84. Dealbreakers
As you may know, I moved from Seattle to Sacramento last year, and now we’re heading into the time of year when the weather is significantly warmer down here.
I knew this would be the case before moving here, and I asked myself, “will this be a dealbreaker?”
Honestly, I wasn’t sure. I’d never lived somewhere that regularly hits triple digits.
But I decided it wasn’t a dealbreaker for at least trying living here.
(Snow, on the other hand, was a dealbreaker.)
This sort of thing comes up in careers all the time.
We have preferences for how we want our work lives to be. We have hopes and dreams. And we also have dealbreakers: things we simply cannot abide.
I talk all the time about how you can love your job, even if you’re going to leave it. We also talk about how you don’t have to choose to like your job if you don’t want to.
So, where do dealbreakers fit in this equation?
My amazing coach, Maggie Reyes, once said, “The purpose of knowing how to separate facts and stories and choose thoughts on purpose is not to accept behavior you don’t actually want to accept. The purpose is to allow you to respond from a powerful, loving, clear mindset from which you can make requests, explore options, look for common ground, decide what matters and what doesn’t, and find ways to move forward that work for you.”
A dealbreaker is something that you have decided you don’t want to accept.
You know that you could accept it. You know that someone else may even prefer it. But for you, it’s a hard no.
What’s a dealbreaker and what isn’t is something only you can decide for yourself.
But once you know what yours are, what do you do with that information?
Tune in this week to find out.
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WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
What it really means to look at something from a loving place.
Why you don’t have to change your mind about something if you decide you don’t want to.
How ending something can be a loving outcome for everyone involved.
Why creating boundaries and seeing things as dealbreakers from your default brain doesn’t give you the whole picture.
How to decide what is really a dealbreaker for you, and what you want to stick around and change.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about dealbreakers.
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.
Hey, y'all, Happy Wednesday. It is really hot in Sacramento right now. And even though I knew that that would be part of what would happen in Sacramento, it's not my favorite. I really like how it's sunny most of the time. I really like how even throughout the winter sometimes we would have like really sunny, beautiful, sometimes even warm days.
And now we're heading into the part of the year where sometimes it can be triple digits. Which is a little bit much for me personally, especially because we live in a 120 year old house. And while our main floor has air conditioning, central air, our upstairs actually does not. And the upstairs is where my office is and Alex's office and our bedroom.
So having lived in Seattle for about 10 years and Seattle, a lot of places there don't have air conditioning because it didn't used to be as hot. So I had purchased there like one of those little portable air conditioners. So I brought that with me when we moved. And so luckily, that is something we can use in the bedroom to like make it cool down and I can like move it to my office during the day.
Last summer, we did have air conditioners because when we bought the house it came with like window units. But when Alex, she did some work on the house and she took them out and she doesn't want to put them back in because, honestly, they're kind of old and the filters in them are probably nasty. She wants to get new air conditioners, but she hasn't gotten them yet.
So we're kind of in this like limbo where it's like we do have the one portable air conditioner and I can move it back and forth. But I was kind of like, darling, it's going to be like 100 this week and we need to get this figured out. And let's be clear, when I say we need to get this figured out, that means Alex is going to figure it out because Alex figures out the house stuff that's like part of the arrangement in our relationship.
And it's going to take some time, of course. But it really matters that it does get figured out because it's May now, when this podcast comes out I think it'll still be May. It's May when I'm recording it and obviously June, July, and August are going to be hotter, probably, than May. Usually the hotter months here are July and August. So we're like getting a bit of an early heat wave right now.
And while there are workarounds and we're using them, and they're great and they're helpful in the short run, like we talked about recently, short term versus long term thinking and short term versus long term solutions. In the short term we have some solutions in place. I can move the air conditioner back and forth, like from the day to the night. That doesn't really help Alex, she's just in a very hot office. So we definitely want better solutions, for now it's okay though.
But in the long term, having, like, no air conditioners at all won't work for me, right? Like, that's something I don't want to coach myself to love. That's kind of a dealbreaker, right? It's like, we got to get that sorted out. And even if it costs a lot of money, or it takes some time, or it's going to have effort involved, that's something that I really want to have happen for my sanity and comfort in this home. And living in a city where it gets so spicy hot, right?
