62. What to Leave Behind in 2021
The end of the year is kind of arbitrary. It’s not necessarily a better time than any other to make changes in your life. But we do tend to reflect and make plans at this time of year, so this week, we’re talking about what we want to leave behind in 2021, and what we want to bring with us into 2022.
Whether you’re thinking about your career or any other area in your life, there may be things in your current way of being that you just don’t want to bring with you. It could be a habit or a belief or a relationship or a way of speaking to yourself.
But it can be hard to leave these things behind if you’re actively judging yourself about them.
However, there is a way to leave things behind that isn’t about judging them or judging you.
Trying to change from a place of self judgment feels like shit and isn’t very effective, so this week I’ll teach you a new way to say goodbye to the things you don’t want to bring with you into 2022.
Oh and bonus, I’m including a fun little meditation in this week’s episode, and it’s all about letting go of the things you don’t want to take with you any longer.
If you want to supercharge your capacity to create a life that blows your mind, I have some one-on-one coaching slots opening up soon. Send me an email and let's talk about it or click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If there are topics y’all want me to talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
How to decide on what you want to leave behind as we go into a new year.
Why judging your habits as being good or bad isn’t actually helpful, and can even completely backfire.
How to set your judgments aside while still allowing yourself to change.
Where certain things are demonized through our conditioning,
The internal shift you will have to make to leave whatever it is behind in 2021.
My meditation to help decide what you want to leave behind, and what you want to bring in instead.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about what we want to bring with us into 2022 and what we want to leave behind in 2021.
You are listening to Love Your Job (Before You Leave It), the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, happy Wednesday. It is the final Wednesday of the year. And that's pretty exciting. Before we get into this week's topic, I just wanted to tell y'all, so last week we talked about sleep. And it was interesting because I have actually been having really good sleep for a while.
Or I had right up until literally the day I recorded that podcast. And then that night I woke up around five in the morning, and then many times since then actually I have been struggling to stay asleep through the night again, or having trouble falling asleep.
So it's always really interesting to me when that happens. Like I've got the client part of me and I've got the coach part of me. And the coach part of me knows all this stuff, and it's really good and useful and helpful, as you all know. And then the client part of me sometimes isn't around for a while.
So if my sleep is really well managed, that client part of my sleep idea is quiet. But when I started having some sleep struggles, first of all, I was like, “Cool, I did just do a podcast on this so everything I would want to talk to myself about, the part of myself that's the client is all top of mind.” But on the other hand, I was like, “Oh yeah, look at this client part of me who has these tools and they're helpful, but is also losing her shit a little bit.”
And I wanted to bring that up because, as you all know, it's really important to me to always talk about the real things that go on for me because in addition to being a coach, I am a human person with a human brain. And my human brain still has a lot of thoughts and feelings, even with all the coaching tools.
And the coaching tools work, I have an incredible life and I have used the coaching tools to do so much. But I always want to impress upon y'all that it doesn't mean I'm some non-human person. Still very much having a human experience over here.
Also, I was listening to a really great podcast lately, it was a recent episode of The Unfuck Your Brain podcast with Kara Loewentheil. And she had a guest on, Dr. Becky, who also has her own podcast called Good Inside. And in the podcast, one of the things they were talking about, Dr. Becky was talking about being this expert and having all these tools and tips and tricks she teaches her audience. But sometimes she also doesn't follow the things she teaches.
And she was talking about how it's like one part of us that knows all of the information. And then when we're in the moment and when we're really struggling with something, like if we're in the middle of a big feeling, if we're in the middle of a stress response, sometimes we're not able to do the thing, even if we know what the thing is.
So even me as a coach, knowing all the coaching tools, sometimes I'm able to implement them, sometimes I remember to implement them. And sometimes I don't. And what I want to offer to y'all is that that is what I think success looks like.
A lot of my clients, and the past version of myself, think that success looks like being perfect. So if you have these tools and tips and tricks, a lot of people would think success looks like using those perfectly every time.
But for me, success is even implementing them some of the time. And even some of the time being able to go like, “Wait a minute, my brain is totally losing its fucking mind about this thing and I have some tools I could use.” Or even being like, “Oh, my brain just had a meltdown. But now here are some ways I can bring myself back to an even keel and then decide how I want to move forward from here.”
So what I'm really saying is, if we have awareness and if we're like, “Hmm, something's going on,” even if our brain just had a meltdown, or even if we didn't use any of the tools we have, that time when we're like, “Hmm, I can engage with myself kindly about this or do something about this or do things differently.” That is success.
We don't have to be perfect to be good. We don't have to use the coaching tools perfectly to be using the coaching tools. And none of us will ever be using the tools perfectly because we are human beings and perfection is not what we're doing here, like I say all the time. So that's that, also that podcast episode between Dr. Becky and Kara was really great, so I highly recommend that. Go have a listen.
