140. Make It Appetizing
When you think about working on your goals, how do you feel?
Are you hot and bothered to get started?
Or are you sort of dreading it?
When you actually sit down to do the work, how do you feel?
Are you enchanted by the process?
Or are you counting the minutes until you can take a break and scroll Tiktok?
When you’ve put in the time and effort and you achieve your goal, how do you feel?
Does it feel dreamy and delicious to have followed through on your vision?
Or do you feel weirdly let down by the whole thing?
To put it a different way, is setting and achieving goals appetizing and enjoyable or does it feel more like suffering?
For so many people (maybe including you?), setting and achieving goals is not actually very fun.
And a lot of people think it shouldn’t be fun.
It’s goals.
It’s work.
Why should it be fun?
But guess what, when things are fun (or at least more appetizing), it’s a lot easier to get yourself to do them.
And it’s also a much more enjoyable way to achieve goals.
Which is wonderful for its own sake.
And which also means you’re more likely to keep wanting to set and achieve goals.
It’s a win/win and it feels like it too.
Join me this week to learn how you can intentionally make your goals more appetizing and what kind of results you can expect when you do!
Because life is too long and too short for goals to feel like suffering.
Want to create a wildly delicious life and career? Let’s work together.
I have one-on-one coaching slots opening up soon. Click here to schedule a consult call with me so we can talk about how one-on-one coaching could support you in creating a magical life and career.
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Want something a little more extra? I have just the thing. My year-long coaching and mentorship program, Unhinged AF, is the most extra, extravagant offering I currently have. One-on-one coaching, in-person or virtual deep dive days, and special surprises. If this sounds like just the thing for you, book a consult call and let’s discuss a customized program that’s all about helping you break free from your current life and career to build something that truly blows your mind.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why building the skill of making something appetizing is extremely worthwhile.
The 2 tiers to making things appetizing.
How most people often try to get themselves to do something they’re not excited about.
Why people don’t try to make things more appetizing.
The easiest and hardest ways to make something more appetizing.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about the concept of making things appetizing.
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 hope this finds you very well. I’m doing pretty well myself, although I actually am recording this episode for the second time because I recorded it yesterday and then when I went to save the file, my computer, I don’t know what happened. But I had to restart the computer and I lost the file.
And I was so sad because I was really in love with the way that the podcast had come out yesterday. So we’re just going to do it again. And we’re going to hopefully get as much or even more magic, or maybe just different magic.
So, yesterday when I recorded this podcast for the first time I was super jazzed coming off of a group coaching call where I’m in the client mix, not on the coaching side. So for those of you who don’t know, which is probably all of you because I don’t think I’ve talked about it yet, I’m doing this really cool coaching offering with Susan Hyatt, and it’s called The Ultimate.
And I coach with her for a year. So 12 months of one on one coaching. And I also get to join all of her group stuff, with a few exceptions. But basically most of her other offerings, I’m also available to just join in on and I get four VIP days.
So if this sounds familiar to you, I have a kind of similar offer right now called Unhinged As Fuck. And yes, I modeled that offer based around Susan Hyatt’s offer because I thought it was such a cool concept of a year of mentorship plus in-person deep dive days. She calls hers VIP days, I call mine deep dive days. And because Susan has a bunch of other programming, I get access to all of that as well.
And so as part of that, I’m in this small group called Beyond, which I think is basically just about creating a life and career or business kind of like beyond everything you’d ever imagined, beyond your wildest dreams, like beyond what you currently think is possible. It’s a really cool space.
And Susan has been a coach for a long time, I think something like 16 or more years. And she’s very seasoned and it’s super fun to work with someone who has been in the game that long. And so being in her small group and seeing how she does things and the kind of materials she’s created for us, her clients, has been so inspiring.
And I’m like, ooh, I think what I feel is that I’m going to soon be kind of recreating and redesigning my small group, Satisfied As Fuck. Obviously, mine’s not going to be just like Susan’s. I’m a different coach with a different way of being and way of coaching and kind of a different topic, although they’re similar. But I just like the structure that Susan brings and so I want to create a kind of similar structure for my own program.
Every time I run Satisfied As Fuck, it’s been a little bit different. I mean, I’m only in the second time, but I learn something every time and I’m getting better and better at coaching in a group and understanding what the group needs and what kind of tools they need more explicitly. And it’s so fun to be in someone else’s group when they’re much more seasoned and everything is kind of more advanced, right? Like I said, Susan’s been doing this for a long time.
