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What if pressure weren't the problem? Thoughts and capacity were! · #BeMoreLobster

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Today, I'm inviting you into a conversation about pressure.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Specifically around when you tell yourself I just need to put less pressure on myself.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I'm gonna put a caveat right here at the beginning to say that I understand that there are times in life when your cognitive, your mental, your emotional, physical batteries are going to be stretched to capacity, when your bandwidth is gonna feel like you're at the edge, when you're managing something different and extra alongside all the other things that you're already doing and managing in your life.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: However, today's conversation is much more rooted around when you're telling yourself this in your business, when you're telling yourself in your business, I just need to put less pressure on myself.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because after having coached on this hundreds of times, what I see to be true is that pressure is invariably never the problem.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then I'm gonna teach you or show you how I coach my clients through that so you can apply it for yourself today and feel instantly better.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: So if that sounds good, you know what to do, grab your brew and let's dive right in.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I've got the caveat out of the way to begin with.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: There are gonna be moments in life, times in life, when things are going to just feel hard.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Period.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I use the things myself now that I will benefit from that no matter what it is.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Like I will I will find a way to gain wisdom from that.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: In the moment, invariably very, very difficult, if not impossible, but I'm getting better and better at it.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: So that's my first thing that I'd offer you is that when it feels hard, ask yourself how is it for me?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: How can I how can I gain from this?
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe you won't do it right in the moment.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: But let's go back, let's get to the to the the uh crux of the conversation, which is I need to put less pressure on myself.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna first off share with you what tends to happen at the beginning part of a coaching conversation when a client brings this to the table.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: And the first thing that I have them notice is that the pressure is a feeling.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you have listened to the rest of my podcast, there is a podcast called something like From Overwhelmed to On Top, during which I teach you a coach, a life coach tool called the model.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: So you really, really want to go listen to that.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what episode number it is, but it is called Overwhelmed to On Top.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: And in the model, we have five steps: it's circumstance, thoughts, feelings, actions, results.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: So when a client comes to me and says, I need to put this pressure on myself, the pressure is in the feeling line.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: They are feeling pressure, and it's because all of the things that they're thinking about their business, the thoughts that they're having is creating a feeling of pressure around their business.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: And what invariably tends to happen is that they are telling themselves there's too much to do, there's not enough time, and there is this sense of overwhelm and uh almost like this, like it's a lack, but it comes that somatically it comes from a place of like wanting to chase, it kind of gets in that sensation, but then the overwhelm becomes so much that we can get into fight, flight, or freeze.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: And what I help them to notice is that normally what's happening is either they're looking too far ahead, so they're thinking about problems for their business that they don't even need to be considering right now, or they are seeing and hearing all the things that they think they should be doing, so they're getting emails from things they've signed up for, or they're seeing things on social media because of their out because of what they're watching in their algorithm, and it's like, and you should be doing this, and you should be doing this, and you should be doing this, and you should be doing this, and it's making them look at the things that they're not doing, and that's also creating this pressure.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then the third thing that tends to be very common is they're looking back down their past timeline at how long it's taken them to get where they are, and they're using that as the measure for how long it's gonna take them to get where they want to go, and all of these as like are being thrown in this pressure cookup, which it starts to build up this pressure in their body and their brain, and then your brain is is literally going out to seek what's important to you, which is more of these pressure thoughts, and it's this never-ending cycle.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if we look at pressure as a feeling in the model, what I notice that people tend to do is they think that solution, the solution is to decrease the pressure, and that normally means taking something off my plate, but the way that that shows up sometimes is lowering their goals or lowering their standards or backing down from something that's important to them, or stepping away from another area of their life.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: So, in order to maintain momentum in their business, I just I can't I haven't got the time to work out anymore, or I haven't got, you know, I I I have to work at night time, so I'm not gonna spend quality time with my my husband, my wife, my children.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: So something normally gets neglected that's also important to them.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: So now we've got this contradiction, we've got this dissonance between who they want to be and who they're being, and guess what that does?
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: It adds to the pressure.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna simplify that in one sentence.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: When you problem solve for pressure being a feeling, you immediately want to decrease the pressure by taking something off of your plate, but invariably it means that you're actually ending up sacrificing something that's important to you.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now, sometimes, like I said at the beginning, when life happens, I would absolutely 100% coach my clients on where we can back down right now, where where is it safe for you?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Where is it possible for you to reduce so that you can maintain the things that are important?
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes it's actually stepping, it is stepping away from their business for a little bit.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: Other times it's like, well, we can we can reduce here and we can reduce here, but for the most part, invariably the answer is not to problem solve for pressure being the feeling and to reduce the pressure, it's actually something entirely different.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now, to get to that space, I'm going to let you know that when my clients come to me with this problem, that I look for the pressure being in the result line.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: So we have the circumstance of the business, we have thoughts, feelings, actions, and results.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: And the pressure is a result of the things that they're thinking, feeling, and doing in their business that creates this experience of pressure.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when you see pressure in the result line, when you see pressure as a result of other things, you now problem solve it in an entirely different way.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: And without fail, the way that I would coach my clients on this is to say that the reason that the pressure is there is because of the beliefs that you are having about yourself and what's possible for you and how quickly it can happen for you, and how much pain you're willing to experience or will experience, and your willingness to keep increasing your passive capacity for the hard things, for doing things in uncertainty, for doing things that you don't know how to do, and that becomes a completely different solution.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: So if we go back to look before, where we said when we look at feeling and when we look at pressure as being a feeling, it's because of the way that we're looking at things.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: We're looking out into the future, we're seeing and hearing all of the things, we're looking back to predict our future.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Can you notice that that is coming because we're looking outside of ourselves?