Okay. Now without further ado, let's get into what we're talking about today. And what we're talking about today is what do you want to leave behind in 2021?
So, the end of the year is kind of arbitrary, it's not a better or worse time than any other time to do anything. But it is a time of year, I think, when people reflect a lot and when they're making plans for what they want to do, and who they want to be, and where they want their life to go. And this can happen in all kinds of areas of your life.
It can be what we're mostly talking about here, which is career. But it can be anything. And for the purposes of this podcast, let's just think about everything in your life. Like what, if anything, do you want to leave behind? What do you not want to bring with you?
Maybe it's a habit. Maybe it's an attitude. Maybe it's a belief. Maybe it's a behavior. It could really be anything, just something that you're like, “I'm ready to set that down. I'm ready to say goodbye to that. I'm ready to part with that.”
And something that I really want to offer here is there's a way to leave things behind and to say goodbye to them, that isn't about judging them and it's also not about judging us. So a lot of people have behaviors or habits that they don't want to do anymore. And then they judge themselves for doing them and they judge the habits also.
And I get why we do that, because that's like literally how we were all parented. Or a lot of us were parented, with this kind of shame and judgment and like don't do that, it's wrong and bad. But what I see as a coach, and what I've seen with myself in my own life is that tends to not be helpful and it often tends to backfire.
For instance, let's take a pretty common example, which I would call work adjacent, is like having a habit of drinking a certain amount and maybe wanting to have a habit of drinking not at all or just drinking less. But when people judge and shame the larger quantity of drinking and when they judge and shame themselves for doing the larger quantity of drinking, that does not tend to lead to less drinking.
And I often see it lead to more drinking because people are often drinking as a way to comfort or soothe themselves, or as a way to numb or avoid. And so if they're creating all this negative emotion with their judgments of themselves and their judgments of that behavior, then they're like, “This fucking sucks. I don't want to hang out with these negative feelings.” And they're like, “Hmm, what do I do when I don't want to hang out with my negative feelings? Oh, I know, I have a glass of wine.”
So in that way, the judgment and shame can actually fuel the behavior versus helping us cut down on it. So that's really key for this idea of what do we want to leave behind in 2021 because it's like think about what you might want to leave behind and then think about if you have some judgments about that.
And then can we set those judgments aside and see that this thing, whatever it is, is probably something that we learned to do, where we were trying to help ourselves in some way. And it may have even been an adaptive coping mechanism at one point, even if it's maladaptive now.
And by adaptive and maladaptive, it's like let's just think of them as helpful and unhelpful. Sometimes things that we learn to do as children really maybe did help us survive, even if they weren't like the “perfect coping strategy,” not that there is a perfect coping strategy.
But they may not be things we want to keep in our lives, but we can still notice that like, oh, part of me chose to do this for life-saving reasons, or just getting by reasons, survival reasons, trying to like figure out life and keep going. And a lot of times as kids, we don't have the tools to deal with our difficult feelings because no one teaches us to. So we do develop all these little habits and patterns and workarounds, right?
Like, when I was a kid, I was really obsessed with books and reading. And as an adult, I'm still really obsessed with books and reading. But I can also see that as a child who didn't know how to navigate her difficult feelings, a lot of times it was easier for me to disappear into a book.
It was easier for me to just go away from my own feelings, go away from my own reality, and go spend time with these imaginary characters who were super safe. And who I didn't actually have to interact with and who couldn't hurt me and I couldn't hurt them. Like I didn't have to deal with any of how to be a person in social relationships. It was just easier, right?
I can keep that behavior and do it in a different way than I did as a kid, which I think I've learned to do as an adult. But some of the behaviors we might have developed, we might not want to keep. But when we can see them as something that a part of us that cares about us developed to try to figure out life and make it in the world, then I think it's easier to be softer with ourselves and softer with the behavior pattern.
And interestingly, being softer, makes it easier to change. It makes it easier to leave these behavior patterns behind. People always think the opposite is going to be true. They're like, “If I'm soft with myself, I'll just do it forever.” But if you really don't want to do it, and you're soft with yourself about having done it, that's actually going to give you more space to stop doing it.
I will say also, some people only want to leave things behind because they think they should. And in that case, if you're softer with yourself, you might decide you actually don't want to leave the thing behind and that's also allowed. Because a lot of times we've also learned to demonize certain things in our lives, certain behavior patterns, because of what culture has taught us about them.