And that brings me to what I want to talk about today, which is dealbreakers, right? I obviously have a podcast called like, Love Your Job Before You Leave It, and we talk a lot about how to have a better experience of your current job, even if you want to leave it. And we talk a lot about the idea that learning to love your job can be useful, even if you're going to leave it because your brain goes with you and your mindset goes with you, and your ability to be resilient, all that goes with you.
We also talk a lot about agency and sovereignty and like you get to leave whenever you want, right? So it's interesting, because those are kind of paradoxical to one another. On the one hand I do think it's really useful to look at our thoughts and look at our mindset and see what's in there that maybe we don't want to keep, right?
Like if we have some internalized patriarchy, or some internalized capitalism, internalized ableism, internalized white supremacy, things like that, we may not want to keep those. Those may be leading, like informing us having a negative experience in our work. We may not want to keep those. But we may also not want to keep the work once we've done that piece.
So in all of that, I think it's an interesting question to think about, like where do dealbreakers come into all of that? Like okay, I can love my job, I can change my thoughts about it. Maybe there's some internalized socialization I want to get rid of or thought errors I'm having that are creating negative experiences for me. But also I get to leave whenever I want because I get to do whatever I want for whatever reason I want because agency and authority. Where do dealbreakers come in?
So I think in order to get into that, I want to first read you a quote from one of my coaches. And this is my coach Maggie Reyes, she's a marriage coach, she's phenomenal. If you are wanting to do coaching work around your marriage or main relationship, I mean, Alex and I aren't actually married, but we act like married, that's like the level of commitment that we have here. So I work with Maggie on that relationship.
And she posted something recently that I was just like, this is fucking amazing, and everyone needs to hear it. And I wanted to read it to y'all. So I messaged her and got her permission because getting permission is important. And if it's someone we can't actually get permission from, like we can just attribute. That can also be a great way to do it because, you know, if I like message Elizabeth Gilbert or something, she might not message me back. But Maggie did. And here's what she said.
Maggie said, “The purpose of knowing how to separate facts from stories and choose thoughts on purpose is not to accept behavior you don't actually want to accept. The purpose is to allow you to respond from a powerful, loving, clear mindset from which you can make requests, explore options, look for common ground, decide what matters and what doesn't, and find ways to move forward that work for you. Being aware of our thoughts is self-empowering. Using that awareness to deny our ability to have preferences and express them is self-deception.”
Okay, so that's the end of the quote from Maggie, I realized I can't show you the quotation marks. It's so jam packed with great ideas, right? So let's start at the beginning, being able to separate facts from stories, that's what we talk about all the time here. Like what are the facts of the situation? What is the narrative you're telling about those facts?
Is the narrative you're telling about those facts making it easier to get what you want? Or is it making it harder to get what you want? Is it empowering you to create what you want to have in your life and career? Or is it putting you into the pit of despair? Which I talk about often, where then we just are like sad and not doing anything.
And listen, nothing wrong with being sad, feeling our feelings is important. But the pit of despair is a little bit different because people tend to get stuck there versus processing emotion, which is when we like move through the emotion.
Okay, so just because you can separate the difference between a fact and a thought doesn't mean you necessarily have to even change your thoughts. And it doesn't mean you have to accept and love things you don't love. Like recently, I think it was maybe last week, we talked about how I got a haircut, and I don't love it, and I'm not going to fucking coach myself to love it because I don't fucking want to.
And so this, I think, is again an example that what Maggie is talking about could relate to. I don't want to self-deceive, I want to love myself with the haircut, I want to figure out what's the most empowering thing I can do from there.
Okay, so for y'all, for dealbreakers, to me it's like a dealbreaker is just something you have chosen you don't want to accept. But I do think it's really helpful to think about dealbreakers from already having, like what Maggie said was that loving, clear, empowered mindset, right?
So so often what I see is people in workplaces are having a fucking terrible experience and ultimately do want to leave, but everything is offensive and upsetting to them. And they're not yet able to look at it from a powerful, clear, loving place. And it doesn't even necessarily have to be loving for the other people there, I think it can also just be loving for you.
And Maggie's a marriage coach, so in her work I do think it actually is more about creating connection and being loving towards the other person. But she even had a podcast recently where one of her clients went through the program and what happened ultimately was that that client and their partner ended their relationship. Ending things can be a beautiful outcome too, that can be loving.
