Author: OliviaVizachero

You’re listening to The Less Stressed Lawyer podcast, Episode 75. Today, we’re talking all about chronic consumption, and the proper process of learning. 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.

Hello, hello, how are you? I hope all is well in your neck of the woods. My September is going pretty okay. I’ve got some changes on the horizon. I’m getting ready to move to Charleston. I’m so excited about that. If you’ve been following along on social media, mainly on Instagram, you might know a little bit about that already. But I’m looking forward to doing that.

I’m in Michigan right now. So, I’m enjoying the change of the seasons. I hope that you’re enjoying whatever season you’re in. Whether it’s geographically where you’re located, or the season of work that you’re in, or the season of life that you’re in. I hope you’re enjoying it.

If you’re not, there’s no need to fret. You are in the right place, listening to this podcast, learning how to work through it, so you feel better, so you get into a better season.

Now, one of the things that I see people do, it’s one of the mistakes that they make that actually keeps them stuck in a season that doesn’t serve them, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. I talked a little bit in the last episode about the messiness of learning new things. I really wanted to dive in today, again, a really specific issue that I see people with.

I’ve devoted this entire month on social media to talking about time management. I’ve already done a really comprehensive time management series on the podcast, which I’ll link for you in the show notes. Go back and binge that if you haven’t.

But I want to talk about some of the problems that I see people encounter. One of them was what I talked about in the last episode, which is that people want to avoid the messiness of learning new things. Because they want to avoid that messy process, that clunky process, they don’t embark on learning new things.

They just stay stuck in this season of struggle, and they don’t work through it; they don’t improve, they don’t figure it out, they don’t learn, they don’t keep implementing and making changes and learning more and making more progress and just constantly improving.

Another thing that I see people do all the time, and I am calling myself out here because I used to be so guilty of this, and this is how I know how to spot it in other people. But people will chronically consume. They just stay in consumption mode.

This definitely comes from those perfectionistic tendencies, where we keep telling ourselves we don’t have enough information to get started yet. We need to keep learning more. There’s one more thing that we haven’t read, yet. There’s one more thing that we haven’t heard, yet. There’s a tip out there that’s really going to unlock everything for us, and we’ve got to go out there and find it.

We can’t get started implementing yet, until we’ve exhausted basically every resource imaginable, everything that’s available to us. We have to leave no stone unturned. We keep binging content; we just keep listening, keep reading, we keep consuming, we keep watching.

We keep taking in information, but we don’t ever actually get to the part where we implement what we’ve taken in to actually begin the full learning process and to complete the learning process.

So, today I’m going to talk to you a little bit about a process that I created. I recently spoke, I gave a keynote presentation at a marketing conference hosted by Roman Zelichenko, who is a good friend of mine. His marketing conference is specifically tailored towards immigration attorneys and people in the immigration industry, outside of legal professionals or outside of attorneys, specifically.

When I was brainstorming my keynote speech for GMI CON, which is what the name of the conference is, I was thinking to myself, “How do I make sure people get the most out of this conference? What holds people back from implementing what they learn? From actually taking advantage of all of the information that gets presented to them?

What do I see from my clients, time and time again, that holds them back? That keeps them stuck. That keeps them struggling and suffering in that season of confusion of not knowing how to do something? Of continuing to tolerate a problem because they haven’t completed the learning process to reach the solution?

So, I started to make a list of all of the things that I see people do, that really gets in their way of making progress, of solving problems, of learning new things. As I started to make that list of problems, I was able to put together a learning process that I have been giving to my clients. I taught this when I was in Montana, and I taught it to Roman’s conference attendees as well. It’s just a really good framework for learning anything new.

So, the first mistake that I see people make is what I was talking about at the beginning of this episode, it’s that chronic consumption. People just consume, consume, consume, and they never get out of consumption. They never feel satiated. They never feel full. The learning process never feels complete. They keep wanting more because they haven’t ever defined what enough is to begin with, so they just keep consuming.

Another thing that I see people do is they keep remaking the same decisions, right? So, they’ll decide to work on something, and then they’ll change their mind. Then they redecide it. They keep staying in that decision making process, questioning themselves, second guessing themselves, changing their mind, hemming, and hawing wavering.

That slows you down, and really stops you altogether from making any progress. Because how can you move forward if you keep moving backwards and remaking the decision you already made? Right? If you’re thinking about the conference that I spoke at, it was a marketing conference, so just redeciding, am I going to do social media marketing?

