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Transformative Habits for Personal & Professional Growth with Sue Ryan · The Confident Entrepreneur With Jennifer Ann Johnson

• 0:37
  Jennifer Johnson: Today we welcome back into the studio Sue Ryan.
• 0:40
  Jennifer Johnson: She is a dear, dear friend of mine and for the past 40 years she has been helping individuals, from entrepreneurs to Fortune 100 companies to C-suite leaders and over 700 organizations of all sizes and multitudes of industries navigate transitions in their business.
• 1:00
  Jennifer Johnson: And she's a rock star.
• 1:02
  Jennifer Johnson: She simply is a rock star.
• 1:06
  Sue Ryan: Well.
• 1:06
  Sue Ryan: I don't know if Osby Osbourne would agree with that.
• 1:10
  Jennifer Johnson: Well, there you go, you're phenomenal.
• 1:13
  Jennifer Johnson: Thank you, and I'll go with rock star.
• 1:15
  Jennifer Johnson: Yeah, just go with the rock star.
• 1:16
  Jennifer Johnson: Claim it, own it.
• 1:17
  Jennifer Johnson: I'm going to claim it.
• 1:18
  Jennifer Johnson: Today.
• 1:20
  Jennifer Johnson: I want to talk with you about habits.
• 1:23
  Jennifer Johnson: Yes, ma'am, okay, and not just any habits, but habits that we can find for ourselves to create a better business environment, for ourselves to create just a better life.
• 1:35
  Jennifer Johnson: Sure, right, sure.
• 1:37
  Jennifer Johnson: And do you have any thoughts on what successful habits of, or how should I phrase this?
• 1:45
  Jennifer Johnson: Habits of successful entrepreneurs?
• 1:48
  Sue Ryan: Yes.
• 1:49
  Jennifer Johnson: Do they all have something in common?
• 1:50
  Jennifer Johnson: No, wow, yes, no.
• 1:55
  Jennifer Johnson: Thank you, ma'am.
• 1:57
  Sue Ryan: I'm going to disrupt your podcast.
• 2:01
  Jennifer Johnson: Please disrupt it.
• 2:03
  Sue Ryan: I could talk about specificity of.
• 2:05
  Sue Ryan: They get up at five in the morning, they make a list, they have the priorities, they have all these different things and yet that, to me, is an endpoint.
• 2:12
  Sue Ryan: I talk about cause and effect.
• 2:14
  Sue Ryan: When you are in alignment with what's most important and you create the habits that work for you, you create your own and you live with them and you live from them and they fit you and they're very efficient.
• 2:24
  Sue Ryan: If I try to copy your habits, that does not mean it's the right habit.
• 2:30
  Sue Ryan: So my thing is you want to understand yourself in a meaningful way and you want to get back to what is important for you in your life.
• 2:41
  Sue Ryan: And how are you going to know how to create the habits that work and support you, because otherwise you will be striving to be like someone else, you'll hold yourself in judgment, you can't be fully present, you can't be in alignment, you're not making the wisest choice, you're chasing, you're chasing and you're chasing somebody else, not yourself.
• 3:00
  Sue Ryan: My one tip for today a big, huge thing, and I've got something I put together on it.
• 3:05
  Sue Ryan: I am incredibly passionate about this because I lived in the absence of it and I strove and strove and strove and I did all the mechanical things until I learned what this is.
• 3:20
  Sue Ryan: When we are very, very young, our personalities are forming and the beliefs that we have.
• 3:27
  Sue Ryan: The truth that serves us when we're very young is being formed in us, and some of it comes from our genetics, some of it comes from our early childhood environment, some of it comes from our family environment and we develop these beliefs of it comes from our family environment and we develop these beliefs and, as our little personalities are forming, these beliefs get established and then, throughout our younger years, we're developing new beliefs and they become automatic patterns running us.
• 3:52
  Sue Ryan: So, by the time we're like in our early 30s, over 90% of who we are are a set of automatic patterns running us and we're not aware of them because, unlike when you go to the, you get life insurance policy, you get a car insurance policy, you get a condo policy or home policy, and six months ahead of time they say, hey, your policy is going to renew.
• 4:10
  Sue Ryan: Has anything changed in your life?
• 4:12
  Sue Ryan: We're not normally encouraged to evaluate what we believe to be truth, and the analogy I use is when I was seven years old, I wore pants that were a certain size.
• 4:24
  Sue Ryan: Well, they don't fit me anymore.
