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iAlign #48 - Why Shame Breaks Your Laser Focus · The iAlign Podcast with Flint Mitchell

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Seeking Authenticity Podcast, hosted by Ioline, where you get practical insight and interviews aimed at identifying your unique purpose in life, one aligned with your core values.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: We help ambitious individuals who are seeking a better life build confidence, peace, strength, and pride in themselves so that they wake up each day feeling present, moved to act by their own unique adventure, and unloaded by a heavy conscience, which is where they need to be if they want to pursue an ambitious and successful life while still loving the person looking back at them in the mirror.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Flint Mitchell, CEO, founder, and head coach of Ioline, a coaching and software company aimed at building a more value-aligned world by supporting one billion people to take one value-based decision every day.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the episode.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Your routines will fall apart.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: It is natural.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it would be unnatural for someone to claim that their routines never fall apart.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: If you hear someone say that there's due, the fake guru alarm in your head should be going off.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need to have your routines be perfect in order to stay laser focused in life, though.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: What you need is a system that allows for two things.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: First, to predict when these moments are going to happen so that you can prepare for them and lessen their impact on your routines.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: And second, is that they reliably bring you back to center so that you can keep moving even during low emotional states.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll jump into these right now.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: The first one, so a key element of a system like this is that it always must pay attention to shame and guilt, or just generally speaking, intense negative emotional states of being.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: This is because these intense states of being can easily pull you off track for days, for weeks, months, even years.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: I know you don't want to admit it, but yes, there is likely a year or several year period of your life that you recognize that shame or guilt or some other negative emotional state prevented you from living in alignment.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: You might actually feel that it was much longer than several years.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: You may actually feel like you're there right now, and that's okay.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: You're here now, you're aware of it, and you're reading content or listening to content like this podcast episode right now, aimed at supporting you to get back on track.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: You can identify one action right now aligned with your values and your mission that can move you forward in the right direction.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Do you see what I did there right now with that statement?
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Let's let's go back and talk about it.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: First, I immediately address the shame.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: I said, that's okay.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because it is okay to fall off track.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's only not okay if you allow yourself to wallow and spiral further.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I say that because you matter.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: Your life and your passions and your mission and your relationships and your values, all of that.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: It matters.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore, it is not okay for you to allow for your shame or your guilt to prevent you from pursuing them.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Next, I said you're here now, you're aware of it, you're reading or listening to content like this podcast episode aimed at supporting you to get back on track.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Next, we immediately bring ourselves back to the present and recognize that we have resources and tools at our disposal, in this case, this podcast episode.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm sure you have others, and that comes in the form of uh therapeutic tools like the ABC method of rational emotive behavior therapy, or podcast episodes of people that support you, or accountability partners, or coaches, etc.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: If you really don't know where to start, if you don't have the tools, please reach out in the show notes of this podcast episode.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: But there is no point in trying to take actions to move forward until we have established a moment of presence.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: So right now, after we identify that shame or guilt is occurring or some other negative emotional state, then we use some sort of resource or tool to bring ourselves to the present moment, to recognize that we are capable of moving through it, right?
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: But if you try to just move forward without using any sort of tool, without creating any sort of moment of awareness, it's when you fall into the willpower trap.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's the feeling of bashing your head into a wall repeatedly trying to get a task done, but unable to do it.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because we are not yet past the emotional state.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: We haven't allowed it to sit.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: We aren't even recognizing, we're probably shoveling shit over it, right?
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Trust trying to like get forward, just keep moving forward.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like let's I have to get this task done.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like it doesn't matter that I feel bad about myself in this moment, right?
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just gonna use willpower.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't work.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know it doesn't work.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: We all know it doesn't work, so let's do something different, right?
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: We need that moment to separate from the shame or the guilt, to let them exist, to be aware of them, to turn them into data.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, all negative emotions have worthy data in them that we can collect if we allow for it.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: So we use a tool or a resource like a reframe or journals or our accountability partner or coach, etc., to do this.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now we can be in a grateful state that this emotion, this negative emotion, came because it allowed us to strengthen ourselves, to learn about ourselves, and to implement our system for dealing with it, which in turn allows us to become more confident in our ability to deal with these types of emotional states in the future.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Next, I said, you can identify one action right now aligned with your values and your mission that can move you forward in the right direction.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: So we have addressed the shame.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: We have allowed it to exist and learned about it and learned about ourselves from it.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: We have moved from it to gratitude or presence, a slightly more positive self-image due to the confidence in ourselves we build from implementing the system correctly.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: And next we realign with our mission or our purpose or our goals.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: The clarity we have created for ourselves using the system over what each of these things are as defined by our core values, allows for us to easily identify actions that we can take that will make us proud of ourselves right now.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: We might not have been very proud of ourselves because of the shame or the guilt that was occurring even just moments ago, but we allowed for those to come in, we recognized them, we used some sort of resource or tool to bring ourselves back to the present moment, to collect data from it, even to be grateful for it.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: And now we can take a moment to identify an action that will make us proud going forward.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we immediately use this system to go from an intense emotional negative state of being to a positive state of action that moves us forward.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that action could be complex or it could be very, very simple.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: It could simply be implementing the action of our focus routine, of recalibrating our calendar for the next day and then moving forward.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: This is how routines break, how we even break in the moment, but our consistency does not.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: You are capable of continuing to move forward regardless of any intense emotional experiences that have pulled you off track in your past.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: The only difference between the version of you that spiraled off track for long periods of time and the present and future version of you that will like actually laugh as your subconscious mind immediately starts to implement this system and bring you back to center before the intense emotional experience even started.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: You'll wake up and think, oh, I'm a bit off today.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, this thing was going on with me yesterday.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, my parents or my girlfriend or this person said this thing and it affected me in this way.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I already started to see my mind start to reframe the things that they were saying, or that the things that the voices in my head were saying, or that that opportunity at work that I missed.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: How is it already starting to reframe that experience in my life?
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: The difference is the system that you use.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: That is it.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: And look, you're welcome to build your own.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: Or you can reach out in the show notes and use the eye line system that already exists.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: Regardless, though, I hope you have a great rest of your day.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: Peace.