150. Why Bother vs Why Not
One hurdle that tends to get in the way of people’s dreams, goals, and visions for the future is a “why bother” mindset.
Whether it’s dating, making friends, getting clients, or asking for a promotion…
Your brain may worry that your efforts aren’t worth it.
Taking action can feel scary, tedious, or even pointless.
So why expend the energy?
Why risk it?
Why bother?
On the other hand, why not?
A “why bother” attitude indicates an underlying assumption that your efforts won’t work or won’t be worth it even if they do.
But what if THEY ARE worth it, because every action gets you closer to where you want to go, whether it’s a success or not.
A “why not” attitude invites action.
And action creates room for the possibility of something magical happening, even if it means failing and figuring it out.
What do you want and how could you move closer to it, just by switching from “why bother” to “why not?”
Join me this week to hear how everything in your life can change with a “why not” mindset, and the power of realizing you don’t have to stay trapped thinking “why bother” forever.
If you want to join me for an in-person deep dive day where we coach all day on whatever you want, DM me on Instagram or send me an email to find out more!
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.
My small group coaching program, Satisfied AF, is officially open for enrollment! Click here to schedule a consult call for Satisfied AF and we can figure out what’s not working in your life and career as well as how to transform it into something that delights you.
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:
The difference between a “why bother” mindset and a “why not” mindset.
Why it’s a powerful shift to go from “why bother” to “why not.”
How anything you want is possible if you showed up with a “why not” attitude.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
If you’re enjoying the show, please leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts!
Feel free to ask me any questions over on Instagram!
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!
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about why bother mindset versus why not mindset.
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 you’re having a marvelous week. And if it’s not marvelous, I hope it’s at least amusing and interesting. And if it’s not that, I hope that you’re at least able to be having a yummy, loving, supportive relationship with yourself while it’s not amusing or marvelous.
I myself am not having my most marvelous week ever. And I’m trying to allow what is marvelous to be marvelous and I’m trying to stay amused. And I’m also just trying to lovingly be there with myself because a lot of things feel difficult. And that’s because we had our house fumigated and it was delayed. And so we’ve been out of our house for a long time. The prep for the fumigation felt very taxing. We had to take all of our plants out.
Did you know that you can’t have any living thing in your house while it’s fumigated? I mean, it makes sense if you think about it. But that means all houseplants have to go. All your food, including everything in your freezer, your fridge, your pantry, all your other beverages like wine, liquor. Technically, I think if it’s in a super duper sealed container it can stay, but I was not trying to risk it. So I just took everything out. And that was a lot of prep work.
And plus, you have to find places to put it. So we’re calling our friends like, hey, can I put all my wine at your house? Can it fit in your wine fridge or your regular fridge? Because I don’t think you’re supposed to put it in and then take it back out of the wine fridge.
And we are people who have not just a freezer, but we also have a second freezer and we like to stock up on groceries. So then I was like, oh, how many of these groceries from the deep freeze can we eat before we do this? And then we had to move the rest of them.
And then, like I said, we were late getting back in our house because there was a delay during the fumigation. So we had actually scheduled to be out of town. And we got back in town on Saturday, thinking we’d get back in the house on Saturday, but then there was a delay. So we didn’t get back in the house till today, which for you is Wednesday, but for me it’s Tuesday.
And so we were staying at a friend’s and then staying in a neighbor’s Airbnb. And it’s just, I’m very much a home person. I really like to be in my own space and have all my little things that I’m used to having around. And so it’s been kind of challenging to not be able to be home. But I’m home now and I’m very happy about it.
There is, of course, now a lot of putting things back together. We have to go collect all the house plants, we have to go collect all the groceries. So it’s going to be some more work to get it all put back together, but I’m very happy to be home. And I’m finding ways to be kind and supportive to myself as I go through the things that are not my most favorite.