People will decide that, and then they’ll redecide it. Deciding, when do I enter my time during the day? Do I do it contemporaneously? Do I do it at the end of the day? Do I do it at the end of the week? Do I do it at the end of the month? Do I do it first thing in the morning?

If you keep redeciding that it’s going to keep you in confusion. You’re not going to follow through with the decision that you already decided upon if you give yourself permission to keep reopening that discussion and to decide anew. Alright? This is totally a defense mechanism. It keeps you safe. It feels really productive to continue to remake the same decision.

But it doesn’t actually work. I actually used an analogy at the conference… and this totally applies to time management too; think about deciding what you’re going to do for the day and then you remake that decision. You scratch your original plan and then you’re like, “Okay, what am I going to do today, now?” Then an hour goes by, and you’re like, “Okay, really, what am I going to do today?” You keep remaking the same decision.

It’s sort of like when you make a list of what to pack for a trip, and instead of then moving on to actually packing your suitcase, you tear the list up, and you remake the list of what you should pack for the trip. You’ll never end up with anything in your suitcase because you keep remaking a decision that you’ve already made.

Now, deciding things feels like you’re moving the ball forward, but you’re really not. You need to make the decision and then take action in accordance with that decision. You need to put that decision into practice, into play.

Another thing that I see people do is that they don’t make a plan. They’ll decide, but then they don’t make any plan to actually implement the decision that they just made. So, they have really no clarity on how to progress, on how to proceed.

Then they just stay in a place of confusion, thinking, “Well, I don’t know what to do next. I don’t know where to go from here. I don’t know how to figure this out. I don’t know how to get to the result I ultimately want to create.” It’s very hard to implement when you haven’t come up with a plan for what implementation is going to look like. Okay?

The other thing that I see people do, if they’ve actually overcome any of the things that I just mentioned, and they get to doing the stuff that they need to do in order to solve the problem that they’re facing, they won’t evaluate. So, they won’t gain information from what they’ve tried already, and they won’t glean learning from it. They won’t find the wisdom that’s come from the tries that they’ve done.

Now, if you were a person who struggles with any of the things that I just mentioned, I want you to check in with yourself. Pause the episode for a second if you have to. Just get clear, where are you doing some of these things? Are you doing all of these things? You want to be able to spot your pain points because that’s how you’re going to get better over time.

You’ve got to be able to catch yourself in the middle of working on this process that I’m going to teach you to know where you’re likely to get stuck, so you can catch yourself and work through it. You can course correct, you can interrupt yourself, get out of your normal habit to freeze, to spin, to indulge in inaction. You want to be on to yourself ahead of time so you can spot it as soon as you see it. Okay?

Here’s something else I want you to be on the lookout for, while we’re speaking of things to be on the lookout for. I also want you to pay attention, if when you’re working on solving a problem, or you’re telling yourself you’re going to learn something new, are you lying to yourself? Are you telling yourself you’re “working on it?” Are you telling yourself that you’re trying to learn something?

If you’re telling yourself these things, I want you to tap in and be really honest with yourself. Get super candid, radically candid, and be honest with yourself right now? How exactly are you trying to learn this new skill? How are you trying to improve? How are you working on it? Walk me through the process that you’re implementing.

Typically, when people tell me that they’re trying to get better at something, like, “I’m trying to get better at time management. I’m trying to learn how to manage my time. I’m working on getting better at time management. I’m working on my time management,” and I ask them, “How? Please regale me with all the ways that you’re trying. Describe to me exactly what your process of ‘trying’ looks like. What is ‘working on it’ look like for you on a day-to-day basis?” They’re going to struggle to articulate it.

Because they’re stuck at step one, typically. They’re still in that consumption mode. They haven’t moved out of it. They haven’t come up with a plan. They haven’t formulated what exactly they’re going to do to create clarity so they can actually move into the implementation process, and move forward and just follow the yellow brick road.

They haven’t done any of that stuff. They’re telling themselves, “I’m working on it. I’m trying,” but in reality, they really aren’t. They’re not doing anything to move the ball.

So, I came up with a process that you can follow to learn any new thing, any new skill, or to solve any problem, any problem that you’re facing. Okay? First and foremost, you’ve got to identify what it is that you’re going to learn or what problem that you’re going to solve. You’ve got to get clear on that.