So as an example, watching TV gets a bad rap. A lot of people have a lot of negative things to say about it, but TV is neutral. How much TV you watch is neutral. It's not better to not watch TV than it is to watch TV. Yes, I've read a lot of the science about dopamine. So doing things, whether they're substances or behaviors that lead to big bursts of dopamine in your brain does have a real impact on your brain and how it's doing and processing things and how much dopamine you have at various times. That's true.
But also, we put all this morality onto a lot of kinds of behaviors, like these are the good behaviors and these are the bad behaviors. And so a lot of times people only want to stop doing one thing and start doing something else because they think that's better.
And first of all, much like the judging and shaming, I find that often backfires. And second of all, I just don't personally think it's accurate. I don't think watching TV is morally inferior to eating a carrot or what have you, or taking a run. I think that both behaviors are neutral and we get to decide what kind of lives we want to have.
But because we did grow up in society and culture, which has a lot of opinions about what's good and what's bad and what we should be doing what we shouldn't be doing, sometimes we have to get all that out of the way before we can actually even make a choice about what we want to be involved in our life. But let's just say you've already done that work for the purposes of this podcast and you know what you want to leave behind.
Then the question becomes how do I leave it behind? And there's a lot of other podcasts that can really help you kind of dig into that about goal achievement and how to use tiny little steps to create really big changes in your life. But for this podcast, let's just think about sort of the internal shift of just going from like, “I'm a person who blah, blah blahs” to like, “I'm not a person who blah, blah, blahs, that's just not a thing anymore.”
And how we choose to identify can be really powerful and it really determines the narratives we have about things, and those determine how we feel and how we show up to life. So let's just say that we had the example already with the drinking, that’s not really a work example. But I do think it's work adjacent because I think a lot of people drink because they feel work stress. So let's just use that.
If that were your thing and you were like, “I am now drinking a bottle of wine a day, I don't want to do that in the new year.” You could go in the identity piece from like, “I'm a person who drinks a bottle of wine a day” to, “I'm not a person who drinks a bottle of wine a day.” Or “I'm a person who drinks half a bottle of wine a day.” Or, “I'm a person who doesn't drink on weekdays.
Whatever the shift is you want to make, whatever the thing you want to leave behind particularly is. And then we can still, in our way we're approaching it, use these really small steps, these little incremental steps. If you want to you can, of course, also do the full reset method where you're like, “I've been doing this and now I'm going to do this totally other thing.”
I find that to be more difficult a lot of the time. I think that these little shifts over time, the incremental changes are often more effective. But you are the authority of you. And for some people it is easier just to take all the bottles of wine out of the house and not buy any more and then just become a person who doesn't drink at home.
You get to decide how you want to do it. The focus of this podcast is really about just taking a look around your life and thinking about is there something in 2021 that I'm just ready to say goodbye to? That I'm just ready to not bring with me into the new year.
Once you figure out what it is you want to leave behind, you can make your own specific plan for how to do that. But also, I want to walk you through a meditation. And this is not the kind of thing I normally do on the podcast, but I actually made this meditation a couple of years ago. And I've only shared it with a few people, but the people I have shared it with really liked it.
So I wanted to share it with all of you and I think maybe it'll help you kind of move through this process of thinking about what you want to leave behind and then what you want to have instead. Because sometimes we can just leave something behind and have an empty space, there's nothing wrong with that.
But sometimes it can be really powerful to think about what you would like to have instead. And if you're a person who doesn't X, Y, Z, what do you do? What fills that space in your life?
And from the stuff I've read also about habit cultivation, it can be really powerful if you have a habit that has a cue, by which I mean, you're like, “Oh, I always have a glass of wine at five o'clock.” And not me personally, this is just an example. But if that's your cue, oh, it's 5pm, it's time to have a glass of wine, then sometimes an effective way to change habits can be putting a different behavior into that same spot so that when the cue happens you do something else.
So the cue happens and your brain goes like, “Oh, it's time for that thing.” And you put something else there. And from what I read about habits, one of the things that they recommended was finding something that you like better, but that has a similar output or sort of like reward.
Now you get to decide if you want to swap one habit for another or if you want to become a person who can like sit with the urge to do the thing and allow that to move through you and pass. I don't think one's better than the other, I think they're just two different ways of doing things. But for this one, like the quintessential example is smokers often take up running because smoking gave them a certain kind of like feel. I've never been a smoker so I don't exactly know what it was.
But from the book I read, the runner's high is kind of a similar thing. So the idea is that you have the cue and then you have the behavior. And then you have a feeling in the body or brain that's similar, but created by something different.
So with the cigarette, it's like whatever the feeling is when you have nicotine, probably like a little kind of high feeling, I don't really know. Body buzz, I'm not sure. But with running it is whatever the neurochemicals are that get released when you do a certain kind of exercise.