So the way I kind of want to pitch it is like if you felt completely empowered, if you felt like your happiness was an inside job that you could create in any workplace, if you felt clear about what you wanted and what you didn't want. And these to me are feelings, which will be created by your thoughts. But let's just skip ahead to the idea that they already exist in you. From that space what do you want to create? What do you want to be with? What do you want to not be with, right?
So I think so many of us are trying to create dealbreakers and boundaries from this place of like, oh, when someone does this I feel disrespected. Or when someone does this I just get so angry and defensive. There's nothing wrong with that but I think it can allow us to be in kind of a murky headspace because we're looking to what the other person is doing or what the organization is doing to decide if we get to be happy. To decide if we get to feel okay about ourselves, and to decide if we're successful, to decide if we're respected, to decide if we're intelligent.
And when we're in that headspace we can be very reactive and there can be a lot of things that we're just like, that's a no, that's a no, that's a no. Now you're allowed to have nos, you're allowed to have as many nos as you want, again, for whatever reason you want.
But one thing I've found with coaching is that the more that I separate the thoughts from the facts, the more that I think about how I want to relate to the facts on purpose versus the default that my current brain wants to react to them from, the more many, many, many things that I used to be upset about are actually fine and feel pretty neutral to me. And sometimes they even feel good, right?
So as an example, I may have talked about this before, but as an example, early in my business when people would message and want to cancel a coaching call inside the cancellation window, right? So like a doctor's office you need like 72 hours to cancel your appointment. I think at a doctor's office it's usually 24, but I've made mind 72 because I'm fancy, okay? And sometimes people want to cancel within that.
And when I was really new in my business I would get this sensation of like they don't respect my time. That's actually a thought. And then the sensation I would get, like the feeling in my body would be like, I don't know, maybe resentment, let's say.
And I realized pretty quickly that I was like, oh, I don't want to think that when they do that. I don't want to create that emotional experience for myself because it feels yucky and I don't like how it has me showing up as a person and as a coach. And it's not what I want to model and embody and demonstrate for my clients, because people are going to ask them for exceptions to, right?
So this is a great thing about being a coach, is it really invites me so much deeper into my own work. And I've talked about that before because everything becomes potentially an example. I think that can be a really beautiful thing.
When I say it out loud, I'm like that maybe sounds like pressure. I don't think it feels like pressure on the inside. I think it feels like everything is now useful in a way that's really kind of wonderful and invites me to kind of like live at my growth edge in a way that I relish in.
Okay, so I decided very early on I don't want to think those thoughts when people ask to cancel late. And I was like, what do I want to think? And I had this moment where I was like, you know what? Something that I want to teach my clients is to ask for exceptions.
I ask for exceptions all the time. I try to do it in a really respectful way because I like that and that feels good for me. But I ask for exceptions all the time. Anytime someone's like, “Oh, you can't do that.” I'm like, “Is it possible you could make an exception?”
Now as a little caveat, there are certain times where I would not recommend asking for an exception. Like consent conversations, no means no. But in a lot of things when it's a business policy or something like that, or you want to, I don't know, get your airline ticket refunded or get it exchanged when it's not supposed to be, that's the kind of thing where I'm going to be asking for an exception. And you get to decide for you what feels yummy and juicy and delicious and what feels like a no to you.
Okay, so then I decided that it was really cool if my clients ask me for an exception. It meant that the coaching was working, it meant that they were being courageous and asking for what they wanted, and I could really relish and delight in that. And I could still say no if I wanted to, or I could make an exception and say yes. And so that created a totally different experience for me, right?
So as an example, someone could have been like, “Oh, well, it's a dealbreaker if my clients try to cancel at the last minute. I only want to work with clients who show up when they say they want to show up.” You could have that dealbreaker if you wanted to. But for me, what I found was once I separated the thoughts from the facts and once I coached myself on that, that wasn't a dealbreaker for me. It was something I could celebrate, and it was something I could manage and handle.
And I realized I could also coach myself around my discomfort of saying no, because I'm a recovering people pleaser too. So part of it was I didn't want them to ask because then I was “being put in the position” to have to say no, and I didn't want to do that because that felt uncomfortable for me.
