The Triple C Project

Change Is Inevitable: Will You Let It Happen Or Make It Happen?

• Ryan Spence • Season 2 • Episode 99

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Speaker 1:

you are not the title on your business cards and you're not your fancy office, you're not your huge salary, you're not any of that stuff. You're so much more. You're capable of so much more. You're listening to the Triple C Project. Welcome to the Triple C Project, the podcast that helps you gain clarity, boost confidence, build courage so you can live life lit. I'm your host, ryan Spence, the Big Law 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 99 of the Triple C Project, one away from 100. Can't believe it's going to be 100 episodes soon. Already. I'm very excited about that. But let's save that chat for the actual 100th episode.

Speaker 1:

And this week I'm going to ask you have you ever watched the Lion King, that famous Disney movie which has been remade and made into a musical top-selling musical, I believe, and all the rest of it. Yeah, the Lion King. Probably didn't expect me to be talking about the Lion King on this show, but my six-year-old was a huge fan of the Lion King. He was obsessed with the Lion King. So when he was about two, two and a half, we were still living in Singapore and he would watch the Lion King on loop if he could, and when he couldn't watch it he had to have the soundtrack. And so every morning getting ready for preschool, having breakfast, we would have the Lion King soundtrack on. It was kind of mandatory for quite a few months.

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Actually, circle of life and circle of life is literally as you, you mean we all know the circle of life is right, you are born, you live and then you die. That's the sort of crude circle of life that we think about, and I bring that up because it got me thinking about the circle of life is this big thing, but actually we have different circles of life within our life and that's what changes, right, because we are always changing. So we are always being born, living a moment, dying and being reborn, and what I mean is that every day we are, we're taking in new information, we're learning more about ourself, we're taking in new information, we're learning more about ourselves, we're having new experiences, we're gaining weight or losing weight, like there is this perpetual change that happens where a new person is born, lives a period and then dies, and a new person is born again and again, and again and again. And the thing about this change is that change is inevitable. I mean, even if you did nothing, even if you didn't intentionally try to change anything about yourself or your life, change would happen. You're getting older every day, your body's changing every day and there's nothing that you can really do about it, but yet we have this huge fear of change, this monumental fear of change, even though it's going to happen. It's going to happen whether we like it or not. I have this in my own life and my clients have this as well. It's this fear of letting go of who you think you are, of stepping into what you may become. There's this thing that comes about particularly in the context of my experience and so many of my clients in big law, that there's this fear of a loss of identity, that if you intentionally go ahead and try to change things, who will you be? You become scared of who you'll be without all of the things that you've become accustomed to.

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If you've worked hard, you've worked hard to get to this position, wherever it might be the position in your law firm, in your company and objectively, from the outside, you're on the path right. You're literally on the road to success. You've got the title, you've got the status, the prestige, the business card, the fancy office with the amazing view, the fancy office with the amazing view, and you've got all the things that you're told that you should strifle, and you've been working towards accumulating these things for so long that it just becomes who you are. So when you introduce yourself to anybody, you give them the name of your firm, you give them your title, you slip them your business card proudly and wait for them to be impressed by what you do and where you work and what that says about you, and that feeling can become quite addictive and before long this all becomes wrapped up as who you are. This becomes your identity.

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You are X person at Y law firm or X person at Y company and your title you make your title mean something about you. You know your senior associate at X firm or your vice president of blob at that company and you don't even think about it, it just rolls off the tongue. You become so accustomed to saying it and you're in this bubble where everybody else is doing the same. Everybody else is chasing what you're chasing, and it's not surprising, because you were told to follow this linear path and work and strive towards these things. And now you have everything that you were told to work for. And you're also told that if you went along and acquired these things, you acquired the title, the status, the house, the office, the car. You worked on, the headline deals and you did all of that. That would make you successful.

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You were told that that's what success is, and you believed everyone that told you that. Of course you did, because the people telling you this are the people closest to you. They're your parents, they're your family, they're your friends, your teachers, your mentors, because they've also been told that They've also been conditioned to think this way, because they've also been told that They've also been conditioned to think this way, and they've all bought into this vision of success. And so it's not that these people are lying. It's what they believe and they mean it in the nicest possible way. They want you to succeed, they want you to do well, they want to support you, and all that they've been doing is simply giving you their vision of success, because that's the vision of success that they've been fed themselves and that they've bought into themselves.