But this week we’re talking about why not mindset versus why bother mindset. And the reason we’re talking about this is because one of my SAF clients was posting about this in the celebrations, wins and delights channel.
So for SAF my small group, Satisfied As Fuck, we have a Slack and the Slack has different channels. There’s a channel for coaching where they can get coaching from me. And there’s a channel for celebrations, wins and delights where they post their celebrations, wins and delights.
So one of the things about the human brain is the human brain has a negativity bias, which means it gives so much more focus and attention to what’s not working. And I have the celebrations, wins and delights channel so that my clients can practice noticing what is working and what is going well and really reveling in and enjoying that. And it’s such a fun channel to read and to celebrate everyone for all the things that are going well and to be inspired by each other.
But anyways, one of the clients in there posted about a win that they had. And one of the things that they were saying helped them create that win was shifting from a why bother attitude to a why not attitude. And I immediately was like, oh, I’m obsessed with this. This should be a podcast. And I got permission from the client to talk about it and now here we are.
And so, basically, a lot of the time when people have big dreams and goals and ideas, or even little dreams, goals and ideas, when we want to do something and we’re not doing it, a lot of times something that can get in the way is this sort of why bother mindset or why bother attitude. And I think what “why bother” does is it makes us feel like the action that we’re going to take might not do anything, so there’s no reason to do it.
There’s no reason to expend energy. There’s no reason to risk ourselves, like to put ourselves out there emotionally or to put ourselves out there online if we’re marketing. And this applies to everything right? It could be like, why bother getting on the dating apps to spend 10 minutes on there trying to swipe and see if I can find someone to go on a date with.
This is not me personally, I’m deeply partnered, but dating is something my clients work on sometimes. So that’s a place where people might get into the why bother, especially if they’re like, oh, there’s no one good single so why bother? Why even put in the effort?
Or this happens all the time when people have businesses and they have a plan to post marketing content on social media or send out a newsletter. But if they’re like, why bother because no one’s going to buy from me, or no one’s going to like my post, or no one’s going to resonate with this. Why bother shuts us down before we take action.
And I think a lot of the reason we have this is because, I mean, for one hand, we don’t know which of the times we put ourselves out there are going to create the outcome. A lot of times, like if you want a new job, you have to send out lots of applications. You have to have lots of networking conversations. You’ve got to look at lots of job descriptions and rewrite your resume six different ways for each one. And it takes all this action and activity, and we don’t know which of the actions are going to pay off.
So on the one hand, there’s some validity that each specific thing might not have a payoff. But on the other hand, usually the collection of activities does, right? The collection of activity creates something, even if we’re not sure which specific Instagram post is going to create a client. But if we do a lot of Instagram posts, we get clients, right?
Or we’re not sure if we swipe right on a bunch of people on Bumble BFF, maybe we’re not sure which of those people are actually going to become our really good new friend. But swiping right on a bunch of people, having conversations, going on first friend dates, going on second friend dates, continuing to stay in touch with people, those activities, as a collection, create the thing that we want, right?
It creates friendships. It creates the clients. It creates getting the new job. Maybe we have 168 conversations with our supervisor about getting a promotion, and maybe 167 of them didn’t result in a promotion, but maybe the 168th does.
So it’s a really powerful shift to go from why bother, this might not create anything good, to why not? Like why not just try? Why not just put it out there? Why not just do it? Let someone else say no versus saying no to yourself ahead of time, because in a lot of ways saying why bother is saying no to yourself ahead of time. It is saying it’s not worth it. I’m not going to put myself out there. I’m not going to try. Nothing good can come of this.
But when we tell ourselves that and then we don’t take action, then nothing good comes of it because we don’t do anything, usually, right? So I think why not is such a powerful, simple thought. And it’s such an easy shift. It’s a simple shift.
It might not feel easy, you might be like, I’ve been saying why bother to myself for 27 years and when I try to say why not, it feels really uncomfortable and my eyes roll into the back of the head. So I’m not saying it’s necessarily going to be feeling really easy.
