How to Build the Life You Want
Today, I’m going to give you a 4 step process for building the life you want.
It can be applied to every area of your life.
It’s simple — but not easy.
And if you follow it, I guarantee, you will build the life you want.
Here’s the process—
Step 1: Find a Should vs. Want conflict in your life
You run into these all day long.
You WANT to do one thing, but you feel you SHOULD do something else.
Should vs. Want conflicts come in all different sizes.
It can be as big as “I don’t want to work here anymore, but I have to make money.”
Or as small as “I want to interrupt this person who keeps taking over my meetings, but it’s not polite to cut them off.”
You feel tense or frustrated or resigned or restricted (or many other uncomfortable emotions).
The first step is noticing when this happens.
Too many of us just blow past all our Should vs. Want conflicts, thinking they’re just inevitable facts of life we have to resign ourselves to…
And never realizing that they are a solvable problem we can sit down and figure out.
Step 2: Resolve the conflict in a way that gets you everything you WANT with no Should’s
Very often, there are genuine Wants on BOTH sides of a Should vs. Want conflict.
When you think: “I want to interrupt this person who keeps taking over my meetings, but it’s not polite to cut them off.”
There are Wants underlying the “I want to interrupt this person” side:
You want to keep your meeting on track
You want to give other people a chance to weigh in
You want to signal to this person that they’re taking up too much airtime
AND there are likely some Wants underlying the “it’s not polite to cut them off” side:
You don’t want to hurt your relationship with this person
You don’t want to embarrass them
AND there are often some pure Should’s mixed in as well.
Underlying the “it’s not polite to cut them off” side, there may be a Pure Should:
You should never interrupt someone when they’re speaking
You know this is a Pure Should if no part of you actually wants this.
It’s 100% something you think you HAVE to do, with no want mixed in at all.
Now, get creative. How can you get ALL the Wants, with none of the Should’s?
How can you…
Keep your meeting on track
Give other people a chance to weigh in
Signal to this person that they’re taking up too much airtime
While also…
Not hurting your relationship with this person
Not embarrassing them
And courageously allowing yourself to…
Interrupt someone when they’re speaking
Do not let your brain tell you that it’s not possible.
There is always an answer.
Don’t go to work reconciling yourself to your “sad reality.”
Get to work figuring out how to have it all.
If it’s truly not possible, I want you to PROVE it through action and experimentation, not resignation before you even get started.
Step 3: Take action that grows your nervous system capacity in bite-size, manageable ways
First, let me explain what I mean by nervous system capacity.
How do you feel when you imagine doing the following things:
Going down a playground slide
Jumping down from a 3 foot tall ledge
Zip-lining 30 feet in the air
Skydiving from 10,000 feet
You probably feel very comfortable about going down a playground slide.
You’re not scared of it ahead of time. You can easily do it anytime you want with no preparation or warning.
You’d feel comfortable the whole time you did it. And you don’t need any recovery time afterward.
All of which is to say: You already have the nervous system capacity to go down a playground slide very comfortably.
There was a time when you were very little when going down a slide DID scare you!
But you did it multiple times. You gathered concrete evidence that it was safe and nothing bad happened to you.
You don’t just know in theory that it’s safe — you know from lived experience that it’s safe.
You know it in your bones (aka in your nervous system) — not just in your head. So now you can do it confidently without thinking about it.
Skydiving is probably on the opposite end of the spectrum.
It sounds pretty scary ahead of time. If you know you’re going to do it tomorrow, you might be nervous all day today in anticipation.
You would want some preparation before you did it — an explanation of how it works and an instructor to come with you.
You’ll be freaking out the whole time it’s happening. And you’ll probably need some recovery time afterward to calm back down and return to equilibrium.
All of which is to say: You do NOT yet have the nervous system capacity to go skydiving comfortably.
You’ve never done it before. You know in theory that it’s safe but you DON’T know that from lived experience.
You ONLY know it in your head — not in your bones (aka in your nervous system).
And the best way to grow your nervous system capacity to be able to go skydiving comfortably is to go skydiving lots of times.
SHOW your brain the evidence. Let it learn through lived experience that it’s perfectly safe.
Do it enough times, and it’ll become as easy as going down a slide. (Your skydiving instructor, who’s done 1000+ jumps, is probably bored on your jump!)
That list above also shows you that your nervous system capacity for doing things exists on a spectrum.
It’s not all “as easy as going down a slide” or “as hard as skydiving.” There’s lots of room in the middle!
Jumping down from a 3 foot tall ledge might make you slightly nervous, but you’d be able to do it and dust yourself off pretty fast.
Zip-lining 30 feet in the air might be quite scary, but you’d be able to jump off the platform with a nudge and probably be excited to do it again by the fifth or sixth time.
Going against your Should’s also requires growing your nervous system capacity.
Your automatic brain genuinely believes that adhering to your Should’s is keeping you safe.
Going back to interrupting that person who’s taking over your meeting—
You may know in theory that it’s okay to interrupt someone.
But you don’t yet know it through lived experience.
In your bones (aka in your automatic brain and nervous system), you still believe that it’s NOT acceptable to interrupt someone and that everyone will be mad at you.
So you’ll feel nervous beforehand.
You may need to prepare by building the case for why this is helpful for everyone, and practicing a couple things you can say to cut in.
“Let me pause you there, Sam. That’s is a great point, but let’s table it for later. Jen, were you about to say something?”
You’ll feel very nervous as you actually do it — you’re doing the thing your brain is convinced isn’t safe!!
You may need some time afterwards to calm back down and reassure yourself that it went fine.
And…the more times you do it, the more you will SHOW (not tell) your brain through concrete evidence that violating this Should is SAFE.
That you actually CAN get everything you want and disregard this Should and everything turns out fine.
There’s no need to shock your system while doing this. Make it bite-size and digestible.
Growing your nervous system capacity is not that different from working out.
When you exercise, you tire your body out, push it a bit past its current capacity, create micro-tears in your muscles…
…and then your body rests, recovers, and comes back stronger.
Each workout grows your body’s physical capacity for activity.
But working out too hard, too fast can cause injuries and set you back.
Growing your nervous system capacity works the same way.
Push yourself in doable, bite-size, manageable ways. Get consistent reps.
There is NO need to go crazy. Doing too much, too fast will only shock your system and set you back.
So as you prepare to interrupt the person who keeps taking over your meetings, you might do some “lower intensity warm ups” like:
Watch someone else interrupt someone and take note of how nothing bad happens afterward
Ask a friend to talk while you practice interrupting them
Practice interrupting someone else in a low-stakes one-on-one conversation
There’s no right answer — what matters is that it feels like a stretch but still DOABLE to you.
And keep going and keep growing your capacity in this area until following your Wants, with no Should’s in sight, feels as easy as going down a playground slide.
Step 4: Experiment, experiment, experiment
Here’s the reality you’re going to run up against as you start following your Wants and growing your nervous system capacity to disregard your Should’s.
You are not going to get the exact result you want every single time.
If you knew EXACTLY how to do this, you would have done it already.
And you haven’t done it already, which means you’re going to have some fumbles as you figure out HOW to do it.
You’ll try to cut that person off — and they’ll just keep talking over you.
Or you’ll break in — and they’ll get annoyed at you afterward.
Those fumbles are not a sign that you should stop, give up your Wants, and retreat into Should Land forever.
They are just a sign that there’s something you haven’t yet figured out.
You had a hypothesis of what would work. You tested it. The hypothesis was disproven. Gather the learnings, and move on to the next experiment.
This is also why it’s important to keep things bite-size and manageable in Step 3 — to prevent big blow-ups that will send your animal brain scurrying back into the cave, never to come out again.
It will take some iteration to figure out how to do this — how to honor ALL your Wants, without deferring to Should’s, and get the external results you want too.
This iteration is worth it.
Figuring out how to get everything you want and charting YOUR way of doing things takes work.
Resigning yourself to your Should’s and squishing yourself into a box ALSO takes work.
You have to do work either way.
I’d rather have you do the work being creative and courageous while you build the life you actually want…
…than do the work of being disappointed and constrained while resigning yourself to the life you “have no choice about.”
We talked through just one example today, but in the next few days, I’m going to share more examples of how I’ve used this process to build the life I want, across a variety of areas like:
My career
Food & weight loss
Dating & relationships
Whether or not to have children
How I run my business (because it turns out the Should’s don’t stop just because you’re the one in charge!)
And guess what’s helped me completely transform my life across multiple areas in just a couple years? You guessed it: coaching.
Not because coaches are unique geniuses with all the answers.
But because a coach keeps you focused, on track, and accountable as you run this systematic process…
…and acts as a thought partner while you problem-solve how to fulfill all your Wants without succumbing to Should’s.
…AND helps you learn the tools to work through all the big emotions that come up while you’re growing your nervous system capacity and running experiments.
Coaching is the best investment I have ever made.
Because it unlocked my ability to create everything I wanted in my life.
And now, I want to do for you what my coaches have done (and still do!) for me.
Let’s get started today.
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