In this episode we talk about FOMO one MO time!

In a previous episode on the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) we talked more about the "Fear Of" than the "Missing Out". Yet sometimes we do actually miss out – when we make choices we have to deal with trade-offs and sacrifices. Saying "yes" to one thing does lead to "no" for other things. So how do we deal with the aftermath -- the feelings of remorse and regret that accompany lost opportunities?

It's not dramatic to say that as humans we are wired to experience grief and regret when we lose out on opportunities. This happens even when we know we made the right decision! There is always loss – we can't have it all. The point is not the quality of the choice; the point is that we have to make sense of the emotions we experience when we are denied an opportunity or experience so we can be at peace with the decision.

We offer our perspectives on why we tend to sit in our negative emotions more than the positive ones, and offer some thoughts on how to shift our mindset so we can spend equal (or more) time focusing on what we have gained from our choices. In doing so we can leave options on the table from a place of wisdom and self-confidence and move forward with grace.

We also talk about the importance of remembering that our lives have seasons, and that saying "no" to something now does not mean it won't present itself in a different form at a later point in life – at a time when we are in a better situation to say "yes".

As always, we'd love to hear about your experiences, so please contact us via insidejobthepodcast.com or on Instagram and Facebook @insidejobpodcast

Inside Job is brought to you by Nayla Bahri and Eric Johnson.

To learn more about us and our work, visit www.insidejobthepodcast.com or email us at [email protected].

To learn more about the ideas and resources discussed in this episode, check out our show notes.

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In this episode we tackle the question, "What do I do with the sense I have that I was promised a specific outcome at work as a result of a certain amount of time and energy on my behalf?"

In what will likely be disorienting to many workers, neither of us believe that companies can make promises. Which means that addressing the question at hand requires a meta-analysis of not only each individual circumstance but also the general employer-employee relationship and agreement.

Certainly companies send a lot of signals about how it views its employees, and how it plans to implement a system of reward, recognition, and advancement. Employees are left to interpret those signals and determine how to make sense of their own situation. The result is a complicated web of expectations, entitlements, implied promises, interpreted promises, and probabilities that drastically affect how all parties feel about each other (and themselves) and their future together.

We break that web down and talk about what it means to imply a "promise" or "guarantee", and how employees should think through the ways to interpret and respond. We also highlight the critical differences between promises and possibilities/options, and discuss how specificity can be a bridge to resentment when it comes to these conversations.

We close by talking about how to stay positive when considering our future, and how to avoid becoming cynical when discussing our path forward with our organizations.

As always, we'd love to hear about your experiences, so please contact us via insidejobthepodcast.com or on Instagram and Facebook @insidejobpodcast.

Inside Job is brought to you by Nayla Bahri and Eric Johnson.

To learn more about us and our work, visit www.insidejobthepodcast.com or email us at [email protected].

To learn more about the ideas and resources discussed in this episode, check out our show notes.

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"Comparison is the thief of joy."

In this episode we tackle a topic suggested by one of our listeners – how to handle professional FOMO (the Fear Of Missing Out). FOMO arises when we look around at our colleagues, friends, and even our families and see that they have things that we want. They may be getting promoted faster, paid more, recognized more publicly, or taking on assignments we desire.

FOMO may lead us to feel as though we are not doing enough, or not doing it quickly enough (or both), and may have us experiencing a sense of inadequacy.

Throughout our conversation we unpack FOMO, reminding our listeners (and ourselves) that the picture we are viewing is only a fraction of what's happening in the lives of others. Nayla talks about why we have to be careful comparing our "middle chapters" to other people's "ending chapters", and Eric discusses the importance of noticing if we are using norms or outliers as our benchmarks.

More importantly we recognize that FOMO and envy are related, and rather than to be avoided they are both to be explored. We believe envy can be an important source of information, and that it holds clues that our values need to be revisited and possibly updated. FOMO and envy also serve as an invitation to create personal research questions to further identify information that might help us make better decisions about future roles and opportunities.

And because we are who we are, we talk about the role hummus can play in career advancement and what Matthew McConaughey would say about FOMO.

Inside Job is brought to you by Nayla Bahri and Eric Johnson.

To learn more about us and our work, visit www.insidejobthepodcast.com or email us at [email protected].

To learn more about the ideas and resources discussed in this episode, check out our show notes.

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"How should I start thinking about what I want from the coming year?"

We have been getting this question a lot lately, as we do around this time every year. In this episode we offer our thoughts on the principles we use to guide our clients forward in their thinking and planning.

The principles we offer are:

• Notice what your energy is calling you to do, and go after the things that really matter.
• Approach your life from a place of want, not should. Notice that what is likely to get done is the stuff you actually care about, and not the crud you think you should care about.
• Maintain a generosity of spirit towards yourself. Focus as much on answering the question, "How do I want to be?" as you do on, "What do I want to accomplish?"

