153. Key Takeaways from 1.5 Years of Coaching
I recently had my last coaching call with a client I’ve been working with for the past one and a half years.
We were exploring the key takeaways she gained during this time, and what she shared was so good I had to tell y’all all about it.
Some of these are things my client was reflecting on and some were my observations after spending eighteen months watching this client grow and change.
Even if you pick just one thing to implement, I promise, it’s going to have a huge impact on your goals, career, and overall life satisfaction.
Listen in to hear six pieces of wisdom that can change your life for the better, and how you can take this work deeper with me if you don’t want the coaching to stop there.
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WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
6 key takeaways from 1.5 years of coaching with one of my clients.
How coaching teaches you to navigate discomfort.
One powerful practice for believing something new.
How to question an inner voice that’s belittling you.
Why being wrong can be really wonderful.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about key takeaways from a year and a half of coaching.
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’m in a great mood today and there’s a few reasons for that. Number one, the weather is cooling down and I am loving it. Number two, I received an order of a box of wine today that I’m very excited about. There’s this wine that I love, it was actually one of the first Rosés I ever liked. And if you know anything about me, I am mostly a Rosé lady. Well, Rosé and champagne, right? So champagne, sparkling Rosé and Rosé are kind of like the three loves of my wine life.
And there’s this one bottle that I had had years and years ago. Probably, I don’t know, like 2014? So that’s like nine years ago. It was one of the first Rosés I ever had. I had it at this Co-op grocery store in Seattle. They were doing a wine tasting and I tasted it and I liked it, bought a bottle and took it home. My partner at the time also really liked it.
This was before Alex, so this is so long ago it’s like a different person. And Alex and I have been together for six years. So that’s kind of wild to think about. But we both liked it so much I went back and bought six bottles. And at that point in my life, I was not a person who buys wine by the case or usually even anyone who buys more than one bottle or two bottles at a time.
I was in a different place financially and just a different place as a person. And so this was really rare. And I really loved that wine. And we drank the six bottles over the course of, I think, that summer. And then I think maybe I bought some more. But then I hadn’t seen that wine in a long time.
And it was interesting, it has a switchblade on the cover, like an illustration of a switchblade. And I always kind of kept an eye out for it. And then when I moved to Sacramento, they had it at the local Co-op here. And I was like, oh my gosh, I think it’s the switchblade wine. I think it’s the same one.
So I bought it and I took it home. I was like, am I still going to like this? At that point I was like, it’s been seven years, my tastes have changed a lot, I’ve changed a lot. But we had that wine and I did still like it. And so then I was buying it at the co-op and then they stopped having it, I think, because it was winter. And I went through this whole thing, I was ordering it by the case from them.
And then I ended up finding this website online that also has it that would let me buy different quantities. And so I started buying it there. Anyways, this is like the longest story about nothing. But I’m always really excited when the wine delivery comes because I have to be here to sign for it because it’s alcohol. So it’s like a little bit the stars need to align for the wine to come at the right time for me to be here to receive it.
It’s funny the hoops I jump through to get this wine. But I really love it. And I’m willing to put that effort in and do that work in order to have this thing I love. And today it worked out perfectly. I was able to be downstairs so that when the UPS person came, I was able to sign and receive my wine and it got here and I’m very happy.
And then the third thing that I’m really feeling yummy warm feelings about is I just got off of a coaching call with a client I’ve worked with for a long time. And this was the final call in the client’s current coaching package. So she’s graduating and moving on. Always a possibility she’ll come back for more coaching later, but for now our coaching journey has come to a close.
And this client worked with me one on one for six months, and then did my very first cohort of Satisfied As Fuck, my small group. And then worked with me one on one for another six months. So we’ve been together for a year and a half. And we were talking on this call about the key takeaways, the biggest lessons she’s learned through a year and a half of coaching with me. And the stuff she was saying was so good. I was like, “Oh, I have to do a podcast and tell everyone all about this.”
So the first thing that she said was one of the most important takeaways from coaching with me was that she has value outside of work. Now, if you listen to this podcast a lot, you’re probably like, “Yeah, we all have value outside of work.” But I think for a lot of people, they don’t believe that.
A lot of people get their sense of worthiness from their profession, from their career, from how they show up at work, what results they create at work, how people see them at work. I’ve encountered this with many different clients where they want to have work/life balance, they want to go to work at nine and leave at five and feel good about it.
But it’s really hard for them to do that because so much of their identity and their worthiness, the way they see their own worthiness, is tied up with being a hard worker, being the hardest worker, being the last person in the office, having a prestige around the kind of worker that they are.
And so one of the very first patterns that I worked on with this client was this idea that she has value outside of work. And after working together, I would say for a few months, she had really shifted into that. But even now, like over a year later than that, this is still one of her big shifts that took place in the coaching together.