So that's an example of you're taking the cue and replacing a habit you don't want to have with a habit you do want to have that's going to have a similar output on your body or mind body kind of feeling or reward. Now, I want to be clear, to circle back running is not better than smoking. One is not morally superior together, you might just prefer to have one habit.
And I feel like that actually may ruffle a few feathers. People will be like, “How can you say that running is not better than smoking?” But what I mean is these are both just behaviors that you can choose and you get to choose what kind of behaviors you want in your life.
And some of the behaviors you may want in your life, there may be other people in the world who think they're unhealthy. And those other people get to have their opinion because we can't stop them and because all humans get to have their freewill and whatever opinions they want to.
And you get to choose for yourself what you want to do. And you might want to choose to put in a habit that someone else might think is unhealthy. And you're allowed to do that because you're the fucking authority in your own life. Okay, so that's that. Now let's do the meditation. All right, y'all ready? Let's go.
Okay, so if it's safe and you're not like driving your car, I would invite you to get in a comfortable position and close your eyes. And I'll also just say I do walking meditations too. So I think if you are walking and doing something like that, you don't want to close your eyes, that's also fine.
Okay, we're still going to visualize though. We're going to imagine that you look down and, in your hands, you're holding a bag. And in the bag is something you want to return. This return, it's kind of like the idea we've been talking about the whole podcast, about what you want to leave behind in 2021. But for the purposes of this meditation, it's a return. Like something you would take back to a store.
Okay, so you have your return in your bag and you're outside of a store. And you're going to go in the store and you're going to get in line in the customer service line where we take things back when we don't want them. And this store is really magical, it doesn't have any of the policies that the stores we’re used to would have. It will take back anything, it doesn't matter if you've used it. It doesn't matter if you've had it your whole life. They are thrilled to take it off your hands and they are going to give you something in exchange for it.
So it's kind of like the store of everything. You can bring back an identity marker that you don't want anymore. You can bring back a thought pattern that you don't want anymore. You can bring back a habit that you don't want anymore. You can bring back a way of being that just doesn't fit you anymore. Anything you want to let go of and release.
And it's not just about getting rid of it. It's not about throwing it in the trash. It's not about leaving it on the table at a coffee shop you visited once. This is where you take something on purpose and you're saying goodbye to it because it's not the right fit for you. It's not the thing you actually want to have. And when you take it back, they are going to give you something of equal value.
They're going to give you cash, or a gift card, or some other thing from this magical store of everything. So while you're in line, I want you to open the bag and look into it. What's in there? What is it that you want to return? What is it that you no longer want to own or have?
And what is it that you want in exchange? Do you want a refund? Do you just want your money back? Do you want to gift card so that you can think about what else you would like to have? Do you want something really similar? Like maybe you want the same thing, but in a different size or shape or color. You can have whatever you want, but you have to figure out what that is or at least what that is for this moment.
And the way I think about this is maybe you just want space back in your life, that might be cash. Maybe you want a gift card, which is subtly different than cash. It's a different way of holding space. That money has an intention already contained around it. Unlike cash, you can't do just anything you want with it, you can only do certain things with it. It has value in certain places, but not in others.
Or maybe there's something you already know you want from this store. Something that you want to walk out of the store with today. Something you want to go ahead and become, or hold in your hands, or believe to be true about yourself, or be able to do. In that case, you want to ask for an exchange.
So you're moving through the line and now it's your turn. And you're going to step up and the cashier is just a warm, lovely human. They're so happy to see you. They're so happy that you brought this thing back. They know how much courage it takes to take something that has belonged to you and decide you don't want it anymore.
And you're going to look at whatever you're taking back, and you're going to say like, “Thank you. Thank you for your service, and I'm ready to let you go.” And then you're going to hand it to the person on the other side of the counter. And they're going to be so grateful to take it off your hands.
And then you're going to tell them what you want. Do you want cash? Do you want a gift card? Do you want the exact same thing, but in a different color? Whatever it is, let them know. They're going to be really happy to help you.
And there aren't any rules at the everything store about what you can bring back. You can bring back anything. You can bring back something you've had since 1984. You can bring back of a belief system that you were born into. You can bring back a habit that you've had since childhood or one you picked up last week. Whatever you want to return and get a refund for, you can do it now.
Go ahead and do it. Go ahead and give them the thing, thank it for its service. Because remember if it's a habit you picked up, you were probably trying to help yourself out by having it even if it turned out to not feel very helpful. And then tell the person what you want.
Open your hands, receive what they give you. Thank them and step out of line. Now you have released whatever it is you came here to release and now you have a new possibility in the palm of your hand, whether it's cash, a gift card, or something brand new.
From here, you can do anything. You can go through the everything store and shop for more things you'd like to have. You can sit in the everything store’s cafe and have a cup of coffee with your gift card and think about who you want to become in 2022. You can leave the everything store and step out into the sunshine and go about your day.
