The one thing I don't talk about enough
You guys know that I’m all about changing your thoughts in order to solve your problems.
But too often, people think that this means they have to do this work all by themselves.
They think that if they lean on others, that means they’re relying on external validation instead of internal belief.
So they work super hard to change what they’re thinking in a total vacuum, like a monk on a mountaintop.
Guys, I am here to tell you—
Use other people to help you change your thoughts!!
Here are 4 ways you can do that:
1: Ask others for reassurance, support and cheerleading 🎉
It’s very, very hard to have an unbiased perspective on yourself.
Your brain is extremely like to over-focus on the negative and ignore or discount what you’ve done well.
That’s okay! It’s just an optical illusion. So many people have it.
As you retrain your brain to see yourself differently, expose your brain to other people’s loving perspectives.
Let your best friend tell you what an awesome job you’re doing and why everything you’re worried about is totally insignificant.
Have your spouse hype you up and praise how far you’ve come.
Tell the group chat about a conflict you’re in and let them say, “WHAT?? That other person is NUTS!!!”
Leaning on other people’s support, reassurance, and cheerleading doesn’t make you weak or un-self-sufficient.
It’s a structural intervention against your brain’s negativity bias.
It shakes your brain up and shows it that there are other ways of thinking about the situation.
And it’s a first step in learning how to say those same things to yourself.
2: Look to other people for thought suggestions 🤔
How do you want to think about…Your goals? Your career? Dating? Your marriage? Money? Fitting in? Failure and making mistakes?
Those are not questions you need to answer alone.
Go listen to other people’s perspectives!
Whether it’s friends, mentors, books, or podcast interviews — figure out how other people think about these things.
Especially if you’re in a “thought quagmire” and you just can’t figure out a helpful perspective on something.
Go gather a bunch of other people’s thoughts and use that as your raw material to borrow from, build on, and remix to develop your own perspective.
For example, I credit Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend for helping me develop a totally different perspective on creativity, writing, and having a creative career — one that got me from “frustrated non-writer” to “full-on creative person who writes every day.”
And I credit Spinsterhood Reimagined and Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus for totally shaking up my views on dating and relationships — getting me from “super frustrated about dating” to “I’m genuinely good either way.”
Whatever problem you feel totally stuck on — like you’re caught between 7 rocks and 13 hard places and there’s just no way out…
Go listen to other people’s perspectives on that topic.
There are an infinite number of ways to look at any situation.
And you don’t have to figure out the new way yourself!
Build on other people’s perspectives.
3: Use other people as role models, to build your belief that what you want is possible 🦸🏻♀️
There is nothing more powerful than seeing someone like you living the life you want to be living.
I still remember the day, when I was in junior year of high school, that I found out a girl in the year above me had gotten into Harvard.
We had pretty similar backgrounds. We did the same activities.
When I heard the news, for the first time, I viscerally believed:
Wait a minute… She’s just like me. This is possible. I can do this too.
The same was true when I launched my coaching business.
I would never have started my business if I hadn’t seen so many examples of other coaches in the industry — all women, all people I admired, all people with excellent writing and original thinking, all building amazing, profitable businesses.
In January, I was at a strategy retreat for coaches, and I spent one morning sitting between two coaches who had each made half a million dollars the past year and were well on the way to planning their million-dollar scale.
I saw them, and I viscerally believed:
Wait a minute… They’re just like me. This is possible. I can do this too.
If you want to achieve something, the first thing you have to do is believe that it’s possible for you.
If you believe it’s possible, you’ll just get to work figuring out how to do it.
If you’re not sure that it’s possible, you’ll hesitate and go back and forth and not fully commit to making it happen.
Believing it’s possible is crucial.
But you don’t have to strain and grasp to build that belief alone.
Go out and find people like you who are already doing the thing you want to do.
It’ll be a 1000x easier to believe it’s possible, and then you can just get to work.
4: Join communities of like-minded people to show your brain that you’re not crazy and you’re not alone 👯♀️
When you’re doing something that’s different from what everyone in your current group does, you’ll feel like you’re crazy.
This is not a personality flaw. It’s just a feature of how your brain works.
For most people, it feels viscerally, horribly uncomfortable to be the one person in a group that does something different. Your automatic brain just wants to conform.
You can change your thinking to reassure yourself that it’s okay to be different and to reinforce your belief in your path (definitely do that too!)…
AND you can join communities of like-minded people to help your brain really believe “I’m not crazy.”
If everyone around you is on the corporate ladder, but you want to be an entrepreneur…find other entrepreneurs to hang out with.
If everyone around you has or wants kids, but you don’t want to be a parent…find other people who don’t want to have kids.
If everyone around you is very logical, but you’re secretly into spirituality…find other spiritual people to spend time with.
You’ve got to change your thinking to change how you feel and change the life you’re living.
But “change your thinking” doesn’t mean “do it all by yourself, silently in your head.”
We are, at the end of the day, social animals. We are incredibly influenced by the opinions of the people around us, the media we consume, the role models we hold up in our minds, and the communities we belong to.
That saying — “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with”? It’s totally true.
So use your social brain to your advantage.
Lean on the people in your life and set up your social surroundings to support you in believing the things you want to believe.
This kind of problem-solving is exactly what we do in coaching.
We find the thinking that’s holding you back from feeling the way you want to feel and living the life you want to be living.
We brainstorm what else you could possibly think here — that resonates with you AND gets you the results you want.
We come up with concrete action plans to actually build belief in that new way of thinking.
We iterate, troubleshoot, and adjust until you’ve gotten the results you want.
And not only do you walk away with the results you came for…
You walk away with mastery of this process, so you can use it to solve problems easily and efficiently for the rest of your life.
I have absolutely no doubt that you can create the life you’re looking for.
The process is right there, waiting for you to get started.
So come talk to me, and let’s get started today :)
What my clients have to say…
“My general happiness levels are higher. I have coping mechanisms during stress. My husband is seeing the results of it —I have a better married life with him.
Coaching has given me more inner peace and focus as to what are the things that I want and how to go after them without setting ceilings. And it’s allowed me to get to the root of what it is that I want, and not just chase the next big thing.”
—Client | CEO, PE-backed company
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