Big enough that it was the first thing she listed, even though we’ve worked together much longer than that. And I think the longer we worked together, the more we were able to add on that foundation. In coaching, one of the things we do is we shift thought patterns. We shift a thought pattern from like, I’m worthy because I’m a hard worker, to I’m worthy because I am or I have worth outside of work.
And that is a shift that can happen pretty quickly. But the longer you work on the shift and the longer you continue to practice that and support it and lay groundwork around it, the more deeply the shift takes place and the more sustainable it is. And the easier to sustain it is because it becomes deeply ingrained.
And so this client is at a place now where this isn’t even a question. It’s like a certainty for her that she has value outside of work. And it’s not something her brain, I think, even thinks about that much anymore.
So if you’re a person who ties your worthiness to your work, I just want you to know that there’s hope for you and you can have a different experience. And coaching is a way you can get that different experience.
Okay, the second key takeaway was just because something expects something of you, doesn’t mean you have to do it. I absolutely love this one. I think so many people put so much pressure on themselves that just because someone expects something – Whether it’s at work, in their relationship, whether it’s their kids, whether it’s their parents, whether it’s their sister, or their best friend. They think if someone expects something of them, they have to do it. And it doesn’t mean that.
If someone expects something of you, and you don’t want to do it, you have options. And you can have communication with that person or with those people and figure out other alternatives. And it’s okay for other people to be disappointed. I realize that for a lot of us, we don’t want other people to be disappointed.
And I want to be clear, I’m a recovering people pleaser. I never want anyone to be disappointed. But sometimes someone’s going to be. And something I’ve learned to do over time is figure out do I want them to be disappointed or do I want me to be disappointed?
And it’s okay if I prioritize myself because I am the person who’s in charge of myself and taking care of myself. And someone needs to do that and I’m the only one with all the information to do it because I know myself and inside my head.
And also sometimes other people are going to be disappointed and then it’s a question of when. Like do I want to disappoint them now ahead of time by telling them something’s not going to work? Or do I want to try to do more than I can and then have them be disappointed later when it’s not able to happen?
So just because someone expects something of you, just because someone wants something from you, just because someone wants something to go a certain way, that doesn’t mean you don’t have options. You do. You’re allowed to say no. You’re allowed to negotiate. You’re allowed to renegotiate. If you’ve already made an agreement, you’re allowed to change your mind.
And some of those things are going to feel uncomfortable, but that’s okay. One of the things that coaching does is it teaches you how to navigate discomfort. Often to get what we want in life is going to require discomfort because usually it involves letting other people be disappointed, or it involves doing something difficult, or it involves telling someone something, we’re afraid they’re not going to like hearing. And that’s okay because discomfort is not fatal.
Also, the other thing is, you’re probably experiencing a lot of discomfort now. So I think it’s so impactful to realize you’re probably actually not going to have more discomfort, you’re just going to have different discomfort. You’re going to have discomfort that’s more aligned with you getting what you want. It’s going to maybe be a different kind of discomfort, but you’re totally capable of feeling it and navigating it. And the more you feel and navigate it, the easier it gets.
So those two were the two that my client listed off the top of her head. And the third one is something I told her is one of the things I’ve noticed and I remember being really impactful in us coaching together. And number three is, in order to shift from one thought pattern to a different thought pattern, you have to practice the new thought pattern. And sometimes you have to practice in between baby step thought patterns that move you closer to the new thought pattern.
So when I first started coaching this client, there was a lot of the stuff we were talking about, like the new thoughts were not new to her, but she wasn’t practicing them. So they weren’t becoming habitual for her. And so one of the things that I asked her to do, and this is like in the very first round of one on one when we’d only been coaching together for maybe like a month.
Some of the thoughts that we were discussing as establishing new thought patterns, I asked her to write them down multiple times each and every day. I sometimes call this Bart Simpson-ing a new thought, which actually I think I saw that phrasing online maybe from a post by Simone Seol.
And it’s the idea of writing the same thought over and over again, the way kids used to have to do that on chalkboards. And Bart Simpson is the example because in episodes of The Simpsons he was often getting in trouble. And so he was often writing his lesson over and over again on the chalkboard.
Now, this isn’t always helpful necessarily for kids, like actual kids. But I think for establishing new thought patterns that you want to believe, this can be really powerful. And it’s something I do myself in my own self-coaching practice as well.
So if there’s a thought pattern I have that is not helping me, that’s harming me, that’s getting in the way of me getting what I want. If I have a thought pattern that’s unkind, it’s self-belittling and I want to replace it with something else, whatever the new thought is I want to replace it with, that’s the one I’ll practice over and over.
I like to practice it by writing it over and over on a piece of paper. But you can also practice it by saying it over and over out loud. You can practice it by making it the password on a computer. You can practice it by making it a background on your phone, I do that one sometimes too. But no matter how you choose to practice it, the idea is that you need to practice it in order for it to become habitual.