As we explore these principles we also introduce the idea of "new year's dissolutions"; we recognize that 2021 isn't giving any of us more hours in a day and we can't start doing new things until we stop doing the things that aren't serving us anymore. Throughout our conversation we continue to offer that we're all just trying to do the best we can with what we've got.

As a bonus we offer our guidance on why you don't want to run the toilet toss at the school carnival and how to avoid kicking your own ass.

Inside Job is brought to you by Nayla Bahri and Eric Johnson.

To learn more about us and our work, visit www.insidejobthepodcast.com or email us at [email protected].

To learn more about the ideas and resources discussed in this episode, check out our show notes.

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As the year comes to a close, we're taking a deliberate moment to declare victory and celebrate the wins of 2020. Yes, the year has been difficult, "unprecedented" and full of hardship, and yet, we know that each of us can find at least one thing to celebrate, no matter how small.

It's so easy to overlook, minimize or simply forget the wins we create. Most of us lack good habits around celebrating ourselves, and our biology is designed otherwise. After all, as Rick Hanson says, our brains are like Velcro for negative experiences, and Teflon for positive ones!

We're not talking about silver linings, the "at least" statements we often fall to, but honest-to-goodness wins – things that went well, plans that we saw come to fruition, simple pleasures we generated for ourselves (learning to cook something new, reconnecting with an old friend, making time for a personal project we've delayed…) and the big tasks we took on despite the changes to how we live our daily lives (finishing school, getting professional mental health help, developing an exercise routine.)

We believe in the power of noticing and celebrating the victories in our lives, and in practicing that routinely.

To hear how others are celebrating their victories, we partnered with Daily Haloha (an app that connects people around the world through responses to thought provoking questions every day) to ask participants to weigh in: "A win I had in 2020 was_____".

We received 1100 replies from around the world, ranging from the simple: "I learned to cut my own hair" to the deeply profound "I finally dealt with my depression and got professional help".

In this week's episode, we explore the responses to that question, and offer ideas of how to build a celebration practice of your own.

Also, this week, we celebrate our 40th episode of Inside Job, and crossing the threshold of 10K downloads. Join us on Instagram where we're hosting our first giveaway, to celebrate!!

Inside Job is brought to you by Nayla Bahri and Eric Johnson.

To learn more about us and our work, visit www.insidejobthepodcast.com or email us at [email protected].

To learn more about the ideas and resources discussed in this episode, check out our show notes.

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Call it the internal saboteur, the gremlins, the inner critic, or as the great Anne Lamott calls it – KFKD, all of us have heard the internal voice of doubt, fear and discouragement that stops us from the pursuit of the thing we want. This voice keeps us small and still, and often tricks us because it proports to tell us the truth and keep us safe.

As always, we start with the inside job of noticing that the voice exists in the first place, and that while it shows up as evidence- based, it doesn't have your best interests at heart.

How we start to notice the inner critic and what do we do?

Sometimes the inner critic is revealed to us in language, often with the word "but":

• I would love to go for that job, but I don't think I have the right experience.
• I would love to go for that business idea, but I love the steadiness of my current paycheck.
• I really want to try that sport, but it would be too expensive to start.

We also have to develop the sophistication and discernment to know how sneaky the inner critic can be. Sometimes the inner critic is loud and black and white, sometimes the voice is delicate in its deception – we offer examples of both.

We talk about how personifying – giving a visual identify or even a name to our inner critic – can help us relate to his or her voice differently, reminding it that we can handle whatever we're facing. It also can spare us from wasting energy "crushing" the inner critic, so that we have the energy to chase what matters.

Finally, invite our listeners to dial down the voice of the inner critic in favor of the other voices we have internally, whether it's our inner voice of wisdom, our personal board of directors, or our future selves.

Inside Job is brought to you by Nayla Bahri and Eric Johnson.

To learn more about us and our work, visit www.insidejobthepodcast.com or email us at [email protected].

To learn more about the ideas and resources discussed in this episode, check out our show notes.

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If we're human, we're going to have the experience of things not going as we'd planned. We did the preparation, we put in the effort, practiced and still… disappointment.

Eric and Nayla share their own disappointments in an unproductive day of recording this very podcast, and how they noticed the spiral of normal reactions immediately afterwards.

A natural instinct might be to catastrophize and personalize the circumstances to signal an unmitigated, irreversible disaster, thinking to ourselves: I can't be trusted… No one will ever hire me…something is terribly wrong with my candidacy, or worse, with me!! Part of the Inside Job is to explore the question: What Am I Making This Mean? How likely is that? What else could possibly be true?

We offer that the opportunity to turn our disappointments into learning experiences shouldn't be missed. What really happened? What would we do differently next time? What did go well? Are there messages we have to understand and integrate from this event? (Also, these setbacks are evidence if the leaders and organizations that say things like "We celebrate failures as a source of learning" really mean it, or are blowing smoke.)

