93. The Stories That Keep Us Stuck

Speaker A: Welcome to Visionary's Pursuit, a podcast where we explore what it takes to turn your bold and inspiring ideas into reality. I'm Carolina Suleta. I'm a life and a business coach and your host for this podcast. I'm thrilled to have you here. Hi and welcome back. This is episode 93 of the Visionary's Pursuit podcast. How are all of you? It's been a while. This summer we took a three week break from the podcast. We shared some of our most listened episodes and now I'm back live, excited to connect with all of you. This summer we went to Colorado, where Andrew is originally from. And we spent multiple weeks at a lake house in the mountains of Colorado. It's one of my favorite places in the world because it's disconnected from the city and doing things and it's surrounded by national forest and nature and we got to see foxes and deer and bald eagle and many other different animals and birds. And it was all about slowing down life and being outdoors and being with the people that we love the most. One of the beautiful things we have in our family is that Andrew's family and my family are actually friends. Andrew and I met on an airplane, so nobody knew each other before we met. But throughout the years they've become friends. So Andrew's family invited my family, my parents, my two brothers, their spouses, their kids, which they have a three year old and a three month old. So it was a big family reunion for an entire week. There was all the beautiful things about being with family. A constant buzz around the house of everyone talking, doing hiking together, swimming in the lake, kayaking, going on bike rides, playing Roomie Q and all the amazing board games that we love and hanging out with each other. And many moments I took a step back and I was looking at all these people and feeling so grateful that we're in a moment in life where both of our families and parents are healthy and we're together. But also reflecting a little bit on my journey with coaching and this work I do on myself on personal development. And listen, every time we're with family, there's conflict, there's things that, you know, we rub each other in the wrong way. Like they say there's nobody that pushes your buttons like your family because they were the ones that put them there in the first place. But in general, I feel that my relationship with everyone in my family is really healthy and it's really good. Of course, they're not perfect, but I do credit the quality of these relationships to the work I've learned Through coaching, understanding that I cannot have manuals for them, or when I do that, it's my problem when I'm expecting them to behave in a certain way. Noticing my thoughts in every moment and choosing them carefully. And it doesn't mean. Again, I don't want this to sound like, oh, I have this beautiful, perfect relationship. Of course not. There's always things that happen that may hurt our feelings or make us feel scared or upset in some way. And of course, when I'm with all these people that I love, they're my family and it happens. But being able to be mindful and notice what I'm feeling instead of reacting to those thoughts, being able to have a space with Andrew in which we can talk through things and connect with each other and support each other. I do credit that, uh, to all this personal work I've done. Because sometimes when I look at all these years and this huge amount of money and time I've spent investing in myself, sometimes I wonder where would I be, how would my life be if I hadn't chosen this path? And it's impossible to know. But I believe that one of the biggest, most significant impacts is in the quality of the relationships I have with the people I love. And I also believe that the quality of our relationships equals the quality of our life. Being able to spend an entire week with Andrew's family and my family and everyone getting along together and creating the most beautiful. Like I look at the pictures and I just smile of the beautiful memories we created together and being here after that time has been completed and. And the only feeling I have is gratitude and love. And for me, I think that's a measure of success. And why I wanted to share is because I like to give you insights a little bit into my life, but also to tell you that when we do this work, not only for our business, not only for making more money, not only for growing our businesses and being more successful, when we do this work, the relationships with the people around us improve. And that is invaluable. And that is the hope I have for all of you. And I get it. I talk to so many people and I know relationships with family can be very tricky. But I also believe that when we work on ourselves, when we let go of our self righteousness and we let go of the manuals we have for other people and we accept them and embrace them as who they are, they don't need to change for our relationships to improve. So with that said, I am excited to be back energized to be connecting with all of you. And that reminds me that I received a couple of messages from some of you this summer thanking me for the podcast, telling me how valuable it's been in your lives. And I want to say thank you. It really means a lot to me when I hear that this content is creating an impact. And I want to say thank you on, um, behalf of Andrew and I, because it does mean a lot to us that what we're creating is of value to all of you. And we want to invite you to rate the podcast, write a comment, share it with other people, because that's the way that we can continue to expand our audience and hopefully have a bigger impact. So for today, what I want us to talk about are the stories that keep us stuck. One of the central premises of this podcast is that circumstances, things that are happening