I think they’re both super fun. I think with Satisfied As Fuck it’s also like people got to come with me on the journey of me even discovering what that is and what it means. And clients have had really wonderful results and created amazing things also. But it’s fun just every time I do this program, to sort of have the opportunity to reimagine it and level it up and help my clients create even more and more satisfaction.
So that’s what I was super excited about yesterday, the first time I recorded this podcast. And I think it relates really well to what I wanted to talk to you about, which is this concept of making things appetizing.
So when you’re thinking about something like creating new materials for a program you’re running, that can be a really appetizing prospect. Like ooh, it’s going to be so fun and interesting to make these materials, I’m so inspired. Which is how I’m feeling right now. Or making materials for a program can feel really unappetizing, really like, ugh, I don’t want to do that work. It’s going to be a drag. I’ll have to take all this time, it’s going to be hard.
And I kind of wanted to capitalize on the buoyancy I was feeling to kind of talk about this because sometimes this does happen where just through whatever circumstances, right, like through me being in this small group as a client I got this idea to redo my materials and it felt really appetizing. It felt really delicious like, oh, this will be fun, this is going to be so cool, my clients are going to benefit so much.
And so I didn’t have to kind of do the work in my brain to make it appetizing because that was sort of happening already. But a lot of times in life that won’t happen already. So building the skill of knowing how to make something appetizing on purpose, that’s a very useful skill. And there are two main tiers to making something appetizing.
Number one is what we were just talking about, is like the story. Making it sound appetizing to yourself. And often this happens by focusing on what’s the outcome going to be? What are the benefits going to be? Why is it going to be worthwhile?
So another example is I do physical therapy pretty much every day and I have a really high follow-through track record with it. And part of why I’m able to do that is because I’ve made it appetizing to myself in the story I tell about it.
I tell a powerful, appealing story about how doing this physical therapy is going to mean that I’m able to keep taking my long walks that I really like. And doing the physical therapy is going to mean that I’m going to be able to stay active as I age. And in the short-term doing the physical therapy is worthwhile because it’s helped me decrease the pain in my knee and the pain in my hip, and those are things I care about.
So I don’t really like the activity of doing the physical therapy. Sometimes it’s a little bit satisfying to be like, okay, I just did like 20 clams and I kind of feel accomplished. But doing them themselves, that’s the kind of thing that I might put off if I didn’t have that appetizing story.
And then the second level of making something appetizing is making the actual activity itself more pleasurable, like easier to do, more pleasurable, more appetizing with the circumstances in the moment. And so the way I do that with physical therapy is I either play music or I play a podcast.
Or I actually have this one quad stretch that I do that I have to kind of hold. I have a kind of short attention span, so sometimes it’s hard for me to stay in these longer stretches. So I watch TikToks. I turn my TikToks on and then I set a timer for 45 seconds. And then I do like two sets of 45 seconds on each leg and I’m able to stay and make that appetizing. I’m able to make the activity more pleasurable and appealing by both the storytelling about why I’m doing it and by the actual changes I’ve made to the doing of it.
So, even though the situation yesterday in Susan Hyatt’s group kind of made me think about this and realize I wanted to tell you all about it, this actually isn’t a new idea. Because a couple of months ago I was coaching one of my clients, and I don’t remember the exact details, but I think they were trying to get themselves to follow through on something they wanted to follow through on. Let’s just say it was like, I don’t know, calling a doctor’s office or something, but I’m actually not sure what it was.
And the way they were trying to get themselves to do it was by kind of telling a disempowering, shaming story of like, oh, you should have already done this. You’re supposed to be an adult, blah, blah, blah.
I don’t remember their exact thought patterns, but it was just like, these are the common kind of thought patterns people have when they’re not doing something that part of them wants them to be doing, right? Like calling and making an appointment or cleaning out the closet, or rewriting your resume or reaching out to some people for networking, right?
A lot of us tell ourselves a disempowering story about how terrible we are that we haven’t done it already. And then we also make doing the activity really unpleasurable by beating ourselves up during it or we schedule way too big of a block of time to do it that’s going to feel really painful and uncomfortable. And we don’t find ways to make it more appetizing, more enjoyable, and also just more doable right?
Having something be doable is a way to make it appetizing. And the metaphor I was telling this client is I was like, we’re going to write your calendar for tomorrow and have your to-do items on it. But we’re not going to have a to-do item that feels like eating a handful of dry lentils. And that’s really what I remember from the coaching, is just this visual of someone just like being like, well I need nutrients, so I guess I’ll just eat this handful of dry lentils.