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And so, without thinking, you've just accepted that of course you would. I mean, of course you accept it, because these are people that you trust, that you love, that you respect, and you don't have anything else to base this on. So you go ahead with it, you go along with it, you want all of those things and because that's all you see as being successful, that becomes what success means to you and you. We accept that without giving any real thought as to what success actually means to you, because success can mean many things. And the problem with this is that you're buying into somebody else's vision, you're allowing somebody else to tell you the life that you should be living, the life that you should want to live, and so you go all in and you do all the work and you get all the grades and you reach the exact place that you were told you should reach, that you thought you wanted, based upon the vision that you bought into, that vision of somebody else, that other vision of success that you hadn't really given any thought to, you hadn't really put any input into. You had just accepted it as gospel.

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And what happened? Well, on the way to this place, this success temple that you thought you wanted to own to be in, on the way to achieving all of these things that you thought you wanted to achieve, and putting your head down and sacrificing everything to get there, to get the things that you thought would make you happy and would finally make you feel fulfilled and make you feel accomplished, you've left a trail of destruction in your wake, and what I mean by that is not necessarily that you've broken a lot of things, but I mean that you've kind of destroyed some things for yourself. There's been some collateral damage to you getting to where it is that you now are. So think about all of the, the cancelled holidays I mean you've had to, the holidays you had to sacrifice because you've had to be in the office to work on that urgent deal that needed to be done and nobody else could possibly do it. Think of the holidays where you sat on a beach with a drink to your left and your laptop in your hands, typing away for most of the day, not really switching off and recharging, but basically just doing your job somewhere hot, somewhere, tropical.

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Think of the fractured relationships that you've left behind from all the cancelled plans. I mean, nobody wants to be consistently arranging to meet you for dinner and waiting 30 minutes an hour, 90 minutes, at a restaurant for you to arrive, only for you to cancel at the last minute because something urgent has come up and you've got to stay in the office. People get bored. And think of the array of discarded plastic food containers that you've had over the weeks, the months, the years that, if they hadn't been emptied by the cleaners of your office, would still be there stacked high to the ceiling. And those containers that contained multiple dinners that you've eaten at your desk every night, no-transcript.

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Think of all of those things that you've left in your wake on this trail to get to this place and to achieve these things you thought you wanted, because everybody told you that's what you should want. And now, now you're exhausted, now you're, you're unfulfilled and you're desperately yearning for more thinking. There's got to be more to life than this. But all of your energy and your headspace has been spent getting you to this place, has been spent on this train heading to a place where you didn't even decide you wanted to go. You were just told that that's where you should go and you never thought about if that was really what you wanted. You never thought if that train was the train you wanted to be on. And now, because of that, you've got no other reference points. You've got no other ideas. You've got no real idea of what more looks like for you no idea. And because you don't have an idea, you believe that where you are is where you have to be and nothing can change.

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Even though you dream of change, as much as you'd like to believe there has to be more, you can't see that there is any possibility for someone like you to have something different, to have something different, to have something more. And also you're thinking who are you? Who, in your position, walks away from what you have? Who desperately wants to change a situation like this? Who wants to change, being able to walk into a tower of glass and steel every day and sit behind a nice desk with a nice view and an expensive office chair and getting a nice salary in your bank account every month and going to client dinners in fancy restaurants and flying off on business trips and staying in nice hotels. Who gives that up? That's success? Who walks away from that? Who wants to change all of that when everybody else from the outside looking in thinks you've got it made and so you feel guilty.

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And so what you do is you just feel that I should just accept this and just suck it up Because this is the way it has to be, and it's me I'm the problem. But is it, are you? Because, really, what's happened is you've really bought into this life this vision that other people have created for you, and you've given it your all, to the point where you don't have the space or the time or the energy You've never given yourself any of that to really envision what the alternatives could be, what life could be for you, what it is that you really want, who you really are. Reason you haven't done that is because you're so far down the line that your whole identity is now wrapped up in this thing that it's become even harder to think about doing something else. Really seriously. You're scared to let go. You're scared to even imagine letting go, Because you're scared to find out who you would be without the things that you have, without the job that you do the career, that you have the office, the title, the status.