in our life are separate from our thoughts. And things that are happening in our life can be things like, I'm having a baby, my kid is 3 years old, my husband is sick, or my husband is an artist, or my husband is going from one job to another, or we have X amount of money in the bank. And my philosophy, the way I see life, is that those circumstances are not the ones that keep us stuck. It's the way we think about those circumstances that keep us stuck. So today I want us to talk about those stories. Because most of the time we're not stuck because we lack discipline or because we don't have enough ambition. We're stuck because our brains, our minds, have created a story that is so convincing that keep us exactly where we are. These stories are meant to protect us from uncomfortable experiences. They want to protect us from rejection and failure and disappointment and making the wrong choice voice or to be embarrassed when other people are seeing us Try or because there's uncertainty and we're entering the unknown. Our, uh, mind creates these stories to give us short term emotional relief. But at the same time, there are the stories that keep us from taking action that could move our life or our business forward. I often talk with people about burnout, about being overwhelmed, about being exhausted or lack of energy or feeling tired. And many attribute their burnout or their exhaustion to circumstances, to the demands of their business, to working long hours, to not being able to disconnect from work. And of course, those things definitely impact our levels of energy. But what I have discovered throughout the years is that the thing that takes most energy away from us are our own thoughts. Maybe you've had the experience of getting to the end of the day and feeling exhausted. But when you look back, you realize that you didn't take as much action, you didn't do as many things. The problem was that you spent the day in confusion, in overwhelm, telling yourself, I'm not doing enough. Uh, beating yourself up because you should be doing more, or being in confusion because you're telling yourself, I don't know what to do. Should I do this or should I do that thing? Or you started one thing and then you told yourself that wasn't the thing you should be doing, and you move to the next, and you didn't accomplish anything, but you felt busy all day. Or sometimes we get to the end of the day and we're exhausted because the majority of the day we spent the time thinking, I just don't have enough time, and rushing through things and putting pressure on ourselves to get it all done right now because we are in this scarcity for time. These thoughts sound like explanations. They may even sound like facts. But really what they are, are stories that our mind is creating to protect us from the discomfort that comes with taking action. So I'm not gonna sit here with you to try to argue that they're completely true or completely false, that you absolutely know what to do, or that you absolutely have enough time. What I want us to consider is a more useful question that is the what happens when I believe that thought is true? What happens when I believe I don't have enough time? What happens when I believe I don't know what to do next? What happens when you believe that you're not doing enough? What happens, or what do you do next when you assume the thought is true? Steven Hayes, he's the creator of acceptance and commitment therapy, and he uses a term that I really love that's called cognitive fusion. And what he means by cognitive fusion is what happens when we get entangled with a thought, when we don't simply notice, oh, I'm having a thought, that tells me I don't have enough time. But we actually experience the thought as real, so we believe we don't have enough time. So cognitive fusion is when we get entangled, when we accept a thought as a circumstance, when we believe that a story our brain is telling us is 100% true. So my goal today is for us to explore together some of those common stories that keep us stuck. But the message is not that you should try to eliminate or negate those stories. Your mind is presenting you. Because a lot of the times when we push back against the story, when our, uh, brain is Telling us, I don't have enough time. And we're like, yes, I have time. We can't really get out of that fight. The goal here is to create enough distance between you and the thought so you can choose your actions instead of that thought or that story choosing the actions for you. So let's explore three of the most common stories I hear. The first one is I am not doing enough. I was talking with a client recently, and that's what he presented. He told me he was feeling very frustrated and very stuck because he wasn't doing enough. I've heard it also from other people, not exactly in the words, I'm not doing enough, but I should be doing more. I should be further ahead, Or I look at other people and everyone is doing more than I am, or I'm wasting my potential. But the problem, as I was talking with this client, is not that to argue if he was doing enough or not. It's that the brain was telling him he should be doing more, but that more was so blurry. More of what? How much more? When will you know you're doing enough? What specific actions would count as enough? When would you know you have done it? And he didn't know? Because when our brain presents this story that's like, I'm not doing enough. There is no visible finish line. There's only this permanent feeling of inadequacy. So you can think about it as a loop. We start by telling ourselves, I'm not doing enough. Then we use criticism and pressure to try to motivate ourselves. But instead, that criticism produces shame, discouragement, sometimes overwhelm, and then our motivation and our energy decrease. And then we take