Month: August 2023

You’re listening to The Less Stressed Lawyer Podcast, episode 73. Today, we’re talking all about asking for help. You ready? Let’s go.

Welcome to The Less Stressed Lawyer, the only podcast that teaches you how to manage your mind so you can live a life with less stress and far more fulfillment. If you’re a lawyer who’s over the overwhelm and tired of trying to hustle your way to happiness, you’re in the right place. Now, here’s your host, lawyer turned life coach, Olivia Vizachero.

Well, hello there. Long time, no talk. How are you? I hope all is well with you in your neck of the woods. I just got back from the most incredible week in Big Sky, Montana. I posted my in person event for The Less Stressed Lawyer mastermind, and it was decadent beyond belief. I just can’t begin to tell you about it, to tell you how amazing it was, how beautiful it was. The scenery is just absolutely breathtaking. The venue was really, really special.

We were at a five star hotel, which, if you’ve never stayed in one before, you gotta try it. It’s really next level. So everyone was raving about the staff and the service and the food and just everything being really over the top. It was incredible. That being said, it kept me busy. So it’s been a minute since I’ve talked to you. I’m so excited to come back and teach you more things after having a week off from the podcast.

So with that being said, today’s episode is actually sort of inspired by my recent mastermind experience. Today, we’re going to talk about asking for help. I want to just start to peel back the layers on your relationship with asking for help and see what comes up for you. What’s there, what can we work through? Does your mindset support you asking for and receiving help? Or does it lead you to really just rely on yourself at all times for everything?

If you’ve listened to the podcast for a while, you know I’m a really big advocate for being resourceful. I do think you’ve got to tap into your own resourcefulness more often than not, okay. But with that being said, I do think we can take it too far. We can get to a place where we’re sort of toxically independent. I really don’t love the word toxic, but I think it is appropriate here. We become toxically independent, and we do ourselves a really significant disservice by purposely struggling more than we would otherwise need to for the sake of just being able to wear the badge of honor that we did it alone and that we didn’t ask for help.

So if you’re someone who struggles with asking for help, maybe you feel really overwhelmed right now in a particular area of your life or in every area of your life. This is the episode for you.

Now, here’s what inspired this topic today. What I noticed as I went through my mastermind experience putting on this huge live event for my clients who all flew to Big Sky to be there and spend time with each other and learn from me, and work on improving their lives. One of the things that I noticed this time was I had a much better relationship with asking for help.

There were a couple things that came up throughout the course of me putting on this event. You’re never required to ask for help. I could have struggled on my own, but I chose not to. I really see a stark difference, there’s a clear delineation, between how old me would have handled this and how new me present me handles situations like this.

It’s funny. I’m going to be kind of cheeky here, but it’s almost as if coaching works y’all. I have a different relationship with asking for help because I’ve done the work to change my mindset around it. I’ve identified my thoughts around asking for help. I’ve understood my resistance to it, how it makes me feel when I ask for help, and I understand why I feel that way. It’s because of the thoughts that I’m choosing to think about asking for an extra set of hands, asking for assistance.

As I’ve started to uncover that, I’ve realized what it ends up driving me to do. I end up avoiding the negative emotion that comes up for me when I think about asking for help. Then I just do everything all on my own. In a lot of times, you end up exhausting yourself really unnecessarily. I don’t know about you, and maybe this isn’t true for everyone at all times, but I like helping other people.

I read, I forget who it’s from, and I think I’ve actually mentioned this on the podcast before. There’s a really great post from a content creator that I follow. I think it’s Rachel Cargle, but I could be wrong. The point of this post that I read a couple months back was you’re not the most thoughtful person, you know. that doesn’t mean that you’re not thoughtful. That’s not the point of it. But it just means that other people that you know quite possibly could be as thoughtful as you. You are not the single most thoughtful person in the universe.

what I took that to mean when I read it is that if you like helping people, if you don’t mind helping people, and you’re not the single most thoughtful person alive, then it’s true that other people don’t mind helping you. Right? The tables can turn. Other people don’t mind lending you a helping hand.

I love to help people, when it’s possible for me to, when I’m doing it not from people pleasing energy, but from clean energy. I truly have a desire to lend my set of hands and give aid where I possibly can, to give support where I possibly can. I love doing it. It makes me feel like I’m contributing. It makes me feel charitable. It makes me feel kind and generous. other people like feeling those feelings too.

So as I went through the mastermind experience hosting this live event, I recognize that between me from several years ago on me now I handled it completely differently. I asked for help. it really made a difference. So I want to talk about a couple of the ways I did that. then I want to talk about your relationship with asking for help. See if it serves you, see if it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, we’ve got to shift that mindset when it comes to asking for help so you can really start to request and get the help that would really make a difference in your life.

So if you were in Montana with me, you know that the last night, I hosted a farewell dinner, which I always do when I host an in person event. at the farewell dinner, I’ve got a flair for the drama. So I really wanted to have this very long runner down the table. So I do one long rectangular table. They call it a kings table. I do one long table for my farewell dinners. I like to have a really dramatic centerpiece. I like it to run all down the table.

I’ve done this every time I’ve hosted the farewell dinner. I always have these long table runners. Normally they consist of flowers. Well, this time I decided to switch it up, and I got this really amazing idea to do a candle runner all day on the table. if you follow me on social media, you can see the pictures. They shared some on Instagram.

I knew it was going to make for just such a stunning visual effect at the dinner to have this 36 foot candle runner down the center of the table. Because it was going to be dark during most of the dinner, and I wanted the table to be aglow. I just knew it was going to be beautiful. So I order everything that I need to order, and I have it shipped to the hotel.

then while I’m in route to Montana, I’m literally on the airplane flying to Big Sky, I get a notification from Amazon that instead of having these items delivered by Friday, and I need them by Saturday, they weren’t going to arrive until the following Monday. So it was going to be too late. So instantly, I start to scramble, and I just go into problem solving mode because that’s where my brain always goes immediately. I’m like how do we fix this? I believe we can fix it. How am I going to do it?

So I could have given up on my idea. I could have gone back to just doing flowers and string lights, which is what my original idea was. But instead of doing that, I get this brilliant idea to see if maybe Big Sky’s the issue. Maybe because it’s such a remote destination, that that really impacts the shipping time. I had already sent something overnight to Big Sky. So I knew that it was possible to send from where I live in Michigan to Big Sky to send things overnight.

So I ended up ordering all of the supplies, reordering the supplies. So I cancelled the original order. I reorder all of the supplies, and I have them delivered to my house in Michigan. I asked my mom for a favor. My mother is wonderful. if you were in Big Sky, you also got to meet my parents. They made a guest appearance.

But I mustered up the, I guess we’ll call it humility. I mustered up the humility and courage to ask for help. I asked my mom hey, could you please pick these things up from my front porch because they’re all being delivered, and they’re being delivered on different days. Can you take them and ship them for me? Can you ship them to the hotel where I’ll already be? So I’ll be able to oversee the receipt of them at the hotel. I just can’t handle the shipping of them to the hotel because I’m already going to be in Montana.

she was a little confused at first. She was like why does it make sense for them to come here and then to go there? But I explained to her that because of the way that Amazon distribution centers work, they could arrive on time my house to be shipped overnight via a different carrier, but Amazon wouldn’t get them there in time.

So I asked her, and she graciously agrees. y’all, it was so much work for her. It was so many boxes, but she helped me. I was courageous and humble enough to ask for the help because I really could use it. because I was willing to do that and because she was so gracious to offer to help and accommodate me, we got the job done.

Then similarly, when I was in Big Sky, a really good friend of mine, Andrea Nordling, she’s a coach. She is a business coach for holistic nutritionists. she was also hosting a retreat in Big Sky. this actually brings up a couple different ways that I was a gracious recipient of help.

Now, I didn’t specifically ask Andrea for help in two different instances, but she offered it. I recognized I had this initial desire to tell her no. Oh, I don’t need your help. No, I’ll be fine. It’ll be okay. So, first things first, I had committed myself to filling more rooms at the hotel that I hosted this event at than the numbers that I got from the launch that I did to sell the event.

Andrea got this idea to also host an event the same weekend as me in order to fill these rooms. Now, if you’re not familiar with how corporate room blocks go, you’re on the hook for the rooms that you contract with the hotel to fill. So if they go unfilled, you have to pay for them.

So Andrea offered to really do me a favor and fill some of the rooms with her people by hosting an event there, which ended up taking a lot of pressure off of me to fill rooms or being on the hook financially if they go unfilled. So this made a massive difference in how this event ended up going because she offered to do this. I had a sincere desire to tell her no and pretend to be proud and tell her that it was all okay, but I resisted the urge to do that. I just accepted her offer to help.

Her and her assistant or business manager, Raven, were in Montana the same time I was. they saw me setting up these candles with my cousin who also helps me during these events. So Andrea and Raven come outside, and they just start pitching in. We had so many boxes to open up. then after we opened all the boxes, we had to arrange everything, and we had to light the candles to get the wicks started. It was quite a process.

I was reflecting on it later in the evening. Because, again, it came together so beautifully. Just really, really incredible. Just so aesthetically amazing. I got back to my hotel room to change out of my workshop clothes into like my evening attire. when I was doing that, I just took a second, and I reflected on how grateful I was that Andrea and Raven, and my cousin Emily helped me put this together.

I realized that I would have done the same thing for them in a heartbeat. No one would have had to ask me. I would have just wanted to chip in and offer my assistance. I noticed when Andrea and Raven started to help out, I wanted to tell them hey, we’ve got this. Don’t worry about it. I don’t need extra sets of hands. We’ll get it figured out ourselves. I resisted the urge to do that, and I just allowed myself to be a gracious recipient of help.