I want you to make sure that you can articulate it very simply. Can you put it into one sentence? “This is what I want to learn how to do. This is the problem that I want to solve.” It should be very specific. I should be able to come in to your life with my little clipboard, and make sure that you’ve learned the skill or solved the problem. All right? We want to make sure that it’s specific.

From there, there’s a five-step process that you’re going to follow. The first one is to consume information. You might need to go out and gather information. If you’re learning how to manage your time, I highly recommend you go listen to the very comprehensive series of episodes that I did on time management.

Now, when it comes to consumption, you’re going to have to constrain. So, I want you to limit the experts you follow, the amount of information you’re going to consume, how long you’re going to spend learning. Because you can just spend all of your time learning and learning and learning.

There are enough books on time management for you to keep yourself busy for probably the next 10 years, if we’re being really honest. Maybe even longer than that. You could listen to YouTube videos or podcast episodes every night for the next year, and you would be in no better position when it comes to managing your time because you’re stuck in that chronic consumption mode.

You won’t move forward into that messy part, where you actually start to make decisions, you start to make plans, you implement them, you do it messily, then you learn and evaluate, and then adapt your action plan based on the evaluation. So, we’re going to consume, but we’re going to do it in a really constrained and restrained manner. All right?

If you try and listen to everything, you’re never going to be able to move forward. So, you have to decide how long am I going to consume information for? What content specifically am I going to consume? Who am I going to consume content from?

You want to make these decisions, and you want to limit it, so you actually are very clear on when you will move forward into the next phase. So, step one is consume in a constrained manner.

Step two is you’ve got to decide. Decide exactly what you’re going to do moving forward. So, if you’ve listened to some podcast episodes, if you’ve watched some YouTube videos, if you’ve talked to experts or colleagues and learned how to do some things from them, that’s all that consumption, right?

Now, you have to decide what you’re going to do moving forward. Whose methodology are you going to use? What’s your approach going to be? What are you going to try and do? What are you going to not do?

If you’re thinking about marketing on social media for your practice, are you going to be on all of the social media platforms? Or are you going to consume content to figure out which platforms might be the best platforms for you?

Then you’re going to step two; decide how you’re going to proceed. Once you make your decisions, now you’ve got some clarity. What’s it going to start to look like to move forward? Now remember, when it comes to deciding, you’re going to decide one time, and you’re going to honor that decision moving forward.

You’re not going to remake that decision unless you come up with information, through your evaluation process, after implementing your original plan, for a long enough period of time to gather reliable data. I suggest six months. If you want to do three, do three, but for a while. To gather enough information, to where you can really rely on it and start to see trends.

You’re going to decide, and not remake that decision until you’ve gone through the rest of the process, evaluated, and you have a really good reason, a reason supported with facts and data, to make a change. Alright? So, step one, consume with constraint. Step two, decide. How are you proceeding? What are you going to do? Whose process are you going to follow? What information are you going to take? Then leverage and apply.

Step three, with that clarity that you have gained from making that decision, you need to make your plan, your action plan, that you’re going to use to implement. Now, you may be able to map out a complete plan start to finish. But sometimes you don’t know all the steps yet.

Especially when you’re learning new things, you only know the next few steps, or maybe you only know the first next step that you need to take. If that’s the case, then your plan is going to be short and sweet. Okay? More information is going to be revealed to you at a later point, after you’ve begun to implement, and then you’ll be able to make more of your plan. You’ll be able to flesh it out further.

If you’re someone who really loves to know all the steps, A-Z, at the start, check in with yourself. Recognize that that is your perfectionism trying to drive the bus and control what you do. It’s okay to give yourself permission to only know the first couple of steps, or just the first step, and get started.

You want to gain a lot of clarity here, though. You want to make sure that you don’t have confusion about what your next step is. Even if it’s only that first step, I want it to be clear in your mind so you can begin to implement.

So many people don’t begin to implement because they’re still confused. They don’t really know what they need to be doing in order to move forward. So, ask yourself, as you make your plan for step three, is there anything I’m confused about? Is there anything that I think I don’t know yet? That’s preventing me from moving forward with my best educated guess on how to proceed?

If the answer is no, then your plan is complete. If the answer is yes, go get that question answered. Go find the answer to that, and then make that part of your plan. Fold it into the plan that you’ve created.