It’s simple. It’s like one word to a different word. But even if you implement it only a little bit, it could have a huge impact for you, right? Like, if you have 10 goals and every time you want to work on any of them your brain goes like, why bother? And then you don’t work on them.
And then you say, okay, I’ll keep saying why bother to nine of these, but this one over here I’m going to start saying why not and I’m going to start taking action on it. And then I’m going to start seeing what happens. And then you start getting results. And then it might be like, oh, I think I’m going to start saying why not do one of these other ones. Or you could take all 10 of them and just start saying why not a little bit of the time.
I think you could do it either way. I think personally when we pick one thing to work on, sometimes we see progress there faster. And then that can be very galvanizing. And that can be very encouraging. And that can allow us to get the habit in place in one area and then expand it out.
But I am not here to tell you how to do things. I’m here to teach you some tools and tell you what those tools can make possible. And then you’re here to implement them in your own life in the way that you think makes the most sense and works the best for you.
So what do you currently want to have or do or be that you’re not taking action on because you’re getting stuck in this thought pattern of like, why bother? It won’t move anything forward. It’s not going to help anything, et cetera, et cetera. And where would it feel really yummy and delicious to move to why not?
Now, you get to pick what this is, right? Especially if you have a lot of different things, you might want to pick the one that bothers you the most or you might want to actually pick the one that feels easiest to get started on. The one where you’re like, well, I actually know some action steps here.
And then as you shift from why bother to why not, other things may come up. This actually happens a lot in coaching, where we begin to kind of pick apart a thought pattern that’s blocking us and then we discover other obstacles. So it’s okay if you do that and then that happens. But then for every obstacle that comes up it’s just like, well, how do I navigate this?
And how do I navigate this from the assumption that there is a way to navigate this and that navigating it is worth it, right? Because that’s really what this is about at the end of the day. Why bother is it’s not possible, it will be too hard. It’s not worth the effort. It’ll never happen for me. And why not is saying, maybe something magical could happen. Maybe something could move forward on this. Maybe I can figure it out. Maybe I can learn something. Maybe even if this isn’t successful, I can get better at it.
So I’ve talked, I think, before on the podcast about my country dancing obsession. And when I first started country dancing, I was very, very bad at it. I just really loved it, so it didn’t stop me. I didn’t have “why bother” with it. I was just obsessed with it immediately and I wanted to do it, even if I never got better.
But I think it could be a good example where I started something and it was joyful. But if I had been spending more time in my brain about like, well, I’m never going to get better, I might have gotten into that why bother headspace. But somehow, magically, miraculously, with that I immediately it was in a why not? Like, oh, this brings me joy, why not just do it? And then I did get better, right?
So I love that example as just proof that even when we don’t believe in something, it can still happen for us sort of by accident and a surprise when we keep showing up anyways. And so I just wonder what would be possible for you. What do you want to have in your life that you don’t have, that you could get access to via switching from why bother to why not?
Could you get more clients? Could you get more revenue? Could you get a new job? Could you change industries? Could you finally ask out that hot person you see at the farmers market or wherever, right? Could you have some really wonderful new local friendships that you build? Could you change the fashion of your entire closet from how you’ve been dressing for 20 years to some kind of new vision you have for yourself and your aesthetic?
What could change? And anything could change, so it’s not even what could change, it’s what would be delicious for you to change? What are you ready to stop feeling cynical like, why bother, it’s never going to work about? And what are you ready to feel like, oh, okay, vulnerable, but maybe this could be something different and that could be really exciting.
Whatever that is, apply this teaching to it, start to initiate this thought of why not, why not just try a little? And you can start small and just keep going and see what changes for you. I promise, if you actually do this, big results will come.
Even if they’re like little tiny results, it’s going to feel so incredibly powerful to realize that you’re not stuck and trapped in the why bother mindset and that you can change that. And that you can change pretty much anything in your life that you actually want to change.