• 4:25
  Sue Ryan: So why would I think that the beliefs that were in my life would necessarily believe me?
• 4:29
  Sue Ryan: So when I talk about creating habits, I go back to the source.
• 4:34
  Sue Ryan: What is it I believe is the truth for me?
• 4:36
  Sue Ryan: And this is raising it to our level of awareness.
• 4:40
  Sue Ryan: So the first thing that we do is we start becoming aware.
• 4:43
  Sue Ryan: What is it that we believe?
• 4:44
  Sue Ryan: What is it that we believe to be true?
• 4:46
  Sue Ryan: Why do we believe that to be true?
• 4:48
  Sue Ryan: Now, some of those are really great.
• 4:51
  Sue Ryan: A quick example that I use is when we were very young, we were taught look both ways before you cross the street, and that was to keep us.
• 4:57
  Sue Ryan: It was from a place of love, to keep us safe.
• 4:59
  Sue Ryan: And now, thank goodness, I learned that, because now I automatically look both ways before I cross the street, or I would be as flat as a pancake.
• 5:05
  Sue Ryan: So, just as powerfully as those that are valuable, some of those, I'm not worthy, I'm not good enough, and when we're very young, we haven't learned discernment yet.
• 5:14
  Sue Ryan: So when somebody says you're a bad person or you're no good, we believe that to be true, especially when it comes from a person of authority, and then we don't have this thing that goes.
• 5:23
  Sue Ryan: You know, in first grade they don't say okay, now let's look at anything you believe.
• 5:27
  Sue Ryan: And when we get to sixth grade, okay, let's look at our beliefs.
• 5:29
  Sue Ryan: So I'm big on evaluating beliefs and I'll walk through that if you'd like.
• 5:37
  Jennifer Johnson: I mean, I think it's great, and it's not something that we're not even, as individuals, aware of.
• 5:44
  Jennifer Johnson: This right, like you said, we are on pretty much autopilot.
• 5:48
  Jennifer Johnson: It's like breathing.
• 5:50
  Jennifer Johnson: We don't have to think about it.
• 5:52
  Jennifer Johnson: We just go about our daily business, doing what we do, because that's what we've always done, until something breaks down and we have to go.
• 6:00
  Jennifer Johnson: Well, wait a second, what's happening?
• 6:03
  Sue Ryan: This is one of the things I work so much with people navigating transitions.
• 6:07
  Sue Ryan: And if you're going to a new space with old habits, that are patterns that are running you, how can you be the best version of yourself?
• 6:17
  Sue Ryan: My passion in life is people continuously become the best version of themselves, and so you go back and you start.
• 6:25
  Sue Ryan: Just, it's so simple.
• 6:26
  Sue Ryan: You start raising to your level of awareness what do I believe to be true?
• 6:29
  Sue Ryan: Why do I believe that to be true?
• 6:30
  Sue Ryan: What do I choose to believe to be true?
• 6:34
  Sue Ryan: And then you start creating new habits based on what that is.
• 6:41
  Sue Ryan: So you start believing that that is what is true.
• 6:43
  Sue Ryan: Then you start programming yourself for that.
• 6:45
  Sue Ryan: You practice it over and over and over again.
• 6:47
  Sue Ryan: That becomes an unconscious pattern of behavior and now you know you keep checking in on things and checking in on things.
• 6:52
  Sue Ryan: And then you get an accountability partner, or multiple ones in different areas of your lives, in areas that you're not aware of, and they can help raise your level of awareness, which also helps them do the same thing and that's great advice.
• 7:05
  Jennifer Johnson: But now, how do we know that we need to do this?
• 7:09
  Jennifer Johnson: I don't know gut check or this check, like how do we know that we need to do it and how often do we need to do it?
• 7:18
  Sue Ryan: Excellent question.
• 7:19
  Sue Ryan: You can do it as often as you choose to do it.
• 7:22
  Sue Ryan: The number one thing you want to be doing is becoming aware.
• 7:27
  Sue Ryan: The first level of this is consciousness and awareness, so it is becoming really aware of what you're doing, and one of the things, for example, I caught myself the other day.
• 7:39
  Sue Ryan: Somebody suggested something and they said you know, you ought to pick up pickleball there it's a great way to meet people and I was like I've got a lot of things going on in my life.
• 7:47
  Sue Ryan: You know I don't.