So just take a moment to decide what do you want to do next, and then do it. And then when you're ready, if your eyes are closed go ahead and open them. If your eyes are open, kind of give yourself a little body shake to bring yourself back from this meditation.
What I think is so helpful about this meditation is it's really going to give you permission to be willing to let go of anything. No matter how long you've had it. No matter how much you think it's something you actually can't let go of. What if it is? What if you can leave behind anything you want to in 2021? What would you choose to leave behind? And what will you choose to take with you?
All right, y’all, that's what I have for you this week. Can't wait to talk to you in 2022 and to find out what you left behind and what you do take with you. Have a wonderful new year and I'll talk to you soon.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job (Before You Leave It), the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, happy Wednesday. It is the final Wednesday of the year. And that's pretty exciting. Before we get into this week's topic, I just wanted to tell y'all, so last week we talked about sleep. And it was interesting because I have actually been having really good sleep for a while.
Or I had right up until literally the day I recorded that podcast. And then that night I woke up around five in the morning, and then many times since then actually I have been struggling to stay asleep through the night again, or having trouble falling asleep.
So it's always really interesting to me when that happens. Like I've got the client part of me and I've got the coach part of me. And the coach part of me knows all this stuff, and it's really good and useful and helpful, as you all know. And then the client part of me sometimes isn't around for a while.
So if my sleep is really well managed, that client part of my sleep idea is quiet. But when I started having some sleep struggles, first of all, I was like, “Cool, I did just do a podcast on this so everything I would want to talk to myself about, the part of myself that's the client is all top of mind.” But on the other hand, I was like, “Oh yeah, look at this client part of me who has these tools and they're helpful, but is also losing her shit a little bit.”
And I wanted to bring that up because, as you all know, it's really important to me to always talk about the real things that go on for me because in addition to being a coach, I am a human person with a human brain. And my human brain still has a lot of thoughts and feelings, even with all the coaching tools.
And the coaching tools work, I have an incredible life and I have used the coaching tools to do so much. But I always want to impress upon y'all that it doesn't mean I'm some non-human person. Still very much having a human experience over here.
Also, I was listening to a really great podcast lately, it was a recent episode of The Unfuck Your Brain podcast with Kara Loewentheil. And she had a guest on, Dr. Becky, who also has her own podcast called Good Inside. And in the podcast, one of the things they were talking about, Dr. Becky was talking about being this expert and having all these tools and tips and tricks she teaches her audience. But sometimes she also doesn't follow the things she teaches.
And she was talking about how it's like one part of us that knows all of the information. And then when we're in the moment and when we're really struggling with something, like if we're in the middle of a big feeling, if we're in the middle of a stress response, sometimes we're not able to do the thing, even if we know what the thing is.
So even me as a coach, knowing all the coaching tools, sometimes I'm able to implement them, sometimes I remember to implement them. And sometimes I don't. And what I want to offer to y'all is that that is what I think success looks like.
A lot of my clients, and the past version of myself, think that success looks like being perfect. So if you have these tools and tips and tricks, a lot of people would think success looks like using those perfectly every time.
But for me, success is even implementing them some of the time. And even some of the time being able to go like, “Wait a minute, my brain is totally losing its fucking mind about this thing and I have some tools I could use.” Or even being like, “Oh, my brain just had a meltdown. But now here are some ways I can bring myself back to an even keel and then decide how I want to move forward from here.”
So what I'm really saying is, if we have awareness and if we're like, “Hmm, something's going on,” even if our brain just had a meltdown, or even if we didn't use any of the tools we have, that time when we're like, “Hmm, I can engage with myself kindly about this or do something about this or do things differently.” That is success.
We don't have to be perfect to be good. We don't have to use the coaching tools perfectly to be using the coaching tools. And none of us will ever be using the tools perfectly because we are human beings and perfection is not what we're doing here, like I say all the time. So that's that, also that podcast episode between Dr. Becky and Kara was really great, so I highly recommend that. Go have a listen.
Okay. Now without further ado, let's get into what we're talking about today. And what we're talking about today is what do you want to leave behind in 2021?
So, the end of the year is kind of arbitrary, it's not a better or worse time than any other time to do anything. But it is a time of year, I think, when people reflect a lot and when they're making plans for what they want to do, and who they want to be, and where they want their life to go. And this can happen in all kinds of areas of your life.
It can be what we're mostly talking about here, which is career. But it can be anything. And for the purposes of this podcast, let's just think about everything in your life. Like what, if anything, do you want to leave behind? What do you not want to bring with you?
