112. Going Against the Grain
Want a household division of labor so ideal it makes you salivate?
A career that lights you up in all your favorite ways?
A schedule that works just right for you?
A partner who is deeply attuned to your needs, makes you laugh, and handles conflict well?
These things (and more!) can all be yours.
But getting them will probably involve going against the grain.
And going against the grain can feel massively uncomfortable.
What’s the grain?
It’s “the way things are.” And “how it’s always been done.”
It’s what everyone else has and what you’re pushed to accept and even cherish as “good enough.”
It’s what society taught us is “normal,” and therefore the best we could hope for.
Most people don’t have a satisfying AF life.
They don’t have a deliciously wonderful career.
Not because they’re unworthy or incapable but because creating those things involves pushing back against what you’ve been taught is good enough.
And like I said, that’s uncomfortable.
But let me just tell you - it’s so worth it.
Because when you’re willing to go against the grain, you can create all kinds of things that are supposedly impossible.
Tune in this week and let’s discuss the magic of going against the grain, the big obstacles you’ll need to overcome, and most importantly the fact that you don’t have to go against all the grain all the time to create a wildly satisfying life and career.
If you want to supercharge your capacity to create a life that blows your mind, I have some one-on-one coaching slots opening up soon. Send me an email and let's talk about it or click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If there are topics y’all want me to talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
Satisfied AF is officially open for enrollment! Click here to get on a consult call and talk about what it would be like for you to be Satisfied AF in your life and career.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why the skill of going against the grain is so essential for building a wildly satisfying life and career.
Why going against the grain feels massively uncomfortable and counterintuitive at first.
How most of us (myself included) dip between going against the grain and following our socialization.
Why there is equal discomfort in staying the same versus going against the grain.
The vulnerability of believing that your life could be richly, deliciously satisfying.
What changes when you shift your habits and become practiced at going against the grain.
Why your brain wants belonging, and how to give your brain the sense of belonging it needs.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
If you’re enjoying the show, please leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts!
Feel free to ask me any questions over on Instagram!
Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect by Jonice Webb Ph.D.
Positive Discipline by Jane Nelson
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about going against the grain.
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. I'm having a great day today. By the time this comes out I think it'll be maybe mid-December, or early December, I’m not sure. But right now it's the Monday after Thanksgiving and I'm just feeling so deliciously happy and satisfied with my life and with what's going on. And that's such a fun thing because that's essentially what I help other people create and what I teach people how to do in my one-on-one coaching and in Satisfied As Fuck group coaching.
And of course, I'm a human being with a brain also so I don't feel like that 100% of the time. But it's so delicious when I do, and I have such a better skill set for it now. I think when joyfulness and contentedness used to happen in my life I would feel very grippy and very graspy towards it. And like I had to like hold on to it and I had to make it stay and it was like the good thing and the other stuff was the bad thing. And it made it very fraught and like loaded and difficult to enjoy, actually.
Whereas right now I'm just like feeling like this like bubbling over with wonder, and delight, and satisfaction and deliciousness. And just like being with it, just like, oh, this is fun. And also with this knowledge that this is something I cultivated and built brick by brick in a lot of ways.
Don't get me wrong, I'm incredibly lucky and I'm incredibly privileged, and there's lots of good stuff in my life that I did not create. But I have done so much work these past several years on both cultivating satisfaction, like cultivating satisfaction with the things that are already going well in my life and cultivating gratitude, cultivating appreciation, cultivating joy, cultivating the ability to relax and enjoy when things are going well versus like feeling stressed and anxious.
And I have also done a lot of work to make very real changes in my life so that my life matched more of what I wanted it to be, right? Changes like leaving my corporate job to start my business. And then once I had the business, figuring out how to actually have a business, right? How to run it, how to sell things, how to serve clients, how to do my own taxes. Well, I don't do that, I have a CPA who does that. But I did still have to like set up my payroll and that was fucking hard, y'all.
If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you probably remember last summer when I was in the midst of setting payroll up and really struggling with it. Or last winter when I had to run my own 401k contribution for the first time ever and just having a massively hard time with it. And so I want to point out all those things because this is what I'm always talking about.
