The Workday Mindset Podcast

In this episode I want to do something a little different and invite you to think about how three visuals - bridges, tunnels, and doors - are great vehicles for thinking about how to navigate challenging moments you encounter in your day, and at the same time be a way to open yourself up to receiving opportunities that are all around you that are ripe for the taking. 

Routines are a great vehicle for change. But sometimes we get so caught up in whether we’re doing the routines right that we can find ourselves unintentionally stuck inside of them. 

And what I mean by that is we can get trapped in our desire to strictly follow the process of the routine, instead of really pausing to notice whether the routine is actually helping to deliver what you need, in that moment, and whether the routine is actually aligned with your purpose for creating the routine in the first place. 

In this episode I’ll guide you through a simple thought process you can apply to your current routines to make sure that the routines you have are truly serving you, and that you’re not caught up in serving them.

Many of the big, meaningful changes we want to experience take time. They unfold over time and in a way that we almost never can quantify or completely influence or accurately predict. 

And sometimes when we’re working toward a change that takes time, one of the challenges we face is that we get caught up in waiting for the big change to happen. 

In other words, we’re so focused on waiting for the entire change to materialize in full that we end up overlooking all of the signs and indicators along the way that are confirmation that what we’re doing day after day is actually working - and we end up missing opportunities to acknowledge and celebrate all of the indicators that precede that big change we want to see. 

In this episode I’ll introduce you to a concept that will help you tune into the progress that you’re making each day, and that will help you develop an enthusiasm for not just for the end result, but the entire process. 

We can learn a lot from the success stories of other people. But if we’re not careful about how we process and relate to those stories, we can start to get caught up in them and use them as a template to measure our own success - instead of studying the through lines or the nuggets of wisdom they contain. 

In this episode, we discuss how we can avoid getting caught up in other people’s success stories, and use them instead to promote our own growth.

We have a tendency to tell ourselves to not get our hopes up about something that we really want or something that we’re excited about that involves a level of uncertainty. 

And we tend to tamp down our excitement through the words we use by adding qualifying statements - something like “This would be perfect for me, but it’s a long shot” - and we do that because if we don’t get our hopes up, then we don’t have to feel the perceived judgment of others or our own disappointment if it doesn’t work out. 

In this episode, we talk about why you absolutely must get your hopes up - even when there’s uncertainty - and how you can simultaneously get your hopes up and hold space for how you might feel if things don’t turn out the way you want. 

When we think about a potential future scenario that makes us uncomfortable, our mind wants to “confront” the thought. It wants us to meet the thought on the thought’s terms and to accept the future scenario as true - even if it has no basis in fact - so that we can come up with a solution, just in case that future scenario actually happens. 

When we confront thoughts like this, what we end up doing is breathing life into them and giving them power over us. 

So instead of “confronting” a thought, in this episode we talk about a better way to address these thoughts - a way that helps us loosen the grip that a challenging thought has over us.

We all spend a lot of time trying to be consistent and trying to project a sense of consistency to other people. And we do that both because we think that inconsistency signals to others that we’re unfocused or undisciplined, and also because inconsistency can make us feel uncertain. 

But in truth we need to embrace and make room for inconsistency in our life - because if we don’t make room for inconsistency, we leave no room for growth. By definition, growth is a state of consistently being inconsistent. Growth means that you are a version of yourself that is inconsistent with a previous version of you. 

In this episode, we talk through why we cling to consistency, but also how we can start to embrace inconsistency and see it as the powerful mechanism for change that it is. 

When we think about what we want for ourselves in the future, it’s natural for us to try to issue spot and for our mind to want to solve any problems that we see coming down the pipeline. 

Our mind wants to think through all the little nooks and crannies related to events in the future so that we can feel like we’re prepared for everything that might come up - because if we feel like we’ve thought through things then that gives us a level of comfort and it helps us feel safe. 

But the challenge we face when we look into the future like this is that it forces us to lose touch with the present moment. When we’re pulled into contemplating and trying to predict and solve for a future version of events, we shift from the present, where we have the ability to actually take action, to being stuck in the uncertainty of a future thought, where all we can do is think. 

In this episode, we talk about how you can take a different approach that will leave you feeling empowered instead of stuck - and it involves shifting your mindset to a place where you’re taking ownership and responsibility for how you’re thinking moment to moment.

When we’re envisioning how a future version of events will play out, we tend to associate those events with “The Struggle.”  We constantly hear messages about how “Life is hard”, “No pain no gain”, “Nothing in life is free” - and we also are instinctually wired to look for the warning signs of potential future struggles so that we can avoid them. 

But this type of mindset can significantly impede our progress because if we believe that we have to struggle, our attention is drawn to the struggle - and we tend to find all sorts of evidence in our day to day to confirm that things must be hard, and in turn we make them hard. 

In this episode, we cover how to notice when you’re telling yourself a story about your future that involves “The Struggle”, and how to reroute this thought away from internalizing The Struggle and toward processing challenges in a healthy way, and in a way that leaves room for inspiration and growth.

Buffers are actions, routines, habits or thought patterns we engage in that help to keep challenging situations or things that we don’t want to confront at an arm’s length. 

Our minds are incredibly skilled at inserting buffers into our day as a way to avoid and push away things that we know will cause us to experience some level of discomfort or that we think have the potential to cause discomfort.

Buffers allow us to hide behind something pleasurable or non-threatening that will put distance between us and emotions that we don’t want to experience. 

But when we use buffers, we miss opportunities to cultivate strength, wisdom, knowledge, resilience, and to learn information that is essential to our personal growth that can only be learned through periods of discomfort or unhappiness. 

In this episode we talk about how to identify buffers, how they’re holding you back, and what you can unlock if you choose to limit the number of buffers in your day.