Wisdom Warriors is tomorrow, register NOW to catapult your results
Hey, everybody! Coach Carol here, basking in the beautiful, steamy summer. Today, I have a message for you about how our mindset can get us stuck in the fear of failure—or even the fear of success.
Before I dive into that, don’t forget TOMORROW is my FREEEEEE live monthly zoom call. It’s at lunchtime so there is zero reason to miss it. And tons of reasons to make it a priority!
Your response helps me understand how to support YOU better. For example, one respondent mentioned a fear of success, specifically worrying about working too much and burning out. If this resonates with you, pay special attention.
I completely understand and relate. Balancing a successful, impactful business while taking care of yourself and your loved ones is challenging. The fear of success and the fear of failure are two sides of the same coin. The key is to cultivate a high-performance mindset.
High-Performance Mindset
High performance doesn’t mean constant hustle. It’s about creating a plan that includes ample self-care, tailored specifically for you. This is my focus in our upcoming Wisdom Warriors FREEEEE ZOOM session (tomorrow) and my next program starting in late September.
For context….let’s talk about a concept from Melinda Cohan’s upcoming book, The Professional Coach. There’s a whole section dedicated to creating without burnout!
Saturate: Immerse yourself in your work with enthusiasm. Dive in and enjoy the process without fear.
Percolate: Reflect on your saturation phase. Let your ideas and experiences simmer.
Create: Build something from your percolated ideas—whether it’s a program, schedule, or marketing plan.
Celebrate: Acknowledge your accomplishments. Reflect on what worked and what didn’t.
Rejuvenate: Incorporate regular self-care. This isn’t an extra; it’s essential for sustained productivity.
Sounds simple, right? Yet, when we go to DO this, “life” gets in the way. Our habits get in the way. Our neurodiversity gets in the way. That’s why reading these awesome articles is….well…not enough.
Not to worry, though. Your free lunch has arrived and it’s tomorrow.
Overcome the fear of success and achieve high performance. Join me on Monday, August 5th, at noon for Wisdom Warriors. It’s free and designed to fit into your lunch break. Let’s start transforming your mindset together. Bonus…ask me anything 🙂
You want it all, yet, you are not doing any of it.
Are you finding yourself *overwhelmed* at times?
Decision Overwhelm is real. You may WANT change, and, you may be avoiding it. It may all feel like “too much” at times.
In this article, we will get started, and tomorrow – Monday, October 2nd- we’re going to be diving much further into this at Wisdom Warriors and having an open discussion. One thing we will do for MONDAY is to introduce you to a powerful decision making “tool” so you will want to attend. Now, we will address some “background noise” – which is often what we are TELLING OURSELVES. This is powerful stuff!
Before I go into that topic – what are we telling ourselves- I will share with you a recent DECISION I made.
It would be really easy for me to go into “decision overwhelm” about this. My young adult son had an accident, and he really needed me. So I decided to reorganize my life and my work and my family (which was a big decision) in order to fly across the country for five days and help him out. It’s important to keep moving in your decisions, and do the thing that feels right to you and your heart, and it is aligned with your values and move the rest of your life around accordingly.
Now I’ll share a story. Ask yourself, what big “thing” do I want – and what decision will I make?
Recently, I had a powerful conversation with a person who was referred to me for coaching. This person kept saying over and over again that she’s just “not organized”. She is DEFINING HERSELF as this. This creates an overwhelm, which does not allow small steps.
To completely change the overwhelm once and for all…. is to do it not all at once, but rather, in steps. MANTRAS can help. Perhaps you have tried that, and it’s not worked for you. I have a tip. Try NOT saying: “my new mantra is I’m organized, so I’m going to just say I’m completely organized and everything’s going to be perfect”. That doesn’t really work, because your brain knows it’s a big fat lie.
Try saying “I am in the process of becoming better organized.” Your brain then processes this and considers “Well, maybe I could handle that”. So do that. Make a T chart. On the upper left, write “don’t like” and on the upper right hand corner write “want instead.” This will help you BREAK DOWN what you want so that it is not a Big Hairy Audacious Goal “only.” It will be a list of do-able items.
There is so much power with do-able change.
