it’s five pieces of positive data about the relationship to balance one piece of negative data. I actually think he says it’s five pieces of positive or neutral, so that’s also really good for you to know. It doesn’t always have to be a positive thing, but you’ve got to balance out.
So because of that bias, your brain is going to give as much weight to one piece of critical data or negative data as it would to five pieces of positive or neutral data. And so in order to balance that negativity bias, you’ve got to start noticing what’s working, noticing what is satisfying, noticing what is delightful, noticing what is delicious in your life.
And I want to take a moment to just say this is not like being grateful. This is not a gratitude list. This is not what should I be grateful for in my life? This is not a way for you to should and judge and shame yourself about not being more grateful blah, blah, blah. What this actually is, is this is more of an exercise in noticing. What do you actually already like about your life that maybe is just not top of mind?
So I eat chocolate after breakfast every day. I really like that. I find it to be literally delicious and also just fun and I don’t think I was allowed to eat candy in the morning as a child probably. I don’t really remember, but that doesn’t seem like something that would have been celebrated and encouraged. So it also feels a little like, ooh, I’m breaking the rules. These are my rules as an adult, but it’s also not the rules most people live by because most people eat chocolate for dessert later in the day.
But now that I mostly don’t have caffeine, I like to eat my chocolate in the morning because chocolate has a lot of caffeine in it and I’m not trying to fuck my sleep up, y’all. So that’s something that I find really satisfying and I do it every day. But if I just do it out of habit and I don’t pay attention, I’m missing the opportunity to scoop up and savor and experience the satisfaction that already exists in my life.
So for you, you can kind of scan your life like a treasure hunt. Sometimes I use the term pleasure hunt, but you can also call it satisfaction hunt. Or in the last round of SAF one of the clients called it detective satisfaction or something like that. So it’s like a detective going through their life trying to I Spy where the satisfaction existed. I like that because I think it’s silly and fun.
But whatever way you want to do it is available to you to notice what you already like, what’s already satisfying. And then once you notice it, you can check it into your body and be like, oh, can I feel the satisfaction in my body? What does it feel like? What’s it like to be with that emotion? What’s it like to savor this experience and actually spend time in it?
So many of us are always looking for the next satisfying thing. And it’s not your fault if you do this. This is kind of part of how the human brain is wired and we have hedonic adaptation, which means we get really used to the things that are good in our life and then we look for things that are even more good, or we look for the next thing. The brain is really good at moving the goalpost.
And so what we’re doing here is we’re kind of purposefully balancing that by slowing our brains down and being like, hey, you don’t need to rush to the next satisfying thing. What you need to learn to do right in this moment is to be with this satisfying thing because it’s your capacity to be with any single satisfying thing that’s going to create your satisfaction. If you rush to the next thing, by the time you get to it you’re going to rush somewhere else and then you’re not going to feel very satisfied, right?
So what we’re learning to do is notice and enjoy the satisfaction that already exists. But, of course, we’re not going to stop there because we’re also going to make big and wild changes, or small and subtle changes, or whatever fucking kind of changes you want to make in your life. And when we notice and revel and enjoy what is working, that also gives us what I’m going to call emotional fuel that we can use to make changes.
A lot of people think if they feel satisfied, they’ll stop doing anything. I distinctly remember being a child and thinking I want to have a good life, but I don’t want to be content because if I’m content then I won’t do anything. And I’m like, first of all, where the fuck did I get that idea? I mean, obviously, I got it from culture because that’s a pretty common teaching, right? But I’m also like, that’s silly. What if I could be content and still do stuff?
If I have a delicious meal, I’m still going to get hungry and have another delicious meal later. It’s such a weird thing that we’re like, oh, I don’t want to get too happy because then I won’t do anything. But the only reason I’m doing things is to be happy. It’s like it doesn’t check out, y’all. Or at least it’s not how I want to do things. If I notice and revel and enjoy what is working and I get so satisfied I want to stop working on things, maybe I didn’t want to work on those things anyways.