Versus after coaching myself, I was like, “Oh yeah, I want to fucking do that because I want to learn how to do that. And I want to learn how to say no with love. And I want to learn how to celebrate them and still say no with love.” And so it was actually a great piece of work for me. Not something that would ever need to be a dealbreaker.
That being said, there are other things that can be dealbreakers, right? And in your career, there may be things like in your current job that are dealbreakers, right? But I think getting clear on the thoughts versus the facts is going to, again, help you illuminate what actually are true deal breakers and what are things that your brain just absolutely loses its shit about, like my brain used to about those late cancels, but that ultimately, maybe you don't want to keep your thoughts about.
So in your career, get a piece of paper and write down like maybe if you have a job where you think there are dealbreakers, I would get a piece of paper and write down what those are. And then for each one you can go through and be like, why does this bother me?
Does this bother me because of the story I'm telling about what this means? What this means about me, what this means about the people I work with, blah, blah, blah, what this means about the world, what this means about the industry. Or even if I could see this thing as neutral and separate from its story is this just something I'm like not here for?
So another example is like my body doesn't tolerate certain foods very well. I'm not going to coach myself to eat those because the experience of eating them creates problems in my body. Now, I could coach myself to do it, but why would I, right? Y'all, like why would I?
So I think this is something interesting to think about for your jobs, is like what is not working for you because the story and what is just not working for you? And again, you're just also allowed to have preferences and have preferences about what behavior feels good to you, what kind of hours feel good to you, what kind of work feels good to you. Any of that, like you're allowed to have those preferences.
Here's the thing though, a lot of us are not going to quit our jobs right away, even if we discover that there are dealbreakers in our current jobs. Some of us might. And again, do whatever you want for whatever reason you want, you're an adult. But a lot of us, even if we identify like, oh shit, my current job, actually even when I weed out the stories, my current job does have deal breakers, you're probably not going to leave immediately.
Maybe you will, again. But if you don't, all the coaching stuff I'm teaching can also be useful because even when we uncover dealbreakers, if we're not going to choose to leave that situation immediately, then choosing to use coaching tools to have a better experience of it while we're there can also be a powerful choice.
And this brings me to something else I talk about a lot on the podcast, which is like the idea of incrementality, right? We live in a culture that has a lot of all or nothing thinking. Like either I'm going to stay and love my job or I'm going to quit today, right? Those choices are available, but so often in life we build things bit by bit.
So it's like, can we use the coaching tools to have a little bit better of our work experience today and get a little bit of our energy back so we can apply that energy we're getting back to our job search, or like figuring out what we're going to do next?
Because for a lot of people, I think even when they're in a job they want to quit or there's a job with a lot of dealbreakers, when they're spending a lot of like time and emotional energy resisting that job and hating that job, that can be very exhausting. And that can make it very difficult to then do the effort of getting another job.
And let's just add one more final piece here, which is different people are going to have different dealbreakers, and that's okay. I think so often when something doesn't feel good to us, we want to sort of take a poll with our friends and family about like, does this seem okay to you? Does this seem okay to you? Okay, these six people said it is okay, so maybe it is okay and I'm just overreacting. Or like, oh, no, they all said it's not okay, but I think it's fine.
Different people have different dealbreakers, different people have different things that are yummy to them and are not yummy to them. Once we peel back our thoughts and look at those and examine those and see what the stories are, then we can actually see what are our dealbreakers versus what would someone else's be?
And I think you probably know a lot more of these answers than you sometimes think you do. Because I think a lot of us, especially if we've been socialized as women or other marginalized identities, we're like second guessing ourselves all the time.
We're like, oh, I want this, but I can't have that, so I'll have to do this. And then I'm going to do that. And it's not okay to do this, versus just being like, oh, I know what I want. I don't have what I want. How do I get what I want? How do I get to what I want?
And there's going to be various pieces of that. Some of the pieces are going to be like how do I let go of these old stories that are creating negative experiences for me I don't want? And some of its going to be like how do I make the actual changes I want to make in my life so that I can have things that meet my preferences?
And sometimes in life we're not going to get the thing that meets all of our preferences. I think it's great when we can, and I do think we can all have really spectacular lives. And sometimes it's also about figuring out which of my preferences matter the most to me and going after those ones. Because we have the capacity to feel any feeling in any situation.