First of all, can you even eat dry lentils? That would probably make you sick. And even if you can, probably not very delicious, right? You want to soak the lentils and you’ve got to cook the lentils, you’ve got to season the lentils, you’ve got to put some like fresh cilantro on the lentils. Just because you need to nourish yourself doesn’t mean that all nourishment is created equally. And in this metaphor I’m comparing feeding yourself to doing the things that are on your to-do list.
And again, the way we make it more delightful to be nourished is we make it more appetizing. With literal lentils, we do that through seasoning and spices and cooking and garnishes like yummy cilantro, if you think it’s yummy. I think it’s yummy. I know some of y’all think it tastes like soap, but anyways.
And with the activities in our life, whether it’s calling the doctor, whether it’s applying for new jobs, whether it’s doing PT like me, it’s about telling yourself a powerful, appealing story that makes it appetizing ahead of time to get yourself to do it. And then it’s also about what kind of little additions or tweaks or deletions can you make to make the actual activity itself more enjoyable.
Like with my physical therapy I listen to music, I listen to podcasts, I watch TikToks. There’s other stuff where maybe making it more enjoyable means doing it in smaller chunks. Like working on your resume for 25 minutes and then giving yourself a five minute break where you do something that’s pleasurable to sort of like mix in the pleasure with the activity and give yourself a little reward.
And with something like redoing the material for my group, there’s all the excitement and appetizing feeling I have from being on Susan Hyatt’s call and being the client on the receiving end of great program materials. And then there’s also like, how am I going to make it fun to actually do the edits to the materials?
And I was just talking to Susan today, because we have one of our one on one calls. And we’re having a VIP day together in Sonoma County at some point, I think in July. And I was like, oh, I think maybe I want to work on it together. So that’s a way that I can make it more pleasurable. Now, could I do it alone on my own? Yeah, sure. I do a lot of stuff alone on my own, but to me, that’s not the most appetizing way to do things.
That’s actually why I buy coaching packages a lot of the time. I know coaching tools, I’m a really skilled coach and I can coach myself. I have blind spots that I can’t see because we all have blind spots. But also, I just find it to be more pleasurable, more appetizing to work with someone else. To work with a coach, especially a coach who is further along in their business than I am or has some kind of specialized skill set that I don’t have.
And I like the storytelling of that, like, oh, I’m going to be in community with somebody. I’m going to get to meet with them, we’re going to have fun, we’re going to build a relationship. And then I like the actuality also. I like the action of being on a coaching call with someone else who’s going to make jokes with me, but also hold me accountable and also give me the insights they have from running a business for like 16 years, when I’ve only been running my business for five.
I’m not sure if you can hear it, but the leaf blowers are out in full force, which is a very Sacramento thing. There are always leaf blowers here. And the leaf blowers agree, they agree that it’s much more enjoyable to make things appetizing, but also guess what? It makes it much more likely you’ll actually do the thing.
And so many of the people who come to me for coaching, there’s something they want to do that they’re not doing. And they’re not doing it either because they don’t know how, they haven’t figured out how to do it. Or they kind of just have an inertia obstacle. And so if you have an inertia obstacle, finding ways to make things more appetizing, both in the storytelling element of them and then the actual doing of them, that’s going to give you a lot more power to actually get that shit done.
And if there’s some other kind of obstacle, like there’s some kind of information you need that you don’t have, something like that, you can also use this tool to make it more appetizing to go learn that information. Whether you need to hire an expert or whether you need to do some Google searches, whatever it is. Everything in your life this can apply to.
And I think one of the reasons that people don’t make things more appetizing is that I think a lot of people, especially people socialized as women and especially people socialized with marginalized identities, on some level they think they don’t deserve it. They think they don’t deserve for life to be pleasurable and good and for them to feel good while they’re achieving their goals.
There’s this thing I come across a lot where people on some level think they have to suffer in order to have the good thing. They think it’s supposed to feel painful. And guess what? You’re a mammal, you don’t want to feel pain. It’s sort of against our wiring, right? We usually go away from pain. We’re like, ouch, ouch, I don’t think so.
So I kind of want to offer for you, what if you were willing to believe you did deserve it? What if you were willing to believe you’re allowed to have an appetizing story and an appetizing experience of the things you want to do? What if you were willing to give yourself permission to have pleasure and joy even as you go after your goals?