And so I think using myself as an example could be really helpful. Like I have a very rich and satisfying life now. Part of that is because I have developed the skill of being satisfied and I know how to do that and how to feel that in my body, and that's where satisfaction exists. It's often, I think, something we're chasing, that we think is going to happen in the circumstances of our lives or in we how we think about our lives. But the feeling of satisfaction, it's an emotion, and emotions live in our bodies.
So you have to be in touch with that sweet body of yours to feel the emotional texture and fabric of your life, right? And then also the other side of that, which is making things happen. Making shit happen and making changes to your life, and cultivating courage and cultivating resilience because a lot of times when we make changes to our lives, it's fucking hard, right?
It's hard to learn to do things we've never done. It's hard to have difficult conversations, even though those difficult conversations are the pathway to the beautiful, connected, fulfilling relationships we want. This stuff is not for the faint of heart. And that's part of why I offer a group coaching program so that you can do this work with a group of like-minded people and with guidance from me because you can do it alone, but personally I think it's really hard and less enjoyable to do that way. That's my experience.
So that kind of leads into what we're going to talk about today. And what we're going to talk about today is going against the grain. And what I mean by that is making decisions that are like unusual. Either unusual to your own understanding of yourself or unusual to what the culture has taught you to privilege, do, be like, et cetera.
This has been a podcast topic I've been wanting to discuss with y'all for a long time because in my experience, going against the grain is a necessary step to create a satisfying as fuck life if you don't already have one. If you already have one, great, you probably don't need to go against any grains or you're already going against them all, that's good. But if you don't have a satisfying as fuck life right now, then in order to get to that you're probably going to have to go against the grain in some area.
Whether that's going against the grain with yourself. Whether that's going against the grain with your culture and what your culture has taught you it means to live a good and satisfying life or what your culture has taught you is okay or acceptable for you to do or be. Whether that means going against the grain of how much effort you've been wanting to put into stuff.
Whether it means going against the grain of what you were taught about emotions, because for a lot of us, we weren't really taught how to feel feelings. And to get to that rich and satisfying as fuck life, we have to get in touch with our emotions in this new and different way and that often does involve going against the grain of some of the things we were taught about life, about feelings, et cetera.
And here's what I really want you to know, and this is like maybe sort of the bad news. Going against the grain can feel massively, massively uncomfortable. And if you think about it, that makes total sense because you're going in a direction contrary to either your natural inclinations or your learned inclinations, right?
I do think people have some natural inclinations. I think a lot of our inclinations are things we've learned from our parents, other caregivers, all the various ways we take in socialization, whether that's TV shows, movies, peers, anything like that.
So in order to create anything in your life that you don't already have, you usually have to make different choices. And that's going to involve often not following those inclinations and trying new shit and then seeing what happens. Try new shit, evaluate, and then we either repeat if we liked the results we got from the new shit, or we have to try even other more new shit until we get what we want.
And I think when people go out and begin to try to do the work to create a satisfying as fuck career, to try and create a satisfying as fuck relationship with their significant other, to try and create a satisfying as fuck relationship with their co-workers, their peers, their friends, their children, their parents, one of the things that gets in the way and that just makes everything come to a dead stop, is it feels uncomfortable, and it pushes against the socialization.
Or like the socialization we have just creates such a barrier and obstacle that we never even try the shit that we're like setting out to try. And it can feel really counterintuitive, right? Because people are like, but my satisfying as fuck life will feel good, right? That's like the whole thing, it’s satisfying as fuck, satisfying as fuck feels good. And that is true, but there's this thing that happens in the middle, right?
There's where you are now, which you feel comfortable in some ways and uncomfortable and others, which we've talked about in a different podcast which is like which kind of discomfort do you want? Do you want the discomfort of staying the same? Or do you want the discomfort of trying something new?
So where you currently are, there's some comfort and some discomfort. Where you want to go is that satisfying as fuck, yummy, delicious place, and then there's in between. And the in between is where it can feel massively uncomfortable. That's where the going against the grain happens.