That doesn't mean we have to feel any feeling in any situation, but I think that's really important to know because it gives us so much more power to then make those choices, to choose what is a dealbreaker to us and to choose what is a preference to us knowing that no external circumstance is ever going to create all our feelings. That's our job, but we still get to choose which circumstances we want to do that in.
All right, y'all, I want to hear all your thoughts on this. And if you have questions on it, come post to me on Instagram at Kori Linn. And if you're in a job that is not working for you, that has dealbreakers but you're struggling to get out of it, you're struggling to have the mental energy and bandwidth to do your job search, come have a consult with me and let's talk all about it. Just the consult alone can change the trajectory of your career. And if it seems like a good fit, we can talk about how to work together.
All right, y'all, that's what I have for you. Have a great week and I will talk to you next time. 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.
Hey, y'all, Happy Wednesday. It is really hot in Sacramento right now. And even though I knew that that would be part of what would happen in Sacramento, it's not my favorite. I really like how it's sunny most of the time. I really like how even throughout the winter sometimes we would have like really sunny, beautiful, sometimes even warm days.
And now we're heading into the part of the year where sometimes it can be triple digits. Which is a little bit much for me personally, especially because we live in a 120 year old house. And while our main floor has air conditioning, central air, our upstairs actually does not. And the upstairs is where my office is and Alex's office and our bedroom.
So having lived in Seattle for about 10 years and Seattle, a lot of places there don't have air conditioning because it didn't used to be as hot. So I had purchased there like one of those little portable air conditioners. So I brought that with me when we moved. And so luckily, that is something we can use in the bedroom to like make it cool down and I can like move it to my office during the day.
Last summer, we did have air conditioners because when we bought the house it came with like window units. But when Alex, she did some work on the house and she took them out and she doesn't want to put them back in because, honestly, they're kind of old and the filters in them are probably nasty. She wants to get new air conditioners, but she hasn't gotten them yet.
So we're kind of in this like limbo where it's like we do have the one portable air conditioner and I can move it back and forth. But I was kind of like, darling, it's going to be like 100 this week and we need to get this figured out. And let's be clear, when I say we need to get this figured out, that means Alex is going to figure it out because Alex figures out the house stuff that's like part of the arrangement in our relationship.
And it's going to take some time, of course. But it really matters that it does get figured out because it's May now, when this podcast comes out I think it'll still be May. It's May when I'm recording it and obviously June, July, and August are going to be hotter, probably, than May. Usually the hotter months here are July and August. So we're like getting a bit of an early heat wave right now.
And while there are workarounds and we're using them, and they're great and they're helpful in the short run, like we talked about recently, short term versus long term thinking and short term versus long term solutions. In the short term we have some solutions in place. I can move the air conditioner back and forth, like from the day to the night. That doesn't really help Alex, she's just in a very hot office. So we definitely want better solutions, for now it's okay though.
But in the long term, having, like, no air conditioners at all won't work for me, right? Like, that's something I don't want to coach myself to love. That's kind of a dealbreaker, right? It's like, we got to get that sorted out. And even if it costs a lot of money, or it takes some time, or it's going to have effort involved, that's something that I really want to have happen for my sanity and comfort in this home. And living in a city where it gets so spicy hot, right?
And that brings me to what I want to talk about today, which is dealbreakers, right? I obviously have a podcast called like, Love Your Job Before You Leave It, and we talk a lot about how to have a better experience of your current job, even if you want to leave it. And we talk a lot about the idea that learning to love your job can be useful, even if you're going to leave it because your brain goes with you and your mindset goes with you, and your ability to be resilient, all that goes with you.
We also talk a lot about agency and sovereignty and like you get to leave whenever you want, right? So it's interesting, because those are kind of paradoxical to one another. On the one hand I do think it's really useful to look at our thoughts and look at our mindset and see what's in there that maybe we don't want to keep, right?
Like if we have some internalized patriarchy, or some internalized capitalism, internalized ableism, internalized white supremacy, things like that, we may not want to keep those. Those may be leading, like informing us having a negative experience in our work. We may not want to keep those. But we may also not want to keep the work once we've done that piece.