In summary,
Use a mantra that helps trick your brain into thinking bigger…”I’m in the process of….(your desired outcome.)
Pick one small step so that it’s not “all or nothing.”
Make a chart of what you want – so that you become clear on your Desires by considering what you Don’t want. Use this for number 2
Come to Wisdom Warriors on Monday 10/2 so that you receive the bonus tool and make decisions so much easier.
You are on your way to ending decision overwhelm, once and for all!
So many people say their inbox is driving them crazy, how they have too many emails, and that the demands are always coming at them. They are at the mercy of that inbox.
Well, I have news for you. You may not like this. Ready? It’s probably NOT your inbox. To address JUST the inbox, there’s lots of programs where you can go to inbox zero and you can have this system and that system and have it filtered, etc. Those things are really good to do. However, the problem is much bigger and much deeper. I say this with love: the problem just might be you.
It’s not that you are a bad person. I believe that we are all made in the image of the divine and that we are all amazing.The problem comes in when we sometimes overdo ourselves, get distracted, and we overfill our lives to such a point where we are so overloaded that all we can do is look at our inbox.
Think about a river, a river that is getting polluted. Sure, you can pick up the trash at the end of the river. That’s like dealing with “inbox zero”. Or you can go to the source and say, what’s happening? That’s what we’re doing today: getting to the SOURCE.
Let’s discuss three ways that you can look differently at your inbox.
Dial into the FEELING of the inbox tyranny. If you feel that all you’re doing is reacting and all you’re doing is being in that inbox and dealing with that inbox, that is your sympathetic nervous system going full blast. Great news: you can reverse this.
We have four energy systems in our bodies, and the first energy system and the most powerful one is the sympathetic nervous system. That system is what keeps us safe. It’s why we run out of burning buildings without thinking twice about it. You are living with it and it is creating cloudiness in your executive function brain, so that you feel as though you are under attack. Just the anxiety level of it is big. So know that the sympathetic nervous system is on overload.
The way to calm it is to breathe and to give yourself grace and to do things that will calm you so that your sympathetic nervous system calms down and that your executive brain actually functions.
2)When you’re in Overload,you are in firefighting mode (this is related to number one). Firefighting mode feels really good, because who doesn’t love a good firefighter, right? He or she puts out the fires in the building. We love firefighters. However, if we are in firefighting mode all the time, guess what we’re not doing? We’re not doing our big, important work that requires that deep thought. What we get, however, in firefighting, is “wow, thanks very much for responding right away”. And that dopamine comes in, it’s like, woo, I’m a hero, I’m a firefighter and I’m doing it. And that’s addictive. We get this false sense of “I’m getting it all done.”
3)Remember, the inbox is the presenting problem. It seems as though that’s all you’re doing. And guess what? It’s because you are, that’s what you’re doing. You do have the power to decide. You get to decide to do something differently.
You get to decide whatever you want for your life. You get to decide not to “squirrel” in your inbox and go to other people’s problems (AKA Your Inbox) all the time. You get to be the king or queen of your own darn life. DECIDE is a big topic…bigger than this article. Read more on that here: UnScatter Your Entrepreneurial Life Guide.
Download and print that, and read it through. More importantly, do the exercises because it will help you DECIDE. Most of the time when we’re in our inbox, it’s because we haven’t decided to say yes to ourselves and our own priorities.
And please let me know what you think of the guide! Email me carol@unscatterme.com.
So, rise above your inbox tyranny and decide. Another way to move out of the chaos, with your friends, is to attend Wisdom Warriors.
In fact, tomorrow (Monday) is our Wisdom Warriors (the free monthly version of the UnscattereMe community on Facebook), where we will be addressing our issues with SQUIRRELING and how to turn that around!
I will teach, live, how to trust your gut when all you can think about is your failures, to capitalize on that last minute energy even when it’s not the last minute, and to really chase your dreams, not your squirrels.
Today’s topic: breaking up with your nice to-do tasks. Sounds great, but why would you want to do that, anyhow?
Well, often when we are trying to get ahead of our to-dos, we put our head down and to go through the list, and doing that results in a feeling of being depleted. Or, perhaps there are feelings of working a lot and not getting anywhere. It’s very demotivational. These things are un-fun – and as a result, we procrastinate and we get distracted. All of the things that we believe are the problem (being distracted, not focused and so on) are actually because we are not engaged in what we’re doing.
