Stop self-sabotaging your dreams

Are you self-sabotaging?

Are you talking yourself out of doing what you want before you've even started?

Are you allowing the thoughts, opinions and agendas of others to influence what you do instead of trusting and believing in yourself?

Well, now's the time to stop!

And in this episode, I tell you how. It will require some unlearning, but it will be worth it!

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Transcript

Ryan Spence: 0:00

We all have these stories that you tell yourself based upon stories that people around you tell based upon the conditioning that you have. But I want you to start to become more adept at questioning those stories. But not only questioning those stories as to whether they are true, but questioning whether that's true in relation to what it is that you want

Rafa: 0:21

You're listening to, The Triple C Project.

Ryan Spence: 0:30

Welcome to The Triple C Project. The podcast that helps you gain clarity, boost confidence, and build courage, so you can live life lit! I'm your host, Ryan Spence, the biglaw dropout, life coach, author, speaker, lover of hoodies, hip hop, and big, hairy, audacious goals. If you're tired of living the life you think you should want, and ready to start living the life you do want, this podcast will help you get from where you are, to where you really want to be. So now we're friends, I invite you to grab a drink, take a seat, and allow me to guide you towards living, a life that's lit! Hey, hey, welcome to episode 25 of The Triple C Project with me your host Ryan Spence, former Big law lawyer now coach for lawyers and corporate professionals just like you and author of The Triple C Method, gain clarity, boost confidence and build courage so you can live life lit, the book is out. Now if you haven't got your copy yet go and pick it up. So we're going to help you it's not only part memoir of my journey from big law lawyer to the biglaw dropout. Got my words mixed up there. But it's also part blueprint, a toolkit if you wish in helping you move from a life of lethargy to a life that's lit. Go ahead, grab the book, paperback ebook also now on audio, well, all the usual places you would get your books from. And don't forget to download the workbook. The workbook is going to allow you to do the work. And so the questions do the journaling that I talked about in the book, or what exercises that have helped me get from where I was on the path to where it is that I want to be. This week, I want to talk about self sabotage. Self Sabotage is something that I was definitely guilty of something that I see clients play into as well when they when they come to sessions. What do I mean by self sabotage? Well, let me set the scene and show that actually, it's not really your fault. Especially if you're a lawyer, as I was, we're trained to think in a linear manner, we are trained to look at things logically. And that logic is good for the job that we do is good when you're looking at and reviewing documents is good when you've got to solve a particular problem which there was a formula to solving, you just work through the steps. But it's not really good. Always in the wider aspects of your life, particularly when you're not happy with where you are, and you're trying to create and design a different vision and alternative life for yourself. Because the way that you're trained or the way that you think is going to keep you thinking in the same manner. So it's going to keep you stuck in what you already know, and what you think is already possible. And this is something which I had in my last five years, as I've talked sort of quite openly about before, I had limiting beliefs in terms of what I believe that I could do what I believed was possible for me. So we self sabotage. That's basically what that means. It means that you talk yourself out of something before you've even had a chance to try it out to see if it works. So that manifests itself in various ways. So for example, when I thought I wanted to be a yoga teacher, I would tell myself, I can't be a yoga teacher, because you can't make any money be the yoga teacher. I see clients come to me saying similar things. I can't do X because I'll never make any money doing it or I can't do why because I'm too old or because I could never get the skills or because nobody will take me seriously. There are lots of different narratives that we tell ourselves. And I've talked about this a little bit before, in relation to confidence and asking yourself, where's the evidence? So sabotage, it's I want to explore this a little bit deeper. Because you're telling yourself stories that aren't true. They may be true to an extent that they may not be true in relation to what it is that you're trying to do. And the reason I post this because it's a little complex to explain. Well, I'm going to try because I think this is really going to help you get out of your own way. So let's say for example, yoga teachers don't make money. Okay? That's that's a bold statement. Thing about that statement is, it's not true. There are yoga teachers who don't make much money at all, they are running around shooting 20, 30 classes a week, taking as much as they can just to make ends meet. And in some cases even failing to do that. And they're burning themselves out in the process. That is true. There are yoga teachers who are at the top who have got endorsement deals, who are hosting high end retreats, who are what you might call your quote, unquote, celebrity Yogi's, although I'd hate that term, that making tonnes of money. And there are people in between, I mean, who are teaching yoga as a side hustle, something that they love to do, and it's not really about making money, it's just something that they enjoy. And they do on the side, there are other people who are teaching