So in all of that, I think it's an interesting question to think about, like where do dealbreakers come into all of that? Like okay, I can love my job, I can change my thoughts about it. Maybe there's some internalized socialization I want to get rid of or thought errors I'm having that are creating negative experiences for me. But also I get to leave whenever I want because I get to do whatever I want for whatever reason I want because agency and authority. Where do dealbreakers come in?
So I think in order to get into that, I want to first read you a quote from one of my coaches. And this is my coach Maggie Reyes, she's a marriage coach, she's phenomenal. If you are wanting to do coaching work around your marriage or main relationship, I mean, Alex and I aren't actually married, but we act like married, that's like the level of commitment that we have here. So I work with Maggie on that relationship.
And she posted something recently that I was just like, this is fucking amazing, and everyone needs to hear it. And I wanted to read it to y'all. So I messaged her and got her permission because getting permission is important. And if it's someone we can't actually get permission from, like we can just attribute. That can also be a great way to do it because, you know, if I like message Elizabeth Gilbert or something, she might not message me back. But Maggie did. And here's what she said.
Maggie said, “The purpose of knowing how to separate facts from stories and choose thoughts on purpose is not to accept behavior you don't actually want to accept. The purpose is to allow you to respond from a powerful, loving, clear mindset from which you can make requests, explore options, look for common ground, decide what matters and what doesn't, and find ways to move forward that work for you. Being aware of our thoughts is self-empowering. Using that awareness to deny our ability to have preferences and express them is self-deception.”
Okay, so that's the end of the quote from Maggie, I realized I can't show you the quotation marks. It's so jam packed with great ideas, right? So let's start at the beginning, being able to separate facts from stories, that's what we talk about all the time here. Like what are the facts of the situation? What is the narrative you're telling about those facts?
Is the narrative you're telling about those facts making it easier to get what you want? Or is it making it harder to get what you want? Is it empowering you to create what you want to have in your life and career? Or is it putting you into the pit of despair? Which I talk about often, where then we just are like sad and not doing anything.
And listen, nothing wrong with being sad, feeling our feelings is important. But the pit of despair is a little bit different because people tend to get stuck there versus processing emotion, which is when we like move through the emotion.
Okay, so just because you can separate the difference between a fact and a thought doesn't mean you necessarily have to even change your thoughts. And it doesn't mean you have to accept and love things you don't love. Like recently, I think it was maybe last week, we talked about how I got a haircut, and I don't love it, and I'm not going to fucking coach myself to love it because I don't fucking want to.
And so this, I think, is again an example that what Maggie is talking about could relate to. I don't want to self-deceive, I want to love myself with the haircut, I want to figure out what's the most empowering thing I can do from there.
Okay, so for y'all, for dealbreakers, to me it's like a dealbreaker is just something you have chosen you don't want to accept. But I do think it's really helpful to think about dealbreakers from already having, like what Maggie said was that loving, clear, empowered mindset, right?
So so often what I see is people in workplaces are having a fucking terrible experience and ultimately do want to leave, but everything is offensive and upsetting to them. And they're not yet able to look at it from a powerful, clear, loving place. And it doesn't even necessarily have to be loving for the other people there, I think it can also just be loving for you.
And Maggie's a marriage coach, so in her work I do think it actually is more about creating connection and being loving towards the other person. But she even had a podcast recently where one of her clients went through the program and what happened ultimately was that that client and their partner ended their relationship. Ending things can be a beautiful outcome too, that can be loving.
So the way I kind of want to pitch it is like if you felt completely empowered, if you felt like your happiness was an inside job that you could create in any workplace, if you felt clear about what you wanted and what you didn't want. And these to me are feelings, which will be created by your thoughts. But let's just skip ahead to the idea that they already exist in you. From that space what do you want to create? What do you want to be with? What do you want to not be with, right?
So I think so many of us are trying to create dealbreakers and boundaries from this place of like, oh, when someone does this I feel disrespected. Or when someone does this I just get so angry and defensive. There's nothing wrong with that but I think it can allow us to be in kind of a murky headspace because we're looking to what the other person is doing or what the organization is doing to decide if we get to be happy. To decide if we get to feel okay about ourselves, and to decide if we're successful, to decide if we're respected, to decide if we're intelligent.