And one little thing I want to add too is sometimes an appetizing thing to do is to have a little attitude problem. And I think this is so funny because attitude problems get such a bad rap, but I think they can be very pleasurable if they are kind of used for you instead of against you.
So I’m a person who definitely has little attitude problems sometimes. And when I was younger, like in coaching as a client I would try to hide that from the coach. And I’ve really come to embrace coaches where I can kind of bring out my attitude problem and be like, okay, I hear what you’re saying, but here I have this attitude problem. And something I’ve really come around to is the idea that that part can come too.
So if there’s something I’m trying to do, again like physical therapy, I have a little attitude problem about that too, sometimes. So I don’t want you all to think I’m just like Pollyanna over here, like and then I tell myself a powerful story and then I do it and it’s amazing.
It’s a little bit more like this, where I’m like, my brain is like, “I don’t want to do physical therapy again. I do this shit every day.” And I’m like, okay, but remember, we like taking these long walks around the neighborhood, we really like that. And if we want to be able to do that and not be in pain, this is the thing you can do.
And then my brain is like, “Grumble, grumble, grumble.” But it’s like, “Okay, I do kind of like the long walks.” And I’m like, yeah, I know. And then it’s like doing the thing and then it’s like listening to the TikToks. And it’s like, “Grumble, grumble.” And I’m like, okay, I know. But we can have fun while we do this and it can be pleasurable, and we can still do it. And then we can have the outcome we want. And my brain is like, “Okay, I want the outcome. So I’ll do it.”
And I wanted to break that down for you because I think that makes it much more doable. If you’re like, oh, I can tell myself a powerful story, I can find ways to make the experience more enjoyable. And I can also bring my grumbly, grumbly little attitude problem along with me, right? And that can be part of it.
That can be part of a successful life. That can be part of a successful physical therapy at home practice. That can be part of a successful job search. That can be part of a successful marriage if you have a kind of a grumbly attitude problem about your significant other.
And this kind of relates to the podcast we had recently about reparenting. And so in this instance, the parent, it’s like my internal wise, gentle parent is helping make a situation appetizing, while loving the part of me that has an attitude problem and would really rather not do it. So I’m not battling against myself. I’m working with myself. I’m working with the attitude problem. And I’m just choosing to also orient towards pleasure and appetizing and satisfaction and yumminess and delight.
And the final thing I’ll say is I think one of the easiest and hardest ways to do this is how you talk to yourself, right? One of the things that makes so many things so unappealing is that we’re going to say mean things to ourselves while we do it. And one of the simplest ways to make it more pleasurable is just to say kind things to yourself while you do it, kind and supportive things.
It’s also hard because it is very challenging to change our internal dialogue. That’s one of the key things we do in coaching, we change how you talk to yourself. When you change how you talk to yourself inside your head, whole worlds open up.
You’re capable of doing things you weren’t capable of doing before because when you have a kinder supportive voice in your head, it feels much safer to try new things, take risks, put yourself out there, go after things you’ve been wanting to go after but been too scared to or knew that if you did go after them you’d say a bunch of mean shit to yourself.
And so that’s part of making it appetizing too. When we talk about telling a powerful, appealing, appetizing story, it’s not just about who you’re going to become or what’s going to be available to you. Those things are good, and you should do this. It’s also about being like, hey, it’s okay to do this imperfectly. It’s okay for you to find ways to make this more pleasurable for yourself. It’s okay if we maybe just do half the amount of PT today because you’re feeling tired.
So it’s also about kindness and gentleness and supportiveness. And I feel like I keep saying one more thing. But one more thing, I was talking to a client recently where I was like, hey, and we’re not lying to ourselves. You’re not being like, “Hey, you’re the best at this,” if you’re not the best. You’re finding kind, true supportive things you can say.
An example could be like, oh, you know what, you’re doing your PT every day and that’s amazing. And you seem to be struggling with this one thing, so maybe we need to find a different way to do it or get some more help or stuff like that.
So it’s not about lying to yourself. It’s not about pumping yourself up. It’s just about speaking kindly and supportively. I mean, honestly, really, it’s about treating yourself with dignity. And that seems like such a low bar, but it’s such a high bar for so many of us. Like the internal voice we have doesn’t treat us with dignity.
And so even just switching to dignity is such a way to help us be able to do the things we haven’t been doing. And it’s going to feel like a much more appetizing, appealing, powerful way to talk to yourself if you’re used to being super critical. And if you’re used to being super critical, you might need to move to neutral first.