Things that you think on a regular basis already, those are already habitual. Just like if you were driving from your house to your favorite grocery store, you would just know how to drive there. It’s habitual, you wouldn’t have to think about where you’re going. You can almost do it on autopilot.
So whatever thought patterns you already have, those are on autopilot. They don’t take effort from you. They feel easy, they feel natural, they feel normal. When you want to switch that thought pattern to a different thought pattern, that takes effort the same way it would take effort to learn to drive to a different grocery store.
Like if your favorite grocery store closed and you had to start going somewhere else, the first several times you drove there, you might accidentally autopilot to the old grocery store. You might have to actually follow a GPS. You might forget where you’re going because you don’t have the new habit in place yet.
But you can learn new habits. And learning a new habit, whether you’re driving to a different grocery store or learning a new thought pattern, it’s the same thing, you just have to do it on purpose over and over until it becomes habitual.
Okay, number four, this is another one that my client came up with. You don’t have to have perfect conditions to do things, right? So the client was actually referring to you don’t have to have perfect conditions to practice your thought work, which is what we call it when we’re changing from one thought to another thought like that.
For this client, the perfect conditions were like a pretty notebook, right? So the way she said it was, I don’t have to have my pretty notebook to practice my thought work. But I thought it was such a good general lesson too for anything that you’re working on in life.
If you’re working on a goal. If you want to make new friends. If you want to write a novel. If you want to launch a business. If you want to get a promotion, you don’t need perfect conditions in order to move towards that, right? Perfect conditions are great, but waiting for perfect conditions means you won’t do the thing. And that means you’re not moving closer to your goal, whatever it is.
So coming to believe like, okay, I don’t need perfect conditions. Like it would be great if I could get this letter of recommendation from this person, but I’m just going to move forward without it. Or I’m going to move forward getting a letter of recommendation from someone else or figuring out whatever steps you can take from the place that you are because the place that you are is always the place from which to start.
And there can always be excuses about why we don’t need to get started or why it would be better to start later. But starting now is what gets you going. So don’t wait for perfect conditions, just do what you can with what you have and you’ll be amazed at how far you’ll get doing that.
Okay, number five, the way my client said this was that she assumes everything her brain says is a lie. That’s not how I would personally frame it. So the way I would frame it is assume everything your brain says could be false, right? So the way she does it is she just kind of has the base assumption like thoughts are made up, thoughts are patterns, thoughts are only one way of looking at things.
So if she assumes it’s a lie, she looks for other truths, because some of the thoughts we choose are on purpose and some of the thoughts we choose feel really true. If you want a softer approach to this one, it’s kind of like just assume it could be incorrect. Just assume there’s a different way to see it or there could be a different way to see it. Another way she said this was to take everything with a healthy portion of skepticism.
So, often when our brain is thinking about things our brain is filtering through the lens of what it’s afraid of and what it doesn’t want to have happen, which seems like a silly thing to do. But that’s what negativity bias does, right? It focuses us on what am I afraid of? What am I worried about? How could this hurt my feelings the most? How could this be the most problematic?
And a lot of times we take neutral information and we make it negative. And we take negative information and make it even more negative. And sometimes we even take positive information and make it negative, right?
Like if someone is like, “You look nice,” we’re like, “They’re making fun of me,” right? Not that no one makes fun ever, sometimes people do. But that’s just an example. Sometimes it can be very hard for us to allow things to be positive, especially if we’re in a headspace where we feel really negative.
So when you assume everything your brain says could be incorrect or could be not the whole picture, it kind of allows you to have this flexible baseline where you’re like, maybe there’s a different way of seeing this. Maybe my brain is jumping to some conclusions. Maybe it’s just plain incorrect, right?
And I think this is an especially useful one for all the mean shit our brain says, right? Like I talk a lot on the podcast about how we have that inner voice that kind of belittles us. Anytime your inner voice is belittling you, I think that’s a great time to just assume that what your brain is saying could be untrue.
But sometimes our brains are a little more subtle, right? Sometimes it’s not actively belittling us, but it’s just saying things that sound factual. Like belittling, an example could be like, “Oh, you’re so bad at this. It’s never going to work,” right? Which you might be like, “Wait, is that belittling?” I think that is belittling. I think it’s rude and critical and not helpful.
But something your brain might say that might sound more factual is just like, Susan doesn’t like you. Sarah doesn’t like you. No one likes you. That might not feel belittling, it might feel factual if you’re just in a headspace where it seems like no one likes you.
If your brain is saying something that hurts your feelings or makes you feel bad, maybe just be willing to entertain the idea that it could either be inaccurate or not seeing the whole picture. Because, listen, sometimes people don’t like us. But that doesn’t mean everyone doesn’t like us.
I was coaching this client, too, about making friends. And one of the ideas I shared with her was we don’t need everyone to like us, right? But I love to believe that I’m a great friend for some people. I’m a great friend for the right people.