And listen, this is not always the easiest thing to do on your own. You can do it on your own, but I think it’s so much more fun to do in coaching, either with a one on one coach or in a small group where you can be inspired by all the people in the group as well. And I do have spaces for some new one on one clients.
And the next round of Satisfied As Fuck small group is going to be starting in the fall, very soon. And I would love to have you join us. Or I would love to have you work with me one on one, if you would like more of a private custom coaching package.
So if you would like to have a conversation about that, scoot on over to my website and sign up for a consult call and let’s talk about it. I want to help you get more of what you want in life. I want to help you create a life and career that’s wildly satisfying and delicious, just for you.
All right, that’s what I have for y’all this week. Have a wonderful 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 you’re having a marvelous week. And if it’s not marvelous, I hope it’s at least amusing and interesting. And if it’s not that, I hope that you’re at least able to be having a yummy, loving, supportive relationship with yourself while it’s not amusing or marvelous.
I myself am not having my most marvelous week ever. And I’m trying to allow what is marvelous to be marvelous and I’m trying to stay amused. And I’m also just trying to lovingly be there with myself because a lot of things feel difficult. And that’s because we had our house fumigated and it was delayed. And so we’ve been out of our house for a long time. The prep for the fumigation felt very taxing. We had to take all of our plants out.
Did you know that you can’t have any living thing in your house while it’s fumigated? I mean, it makes sense if you think about it. But that means all houseplants have to go. All your food, including everything in your freezer, your fridge, your pantry, all your other beverages like wine, liquor. Technically, I think if it’s in a super duper sealed container it can stay, but I was not trying to risk it. So I just took everything out. And that was a lot of prep work.
And plus, you have to find places to put it. So we’re calling our friends like, hey, can I put all my wine at your house? Can it fit in your wine fridge or your regular fridge? Because I don’t think you’re supposed to put it in and then take it back out of the wine fridge.
And we are people who have not just a freezer, but we also have a second freezer and we like to stock up on groceries. So then I was like, oh, how many of these groceries from the deep freeze can we eat before we do this? And then we had to move the rest of them.
And then, like I said, we were late getting back in our house because there was a delay during the fumigation. So we had actually scheduled to be out of town. And we got back in town on Saturday, thinking we’d get back in the house on Saturday, but then there was a delay. So we didn’t get back in the house till today, which for you is Wednesday, but for me it’s Tuesday.
And so we were staying at a friend’s and then staying in a neighbor’s Airbnb. And it’s just, I’m very much a home person. I really like to be in my own space and have all my little things that I’m used to having around. And so it’s been kind of challenging to not be able to be home. But I’m home now and I’m very happy about it.
There is, of course, now a lot of putting things back together. We have to go collect all the house plants, we have to go collect all the groceries. So it’s going to be some more work to get it all put back together, but I’m very happy to be home. And I’m finding ways to be kind and supportive to myself as I go through the things that are not my most favorite.
But this week we’re talking about why not mindset versus why bother mindset. And the reason we’re talking about this is because one of my SAF clients was posting about this in the celebrations, wins and delights channel.
So for SAF my small group, Satisfied As Fuck, we have a Slack and the Slack has different channels. There’s a channel for coaching where they can get coaching from me. And there’s a channel for celebrations, wins and delights where they post their celebrations, wins and delights.
So one of the things about the human brain is the human brain has a negativity bias, which means it gives so much more focus and attention to what’s not working. And I have the celebrations, wins and delights channel so that my clients can practice noticing what is working and what is going well and really reveling in and enjoying that. And it’s such a fun channel to read and to celebrate everyone for all the things that are going well and to be inspired by each other.
But anyways, one of the clients in there posted about a win that they had. And one of the things that they were saying helped them create that win was shifting from a why bother attitude to a why not attitude. And I immediately was like, oh, I’m obsessed with this. This should be a podcast. And I got permission from the client to talk about it and now here we are.