Sometimes going from supercritical to super supportive is too big of a leap. So if you have a supercritical internal voice, just try going to neutral. So it can go from like, “You’re terrible at PT,” to like, “Oh, you’re doing PT.” And then eventually we can work our way up to like, “Good job. You’re doing a great job. Good job, you did the PT. 10,000 million points.”
All right, that’s what I have for y’all today. Basically, the idea that when you choose to make things appetizing, both through the way you talk to yourself about them and the way you do them, then you’re going to do a lot more of that shit you’ve been trying to do, and you’re going to have a lot more fun doing it. And that is what’s going to help you achieve your goals and create a life and career that’s satisfying as fuck.
And you don’t have to do that shit alone. You can get in the next Satisfying As Fuck group, it’s going to launch in the fall. Or you can come work with me one on one starting right now. I have two open spaces for new one on one clients, and I would love for you to be one of them. All right, that’s what I have for you. Have a lovely week, and I’ll 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.
Hello, hello, hello, happy Wednesday. I hope this finds you very well. I’m doing pretty well myself, although I actually am recording this episode for the second time because I recorded it yesterday and then when I went to save the file, my computer, I don’t know what happened. But I had to restart the computer and I lost the file.
And I was so sad because I was really in love with the way that the podcast had come out yesterday. So we’re just going to do it again. And we’re going to hopefully get as much or even more magic, or maybe just different magic.
So, yesterday when I recorded this podcast for the first time I was super jazzed coming off of a group coaching call where I’m in the client mix, not on the coaching side. So for those of you who don’t know, which is probably all of you because I don’t think I’ve talked about it yet, I’m doing this really cool coaching offering with Susan Hyatt, and it’s called The Ultimate.
And I coach with her for a year. So 12 months of one on one coaching. And I also get to join all of her group stuff, with a few exceptions. But basically most of her other offerings, I’m also available to just join in on and I get four VIP days.
So if this sounds familiar to you, I have a kind of similar offer right now called Unhinged As Fuck. And yes, I modeled that offer based around Susan Hyatt’s offer because I thought it was such a cool concept of a year of mentorship plus in-person deep dive days. She calls hers VIP days, I call mine deep dive days. And because Susan has a bunch of other programming, I get access to all of that as well.
And so as part of that, I’m in this small group called Beyond, which I think is basically just about creating a life and career or business kind of like beyond everything you’d ever imagined, beyond your wildest dreams, like beyond what you currently think is possible. It’s a really cool space.
And Susan has been a coach for a long time, I think something like 16 or more years. And she’s very seasoned and it’s super fun to work with someone who has been in the game that long. And so being in her small group and seeing how she does things and the kind of materials she’s created for us, her clients, has been so inspiring.
And I’m like, ooh, I think what I feel is that I’m going to soon be kind of recreating and redesigning my small group, Satisfied As Fuck. Obviously, mine’s not going to be just like Susan’s. I’m a different coach with a different way of being and way of coaching and kind of a different topic, although they’re similar. But I just like the structure that Susan brings and so I want to create a kind of similar structure for my own program.
Every time I run Satisfied As Fuck, it’s been a little bit different. I mean, I’m only in the second time, but I learn something every time and I’m getting better and better at coaching in a group and understanding what the group needs and what kind of tools they need more explicitly. And it’s so fun to be in someone else’s group when they’re much more seasoned and everything is kind of more advanced, right? Like I said, Susan’s been doing this for a long time.
I think they’re both super fun. I think with Satisfied As Fuck it’s also like people got to come with me on the journey of me even discovering what that is and what it means. And clients have had really wonderful results and created amazing things also. But it’s fun just every time I do this program, to sort of have the opportunity to reimagine it and level it up and help my clients create even more and more satisfaction.
So that’s what I was super excited about yesterday, the first time I recorded this podcast. And I think it relates really well to what I wanted to talk to you about, which is this concept of making things appetizing.
So when you’re thinking about something like creating new materials for a program you’re running, that can be a really appetizing prospect. Like ooh, it’s going to be so fun and interesting to make these materials, I’m so inspired. Which is how I’m feeling right now. Or making materials for a program can feel really unappetizing, really like, ugh, I don’t want to do that work. It’s going to be a drag. I’ll have to take all this time, it’s going to be hard.