• 7:48
  Sue Ryan: And I stopped and I said whoa, that was an unconscious pattern of behavior.
• 7:54
  Sue Ryan: Is that I'm too busy to pick up something new?
• 7:57
  Sue Ryan: And I said I choose to stop and intentionally explore that.
• 8:03
  Sue Ryan: So, like we had spoken about in the other podcast, sometimes we become aware of it through somebody else's, an accountability partner, somebody else who can see in us what we can't see in ourselves when we're intentional in our day, when you, literally, you're looking at it and say, okay, okay, I just brushed my teeth and I have no idea what I did.
• 8:21
  Sue Ryan: I just went through that conversation.
• 8:25
  Sue Ryan: I said this about something.
• 8:28
  Sue Ryan: So, in all of these different areas, we start raising our level of awareness of it.
• 8:32
  Sue Ryan: I created a guide.
• 8:34
  Sue Ryan: I'll give you the link for it and people can go through it.
• 8:36
  Sue Ryan: It is gradually starting.
• 8:38
  Sue Ryan: It's creating your level of expectation that you are going to evaluate things in your life and nothing is off limits.
• 8:45
  Sue Ryan: One of the other great ways of doing this and I call it the wheel of life alignment and they've got these exercises called wheel of life balance where you look at pies in your life and you give you know this is health and fitness, this is spiritual, this is perfect.
• 9:00
  Sue Ryan: All of those things.
• 9:01
  Sue Ryan: You start looking at those and you start becoming.
• 9:05
  Sue Ryan: What do you think about money?
• 9:06
  Sue Ryan: What do you believe about money?
• 9:09
  Sue Ryan: And you ask yourself my beliefs about money came from the way my parents did or didn't teach me and that's just what I believed.
• 9:18
  Sue Ryan: I didn't question that.
• 9:19
  Sue Ryan: I didn't go back and do it and it's not like it's the absence of that.
• 9:22
  Sue Ryan: It's like is that still the truth for me?
• 9:24
  Sue Ryan: That's something I learned many years ago.
• 9:26
  Sue Ryan: So you become unquenchably curious and ask yourself what else is possible and ask yourself is this really true for me?
• 9:37
  Sue Ryan: And you can write those down on a piece of paper and you can carry them around with you and in so many different areas and you create the level of expectations with other people around you, especially your friends, to ask the same thing.
• 9:50
  Jennifer Johnson: Is your closet overflowing?
• 9:51
  Jennifer Johnson: Well, your kids' closets are as well.
• 9:53
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• 9:55
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• 10:02
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• 10:09
  Jennifer Johnson: You can reach out to them online at truefashionistascom.
• 10:12
  Jennifer Johnson: Come into the store or check them out on Facebook or Instagram, and that's truefashionistascom.
• 10:18
  Jennifer Johnson: All right, friends, we're back with Sue Ryan, and we are chatting today about habits of successful entrepreneurs.
• 10:25
  Jennifer Johnson: Now, I know that there was a part that you wanted to get to, so I definitely want to delve into that right now, because it's important information.
• 10:35
  Sue Ryan: And into some of the common habits that we were talking about.
• 10:38
  Sue Ryan: When you're creating a habit and a habit is and, by the way, getting back to like the word habit when I say a habit is one of the things that we want to make sure we're doing is getting our own definition of words.
• 10:52
  Sue Ryan: So this is a huge thing.
• 10:55
  Sue Ryan: If we want to create a new habit, we want to become aware of what our other habits are.
• 10:58
  Sue Ryan: So start listing out what are your habits.
• 11:00
  Sue Ryan: Then identify how it's working for you, why you believe you have it.
• 11:05
  Sue Ryan: If you were to replace it with something, what would you replace it with?
• 11:08
  Sue Ryan: And just you know, like, make it like a checklist.
• 11:11
  Sue Ryan: So like, this is a great habit.
• 11:13
  Jennifer Johnson: It's becoming aware of them is the problem because, and I don't mean it in a problem wise, but that's the challenge, because we have to stop and be still enough to go.
• 11:24
  Jennifer Johnson: All right, I need to do this exercise.
• 11:25
  Jennifer Johnson: I really want to know what I'm doing.
• 11:28
  Sue Ryan: Exactly, and some of it is.
• 11:29
  Sue Ryan: You don't even know that you're doing it.
• 11:31
  Sue Ryan: The interesting thing when I get people doing these exercises, they're surprised at the number of things they do.