Now, step four, you’ve got to implement your plan. It’s going to be uncomfortable. You’re not going to want to implement, you’re going to want to stay in the safe zone of making decisions and remaking decisions, and making plans and remaking plans, and chronic consumption, and all of that.

But we’ve got to get you to the doing because that is where learning really happens. You have to take an educated guess, work your plan, and see what happens. Gather data, conduct an experiment, learn what works and learn what doesn’t work. You’ve got to see how it all plays out.

You’re going to figure out what are your preferences? What’s effective, what’s not? What were you assuming was going to go one way that actually went a different way? What were you wrong about? What were you right about? What do you want to do more of? What do you want to tweak a little bit?

You’ve got to do all of that, and the only way that you’re going to learn and gather all of that amazing information that’s going to help you learn new skills and solve problems, is by actually getting to work implementing your plan and doing each one of the steps necessary to create your desired result.

Now, think about this. Think about trying to learn a new language. You can research all of the different apps or tools or programs that you could use in order to learn a new language. You could listen to podcast episodes about which ones are the best ones. Then you could pick one. Then you could redecide and keep redeciding. Maybe you’re not going to take a course, you’re going to hire a private tutor. You just stay in that indecision.

Then you make a plan. “I’m going to do it every day. I’m going to practice learning this new language every single day. I’m going to do it in the morning, and then for 30 minutes at night.” You make the plan, but if you never implement you will never learn the language, right?

Same thing, if you say, “Alright, I’m going to listen, every day for an hour; 30 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes at night. I’m going to listen to Italian being spoken.” But you never actually practice speaking words in Italian, yourself. You never try to have a conversation with someone. You’re not going to, ultimately, learn the language.

You might learn a couple things, but you’re not going to learn it completely, right? You’re not going to get to the end result that you ultimately want, if you don’t engage in the full implementation process, get your hands dirty, get in there, let it be messy, let it be clunky.

You’ve got to actually implement your plan, otherwise you’re not going to learn the new skill you want to learn. You’re not going to solve the problem that you’re facing.

Think about this when it comes to time management. You’ve got to work the process. You can listen to me talk all day long about managing your time, but until you decide to use my process, that I teach, rather than anyone else’s process… and I’m recommending that because it’s really easy to get confused. I teach time management differently than someone else.

So, if you’re half pregnant between my way and someone else’s way, and you don’t decide to just follow me, you’re going to stay so confused trying to mix different methodologies together, and not being sure how that works. You’re just going to continue to spin and not move forward.

You’ve got to consume my content, and then decide to follow me, constrain to me, and then make the plan. I give you the plan that you need to follow. I tell you the step-by-step process. And, if you want to hear it from me all over again, come to the webinar I’m teaching this month. It’s September 29, at 12pm. Eastern; How to Manage Your Time. I’m going to walk you through the step-by-step process for managing your time.

But there is a specific process to follow, and you have to implement that process in order to actually learn how to master time management. You can’t just hear me talk about it; you have to do it. You have to practice it yourself. It’s the practice that’s going to make the progress.

It’s the practice that’s going to take you out of being stuck in that place where you’re like, “I know what I need to do, but I’m just not doing it.” Respectfully, you don’t know what you need to do. If you did, you’d be doing it. You think you know what it takes, but you actually don’t know what it takes.

The way to figure out what it takes is to implement your plan, to follow my process, to do it in a really messy manner, and then learn what it actually takes from you. Learn what feelings you have to feel as you implement the process. Learn the tricks and tools that I teach and why I teach them, the reasoning behind them.

Why I recommend that you should have an electronic to-do list and not a handwritten to-do list. Why I tell you to pick ‘start and stop times’ for when you’re going to start work and end work. Why I tell you to do a time audit, so you learn how long things take you. Why I tell you to double the estimate, when you’re estimating how long a task is going to take.

You’re going to learn my reasonings behind all of these rules when you actually get into the messy implementation of the process that I teach you. Okay? That is how you’re going to learn.

Then, of course, you go to step five, evaluate. Evaluate the action that you took. We always want to be acting and then auditing and adapting; act, audit, adapt. That’s how we learn. That’s how we make more and more progress. We don’t just stagnate and stay stuck with the same problems that we continued to have.

Through evaluating, and then adapting what you have been doing, tweaking it with your newfound theory, your new experiment, “Hey, this didn’t work, I’m going to guess that this might work instead,” you go out there and you adapt.

