Free Your Mind: How To Escape Your Self Imposed Limitations

Ever found yourself staring at the four walls of your life, feeling trapped in a narrative dictated by someone else's question - 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' It's time to shatter these walls with the key of clarity.

I invite you to join me as I explain what it means to inhabit a mental cell of self-limitation and how The Triple C Method® can help you break free so you can walk through your portal of possibility.

This isn't just a conversation; it's a call to action, an invitation to step outside your mental cell and marvel at the possibilities that await you on the other side.

So, will you answer the call?

Check out my latest Substack because it's time to start asking yourself, and others, better questions.

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Transcript

Ryan Spence: 0:02

And I say that that is the point where I found Clarity, and that Clarity is what helped me find the key to the door of my mental self-limitation. You're listening to the Triple C Project. Welcome to the Triple C Project, the podcast that helps you gain clarity, use confidence, build courage so you can live life. Next, I'm your host, ryan Spence, the Big Lord, dropout life coach, author, speaker, lover of hoodies, hip-hop and big, hairy, abacious 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, with 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 77, the Triple C Project. And, having disappeared for what seemed the entirety of the month of July, the sun has finally arrived back here in the UK, which always makes my mood infinitely better. I'm definitely one for hot weather, not for cold, which I may have said before, but it's true. So, yeah, lovely weather, it's all coming back, and just in time for my holiday in the next couple of weeks as well. So fingers crossed that it sticks around and helps me have a good time, or adds, should I say, to my good time on a holiday, because everything is internal right, we can choose, choose how we want to feel, and, yeah, I definitely do believe that, but it still doesn't stop me hating shitty weather. Anyway, this week I have a new piece on Substack. I never really know what to call a Substack and it's not really a newsletter. Is it an article? Is it a new chapter? I don't really know and I guess it doesn't really matter, but I have a new piece on Substack this week. As you may recall, if you listen to the last couple of episodes, this is my new creative project that allows me to just explore my creativity, my curiosity and write about things that maybe don't fit squarely into the realms of the work that I do in the business, and there will be some overlap, but it just gives me a wider platform, I think, and isn't as constricting as social media, and if you want to know more about how, why I started this project, you can go and read the first piece. The link to my Substack will be in the show description, but this week's piece, article newsletter, is something which I've been pondering for a while and I think I may have done an Instagram post on it a while back, but this has allowed me to kind of expand on my thinking there, and the title of the article is why.

Ryan Spence: 3:08

What Do you Want To Be Is the Wrong Question, and it's all about that question that we all got asked as kids and as we sort of got older what do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want to be when you grow up? And in the article I talk about why it's actually it's not a helpful question. I think, like I was far as saying it's actually a dumbass question. It's maybe a little bit harsh, but it's kind of how I feel. And even though the question is often asked from a place of good intentions, what I've realized is it's actually a question that's quite limiting and there are better questions that you can ask children, teenagers, young adults, grown adults about life that are more expansive. And this ties into what I'm going to talk about today, because for me, that question what do you want to be when you grow up it is a self-limiting question because there's one or two things that happen. Either you say something which the other person thinks is so ridiculously outlandish or unrealistic for you that they then come back and try to dissuade you or put you down or make you feel foolish for the thing that you said. Or you choose something that is palatable for them, or they choose it for you, but it's something that is within the very narrow confines of what's deemed to be acceptable or appropriate for you, for you at your stage of life, for you at your social station, with your race, your gender, whatever it may be, whatever that person who's asking you the question for sees for you. That's kind of how they want you to answer. So they are effectively trying to get you to put yourself into a box, and we hit about that around here, as you know. That's why the, the sub stack, is called finding self. It's all about breaking out of the box and finding yourself, and that ties into what I'm going to talk about today.

Ryan Spence: 5:05

And what I'm going to talk about today is this idea of a mental self, of self limitation. I've talked about this before, but not for a while now. It used to be a lot more on Instagram, but it's been coming up for me more and more as I speak to more and more clients, and it took me back to my first steps and this quest of growth and transformation and finding my mission and being on that path, and so I thought I'd share a little bit about that in the hope that it can help you. So I guess the first thing is well, what is a mental self of self limitation? So imagine a self.