• 11:37
  Sue Ryan: They're not even aware they do it and some of it is they've gotten in the habit of going to Starbucks and when they're doing that, going to Starbucks isn't really the end thing.
• 11:49
  Sue Ryan: They're checking this, they're doing that, they're at Starbucks while they're doing this and what?
• 11:52
  Sue Ryan: It's a piece of something else, and so part of it is becoming intentional in your life and raising to your level of awareness and then asking yourself what is it I choose to believe?
• 12:03
  Sue Ryan: Does this support or sabotage me?
• 12:05
  Sue Ryan: Where is this in what I am looking to accomplish when you're working?
• 12:11
  Sue Ryan: So when we talk about things that we want to have as a habit, you say, okay, well, what does a habit mean for me?
• 12:17
  Sue Ryan: How does a habit serve me?
• 12:18
  Sue Ryan: So you want to get really really clear on what kind of habit you want, not even the specific habit like brushing your teeth every morning.
• 12:26
  Sue Ryan: But what do I want a habit to do for me?
• 12:31
  Sue Ryan: What is the purpose of a habit in my life?
• 12:36
  Sue Ryan: And if you have clarity on how it supports, not sabotages, you.
• 12:43
  Sue Ryan: Then you start looking at everything you're doing through the lens of this is a habit and it's not working so well for me.
• 12:53
  Sue Ryan: And then you say what does Choose what works for you?
• 12:57
  Sue Ryan: And then you say what does Choose what works for you?
• 12:59
  Sue Ryan: And then you continue to reset your expectations and so not everything becomes a habit.
• 13:05
  Sue Ryan: Sometimes it's an interim process that you're doing.
• 13:08
  Sue Ryan: I'm experimenting with this.
• 13:10
  Sue Ryan: A lot of people talk about losing weight and they say, well, I'm going to get in the habit of doing this and the habit of doing this, and then they think that they have to do this and then start doing it for a long period of time.
• 13:18
  Sue Ryan: You know, a habit for me could be that I'm going to you know I don't do this, but I'll just give an example.
• 13:24
  Sue Ryan: A lot of people will drink a cup of coffee in the morning and they'll put creamer and things like that.
• 13:29
  Sue Ryan: And then they think, okay, I can never have that anymore.
• 13:32
  Sue Ryan: When something to your level of awareness and you're at choice with it, it doesn't mean you have to create a new habit.
• 13:37
  Sue Ryan: It means you could become aware of something you're doing and you're choosing and you're saying this morning, I really do feel like having a cup of coffee with that creamer tomorrow?
• 13:45
  Sue Ryan: No, I don't, and you're at choice.
• 13:48
  Sue Ryan: So it's not the the necessarily having to have everything be a habit.
• 13:52
  Sue Ryan: And it's not that you have to replace a habit with a habit.
• 13:56
  Sue Ryan: You could replace it with a pathway.
• 13:59
  Sue Ryan: I'm choosing to do something different.
• 14:01
  Sue Ryan: I don't know what that habit's ultimately going to be, because I'm not there yet.
• 14:05
  Sue Ryan: However, the pathway is going to be conscious actions I'm taking toward the outcome I choose to have and what you're doing in the process for that which is taking you to a new place and you're discovering new things and along the way, you may say this is kind of working for me, I think.
• 14:25
  Sue Ryan: I'm going to keep doing this or no, I think I'm going to try something else.
• 14:30
  Sue Ryan: So again, a big part of what happens is that habits tend to be places where we have judgment.
• 14:36
  Sue Ryan: It's either good or bad.
• 14:38
  Sue Ryan: When we just accept this is what I'm doing.
• 14:40
  Sue Ryan: This is what I'm doing, and okay, I used to do this and this is what it is.
• 14:45
  Sue Ryan: I'm at choice.
• 14:46
  Sue Ryan: I can do this and always stay at choice.
• 14:51
  Jennifer Johnson: I love that.
• 14:52
  Sue Ryan: Thank you.
• 14:54
  Jennifer Johnson: It works and I like how you said it.
• 14:56
  Jennifer Johnson: Basically is what you're doing serving you?
• 14:59
  Jennifer Johnson: Is it doing anything for you?
• 15:01
  Jennifer Johnson: Maybe it's hindering you from something else.
• 15:06
  Sue Ryan: And if it's a long-held belief like I'm not worthy.
• 15:09
  Sue Ryan: Oh, those are the worst right, those are the worst.