When you leave the familiarity of where you are, but you're not quite to the satisfied as fuck place there's this thing in the middle where it can just feel like you're pushing against the current. And it can feel really frustrating. It can feel kind of scary. It can feel kind of like dangerous almost, right? Because we're social mammals, right?
So you're a social mammal, and part of being a social mammal means that you want to belong. And part of belonging sometimes, like the way we shorthand that for ourselves in our brains is being like everyone else. And going against the grain is by definition not being like everyone else.
If there's a socialization that you picked up as a kid and living your satisfied as fuck life means doing the opposite of that or doing something like, you know, kitty corner away from that, whatever it is, it doesn't always have to be the opposite, it's going to feel weird to you. It's going to feel really uncomfortable. It's maybe going to feel wrong on like a deep visceral level. And that is often the price of admission to get into that satisfied as fuck life.
Now, I also want to take a moment here, and I've said this before, but it just bears repeating, having a satisfied as fuck life does not mean you always feel satisfied as fuck. We talked about this at the beginning of the podcast, but I just want to repeat it here because the way I just laid it out it did sound like a destination, right? Like there's where you are, there's the journey, and then there's you're satisfied as fuck life.
But the thing about having a satisfied as fuck life is while it does feel deeply and immensely rich and satisfying, there's many opportunities for you to either continue going against the grain and creating the thing you want or for you to sort of dip back into following the socialization. And for most of us, we kind of go back and forth between the two. And by most of us I'm including myself, right?
Like I left my old job and started this whole business and the whole thing I do is working with people about how to create a rich and satisfying as fuck to them life. And also, like I'm always saying, I'm also a human with a brain so there's times, like pretty often, we're I’ll notice my brain is like, “Oh, this is what I want to do. But that would involve feeling uncomfortable and I don't want to, so I'm just going to follow this old socialization.”
And then I'll notice, and I'll be like, “Why the fuck do I feel, you know, tired, angry, annoyed, resentful?” Not that those feelings always indicate that you went back and followed some old socialization, but for me they're pretty often a clue or a cue to be like, wait a minute, what decisions have I been making lately? And what headspace was I making those from?
And did I make decisions that actually align with my satisfied as fuck life? Or did I make decisions that match those previous inclinations, that socialization I used to live my life by? Or that society is still constantly pressuring me to live my life by even though I'm mostly saying no fucking thank you.
But I do think the part where you go from living life the way you've lived it to just beginning to try new things, I think for many people that is the scariest, hardest part. When you are practiced in living your rich and satisfying life, you have those muscles in place, you have that capacity in place. And so even though sometimes you might fall into the old socialization or make the old choices by accident, or even on purpose, there's sort of this like new way of being that you've built and established.
But when you're in the very beginning, just venturing out, it can feel kind of excruciating. And there can be sort of this like deep vulnerability. Like for a lot of people, they're just like, “Well, this is the way it is,” right? This is the way life is, this is way life has always been. It’s never been satisfying as fuck before, it's probably never going to be satisfying as fuck.
So the idea that you would be willing to believe that life for you could be richly and wildly, deliciously satisfying, that may feel kind of threatening. And I think for a lot of people, when they think about the possibility of believing that could be for them, it's like almost embarrassing, right?
It's almost like, oh, if I begin to believe that could be possible for me and I make efforts towards that and then I don't get there, how fucking humiliating. How embarrassing. How like, bleh, right? It's like this, bleh, I don't know what the word for that is, but just like bleh.
And I think it's that sensation that keeps a lot of people going with the grain, just continuing with the inclinations, whether their own or learned, and being sort of like half satisfied, right? For a lot of people it's not a terrible life, sometimes it feels really good. But it's not exactly what they want.
It's not wildly rich and satisfying. It's not toe curling. It's not like the yumminess. It's not like a homemade chocolate truffle. It's sort of just like, okay, this is like a story about cookie. I mean, it's fine. It's not bad, I wouldn't like kick it out of my life. But is it really as good as it gets?