Maybe it's a habit. Maybe it's an attitude. Maybe it's a belief. Maybe it's a behavior. It could really be anything, just something that you're like, “I'm ready to set that down. I'm ready to say goodbye to that. I'm ready to part with that.”
And something that I really want to offer here is there's a way to leave things behind and to say goodbye to them, that isn't about judging them and it's also not about judging us. So a lot of people have behaviors or habits that they don't want to do anymore. And then they judge themselves for doing them and they judge the habits also.
And I get why we do that, because that's like literally how we were all parented. Or a lot of us were parented, with this kind of shame and judgment and like don't do that, it's wrong and bad. But what I see as a coach, and what I've seen with myself in my own life is that tends to not be helpful and it often tends to backfire.
For instance, let's take a pretty common example, which I would call work adjacent, is like having a habit of drinking a certain amount and maybe wanting to have a habit of drinking not at all or just drinking less. But when people judge and shame the larger quantity of drinking and when they judge and shame themselves for doing the larger quantity of drinking, that does not tend to lead to less drinking.
And I often see it lead to more drinking because people are often drinking as a way to comfort or soothe themselves, or as a way to numb or avoid. And so if they're creating all this negative emotion with their judgments of themselves and their judgments of that behavior, then they're like, “This fucking sucks. I don't want to hang out with these negative feelings.” And they're like, “Hmm, what do I do when I don't want to hang out with my negative feelings? Oh, I know, I have a glass of wine.”
So in that way, the judgment and shame can actually fuel the behavior versus helping us cut down on it. So that's really key for this idea of what do we want to leave behind in 2021 because it's like think about what you might want to leave behind and then think about if you have some judgments about that.
And then can we set those judgments aside and see that this thing, whatever it is, is probably something that we learned to do, where we were trying to help ourselves in some way. And it may have even been an adaptive coping mechanism at one point, even if it's maladaptive now.
And by adaptive and maladaptive, it's like let's just think of them as helpful and unhelpful. Sometimes things that we learn to do as children really maybe did help us survive, even if they weren't like the “perfect coping strategy,” not that there is a perfect coping strategy.
But they may not be things we want to keep in our lives, but we can still notice that like, oh, part of me chose to do this for life-saving reasons, or just getting by reasons, survival reasons, trying to like figure out life and keep going. And a lot of times as kids, we don't have the tools to deal with our difficult feelings because no one teaches us to. So we do develop all these little habits and patterns and workarounds, right?
Like, when I was a kid, I was really obsessed with books and reading. And as an adult, I'm still really obsessed with books and reading. But I can also see that as a child who didn't know how to navigate her difficult feelings, a lot of times it was easier for me to disappear into a book.
It was easier for me to just go away from my own feelings, go away from my own reality, and go spend time with these imaginary characters who were super safe. And who I didn't actually have to interact with and who couldn't hurt me and I couldn't hurt them. Like I didn't have to deal with any of how to be a person in social relationships. It was just easier, right?
I can keep that behavior and do it in a different way than I did as a kid, which I think I've learned to do as an adult. But some of the behaviors we might have developed, we might not want to keep. But when we can see them as something that a part of us that cares about us developed to try to figure out life and make it in the world, then I think it's easier to be softer with ourselves and softer with the behavior pattern.
And interestingly, being softer, makes it easier to change. It makes it easier to leave these behavior patterns behind. People always think the opposite is going to be true. They're like, “If I'm soft with myself, I'll just do it forever.” But if you really don't want to do it, and you're soft with yourself about having done it, that's actually going to give you more space to stop doing it.
I will say also, some people only want to leave things behind because they think they should. And in that case, if you're softer with yourself, you might decide you actually don't want to leave the thing behind and that's also allowed. Because a lot of times we've also learned to demonize certain things in our lives, certain behavior patterns, because of what culture has taught us about them.
So as an example, watching TV gets a bad rap. A lot of people have a lot of negative things to say about it, but TV is neutral. How much TV you watch is neutral. It's not better to not watch TV than it is to watch TV. Yes, I've read a lot of the science about dopamine. So doing things, whether they're substances or behaviors that lead to big bursts of dopamine in your brain does have a real impact on your brain and how it's doing and processing things and how much dopamine you have at various times. That's true.
But also, we put all this morality onto a lot of kinds of behaviors, like these are the good behaviors and these are the bad behaviors. And so a lot of times people only want to stop doing one thing and start doing something else because they think that's better.
And first of all, much like the judging and shaming, I find that often backfires. And second of all, I just don't personally think it's accurate. I don't think watching TV is morally inferior to eating a carrot or what have you, or taking a run. I think that both behaviors are neutral and we get to decide what kind of lives we want to have.