• 15:11
  Sue Ryan: And then you've created habits that support you not seeing yourself as worthy, not taking actions based on being worthy, and you know, and, and like if you were saying that if and I've had people where they come they'll say, well, you know they'll, you'll ask them a question and they preface the answer with well, I'm not really good at that and I haven't done this and I haven't done it and I'll say stop, I've done that.
• 15:32
  Sue Ryan: I'm sure you heard me.
• 15:34
  Jennifer Johnson: I've told you to stop.
• 15:35
  Jennifer Johnson: You have, but again that it took somebody to tell me that, to break me from it, and you wrote a book about that?
• 15:45
  Sue Ryan: Yes, and yet what happened was, until you were able to break that, you didn't even know you were doing it.
• 15:53
  Jennifer Johnson: And I, honestly, if I I don't know if I would have found it on my own- so often we don't because we can't see in ourselves.
• 16:02
  Sue Ryan: Yeah, it's a habit, it's an un.
• 16:04
  Sue Ryan: A habit is an unconscious pattern of behavior and we get into those so often not even knowing whether they serve us or not.
• 16:12
  Sue Ryan: That's not the point of a habit.
• 16:13
  Sue Ryan: A habit is a thing.
• 16:14
  Sue Ryan: It's not good or bad, it just is.
• 16:16
  Sue Ryan: It's what we apply to it and we say, well, it has to be either good or bad when we have.
• 16:26
  Sue Ryan: And then we're talking about entrepreneurs and we're talking about female entrepreneurs.
• 16:30
  Sue Ryan: One of the greatest things you can do is when somebody is saying something and you know it doesn't serve them, and it's just this thing that they just keep saying.
• 16:36
  Sue Ryan: You is saying something and you know it doesn't serve them, and it's just this thing that they just keep saying.
• 16:39
  Sue Ryan: You say, stop Right there, exactly, and wake them up and say if you didn't believe that to be true, what would you choose?
• 16:45
  Sue Ryan: What?
• 16:46
  Jennifer Johnson: action would you choose and I've heard you say that before and that's very powerful when you actually sit down and think about it.
• 16:53
  Jennifer Johnson: It is If you didn't have that negative word, know, negative word in your mind, what else would you choose to believe is true here?
• 17:00
  Sue Ryan: What would you put there instead Exactly, and how's that working?
• 17:03
  Sue Ryan: And again I go back to this Dr Phil saying because it really is great so how's that working for you?
• 17:12
  Sue Ryan: And it's humorous because when you do and you think about it from that perspective.
• 17:14
  Sue Ryan: It's like, yeah, not so good and yet okay, and I talk a lot about borrowing confidence, borrowing courage and borrowing strength.
• 17:21
  Sue Ryan: When we're looking at replacing or creating a habit or creating a pattern of behavior, a pathway to something that's better.
• 17:30
  Sue Ryan: We may not be strong enough yet on our own and we do not have to be as females, as entrepreneurs however you want to classify it when we reach out to each other and say I am working on this and I appreciate you being another set of eyes and ears and another heart to support me in this.
• 17:48
  Sue Ryan: That's where women can raise each other up so quickly.
• 17:53
  Sue Ryan: We can hold each other accountable, we can invite people into the consideration of an alternative perspective and when they say something and we can tell that they're not at choice, we can say do you really feel like you were at choice with what you just said?
• 18:07
  Sue Ryan: And if you were at choice, what would you say or what would you do?
• 18:11
  Jennifer Johnson: Beautifully said.
• 18:12
  Jennifer Johnson: Thank you.
• 18:13
  Jennifer Johnson: Our conversations are always beautiful.
• 18:14
  Jennifer Johnson: I love that.
• 18:15
  Jennifer Johnson: I love you.
• 18:16
  Jennifer Johnson: If our listeners want to get a hold of you, how can they?
• 18:21
  Sue Ryan: do so.
• 18:21
  Sue Ryan: My email address is sue at sueryansolutions and my website is sueryansolutions.
• 18:29
  Sue Ryan: They can go to my website and get a message to me and get on my calendar and I am grateful for the opportunity to speak or coach or listen or whatever I can do to help people.
• 18:43
  Jennifer Johnson: That's my passion and I can say that firsthand.
• 18:45
  Jennifer Johnson: I know it's your passion.
• 18:46
  Jennifer Johnson: You're a phenomenal individual.
• 18:48
  Jennifer Johnson: Thank you, absolutely.