Whereas being willing to believe that life could be wildly better, it's kind of threatening. It's kind of dangerous. It's kind of scary, right? Like, what if you try and don't get there? And my answer to that is, what if you try and don't get there, but what if you get somewhere marvelous, right? I was coaching someone once who was like, “What if I believe that I can make a million dollars in revenue in a year, and then I go all in on believing that's possible and then I don't do it.”
And I was like, “Well, what if you believe it's possible, and you don't do it, but you make 750,000 in revenue?” If you're willing to believe it can be wildly delicious and you don't get to that imagined goal, but maybe you're going to get somewhere really cool. I think for a lot of people they're like, well, either I'll get to my imagined goal or I'm still where I am. And I'm like, well, there's probably a lot of space in between those things and a lot of other places you could get to that might be really cool.
Also, wouldn’t you like to know if it is possible or not? That's part of why I quit my job. I didn't actually know if I would like being a full-time coach. I didn't know if I would like running my business. And there were a lot of times when I did not fucking like it, y’all. But I also had this thing in me where I was like, “I need to know, and I can just find out.”
And I do think like with my pre-coaching or like early coaching brain, if I had tried running my business and then it hadn't stuck with it and I went back to corporate, it probably would have felt kind of excruciating and like embarrassing.
But also then I would have known and then I would have been able to stop fucking fantasizing about quitting and launching a business because I would be like, “Nope, tried that, didn't turn out to be the thing.” Although for me, I tried it and it did turn out to be the thing, at least the thing for now.
Okay, so to recap, the whole point of this podcast is just the idea that when you begin to make new changes about your life, in your life and like how you relate to people, what the choices are you're making about your career, all kinds of things. When you begin to make new choices and then it feels like shit, that's normal.
It's not my favorite part. It's not the fun part to me, although you could decide it is the fun part. Like maybe if you like gritty, tough activities, maybe this is the fucking fun part for you. It's not my favorite part. But what I want you to know is that it's expected, it's normal. It doesn't mean anything has gone wrong, it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you, it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with changing your life.
It just means when you have a set of habits and a set of ideas about what's normal and okay, and then you shift those habits and you try different things, there's a part of your humanity that finds that deeply unsettling because there's a part of your brain that thinks anything you've done before is safer because you did it already and then you didn't die, right? But your brain evolved to keep you alive. And that's a good thing, right? I'm a fan of you being alive.
But what we're trying to do with the Love Your Job Before You Leave It podcast, and what we're trying to do with the satisfied as fuck concept and the Satisfied As Fuck group coaching program, is to create something wildly delicious. And sometimes that's going to involve doing things that your brain will find unsettling because they're going to be new and because your brain did not evolve for you to have wild deliciousness. Again, it evolved for you to survive and it's good at that. And we can be really grateful for it.
And it's totally okay that sometimes things feel unsettling and uncomfortable. Because as much as that's not my favorite part, it's not fucking fatal, it's just a difficult emotion. It doesn't have to stop you from having what you want and getting what you want in life and creating your wildly delicious satisfying as fuck life and career.
But, again, I do think this work can be really hard to do on your own. And if you want to do this work, I highly recommend coming and joining the Satisfied As Fuck group coaching program because the thing is, your brain wants belonging.
And if you want to change things in your life, one of the fastest easiest ways to do that, with you being a social mammal, is to come do it in a group of people. Because then your brain can see there's a group here, I can have belonging, I'm a social mammal, these mammals also here are doing the same thing, we're doing this work together.
And if you happen, in your own life, to be surrounded by a bunch of people who are going against the grain all the time and trailblazing, then maybe you don't need that community. Maybe you can do it without that because you already have that community built into your life. But for a lot of us, we don't.
For a lot of us we're surrounded by people where it's very normalized to hate your job. It's very normalized to like rip on your spouse. It's very normalized to think being a parent is a drag and just really fucking hard work and that's the way it has to be.
It's sort of in our culture, or like the culture I grew up in, and maybe the culture you grew up in. It's very normalized to kind of like borderline hate your life a little sometimes. And so that may be where you're getting stuck, as you're like, well, yeah, you're supposed to roll your eyes about your spouse and you're supposed to hate work because it's a job, right? And you're supposed to think this parenting shit is extremely fucking hard.