We believe we have to/ should be doing them – and they feel really, really ridiculously heavy. Let’s focus on releasing some of this weight, so that we feel happy, we feel strong, we feel light, & we feel expansive. If you go to the Productivity Success Cake, a lot of that (feeling of strong/light/expansive) is baked into the health layer and into the environment layer. However, what I’m going to focus on today is the productivity layer.
In the productivity layer we have a piece called ‘Time and Tasks. In this is “breaking up with your nice to-do tasks”. Those tasks can be significant and we all have them! For example, periodically I go through and I empty out bins of pages of ‘someday I’ll get to this,’ you know, beautiful ideas. Maybe you’ve got ideas from programs that you attended that ‘someday I’ll do this and the truth is that all of that physical clutter or clutter on your computer, it’s adding to your mental angst and you’re not getting to it anyway. So you just want to release it and break up with it. Not easy though, is it? So I’m going to tell you a little story about how a client of mine and I – we did just that.
Read on or watch the video.
I have a client and the tasks were on this person’s computer. They were all nice and neat and assigned to this person, with a deadline. We started by talking about deleting those tasks which were over a certain age – for example, they were 6 months overdue – but that didn’t seem right. So we considered deleting anything over a year (because if you have not done them in a year and nobody’s died, you can get rid of them), and most of them were able to be deleted. I was really curious why we could not just get rid of the rest. We discovered there were some deeply held beliefs around responsibility, and perhaps some worthiness. Also, the lack of global deleting had to do with how this person’s company was set up. The tasks that were assigned to this person should have been assigned to somebody else – but the ‘somebody else’ was not holding up their end of the bargain, and therefore, it didn’t get actioned.
So it’s kind of two- or three-pronged. It’s all about considering how much you take on, how much really is YOUR job and how much the needle moves.
There were other tasks that were more ‘nice to-dos.’ For example – the head chatter may say, “Well, I should really do research for that client because if I did, it would make that client’s experience better in my line of work”. And that’s not untrue. However, it’s a little bit like my bins of ideas of things that I’d like to do someday in my practice (because most people I know that are creative geniuses like myself we’re always going to take a new personality exam etc…we want to learn more). The truth of the matter is that there’s only so much time in the day and there’s only so much of us. So we must make choices. Concentrate on the things that you are not only just able to do, but that will really move the needle.
I did a Facebook live in UnscatterMe, my online Facebook community (which I recommend that you consider joining!) and what I talked about in that community earlier today was how to prioritize. Breaking up with your ‘nice to dos’ is one way of prioritizing. Head over to the group and watch the video to see what that looks like.
When you look at your to-dos in that piece of the cake, that time and task to-dos, if there is anything that’s a to-do of more than six months, really seriously ask yourself, is it that important? If it is, think about how you will shift your priorities to get it done. If it’s not that important, put it in a to-do list for next year, next quarter, next month, so that it’s not in your face, holding you down, weighing you down, not allowing you to be productive, not allowing you to live in your greatness, not allowing you to feel unscattered so that you can live your best, most confident, happy, entrepreneurial life that you deserve, so that you can actually do the work that you came into this world to do.
Hey everybody. Carol, back here with the second video lesson, I’m very excited to see you all.
In this lesson I wanted to give you a real live example, and the example I want to really highlight today is somebody that- I’ll be honest with you – I never thought would would come into my world and be so blessed by me, and whilst he’s no longer a client, he was really a special person. Let me tell you what happened.
Read on or watch the video.
His name is Husain, right? He’s the PhD who could not find order. I mean, this man is ridiculously smart, but yet order was just not something that he could find. And so I know last time I really shared with you my pretty vulnerable truth. But this is not just my experience, I have this really powerful story to tell about my client Husain. He was in the situation where he just desperately wanted to follow the rules, but for the life of him, it wouldn’t work. He tried to be orderly. I mean, many people say that ‘oh my gosh, I’ve tried to be organized’ and ‘I used to be organized’. We hear that a lot. But yet something is different now because you’re in a different situation. In his case, he had just started his business a couple of years previous and I thought, my God, I have no idea how I’m going to help this man because I don’t know anything about his business. But in truth, I didn’t need to know anything about his business. He felt as orderly as a ‘cotton ball on fire’ – those were his words – and as a result, his business was tanking. His marriage was teetering on divorce, and I have got to say his self-hate level was pretty high.