But because we did grow up in society and culture, which has a lot of opinions about what's good and what's bad and what we should be doing what we shouldn't be doing, sometimes we have to get all that out of the way before we can actually even make a choice about what we want to be involved in our life. But let's just say you've already done that work for the purposes of this podcast and you know what you want to leave behind.
Then the question becomes how do I leave it behind? And there's a lot of other podcasts that can really help you kind of dig into that about goal achievement and how to use tiny little steps to create really big changes in your life. But for this podcast, let's just think about sort of the internal shift of just going from like, “I'm a person who blah, blah blahs” to like, “I'm not a person who blah, blah, blahs, that's just not a thing anymore.”
And how we choose to identify can be really powerful and it really determines the narratives we have about things, and those determine how we feel and how we show up to life. So let's just say that we had the example already with the drinking, that’s not really a work example. But I do think it's work adjacent because I think a lot of people drink because they feel work stress. So let's just use that.
If that were your thing and you were like, “I am now drinking a bottle of wine a day, I don't want to do that in the new year.” You could go in the identity piece from like, “I'm a person who drinks a bottle of wine a day” to, “I'm not a person who drinks a bottle of wine a day.” Or “I'm a person who drinks half a bottle of wine a day.” Or, “I'm a person who doesn't drink on weekdays.
Whatever the shift is you want to make, whatever the thing you want to leave behind particularly is. And then we can still, in our way we're approaching it, use these really small steps, these little incremental steps. If you want to you can, of course, also do the full reset method where you're like, “I've been doing this and now I'm going to do this totally other thing.”
I find that to be more difficult a lot of the time. I think that these little shifts over time, the incremental changes are often more effective. But you are the authority of you. And for some people it is easier just to take all the bottles of wine out of the house and not buy any more and then just become a person who doesn't drink at home.
You get to decide how you want to do it. The focus of this podcast is really about just taking a look around your life and thinking about is there something in 2021 that I'm just ready to say goodbye to? That I'm just ready to not bring with me into the new year.
Once you figure out what it is you want to leave behind, you can make your own specific plan for how to do that. But also, I want to walk you through a meditation. And this is not the kind of thing I normally do on the podcast, but I actually made this meditation a couple of years ago. And I've only shared it with a few people, but the people I have shared it with really liked it.
So I wanted to share it with all of you and I think maybe it'll help you kind of move through this process of thinking about what you want to leave behind and then what you want to have instead. Because sometimes we can just leave something behind and have an empty space, there's nothing wrong with that.
But sometimes it can be really powerful to think about what you would like to have instead. And if you're a person who doesn't X, Y, Z, what do you do? What fills that space in your life?
And from the stuff I've read also about habit cultivation, it can be really powerful if you have a habit that has a cue, by which I mean, you're like, “Oh, I always have a glass of wine at five o'clock.” And not me personally, this is just an example. But if that's your cue, oh, it's 5pm, it's time to have a glass of wine, then sometimes an effective way to change habits can be putting a different behavior into that same spot so that when the cue happens you do something else.
So the cue happens and your brain goes like, “Oh, it's time for that thing.” And you put something else there. And from what I read about habits, one of the things that they recommended was finding something that you like better, but that has a similar output or sort of like reward.
Now you get to decide if you want to swap one habit for another or if you want to become a person who can like sit with the urge to do the thing and allow that to move through you and pass. I don't think one's better than the other, I think they're just two different ways of doing things. But for this one, like the quintessential example is smokers often take up running because smoking gave them a certain kind of like feel. I've never been a smoker so I don't exactly know what it was.
But from the book I read, the runner's high is kind of a similar thing. So the idea is that you have the cue and then you have the behavior. And then you have a feeling in the body or brain that's similar, but created by something different.
So with the cigarette, it's like whatever the feeling is when you have nicotine, probably like a little kind of high feeling, I don't really know. Body buzz, I'm not sure. But with running it is whatever the neurochemicals are that get released when you do a certain kind of exercise.
So that's an example of you're taking the cue and replacing a habit you don't want to have with a habit you do want to have that's going to have a similar output on your body or mind body kind of feeling or reward. Now, I want to be clear, to circle back running is not better than smoking. One is not morally superior together, you might just prefer to have one habit.
And I feel like that actually may ruffle a few feathers. People will be like, “How can you say that running is not better than smoking?” But what I mean is these are both just behaviors that you can choose and you get to choose what kind of behaviors you want in your life.
And some of the behaviors you may want in your life, there may be other people in the world who think they're unhealthy. And those other people get to have their opinion because we can't stop them and because all humans get to have their freewill and whatever opinions they want to.
And you get to choose for yourself what you want to do. And you might want to choose to put in a habit that someone else might think is unhealthy. And you're allowed to do that because you're the fucking authority in your own life. Okay, so that's that. Now let's do the meditation. All right, y'all ready? Let's go.