And so, basically, a lot of the time when people have big dreams and goals and ideas, or even little dreams, goals and ideas, when we want to do something and we’re not doing it, a lot of times something that can get in the way is this sort of why bother mindset or why bother attitude. And I think what “why bother” does is it makes us feel like the action that we’re going to take might not do anything, so there’s no reason to do it.
There’s no reason to expend energy. There’s no reason to risk ourselves, like to put ourselves out there emotionally or to put ourselves out there online if we’re marketing. And this applies to everything right? It could be like, why bother getting on the dating apps to spend 10 minutes on there trying to swipe and see if I can find someone to go on a date with.
This is not me personally, I’m deeply partnered, but dating is something my clients work on sometimes. So that’s a place where people might get into the why bother, especially if they’re like, oh, there’s no one good single so why bother? Why even put in the effort?
Or this happens all the time when people have businesses and they have a plan to post marketing content on social media or send out a newsletter. But if they’re like, why bother because no one’s going to buy from me, or no one’s going to like my post, or no one’s going to resonate with this. Why bother shuts us down before we take action.
And I think a lot of the reason we have this is because, I mean, for one hand, we don’t know which of the times we put ourselves out there are going to create the outcome. A lot of times, like if you want a new job, you have to send out lots of applications. You have to have lots of networking conversations. You’ve got to look at lots of job descriptions and rewrite your resume six different ways for each one. And it takes all this action and activity, and we don’t know which of the actions are going to pay off.
So on the one hand, there’s some validity that each specific thing might not have a payoff. But on the other hand, usually the collection of activities does, right? The collection of activity creates something, even if we’re not sure which specific Instagram post is going to create a client. But if we do a lot of Instagram posts, we get clients, right?
Or we’re not sure if we swipe right on a bunch of people on Bumble BFF, maybe we’re not sure which of those people are actually going to become our really good new friend. But swiping right on a bunch of people, having conversations, going on first friend dates, going on second friend dates, continuing to stay in touch with people, those activities, as a collection, create the thing that we want, right?
It creates friendships. It creates the clients. It creates getting the new job. Maybe we have 168 conversations with our supervisor about getting a promotion, and maybe 167 of them didn’t result in a promotion, but maybe the 168th does.
So it’s a really powerful shift to go from why bother, this might not create anything good, to why not? Like why not just try? Why not just put it out there? Why not just do it? Let someone else say no versus saying no to yourself ahead of time, because in a lot of ways saying why bother is saying no to yourself ahead of time. It is saying it’s not worth it. I’m not going to put myself out there. I’m not going to try. Nothing good can come of this.
But when we tell ourselves that and then we don’t take action, then nothing good comes of it because we don’t do anything, usually, right? So I think why not is such a powerful, simple thought. And it’s such an easy shift. It’s a simple shift.
It might not feel easy, you might be like, I’ve been saying why bother to myself for 27 years and when I try to say why not, it feels really uncomfortable and my eyes roll into the back of the head. So I’m not saying it’s necessarily going to be feeling really easy.
It’s simple. It’s like one word to a different word. But even if you implement it only a little bit, it could have a huge impact for you, right? Like, if you have 10 goals and every time you want to work on any of them your brain goes like, why bother? And then you don’t work on them.
And then you say, okay, I’ll keep saying why bother to nine of these, but this one over here I’m going to start saying why not and I’m going to start taking action on it. And then I’m going to start seeing what happens. And then you start getting results. And then it might be like, oh, I think I’m going to start saying why not do one of these other ones. Or you could take all 10 of them and just start saying why not a little bit of the time.
I think you could do it either way. I think personally when we pick one thing to work on, sometimes we see progress there faster. And then that can be very galvanizing. And that can be very encouraging. And that can allow us to get the habit in place in one area and then expand it out.