And I kind of wanted to capitalize on the buoyancy I was feeling to kind of talk about this because sometimes this does happen where just through whatever circumstances, right, like through me being in this small group as a client I got this idea to redo my materials and it felt really appetizing. It felt really delicious like, oh, this will be fun, this is going to be so cool, my clients are going to benefit so much.
And so I didn’t have to kind of do the work in my brain to make it appetizing because that was sort of happening already. But a lot of times in life that won’t happen already. So building the skill of knowing how to make something appetizing on purpose, that’s a very useful skill. And there are two main tiers to making something appetizing.
Number one is what we were just talking about, is like the story. Making it sound appetizing to yourself. And often this happens by focusing on what’s the outcome going to be? What are the benefits going to be? Why is it going to be worthwhile?
So another example is I do physical therapy pretty much every day and I have a really high follow-through track record with it. And part of why I’m able to do that is because I’ve made it appetizing to myself in the story I tell about it.
I tell a powerful, appealing story about how doing this physical therapy is going to mean that I’m able to keep taking my long walks that I really like. And doing the physical therapy is going to mean that I’m going to be able to stay active as I age. And in the short-term doing the physical therapy is worthwhile because it’s helped me decrease the pain in my knee and the pain in my hip, and those are things I care about.
So I don’t really like the activity of doing the physical therapy. Sometimes it’s a little bit satisfying to be like, okay, I just did like 20 clams and I kind of feel accomplished. But doing them themselves, that’s the kind of thing that I might put off if I didn’t have that appetizing story.
And then the second level of making something appetizing is making the actual activity itself more pleasurable, like easier to do, more pleasurable, more appetizing with the circumstances in the moment. And so the way I do that with physical therapy is I either play music or I play a podcast.
Or I actually have this one quad stretch that I do that I have to kind of hold. I have a kind of short attention span, so sometimes it’s hard for me to stay in these longer stretches. So I watch TikToks. I turn my TikToks on and then I set a timer for 45 seconds. And then I do like two sets of 45 seconds on each leg and I’m able to stay and make that appetizing. I’m able to make the activity more pleasurable and appealing by both the storytelling about why I’m doing it and by the actual changes I’ve made to the doing of it.
So, even though the situation yesterday in Susan Hyatt’s group kind of made me think about this and realize I wanted to tell you all about it, this actually isn’t a new idea. Because a couple of months ago I was coaching one of my clients, and I don’t remember the exact details, but I think they were trying to get themselves to follow through on something they wanted to follow through on. Let’s just say it was like, I don’t know, calling a doctor’s office or something, but I’m actually not sure what it was.
And the way they were trying to get themselves to do it was by kind of telling a disempowering, shaming story of like, oh, you should have already done this. You’re supposed to be an adult, blah, blah, blah.
I don’t remember their exact thought patterns, but it was just like, these are the common kind of thought patterns people have when they’re not doing something that part of them wants them to be doing, right? Like calling and making an appointment or cleaning out the closet, or rewriting your resume or reaching out to some people for networking, right?
A lot of us tell ourselves a disempowering story about how terrible we are that we haven’t done it already. And then we also make doing the activity really unpleasurable by beating ourselves up during it or we schedule way too big of a block of time to do it that’s going to feel really painful and uncomfortable. And we don’t find ways to make it more appetizing, more enjoyable, and also just more doable right?
Having something be doable is a way to make it appetizing. And the metaphor I was telling this client is I was like, we’re going to write your calendar for tomorrow and have your to-do items on it. But we’re not going to have a to-do item that feels like eating a handful of dry lentils. And that’s really what I remember from the coaching, is just this visual of someone just like being like, well I need nutrients, so I guess I’ll just eat this handful of dry lentils.
First of all, can you even eat dry lentils? That would probably make you sick. And even if you can, probably not very delicious, right? You want to soak the lentils and you’ve got to cook the lentils, you’ve got to season the lentils, you’ve got to put some like fresh cilantro on the lentils. Just because you need to nourish yourself doesn’t mean that all nourishment is created equally. And in this metaphor I’m comparing feeding yourself to doing the things that are on your to-do list.
And again, the way we make it more delightful to be nourished is we make it more appetizing. With literal lentils, we do that through seasoning and spices and cooking and garnishes like yummy cilantro, if you think it’s yummy. I think it’s yummy. I know some of y’all think it tastes like soap, but anyways.
And with the activities in our life, whether it’s calling the doctor, whether it’s applying for new jobs, whether it’s doing PT like me, it’s about telling yourself a powerful, appealing story that makes it appetizing ahead of time to get yourself to do it. And then it’s also about what kind of little additions or tweaks or deletions can you make to make the actual activity itself more enjoyable.