And when we're in that headspace we can be very reactive and there can be a lot of things that we're just like, that's a no, that's a no, that's a no. Now you're allowed to have nos, you're allowed to have as many nos as you want, again, for whatever reason you want.
But one thing I've found with coaching is that the more that I separate the thoughts from the facts, the more that I think about how I want to relate to the facts on purpose versus the default that my current brain wants to react to them from, the more many, many, many things that I used to be upset about are actually fine and feel pretty neutral to me. And sometimes they even feel good, right?
So as an example, I may have talked about this before, but as an example, early in my business when people would message and want to cancel a coaching call inside the cancellation window, right? So like a doctor's office you need like 72 hours to cancel your appointment. I think at a doctor's office it's usually 24, but I've made mind 72 because I'm fancy, okay? And sometimes people want to cancel within that.
And when I was really new in my business I would get this sensation of like they don't respect my time. That's actually a thought. And then the sensation I would get, like the feeling in my body would be like, I don't know, maybe resentment, let's say.
And I realized pretty quickly that I was like, oh, I don't want to think that when they do that. I don't want to create that emotional experience for myself because it feels yucky and I don't like how it has me showing up as a person and as a coach. And it's not what I want to model and embody and demonstrate for my clients, because people are going to ask them for exceptions to, right?
So this is a great thing about being a coach, is it really invites me so much deeper into my own work. And I've talked about that before because everything becomes potentially an example. I think that can be a really beautiful thing.
When I say it out loud, I'm like that maybe sounds like pressure. I don't think it feels like pressure on the inside. I think it feels like everything is now useful in a way that's really kind of wonderful and invites me to kind of like live at my growth edge in a way that I relish in.
Okay, so I decided very early on I don't want to think those thoughts when people ask to cancel late. And I was like, what do I want to think? And I had this moment where I was like, you know what? Something that I want to teach my clients is to ask for exceptions.
I ask for exceptions all the time. I try to do it in a really respectful way because I like that and that feels good for me. But I ask for exceptions all the time. Anytime someone's like, “Oh, you can't do that.” I'm like, “Is it possible you could make an exception?”
Now as a little caveat, there are certain times where I would not recommend asking for an exception. Like consent conversations, no means no. But in a lot of things when it's a business policy or something like that, or you want to, I don't know, get your airline ticket refunded or get it exchanged when it's not supposed to be, that's the kind of thing where I'm going to be asking for an exception. And you get to decide for you what feels yummy and juicy and delicious and what feels like a no to you.
Okay, so then I decided that it was really cool if my clients ask me for an exception. It meant that the coaching was working, it meant that they were being courageous and asking for what they wanted, and I could really relish and delight in that. And I could still say no if I wanted to, or I could make an exception and say yes. And so that created a totally different experience for me, right?
So as an example, someone could have been like, “Oh, well, it's a dealbreaker if my clients try to cancel at the last minute. I only want to work with clients who show up when they say they want to show up.” You could have that dealbreaker if you wanted to. But for me, what I found was once I separated the thoughts from the facts and once I coached myself on that, that wasn't a dealbreaker for me. It was something I could celebrate, and it was something I could manage and handle.
And I realized I could also coach myself around my discomfort of saying no, because I'm a recovering people pleaser too. So part of it was I didn't want them to ask because then I was “being put in the position” to have to say no, and I didn't want to do that because that felt uncomfortable for me.
Versus after coaching myself, I was like, “Oh yeah, I want to fucking do that because I want to learn how to do that. And I want to learn how to say no with love. And I want to learn how to celebrate them and still say no with love.” And so it was actually a great piece of work for me. Not something that would ever need to be a dealbreaker.
That being said, there are other things that can be dealbreakers, right? And in your career, there may be things like in your current job that are dealbreakers, right? But I think getting clear on the thoughts versus the facts is going to, again, help you illuminate what actually are true deal breakers and what are things that your brain just absolutely loses its shit about, like my brain used to about those late cancels, but that ultimately, maybe you don't want to keep your thoughts about.
So in your career, get a piece of paper and write down like maybe if you have a job where you think there are dealbreakers, I would get a piece of paper and write down what those are. And then for each one you can go through and be like, why does this bother me?