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It's kind of like having somebody support you because you can't really walk, you've had an accident and you can't really walk and you have somebody who just walks around to kind of keep you propped up and at some point over time you start to resent that person or dislike that person and you don't really want to have them around. But you become so accustomed to having them hold you up that you believe that you need them. You fear pushing them away and letting them go, because if you do that you might just fall down because you've forgotten what it's like to stand up on your own to do something that you want to do for yourself. And that's kind of how this is. That's how I saw it. And once we've done the work I know that's how some of my clients see it Because your identity is so wrapped up in what you're doing that you've forgotten who it is that you truly are.

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I've been there, man Boy, have I been there? I've been there, man Boy, have I been there? I was there for so many years and I've been through that roller coaster of emotions, of feeling that this isn't for me. I want to get out. I want to do something else Of walking up to the edge of the cliff but then stepping back because I can't do it. I can't take that leap and I would walk to the cliff and walk back and walk again and walk back and the idea of not having any to sit and really find myself, find who I was beneath this big law persona, and connect with what I really wanted out of life and who I really was.

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It was all too scary because I didn't know what I might find. It was all too scary because I didn't know what I might find, you know, so I've come up against fear. This is what I want to say is that I've come up against fear time and time again and I've stood at the edge of that cliff for years and years and years until it got to the point where I decided enough was enough. And if you heard my story anywhere, you'll know that that point was for me, was Christmas 2018 in Bali. That holiday was the line in the sand, and that's when I knew. That's when I knew something had to change, and that's when I knew. That's when I knew something had to change and that's eventually when I, I guess, got to the edge. And this time I jumped metaphorically.

Speaker 1:

And if the fear of being on that cliff edge and not wanting to be there was scary, jumping was scary too. Don't get it scary. Jumping was scary too. Don't get it twisted. Jumping was scary. But the way I look at it, I had a choice. I could be scared in the situation and stuck in the situation that I was in where I didn't want to be. I was in where I didn't want to be or I could be scared, embracing the unknown and knowing that potentially there were other things I could find out there that may be better than where I was, because where I was certainly wasn't where I wanted to be, and for me jumping was exhilarating. Yes, there was the fear, but it was was exhilarating. Yes, there was the fear, but it was also exhilarating, it was excitement. Anyone who's bungee jumped or skydived or done any extreme sports, you know there is that kind of fine line between the fear but then the adrenaline that gives you that excitement. It makes you feel alive, and that's kind of what I felt. I felt alive and I still do, because, although I jumped, I'm still falling. No, I'm still figuring it out on the way down, but I'd much rather be here, and I'm much happier being here than where I was before. And so here's what I can tell you about jumping about taking that leap, and here's what I've discovered to be true through my free fall from jumping off that cliff back in 2020.

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You are not the title on your business cards, you know, and you're not your fancy office. You're not your huge salary, you're not any of that stuff. You're so much more. You're capable of so much more. What you do isn't who you are Not at all. You know. You might do the job of a lawyer, but a lawyer is not who you are. You might do the job of an accountant, and accountant isn't who you are. You might do the job of a corporate exec, but that's not who you are either, because who you are is far beyond what you do. It's far beyond the thing that you do.

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But to find out who you are beneath all of that, when you've thrown yourself into this thing, you've career down this path of full power for so long, because that's what you thought that you should do and you haven't taken time to look up and think, actually, do I really want to head where I'm going? Then what you need to do is find some time to pause, because to find out who you are, you've got to find your way back to yourself. You've got to then dig down deep within your soul and do that in a way that find out what makes you tick, that helps you to find out what's important to you, what are your core values, what are the things that you're going to live your life by. How will you know when you are in alignment and what are you going to do? What are you going to do then when you found those things out? What are you going to change to ensure that you are in alignment, that you are living for yourself and not living for somebody else? That's what you need to do, and that's why I love the work that I do, because helping people find their way back to themselves, helping them realize they have so much potential.