I kind of am like, oh, I’m a little bit like a spicy curry. Not everyone likes spicy curry. I’m too spicy for some people. I’m not spicy enough for other people. But that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with me. It’s just like I’m not a good fit for everyone, and that’s okay. But that’s a really different frame than, this person doesn’t like me, no one likes me. I’m doomed, I’ll never make friends.
So basically, this one is sort of summed up as don’t believe everything your brain says. Be willing for anything your brain says to just be a little bit wrong, massively wrong. And we didn’t talk about this on the call that I had with my client, but what I would just add in here as someone who’s received a lot of coaching myself, someone who coaches herself, and someone who’s coached a lot of people, is like it can be really fun to be wrong.
I think a lot of people are like, oh, I can’t be wrong, that’s terrible. If I’m wrong, that’s bad. It means something bad about me. But one of the things that coaching has really taught me is that being wrong can be really wonderful. And a lot of the things that I’ve been wrong about have been mean things I thought about myself.
And so in addition to being willing to entertain the idea that what your brain is saying is incorrect, also entertain the idea that that could be delicious.
Okay, the final takeaway is find ways to keep it fun. Now, the it here for the client, when I say find ways to keep it fun, was coaching and thought work and the things we were doing together. But I think this actually applies to anything.
And so the way that this client kept it fun was by using stickers. And this is actually something I recommend for a lot of clients. Stickers are just fun, and they’re shiny, and they’re colorful, and the brain likes stuff like that. And if you get to put a sticker on a piece of paper every time you take a step towards your goal, that can feel really rewarding.
It’s visual, you can see the progress you’re making. And it’s just fun. And so I think that’s a great way to do things. Like if you have a new thought you’re trying to practice, like my client was, and you’re writing it down five times a day, you can write it down five times a day and then you can give yourself a sticker for writing it down five times a day, right?
Or if you have a thought you’re trying to practice you could make it sound like it goes to a Lizzo song or something. I do this sometimes where I take a real song and then I sort of do like a Weird Al kind of thing. I do it to be playful and silly a lot and it’s just fun in its own right. But you could also use that as a way to practice your thoughts, by singing it to a fun song. That’s a way to make it fun.
So I think when things are fun, we do more of them. Something I used to say a lot in the beginning of my business was fun gets it done. And I really think that’s true. So if you are trying to work towards a goal, how can you make it fun?
And I think the bigger the goal, the harder the goal, the scarier the goal, the more fucking fun you need. So for some things, stickers might be enough. But for other things you might need way more fun. You might need party streamers, you might need a whole soundtrack, you might need people cheering you on, you might need confetti, you might need ice cream.
I often choose to have champagne as a way to keep things fun and to keep things celebratory. I’m not here to tell you how to make it fun, I’m just here to tell you that making things fun can be extremely powerful and can give so much momentum. And the brain loves to celebrate and be celebrated. And when it sees that it’s being celebrated for things, it’s more likely to want to do those things.
Okay, so let’s go over them all one more time now that we’ve talked through them all. One, you have value outside of work. Two, just because something expects something of you, doesn’t mean you have to do it. Three, you’ve got to practice new thoughts. Anything new you want to build, whether it’s a thought or another kind of habit, you have to practice it. Four, you don’t need perfect conditions to practice to get started to move towards things.
Five, just take the things your brain says with a grain of salt and be willing to entertain the idea that your brain could be wrong about them. And that being wrong about them could be fucking amazing. Six, this is kind of sort of five, take everything with a healthy portion of skepticism. So that’s kind of really more 5.5.And then the final one, which you can call seven or six depending on how you’re counting, is to find ways to keep it fun.
All right, those are my client’s key takeaways from a year and a half of coaching with me. And I just want to say there’s a lot in this episode, if you even pick one thing to implement, that’s going to have a huge impact on your life and your goals and your satisfaction.
And also, the coaching doesn’t need to stop there. You can also hire me for a deep dive in-person coaching day, for one on one coaching, or you can join my small group Satisfied As Fuck, the next cohort starts in October. And you can implement these with me and with all the coaching and support and hilarity and delight that comes along with it. And you can figure out what your key takeaways are from coaching together.
All right. That’s what I have for y’all today. Have a lovely week and I’ll talk to you next time. Okay, bye.
Hey, it’s Kori, I have one additional announcement for you. And that is, I am doing a campaign for RIP Medical Debt. RIP Medical Debt is an incredible nonprofit who is buying up bundled medical debt and forgiving it. So basically, because the medical debt is bundled together, it’s sold at a fraction of its original cost.
So when you make donations to RIP Medical Debt, your donation has like 100x impact, right? So if you donate $100, the impact is like $10,000 of medical debt, roughly, that is going to get forgiven. And I’ve been following this nonprofit for a while, I’ve been super inspired by them. And so I decided to do a campaign with them.