less action. And then our, uh, brain takes that less action as evidence that we're not doing enough. And this evidence, then we continue telling ourselves, I'm not doing enough, and we're back in the loop. And. And in fact, many of us have a, uh, mistaken belief that pressure and criticism is what motivates us. And listen, it is true for many of us. Being hard on ourselves, pushing ourselves, having negative comments about ourselves in our brain has been what has given us the impulse to take the next action and the next action. And in fact, some of us have developed the mistaken belief that criticism is the way that we motivate ourselves. And I'm sure that it has worked. But there's a point that it stops working. Criticism can initiate action because we are in pain. And when we're in pain, we want to move away from the pain, but that it's not sustainable. And as, uh, I talk to a lot of my clients is okay, criticism, being hard on yourself has taken you here. But in order to 10x your life, in order to take this business to the next level, this is the thing that's actually holding you back. Kristin Neff is one of the most renowned experts on self compassion. And she challenges and hardly believes that criticism is not necessary for motivation, that self compassion is the answer. But when people hear self compassion, they usually think about giving ourselves a pass, avoiding responsibility, lowering our standards. And that's not what self compassion is. But self compassion is not about avoiding responsibility or lowering our standards. It's about being honest with ourselves while we hold ourselves in high regard. So when we're having self compassion, we can say something like, I am not where I want to be. I want to be more efficient, more productive, I want to be doing more things. But we are not adding to that that there's something wrong with me. We are not shaming ourselves for not doing enough. We are acknowledging, uh, a desire we have. And this is what happened with my client. He came to me feeling awful, honestly, because he had been beating himself up, not doing enough, being behind, not fully going for the goal he had. And to the point that he was already doubting if he was the right person to achieve that goal. So what we did is a couple of things. The first thing we did is to give that part of his brain that was wanting to be doing more a space to say what that more meant. My question to him was, if you were doing everything your brain thinks you should be doing, what is it that you would be doing? And immediately when we did that, it went from shaming himself to an action plan. Here are the things I want to be doing. And the second thing is we really went deep in challenging the thought that self criticism is a way to motivate ourselves. And talking about what I was telling you earlier, that self compassion is about holding ourselves responsible, but in a way that we're also holding ourselves with high regard and not beating ourselves up. So if your story, if the story that keeps you stuck is I'm not doing enough, first, I want you to create some distance between you and that thought by instead of believing you're not doing enough, telling yourself, I am having the thought that I'm not doing enough, which is different than I'm not doing enough. Second, define what enough is. If you were doing enough, what would you be doing? And look that as your action plan. And third, really challenge the belief that self criticism is the way that you motivate yourself. The second common story that I hear people share that is keeping them stuck is I don't know what to do. And it can sound like, should I do this or that or maybe this other thing, is this the right direction? I'm not sure what if there's a better approach? Maybe I need more information before I decide. And like the previous story, it also takes us into a loop. So first we go and start considering multiple possibilities. I could do A, B or C. Then we choose one and we begin, we start doing some work there. But of course discomfort shows up and uncertainty shows up. And then we interpret that discomfort as evidence that we chose the wrong path. So we switch to option B. But then the uncertainty, uh, follows and the discomfort follows. So then we conclude that we are confused, that we don't know where we're going, and we start losing trust in ourselves. I see this happen often with people who have a full time job that they're exhausted, tired, they want to, uh, run away from, and they want to start their own business. So they quit, they go start their own business, but their own business gets hard, they're not getting the paycheck, so then they go look for a job and then they're miserable at the job, so they quit again and go look for another and then try to start another business. And after they do this a couple of times, what ends up happening is that they start eroding the trust they have in themselves to actually succeed at either of those. It also happens when people are spending too much time and energy researching or reconsidering or switching. Because when we don't stay long enough with a choice, we cannot actually learn from it and transcend it. So listen, sometimes confusion is genuine and we may truly need some information. In fact, uh, sometimes when people come to me and they're about to make a choice, I start asking them questions and we get to the conclusion that they need to answer certain questions before they can make the right choice. But sometimes confusion happens in our brain because we have a desire for certainty. We have a desire that we can guarantee that whatever we're going to put our energy into is going to be successful. But the truth is that choosing means you're risking doing something wrong, you're risking failure. When we choose and we actually stay with a choice long enough, we're