Now, after working through my five steps to become confident and focused, life really doesn’t get in the way for him. He has implemented just enough structure in his life so that he is now able to access that energy flow so that he does not shut down and he’s prioritizing his own needs. He wasn’t doing that before, even with six very young children. That’s pretty amazing. And he is an engaged, actively engaged spouse.
Think about the iceberg again.
The five steps are right above the line where the ‘decide’ is. We talked about the ‘financial’ and ’financial stability’ already but there’s also other ones – self-love and deep healing. Luckily Husian had the financial stability all set so that he could really hang on to this work and really go deep. But that deep healing and that self-love we really worked on that. So what he thought he needed was to get more organized, right? And that ‘more organized’ is in my Discover Program. What he learned by starting here is that he had to dive down into this piece so that it would then support that piece. And now his life is kind of amazing because he gets in these flow states where things are profitable and easy. So if you like flow state, if you like profitable and easy pay attention, download the free guide on the five steps because it’ll really get the ball rolling.
The other thing that I wanted to say was that Husain’s energy, and that of many of the people II work with, is kind of up and down. And what happens is when our energy is up and down, is that our villains, our gremlins, our voices in the back of our head, start talking to us about how we’ll never make it and we’re not worthy and so on and so forth. So through this process he was able to get that energy back. He was able to make his work, work with his own energy up. So, if you are not a bright and early riser, no worries! Don’t do things bright and early! There can be beliefs in the background saying ‘I must get up now because the rest of the world is up’, or ‘the rest of the world starts work at eight o’clock in the morning’. Well, you don’t have to! I have a current client right now (who isn’t Husain), who has decided on purpose, her work hours are 11am to 8pm. That happens with a lot of my people because a lot of my people are neurodiverse and they tend to work better later at night. And that is okay.
The other thing that can get in the way of being organized and and having a successful business and a life that you love is the lack of vision and the lack of putting that vision in front of you. Through our work together, Husain and countless others got off track – they procrastinated and got shiny object syndrome, (which we all do in my community at least!) but we came back and we would repeatedly go through from ‘decide’ place because this is an iterative process from the ‘decide’ place. What do you want to be focused on for your vision?
Last but not least, I want to bring up another concern that some folks have, and I know Husian had – ‘will I make enough money? You know, sure I have some money saved up, but will I make enough money to really be able to support my family, be able to do this thing?’ And that’s a real consideration. Going through the steps will allow you all those foundational pieces, and then once you do get up to that ‘discover’ step, where we really dive into the productivity success cake. Husain did that process at least twice – because we bake lots of different cakes and they’re all fun and all different, and we learn something more and better about ourselves every single time. You don’t have to do this more than once but no matter how many cakes you bake, whether it’s one or whether it’s two or three, it’s amazing what happens. All of that foundational work you do at the beginning now supports time management, project management, getting more confident in your decisions over and over and over again – and you get to practice and celebrate.
All of the steps are covered in in the guide, and the guide is also all about getting the ball rolling – because that’s the hardest part and is why it’s in red. It’s in red for a reason because too many of us are ‘well I’d like to do that, but maybe I want to do this’. But what about it? I just want to keep this open. Like I was doing that, remember? I was running around thing to thing, throwing spaghetti at the wall. Husian was running around like a cotton ball on fire. If you are feeling ‘I better do whatever I can do for the economy’, then please download the guide and stay tuned because I have a special workshop coming up on Monday, where I really want you to do these steps and have that breakthrough for yourself. It’s going to be your opportunity to go through it yourself and have that breakthrough, and I can’t wait to see you on the other side when I’m congratulating you for your breakthrough and you really are clear about what’s going to happen in light of the recession and not be a victim anymore.
Today I’m addressing some big stuff. We are on the absolute brink -and some people may say we already are- in an economic crisis and doom and gloom and recession. And I’m here to state it and not to get caught up in it. And…with every problem there’s an opportunity and there’s a key point to learn. The key is to be prepared.