Also, if you donate $100 or more to my campaign and send me a picture of your donation receipt, you can get a free 30 minute one on one coaching call with me. And if you can’t donate $100, I totally get it. It’s a lot of money. And I would still love it if you would donate another amount. Or if you aren’t in a place for donating works, maybe you could share the campaign. You can head on over to my Instagram where the campaign is linked in my bio. Thank you so much.
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’m in a great mood today and there’s a few reasons for that. Number one, the weather is cooling down and I am loving it. Number two, I received an order of a box of wine today that I’m very excited about. There’s this wine that I love, it was actually one of the first Rosés I ever liked. And if you know anything about me, I am mostly a Rosé lady. Well, Rosé and champagne, right? So champagne, sparkling Rosé and Rosé are kind of like the three loves of my wine life.
And there’s this one bottle that I had had years and years ago. Probably, I don’t know, like 2014? So that’s like nine years ago. It was one of the first Rosés I ever had. I had it at this Co-op grocery store in Seattle. They were doing a wine tasting and I tasted it and I liked it, bought a bottle and took it home. My partner at the time also really liked it.
This was before Alex, so this is so long ago it’s like a different person. And Alex and I have been together for six years. So that’s kind of wild to think about. But we both liked it so much I went back and bought six bottles. And at that point in my life, I was not a person who buys wine by the case or usually even anyone who buys more than one bottle or two bottles at a time.
I was in a different place financially and just a different place as a person. And so this was really rare. And I really loved that wine. And we drank the six bottles over the course of, I think, that summer. And then I think maybe I bought some more. But then I hadn’t seen that wine in a long time.
And it was interesting, it has a switchblade on the cover, like an illustration of a switchblade. And I always kind of kept an eye out for it. And then when I moved to Sacramento, they had it at the local Co-op here. And I was like, oh my gosh, I think it’s the switchblade wine. I think it’s the same one.
So I bought it and I took it home. I was like, am I still going to like this? At that point I was like, it’s been seven years, my tastes have changed a lot, I’ve changed a lot. But we had that wine and I did still like it. And so then I was buying it at the co-op and then they stopped having it, I think, because it was winter. And I went through this whole thing, I was ordering it by the case from them.
And then I ended up finding this website online that also has it that would let me buy different quantities. And so I started buying it there. Anyways, this is like the longest story about nothing. But I’m always really excited when the wine delivery comes because I have to be here to sign for it because it’s alcohol. So it’s like a little bit the stars need to align for the wine to come at the right time for me to be here to receive it.
It’s funny the hoops I jump through to get this wine. But I really love it. And I’m willing to put that effort in and do that work in order to have this thing I love. And today it worked out perfectly. I was able to be downstairs so that when the UPS person came, I was able to sign and receive my wine and it got here and I’m very happy.
And then the third thing that I’m really feeling yummy warm feelings about is I just got off of a coaching call with a client I’ve worked with for a long time. And this was the final call in the client’s current coaching package. So she’s graduating and moving on. Always a possibility she’ll come back for more coaching later, but for now our coaching journey has come to a close.
And this client worked with me one on one for six months, and then did my very first cohort of Satisfied As Fuck, my small group. And then worked with me one on one for another six months. So we’ve been together for a year and a half. And we were talking on this call about the key takeaways, the biggest lessons she’s learned through a year and a half of coaching with me. And the stuff she was saying was so good. I was like, “Oh, I have to do a podcast and tell everyone all about this.”
So the first thing that she said was one of the most important takeaways from coaching with me was that she has value outside of work. Now, if you listen to this podcast a lot, you’re probably like, “Yeah, we all have value outside of work.” But I think for a lot of people, they don’t believe that.
A lot of people get their sense of worthiness from their profession, from their career, from how they show up at work, what results they create at work, how people see them at work. I’ve encountered this with many different clients where they want to have work/life balance, they want to go to work at nine and leave at five and feel good about it.
But it’s really hard for them to do that because so much of their identity and their worthiness, the way they see their own worthiness, is tied up with being a hard worker, being the hardest worker, being the last person in the office, having a prestige around the kind of worker that they are.
And so one of the very first patterns that I worked on with this client was this idea that she has value outside of work. And after working together, I would say for a few months, she had really shifted into that. But even now, like over a year later than that, this is still one of her big shifts that took place in the coaching together.
Big enough that it was the first thing she listed, even though we’ve worked together much longer than that. And I think the longer we worked together, the more we were able to add on that foundation. In coaching, one of the things we do is we shift thought patterns. We shift a thought pattern from like, I’m worthy because I’m a hard worker, to I’m worthy because I am or I have worth outside of work.
And that is a shift that can happen pretty quickly. But the longer you work on the shift and the longer you continue to practice that and support it and lay groundwork around it, the more deeply the shift takes place and the more sustainable it is. And the easier to sustain it is because it becomes deeply ingrained.