And listen, don't get me wrong, it is extremely fucking hard. I'm not trying to say that parenting is easy, but I do think there are different ways of parenting. And again, you can have that satisfying as fuck delicious life and it may involve doing parenting, doing work, doing your significant other relationships in different ways than you've ever seen them done before. And in ways that aren't being modeled to you out in the you know, “real world.”
But coming and joining a group coaching program means you can see that being modeled. And that part of your brain that wants to be a social mammal, well it just doesn't want to be, it just is a social mammal, like wants to belong, will feel maybe safe exploring that stuff there in the group that it wouldn't feel safe just exploring on your own.
It doesn't mean you can't do the work on your own, you totally can. I just think it's so much more fun, and so much more effective to do the work in a group of like-minded people.
So if that sounds like what you want, come join us. Sign up for a consult for the next round of SAF. The next round starts in February. It's going to be mind-bendingly good, and I would love to have you be part of it. And you can sign up for the consult on my website, and I look forward to talking to you about how you can have a delicious, wildly fucking satisfying life and career in 2023 and beyond.
That's what I have for y'all this week, 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. I'm having a great day today. By the time this comes out I think it'll be maybe mid-December, or early December, I’m not sure. But right now it's the Monday after Thanksgiving and I'm just feeling so deliciously happy and satisfied with my life and with what's going on. And that's such a fun thing because that's essentially what I help other people create and what I teach people how to do in my one-on-one coaching and in Satisfied As Fuck group coaching.
And of course, I'm a human being with a brain also so I don't feel like that 100% of the time. But it's so delicious when I do, and I have such a better skill set for it now. I think when joyfulness and contentedness used to happen in my life I would feel very grippy and very graspy towards it. And like I had to like hold on to it and I had to make it stay and it was like the good thing and the other stuff was the bad thing. And it made it very fraught and like loaded and difficult to enjoy, actually.
Whereas right now I'm just like feeling like this like bubbling over with wonder, and delight, and satisfaction and deliciousness. And just like being with it, just like, oh, this is fun. And also with this knowledge that this is something I cultivated and built brick by brick in a lot of ways.
Don't get me wrong, I'm incredibly lucky and I'm incredibly privileged, and there's lots of good stuff in my life that I did not create. But I have done so much work these past several years on both cultivating satisfaction, like cultivating satisfaction with the things that are already going well in my life and cultivating gratitude, cultivating appreciation, cultivating joy, cultivating the ability to relax and enjoy when things are going well versus like feeling stressed and anxious.
And I have also done a lot of work to make very real changes in my life so that my life matched more of what I wanted it to be, right? Changes like leaving my corporate job to start my business. And then once I had the business, figuring out how to actually have a business, right? How to run it, how to sell things, how to serve clients, how to do my own taxes. Well, I don't do that, I have a CPA who does that. But I did still have to like set up my payroll and that was fucking hard, y'all.
If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you probably remember last summer when I was in the midst of setting payroll up and really struggling with it. Or last winter when I had to run my own 401k contribution for the first time ever and just having a massively hard time with it. And so I want to point out all those things because this is what I'm always talking about.
And so I think using myself as an example could be really helpful. Like I have a very rich and satisfying life now. Part of that is because I have developed the skill of being satisfied and I know how to do that and how to feel that in my body, and that's where satisfaction exists. It's often, I think, something we're chasing, that we think is going to happen in the circumstances of our lives or in we how we think about our lives. But the feeling of satisfaction, it's an emotion, and emotions live in our bodies.
So you have to be in touch with that sweet body of yours to feel the emotional texture and fabric of your life, right? And then also the other side of that, which is making things happen. Making shit happen and making changes to your life, and cultivating courage and cultivating resilience because a lot of times when we make changes to our lives, it's fucking hard, right?
It's hard to learn to do things we've never done. It's hard to have difficult conversations, even though those difficult conversations are the pathway to the beautiful, connected, fulfilling relationships we want. This stuff is not for the faint of heart. And that's part of why I offer a group coaching program so that you can do this work with a group of like-minded people and with guidance from me because you can do it alone, but personally I think it's really hard and less enjoyable to do that way. That's my experience.