For me, though, what I’ve discovered is when I notice and revel in the satisfaction that exists, it actually becomes clear what I really do want to work on and what I just wanted to work on to try to feel better or escape from my negative thoughts, or like blah, blah, whatever like that. The more I cultivate a basic experience of satisfaction, it just clarifies what else I want to keep working on because I’m not trying to hustle for my satisfaction any longer if that makes sense.
And once I figure out what I actually do want to work on, again, I have that positive emotional fuel. I have that satisfaction and delight fuel that I can use to get things done. And if you’re used to fueling yourself with anxiety or shame or guilt, fueling yourself with satisfaction may feel a little bit different because it’s kind of a much more mellow fuel.
Shame and anxiety can be very kind of volatile fuel. So I do think it can really get people to do a lot, but in a very unpleasant way with usually a lot of negative side effects. And then even when you get to your goal, you feel like shit, because someone’s been basically judging and criticizing you the whole way there. And so that’s usually not very pleasant.
Even if you get the promotion or get the relationship or get the new house, you’ve been yelled at and belittled the whole way there and so it doesn’t feel good. Whereas that satisfaction fuel, again, it’s more mellow. It’s more like, okay, we’re amazing and we can also do this thing and let’s just go. I also think it helps us keep showing up if something doesn’t work on the first try. And I think that’s really wonderful because a lot of things don’t work on the first try.
I talk about this all the time, but the first time I tried to make $100,000 in my business. I didn’t do it. And I didn’t do it over and over and over again. And let me tell y’all right now, I was not feeling very satisfied about that at the time. And I was getting coaching about enjoying what was working in my business and I was really, really struggling with it. So none of this is about doing it perfectly. You can still get really far.
But it was a very emotionally painful experience the way that I did it. And I think it’s much more enjoyable to cultivate the satisfaction and let that fuel you as you keep going. And I think it’s much more of an emotionally mellow way to do it too because when you’re kind of in that anxiety shame, it’s like the highs are really high, but the lows are really low. And it’s like this wild emotional roller coaster and you’re trying to get to the goal so you can feel amazing. But then when you don’t get to the goal, you feel like shit.
And I’m not perfect, right? But when I can get to a place of being satisfied and fueling myself with satisfaction, it’s like a very mellow roller coaster where I’m like, oh, it didn’t work. And I’m like, that’s a bummer and I kind of feel shitty. But I’m also like, all right, but a lot is working, and I’ve got this and I’m loving myself through it. And then we just keep going.
And then when I do hit the goals and they’re really big and successful, it feels good, but it doesn’t feel as insanely good. But I actually think that’s useful because it doesn’t throw me off of my kind of homeostasis. It’s like, oh yeah, that’s really amazing and I’m happy that’s happening. It’s like the things that are happening are no longer so extreme. And I think that can be really valuable.
I think that’s why it’s also satisfaction. It’s not like ecstasy, right? The human body, the human brain, they want to be in homeostasis. They want to be in like this kind of neutral thing, which sounds bad. But I think the way I’ve heard this phrased is or you can also just call it peace, right? We want to be at peace. And so it is fun and interesting to have highs and lows, and those are part of the human experience.
But also, again, the human body and brain wants to be in homeostasis. So when you go up and have that super big ecstasy, your brain and body are going to try to pull you back to an even keel. And that might feel really violent when you’re having those super high highs and those super low lows. Verses when you’re sort of kind of more at the peaceful baseline, then you have these like ebbs and flows. It’s like bobbing in the water at the ocean. It’s not violent, it’s gentle and kind of interesting but it’s not going to wreck your day if you flow back and forth between those states.
So that’s basically what it is to create satisfaction. Creating satisfaction, again, comes down to being able to feel feelings in your body, noticing and savoring what is already satisfying. And then using that positive emotion as fuel to create whatever changes you want to make in your life, whether they’re big wild changes, or whether they’re smaller and more subtle shifts.