Read on or watch the video
I’m going to tell you a little story, and this story has to do with me, back in 2009 when we were having another economic crisis. I was first trying to get my life together after I had made the decision to separate from my crazy ex, which came a little bit after 2009 – I didn’t know what to do. I really hated feeling like I was running in circles, just trying to survive. I was in an economic crisis. The great recession still had that hold on us. It was actually a couple years after 2009 but I still had that FEELING.
It reminds me of today. Sure, we’re not in covid, but many of us are still in that survival mode. So – still in an economic crisis back then, I was faced with a big decision. What do I do about living with that abusive alcoholic? I was quite emotionally unstable and to say I was scattered would be an understatement. What I discovered in those first few years of my business and in that economic crisis, the crisis that I was in inside and out, was that counterintuitively I really needed to slow down. I had been running FAST for a long time.
The process of slowing down was unexpected. It worked really well, and that actually opened the door to me being able to think again and say ‘yes’ to my own needs. Imagine that, right? So, I found an amazing mentor, and she helped me build my coaching practice step by step. Slowing down allowed me to see what God had put right in front of me. So I ask you this, imagine if you were able to believe in yourself with ease, without getting constantly pulled in other directions by your family creating or amplifying that feeling of being scattered by that direction pulling. It’s so common among entrepreneurs who have the shiny object syndrome. If you dare to allow yourself to imagine this, do yourself a solid (like my teenager would say) and keep reading. I’m going to give you three tips.
The first tip to remember is to get your confidence back. If you are making a change…for example, -you’ve been away from your business for a little while, or if
-you are going to the next level in your business, if
-you’ve had a change in any way, you may have moved,
-you may have gotten divorced,
or any number of changes- that impacts our confidence. We don’t feel “in the mode.” Getting that confidence back, it’s really important to slow down and to really start working on what makes you feel good. What light do you have to shine on the world? Even if you feel a little rusty since you have not done what you used to do, and even if you feel scattered, I invite you to consider a time in your past where you were really on your game. When you place your mind there, you will walk out in the world with that confidence. It is a number one thing people are really looking for when they begin anew and being in an economic crisis and recession and all the doom and gloom and inflation – that can knock our confidence back and we can think ‘oh my gosh, I’d better run and hide’. I don’t want you to run and hide. Running and hiding will not get you there, I promise you that.
The second thing to consider is really taking a look at your time management – and that’s what I didn’t do. What I did is I ran around like crazy. I had great experience in running around like crazy, throwing spaghetti to the wall, smiling, kind of pretending everything was okay. And you know what? As a business owner, some days you want everything to look like Disney, or to feel like Disney – as everything is not Disney. And baking it, you can kind of tell in the background that things aren’t working. So give your time and attention to what really matters. How do you know what really matters? Well, if you’re making money at it, it’s lighting you up and it’s and it’s really aligning with you and your vision then those are the things that you really want to focus on.
Last but not least there’s a fear that some people have right now and that is that they will have to work full-time in order to support themselves, and that they will have no time to continue building their business the way they want because they just don’t have enough hours in the day. So for that, what I’ll say is you don’t have to work full-time. What’s so important is that you have enough coming in to cover your bills or you have enough put aside somewhere to cover your bills for the next (at least) three months while you’re undergoing some changes in your life. Whatever they are, whether it’s working on your confidence, taking care of your trauma, or maybe you’re in a business building program, whatever the case may be that you do have enough coming in or put aside, it’s actually really important.
The bottom of my iceberg graphic is economic and financial security. If you don’t have that it’s virtually impossible to really stay focused on the things that really matter. You’re going to be in constant fear and worry, and we don’t want you in constant fear and worry.
That’s what I have for today. In summary, you have a beautiful opportunity to harness the “crap of what’s going on in the world,” to take whatever transition you’re in, and capitalize on opportunities that present themselves. Transitions can be starting a new business, upleveling your existing business, changing your business model, getting divorced, getting married, or moving. Regardless, you must stay focused. These are wise ways to do it. So stay tuned for the next lesson for those, which will come out on Wednesday.
What transition might you be in? Comment below and let me know!