in a sustainable way and making a living, you know, are kind of living life, they're not making millions, they're not making the hundreds of 1000s that they may have made in their corporate career if they had one. But they're, they're making what they need to make to live life lit to be fulfilled, to be happy. So there's a whole range within that sphere. If you start by telling yourself, I can't be a yoga teacher, because I'll never make money, you're effectively cutting off all of that. When really what you need to be doing is asking yourself, what kind of yoga teacher do I want to be? How do I want yoga to be part of my life? And I'm only talking about yoga, because this is my experience. And this is kind of the process I had to go through. But this can be applied to anything. Do you want to be a personal trainer? Do you want to quit big law move to a small firm? Do you want to leave your senior management role in the corporate and go and join a startup? Whatever it is, there'll be all of these stories that you tell yourself based upon stories that people around you tell based upon the conditioning that you have. But I want you to start to become more adept at questioning those stories, but not only questioning those stories as to whether they are true, but questioning whether they're true in relation to what it is that you want. So to go back to the yoga analogy, if you want to be a quote unquote celebrity Yogi superstar Yogi making millions of dollars travelling the world hosting high end retreats, that's one path that you can go down. That in and of itself, because there are people doing that negates the story that you can't make money teaching yoga. But if you know that that's what you want to do, then you can start to figure out the steps that you would need to take to carve out and create that life for yourself and start to make decisions that will support you on that path. If you just enjoy teaching, and you maybe want to teach a couple of classes at the weekend, and that's all that you want to do. And that will help you to live life late that will help to give you another outlet, another area fulfilment, then again, you can start to make decisions to allow you to follow that path. And those decisions could be things like blocking timeout in your calendar at work, so that you have time to go and do your own practice, you have time to go and study, you have time to prepare your sequences, committing to yourself treating it like a meeting and making use of that time because we all have times throughout our workday, even in the most intense jobs. Even when I was in biglaw, there's definitely down periods between deals that, quite frankly, I wasted that time. And I could have actually used that time to be better prepared for exiting the world of big law. Because then yeah, I certainly wasn't prepared, I kind of just took the leap and figured I sorted out on the way down, which I don't advise. But hey, it is what it is. But what I mean is that when you get curious when you start questioning why you want to do these things, how you want it to look for you, then you can make decisions based upon the path that you want to follow, not the path upon what you think that you should follow. Because people will tell you not to do things because you won't make money doing it. And in their mind, they're looking at you maybe leaving six figure salary to go and do something which they have never seen anybody make a six figure salary doing it. Now, maybe you don't want to make a six figure salary doing it. Maybe you don't even need to once you've got curious and ask yourself what kind of lifestyle you want, what living life like means to you. Maybe you don't need that. And even if you do need that, I'm sure you do your research. You can go and find the people that are living that lifestyle which you think you might want to live or live some aspects of, and then you can study how they made that happen and try to figure out how you can carve the same path for yourself. So what I'm inviting you to do is to just not self sabotage to just not except the stories that you're telling yourself or that you are being told, because everything was impossible until it was done everything. So question, be curious. There was funny, I was on a guest on a podcast once and I was talking about curiosity. And the host said to me, well, that now that makes four C's, and I laughed, and yeah, I'm not, I'm not writing another book or the four C's, because I don't want to. But it could actually be a fourth C, curiosity. Because we self sabotage, you're, you're disempowering yourself. You're accepting a narrative without testing, whether it's true in relation to what you want in relation to your life. But with curiosity, you can start to get into the weeds and really kind of see how things could be and how that would feel for you, and how you would want it to be. So I think that's all I wanted to say for this week, although actually no one thing I wanted to talk about is just to leave this thought with you about being curious and about not accepting a narrative not accepting the preconceived ideas of what's possible for you and what you should be doing and should be thinking about. So you've probably heard us he's been all over the news over the last sort of year or two, there's a Tik Tok, a guy called Khaby Lame, a Senegalese guy, who is he now lives in Italy. And during the pandemic, he lost his job. He works in a factory, I'm not sure what type of factory but he lost his job, pre pandemic. And during the pandemic, he started to post on Tik Tok. And I don't think he speaks English, or he doesn't speak English that well, he's he speaks Italian and he speaks Wolof, which is the Senegalese language. So his his videos, didn't even have speech. They were just him sort of parodying other things that he'd seen online or