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: When we really truly want to problem solve for pressure being a result, we have to go inside ourselves.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: We have to have a look at what are we thinking?
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: What am I thinking about myself that is creating these thoughts in my business?
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: And more importantly, that the thoughts that I'm having, I can't manage them.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because the fact is that some of your thoughts could be fact.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how to do this.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: This feels very hard.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: I don't actually know what I'm doing right now.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like I have those thoughts all the time.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: But what immediately comes after that is what do I know to be true about this?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: Where can I get help?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: What is available to me?
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: What can I think here?
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the whole point of coaching, right?
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: It takes your brain somewhere different.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now, your brain's going to pressure, not because your brain's broken, but because you just don't know any different right now.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: So let's agree together right now that we are going to say that the pressure for the most part is a result of how you're thinking and feeling about yourself, about your ability to succeed, about the level of capacity that you can experience.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: And by capacity, I mean like, do you have the capacity to feel major disappointment?
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have the capacity to feel challenged, to feel contradicted, to feel rejection, to feel failure, and be able to hold that without making it mean anything about you?
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Are you able to have the capacity to hold the results in your business as nothing more than data rather than taking it personally?
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: These are all the things that are going to set you up for success or failure because depending on which model you choose is going to depend on how effectively you manage your brain and then how you use that effective brain management to take action, aligned, coherent action.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: So let's have a look at pressure being a result and some of the common thoughts that come up.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I've already just given some to you.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I don't know what I'm doing, I'm doing too much, it's not working, it's gonna take too long.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: So, as an example, I coached a client uh relatively recently who was um doing a launch in her business, and there was quite it was the first time she'd ever actually seen a launch through from start to finish, and she was doing really, really well.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: But when the going got tough, when it was like, you know, my my these posts aren't converting or emails aren't converting or I'm not getting sales and stuff like that, then the old story came out that she'd had for a long time, like maybe I should just put less pressure on myself.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, Well, maybe if that maybe don't keep saying that.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: What if it is true instead that you actually just have to increase your capacity to feel disappointed?
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: That you have to accept that maybe part of this process maybe there's gonna be some failures you're gonna have to deal with.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: And would it be not make more sense for us to focus on what are the thoughts that you want to start having?
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because the the whole thing about like choosing new beliefs is that you could like I could say to you, pick a belief now and act from that belief, but I also know how hard that is.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: You've got a full somatic shape, a like a full mind-body wiring around beliefs.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it's a little trite to just say, oh, just choose a different belief.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: But what you can do is you can start to practice a different thought.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: So when you start to problem solve for pressure being a result, we have a look at what new thoughts do I need to start practicing and where do I need to increase my capacity?
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: When you start to do that, you're automatically changing all of the things in the thought line and all of the things in the feeling line.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you can choose to believe, like, I don't know how to do this and I can figure it out.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what I'm doing and I can choose and find the next best step.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: What if I fail?
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so what if I do?
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: What if I fail?
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: What if I fly?
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like you've got to start learning to give your brain the and.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: I say this to my clients a lot of times.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: A client will say to me, but like, what if it goes wrong?
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so what if it goes wrong?
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go there.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: Don't avoid it.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: Let's train for the what if.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Not be and then people get a little bit like scared about manifesting that.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's not manifesting it, it's just proving to yourself ahead of time that no matter what the outcome, you know how to manage it, you know how to figure it out.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes that's just gonna be like, I just need to know that I can hold this disappointment for a period of time without it determining without it like wiping me out for a week, without me telling myself I've got to change my niche because I'm clearly doing something wrong, or I've got to lower my prices, or I've got to change my offer.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: I can just hold a disappointment, I can see everything as data, and then I can evaluate and go, okay, what am I gonna do differently moving forward?
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: So when if I were coaching you around, I just need to put less pressure on myself, I'm gonna say to you, let's have a look at if that wasn't true, and what if we just had to look at what you need, what you're thinking right now, what are the better thoughts to be holding, and what do you need to increase more capacity for?