Another thing that happened during the event was that there was a mix up with the AV company that was providing the audio visual materials for the event. So like the projectors and the television screens for me to like have the PowerPoint up and my flip charts. the easel that I used to write on and coach people in real time on my little board.

they ended up not having flip charts. my photographer, who’s a really good friend of mine, her husband was there. she had said to me when they arrived. If you need any favors, if you need any help, if there are any emergencies, Keith, my husband can run an errand for you. in the beginning, I was like oh my goodness. There’s no way we’ll ever need that.

then sure enough during the welcome reception, so my team is at the welcome reception. So I can’t just send anyone. Like we have jobs to do for the welcome reception. So it was between the welcome reception, which starts at 6:00 p.m., and then the next morning is when I would need these flip charts that I write on as I coach and teach.

I was trying to figure out what could I do if I was just relying solely on myself and I thought, oh, I could get up in the morning, and I could drive from Big Sky to Bozeman, which is about an hour drive. I could get these flip charts and then I could drive back. But I remembered my rule with planning. I never do something if requires it to go the best case scenario in order for it to work out.

So I just trusted that if I did that, I probably would have gotten a flat tire, and I would have been stranded on the side of the road without cell phone service. The whole thing would have been a disaster. then my people would have been waiting for me and the workshop wouldn’t have been able to get started because of it.

So I refrained and resisted the urge to try and just do it all myself. I sat there, and again, humbled myself, and just said they offered. They wouldn’t have offered if they didn’t mean it. I don’t offer help when I don’t mean it. I’m just going to ask for help. sure enough, Keith went, and he picked up flip charts for me. then the next morning was seamless because he offered to help, and I took him up on that offer.

So these are some examples of how I’ve started asking for help in my own life. Live events are big projects to pull off. I have a very small team. Typically, it’s just me planning everything behind the scenes. I do bring in some assistance for these live events. But I still was probably down a little bit of manpower, which I will take that and use that information for future event planning.

But in the meantime as I’m going through this event, I noticed that I had such a different relationship with asking for help than I have in the past. it’s because my thoughts have changed about it. So I want you to check in with yourself. There’s two different ways that you can improve on how you ask for and receive help.

The first is whether or not you ask for it. if you don’t ask for it, I want you to check in with yourself. What’s your relationship like with asking for help? What do you think about people who ask for help? What do you make it mean about you when you ask for an extra set of hands for some assistance, for some support?

Remember, you’re not the most thoughtful person in the world. what I mean by that is that other people are just as thoughtful as you and just as willing and eager to help as you are. So if you make it mean that you’re weak, you want to change that thought, what do you want to think instead?

Maybe you want to think that the strongest people ask for and receive support. Maybe you want to think that there’s no reason that you should be able to do it all on your own. Right? If you’re hyper independent, it’s probably coming from a belief that you should be able to do it all yourself. What if you change that thought? What if you didn’t think that? What if you think that in order to get further, you do that by receiving help rather than resisting help?

Another thing that I see with clients is they feel really guilty when they think about asking for help. normally, it’s because they don’t trust other people to be honest with them. So if this is you, if you think oh, someone’s going to say yes to helping me, but they’re going to hate me for it. They’re going to resent me for it. You’re not trusting the people in your life to be honest with you. that’s where you have to put your time and attention into changing your mindset. You’ve got to trust them to be honest, to say no if they don’t want to say yes.

this is especially hard for my people pleasers. If you tend to people please other people and say yes when you want to say no, you probably expect that from other people. you’ve got to start taking people at face value. You’ve got to start establishing trust between you and them, trusting them to say no if it doesn’t work for them, and not being upset if they tell you know. Being able to receive their know without getting frustrated or hurt.

Do you think people will judge you if you ask for help? If so, what judgments do you think they’ll have? Whatever judgments you assume other people will have of you, they’re really just the judgments that you have of yourself. So take a second and identify what do you think people will think of you if you ask them for assistance? Maybe you’ll think that they think you’re incompetent, or that you’re lazy. If you think those things, those are judgments you have of yourself.

How do you respond when someone else asks you for help? If you have a negative connotation with someone asking you for help, you want to address that mirror judgment and really look at what do you make it mean about them because you probably make it mean the same thing about you. That’s just another opportunity to gain more awareness and to start to shift your mindset here.

then think about how you are when you receive help. Are you a gracious recipient, or do you resist it? Do you argue with people? Do you debate? Do you try and push back and deny people the opportunity to give you help, to offer an extra set of hands?

Think about how you are when people offer to pay for something. Are you a gracious recipient of someone else’s monetary generosity? I am a very generous person when it comes to money, and I love to pick up tabs when I’m out. I love to pay for dinner for other people. I just love to treat people to things. It’s a signature part of my personality. It’s something I just absolutely love to do. It’s one of the ways that I show love and affection.

Other people respond very differently. So some people are gracious recipients, and they say thank you. not everyone. I don’t need everyone to return the favor. That’s not why I’m doing it. Some people like to return the favor. So we take turns exchanging that generosity, which is so much fun. Again, I never expect that from people though I do this because it’s something that I like to do, regardless of what anyone else is going to do going forward.

So some people say thank you, and they’re super gracious recipients. Some people like to return the favor. then the third category is that people argue with me, and they get really offended. the conversation becomes pretty quickly combative because they’re really uncomfortable being on the receiving end of someone else’s generosity.

oftentimes, I use it as a learning moment, as a teaching opportunity just to show people hey, this is an opportunity for you to really work on receiving. Receiving generosity, receiving love, receiving help. These are all things that we can become more gracious recipients of when someone’s kind enough to offer whatever it is that they’re offering.

So do you get uncomfortable when someone offers to pay for you? If you do, you probably get uncomfortable when someone offers to help you rather than just being grateful and graciously receiving their help. That’s what I did with Andrea and Raven. I graciously received their help. They were kind enough to offer. I didn’t even have to ask. I’m so grateful that they jumped in, rolled up their sleeves, and helped us get the job done.

So I want you to take a second. These are the two ways that you can work on receiving help. You can ask for it and be a gracious recipient of it. So what is something that you would like to ask for help with? What could you use some help with? Maybe it’s asking for an extra set of hands on the matter that you’re currently working on at work. All right.

Maybe you need another associate because there’s just too much work to go around and everyone’s buried, but you’re afraid to ask the supervising attorney on the matter to bring someone else on because you think that he or she will think that you can’t handle it.

All right, what would it look like for you to be brave enough to ask for that extra set of hands? What do you need to think, and what positive emotion do you need to cultivate in order to become the person who does that? Maybe you need help from your legal assistant, but you’re afraid to ask them because of the power dynamic. You’re uncomfortable asking for help even though that’s technically the person’s job to assist you. you’re telling yourself well, I technically could do it myself. So I should do it myself.

But if that’s the mentality you have, you’re never going to advance as far as you can in your career because you’re going to continue spending time on things that you shouldn’t be spending your time on. Right? You’re never going to advance your skill set if you keep doing the same things that you’ve always done. You’ve got to learn how to delegate in order to transition out of doing some of that low hanging fruit, that entry level work, in order to build and develop your skill set to advance in your career.

But you might have judgments about that. This person is going to think that I’m taking advantage of them. They’re going to think that I’m lazy, that I’m not willing to do it myself. They might think I think I’m too good to do this, right? How do you want to think about all of this instead? What do you want to think about asking for someone’s assistance instead of any of those thoughts?

Maybe you’re needing help or desiring help in your personal life. I recently coached a client on asking her husband for more help with their daughter. A lot of the day in, day out stuff falls to her. what happens when the day to day stuff mostly falls to her, she really never gets any downtime. She never gets any alone time.

Her husband gets a lot of it because he has a different work schedule than her. then she ends up just being in demand and on call all the time with their little one. So she’s either at work or when she’s home, her daughter’s home. So it becomes a completely full time job. Versus her husband who is at home when their child’s not, he gets a lot of downtime. we were identifying different things that she’d like help with.

So some of it was childcare duties, and then some of it was just different chores around the house. we worked on what it would look like to have a conversation about that from a clean place, not a place of frustration or resentment. then how to go about asking for that help with a lot of sincerity and a lot of trust.

A really great example of someone asking me for help. It would be my mom with holidays. As she gets older and my mom deals with chronic pain, she asks me for help when it comes to preparing meals for the holidays, for Thanksgiving, for Christmas. She will ask me to come early to help her cook, to do all of that. she’ll all also asked for help with like cleaning up.

Normally my uncle chips in and does all the dishes. I do like the heavy lifting on a lot of the cooking on the front end. So prep work and day of. I wake up early with her, and we cook all day together. I lift things if they’re heavy. I try and bear the brunt of that because it doesn’t have as significant of an impact on me as it does her.

she’s brave enough to ask for help rather than trying to white knuckle her way through it and be a hero. No one wins because she ends up being in so much pain that it makes the day a miserable experience for her. it’s really hard for me to enjoy being with her when she’s suffering so much.

So everyone wins. That’s a great thought to think about asking for help and being a gracious recipient of help. Everyone wins when I ask for help. Everyone wins when my mom asks for help. we’re all so eager to chip in and give it.

Just think of that for a second. What if you believed people would be eager to help you? To chip in and lend that extra set of hands? How would that change the way that you approach asking for help? How do you want to feel when you ask for help? What one word emotions do you want to cultivate? What would you need to feel in order to ask for the help that you could really use?

Do you need to feel trusting? Do you need to feel committed? Do you need to feel brave? Do you need to feel assured? Do you need to feel compassionate with yourself? Think of those emotions that you want to cultivate.

Then also think about the negative emotions that you’re going to have to allow. Are you going to have to feel embarrassed? Are you going to have to feel ashamed? Are you going to have to feel insecure or inadequate? Are you going to have to feel judged or exposed? Are you going to have to feel guilty or worried? Are you going to have to feel rejected if someone tells you no, I’m so sorry. I can’t do that. I don’t have the bandwidth to help you in that way right now.

Think about what negative emotions you’re going to have to gag and go your way through in order to ask for help. then think about what you want to think about asking for help instead of what you’ve currently been thinking. How do you want to show up when it comes to asking for and receiving help? What do you need to think in order to do that?