Ryan Spence: 5:46

Thankfully, I've never been to prison you never have either but we've all seen one on TV right, and when you think of a cell, even if you don't have a picture in front of you now, if I ask you to imagine a cell, what do you imagine? You're only thinking of a square room, quite gray, maybe no windows, or maybe a small, tiny window with a bar, but that isn't looking outside, that has no natural light, with this big steel door, very sparse and it's not very inviting, quite a low ceiling. And when you're in that cell you have no control as to when you can get out. The guards decide when you can get out to eat, to exercise, to maybe work, if you're working in there, whatever it is, but every night you're put back in there and you have no ability to escape yourself. So if you transport that to your mentality. That's a mental set of self-limitation. It's this box within your head that is like that cell. It has these thick walls and this low ceiling and this thick door that you feel that you can't get out of. You are not allowed to decide if or when you can exit that particular cell so you can open that door.

Ryan Spence: 7:11

And this reminds me of when I had my very first session with a coach. Back in, I found my notebook actually 14th of January 2019, was my very first coaching session. So I was already in the process of knowing that I was going to be leaving the firm that I was at, but I had no idea what I wanted to do or what I could do. And I remember, in that session, my coach asking me okay well, what are you thinking of? What do you want to do? And I ran through various options, six options in fact, and they were all related to what I was already doing. They were all legal in nature whether it was going to another big firm, whether it was doing some consulting, whether it was just switching practice area, but they were all kind of related.

Ryan Spence: 8:02

And what's interesting is that, as I look back now, I think, yes, that's right, because I was locked in my own mental cell of self limitation. So, even though I was at a point where I knew I was going to be leaving the firm and I was very happy about that and even though I had started to explore the things that I wanted to do, that I enjoyed and was starting to learn more about myself, I was still in this cell. I still wasn't stepping out to see all of the opportunities that were available to me, all of the possibilities of things that I could achieve. And it wasn't until session three, I think it was, where something switched. It was as if something just unlocked in my brain. And I say that that is the point where I found clarity, and that clarity is what helped me find the key to the door of my mental cell of self-limitation.

Ryan Spence: 9:06

So before that I was in this cell and it was okay, I could wander around, it was my own space, but I didn't feel that I could get out, I didn't feel that I could open the door. But then in that session something changed and I was like I have the key. I actually have the key to unlock that door, and that changed things for me, because it started to get me to explore a little bit more about well, who am I and what do I want, and where do I want to be? I don't want to be doing what I'm doing now. I don't really want to be in this mental cell anymore. I feel that there's got to be more out there.

Ryan Spence: 9:45

And so, as I continue to delve deeper to do this inner work still within this mental self, but holding onto this key the more that I started to delve deeper, the more that I started to ask myself questions as to why I believed the things that I believed. Why did I feel that anything that I could do had to be related to what I'd already done? Why did I not feel that there were other opportunities out there and available to me? And once I started to kind of look through all the things that I had done in my past, all the changes, all the pivots that I had made, from being in the music business to going to university to do a music degree, to dropping out of university to working in the music business I mean to doing that, going back to do a law degree, to then becoming a lawyer in big law, all of these different things and all of the skills that those different avenues, had given me all the things that I learned along the way. All of that started to build this belief within me that maybe I can do something different, maybe I don't have to do what I'm doing now. And it also made me realize that I don't want to do what I'm doing now. Actually, I don't want to be a big law lawyer. It wasn't a dream for me, it wasn't something that fulfilled me, but it was something that I could do, that I was good at and that, outwardly, I was successful. So I felt that I should do it.

Ryan Spence: 11:15

But going through that process is, then, what helped to build the confidence. So I could believe that there are other opportunities out there for me, and that confidence allowed me to believe that, with this key in hand, I could actually go and unlock that door. And not only could I unlock the door, but I believe that I could walk through it, and I believe that in doing that, I'd be able to deal with anything that was beyond. I could embrace the unknown that was. It wasn't that it wasn't scary to me, but I just believe that what I was looking for, or the things that I wanted, would be beyond that door. So the only way to get them was to walk out and try and find them. And as that confidence grew, as that belief grew, that then led to this feeling of, okay, I've got to do this. Now I've got the key. I believe I can deal with what others ever on the other side of that door. So let's unlock the door and walk through it. And that's what I did.