You change it up a little bit, and then you implement some more. You see if that worked and you evaluate again, and you’re just going to get closer and closer and closer to the finish line. Okay?

This is the process that I want you to follow. You’re going to consume with constraint. You’re going to decide how to proceed. You’re going to make a plan, a specific plan for how you’re going to proceed. You’re going to implement the plan. You’re going to evaluate. And then get back at it, take more action.

That’s the five-step process for learning new things and for solving problems. That’s what I want you to do. Pick something that you want to learn, pick a problem that you want to solve, and work these five steps. Watch how it gives you clarity of how to proceed, of how to progress. It’s going to make it so much easier for you to move through the different phases of the learning process.

You can work this with intentionality, and you’re going to get so much further faster if you do. All right? That’s what I’ve got for you this week, my friends. Again, if you want to come and hear me teach you all the things you need to know about how to manage your time, the link to register for How to Manage Your Time, on September 29, at 12pm Eastern, is going to be linked in the show notes.

You can also go to any of my social media platforms… LinkedIn, Instagram… and get access to it there. Or you can go to LessStressedSessions.com/signup, and register for How to Manage Your Time there, as well.

All right, that’s the first reminder. Second reminder, remember, I am doing a giveaway. So, if you are loving the podcast, please do me a favor and leave a rating and a review. It helps me get my podcast in front of more people, into the ears of more listeners who struggle with the things that you struggle with, which is why you’re listening to this podcast.

So, we want to get it in front of them as well, so they get the help they need also. Alright, so go leave me a rating and review. If you do it now, between now and the end of October, I’m going to pick five reviewers and I’m going to give away five prizes: one for each review.

Because it means so much to me that you take your valuable time, and you do me the honor of that rating and review. So, go do that.

Then, just a little teaser for next week’s episode. I’m so excited to record this podcast topic. I’m going to teach you how to deal with procrastinators. A lot of my time management content is about people who struggle with time management. It’s about the people who want to get better at managing their time.

But a lot of my clients are actually really good at time management, and they’re on the receiving end of other people’s bad time management habits. So, if that’s you, and you’re up to your eyeballs in frustration with other people’s over promising and under delivering, other people’s procrastination, other people’s unrealistic timelines, and under estimating how long tasks are going to take them.

If you’ve had it up to here with being on the receiving end of that behavior, I want you to tune in for next week’s episode. I’m going to teach you how to handle these people, how to work with them, how to manage them, how to help them navigate this problem.

It’s going to save you a ton of frustration, really reduce the headaches that you have when it comes to this issue. I can’t wait to dive into it.

Until then, I hope you have a beautiful week and I’ll 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 74. Today, we’re talking all about the messiness of learning something new. 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 there, how are you? I hope your week is off to a good start. We are kicking into fall gear over here. I just got back from Dallas. I was there for a Life Coach School event, which is my coaching school. It didn’t feel like fall down there. It was 107⁰ while I was down there. But I’m back in Detroit, not for very much longer. I’m getting ready to move south. I cannot wait to get out of here, just in time to escape the winter. But it’s a fall around here.

One of the topics that I love to cover every fall is time management. So, if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that I’ve already talked about what I call “the three P’s” on the podcast. I did a whole series about people pleasing, perfectionism, and procrastination. And then, I went and got very specific on the process that I teach my clients for mastering time management.

So, I will link those episodes in the show notes. If you haven’t listened to them, you want to make sure that you go check all of them out. It’s such a comprehensive time management series. But today, I want to get really specific on one issue that I see come up all the time for people, especially for my perfectionists.

While this relates to a lot of things, not just time management, I definitely see people struggle with this when it comes to managing their time. Quick segue here, or tangent, I want you to make sure that you don’t miss this, so mark your calendars.

By the way, speaking of time management, I’m going to host a masterclass at the end of the month on How to Manage Your Time. It’s going to be on September 29th, which is a Friday, at 12pm Eastern. In order to register for that, you can go to the show notes of this episode, it’s going to be hyperlinked there for you, and you can go and just register for the Zoom event.

If you want to type in the URL yourself, you can go to LessStressedSessions.com/signup and you’ll have a hyperlink there as well, to register for my How to Manage Your Time masterclass at the end of the month. Okay, so what are we talking about today? How does it relate to time management? You’ve got all the questions. Well, let me answer them.