So that kind of leads into what we're going to talk about today. And what we're going to talk about today is going against the grain. And what I mean by that is making decisions that are like unusual. Either unusual to your own understanding of yourself or unusual to what the culture has taught you to privilege, do, be like, et cetera.
This has been a podcast topic I've been wanting to discuss with y'all for a long time because in my experience, going against the grain is a necessary step to create a satisfying as fuck life if you don't already have one. If you already have one, great, you probably don't need to go against any grains or you're already going against them all, that's good. But if you don't have a satisfying as fuck life right now, then in order to get to that you're probably going to have to go against the grain in some area.
Whether that's going against the grain with yourself. Whether that's going against the grain with your culture and what your culture has taught you it means to live a good and satisfying life or what your culture has taught you is okay or acceptable for you to do or be. Whether that means going against the grain of how much effort you've been wanting to put into stuff.
Whether it means going against the grain of what you were taught about emotions, because for a lot of us, we weren't really taught how to feel feelings. And to get to that rich and satisfying as fuck life, we have to get in touch with our emotions in this new and different way and that often does involve going against the grain of some of the things we were taught about life, about feelings, et cetera.
And here's what I really want you to know, and this is like maybe sort of the bad news. Going against the grain can feel massively, massively uncomfortable. And if you think about it, that makes total sense because you're going in a direction contrary to either your natural inclinations or your learned inclinations, right?
I do think people have some natural inclinations. I think a lot of our inclinations are things we've learned from our parents, other caregivers, all the various ways we take in socialization, whether that's TV shows, movies, peers, anything like that.
So in order to create anything in your life that you don't already have, you usually have to make different choices. And that's going to involve often not following those inclinations and trying new shit and then seeing what happens. Try new shit, evaluate, and then we either repeat if we liked the results we got from the new shit, or we have to try even other more new shit until we get what we want.
And I think when people go out and begin to try to do the work to create a satisfying as fuck career, to try and create a satisfying as fuck relationship with their significant other, to try and create a satisfying as fuck relationship with their co-workers, their peers, their friends, their children, their parents, one of the things that gets in the way and that just makes everything come to a dead stop, is it feels uncomfortable, and it pushes against the socialization.
Or like the socialization we have just creates such a barrier and obstacle that we never even try the shit that we're like setting out to try. And it can feel really counterintuitive, right? Because people are like, but my satisfying as fuck life will feel good, right? That's like the whole thing, it’s satisfying as fuck, satisfying as fuck feels good. And that is true, but there's this thing that happens in the middle, right?
There's where you are now, which you feel comfortable in some ways and uncomfortable and others, which we've talked about in a different podcast which is like which kind of discomfort do you want? Do you want the discomfort of staying the same? Or do you want the discomfort of trying something new?
So where you currently are, there's some comfort and some discomfort. Where you want to go is that satisfying as fuck, yummy, delicious place, and then there's in between. And the in between is where it can feel massively uncomfortable. That's where the going against the grain happens.
When you leave the familiarity of where you are, but you're not quite to the satisfied as fuck place there's this thing in the middle where it can just feel like you're pushing against the current. And it can feel really frustrating. It can feel kind of scary. It can feel kind of like dangerous almost, right? Because we're social mammals, right?
So you're a social mammal, and part of being a social mammal means that you want to belong. And part of belonging sometimes, like the way we shorthand that for ourselves in our brains is being like everyone else. And going against the grain is by definition not being like everyone else.
If there's a socialization that you picked up as a kid and living your satisfied as fuck life means doing the opposite of that or doing something like, you know, kitty corner away from that, whatever it is, it doesn't always have to be the opposite, it's going to feel weird to you. It's going to feel really uncomfortable. It's maybe going to feel wrong on like a deep visceral level. And that is often the price of admission to get into that satisfied as fuck life.
Now, I also want to take a moment here, and I've said this before, but it just bears repeating, having a satisfied as fuck life does not mean you always feel satisfied as fuck. We talked about this at the beginning of the podcast, but I just want to repeat it here because the way I just laid it out it did sound like a destination, right? Like there's where you are, there's the journey, and then there's you're satisfied as fuck life.