If you remember back to the beginning of the podcast episode and the win that I read that my client posted, there are some big wild changes. And there are a lot of small subtle shifts too. And there was a lot of being willing to ask for things to be different, and then things were different. And then being able to notice and celebrate the differentness without needing it to be perfect because, of course, it’s not going to be perfect.
Life’s not going to be perfect. Your relationship with your significant other is not going to be perfect. But it can be a lot better than it is now probably. And it’s interesting, because noticing what’s working now seems like maybe it would keep you from changing things, but it actually doesn’t. It allows you to know which things you don’t want to change and which things you do want to change. It allows you to get a clearer read on what the situation actually is, what’s working and what needs to be different for you.
So that’s what I have for y’all today. And I would also really just like to invite you to consider signing up for the next round of Satisfied As Fuck. This current round is fucking incredible. They’re blowing my mind. I’m having so much fun coaching them. And obviously, as you can see, they’re creating amazing things in their lives and careers.
And also, the next round is going to be phenomenal, and I’d love to have you be part of it. And I would love for us to talk about together what it would be like for your life and career to be satisfying as fuck and then for us to make it happen.
All right, that’s what I have for y’all this week, and I’ll talk to you soon. Have a great week. Bye 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, happy Wednesday. I have something so fun to share with y’all. So, in my small group coaching program, Satisfied As Fuck, we have a Slack. And in Slack we have a channel called celebrations, wins and delights where my clients post things that are going well, things they want to notice and revel and savor. And I had a post in there recently that I just love and am fully obsessed with. And so I asked the client if I could share it with y’all. And the client said yes, so I’m going to read it to you.
One of the things the client mentions is thought work. So thought work is what we’re all doing and talking about all the time here. Like when we say thought work, what we mean is the part of coaching where we work on our thoughts and where we change our thoughts and learn new perspectives and stuff like that. So I just wanted to give you that context so that when you hear that part, you’ll understand what it means.
And just so y’all know, I am sharing this with permission from my client. So here’s what the client wrote. “I’m celebrating the evolution of my romantic life with my husband. I started thought work several years into my marriage. I was in a really bad place with my marriage at the time. With the addition of kids into our lives I was extremely resentful of my partner and how much more of the household and childcare labor I was doing and how little he seemed to think of my needs and my life.
Holidays like Mother’s Day and our anniversary threw me into a place of unspeakable anger towards him and despair, either because he did nothing to recognize it or make my life easier, Mother’s Day, or because I was so angry at him I didn’t see anything to celebrate, anniversary. And every time someone reminded me of it or sent us a card or a gift, I was so upset. Also, I avoided sex and I started to believe I just wasn’t sexual anymore because when I’m that constantly angry, my body just isn’t into it.
I was looking at apartment and divorce websites. I learned from coaching that I had a lot of social conditioning around being in this relationship that was making me absolutely miserable. From the conditioning that says I’m not supposed to “be bossy.” To the conditioning that says I’m supposed to take care of everyone, to the conditioning that sex is a reward I grant for good behavior, to the fact that I was a closeted bisexual person, and I was worried that I shouldn’t have picked a person of this gender at all because, “all men are bad.”
But coaching made this huge, monumental difference in this part of my life. I was able to start small and gradually offload more of the invisible labor to my husband, who to my surprise, adapted to it. I stopped doing the kids’ laundry. I stopped doing dishes. I stopped doing trash. I bill him for half of every fucking child item I buy now. Every time the kids and I go out to eat, every pair of kid shorts I buy, every cough drop, everything. We keep a spreadsheet for it, and I think it’s the most goddamn romantic thing that’s ever happened to me.
Every time I enter a cell with a dollar amount, my brain is like, victory. When I have an issue with how he’s handling or not handling something, I bring it up almost instantly. I don’t get nearly as upset as I used to as a result. I learned that enjoying pleasure, laughing at a joke, or giving someone a hug does not mean “I forgive” something. And thus it is unnecessary for me to give my husband the silent treatment or withhold sex to “punish” him.