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They have all of these dreams that they can explore if they would just allow themselves to take a leap, if they would just trust in themselves enough to believe that they can figure things out along the way, in themselves enough to believe that they can figure things out along the way. Once that happens, man, it's a beautiful thing and clients go on to do things that they never thought were possible. So if you're stood at that cliff edge, if you've been walking back and forth to the edge of that cliff, if you've been thinking to yourself, there has to be more than this. There has to be a different way of living, a different way of doing this. But if the thing that's stopping you is this fear of but who would I be if I leave all of this behind, then I want to leave you with this Don't be scared of not knowing who you'll be if you jump. Be scared of not jumping and not being all that you could be, because there's so much more for you out there than the thing that you feel you're trapped in. Once you break out of that mental cell of self-limitation, you'll be amazed at the possibilities that present themselves to you.

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I have been, I've done things in the last few years that I never thought I would do, that I never thought were possible. I've had people get in touch with me to invite me to participate, to collaborate in ways that I never thought were possible. I've had people get in touch with me to invite me to participate, to collaborate in ways that I never thought possible. Just recently, a book came out that I was invited to write a chapter for. It's called the Life Coaches Toolkit, volume 2. I'll leave the link in the show description, and it's something which I never would have thought would come my way, but these things happen.

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If you're prepared to take the leap, if you're prepared to let go of all of the things that you think you need to have to be successful, if you're prepared to connect with who you really are, then allowing your identity to be the thing that you do. Because, as I said at the top of the show, change is going to happen anyway that's inevitable and fear is going to happen anyway. So, whether you stay stuck in the position that you're in, there's going to be fear. And if you jump, there's going to be fear. And if you jump, there's going to be fear. But one of those decisions is going to lead you into a whole new world of opportunity that could change the course of your life, and one is going to give you more of the same for as long as you remain there. So isn't it better, even with all of that fear, to just get in the driver's seat and take control and intentionally make change happen, rather than just allowing change to happen as it will anyway. Because if you do that, if you proactively, if you intentionally start to make the changes that you feel you need to make in order to live the life that you want, that's what's going to shift you from survival mode to thrival mode, that's what's going to help you live your life lit. And I know this because it's happened for me and it's happened for my clients, and it's a beautiful thing to see, believe me. So acknowledge the fear, then build the courage. Stack your courage, as I say in my book, stack your courage and build it to get after it, to push back against that fear, so you can take that leap and embrace the unknown. That's it for me. Thank you for being here.

Speaker 1:

As always, I really love to hear what insight you take away from this episode. It's funny because this is something that's just just came to me. I didn't really know what I was going to talk about this week and then this came to me from a conversation and I just thought, yeah, but it's so true, I'd forgotten how, just how fearful you can be at that moment of not knowing well who would I be without all of this, and so I hope that you found this helpful in figuring out what you're going to do next, how you're going to make the changes you feel you want to make, what leap you're going to take, and I'd love to hear what decision you make, what insights you take away. You know where to find me, but I'll tell you again over on the email, hey, at IamRyanSpencecom. Or over on social media Instagram at Iam underscore Ryan Spence. Or over on LinkedIn, ryan Spence.

Speaker 1:

All of those links are in the description to the show, as are links to my book, the CCC Method, the new book I just told you about, the Life Coaches Toolkit, volume 2, which isn't just for life coaches, trust me. You can find some helpful tools and tips in there from the 25 or 24 experts plus I, plus me. Me sharing tools and strategies to help you change your life really is kind of the most succinct way that I can put it and also links to how you can, how you can work for me, how you can get my support in helping you move from a life of lethargy towards a living, a life that's lit through my find, your spark sessions or my three-month coaching program. Look a call and let's chat. Love to hear from you. That's it for me from this week, or that's it for me this week, mixing my words up there. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode, episode 100. Woo-hoo, until then, stop living a life of lethargy, start living life lit.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for tuning in to the Triple C Project. In the spirit of the Triple C, here's three things that you can do to support the show. Head to ratethispodcastcom. Slash triple c or over to your favorite podcast app and leave a 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 a 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 iamryanspencecom. Get the mailing 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.