probably going to have some failures, but we're also going to have some learnings. Most importantly, we're going to have some type of result that we can decide what to do with that Result. But when we stay in confusion, what happens is that we don't fully expose ourselves. But when we allow ourselves to indulge in confusion, when we allow ourselves to stay in the story of I don't know what to do, what happens is that in one way, we protect ourselves because we don't fully expose ourselves to the failure, to the rejection. But also we never create a result from which we can learn or keep moving forward. So as you can see, the story of I don't know what to do is also a way of protecting ourselves from pain, from rejection. As entrepreneurs, we make a lot of choices that we're not sure if they're right, because the way we're going to know if we were right is when we see the result it created. Oh, I'm hiring this person. Is this the right hire? Is this not the right hire? I spent the last month with one of my clients talking about a hire she's making and going back and forth. Should I hire and not hire her? Why hire her? Why not hire her? Right? And it was just this confusion. But I think it's important for all of us to train ourselves that confusion. Not being 100% certain on the right choice doesn't mean to stop or not make that choice. It just means that there's uncertainty. And with uncertainty comes risk and exposure. And that doesn't feel very comfortable. And that's why our brain wants to keep us in confusion. A lot of times that confusion is so painful for us and it drains so much of our energy. But our brain believes that confusion is safer than actually the potential rejection, the potential failure. So as I was talking earlier, cognitive fusion is when we fully believe a thought. One of the things you can do here is notice the thought, notice how you're telling yourself, I don't know what the right choice is. I'm not sure about something. And make a choice regardless. One of the things I love to share with my clients is that it's not about making the right choice, but about making a choice and then making that choice, the right one. In fact, with one of my clients, we even created a contract that she signed to commit to a choice for an extended period of time because she was spending too much time in confusion. And doing a contract with yourself, or telling someone that you're committing to something, giving yourself a period of time to which you will gonna be giving everything to that choice is a good way to produce a result that then can either tell you if you're moving in the right direction, or you can learn Something adjust, and then take a different direction. But stick to a choice for a period, uh, of time that you've decided ahead of time. That is key. All right. And moving on to story number three is one that I know. I mean, all of these stories, I've had them before and continue to show up every now and then, but it's the one that I think affects me the most today, and it's that I don't have enough time. So basically, what my brain says is, oh, my God, look at this to do list. It's never ending. I don't have enough time to do it. I need an uninterrupted period of time that is so long. And since I can't have it, I can't get to all these things, or I only have 20 minutes or 30 minutes. Basically, when I'm telling myself I don't have enough time, no matter how much time there is available, it still feels like it's not enough. And listen, sometimes it's true. We generally don't have enough time. But I think that when that's true, it doesn't bother us as much. We might feel tired, we might push ourselves, we might acknowledge that we just couldn't get to it. So the goal here is not to dismiss the reality of those days that you actually don't have enough time. The question is not about, again, arguing if you do have time or don't have enough time. But what is the impact in your life when you believe you don't have enough time? Because often enough time, secretly or unconsciously, means enough time to do it perfectly, enough time to finish the whole project. Enough time so I feel confident and calm. Enough time so I don't have interruptions, enough time. So I have the guarantee that whatever I'm doing is going to work. But because that ideal block of time that we hope we will have never shows up, then we're not efficient. We waste time when we tell ourselves we don't have enough time. Listen, when I tell myself I don't have enough time, I end up in Instagram. I don't know if that happens to you. Or I end up doing things in the kitchen or here or there, like not actually doing work because my brain has told me I don't have enough time. So I don't even use the time I have to do something. So, again, let's talk about the loop, right? The loop that we've described for other stories. The loop in this one is something like this. I look at my to do list, or I imagine how much time a project will take, then that to do list feels too long. The project feels too large for the amount of time we have available today. So we decide that the small amount of time that we do have is not enough. So we postpone that work until we have enough time, until that large ideal block of time appears. But it never appears. So we don't make the progress we want to be making because we are not using those small chunks of time that we do have. So because we're not making as much progress, then the project feels even bigger or our to do list gets even longer. And then we conclude see evidence that I don't have enough time. Once again, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. The story in our brain creates the evidence so we can continue believing in that story as, uh, all the other stories. I don't have enough time is also protecting us. It's protecting us from maybe producing