things eating people do it with his trademark hand gesture. Now, he is now the most followed creator on Tik Tok with I think I read 142 point 1 million followers. But more important than that, he now has a net worth reportedly 13 No 15 15 million US dollars into 2022. And he has a multi year endorsement deal with with Hugo Boss. Now, I'm telling you this because the wisdom, the convention would be that if you lose your job, you run and get another job doing the same thing. Yeah, because that's, that's, that's the logic, that is the logical way of doing things, you follow the linear path of I've lost this job. So I go and look at other other employees in the same field. And I try and get myself another job. Now, in his case, probably because of the pandemic, that wasn't possible. And I don't know the ins and outs of his story. But I use this as an example. Because by not following the linear path by being curious by exploring other opportunities, he's now carved out this career, which he probably didn't think was a possibility before, nobody would say to you, if you lost your job, oh, it's fine. Go ahead and be a Tik Toker. You know, mean, and that can be a career. No one would say that because it's not, it's not logical. And it's not within their purview. It's not within the vision of what they see for you. But by being curious, and by not self sabotaging. You allow yourself to try a whole range of things that you may not have thought about you allow yourself to explore opportunities you allow yourself to, and the analogy I like like to use is pull the many different threads that hanging and see where they lead. So that's what I'd like to leave with you today. Don't self sabotage, don't write yourself off before you've even started. There's a whole world of opportunities out there, there's so many things that you can do that you can try. And there are so many different ways that you can do them doesn't have to be burning down the bridges and jumping out of one career and doing something completely different. And then trying to sort of figure out how you're going to make money doing it doesn't have to be that it can be if that's what's right for you. And if you're in a particularly toxic environment, and it's affecting your health, you probably need to do that. You just need to get out and do something else or get what they call a bridge job to kind of tide you over before you get to the real thing you want to do. But maybe you just need to be more intentional and think this is something which I like I don't necessarily need it to be my main thing. But I'm going to carve out the time of intention about doing that. And therefore your your calendar becomes more intentional. You will come All being out that time and using that time intentionally to do more of the thing that you love, the thing that's going to allow you to create those moments of joy allow you to live, life lit. But you can only do all of that if you get curious and you stop self sabotage and stop accepting the narrative and start creating your own code. That's about all for me this week. If you're looking for space to just brainstorm some of these ideas that you have, with someone who's who has no judgement, who's only here to see you succeed, to see you win, whatever your vision of success and winning looks like, that's what I can help you with as your coach, I had a client say to me once, well, on multiple occasions, that that just actually having that space to sit and brainstorm in a way that what they weren't being judged, and they didn't feel silly, it was extremely valuable to them. Sometimes, that's all that we can do. But what I'd also do is challenge you challenge these assumptions that you have, so that you stop self sabotaging, you stop accepting these narratives as truth, and really explore where they came from, and whether they are true or whether they're actually just things that you're, you're giving into, okay, I'm just coach, I'm here to empower you, I'm here to allow you to recognise your own power and to use that power for good for the good of you for the good of your life. So, head to iamryanspence.com, hit the button for coaching and check out the page and book a call. I mean, we'll get on a call, we'll chat, we'll see where you are, see what you need, and see if we're a good fit, and explore how we can work together. There's multiple ways that we can do that. And, yeah, it's not one size fits all, we will make it happen, whatever works best for you, and what you need at that given moment. So iamryanspence.com, hit the button for coaching, and book a call, I look forward to speaking with you and helping you move from a life of lethargy towards living a life that's lit! Thanks for tuning in to The Triple C Project. Before you go, I want to share something with you. When I was in big law, I struggled with limiting beliefs. I didn't have the competence to believe that I could change my life, that I could leave big law and do something differently, that I could move from a life of lethargy and create a life that's lit. That's why I created a confidence journal. For people like you who are in the same position that I was, was struggling with, and need a boost to allow you to believe that you can do the things that you want to do confidence join me six journal prompts that I've used, and I still use to help me get from the guy who's too scared to post on Instagram, to the guy who is now committed to giving a TED Talk. The guy who wrote a book to the guy who launched a podcast, you can do any of this too. All you need to do is start boosting your confidence. So to do that, head to iamryanspence.com and download the Confidence Journal. It's free. It works and it's going to change your life. Thanks for tuning in. See you next week. And remember, stop living a life of lethargy and start living life lit!