Okay, so if it's safe and you're not like driving your car, I would invite you to get in a comfortable position and close your eyes. And I'll also just say I do walking meditations too. So I think if you are walking and doing something like that, you don't want to close your eyes, that's also fine.
Okay, we're still going to visualize though. We're going to imagine that you look down and, in your hands, you're holding a bag. And in the bag is something you want to return. This return, it's kind of like the idea we've been talking about the whole podcast, about what you want to leave behind in 2021. But for the purposes of this meditation, it's a return. Like something you would take back to a store.
Okay, so you have your return in your bag and you're outside of a store. And you're going to go in the store and you're going to get in line in the customer service line where we take things back when we don't want them. And this store is really magical, it doesn't have any of the policies that the stores we’re used to would have. It will take back anything, it doesn't matter if you've used it. It doesn't matter if you've had it your whole life. They are thrilled to take it off your hands and they are going to give you something in exchange for it.
So it's kind of like the store of everything. You can bring back an identity marker that you don't want anymore. You can bring back a thought pattern that you don't want anymore. You can bring back a habit that you don't want anymore. You can bring back a way of being that just doesn't fit you anymore. Anything you want to let go of and release.
And it's not just about getting rid of it. It's not about throwing it in the trash. It's not about leaving it on the table at a coffee shop you visited once. This is where you take something on purpose and you're saying goodbye to it because it's not the right fit for you. It's not the thing you actually want to have. And when you take it back, they are going to give you something of equal value.
They're going to give you cash, or a gift card, or some other thing from this magical store of everything. So while you're in line, I want you to open the bag and look into it. What's in there? What is it that you want to return? What is it that you no longer want to own or have?
And what is it that you want in exchange? Do you want a refund? Do you just want your money back? Do you want to gift card so that you can think about what else you would like to have? Do you want something really similar? Like maybe you want the same thing, but in a different size or shape or color. You can have whatever you want, but you have to figure out what that is or at least what that is for this moment.
And the way I think about this is maybe you just want space back in your life, that might be cash. Maybe you want a gift card, which is subtly different than cash. It's a different way of holding space. That money has an intention already contained around it. Unlike cash, you can't do just anything you want with it, you can only do certain things with it. It has value in certain places, but not in others.
Or maybe there's something you already know you want from this store. Something that you want to walk out of the store with today. Something you want to go ahead and become, or hold in your hands, or believe to be true about yourself, or be able to do. In that case, you want to ask for an exchange.
So you're moving through the line and now it's your turn. And you're going to step up and the cashier is just a warm, lovely human. They're so happy to see you. They're so happy that you brought this thing back. They know how much courage it takes to take something that has belonged to you and decide you don't want it anymore.
And you're going to look at whatever you're taking back, and you're going to say like, “Thank you. Thank you for your service, and I'm ready to let you go.” And then you're going to hand it to the person on the other side of the counter. And they're going to be so grateful to take it off your hands.
And then you're going to tell them what you want. Do you want cash? Do you want a gift card? Do you want the exact same thing, but in a different color? Whatever it is, let them know. They're going to be really happy to help you.
And there aren't any rules at the everything store about what you can bring back. You can bring back anything. You can bring back something you've had since 1984. You can bring back of a belief system that you were born into. You can bring back a habit that you've had since childhood or one you picked up last week. Whatever you want to return and get a refund for, you can do it now.
Go ahead and do it. Go ahead and give them the thing, thank it for its service. Because remember if it's a habit you picked up, you were probably trying to help yourself out by having it even if it turned out to not feel very helpful. And then tell the person what you want.
Open your hands, receive what they give you. Thank them and step out of line. Now you have released whatever it is you came here to release and now you have a new possibility in the palm of your hand, whether it's cash, a gift card, or something brand new.
From here, you can do anything. You can go through the everything store and shop for more things you'd like to have. You can sit in the everything store’s cafe and have a cup of coffee with your gift card and think about who you want to become in 2022. You can leave the everything store and step out into the sunshine and go about your day.
So just take a moment to decide what do you want to do next, and then do it. And then when you're ready, if your eyes are closed go ahead and open them. If your eyes are open, kind of give yourself a little body shake to bring yourself back from this meditation.
What I think is so helpful about this meditation is it's really going to give you permission to be willing to let go of anything. No matter how long you've had it. No matter how much you think it's something you actually can't let go of. What if it is? What if you can leave behind anything you want to in 2021? What would you choose to leave behind? And what will you choose to take with you?
All right, y’all, that's what I have for you this week. Can't wait to talk to you in 2022 and to find out what you left behind and what you do take with you. Have a wonderful new year and I'll talk to you soon.
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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