But the thing about having a satisfied as fuck life is while it does feel deeply and immensely rich and satisfying, there's many opportunities for you to either continue going against the grain and creating the thing you want or for you to sort of dip back into following the socialization. And for most of us, we kind of go back and forth between the two. And by most of us I'm including myself, right?
Like I left my old job and started this whole business and the whole thing I do is working with people about how to create a rich and satisfying as fuck to them life. And also, like I'm always saying, I'm also a human with a brain so there's times, like pretty often, we're I’ll notice my brain is like, “Oh, this is what I want to do. But that would involve feeling uncomfortable and I don't want to, so I'm just going to follow this old socialization.”
And then I'll notice, and I'll be like, “Why the fuck do I feel, you know, tired, angry, annoyed, resentful?” Not that those feelings always indicate that you went back and followed some old socialization, but for me they're pretty often a clue or a cue to be like, wait a minute, what decisions have I been making lately? And what headspace was I making those from?
And did I make decisions that actually align with my satisfied as fuck life? Or did I make decisions that match those previous inclinations, that socialization I used to live my life by? Or that society is still constantly pressuring me to live my life by even though I'm mostly saying no fucking thank you.
But I do think the part where you go from living life the way you've lived it to just beginning to try new things, I think for many people that is the scariest, hardest part. When you are practiced in living your rich and satisfying life, you have those muscles in place, you have that capacity in place. And so even though sometimes you might fall into the old socialization or make the old choices by accident, or even on purpose, there's sort of this like new way of being that you've built and established.
But when you're in the very beginning, just venturing out, it can feel kind of excruciating. And there can be sort of this like deep vulnerability. Like for a lot of people, they're just like, “Well, this is the way it is,” right? This is the way life is, this is way life has always been. It’s never been satisfying as fuck before, it's probably never going to be satisfying as fuck.
So the idea that you would be willing to believe that life for you could be richly and wildly, deliciously satisfying, that may feel kind of threatening. And I think for a lot of people, when they think about the possibility of believing that could be for them, it's like almost embarrassing, right?
It's almost like, oh, if I begin to believe that could be possible for me and I make efforts towards that and then I don't get there, how fucking humiliating. How embarrassing. How like, bleh, right? It's like this, bleh, I don't know what the word for that is, but just like bleh.
And I think it's that sensation that keeps a lot of people going with the grain, just continuing with the inclinations, whether their own or learned, and being sort of like half satisfied, right? For a lot of people it's not a terrible life, sometimes it feels really good. But it's not exactly what they want.
It's not wildly rich and satisfying. It's not toe curling. It's not like the yumminess. It's not like a homemade chocolate truffle. It's sort of just like, okay, this is like a story about cookie. I mean, it's fine. It's not bad, I wouldn't like kick it out of my life. But is it really as good as it gets?
Whereas being willing to believe that life could be wildly better, it's kind of threatening. It's kind of dangerous. It's kind of scary, right? Like, what if you try and don't get there? And my answer to that is, what if you try and don't get there, but what if you get somewhere marvelous, right? I was coaching someone once who was like, “What if I believe that I can make a million dollars in revenue in a year, and then I go all in on believing that's possible and then I don't do it.”
And I was like, “Well, what if you believe it's possible, and you don't do it, but you make 750,000 in revenue?” If you're willing to believe it can be wildly delicious and you don't get to that imagined goal, but maybe you're going to get somewhere really cool. I think for a lot of people they're like, well, either I'll get to my imagined goal or I'm still where I am. And I'm like, well, there's probably a lot of space in between those things and a lot of other places you could get to that might be really cool.
Also, wouldn’t you like to know if it is possible or not? That's part of why I quit my job. I didn't actually know if I would like being a full-time coach. I didn't know if I would like running my business. And there were a lot of times when I did not fucking like it, y’all. But I also had this thing in me where I was like, “I need to know, and I can just find out.”
And I do think like with my pre-coaching or like early coaching brain, if I had tried running my business and then it hadn't stuck with it and I went back to corporate, it probably would have felt kind of excruciating and like embarrassing.