And so this client is at a place now where this isn’t even a question. It’s like a certainty for her that she has value outside of work. And it’s not something her brain, I think, even thinks about that much anymore.
So if you’re a person who ties your worthiness to your work, I just want you to know that there’s hope for you and you can have a different experience. And coaching is a way you can get that different experience.
Okay, the second key takeaway was just because something expects something of you, doesn’t mean you have to do it. I absolutely love this one. I think so many people put so much pressure on themselves that just because someone expects something – Whether it’s at work, in their relationship, whether it’s their kids, whether it’s their parents, whether it’s their sister, or their best friend. They think if someone expects something of them, they have to do it. And it doesn’t mean that.
If someone expects something of you, and you don’t want to do it, you have options. And you can have communication with that person or with those people and figure out other alternatives. And it’s okay for other people to be disappointed. I realize that for a lot of us, we don’t want other people to be disappointed.
And I want to be clear, I’m a recovering people pleaser. I never want anyone to be disappointed. But sometimes someone’s going to be. And something I’ve learned to do over time is figure out do I want them to be disappointed or do I want me to be disappointed?
And it’s okay if I prioritize myself because I am the person who’s in charge of myself and taking care of myself. And someone needs to do that and I’m the only one with all the information to do it because I know myself and inside my head.
And also sometimes other people are going to be disappointed and then it’s a question of when. Like do I want to disappoint them now ahead of time by telling them something’s not going to work? Or do I want to try to do more than I can and then have them be disappointed later when it’s not able to happen?
So just because someone expects something of you, just because someone wants something from you, just because someone wants something to go a certain way, that doesn’t mean you don’t have options. You do. You’re allowed to say no. You’re allowed to negotiate. You’re allowed to renegotiate. If you’ve already made an agreement, you’re allowed to change your mind.
And some of those things are going to feel uncomfortable, but that’s okay. One of the things that coaching does is it teaches you how to navigate discomfort. Often to get what we want in life is going to require discomfort because usually it involves letting other people be disappointed, or it involves doing something difficult, or it involves telling someone something, we’re afraid they’re not going to like hearing. And that’s okay because discomfort is not fatal.
Also, the other thing is, you’re probably experiencing a lot of discomfort now. So I think it’s so impactful to realize you’re probably actually not going to have more discomfort, you’re just going to have different discomfort. You’re going to have discomfort that’s more aligned with you getting what you want. It’s going to maybe be a different kind of discomfort, but you’re totally capable of feeling it and navigating it. And the more you feel and navigate it, the easier it gets.
So those two were the two that my client listed off the top of her head. And the third one is something I told her is one of the things I’ve noticed and I remember being really impactful in us coaching together. And number three is, in order to shift from one thought pattern to a different thought pattern, you have to practice the new thought pattern. And sometimes you have to practice in between baby step thought patterns that move you closer to the new thought pattern.
So when I first started coaching this client, there was a lot of the stuff we were talking about, like the new thoughts were not new to her, but she wasn’t practicing them. So they weren’t becoming habitual for her. And so one of the things that I asked her to do, and this is like in the very first round of one on one when we’d only been coaching together for maybe like a month.
Some of the thoughts that we were discussing as establishing new thought patterns, I asked her to write them down multiple times each and every day. I sometimes call this Bart Simpson-ing a new thought, which actually I think I saw that phrasing online maybe from a post by Simone Seol.
And it’s the idea of writing the same thought over and over again, the way kids used to have to do that on chalkboards. And Bart Simpson is the example because in episodes of The Simpsons he was often getting in trouble. And so he was often writing his lesson over and over again on the chalkboard.
Now, this isn’t always helpful necessarily for kids, like actual kids. But I think for establishing new thought patterns that you want to believe, this can be really powerful. And it’s something I do myself in my own self-coaching practice as well.
So if there’s a thought pattern I have that is not helping me, that’s harming me, that’s getting in the way of me getting what I want. If I have a thought pattern that’s unkind, it’s self-belittling and I want to replace it with something else, whatever the new thought is I want to replace it with, that’s the one I’ll practice over and over.
I like to practice it by writing it over and over on a piece of paper. But you can also practice it by saying it over and over out loud. You can practice it by making it the password on a computer. You can practice it by making it a background on your phone, I do that one sometimes too. But no matter how you choose to practice it, the idea is that you need to practice it in order for it to become habitual.
Things that you think on a regular basis already, those are already habitual. Just like if you were driving from your house to your favorite grocery store, you would just know how to drive there. It’s habitual, you wouldn’t have to think about where you’re going. You can almost do it on autopilot.
So whatever thought patterns you already have, those are on autopilot. They don’t take effort from you. They feel easy, they feel natural, they feel normal. When you want to switch that thought pattern to a different thought pattern, that takes effort the same way it would take effort to learn to drive to a different grocery store.