I also learned that what I used to think was sexy 16 years ago when we met is no longer sexy to me. I think I had social conditioning to believe I wanted to feel dominated. But my brain lost this conditioning at some point, and I learned that I’m not “not sexual.” It’s just that I don’t want that kind of thing anymore. Instead, I learned that now I want to cuddle like Disney animals for an extended period before anything happens in an environment without children, calmly, sweetly, and that that is a requirement for me.
I also realized I am done being the one to have to deal with pregnancy prevention. Taking hormones isn’t good for my body. That’s up to him now. I also came out to my husband. Could it have all gone south? Sure. I think part of it was getting over the fear that asking for what I need or being completely myself would destroy everything by being willing to deal with that consequence should it arise.
Seeing him adapt to every single thing I asked of him almost immediately, albeit sometimes not well or gracefully, it renewed my faith in our relationship, and it made me actually feel loved. For the first time in 12 years I wanted to celebrate our anniversary this year. I feel I have so many tools to work with now when it comes to my relationship.”
Y’all, the fucking power in that. It makes me want to cry. It gives me chills. This is why I do this work because there are so many people out there living a life that they’re not that into, that doesn’t feel satisfying to them, that they think they have to keep living or they have to keep living it the way they’ve been living it. And they feel miserable, and they feel trapped, and things feel really fucking hard and terrible.
And I want to be the voice that cuts through that and says, hey, it can be better. You can have a more enjoyable experience. You can have a more satisfying life. You can have a more interesting life. You can have a more delicious life. And yeah, it will require making some changes, but it often doesn’t require making the changes we think we’re going to have to make.
Like this person wrote that they were looking at divorce websites, and now they’re excited to celebrate their anniversary with the same person, right? So I think so often people are afraid to look at the things in their life that aren’t working because they think they’re going to have to burn it all down.
And listen, sometimes we do choose to burn it all down. And that’s okay and I can support you in that also. But sometimes what we actually choose is to be more of ourselves in our actual lives, to be more of ourselves at work, to be more of ourselves in relationships, to ask for what we actually want and to give other people the opportunity to get to know us and to be with us the way we want to have someone be with us.
And a lot of times other people just adapt, and it works, and we get what we want. And then we’re sitting around going, what the fuck? Was this always available? It’s magical. And that’s not to minimize the amount of work that this client has done because this client has done a lot of work.
This client has worked their ass off to create something really spectacular for themselves. And it was hard, right? And it did require questioning and unlearning a lot of socialization. And that can be very uncomfortable. And also, look at what’s possible when you’re willing to do that. It’s life changing. It’s abso-fucking-lutely life changing. And that leads into what we’re going to talk about today.
What we’re talking about today is creating satisfaction. And as you know, I have my small group called Satisfied As Fuck, and satisfaction is a big thing that we talk about all the time on the podcast, no matter what the topic is. But I kind of wanted to revisit the idea of what even is satisfaction? And how do you get more of it in your life and your career and everything else, your relationships, all the things.
And there are some other episodes, like we have an episode about how satisfaction is a habit. So that’s also a great re-listen if this really spikes your interest and you want to have more information about it. Also, Satisfied As Fuck is a great place for you to be if you’re interested in creating more satisfaction in your life, in your career, in your relationships, because that is what we work on there.
And we coach on everything in Satisfied As Fuck. So we coach on any topic you want, but through the lens of creating more satisfaction for you. But let’s get into it. What even is satisfaction? And how do we create more of it?
So I think for a lot of people, when you say the word satisfaction everyone’s like, oh yeah, I know about that. But when you actually are like, what even is it? People are like, oh, you know, and you feel it or like it’s kind of amorphous, right? It’s kind of mysterious. And I think for a lot of us, we’re trying to create satisfaction and it’s like getting Easter eggs and then we look inside them and we’re like, are you it? Is satisfaction in here? Is it in here?
We’re collecting all these things in life, like we’re collecting promotions and we’re collecting relationships and we’re buying a house and we’re always like, is this where it will be? It’s, I feel, like a little bit mysterious and so I want to take away some of that mystery today in a good way.