But also then I would have known and then I would have been able to stop fucking fantasizing about quitting and launching a business because I would be like, “Nope, tried that, didn't turn out to be the thing.” Although for me, I tried it and it did turn out to be the thing, at least the thing for now.
Okay, so to recap, the whole point of this podcast is just the idea that when you begin to make new changes about your life, in your life and like how you relate to people, what the choices are you're making about your career, all kinds of things. When you begin to make new choices and then it feels like shit, that's normal.
It's not my favorite part. It's not the fun part to me, although you could decide it is the fun part. Like maybe if you like gritty, tough activities, maybe this is the fucking fun part for you. It's not my favorite part. But what I want you to know is that it's expected, it's normal. It doesn't mean anything has gone wrong, it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you, it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with changing your life.
It just means when you have a set of habits and a set of ideas about what's normal and okay, and then you shift those habits and you try different things, there's a part of your humanity that finds that deeply unsettling because there's a part of your brain that thinks anything you've done before is safer because you did it already and then you didn't die, right? But your brain evolved to keep you alive. And that's a good thing, right? I'm a fan of you being alive.
But what we're trying to do with the Love Your Job Before You Leave It podcast, and what we're trying to do with the satisfied as fuck concept and the Satisfied As Fuck group coaching program, is to create something wildly delicious. And sometimes that's going to involve doing things that your brain will find unsettling because they're going to be new and because your brain did not evolve for you to have wild deliciousness. Again, it evolved for you to survive and it's good at that. And we can be really grateful for it.
And it's totally okay that sometimes things feel unsettling and uncomfortable. Because as much as that's not my favorite part, it's not fucking fatal, it's just a difficult emotion. It doesn't have to stop you from having what you want and getting what you want in life and creating your wildly delicious satisfying as fuck life and career.
But, again, I do think this work can be really hard to do on your own. And if you want to do this work, I highly recommend coming and joining the Satisfied As Fuck group coaching program because the thing is, your brain wants belonging.
And if you want to change things in your life, one of the fastest easiest ways to do that, with you being a social mammal, is to come do it in a group of people. Because then your brain can see there's a group here, I can have belonging, I'm a social mammal, these mammals also here are doing the same thing, we're doing this work together.
And if you happen, in your own life, to be surrounded by a bunch of people who are going against the grain all the time and trailblazing, then maybe you don't need that community. Maybe you can do it without that because you already have that community built into your life. But for a lot of us, we don't.
For a lot of us we're surrounded by people where it's very normalized to hate your job. It's very normalized to like rip on your spouse. It's very normalized to think being a parent is a drag and just really fucking hard work and that's the way it has to be.
It's sort of in our culture, or like the culture I grew up in, and maybe the culture you grew up in. It's very normalized to kind of like borderline hate your life a little sometimes. And so that may be where you're getting stuck, as you're like, well, yeah, you're supposed to roll your eyes about your spouse and you're supposed to hate work because it's a job, right? And you're supposed to think this parenting shit is extremely fucking hard.
And listen, don't get me wrong, it is extremely fucking hard. I'm not trying to say that parenting is easy, but I do think there are different ways of parenting. And again, you can have that satisfying as fuck delicious life and it may involve doing parenting, doing work, doing your significant other relationships in different ways than you've ever seen them done before. And in ways that aren't being modeled to you out in the you know, “real world.”
But coming and joining a group coaching program means you can see that being modeled. And that part of your brain that wants to be a social mammal, well it just doesn't want to be, it just is a social mammal, like wants to belong, will feel maybe safe exploring that stuff there in the group that it wouldn't feel safe just exploring on your own.
It doesn't mean you can't do the work on your own, you totally can. I just think it's so much more fun, and so much more effective to do the work in a group of like-minded people.
So if that sounds like what you want, come join us. Sign up for a consult for the next round of SAF. The next round starts in February. It's going to be mind-bendingly good, and I would love to have you be part of it. And you can sign up for the consult on my website, and I look forward to talking to you about how you can have a delicious, wildly fucking satisfying life and career in 2023 and beyond.
That's what I have for y'all this week, 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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