Ryan Spence: 12:28

I had to unlock the door and walk through it and in walking through it it was kind of like, you know, when you had your eyes closed or you're being in darkness, and suddenly you walk out into the daylight, when you're being to the movies, for example, and you go to the movies in the middle of the day because she's really indulgent, and you see it and you watch your film, and it's in the dark, and then you walk out and it's a beautiful sunny day and your eyes start to adjust to the light of the day and you suddenly see this expansiveness, a bit of sort of the blue sky. That's kind of what it was like for me, because no longer was I in this cell with limited options and limited ideas. Suddenly I was out in this expansive arena where anything was possible. All of these things were calling at me and were making me feel excited about the possibilities of what could lie ahead. I called it walking through the portal of possibility. I think we all have a portal of possibility. It's when you kind of take that step through something, through that door, into a world where you kind of believe anything is possible. You're no longer allowing yourself to be restricted by what you feel that you should be, what you feel that you should do or what you have done before. You are now actively exploring ways that you can try new things, experiment, figure out what you actually love, what you actually want to do, what actually lights you up and I guess this is in hindsight.

Ryan Spence: 14:11

Looking back is where the whole idea of the triple C method came from, because they were the three pivotal steps that had to happen to get me from where I was to where I am, to get me from being too scared to share my thoughts in group chat on social media to where I am now, where sharing is just what I do, because I feel that I have valuable and important things to say that are going to help people figure out their own path, help guide you people like you back to yourself, and I know that to be true because I've seen it happen and clients tell me and non-clients tell me too. So I'd like you to have a think about your mental self of self limitation. What does it look like? And when you think about being in there, what does that feel like? Does it feel comfortable? Do you feel I can do all right here, or do you feel this is really holding me back? I don't really like it, but I'm too scared to figure out what's on the other side of that door, and that's why I know there is no judgment. I just want you to see it, visualize it and sense how it feels to be in it. And if, in doing that, you say to yourself I don't want to be here anymore, I want to break out of this. I want to see what else is out there. I want to see what's possible for me. I want you to see what's possible for me.

Ryan Spence: 15:47

Listen to my story here in this episode in this podcast and Tell yourself that you can do that. But you've got to start with the first step, which is finding the key, and that's the clarity. Find the key, find out who are you, what is important to you, what are your values. What do you want to be guiding your decision-making as you continue throughout your life? Because if it isn't what it's been guiding them now, then something has to change. And Only when you change that Can you start to go through the process of walking up to that door, putting in the key, unlocking it, opening it and stepping through your own portal of possibility To see all the things that are possible for you, that you could do, that you could try, that you could experiment with. So that's it for me this week go, figure it out, find that key, build the belief that you can use it and then the courage to go and then lock that door and step through that portal.

Ryan Spence: 16:59

It doesn't mean that everything is going to be great when you do that. It's not, and I hope that if you listen to episodes and you've you've read the book, the triple C method, you know that it's not, that it's easy, but it is far, far more exciting To be going after what you do want instead of hanging around doing what you think you should want, hating it every step of the way. So unlock your mental self of self limitation and Go out there, see what's possible for you, embrace the unknown. Thanks for being here and if this episode spoke to you, send me a line. Let me know what you got from this, what insight you took away, what you're going to do differently. Having heard my story and heard this episode, send me an email. Hey, at, I am Ryan spent calm. Or hit me up social media Instagram at I am underscore Ryan Spence, or find me at Ryan Spence over on LinkedIn. And if you want to read the sub stack and I think that you should, because it's going to help you Start to think differently about your own mental, self, mental cell, but also about the questions that you ask others and the questions that you ask yourself and Get you asking the right questions to help to point you in the right direction, not questions that are going to keep you in that mental cell, keep you in that box. Link to that sub stack is in the show description and that's it for me. Look forward to you speaking to you again next week. Until then, stop living a life of lethargy. Start living life.

Ryan Spence: 18:38

Thanks for tuning in to the triple C project. In the spirit of the triple C, there's three things that you can do to support the show Head to rate this podcast. Comm slash triple C or over to your favorite podcast app and leave Review reviews really help people checking out shows to see what they can expect and how this show can help them. Second thing you can do share. Share this episode, share previous episode, with a friend, someone who you feel could benefit From what I'm throwing down on this here show. And number three head to I am Ryan spent calm. Get on the main list. I'll be sharing news about the show, news about what I'm up to my new book start writing soon. So to be the first to be in the know, you need to get yourself on the list. Really appreciate you being here and until next week, stop living a life of lethargy. Start living life lit.