And so what I want to teach you is that satisfaction is a feeling. And there’s a few reasons why it’s really important to know that. Reason number one is feelings happen in your body, right? You feel feelings in your body, right? That is where they exist. And if you’ve seen that really famous Brené Brown Ted talk, she talks about how if you numb one emotion, you numb all emotions, right?
So for a lot of people, they’re chasing satisfaction but they’re never feeling it. And sometimes that’s because they don’t have the ability to feel emotions in their body because maybe they’ve been numbing emotions because they aren’t such a big fan of some of the emotions, right? Anger, shame, guilt, sadness, anxiety, those tend to be the ones that people might want to numb.
So the number one thing, the very first step if you’re going to create more satisfaction in your life, your career, your relationships, etc., is you’ve got to be able to feel feelings. And I realize that for some of us, feeling feelings in our body, like noticing the sensations, the emotional sensations in our body, that can feel really scary.
And if that doesn’t feel like a safe thing for you to do, don’t fucking do it. But maybe hire a trauma informed therapist who you can talk to about that because this is a really important skill set. But just because it’s important doesn’t mean you have to do it on your own. And it is totally valid that some people do not feel comfortable feeling feelings in their body due to a variety of experiences they’ve had.
But if you do feel comfortable feeling feelings in your body, then practicing feeling feelings in your body is going to be a way that you can get access to more satisfaction. The more you are able to feel emotions when they happen in your body, the more you will be able to feel satisfaction when it happens in your body.
And so one easy way that you can build this skill is to just take like 30 seconds, 10 seconds, five seconds, 90 seconds, something small, something under three minutes, once a day and just practice noticing emotional sensations in your body. So emotional sensations are sensations that are a feeling or tied to a feeling.
So for instance, if I’m excited my heart is beating really fast and my hands maybe kind of feel kind of tingly, right? And that might be a set of sensations. Now I could have those sensations maybe also if I ran or something, my heart would be really fast. So being able to tell the difference, like is this a physical sensation that’s happening for a physical reason? Or is this an emotional physical sensation? So that’s kind of what you want to tune into.
Or another one is if I feel ashamed I get a little bit nauseous, and my face gets hot. So those are the physical sensations associated with that emotional experience. Or if I feel joy, I get kind of like fluttery in my chest. That’s how it feels for me. So just taking a little bit of time on a regular basis, but in really teeny tiny little increments to just be like, oh yeah, what am I feeling in my body?
And at various times, like when you’re in a good mood and when you’re not in a good mood. So kind of like checking in with the full spectrum of human emotion and how that shows up in your physical body, that’s going to give you fluency so that when you do feel satisfied, you can connect to it. You can actually experience it, versus kind of missing it because you don’t have any awareness of that physical sensation.
Okay, another thing that’s really important to know when we think about creating satisfaction is that the human brain has a negativity bias, right? I’ve heard Dr. John Gottman talk about in a relationship you need to notice, I think it’s five pieces of positive data about the relationship to balance one piece of negative data. I actually think he says it’s five pieces of positive or neutral, so that’s also really good for you to know. It doesn’t always have to be a positive thing, but you’ve got to balance out.
So because of that bias, your brain is going to give as much weight to one piece of critical data or negative data as it would to five pieces of positive or neutral data. And so in order to balance that negativity bias, you’ve got to start noticing what’s working, noticing what is satisfying, noticing what is delightful, noticing what is delicious in your life.
And I want to take a moment to just say this is not like being grateful. This is not a gratitude list. This is not what should I be grateful for in my life? This is not a way for you to should and judge and shame yourself about not being more grateful blah, blah, blah. What this actually is, is this is more of an exercise in noticing. What do you actually already like about your life that maybe is just not top of mind?
So I eat chocolate after breakfast every day. I really like that. I find it to be literally delicious and also just fun and I don’t think I was allowed to eat candy in the morning as a child probably. I don’t really remember, but that doesn’t seem like something that would have been celebrated and encouraged. So it also feels a little like, ooh, I’m breaking the rules. These are my rules as an adult, but it’s also not the rules most people live by because most people eat chocolate for dessert later in the day.