Like if your favorite grocery store closed and you had to start going somewhere else, the first several times you drove there, you might accidentally autopilot to the old grocery store. You might have to actually follow a GPS. You might forget where you’re going because you don’t have the new habit in place yet.
But you can learn new habits. And learning a new habit, whether you’re driving to a different grocery store or learning a new thought pattern, it’s the same thing, you just have to do it on purpose over and over until it becomes habitual.
Okay, number four, this is another one that my client came up with. You don’t have to have perfect conditions to do things, right? So the client was actually referring to you don’t have to have perfect conditions to practice your thought work, which is what we call it when we’re changing from one thought to another thought like that.
For this client, the perfect conditions were like a pretty notebook, right? So the way she said it was, I don’t have to have my pretty notebook to practice my thought work. But I thought it was such a good general lesson too for anything that you’re working on in life.
If you’re working on a goal. If you want to make new friends. If you want to write a novel. If you want to launch a business. If you want to get a promotion, you don’t need perfect conditions in order to move towards that, right? Perfect conditions are great, but waiting for perfect conditions means you won’t do the thing. And that means you’re not moving closer to your goal, whatever it is.
So coming to believe like, okay, I don’t need perfect conditions. Like it would be great if I could get this letter of recommendation from this person, but I’m just going to move forward without it. Or I’m going to move forward getting a letter of recommendation from someone else or figuring out whatever steps you can take from the place that you are because the place that you are is always the place from which to start.
And there can always be excuses about why we don’t need to get started or why it would be better to start later. But starting now is what gets you going. So don’t wait for perfect conditions, just do what you can with what you have and you’ll be amazed at how far you’ll get doing that.
Okay, number five, the way my client said this was that she assumes everything her brain says is a lie. That’s not how I would personally frame it. So the way I would frame it is assume everything your brain says could be false, right? So the way she does it is she just kind of has the base assumption like thoughts are made up, thoughts are patterns, thoughts are only one way of looking at things.
So if she assumes it’s a lie, she looks for other truths, because some of the thoughts we choose are on purpose and some of the thoughts we choose feel really true. If you want a softer approach to this one, it’s kind of like just assume it could be incorrect. Just assume there’s a different way to see it or there could be a different way to see it. Another way she said this was to take everything with a healthy portion of skepticism.
So, often when our brain is thinking about things our brain is filtering through the lens of what it’s afraid of and what it doesn’t want to have happen, which seems like a silly thing to do. But that’s what negativity bias does, right? It focuses us on what am I afraid of? What am I worried about? How could this hurt my feelings the most? How could this be the most problematic?
And a lot of times we take neutral information and we make it negative. And we take negative information and make it even more negative. And sometimes we even take positive information and make it negative, right?
Like if someone is like, “You look nice,” we’re like, “They’re making fun of me,” right? Not that no one makes fun ever, sometimes people do. But that’s just an example. Sometimes it can be very hard for us to allow things to be positive, especially if we’re in a headspace where we feel really negative.
So when you assume everything your brain says could be incorrect or could be not the whole picture, it kind of allows you to have this flexible baseline where you’re like, maybe there’s a different way of seeing this. Maybe my brain is jumping to some conclusions. Maybe it’s just plain incorrect, right?
And I think this is an especially useful one for all the mean shit our brain says, right? Like I talk a lot on the podcast about how we have that inner voice that kind of belittles us. Anytime your inner voice is belittling you, I think that’s a great time to just assume that what your brain is saying could be untrue.
But sometimes our brains are a little more subtle, right? Sometimes it’s not actively belittling us, but it’s just saying things that sound factual. Like belittling, an example could be like, “Oh, you’re so bad at this. It’s never going to work,” right? Which you might be like, “Wait, is that belittling?” I think that is belittling. I think it’s rude and critical and not helpful.
But something your brain might say that might sound more factual is just like, Susan doesn’t like you. Sarah doesn’t like you. No one likes you. That might not feel belittling, it might feel factual if you’re just in a headspace where it seems like no one likes you.
If your brain is saying something that hurts your feelings or makes you feel bad, maybe just be willing to entertain the idea that it could either be inaccurate or not seeing the whole picture. Because, listen, sometimes people don’t like us. But that doesn’t mean everyone doesn’t like us.
I was coaching this client, too, about making friends. And one of the ideas I shared with her was we don’t need everyone to like us, right? But I love to believe that I’m a great friend for some people. I’m a great friend for the right people.
I kind of am like, oh, I’m a little bit like a spicy curry. Not everyone likes spicy curry. I’m too spicy for some people. I’m not spicy enough for other people. But that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with me. It’s just like I’m not a good fit for everyone, and that’s okay. But that’s a really different frame than, this person doesn’t like me, no one likes me. I’m doomed, I’ll never make friends.