Now I want to give you homework. I’m going to challenge you. I want you to find one way to ask for help this week. Be brave. Have your own back. Trust yourself and the other person. go ahead and ask. Don’t make it mean anything negative about you. Just trust yourself and them and ask for the help that would really move the dial for you and make your life a bit easier. Okay.

Go out and do this week. You’ve got to create evidence that you won’t die if you ask for help. I know that sounds really dramatic, but that’s what the primitive part of your brain believes. The primitive part of your brain believes that you’re going to die if you ask. You have to prove to it that you won’t. That everything at the end of the day will be okay if you ask for help.

You can ask and survive the ask, and you can receive and survive receiving. I promise you. Go out there and do it. Give it a try for yourself and see what happens. All right, my friends. That’s what I’ve got for you this week. I hope you have a beautiful week, and I will talk to you in the next episode.

Thanks for listening to The Less Stressed Lawyer Podcast. If you want more info about Olivia Vizachero or the show’s notes and resources from today’s episode, visit TheLessStressedLawyer.com.

You’re listening to The Less Stressed Lawyer podcast, Episode 72. Today, we’re talking all about how to develop confidence and feel better about yourself. You ready? Let’s go.

Welcome to The Less Stressed Lawyer, the only podcast that teaches you how to manage your mind so you can live a life with less stress and far more fulfillment. If you’re a lawyer who’s over the overwhelm and tired of trying to hustle your way to happiness, you’re in the right place. Now, here’s your host, lawyer turned life coach Olivia Vizachero.

Well, hello there. How’s it going? I know that in the last episode I promised you an episode all about time entry and billable hour bullshit, for lack of a better term. I am going to record that episode. I’m just not recording that episode in this episode. I am going to be fully transparent, I am up to my eyeballs in prep for Montana, for the live event for The Less Stressed Lawyer Mastermind.

I was just in Fort Lauderdale over the weekend, heading to a client’s baby shower. It’s a client of mine who has become a really good friend. So, I want to do that episode justice. It’s going to be a really dense episode. I want to get into truly all of the billable hour issues that come up, and the time entry issues that come up.

So, I started outlining the episode to record it, and I just realized it was going to be really, really in depth. We’ll see, it might even be a two parter, I’m not sure. But with that being said, I don’t want to rush it.

I don’t have the time in my schedule, ahead of Montana, to record it the way I want to record it, so I’m going to give you a little bit of an interim, interlude, intermission episode, like a palate cleanser, between the last episode where we talked about the fuckit point, and then time entry and billable hour bullshit. Which is just such a catchy name for the title of a podcast episode. So, I think I’m going to stick with that.

In today’s episode, we’re going to cover how to develop confidence and feel better about yourself. This is actually inspired by an exercise that I gave to a client earlier today, in a one-on-one coaching session. I give this homework to my clients a lot. I specifically assign it to people when they come to me, and they have a really low opinion of themselves.

When they really lack confidence. When they feel very inadequate. When they’re full of self-doubt. When they really engage almost in self-loathing, just beating themselves up constantly, feeling bad about the job that they’re doing, feeling like they’re not measuring up, always feeling inadequate and subpar, insufficient, unaccomplished, and guilty about their performance.

When that happens, when people come to me like that, the first thing we have to start to do is really just start to develop some very small confidence muscles. And the way that we develop that is by changing the way you talk to yourself.

So, when people feel those feelings about themselves, it’s the direct result of the thoughts that they’re thinking about themselves. They tend to just have what I call a “thought playlist” running on repeat all day long. They have extremely negative thoughts.

Thoughts like, “I’m not doing a good enough job. I’m stupid. I’m not competent. People think I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I’m doing. I should know more by now. I could have done that better. I should be further along. I shouldn’t have these questions or this many questions. I shouldn’t have made that mistake.” And everyone’s favorite, “I’m failing.”

That’s what their thought process looks like all day long. And they micro dose terrible emotions as a result of that thinking. So, it’s just like drip, drip, drip of inadequacy, inadequacy, inadequacy. Of self-doubt, self-doubt, self-doubt. Feeling not confident as they go throughout their day.

I’ve told you before, your brain is such a powerful tool. It’s actually really good, you might not feel this way, especially if you’re a procrastinator, but it’s actually really good at following the instructions that you give it. So, if you tell yourself these thoughts unconsciously or subconsciously or maybe even consciously, on repeat, your brain is amazing at saying, “Roger that,” and it goes out and finds more evidence to support the things that you’re already telling it. It’s going to look are all the ways that you’re not doing a good enough job.

Now, I’ve talked on the podcast plenty of times about the need to define what a good enough job is, right? Because if we don’t define that, we’re always going to feel like we’re missing the mark, because we don’t even know what it is that we’re aiming for in the first place.

I have a whole episode where I talk specifically about defining enough. I highly recommend you go back into the earlier episodes of the podcast, and you listen to that. I’ll make sure that that episode is linked in the show notes.

So, if you’re telling yourself that you’re not doing a good enough job, you’re going to look for all of the evidence that you’re not doing a good enough job. You’re going to look for that email from your boss, where they asked you to change these 10 things in the agreement that you drafted.

Or the time that the client was frustrated with you for telling them one thing and then you had to change your mind, or change what you told them, because you learned that it was inaccurate. And upon further research, you realized that one thing that you first said wasn’t true, and something else was accurate instead.

You’re going to look for evidence of that when you are telling yourself that you shouldn’t be asking this many questions. Every time you ask a question, it’s going to be like nails on a chalkboard for you because it’s coming up against that belief that you shouldn’t have as many questions as you have.

You’re going to highlight all the things that you don’t know, and make a molehill into a mountain every time you don’t know something, if you’re telling yourself that you should know more than you do. That someone at your level of experience, the number of years that you’ve practiced, they would know that. Which, if we’re being really honest, there is no rulebook on how much information you should know based on how long you’ve been practicing.

But we love to tell ourselves those sorts of things, and then our brain highlights any experience that matches, or is in conformity with, those negative beliefs that we keep repeating to ourselves.

So, when people come to me, I can quickly sense if they’re very good at telling themselves terrible things. If they’re very practiced in thinking these negative thoughts. I can also tell because I’ll start to inch into just exploring how some positive thoughts might be true instead. I know thoughts aren’t true, we’ve been over this before; we’re not going to get hung up on that.

It’s just a question that I ask people, how is that true, just to get their brain to search for evidence to support that belief. Okay? So, when I ask them to do that, when I asked them to find that evidence to support some of the positive beliefs that I might offer up to them, that I might suggest to them, a lot of times people really struggle with being able to answer me, they just come up blank.

I can quickly, quickly tell a couple things. Number one, they never spent any time telling themselves positive things about themselves. It’s so apparent. You can tell that it’s a skill they haven’t developed. It’s like trying to do a pull up when you’ve never done a pull up before. You’re not going to be able to do it.

I quickly see that they’re not actively engaged, day in and day out, telling themselves good things about themselves, thinking positive thoughts about themselves, and then searching for evidence to support those thoughts, to support those beliefs.

I can also quickly tell that they’re very uncomfortable talking about themselves. So, I always explore that first. I always ask them: What do you think about talking about yourself? What are the thoughts that come up for you when I suggest that you talk about yourself, or when I suggest that you highlight your positive qualities? When I suggest you celebrate some of the things that you’ve accomplished or some of the things that you’re proud of yourself for doing?

Very quickly, anyone who struggles with this line of thinking, they will quickly tell me that they don’t want to be arrogant. They don’t want to be boastful. They don’t want to be rude. They don’t want to be full of themselves. They definitely don’t want to think something that isn’t true about themselves.

They’re so worried if they say something positive and then it’s not true; which it would never be true or false, it would just be an opinion. But if they think something that other people wouldn’t agree with, that that would be a problem.

They really strive to be humble. That’s what they’ve been taught. That humility is ideal, that it’s admirable. And that celebrating yourself and highlighting the things about you that you think are valuable, that you think are good, that are positive, that that is something that’s bad and should be avoided.

So, they’re really not practiced at doing this exercise, at being able to recite things they like about themselves, or to be able to recite things that they’re proud of themselves for having done. We start there. I just open the door, and invite them to think about humility and arrogance as a spectrum.

People tend to be very far, at the extreme of humility. I actually like to call this “toxic humility.” I should do a whole episode specifically on toxic humility. So, toxic humility looks like ignoring all this proof, all of these situations, all this evidence of your favorable characteristics, of your positive qualities, that would support these positive beliefs that you could have about yourself.

That would make you feel confident, accomplished, proud, assured, sufficient. All those delicious feelings that we would love to feel, instead of all the negative ones that I listed earlier. So, I teach people that it doesn’t need to be black or white. That there’s a scale of humility and arrogance. And instead of being at the far end, the toxic end, of the humility spectrum, we can inch it along, sort of like the scales at a doctor’s office.

We can inch that weight along and end up somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. We don’t need to go all the way to arrogant and hubristic and full of ourselves. But we can be somewhere in the middle, where we’re being honest with ourselves and with others about the things that we’re good at, about our accomplishments, about what we do well. And we can boost our confidence, we can increase our confidence, and feel better about ourselves when we do that.

So, I have to teach people, first and foremost, that it’s safe to even think about yourself in this way. That it isn’t arrogant. That you can be confident and humble. All right? That you can be confident and not arrogant. Those things are possible.

Once we create safety around celebrating yourself and thinking of yourself in a positive fashion, because it isn’t arrogant to do that, then I give people an exercise. It’s the exercise that I’m going to give you for homework, okay? I did this once, and I absolutely loved my client’s reaction.

I give this homework assignment in a couple of different ways. I’m going to give you the more robust assignment, and you get to decide how you want to break it up, or how you want to go about doing that. So, a couple months ago, maybe it’s longer than that… It is longer than that, about a year ago… I started working with a client.

They came to me very much in the same exact state as the client that I worked with earlier today. So, very down on themselves, very low self-esteem, very low self-confidence, feeling very inadequate, and full of self-doubt, because of the way that they think about themselves and the thoughts that they practice, and then the thoughts that they go out and search for evidence to further support.

So, after we went through and created some safety around ‘it’s safe to talk about yourself, it’s safe to highlight your accomplishments, and the things that are positive qualities about yourself, the things that you’ve done well,’ I asked this client to make a list of 10 things that she likes about herself.

She about died. She was like, “Ten?!” I was like, “Oh, I’m not done with the homework assignment yet.” I was giggling to myself because I was so excited to say the next part, which I knew she was going to fall over when I said it. She couldn’t hardly wrap her head around coming up with a whole list of 10 things that she liked about herself.

My rule is, I don’t care how big or how small the thing is, you just have to come up with 10. However, that’s not the end of the homework assignment. So, the homework assignment was, “I want you to come up with a list of 10 things you like about yourself every single day, and you don’t get to repeat any of the things that you write down. So, 10 things on Monday, 10 things on Tuesday, 10 things on Wednesday, 10 things on Thursday, 10 things on Friday, and so on and so forth,” essentially until I told her to stop.

It was an exercise that was going to go on in perpetuity. She was beside herself. She was like, “How do you expect me to do that? That’s going to be impossible.” I’m like, “It’s not impossible. Again, I don’t care how big or small the things that you choose to list are, that doesn’t matter to me. I just want you to find anything that you like about yourself.”

Similarly, when working with the client that I was meeting with earlier today, she was also really struggling to articulate at how she’s going to be valuable to a law firm that she’s getting ready to start a new position with. I asked her, “Explain to me how you will be valuable.”

It went off to a little bit of a slow start in the beginning, but after we went through, and again created that safety for her to talk about herself, even if it’s just in her head, or even if it’s just with me… which is exactly what a coaching relationship is for. We create a safe space when we work together to have these types of conversations.

So, when we created that safety to do this work, I then started to probe. “Tell me how you’re valuable. Tell me how you’re going to be valuable.” We started to make a list, but I could tell that it was a struggle for her. She was having a hard time articulating the different ways that she would be valuable, even though she’s working at one of the best firms in the country, and isn’t leaving because she’s getting fired.

There’s stuff that’s going well there, but she’s not used to looking for it because she hasn’t built this competence muscle where she hypes herself up, where she’s her own hype person. So, that’s what I want my clients to become for themselves. I want them to internally validate, not rely on external validation.

The way that you do that is you have to tell yourself nice things about yourself, and then look for evidence to support those beliefs. So, we started with the idea that she’s valuable. We started to come up with a list, but for homework, I wanted her to continue to add to this list. I wanted her homework assignment to be a little bit more robust than the homework assignment that I gave to the other client, that I just explained to you.

So, in the first situation, the question was simply: What are the things that you like about yourself? List 10. Today, I did it a little bit different. I started with that; I wanted her to think about that, what do you like about yourself? So, that was the first question. The second question was, what are you good at? And the third question was, what have you accomplished?

There might be some overlap there. You might like things about yourself that you think you’re good at or that you’ve accomplished. But I love to ask questions in slightly different ways because I do think there’s nuance there. You discover and uncover different responses, different answers to each of those different questions.

You find things that you might not have found had you only asked it one way, versus three ways, versus a multitude of ways. So, I want you to do this, and I always make people actually write this out, it’s not okay to just think about this in your head.

I want you to create a space where you do this work. It can be in your cell phone; I love that. It can be in a journal, but I want you to label, whether it’s the top of the sheet, or the note in your phone, wherever you’re going to make this list at, I want you to label it.

We’re going to create. I want to give you five different questions to ask, okay? You can sit down and spend 30 minutes on it. Spend an hour on it, if you want to do that, and you’re really someone who likes to journal, and you want to devote a lot of time to this exercise. If that’s not you, though, don’t you worry. I’m going to give you an easier version.

I want you to create these five questions, these five headings, and you’re just going to add one thing to each list each day, so you’ve got to come up with five answers, every single day. You can do it. My other client did 10 a day, so you can do five.

So much easier it will be to answer five different questions, only one thing for each question, each day, rather than having to come up with 10 answers for the same question day after day after day. So, I’m taking it easy on you whether or not you feel like it.

Here are the five questions. These five questions, if you take the time to answer them, you will really build and bolster your confidence and feel so much better about yourself.

Okay, so the first question is: What do you like about yourself? Question number two: What are you good at? Question number three: What have you accomplished? Question number four: What’s valuable about you? Question number five: What are you proud of yourself for?

Those are the five questions: What do you like about yourself? What are you good at? What have you accomplished? What’s valuable about you? What are you proud of yourself for?

I want you, each day, to identify one thing for each of those questions. I want you to come up with one answer for each one. Now, for extra credit… I’m going with the whole homework theme here… the other thing that you can do is think about an example for each one of your answers. Okay?

The way that I described this to my client, it’s like you’re creating a little motion picture in your head. I want you to think… if you’ve ever seen the movie, Cinema Paradiso, that movie is all about a movie theater in Sicily. They’re constantly showing the film room, the projection room, where they get the reels of film, they load them into the projector, and then project the movie onto the big screen.

So, I want your head, the inside of your head, to look like that projection room. Okay? Where the film is going through and it’s displaying the motion picture onto the big screen. I want you to see the movies in your head. It’s just going to be a little highlight reel of these little examples.

For instance, if you said one of the things that you like about yourself is that you make excellent beef stew… that’s one of the things that I like about myself… I would quickly see the highlight reel in my head of me cooking it, of me making that item of meat, preparing it for people, of me tasting it, and loving it and enjoying it, knowing that it’s so good.

Obviously, that’s just my opinion that it’s good. But that is my opinion. I can quickly take myself to that place. I can feel that pride and that sense of accomplishment. I want you to feel these feelings in your body. When you create the little motion picture in your head, you’re going to have such an easier time of feeling those emotions and cultivating them for yourself.

If you decide one thing that you’re good at is, I am good at finding double spaces in Word documents, where they’re not supposed to be there. Again, I told you, it doesn’t have to be big or small, it doesn’t matter. You get to pick whatever size you want it to be. So, this is a tiny little thing that I’m actually really good at.

I think I can see the motion picture in my head where I learned how to do that, when I was working on the newspaper during undergrad, adding the Features section of the Michigan journal. I would spot those extra spaces where there weren’t supposed to be extra spaces. I did that all the time when I practiced law too, when I would be proofreading and editing a brief.

When I think about what I’ve accomplished, I’ve been running a successful business for several years now, I can think of all of the different milestones I’ve hit along the way. So, I’m proud of myself for running this business. Typically, I’m prouder of myself for doing things that scare the shit out of me than I am for achieving the “trophies.”

So, for me, I’m prouder for creating this podcast, or launching my mastermind, my group program, or doing webinar after webinar after webinar after webinar and reaching certain attendee numbers, as I’ve gone from my first webinar to my 40th webinar.

When I think about the accomplishments I’ve had in my business, I see the little highlight reel in my head of doing different webinars over the course of the past four years of starting the podcast, of what that was like getting it off the ground working with my production team.

When I think about pulling off live events… and I think I’ve mentioned this on the podcast before, but I’m a team of one. A lot of people think that I have a really big team; I do have a team at my live events. However, everything that goes into the planning of my live events, I do myself. So, that gives me a great sense of accomplishment and pride.

When you start to list these things off, you can see, even if you just pick one thing a day, and you can find some evidence to support it, it’s really going to change the way that you think about yourself.

All right, so you get to go through this list of questions: What do you like about yourself? What are you good at? What have you accomplished? What’s valuable about you? What are you proud of yourself for? You might think that it’s valuable that you give people your honest opinion. For me, I’m a problem solver. I think that’s something that’s super valuable about me. I’m also very resourceful.

Now, that’s just my self-concept, that’s how I think about myself. But I love that about me. I think that that’s very valuable. When I think about what I’m proud of myself for, that kind of ties into what you’ve accomplished. I find that there are certain things you can be proud of that you wouldn’t necessarily consider an accomplishment.

Maybe you’ve done something that’s really uncomfortable. Maybe you’ve overcome an obstacle that you wouldn’t necessarily consider an accomplishment. It’s just getting through a setback and you’re proud of yourself for that. All right?

Maybe you work out every day, or you work out most days, and you’re proud of yourself for doing that. Even though you haven’t hit the goal, whether it’s a personal record that you’re trying to set with weightlifting, or a certain number of pounds lost, or inches lost or whatever, if you haven’t accomplished that, but you’re on your path to get there. You might be proud of yourself for that.

You might be proud of yourself for volunteering to argue the motion at work. You’re proud of yourself for landing a client, because you’ve been working on business development and that’s been something that has had its set of challenges and learning curve associated with it. But you’ve stuck with it, and you’re proud of yourself for that.

Maybe you haven’t signed a client yet, but you’re not giving up. You continue to stick it out and take the action that you need to take, in order to create the results that you want to create.

So, I want you to go through this process and answer these questions, one answer for each question every day, until the point where you have this very robust set of answers for each of these five questions. All right? You’re going to have five separate lists.

I think the beautiful thing to do, you don’t have to do this all the time, especially if you put this in your phone and that’s where you store it, I highly encourage you though, to take some time and hand write your answers. Hand write the thoughts that you believe or that you want to begin to believe about yourself. When you do that, you slow yourself down, and you really drop into the belief because you give yourself the opportunity to have that motion picture play in your head. To think about all the examples and instances where you’ve demonstrated the quality that you’re thinking about.

When we’re typing, whether it’s typing on a keyboard or with our thumbs on our phones, we tend to type so fast that it’s hard to give that motion picture a chance to play. So, I want you, every once in a while, maybe once a week, maybe once a month, you decide on the frequency, I trust you to know what’s right for you.

But do this exercise; write down the thoughts that you want to think about yourself, write out the answers to these questions. And slowly but surely, as you write them out, you’re going to feel the feeling that you’re experiencing in your body change. You’re going to feel it shift. You’re going to feel better about yourself.

It’s such a cool exercise to do because you feel it happen in real time. It happens right in front of you. It happens, actually, right inside of you. It’s really powerful to be able to create that experience for yourself.

Now, the amazing thing about this, the more frequently you think positive things about yourself, the easier it is to think them. So, positivity begets more positivity. Confidence begets more confidence. Feeling better about yourself begets feeling even better about yourself, which is so fun. I want you to take some time, start making these lists in your phone or in a journal somewhere, and just start today; one answer to each question. All right?

Reach out to me. Let me know how this feels for you. Let me know what shifts come up for you. Let me know what epiphany or a-ha moments you have. I can’t wait to hear how it impacts your life. It’s really going to be a game changer.

All right, my friends. That’s what I’ve got for you this week. I hope you have a beautiful week, and I will talk to you in the next episode.

Thanks for listening to The Less Stressed Lawyer podcast. If you want more info about Olivia Vizachero or the show’s notes and resources from today’s episode, visit www.TheLessStressedLawyer.com.

You’re listening to The Less Stressed Lawyer podcast, Episode 71. Today, we’re talking all about the “fuck it” point. You ready? Let’s go.

Welcome to The Less Stressed Lawyer, the only podcast that teaches you how to manage your mind so you can live a life with less stress and far more fulfillment. If you’re a lawyer who’s over the overwhelm and tired of trying to hustle your way to happiness, you’re in the right place. Now, here’s your host, lawyer turned life coach Olivia Vizachero.

Well, hello there. How are you? Things are pretty good over here in my neck of the woods. I got back from Nashville. My time in Nashville, with my business coach, was amazing. I also got to teach a Breakout room of 12 other entrepreneurs, which was also amazing. I had such an incredible time doing that. I’ve wanted to do that for a really long time.

So, I was in Nashville for a week, and I made a ton of really exciting decisions about my own business and some things that I’m going to be doing in the future. I can’t wait to roll that out over the course of the next several months, and then the next several years. I really did some long-term planning for my business, which is so exciting.

I got to help other people do the same thing for their businesses, so my time in Nashville was super productive. And now, I’m back home in Detroit, getting ready for the live event of The Less Stressed Lawyer Mastermind in Montana. I absolutely can’t wait for that. I can’t wait to be back in Big Sky.

You guys, when I tell you it is stunningly beautiful, it is stunningly beautiful. I’ve never seen that many pine trees in my entire life. There’s just something really breathtaking about it. It looks exactly like A River Runs Through It. When I was there in June, obviously, all of the snow melts in the spring, so the water in the river is really, really high.

So, it comes up, there’s no riverbank, it’s just grass, and then water. It’s so cool. It looks exactly like fly fishing in A River Runs Through It. So, I can’t wait to be back there and see Big Sky in the summer, it’s going to be so marvelous. I’m so excited to be able to enjoy the outdoors. Some of our dinner events are outdoors, so it’s going to be pretty spectacular.

But I’m just getting all of that stuff together while I’m back in the mitten, and then I’ll be heading to Montana. So, that’s a little life update from me. I hope your summer is… I hate to say this, it’s kind of coming to a close pretty soon… but I hope it is coming to a good close.

I just saw something on Instagram today that was talking about how there are four months left in the year. And this is actually funny, I think I talked about this last August with the podcaster on the podcast. But a friend of mine always says that in August, the year is over. I always crack up when she says that because I never think that way.

But I saw this Instagram posts today that said there were four months left in the year. I started doing the math, and I’m like, that can’t be true. I feel like they were definitely rounding to four because we’ve still got most of August, and then September, October, November, and December. But if you’re rounding, or you’re like my friend Cheri, she always says the year is over in August.

So, if you’re feeling that way, I really want you to check in with yourself and ask yourself, are you creating what you wanted to create this year? Are you accomplishing what you wanted to accomplish this year? This episode today, this topic that I want to talk to you about…

Which, spoiler alert! If you listen to this in the car with your kiddos, and you don’t like the swearing, this is not the episode to have them tuned into. Okay? So, I’ve given everyone advanced warning there. Go listen to any of my other episodes, I tend to keep it pretty clean on the podcast.

I try and do that so the little ears can also be present, and maybe pick up a thing or two while you’re listening to this content. Anyways, if you tend to listen to it with little ears round, this is probably not the episode for that.

But check in with yourself. How are you making progress? Are you making progress? Do you feel like you’ve stalled? Do you feel stuck? What’s going on? And if you don’t like the answer that you come up with to that question, the chances are you’re not following through. You’re not doing what you said you were going to do. You’re not implementing the plan that you maybe made earlier in the year.

Or maybe you didn’t even make a plan, you’re just winging it. But if you’re not following through and doing what you said you’re going to do, this episode is really going to help shift you to become the person that does what they say they’re going to do.

So, today specifically, I want to introduce you to a concept that I teach to my clients. I call it the “fuck it” point. I thought about saying the “eff it” point, but I just hate doing that. I prefer the word fuck, so we’re just going to use it a lot today. If you don’t like swearing, I’m very sorry, if you feel offended. It’s just your thoughts about my swearing that make you feel offended, not the words I’m using. Getting very meta on the coaching today.

Anyways, I want to teach you about the “fuck it” point. This is a concept that I teach to my clients. Because when we work together, I get extremely granular and we do that because there’s so much learning going on, when we get extremely granular… I’m using my hands right now, as I say this to you, as I speak into the microphone.

But I basically want to take tweezers to the problems that you face, and we’ve got to like pick them apart bit by bit, and untangle them to really understand what’s going on, on a very microscopic level. When we do that, solving the problems that we’re facing becomes so much easier. Okay?

So, I think people really overcomplicate the problems that they face when they’re not following through, when they’re not honoring the decisions that they’ve made, and when they’re not sticking to their plan and implementing it. And people love to indulge in ‘I don’t know’ thinking here.

They’re like, “I don’t know why I don’t follow through. I don’t know why I don’t stick to my plan. I don’t know why I don’t do the things that I tell myself that I’m going to do.” But if you get really granular and you zoom in on the exact point in time where it comes to you having a decision to follow through or not follow through, then we can gain so much awareness.

And it becomes easier to shift how we respond in this specific, exact moment, to start to make a different decision and be able to actually be consistent and follow through.

So, first things first, you have to make a decision in the first place to do a thing. All right? The next episode on the podcast will be all about entering your billable time, but let’s use that as one of the examples today. So, let’s say you work in a job where you have to enter your billable time.

Now, if you don’t make a decision about when you do this, you’re always going to be deciding in real time, in the moment and that’s going to lead to a disaster, a complete clusterfuck. Because in the moment you’re using your primitive brain, and the primitive brain is always going to seek instant gratification, avoid temporary discomfort, and conserve energy.

So, it’s always going to tell you to enter your time later, that you don’t need to do it right now, that you can do it tomorrow or later in the day, or at the end of the month or whatever. It’s just going to tell you not to do it right now. So, you can’t be using the primitive part of your brain for this exercise, you really need to make a decision ahead of time about what you’re going to do.

In this example, you need to make the decision ahead of time about when you’re going to enter your time. Now, I suggest it be one of two things. Either you enter your time at the end of each day, or you enter it after you complete each task, so contemporaneously throughout the day as you’re working.

Now, I’ll start with the first example. If you decided to enter your time every single day, okay, that means before you rest your head on the pillow at night and you fall asleep, your time would need to be in. Okay? You could also do this so midnight is the cut off, or whatever, if you want to do that. But just whenever your day ends, is when you would need to have your time entered by.

So, before you rest your head on your pillow and close your eyes and tuck yourself in, your time would need to be in. In this example, you’ve made the first decision, which is the frequency and the point at which you’ll do this. Every day before you go to bed. And of course, you can do it at the end of your workday. I just mean that it has to literally be done before you go to bed each day; that’s the last possible moment. Okay?

At that moment, you’ve already made this decision, the first decision of when to enter your time. And now, you’re faced with a new decision. It’s your secondary decision, and it’s whether or not you’re going to stick to the first decision. So, am I going to follow through? Am I going to do what I said I was going to do?

With the second decision that you’re being faced with, you reach this point where you get to choose one of two things. You can either do it and honor your word to yourself and follow through. Or you can say fuck it, and do it later, blow it off, go to bed, ignore the original decision.

You make it a tomorrow you problem, or future you problem, or first day of the month or last day of the month you problem. But you specifically… this is the internal dialogue that’s actually going on in your head. It might be conscious, but it might also be subconscious. You might not use these exact words, but I want to give you this language so you can watch yourself as you make the first decision to do something.

And then, you reach the second decision, which is to follow through with what you decided. You have this internal conflict going on in your head, do I follow through or do I not? Do I follow through or do I say fuck it and break my promise to myself? It’s at this moment, at the fuck it point, which is what I call it, that you want to resist the urge to say fuck it, and you want to follow through. Okay?

So, you want to know that that’s what the urge is going to be for you to do, is to say fuck it, and not honor your original decision. You’ve got to interrupt yourself in that moment and choose to commit and follow the original decision that you made and follow through.

Now, part of that, I’ve talked about this a ton on the podcast, is going to require you to feel certain feelings. So, what I mean by this is, if you have made the decision ahead of time to put your time in every single day, then at 12:06am, when you’re climbing into bed… Maybe you don’t go to bed that late, maybe it’s 10pm.

But whatever time it is that you go to bed, and you haven’t done it yet, you should be lying in bed, thinking, “Oh, I didn’t enter my time. I forgot to do that. I said I was going to do that. I made the decision to do that, and I haven’t done it yet.”

You’re going to have this moment where you can just choose to go to bed, or you can flip back the covers, get out of bed… Maybe you have an app on your phone, so you don’t even have to get out of bed. But however it is that you enter your time… Maybe you have to go grab your laptop, go to your work desktop in your office at home, whatever the case may be, but you’ve got to put in your time.

And when you resist the urge to say fuck it, you actually go do those things. You might have to feel inconvenienced. You might have to feel annoyed because you’re getting out of bed, out of your comfy spot. You’re having to exert energy, embrace temporary discomfort, and not seek that instant pleasure that you’re enjoying.

You have to do all of those things in order to work through and move through the fuck it point without quitting on yourself. Without failing to honor your original decision and commitment, okay? Now, if you make the different decision to enter your time contemporaneously throughout the day, at the end of every task, you’re going to have a lot more fuck it points throughout the day, right?

So, every time you finish doing something, you’re going to have that opportunity to say fuck it, or resist the urge to say fuck it, and follow through, regardless of how it feels.

If you’re thinking about this, in practice, what would this look like? You make the decision to enter your time after you complete every task. You finish typing an email, and you’re supposed to enter your time right then and there for that email. But instead of honoring that, you have a phone call that’s supposed to start in 30 seconds.

Let’s say it’s 1:29, and you have a phone call that’s going to start at 1:30. Do you say fuck it and just start the next call without entering your time? Or do you honor the previous commitment that you made to enter your time contemporaneously, and put in that time entry right then and there, and then start the call?

Do you complete the task, and when you’re so worked up and overwhelmed and trying to rush to get through as much of your to-do list as possible, at the end of the task do you say fuck it, and you just move right on to the next thing before entering your time?

Or do you resist the urge to say fuck it and you calm yourself down, ground yourself, you slow yourself down, and you allow yourself to feel pressured and rushed, you let that discomfort be there, and you enter your time regardless? You honor your original decision, regardless?

I see this come up all the time with decisions about when to get back to people, too. So, think about how you communicate with people. Maybe you’ve listened to my podcast episode about defining enough, and you’ve decided that responsive enough to you means getting back to people within 24 hours. I’m not saying that’s the right rule, you get to decide on whatever feels right for you.

But let’s say that’s the rule that you’ve instituted. So, that’s the initial decision. Decision number one is, “I respond to everyone within 24 hours.” And then, when it comes time to actually implement that decision, it’ll be you on a Tuesday. You’ve got emails from Monday that you need to respond to, before you end work for the day.

It’ll be five o’clock, or maybe it’s six, and you’re kind of tired. It’s been a long day, and you’ve got a choice. You reach the fuck it point, for this decision, for the communication within 24 hours decision. And you have the choice to close your laptop and not send any more emails, and go sit on the sofa, lounge, go get dinner, grab a drink, whatever.

Maybe just pick up your phone and start scrolling on Instagram, or whatever other social media platform you prefer. Or you can hunker down, not say fuck it, resist that urge, and send the emails. Communicate within the time that you previously promised yourself you would communicate with your clients in.

Or it looks like deciding at the beginning of the day, or the day before, “Hey, tomorrow, I’m going to call this person, this person, and this person. I’m going to make these three calls. I’m going to reach out to these three clients, to touch base with them.” And you get to the end of the day, or close to the end of the day, and you haven’t made those three calls yet.

So, you’ve reached the fuck it point for that original decision. What will you do? Will you give in to the urge to say fuck it, or will you resist it? I want you to take a second and think about all the ways that you do this at work.

I also see this come up a ton for people with big projects. Let’s say you’ve got a motion that has been hanging over your head for a while, and you keep pushing it off because you keep handling the shorter, bite-sized tasks first. You’re always going to have a ton of shorter, bite-sized tasks available to you. The more you knock them off the to-do list, the more they keep coming back; the more new ones arise.

So, it’s like Whack-a-Mole; it never ends. If you keep waiting to be through all of the small stuff, before you work on the big stuff, you’re never going to work on the big stuff. And if you do this… You’re probably nodding along as you’re listening to this. “How does she know this?” This is super common. People do this all the time.

They’ll make the plan. They’ll make the original decision, decision number one, “Hey, I’m going to start working on this big project tomorrow.” Now, I recommend not calling it a big project. Because when you call it a big project, you just increase your resistance to starting it.

But when you’re telling yourself, “I’m going to start on this tomorrow,” and then tomorrow comes, now you’ve reached the point again; you’ve reached the fuck it point. Do I actually follow through and get started on this? Or do I say fuck it, and kick the can down the road for another day or another week?

And that’s how weeks go by, when you’re like, “I can’t believe I haven’t worked on that yet. I can’t believe I haven’t started on that yet. I can’t believe I haven’t made any progress.” It’s because you keep reaching the fuck it point. And then, you indulge in saying fuck it rather than allowing that discomfort to be there, resisting the urge to say that, and following through.

Now, I think, also for this, it’s very helpful if you commit to what exactly you’re going to do on the “big” project. So, how will you start? What will that look like? The more specific you can get, and the more you can break it down to those smaller, incremental tasks, you’re going to have a much easier time getting started.

One of the things that I teach people all the time is, can you start for five minutes? Can you start for 30 seconds on something? Just getting that initial resistance out of the way, by allowing yourself to start for a very short period of time, allows you to get into the work and then you catch your rhythm. Then you catch the flow, and you can continue to work with much less resistance. You’ve just got to start.

But in order to start, you have to resist the urge to say fuck it when you reach the fuck it point. So, how does this show up for you at work? What fuck it points are you reaching? And what decisions are you making for that second decision? Are you saying fuck it and canceling on your commitment to yourself? Or are you resisting the urge to say fuck it?

And the way that you resist the urge is that you embrace the discomfort that comes from doing the thing that you said you would do. You’ve got to gag-and-go, as I like to say, through that discomfort, feel it on purpose, and take the action that you already, previously, decided, in decision number one, to take.

Now, as you’re coming up with the different ways that you do this at work, you know I love to talk about all things personal and professional, because you’ve got one whole life, work is just a part of it. So, I also want you to give some thought to where you do this in your personal life. All right?

I’ve talked about this on the podcast before. One of the decisions that I’ve made ahead of time is that I plug my cell phone in every single night before I go to bed. And every single night, actually I shouldn’t say every single night; a lot of nights…

I reach the fuck it point, where I’m in bed, I was on my phone, and I’m ready to go to bed. I don’t want to lean over to grab the cord and plug it in. I really just want to say fuck it; I’ll deal with having a phone that’s not charged tomorrow. That’s tomorrow Olivia’s problem.

But I resist the urge, I allow my discomfort, which is just like mild annoyance and inconvenienced, and I lean over, maybe I flip back the covers, I grabbed the cord, and I plugged my phone in. That’s one small way that this happens.

This also happens for people when it comes to working out or sticking to a certain food plan if you’re trying to reach certain health goals or weight goals. Right? Let’s say you decide to work out three times a week. Now, I don’t love that as the initial decision, the decision made ahead of time, because it’s like, “Well, what days? Is it Monday, Wednesday, Friday? Is it Friday, Saturday, Sunday?”

I like to decide more clearly than that. So, you’re not using that primitive brain each day, where you’re like, “Is today the day that I’m going to work out? Or is it tomorrow,” and kicking the can down the road? So, you want to have a better first decision than that.

Now, let’s say, you say, “I’m going to work out Monday, Wednesday and Friday.” That means, before you rest your head on the pillow and close your eyes to go to sleep, you need to have gotten a workout in that day. Or maybe your decision is you want to work out every day, you want to move your body every day. I would get clear on what does that look like.

How will you work out, so you’re not spending time making that decision. You’ve already made it once, to make it really easy for yourself, easier to implement. But then, each day it comes time to do the workout… I’ve talked about this before. I have an episode all about dread.

You’re not going to feel like doing it. You’re not going to feel like going for a walk. You’re not going to feel like lifting weights. You’re not going to feel like doing whatever it is that you do for exercise. There’s going to be a million other things that are more comfortable and more enjoyable and more gratifying than exerting the energy and effort to work out.

And you’re going to reach that fuck it point, that second decision. Am I going to do what I said I was going to do? Or am I going to say fuck it and quit on myself and go grab the nacho cheese Doritos and a beer, or a glass of wine, and watch TV, or scroll on YouTube or scroll on Tik Tok or Instagram or whatever? Am I going to do that instead? Am I going to call one of my friends and gossip and complain instead of doing the thing that I said I was going to do?

Maybe you decide what you’re going to eat each day, and when it comes time to either prepare that meal or order that meal or go get that meal, however it is that you get your food, you say fuck it. Instead, you reach that point of, am I going to honor the commitment? Am I going to stick to my plan? Or am I going to go off plan and do something completely different that doesn’t support my goals?

In these moments, again, you’ve just got to make the decision, the second decision. Do I say fuck it? Or do I follow through? And if you can pinpoint this specific point in time, you’re going to have so much more success allowing the discomfort.

Because you can ask yourself, at this critical fuck it point, what are the feelings right now, if I make the decision to follow through, that I’m going to be forced to feel? And you can list them. You want to make sure you enumerate them and get very clear on what those specific flavors of discomfort are.

Because by identifying them, you make it easier to embrace them. You’re like, “Oh, I feel annoyed. This is what annoyed feels like when I do this thing that I said I was going to do, when it comes time to do it. Oh, I have to feel deprived. I want to eat a cheeseburger for lunch, but I planned to eat a salad. So, I’ve got to feel deprived in this very moment. That’s the feeling, at the fuck it point, that I’m going to have to embrace.”

For a lot of people, they have to embrace feeling tired. Think if you’ve made a decision, “I want to do one load of laundry a day. I do laundry on Thursday nights,” whatever your decision made ahead of time is. Then it comes time to do that activity that you plan to do, and you’re like, “I’m so tired. I couldn’t possibly.”

It is amazing how much stuff you can accomplish tired. Okay? I’m not telling you to work yourself into the ground and hurt yourself, to do any harm long term. But a lot of people are using tired as an excuse to not do things. You can do a lot of shit tired. Okay?

So, in this moment, when it comes time to go throw a load of laundry in, you reach the fuck it point where you can say to yourself, “I’m going to do the thing and follow through, even though I’m tired.” Or you say, “Fuck it, I’ll worry about that tomorrow. I don’t need clean clothes anyways.”

Maybe, if you work from home, that feels very true and relatable to you. But it’s not about whether you have clean clothes. I mean, you want clean clothes, I get that. But that’s not what this is about. It’s about becoming someone who does what they say they’re going to do, regardless of the results that you’re creating on the back end of the decision.

Clean clothes are great. Weight loss is great if that’s what you’re working towards. Being healthy and exercising for your health is great. But more than the result that comes from any of this, I want you to become the person who describes themselves as someone that follows through with doing what they say they’re going to do.

There is an unshakable confidence that comes from being a person who follows through. The trust that you have with yourself. The pride you have with yourself. The sense of accomplishment that you feel, when you do what you say you’re going to do, is immeasurable, and there’s truly no other way to match it.

So, I want you to give that gift to yourself. And the only way to create it, is to come up and meet that fuck it point, then resist the urge to say fuck it and make it a later you, future you problem. Okay? So, take this concept and bring it into your own life.

Use this terminology to describe that point where you’re making that secondary decision, the decision to follow through with your original decision, and then when you name it, you’re like, “I’m at the fuck it point. Now I’ve got a choice to make, do I say fuck it? Or do I follow through?”

Choose to follow through, gag-and-go, feel the feelings, feel the discomfort, and move forward in spite of it. Resist the urge to kick the can down the road and to quit on yourself. Honor your original decision. You’re going to be so proud of yourself for doing this. Okay?

And when you pinpoint this point in time, the fuck it point, it makes it so much easier to do all of that.

Alright, that’s what I have for you this week, my friends. I was so excited to introduce you to this concept. Hopefully, you’re like me, and you don’t mind a little cursing. If you did, I’m sorry. I used to, when I was a kid, whenever my parents would swear, I would always put my hands over my ears and I would say, “I have ears.”

So, if you’re like that, and you have ears and you didn’t love it, I love you and I trust that you will be okay. And that you can manage your mind, with the tools I’ve given you throughout this podcast, to choose a thought that serves you. And to be able to overcome whatever offense you might be feeling, in order to tune into next week’s episode. All right? It’s going to be a good one. I can’t wait to dive into that topic.

In the meantime, I hope you have a beautiful week. I’ll talk to you all in the next episode.

Thanks for listening to The Less Stressed Lawyer podcast. If you want more info about Olivia Vizachero or the show’s notes and resources from today’s episode, visit www.TheLessStressedLawyer.com.

You’re listening to The Less Stressed Lawyer podcast, Episode 70. Today, we’re talking all about other oriented perfectionism. You ready? Let’s go.

Welcome to The Less Stressed Lawyer, the only podcast that teaches you how to manage your mind so you can live a life with less stress and far more fulfillment. If you’re a lawyer who’s over the overwhelm and tired of trying to hustle your way to happiness, you’re in the right place. Now, here’s your host, lawyer turned life coach, Olivia Vizachero.

Hey, you guys. How’s it going? I am so jazzed to talk about this topic. I have had a lot of personal breakthroughs. In this area of my life recently, I’ve been doing so much work on this issue. it’s been so transformative for me and in my relationships really changing the way that I interact with people and how I get along with the people in my life, the people that I care about.

because it’s been so transformative for me, and it’s made such an impact on the day to day enjoyment of my life and the people in my life. I’m really excited to talk about this topic, introduce you to it, and share with you what I’ve learned. So we’re talking today about other oriented perfectionism.

If you’re a perfectionist towards yourself, and if you’re new to the podcast, I have several episodes on this topic. They’re episodes 24 through 26. I’ll make sure they’re linked in the show notes. There’s an episode on perfectionism, an episode on worth dysmorphia, which is a concept that I coined where you underestimate your self-worth, or you have a distorted view of your self-worth.

then I have an episode on overcoming perfectionism. So I have covered this topic before. But all three of those episodes really focus on how your perfectionism is directed at yourself or weaponized against yourself.

today, I want to flip that, and I want to talk about other oriented perfectionism. If you’re a perfectionist towards yourself, you’re almost certainly an other oriented perfectionist as well. You almost certainly struggle with other oriented perfectionism, which is perfectionism that’s oriented or aka directed at other people.

So you’re expecting them to be perfect instead of expecting yourself to be perfect. the thing that I find so fascinating about other oriented perfectionism is how subtle it is, which is why addressing it and creating awareness around this topic is so powerful. Because people don’t even realize that they’re doing it most of the time.

Since I started exploring this in my own life and I’ve been having all of these aha’s and breakthroughs, seeing how I’m indulging or engaging in other oriented perfectionism, I see it so ubiquitously with my clients. It comes up for them all the time. I’m seeing it in just every area of their lives. So I was so excited to talk about this because since it’s so prolific and prominent, it’s going to be so transformative for you to shift the way that you think about this and to really dial down your oriented perfectionism.

Now, people don’t even realize they’re doing this, like I said a moment ago. You’re really unaware that this is even a thing that you’re struggling with. it’s because basically no one would articulate that they expect another person to be perfect. You’re not going to say that or even think that to yourself in your own head.

Because if you thought that thought you’d quickly identify it as being unrealistic. You’re like oh, of course no one’s going to be perfect. I don’t expect them to be perfect. So we don’t articulate it in that way using those words.

We simply receive behavior or actions that we don’t like. they’re different from the expectation that we have for people. we get upset when people do certain things that don’t align with our expectations. So it’s having that expectation, and then it contrasting with reality, with our lived experience. But it’s that expectation that we basically formed based on nothing that is the expectation of perfect, that people should behave a certain way.

Now, we make it a problem when people don’t conform with our expectations, when they don’t meet our expectations. As if something’s gone wrong when we don’t like how a person behaves, what they do, what they say, how they act, the way that they show up.

what I’ve started to realize one of the concepts that I teach my clients is that life is 50/50. 50% good, 50% not so good. Now the facts that we experience in and of themselves, they’re neutral. But the human experience is such that you will likely want to think that 50% of what you experience is good. that 50% of what you experience is not so good. that’s just normal. That’s a pretty common way for it to split.

this is, of course, just your opinion, which is in your control, but this is generally how it breaks down. Okay. I like to apply this thinking on that macro level that life is like this and on a micro level. So rather than just thinking 50% good and 50% bad, I like to think that life will be 50% boring and 50% not boring, or 50% fun and 50% not fun.

I like to apply this to myself, that I will be 50% amazing and then 50% not so amazing. That I’ll have my moments too. Giving myself permission to be less than perfect. I also think it’s about entrepreneurship. 50% of owning a business is incredible, and 50% is not so incredible. 50% is easy and 50% is not easy. 50% is fun, and 50% is not fun.

So I’ve started to apply this to people as well. I’m going to like 50% of what they do, and 50% of what they do I won’t like. I will like 50% of their qualities and 50% of their qualities I won’t enjoy. that doesn’t mean that anything’s gone wrong. It just sets my expectations such that when people behave in a way that I don’t prefer, I don’t make it a problem. I’m just like oh, of course. This is the 50% that I’m not going to love. this is subjective, right?

What I like about someone might be something that someone else doesn’t like about them. vice versa. What I don’t like might be someone else’s favorite quality about someone. So these are just our own subjective individual preferences, and we get to have them. There’s nothing wrong with our preferences. But you want to realize and set the expectation that people aren’t going to 100% meet your preferences. They’re not going to perfectly and neatly fit within that box that you create.

I recently had a conversation with my romantic partner. this was such a breakthrough for me, like an epiphany. He was helping me move. one of the things in our relationship that I’ve been working on is for us to always speak to each other respectfully. that’s something I borrowed from a friend of mine, her name is Maggie Reyes. She’s a brilliant marriage coach. That’s something that she teaches her clients.

of course, I can’t control him and how he speaks to me and what he does, I can just control myself and how I speak to him. But I can also have boundaries in how I respond. If I perceive that he’s speaking to me in a way that’s disrespectful, I can choose to end the conversation until he comes in a way that I consider respectful.

So I was getting really frustrated. He was helping me move and the tension was growing throughout the day. We were starting to get on each other’s nerves. I was starting to get frustrated and annoyed. I just felt like the conflict and tension was building as the day went on. I was able to calm myself down rather than being reactive and nasty. But I very calmly said to him, I was like hey babe, sometimes you’re just really hard to get along with.

he took a deep breath. the reason that I wanted to articulate it was I wanted to communicate like where I was at in that moment, how I was feeling, what my thought process was, just where I was at so things didn’t continue to escalate. as I communicated that he just kind of smirked at me. he took a deep breath. He was really calm. he goes, “Babe, do you think that you’re not hard to get along with sometimes?”

I swear it hit me like a ton of bricks. It completely caught me off guard. if I’m being really honest, and I’m not ashamed to admit this to you, I want to be fully transparent but it’s kind of comical to me. I actually was stunned. It surprised me. I was like huh actually, I think that I am easy to get along with like all the time. I admitted that to him.

he was like, “Yeah, no you’re not. That’s not how I see you. That’s not how I feel. I think sometimes you’re hard to get along with too.” it was a complete shock and surprise to me. Maybe that seems arrogant or naive or short sighted or whatever. But because I’m familiar with myself and I know how I am and I like how I am, I just assumed that everyone else likes how I am too. That I fit within their expectations of me and that there’s no friction there. that I’m just a complete goddamn delight is really how I see myself.