But now that I mostly don’t have caffeine, I like to eat my chocolate in the morning because chocolate has a lot of caffeine in it and I’m not trying to fuck my sleep up, y’all. So that’s something that I find really satisfying and I do it every day. But if I just do it out of habit and I don’t pay attention, I’m missing the opportunity to scoop up and savor and experience the satisfaction that already exists in my life.
So for you, you can kind of scan your life like a treasure hunt. Sometimes I use the term pleasure hunt, but you can also call it satisfaction hunt. Or in the last round of SAF one of the clients called it detective satisfaction or something like that. So it’s like a detective going through their life trying to I Spy where the satisfaction existed. I like that because I think it’s silly and fun.
But whatever way you want to do it is available to you to notice what you already like, what’s already satisfying. And then once you notice it, you can check it into your body and be like, oh, can I feel the satisfaction in my body? What does it feel like? What’s it like to be with that emotion? What’s it like to savor this experience and actually spend time in it?
So many of us are always looking for the next satisfying thing. And it’s not your fault if you do this. This is kind of part of how the human brain is wired and we have hedonic adaptation, which means we get really used to the things that are good in our life and then we look for things that are even more good, or we look for the next thing. The brain is really good at moving the goalpost.
And so what we’re doing here is we’re kind of purposefully balancing that by slowing our brains down and being like, hey, you don’t need to rush to the next satisfying thing. What you need to learn to do right in this moment is to be with this satisfying thing because it’s your capacity to be with any single satisfying thing that’s going to create your satisfaction. If you rush to the next thing, by the time you get to it you’re going to rush somewhere else and then you’re not going to feel very satisfied, right?
So what we’re learning to do is notice and enjoy the satisfaction that already exists. But, of course, we’re not going to stop there because we’re also going to make big and wild changes, or small and subtle changes, or whatever fucking kind of changes you want to make in your life. And when we notice and revel and enjoy what is working, that also gives us what I’m going to call emotional fuel that we can use to make changes.
A lot of people think if they feel satisfied, they’ll stop doing anything. I distinctly remember being a child and thinking I want to have a good life, but I don’t want to be content because if I’m content then I won’t do anything. And I’m like, first of all, where the fuck did I get that idea? I mean, obviously, I got it from culture because that’s a pretty common teaching, right? But I’m also like, that’s silly. What if I could be content and still do stuff?
If I have a delicious meal, I’m still going to get hungry and have another delicious meal later. It’s such a weird thing that we’re like, oh, I don’t want to get too happy because then I won’t do anything. But the only reason I’m doing things is to be happy. It’s like it doesn’t check out, y’all. Or at least it’s not how I want to do things. If I notice and revel and enjoy what is working and I get so satisfied I want to stop working on things, maybe I didn’t want to work on those things anyways.
For me, though, what I’ve discovered is when I notice and revel in the satisfaction that exists, it actually becomes clear what I really do want to work on and what I just wanted to work on to try to feel better or escape from my negative thoughts, or like blah, blah, whatever like that. The more I cultivate a basic experience of satisfaction, it just clarifies what else I want to keep working on because I’m not trying to hustle for my satisfaction any longer if that makes sense.
And once I figure out what I actually do want to work on, again, I have that positive emotional fuel. I have that satisfaction and delight fuel that I can use to get things done. And if you’re used to fueling yourself with anxiety or shame or guilt, fueling yourself with satisfaction may feel a little bit different because it’s kind of a much more mellow fuel.
Shame and anxiety can be very kind of volatile fuel. So I do think it can really get people to do a lot, but in a very unpleasant way with usually a lot of negative side effects. And then even when you get to your goal, you feel like shit, because someone’s been basically judging and criticizing you the whole way there. And so that’s usually not very pleasant.