But I am not here to tell you how to do things. I’m here to teach you some tools and tell you what those tools can make possible. And then you’re here to implement them in your own life in the way that you think makes the most sense and works the best for you.
So what do you currently want to have or do or be that you’re not taking action on because you’re getting stuck in this thought pattern of like, why bother? It won’t move anything forward. It’s not going to help anything, et cetera, et cetera. And where would it feel really yummy and delicious to move to why not?
Now, you get to pick what this is, right? Especially if you have a lot of different things, you might want to pick the one that bothers you the most or you might want to actually pick the one that feels easiest to get started on. The one where you’re like, well, I actually know some action steps here.
And then as you shift from why bother to why not, other things may come up. This actually happens a lot in coaching, where we begin to kind of pick apart a thought pattern that’s blocking us and then we discover other obstacles. So it’s okay if you do that and then that happens. But then for every obstacle that comes up it’s just like, well, how do I navigate this?
And how do I navigate this from the assumption that there is a way to navigate this and that navigating it is worth it, right? Because that’s really what this is about at the end of the day. Why bother is it’s not possible, it will be too hard. It’s not worth the effort. It’ll never happen for me. And why not is saying, maybe something magical could happen. Maybe something could move forward on this. Maybe I can figure it out. Maybe I can learn something. Maybe even if this isn’t successful, I can get better at it.
So I’ve talked, I think, before on the podcast about my country dancing obsession. And when I first started country dancing, I was very, very bad at it. I just really loved it, so it didn’t stop me. I didn’t have “why bother” with it. I was just obsessed with it immediately and I wanted to do it, even if I never got better.
But I think it could be a good example where I started something and it was joyful. But if I had been spending more time in my brain about like, well, I’m never going to get better, I might have gotten into that why bother headspace. But somehow, magically, miraculously, with that I immediately it was in a why not? Like, oh, this brings me joy, why not just do it? And then I did get better, right?
So I love that example as just proof that even when we don’t believe in something, it can still happen for us sort of by accident and a surprise when we keep showing up anyways. And so I just wonder what would be possible for you. What do you want to have in your life that you don’t have, that you could get access to via switching from why bother to why not?
Could you get more clients? Could you get more revenue? Could you get a new job? Could you change industries? Could you finally ask out that hot person you see at the farmers market or wherever, right? Could you have some really wonderful new local friendships that you build? Could you change the fashion of your entire closet from how you’ve been dressing for 20 years to some kind of new vision you have for yourself and your aesthetic?
What could change? And anything could change, so it’s not even what could change, it’s what would be delicious for you to change? What are you ready to stop feeling cynical like, why bother, it’s never going to work about? And what are you ready to feel like, oh, okay, vulnerable, but maybe this could be something different and that could be really exciting.
Whatever that is, apply this teaching to it, start to initiate this thought of why not, why not just try a little? And you can start small and just keep going and see what changes for you. I promise, if you actually do this, big results will come.
Even if they’re like little tiny results, it’s going to feel so incredibly powerful to realize that you’re not stuck and trapped in the why bother mindset and that you can change that. And that you can change pretty much anything in your life that you actually want to change.
And listen, this is not always the easiest thing to do on your own. You can do it on your own, but I think it’s so much more fun to do in coaching, either with a one on one coach or in a small group where you can be inspired by all the people in the group as well. And I do have spaces for some new one on one clients.
And the next round of Satisfied As Fuck small group is going to be starting in the fall, very soon. And I would love to have you join us. Or I would love to have you work with me one on one, if you would like more of a private custom coaching package.
So if you would like to have a conversation about that, scoot on over to my website and sign up for a consult call and let’s talk about it. I want to help you get more of what you want in life. I want to help you create a life and career that’s wildly satisfying and delicious, just for you.
All right, that’s what I have for y’all this week. Have a wonderful 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.
Enjoy the Show?
Don’t miss an episode, follow the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts.