The #1 Skill You Need to Create the Life You Want
A while back, I laid out a 4 step process for building the life you want.
Find a Should vs. Want conflict in your life
Resolve the conflict in a way that gets you everything you WANT with no Should’s
Take action towards fulfilling your Wants without the Should’s in a way that grows your nervous system capacity in bite-size, manageable chunks
Experiment, experiment, experiment until you figure out how to get the external results you want while doing the things you want
What do you think is the #1 skill you need to execute this process successfully?
Creativity?
Discipline?
Consistency?
Resilience?
All those things are helpful too.
But let me tell you the #1 thing you need — the true differentiator between the people who figure out how to build the life they want and the people who give up and resign themselves to a life they don’t like.
It’s your willingness and ability to feel negative emotions.
Because every step of this process will trigger automatic negative emotions.
It’s scary to even acknowledge your Should vs. Want conflicts rather than stuffing them down and pretending everything is okay.
It takes courage to be honest with yourself about what you want and to challenge the Should’s that feel like laws of the universe.
Doing things outside your comfort zone is…uncomfortable. As you take risks and grow your nervous system capacity, your brain will be convinced you’re in danger the entire time you do it.
And often, it’s not fun to have your experiments fail. You may want to just ignore what happened and retreat into familiar territory rather than dig into the failure and figure out what to do differently next time.
You can change those emotions.
That’s half the work of coaching.
Learning how to adjust your thinking about a situation in order to change how you feel about it and change how you act going forward.
AND…you will have to feel these emotions before you change them.
That’s the other half of the work of coaching.
Because no matter how much you prepare yourself, your automatic brain always moves faster than you, and you ARE going to get hit with that pain and discomfort and fear first, before you have a chance to consciously change your perspective.
Your brain will just go their automatically, before you can stop it.
Which is why, above all other skills, your willingness and ability to feel negative emotions is THE determining factor in whether or not you create the life you want.
(And this is why I created an entire masterclass just on that topic!)
If you fail to create the life you want…
If the execution of your life diverges from the strategy you set out to follow…
It won’t be because what you wanted wasn’t possible.
It’s a big, big world with a lot of pockets for you to tuck into. You are not the only person who wants what you want or sees things the way you do. Your people and the places where you fit are out there.
It won’t be because you weren’t smart enough to figure it out.
Every single one of your questions and fears is figure-out-able. It’s probably LESS complicated than many of the problems you routinely solve at work and school.
If you fail to create the life you want…
It will be because you ran into a negative emotion…
And interpreted that signal to mean “Something is going wrong. I should stop.”
Rather than “Something is going RIGHT. I should keep going.”
It’s like doing a workout and saying “I’m starting to sweat. Something is going wrong. I should stop.”
Vs. doing a workout and saying “I’m starting to sweat. Something is going RIGHT. I should keep going.”
And you guys know that I’m not advocating that you push yourself past your limits and burn yourself out — no more than I would advocate that you run a marathon with no preparation.
Small experiments and bite-size, manageable steps are always my recommendation.
But what I’ve found again and again is that the life you’re looking for is not that far away.
So often, the walls that are boxing you in are made of paper, not brick. 🧱
The thicket of brambles between where you are now and where you want to be is no more than a couple of feet wide. 🌿
You are no more than 5-10 courageous steps away from a totally different kind of life.
I know it’s scary to get started.
But you know what’s even scarier? Staying where you are.
The instinct to turn away from pain and turn toward pleasure is literally encoded in our DNA. It is a primal part of our survival instincts, and overriding that instinct takes real work.
But you know what makes it WAY easier? Getting external support.
You don’t have to do this alone. (I never have!)
A one-on-one coach brings structure to this process and keeps you on track and accountable every step of the way.
The more brainpower you use to keep yourself structured and on track without support…the less brainpower you have left over for problem-solving and courageously taking action.
Put the structure and accountability on auto-pilot.
Preserve your bandwidth so you can use it on what matters most.
And supercharge your thinking by leaning on a coach’s expertise rather than trying to reinvent the wheel yourself.
I want your path to building the life you want to be easy, inevitable, and FUN.
So let’s get started today :)
What my clients have to say…
“Overall, through our coaching, I've learned to change my perspective on the way that I see things.
Before, I felt very stuck in my head, and I had a hard time seeing things a different way. That previous headspace was very much like, ‘I'm the problem, there's something wrong with me.’
And the framework Pooja taught me helped me see things in a more positive or at least neutral light and then troubleshoot from there.”
—Client | VP at Major Financial Institution
Did you know I have a full table of contents, where all my work is categorized by topic, so you can easily find what you need right now? Check it out below! :)
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