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because one of the things that I share with my clients and my children and myself over and over and over and over again is like you have to be willing to train for hard.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: I wish you'd doing some training uh for my coaching research, which I have to do every year, and uh my mentor was talking about um marathons and ultra marathons.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: He said, anything over a marathon is an ultra marathon, and marathons are already really, really hard.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: So anything over that is like ultra.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, and that's what high performers do, that's what life's all about.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like I really, really hate running.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: So the thought of running for a marathon literally makes me want to vomit in my own mouth, not gonna lie.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it's whenever you decide to go above and beyond, like he said, life is not a marathon, life is the ultra marathon, and the same applies to business.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: I see a lot of women like desperately wanting to get to a specific result because they will feel less pressure, because they will feel certain in their ability, but then you're gonna just get a set of new goal and it's gonna start all over.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: So if you actually focus on the thoughts and the capacity, you will never shy away from something.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: You will never feel like you can't manage something.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: You'll just be able to be like, okay, I'm just lifting, I'm lifting a heavier weight right now.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: I've got to hold this for longer.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: This disappointment is bigger at this this like, say for instance, it was disappointment at 50 grand versus disappointment at 500 grand.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: If you can't hold disappointment at 50 grand, how are you gonna hold it at 500,000?
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: If you can't hold failure in a in a small launch, how would you hold failure in a launch where you wanted a thousand people through your doors?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: And these are these are emotions that are gonna serve you in life.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: So when I'm coaching my clients, I remind them like these skills are transferable.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: You you you're doing the your business is an expression and an extension of who you are.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: So you've got to be able to manage this in your life with the conversations with your children, with dealing with your elderly parents, with like just managing day-to-day stuff.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: How you manage that's gonna be how you manage in your business, and vice versa.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: So if I were coaching you, if you came to me tomorrow and said, Louise, I need to put less pressure on myself, first of all, I'm gonna get the fact, I'm gonna find out what's going on in your life.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: So give yourself a little life audit.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: And just be really clear.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like, are you actually trying to be everything to everyone and not giving yourself enough space?
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: Are you do you have no boundaries?
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: Are you running yourself ragged?
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like, where are you making choices?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: If you're in a really hard time right now where you are caregiving, you're running a business, you're running a home, and like you genuinely feel like you're running out of time, then you're gonna have to make some hard choices.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I want you to double down and looking after yourself.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: However, if you do the audit and you can now see that it's not actually true that you need to put less pressure on yourself, you have to believe in yourself more, you have to be willing to feel hard a lot more.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: You have to train to be a business owner, like you train in the gym.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: So then I want you to go and have a look at and do like a thought audit.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: What are the thoughts that you're having that are creating this result of pressure?
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: What are you telling yourself on the daily?
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe even unconsciously, it's that re it's that wide in right now.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: And what are the feelings, the dominant feelings that that's creating that you're carrying around with you every single day?
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then you get to clean that up.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: If you want the result line to be inevitable, success, which is what my program is, that's why my program is called inevitable.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to feel that your success is inevitable in the result line, if you want to feel sufficient in the result line, if you want to feel certain in the result line, if you want the result to be the version of you that knows no matter what happens, you will succeed, then what thoughts have you got to start practicing?
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: What thoughts have you got to put on the dashboard of your mind and practice them every day?
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: What thoughts have you, what feelings have you got our anchor into?
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: What what emotions have you got to be willing to feel more of?
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: What have you got to start to neutralize more?
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like, could you feel failure and it still be relatively neutral?
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: Does that make sense?
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like, because it's not personal.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's how you coach yourself around this feeling that I need to put less pressure on myself.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna leave you on this one last thought, which completely changed an outlook for one of my clients in particular, and it is this maybe the reason it feels like this is because you haven't raised the stakes enough.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's like you've got a goal, but it's not like as my coaches, it's not a barfy goal, it's like, oh, it'd be nice, and it still feels like a stretch from where you are, but it's not exciting.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's not really, it doesn't like really massively excite you.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: It just feels like, oh, I could just breathe if I got there.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: I could just prove something to myself if I got there.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'd just be able to get by if I got there.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't motivate you.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: If anything, it's something that robs from you because it's like you're you're you're working your ass off to get to a goal that doesn't even light you up that much.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: When you raise the stakes, you must raise your standards.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: So it can't just be, oh, I'm gonna I'm gonna triple my my goal just for the sake of it.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, you have to raise the standards to that.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: You have to you have to decide who to be, you have to practice your thoughts, you have to practice the emotion, you have to get more like essentialist with your actions, you have to think not from where you are now, but think about where you're gonna be six months from now, a year from now, and you have to have to act as her now.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: So take yourself through that process.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: Do your life audit first because maybe right now, maybe there is a lot of pressure, and maybe right now the answer for you is to take some pressure off.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: But you'll know if that's not the case for you.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: You'll know that this is about your your belief systems and about the amount of the capacity.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: Take yourself through the audit, find the better thoughts and the better feelings and the better expectations, raise your standards, and then look after yourself so you can maintain that energy.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: Eat well, move your body, get your sleep, ask for support, do your stretching, do your breathing, like all the things that set you up for success.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: I also believe that somewhere in my podcast, I actually took you through my five essays of personal transformation.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: So go back through the archives and see if you can find that one as well, because that's a game changer, too.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: I talked to you about standards and self-concepts in that episode.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you for listening.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: As always, I am very grateful to have you in my community, and I will speak to you again in the next episode of the Bee My Lobster podcast.