Next, we propose, ask yourself: how much does this still matter to me? Do I still want the thing that didn't work out? Do I have the energy to dig deep and try again? What would it take to keep going?

Finally, we talk about the opportunity to show ourselves goodness and compassion, to treat ourselves as a beloved member of our families, rather than resorting always to working harder and faster to make things right.

Inside Job is brought to you by Nayla Bahri and Eric Johnson.

To learn more about us and our work, visit www.insidejobthepodcast.com or email us at [email protected].

To learn more about the ideas and resources discussed in this episode, check out our show notes.

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Most of our clients come to us asking: Can you help me figure out what I want?

Our position: we can help YOU explore and express what you want – the answer to that question resides in you.

Yet, we have a ton of empathy for all the reasons this question is so common: we have all internalized messages about what we can or can't have because of the other commitments in our lives, have ideas of what is or is not available to us, or have restricted views about 'how' the things we love could be part of our work.

Nayla introduces the continuum of Should/Could/Want and Must, (and that Want is the most expansive and creative of these options). Want comes from a place of desire and energy, the sustenance we call on to keep moving forward in our search for what's right for us.

Eric introduces how our internal saboteurs (the internal voices and reasons that block us from articulating and going after what we want) can wreak havoc on our emotions and must be explored and often set aside if we want to move forward.

We believe that your life is the primary source of information about what you want; chances are you are already devoting time to the things you want in your spare time and with your discretionary attention. We offer some tips about how to excavate your own life to find clues that point you towards your true wants. The search for your true career (and life) desires is a process that requires patience. And, it is a process that we can bring other people into as we design and pursue the personal research questions that get us closer and closer to expressing what we want.

Finally, we believe that our wants are fluid and evolve as we grow, so learning to be open to the process of seeking is the surest way to continue to explore the question: what do you want?

Inside Job is brought to you by Nayla Bahri and Eric Johnson.

To learn more about us and our work, visit www.insidejobthepodcast.com or email us at [email protected].

To learn more about the ideas and resources discussed in this episode, check out our show notes.

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What's really going to change on January 1, 2021? The hype around the fresh start of a new year can have the side effect of letting us wait to take action until the calendar turns over – we think there's a better way.

If you're looking for a better outcome in any domain in your life, don't wait for an outside marker of a new start (new year, birthday, new semester). We suggest you start with small steps, now.

Sometimes we act our way into new ways of thinking, rather than waiting until our beliefs or thinking is different. Sometimes the "just do it" advice makes sense! There are lot of popular messages about gathering just a few moments of energy or courage to propel us into action (the movies We are the Millers, We Bought A Zoo and Mel Robbin's work offer a few variations on the theme) – our experience is that sometimes this idea works as an alternative to over-thinking or over-planning.

Aligning your action – even small actions – with purpose and focus offers an antidote to thoughtless and frenzied action, making sure you're working on something that matters to you and is likely to bring you closer to your goals. And the key word is 'closer'.

We also talk through how to combat the instinct to 'get it right' by considering learning rather than perfect outcomes, knowing that even our imperfect actions can serve as practice rounds to get better at whatever we're trying to take on. Finally, we offer the ideas of declaring your intentions out loud as a form of instant energy, and doing the post-action debrief to sort out how things went, and what could come next.

Starting now has the wonderful effect of building momentum in the areas of our life where we want to create change. As the great Dolly Parton says: Energy begets energy.

Inside Job is brought to you by Nayla Bahri and Eric Johnson.

To learn more about us and our work, visit www.insidejobthepodcast.com or email us at [email protected].

To learn more about the ideas and resources discussed in this episode, check out our show notes.

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In this episode, we take on the expert advice around time management and the sacredness of daily routines. Admittedly, this is an area where we are drowning in knowledge but short on wisdom.

We know that this time of year store aisles are filled with yearly planners, organizers, habit trackers, and the like. For those of us feeling a little disorganized and overwhelmed it can be tempting to believe the answer lies in somebody else's "tried and true" approach. The reality is that what works for one person rarely works for everybody else, and that's ok. The point is to find what works for you.

We talk about the pros and cons of routines, and the struggles we have with rigidity and the implied need for perfectionism. We compare and contrast daily vs. weekly routines, and share thoughts on breaking days into segments instead of minutes.

We also revisit the importance of knowing your values and your non-negotiables, and using them to define what a successful day (or week) looks like. Recognize that your values will be different than others, and those differences can lead to unique approaches for time management.

And like always, we discuss the need to be gentle with yourselves and hold yourself with grace. It's not failure if you can't live up to other people's processes. Find what works for you and be okay working your own style on your own schedule, with consciousness and discipline. As long as the results are there and you don't step on organizational norms or break bones in the process then you're probably doing something right.

Inside Job is brought to you by Nayla Bahri and Eric Johnson.

To learn more about us and our work, visit www.insidejobthepodcast.com or email us at [email protected].

To learn more about the ideas and resources discussed in this episode, check out our show notes.

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