Does this bother me because of the story I'm telling about what this means? What this means about me, what this means about the people I work with, blah, blah, blah, what this means about the world, what this means about the industry. Or even if I could see this thing as neutral and separate from its story is this just something I'm like not here for?
So another example is like my body doesn't tolerate certain foods very well. I'm not going to coach myself to eat those because the experience of eating them creates problems in my body. Now, I could coach myself to do it, but why would I, right? Y'all, like why would I?
So I think this is something interesting to think about for your jobs, is like what is not working for you because the story and what is just not working for you? And again, you're just also allowed to have preferences and have preferences about what behavior feels good to you, what kind of hours feel good to you, what kind of work feels good to you. Any of that, like you're allowed to have those preferences.
Here's the thing though, a lot of us are not going to quit our jobs right away, even if we discover that there are dealbreakers in our current jobs. Some of us might. And again, do whatever you want for whatever reason you want, you're an adult. But a lot of us, even if we identify like, oh shit, my current job, actually even when I weed out the stories, my current job does have deal breakers, you're probably not going to leave immediately.
Maybe you will, again. But if you don't, all the coaching stuff I'm teaching can also be useful because even when we uncover dealbreakers, if we're not going to choose to leave that situation immediately, then choosing to use coaching tools to have a better experience of it while we're there can also be a powerful choice.
And this brings me to something else I talk about a lot on the podcast, which is like the idea of incrementality, right? We live in a culture that has a lot of all or nothing thinking. Like either I'm going to stay and love my job or I'm going to quit today, right? Those choices are available, but so often in life we build things bit by bit.
So it's like, can we use the coaching tools to have a little bit better of our work experience today and get a little bit of our energy back so we can apply that energy we're getting back to our job search, or like figuring out what we're going to do next?
Because for a lot of people, I think even when they're in a job they want to quit or there's a job with a lot of dealbreakers, when they're spending a lot of like time and emotional energy resisting that job and hating that job, that can be very exhausting. And that can make it very difficult to then do the effort of getting another job.
And let's just add one more final piece here, which is different people are going to have different dealbreakers, and that's okay. I think so often when something doesn't feel good to us, we want to sort of take a poll with our friends and family about like, does this seem okay to you? Does this seem okay to you? Okay, these six people said it is okay, so maybe it is okay and I'm just overreacting. Or like, oh, no, they all said it's not okay, but I think it's fine.
Different people have different dealbreakers, different people have different things that are yummy to them and are not yummy to them. Once we peel back our thoughts and look at those and examine those and see what the stories are, then we can actually see what are our dealbreakers versus what would someone else's be?
And I think you probably know a lot more of these answers than you sometimes think you do. Because I think a lot of us, especially if we've been socialized as women or other marginalized identities, we're like second guessing ourselves all the time.
We're like, oh, I want this, but I can't have that, so I'll have to do this. And then I'm going to do that. And it's not okay to do this, versus just being like, oh, I know what I want. I don't have what I want. How do I get what I want? How do I get to what I want?
And there's going to be various pieces of that. Some of the pieces are going to be like how do I let go of these old stories that are creating negative experiences for me I don't want? And some of its going to be like how do I make the actual changes I want to make in my life so that I can have things that meet my preferences?
And sometimes in life we're not going to get the thing that meets all of our preferences. I think it's great when we can, and I do think we can all have really spectacular lives. And sometimes it's also about figuring out which of my preferences matter the most to me and going after those ones. Because we have the capacity to feel any feeling in any situation.
That doesn't mean we have to feel any feeling in any situation, but I think that's really important to know because it gives us so much more power to then make those choices, to choose what is a dealbreaker to us and to choose what is a preference to us knowing that no external circumstance is ever going to create all our feelings. That's our job, but we still get to choose which circumstances we want to do that in.
All right, y'all, I want to hear all your thoughts on this. And if you have questions on it, come post to me on Instagram at Kori Linn. And if you're in a job that is not working for you, that has dealbreakers but you're struggling to get out of it, you're struggling to have the mental energy and bandwidth to do your job search, come have a consult with me and let's talk all about it. Just the consult alone can change the trajectory of your career. And if it seems like a good fit, we can talk about how to work together.
All right, y'all, that's what I have for you. Have a great week and I will talk to you next time. 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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