Even if you get the promotion or get the relationship or get the new house, you’ve been yelled at and belittled the whole way there and so it doesn’t feel good. Whereas that satisfaction fuel, again, it’s more mellow. It’s more like, okay, we’re amazing and we can also do this thing and let’s just go. I also think it helps us keep showing up if something doesn’t work on the first try. And I think that’s really wonderful because a lot of things don’t work on the first try.
I talk about this all the time, but the first time I tried to make $100,000 in my business. I didn’t do it. And I didn’t do it over and over and over again. And let me tell y’all right now, I was not feeling very satisfied about that at the time. And I was getting coaching about enjoying what was working in my business and I was really, really struggling with it. So none of this is about doing it perfectly. You can still get really far.
But it was a very emotionally painful experience the way that I did it. And I think it’s much more enjoyable to cultivate the satisfaction and let that fuel you as you keep going. And I think it’s much more of an emotionally mellow way to do it too because when you’re kind of in that anxiety shame, it’s like the highs are really high, but the lows are really low. And it’s like this wild emotional roller coaster and you’re trying to get to the goal so you can feel amazing. But then when you don’t get to the goal, you feel like shit.
And I’m not perfect, right? But when I can get to a place of being satisfied and fueling myself with satisfaction, it’s like a very mellow roller coaster where I’m like, oh, it didn’t work. And I’m like, that’s a bummer and I kind of feel shitty. But I’m also like, all right, but a lot is working, and I’ve got this and I’m loving myself through it. And then we just keep going.
And then when I do hit the goals and they’re really big and successful, it feels good, but it doesn’t feel as insanely good. But I actually think that’s useful because it doesn’t throw me off of my kind of homeostasis. It’s like, oh yeah, that’s really amazing and I’m happy that’s happening. It’s like the things that are happening are no longer so extreme. And I think that can be really valuable.
I think that’s why it’s also satisfaction. It’s not like ecstasy, right? The human body, the human brain, they want to be in homeostasis. They want to be in like this kind of neutral thing, which sounds bad. But I think the way I’ve heard this phrased is or you can also just call it peace, right? We want to be at peace. And so it is fun and interesting to have highs and lows, and those are part of the human experience.
But also, again, the human body and brain wants to be in homeostasis. So when you go up and have that super big ecstasy, your brain and body are going to try to pull you back to an even keel. And that might feel really violent when you’re having those super high highs and those super low lows. Verses when you’re sort of kind of more at the peaceful baseline, then you have these like ebbs and flows. It’s like bobbing in the water at the ocean. It’s not violent, it’s gentle and kind of interesting but it’s not going to wreck your day if you flow back and forth between those states.
So that’s basically what it is to create satisfaction. Creating satisfaction, again, comes down to being able to feel feelings in your body, noticing and savoring what is already satisfying. And then using that positive emotion as fuel to create whatever changes you want to make in your life, whether they’re big wild changes, or whether they’re smaller and more subtle shifts.
If you remember back to the beginning of the podcast episode and the win that I read that my client posted, there are some big wild changes. And there are a lot of small subtle shifts too. And there was a lot of being willing to ask for things to be different, and then things were different. And then being able to notice and celebrate the differentness without needing it to be perfect because, of course, it’s not going to be perfect.
Life’s not going to be perfect. Your relationship with your significant other is not going to be perfect. But it can be a lot better than it is now probably. And it’s interesting, because noticing what’s working now seems like maybe it would keep you from changing things, but it actually doesn’t. It allows you to know which things you don’t want to change and which things you do want to change. It allows you to get a clearer read on what the situation actually is, what’s working and what needs to be different for you.
So that’s what I have for y’all today. And I would also really just like to invite you to consider signing up for the next round of Satisfied As Fuck. This current round is fucking incredible. They’re blowing my mind. I’m having so much fun coaching them. And obviously, as you can see, they’re creating amazing things in their lives and careers.
And also, the next round is going to be phenomenal, and I’d love to have you be part of it. And I would love for us to talk about together what it would be like for your life and career to be satisfying as fuck and then for us to make it happen.
All right, that’s what I have for y’all this week, and I’ll talk to you soon. Have a great week. Bye 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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