Like with my physical therapy I listen to music, I listen to podcasts, I watch TikToks. There’s other stuff where maybe making it more enjoyable means doing it in smaller chunks. Like working on your resume for 25 minutes and then giving yourself a five minute break where you do something that’s pleasurable to sort of like mix in the pleasure with the activity and give yourself a little reward.
And with something like redoing the material for my group, there’s all the excitement and appetizing feeling I have from being on Susan Hyatt’s call and being the client on the receiving end of great program materials. And then there’s also like, how am I going to make it fun to actually do the edits to the materials?
And I was just talking to Susan today, because we have one of our one on one calls. And we’re having a VIP day together in Sonoma County at some point, I think in July. And I was like, oh, I think maybe I want to work on it together. So that’s a way that I can make it more pleasurable. Now, could I do it alone on my own? Yeah, sure. I do a lot of stuff alone on my own, but to me, that’s not the most appetizing way to do things.
That’s actually why I buy coaching packages a lot of the time. I know coaching tools, I’m a really skilled coach and I can coach myself. I have blind spots that I can’t see because we all have blind spots. But also, I just find it to be more pleasurable, more appetizing to work with someone else. To work with a coach, especially a coach who is further along in their business than I am or has some kind of specialized skill set that I don’t have.
And I like the storytelling of that, like, oh, I’m going to be in community with somebody. I’m going to get to meet with them, we’re going to have fun, we’re going to build a relationship. And then I like the actuality also. I like the action of being on a coaching call with someone else who’s going to make jokes with me, but also hold me accountable and also give me the insights they have from running a business for like 16 years, when I’ve only been running my business for five.
I’m not sure if you can hear it, but the leaf blowers are out in full force, which is a very Sacramento thing. There are always leaf blowers here. And the leaf blowers agree, they agree that it’s much more enjoyable to make things appetizing, but also guess what? It makes it much more likely you’ll actually do the thing.
And so many of the people who come to me for coaching, there’s something they want to do that they’re not doing. And they’re not doing it either because they don’t know how, they haven’t figured out how to do it. Or they kind of just have an inertia obstacle. And so if you have an inertia obstacle, finding ways to make things more appetizing, both in the storytelling element of them and then the actual doing of them, that’s going to give you a lot more power to actually get that shit done.
And if there’s some other kind of obstacle, like there’s some kind of information you need that you don’t have, something like that, you can also use this tool to make it more appetizing to go learn that information. Whether you need to hire an expert or whether you need to do some Google searches, whatever it is. Everything in your life this can apply to.
And I think one of the reasons that people don’t make things more appetizing is that I think a lot of people, especially people socialized as women and especially people socialized with marginalized identities, on some level they think they don’t deserve it. They think they don’t deserve for life to be pleasurable and good and for them to feel good while they’re achieving their goals.
There’s this thing I come across a lot where people on some level think they have to suffer in order to have the good thing. They think it’s supposed to feel painful. And guess what? You’re a mammal, you don’t want to feel pain. It’s sort of against our wiring, right? We usually go away from pain. We’re like, ouch, ouch, I don’t think so.
So I kind of want to offer for you, what if you were willing to believe you did deserve it? What if you were willing to believe you’re allowed to have an appetizing story and an appetizing experience of the things you want to do? What if you were willing to give yourself permission to have pleasure and joy even as you go after your goals?
And one little thing I want to add too is sometimes an appetizing thing to do is to have a little attitude problem. And I think this is so funny because attitude problems get such a bad rap, but I think they can be very pleasurable if they are kind of used for you instead of against you.
So I’m a person who definitely has little attitude problems sometimes. And when I was younger, like in coaching as a client I would try to hide that from the coach. And I’ve really come to embrace coaches where I can kind of bring out my attitude problem and be like, okay, I hear what you’re saying, but here I have this attitude problem. And something I’ve really come around to is the idea that that part can come too.
So if there’s something I’m trying to do, again like physical therapy, I have a little attitude problem about that too, sometimes. So I don’t want you all to think I’m just like Pollyanna over here, like and then I tell myself a powerful story and then I do it and it’s amazing.
It’s a little bit more like this, where I’m like, my brain is like, “I don’t want to do physical therapy again. I do this shit every day.” And I’m like, okay, but remember, we like taking these long walks around the neighborhood, we really like that. And if we want to be able to do that and not be in pain, this is the thing you can do.