something that is going to be incomplete or imperfect or that people are not going to like it, or that we're not going to like. Might be protecting us from discovering how hard or how challenging the work we want to do really is. Or even facing the discomfort of doing work that feels hard. It might be confronting us about our priorities, right? Feeling like I don't have enough time might also mean that I'm not prioritizing my time in the right way. It might be protecting us from starting something that we're not going to finish. Or maybe protecting us from feeling disappointed on our own work. Sometimes the fear is not the lack of time. Sometimes is the fear is that we could invest our limited time and still not receive the result that we want. So instead of telling yourself I don't have enough time, or even asking yourself, do I have enough time? I think a better question to ask ourselves is what can I move forward with the time I actually have? What is the most important thing I can do? How can I do something right now? 10 minutes might not be enough to complete a project, but might be enough to open a document, outline a section, or remind yourself what you're doing or you know, send an email to someone that you need a response from. Small actions are the ways that we get to big results. So if this is your story, I don't have enough time. The first thing that we are learning in this podcast is that to create space between the story and ourselves so we don't create cognitive fusion. That is when we actually believe we don't have enough time. So one way to do that is to tell ourselves, I am having the thought, I don't have enough time versus telling ourselves, I don't have enough time. The second step is to ask ourselves a more empowering question. With the time I have, what can I do of my priorities? What is the most important so I can get it started right now? And then also being mindful of our perfectionism, of the part of us that wants to be perfect, and training ourselves to, to do work that is not perfect, but that we can perfect with time. If you have five minutes, if you have 10 minutes, how can you train your brain to use it to find those little pockets of time to be incredibly valuable? And with time, start gaining evidence that you actually get a lot done when you stop telling yourself the story that you don't have enough time. If we look at these three stories, they look different. I know I'm not doing enough, or I don't know what to do, or I don't have enough time. But at the same time, they share several characteristics. Number one, they are vague. What is enough? Why we don't know, what else should you be doing? Like it's just this vague, blurry story in our head. Two, they do not produce the actions we need to create the results we want. They keep us stuck. Three, they make us feel inadequate, uncertain, or scarce. Right? They make us feel small. They don't help us tap into our thoughts, true resourcefulness, or our, uh, capacity. They also give us the reason to postpone the emotional discomfort. Right? If I have to send an email to a client and I tell myself I don't have enough time, guess what? I don't have to sit there and go through the discomfort of writing that email. And here's the most important thing, is that they create evidence that support those limiting beliefs, and then we get stuck in those cycles. I want to emphasize this one more time. This that I'm sharing today is not about arguing if you're doing enough or if you do know what you want to do, or if you do have enough time. It's not about arguing if the story is true or not true. It's about reminding us all to notice the impact, the result we create when we believe that story and instead ask ourselves better questions that help us move towards the person we want to be, the results we want to create, because we all have human brains and we are building businesses, and businesses means we're stepping into uncertainty, into discomfort, into emotional exposure, into the potential of failure and rejection and all these uncomfortable emotions. Your brain will continue to create stories like this because it's trying to protect you from that potential pain. But we don't have to argue with the story. We can recognize it as a story and tell ourselves. I see that story. I understand how it's limiting. I also understand how it's trying to protect me. But I'm going to choose to take a small action instead. Because we all have human brains and we're business founders, entrepreneurs, and we are doing things that are uncertain, that have emotional exposure. The most likely thing to happen is for our brain to continue offering stories like these, telling us that we're not doing enough, making us feel confused about a choice, telling us we don't have enough time, or another version of these stories. But we don't have to argue with those stories. What we need to do is to recognize them, understand that they exist because they're trying to protect us from something that feels uncomfortable, and that we can still make a choice that is better for us. Even if that story is there, we can say, hey, story, I see you. I understand what you're doing for me. Thank you. And I'm going to choose this small action. Stories will come with us, but our job is to not let them decide where we're going. All right, everyone, it was great being with all of you here, and I'll see you next time. Bye. If you're currently pursuing a big, bold idea and would love some support, let's talk in my. In my coaching program, I'll teach you how to manage yourself, your own thoughts and emotions, as well as your team and your money, so you can turn your beautiful idea into a reality. Go now to carasuleta.com consult that is C-A-R-O Z U L E T A.com consult and complete the form to book a complimentary call with me. See you there. Sam.