Which is great. It makes me feel very confident and pause have about myself, but it also takes me out of awareness that there may be things about me that people don’t enjoy. in this conversation with my partner, I realized oh my goodness, this is me being an other oriented perfectionist where I expect him to behave a certain way that always aligns with my preferences. For me to find him 100% agreeable or 100% easy to get along with.

when I realized that that’s actually unrealistic, because sometimes the way I want him to be is different than how he prefers to be. So there’s going to be that natural tension and conflict there. if I change my expectation to be more in line with this 50/50 concept that sometimes I’m going to love what he does, and sometimes I’m not going to. That nothing’s gone wrong. That isn’t a problem for me to solve. Everything’s okay. That’s just how relationships work.

that there are going to be things about me that he likes and things about me that he doesn’t like. That we’re all looking for these unique combinations of what are the things that I prefer in someone that allow me to tolerate the things that I don’t prefer with the assumption that there are always going to be things that I don’t prefer about someone. That that’s just part of the territory of being in relationship with another person.

when you start to look at all of your relationships, and you become aware am I expecting to like 100% of how someone behaves? Or am I expecting to not like some of the ways in which they behave? If you’re expecting to like 100% of how people behave, you’re going to be disappointed and frustrated a lot of the time because people will invariably not meet your expectations.

If you often find yourself thinking that the people around you are doing things wrong, they’re not doing things the right way, or the way that things should be done. You’re engaging in other oriented perfectionism. You think there’s one right way to do something, the perfect way to do something, the best way to do something. Best is really interchangeable and synonymous with perfect.

we often use it instead of perfect because it seems more realistic, but it’s not. It’s the same thing. It’s just as ambiguous, just as unclear, and just as unattainable. if you constantly find yourself saying they did it the wrong way. There’s a right way to do it. There’s a best way to do it. There’s a better way to do it. they didn’t do it that way.

I’m going to take issue with the way that they’re behaving, with the way that they’re acting because they didn’t do it the way that I think it should have been done. This is other oriented perfectionism. it’s this other oriented perfectionism that’s causing all of your negative emotion when people behave the way that they behave.

the truth of the matter is there’s no right way to be. There’s no right way to do things. There are different ways to do things. everyone gets to have an opinion as to whether their way is the right way or the best way or the wrong way, but there is no objective standard. So you might think it’s the right way, and someone else might think your way is the wrong way and vice versa. There are just different ways.

if you start to open yourself up to the idea that there’s no one right way to be, you can start to see where you expect people to be a certain way and how that expectation is actually what causes your frustration. I started to see all the frustration that I create for myself when I expect people to act a certain way, the “right way” in my opinion.

I realized that this is exactly what other oriented perfectionism looks like in practice. In my moving example, for instance, it’s like there’s one right way to help someone move. if it’s not that way, it’s the wrong way. if I opened my expectations up to say there’s a lot of different ways to help people move. there’s a lot of different ways you can behave when you’re helping someone move. there’s a lot of different moods people get to have as they’re helping someone move, it helps me dial down my own disappointment and frustration when reality doesn’t match what I was expecting.

Think about asking your partner to help you do chores around the house. If you’re engaging in other oriented perfectionism, you’re often going to be frustrated with the way that they perform those duties or those tasks. There’s one “right” way to wash the dishwasher. That’s other oriented perfectionism if you’re putting that on someone. If there’s one right way to do laundry, if there’s one right way to put your kids to bed at night to do the evening routine, if there’s one right way to celebrate the holidays.

That’s been me with my parents. I’ve talked about that on the podcast before where I expect them to be a certain way. To like the holidays and want them to celebrate exactly the way that I want to celebrate them. So this is other oriented perfectionism. That there’s one right way to be. I upset myself when people don’t comply or match my expectation.

Think about how this shows up in work as well, especially when it comes to delegating. If you delegate a brief to someone, and you get it back, and they didn’t write it the way that you would write it. There are a lot of ways to write an argument, to structure a brief, to make your case to the court.

if you’re focused on it not being done the one right way that you think it should be done, you’re going to exhaust yourself and really expend so much effort getting it to match the way that you think it should be. you’re going to be so frustrated in the process thinking that the person that you’re supervising that you delegated to didn’t do it the right way.

Maybe someone phrased an email differently than you would phrase it. If you’re in indulging or engaging in other oriented perfectionism, you’re going to feel embarrassed by what they said in the email because you’re thinking they should have approached it differently than they did. That they should have phrased differently, they should have worded it differently.

Another way this comes up, do you ever get upset with someone and tell yourself or say to them it’s not what you did, but how you did it. It’s not what you said, but how you said it. This is other oriented perfectionism. You think there’s a perfect way or a best way for them to phrase something, and they didn’t match your expectation, your definition of “right” and then you take issue with it. You make them wrong.

That happens for people all the time, and it causes so much unnecessary conflict. If you find yourself doing this, just notice that you’re expecting someone to be perfect. that, of course, they’re not perfect. So they get to say things however they want to say things. if you find it disrespectful, you get to decide what you do with that. That’s your opinion, and you’re welcome to have it. But what if you just let it be okay that they said it the way that they did and not take issue with how they phrased it, with how they worded it.

Think about when you get someone’s work product, and you’re reviewing it, and there are mistakes there. If you get frustrated by this, I want you to check in with yourself. What are you expecting? Are you expecting their work product to be perfect?

You typically wouldn’t articulate that that’s what you’re expecting. That that’s the standard. But if you find yourself frustrated with having to correct things or make changes, I want you to check in with yourself here. What is your expectation? How many mistakes is your team member allowed to make? What’s good enough versus perfect?

How many mistakes are you expecting them to make? What if you changed your expectation and you expected there to be things that you need to correct in their work product if that was just part of the program? What does them getting it wrong look like? Are you expecting this to happen? Or are you unconsciously or subconsciously expecting perfection? How often are they allowed to get it wrong? How often do you expect them to get it wrong?

This is what you want to start to consider because my guess is you haven’t thought through this. because you haven’t thought through this, you’re expecting flawlessness, you’re expecting perfectionism even if you wouldn’t articulate it that way.

Think about this back at home also, kind of reverting back to that for a second. Think about your kids. What are you expecting from them? Are you expecting them to behave 100% of the time? Are you expecting them to follow rules 100% of the time? Does that cause you immense frustration when they don’t follow your rules 100% of the time or when they misbehave some of the time? Same thing with your partner. What are you expecting? Are you expecting them to fall into your preferences 100%?

A really simple example of this just take driving. Are you expecting other drivers to be perfect? Or are you expecting them to be flawed humans just like the rest of us? If you were expecting them to be flawed instead of expecting them to be perfect would you be a lot less upset when someone doesn’t use a blinker when they get over and switch lanes, or when someone cuts you off, or when someone takes too long to start moving after the light turns green?

If you’re fast honker, if you’re quick to hit your horn, you’re probably expecting other people to be perfect when they’re driving and to go as soon as the light turns green, to not waste a single second. What would it look like for you to be way more understanding of other people’s imperfections, of other people’s “flaws”? Again, flaws are just subjective. What someone perceives to be a flaw might be what someone else perceives to be an asset or a positive attribute and quality.

I really want you to take some time this week and start to search for the ways that you indulge in other oriented perfectionism, okay? If you think people aren’t behaving correctly and you think they should be doing something different than they are, you are likely indulging in other oriented perfectionism. Okay.

I’ve talked about this before as well using the term manuals. We typically have instruction manuals for people. we get frustrated when people don’t meet the expectations that we have for them in those instruction manuals that pretty much just exist in our head. We, of course, haven’t taken the time to write them down anywhere or share them with people. But we have these manuals for the people in our lives.

the manuals are really based off or fueled by this other oriented perfectionism. That there’s one right way to be. We know what that right way is. if people don’t adhere to our standard of right then they’re wrong. They’re just de facto incorrect.

But what if there’s no best way to be, no right way to be, no perfect way to be? How does that revelation change the way that you show up and experience your relationships? How does it change the way that you interact with the people in your life? I bet it’s going to make you so much more tolerant, so much more accepting, so much more understanding of the people that you interact with.

You’re going to be able to enjoy the parts of them that you enjoy, and not take issue with the parts of them that you don’t enjoy. You’re just going to come to expect that there’s going to be that 50% that you don’t love, and that that’s okay. really all we’re ever doing is searching for the 50/50 split in people that were willing to accept, okay.

You’re looking for the 50% good that you value and you appreciate that makes whatever their 50% combination is of the things that you don’t like tolerable. everyone’s 50/50 split preferences are going to be different. Just like I’ve talked about this before on the podcast, there’s a 50/50 split with being an employee and a 50/50 split with being an entrepreneur.

I prefer the 50/50 split of being an entrepreneur over the 50/50 split of being an employee. That doesn’t mean that being an entrepreneur is better. It just means that it is my preference to choose that 50/50 versus a different 50/50. A lot of people prefer the 50/50 of being an employee. That’s totally fine. Their choice isn’t right or wrong. Neither is mine.

So with the people we have in our lives, it’s the exact same thing. There’s a 50/50 split of the things that we like and the things that we won’t like. that doesn’t mean that there’s a problem. Nothing has gone wrong. Just plan to expect that from people. it’s all about finding the 50/50 split that you prefer, and that you’re willing to accept in order to get the parts that you love. then to take the parts that you don’t love with a grain of salt.

All right, this is going to transform your relationships and make it so much less tense, so much more enjoyable. You’re really going to be able to appreciate people in such a different way. I promise. It’s so revolutionary. I just can’t say enough about it. It’s completely changed my life as I’ve started to have these realizations and epiphanies. I hope the same is true for you.

I would love to hear about how this concept opens your eyes and changes your life improves your relationships. DM me on social media. I’m on Instagram and LinkedIn. Or write a review for the podcast and tell me how this transforms the way you interact with your loved ones, with the people in your life at work, outside of work, all that good stuff.

Okay. That’s what I’ve got for you this week, my friends. I can’t wait for you to start applying this to overcome your other oriented perfectionism. I hope you have a beautiful week. I will talk to you in the next episode.

Thanks for listening to The Less Stressed Lawyer podcast. If you want more info about Olivia Vizachero or the show’s notes and resources from today’s episode, visit www.TheLessStressedLawyer.com.