So basically, this one is sort of summed up as don’t believe everything your brain says. Be willing for anything your brain says to just be a little bit wrong, massively wrong. And we didn’t talk about this on the call that I had with my client, but what I would just add in here as someone who’s received a lot of coaching myself, someone who coaches herself, and someone who’s coached a lot of people, is like it can be really fun to be wrong.
I think a lot of people are like, oh, I can’t be wrong, that’s terrible. If I’m wrong, that’s bad. It means something bad about me. But one of the things that coaching has really taught me is that being wrong can be really wonderful. And a lot of the things that I’ve been wrong about have been mean things I thought about myself.
And so in addition to being willing to entertain the idea that what your brain is saying is incorrect, also entertain the idea that that could be delicious.
Okay, the final takeaway is find ways to keep it fun. Now, the it here for the client, when I say find ways to keep it fun, was coaching and thought work and the things we were doing together. But I think this actually applies to anything.
And so the way that this client kept it fun was by using stickers. And this is actually something I recommend for a lot of clients. Stickers are just fun, and they’re shiny, and they’re colorful, and the brain likes stuff like that. And if you get to put a sticker on a piece of paper every time you take a step towards your goal, that can feel really rewarding.
It’s visual, you can see the progress you’re making. And it’s just fun. And so I think that’s a great way to do things. Like if you have a new thought you’re trying to practice, like my client was, and you’re writing it down five times a day, you can write it down five times a day and then you can give yourself a sticker for writing it down five times a day, right?
Or if you have a thought you’re trying to practice you could make it sound like it goes to a Lizzo song or something. I do this sometimes where I take a real song and then I sort of do like a Weird Al kind of thing. I do it to be playful and silly a lot and it’s just fun in its own right. But you could also use that as a way to practice your thoughts, by singing it to a fun song. That’s a way to make it fun.
So I think when things are fun, we do more of them. Something I used to say a lot in the beginning of my business was fun gets it done. And I really think that’s true. So if you are trying to work towards a goal, how can you make it fun?
And I think the bigger the goal, the harder the goal, the scarier the goal, the more fucking fun you need. So for some things, stickers might be enough. But for other things you might need way more fun. You might need party streamers, you might need a whole soundtrack, you might need people cheering you on, you might need confetti, you might need ice cream.
I often choose to have champagne as a way to keep things fun and to keep things celebratory. I’m not here to tell you how to make it fun, I’m just here to tell you that making things fun can be extremely powerful and can give so much momentum. And the brain loves to celebrate and be celebrated. And when it sees that it’s being celebrated for things, it’s more likely to want to do those things.
Okay, so let’s go over them all one more time now that we’ve talked through them all. One, you have value outside of work. Two, just because something expects something of you, doesn’t mean you have to do it. Three, you’ve got to practice new thoughts. Anything new you want to build, whether it’s a thought or another kind of habit, you have to practice it. Four, you don’t need perfect conditions to practice to get started to move towards things.
Five, just take the things your brain says with a grain of salt and be willing to entertain the idea that your brain could be wrong about them. And that being wrong about them could be fucking amazing. Six, this is kind of sort of five, take everything with a healthy portion of skepticism. So that’s kind of really more 5.5.And then the final one, which you can call seven or six depending on how you’re counting, is to find ways to keep it fun.
All right, those are my client’s key takeaways from a year and a half of coaching with me. And I just want to say there’s a lot in this episode, if you even pick one thing to implement, that’s going to have a huge impact on your life and your goals and your satisfaction.
And also, the coaching doesn’t need to stop there. You can also hire me for a deep dive in-person coaching day, for one on one coaching, or you can join my small group Satisfied As Fuck, the next cohort starts in October. And you can implement these with me and with all the coaching and support and hilarity and delight that comes along with it. And you can figure out what your key takeaways are from coaching together.
All right. That’s what I have for y’all today. Have a lovely week and I’ll talk to you next time. Okay, bye.
Hey, it’s Kori, I have one additional announcement for you. And that is, I am doing a campaign for RIP Medical Debt. RIP Medical Debt is an incredible nonprofit who is buying up bundled medical debt and forgiving it. So basically, because the medical debt is bundled together, it’s sold at a fraction of its original cost.
So when you make donations to RIP Medical Debt, your donation has like 100x impact, right? So if you donate $100, the impact is like $10,000 of medical debt, roughly, that is going to get forgiven. And I’ve been following this nonprofit for a while, I’ve been super inspired by them. And so I decided to do a campaign with them.
Also, if you donate $100 or more to my campaign and send me a picture of your donation receipt, you can get a free 30 minute one on one coaching call with me. And if you can’t donate $100, I totally get it. It’s a lot of money. And I would still love it if you would donate another amount. Or if you aren’t in a place for donating works, maybe you could share the campaign. You can head on over to my Instagram where the campaign is linked in my bio. Thank you so much.
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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