And then my brain is like, “Grumble, grumble, grumble.” But it’s like, “Okay, I do kind of like the long walks.” And I’m like, yeah, I know. And then it’s like doing the thing and then it’s like listening to the TikToks. And it’s like, “Grumble, grumble.” And I’m like, okay, I know. But we can have fun while we do this and it can be pleasurable, and we can still do it. And then we can have the outcome we want. And my brain is like, “Okay, I want the outcome. So I’ll do it.”
And I wanted to break that down for you because I think that makes it much more doable. If you’re like, oh, I can tell myself a powerful story, I can find ways to make the experience more enjoyable. And I can also bring my grumbly, grumbly little attitude problem along with me, right? And that can be part of it.
That can be part of a successful life. That can be part of a successful physical therapy at home practice. That can be part of a successful job search. That can be part of a successful marriage if you have a kind of a grumbly attitude problem about your significant other.
And this kind of relates to the podcast we had recently about reparenting. And so in this instance, the parent, it’s like my internal wise, gentle parent is helping make a situation appetizing, while loving the part of me that has an attitude problem and would really rather not do it. So I’m not battling against myself. I’m working with myself. I’m working with the attitude problem. And I’m just choosing to also orient towards pleasure and appetizing and satisfaction and yumminess and delight.
And the final thing I’ll say is I think one of the easiest and hardest ways to do this is how you talk to yourself, right? One of the things that makes so many things so unappealing is that we’re going to say mean things to ourselves while we do it. And one of the simplest ways to make it more pleasurable is just to say kind things to yourself while you do it, kind and supportive things.
It’s also hard because it is very challenging to change our internal dialogue. That’s one of the key things we do in coaching, we change how you talk to yourself. When you change how you talk to yourself inside your head, whole worlds open up.
You’re capable of doing things you weren’t capable of doing before because when you have a kinder supportive voice in your head, it feels much safer to try new things, take risks, put yourself out there, go after things you’ve been wanting to go after but been too scared to or knew that if you did go after them you’d say a bunch of mean shit to yourself.
And so that’s part of making it appetizing too. When we talk about telling a powerful, appealing, appetizing story, it’s not just about who you’re going to become or what’s going to be available to you. Those things are good, and you should do this. It’s also about being like, hey, it’s okay to do this imperfectly. It’s okay for you to find ways to make this more pleasurable for yourself. It’s okay if we maybe just do half the amount of PT today because you’re feeling tired.
So it’s also about kindness and gentleness and supportiveness. And I feel like I keep saying one more thing. But one more thing, I was talking to a client recently where I was like, hey, and we’re not lying to ourselves. You’re not being like, “Hey, you’re the best at this,” if you’re not the best. You’re finding kind, true supportive things you can say.
An example could be like, oh, you know what, you’re doing your PT every day and that’s amazing. And you seem to be struggling with this one thing, so maybe we need to find a different way to do it or get some more help or stuff like that.
So it’s not about lying to yourself. It’s not about pumping yourself up. It’s just about speaking kindly and supportively. I mean, honestly, really, it’s about treating yourself with dignity. And that seems like such a low bar, but it’s such a high bar for so many of us. Like the internal voice we have doesn’t treat us with dignity.
And so even just switching to dignity is such a way to help us be able to do the things we haven’t been doing. And it’s going to feel like a much more appetizing, appealing, powerful way to talk to yourself if you’re used to being super critical. And if you’re used to being super critical, you might need to move to neutral first.
Sometimes going from supercritical to super supportive is too big of a leap. So if you have a supercritical internal voice, just try going to neutral. So it can go from like, “You’re terrible at PT,” to like, “Oh, you’re doing PT.” And then eventually we can work our way up to like, “Good job. You’re doing a great job. Good job, you did the PT. 10,000 million points.”
All right, that’s what I have for y’all today. Basically, the idea that when you choose to make things appetizing, both through the way you talk to yourself about them and the way you do them, then you’re going to do a lot more of that shit you’ve been trying to do, and you’re going to have a lot more fun doing it. And that is what’s going to help you achieve your goals and create a life and career that’s satisfying as fuck.
And you don’t have to do that shit alone. You can get in the next Satisfying As Fuck group, it’s going to launch in the fall. Or you can come work with me one on one starting right now. I have two open spaces for new one on one clients, and I would love for you to be one of them. All right, that’s what I have for you. Have a lovely week, and I’ll 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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