I’m going to tell you the thing that my clients hate hearing from me, but this is why we have coaches. Coaches just don’t tell us what we want to hear, they tell us the truth. They give it to us the brass tacks version, whether we want to hear it or not, and that’s what helps us grow. That’s what helps us transform that. It’s what helps us learn and develop.

So, I’m going to share this unfortunate truth with you. If you struggle with time management and you want to work on it, I need you to prepare yourself, it’s going to be messy. The process of learning how to manage your time is going to be messy.

Now, if you’re a perfectionist, a part of you just absolutely cringed and recoiled when I said the word “messy.” For so many people, that’s the thing that they’re most afraid of being. Perfectionists crave order and control, and they don’t like engaging in any activities that run contrary to those preferences. Which is why so often perfectionists describe themselves as someone who hates doing things that they aren’t good at. Who doesn’t like trying things that are new.

Why? Why don’t they like those things? It’s because of how it feels. Learning something new feels really messy and disorderly to them. For perfectionists especially, messy is very embarrassing. It’s the thing that they want to be seen by other people as being the least of, not the most of.

When you’re learning how to do something new, you’re going to feel a little chaotic, a little messy, a little clunky. So, today, I specifically want to talk to you about managing the mess when it comes to learning something new.

Because if you keep having this strong aversion to being messy and embracing the mess, if you’re reluctant to embrace it, you’re not going to achieve the goals that you want to set for yourself, that you want to achieve. If you aren’t willing to make peace with the journey that you’re going to have to take to get there.

I’m going to tell you again, I really want to drive this home for you, the journey will not be pristine. I’m sorry, it just won’t be. It’s going to be clunky and paved with failures. I don’t even like to think of it as failing, I just like to think of it as learning.

So, it’s going to be clunky and paved with learning, paved with nuggets of insight and wisdom that come from engaging in the very messy process of doing something new. You have to be okay with that. You have to uncouple the messiness of it all, from your self-worth, from your sense of adequacy and capability. You can’t make the clunkiness mean anything about you.

Truly, it doesn’t mean anything about you other than the fact that you’re simply learning how to do something new. Okay? So, take a second and think. Think about what you’re working on right now in your life. What goal are you wanting to set that you maybe are avoiding because you don’t want to get started on it? Because it’s probably going to be a messy process. That it’s going to be imperfect. That your pursuit of it isn’t going to go as smoothly as you might want it to.

Do you keep avoiding getting started on something? If so, what? What are you avoiding getting started on? Is there something that you’re working on getting better at, that you’re working on improving? What skill are you trying to develop? What habit are you trying to build?

I’ll give you an example of this; I talk about it a lot. I have a rule in my business, I don’t add any new content creation until all of my current content creation that I’ve agreed to do is “dialed in.” That means I consistently hit the deadlines that I set for myself. I follow the timeline that allows me to get that content out when I promise it.

Ever since I added the podcast to my content rotation, I have been working on figuring out the schedule that works for me. So, it’s been clunky over here, it’s been messy. I typically send out a Friday email, and since I added the podcast in, the availability of content creation space I have in my calendar, it wasn’t enough to accommodate the podcast.

So, I’ve been spending a lot of time figuring out how do I eliminate other things from my schedule, in order to make room for all of the content creation that I want to do, in order to market my business? So, it’s been clunky over here.

And I’ve allowed it to be clunky. I keep learning and I keep iterating and I keep eliminating things, in order to give myself the space that I need to create all the content that I want to create. Do I wish it was less clunky and less messy? Of course, I do. I’d love it to be pristine. But I’m learning how to make space for all of that.

I’m learning what it requires of me; the time involved, the planning, the recording, the production; with everything else that I have on my plate as I’ve also been launching a group coaching program throughout the past year and a half. That, mixed in with the other content creation that I’ve been doing, is very new to me. So, it’s been messy over here.

I’m just allowing myself to sit in the mass as I learn, as I tweak, as I make changes. Okay, so that’s just one example of this.

I want you to think about those questions. What are you working on getting better at? What goal do you have that you might be avoiding? What skill are you trying to develop? What habit are you trying to build?

Think for a second, and I want you to think about this specifically, how do you show up when you pursue this goal, work to make progress, and it doesn’t go as planned? How do you show up when it doesn’t go as planned? What do you do? Do you beat yourself up? Do you quit? Do you “quietly quit?” Man, that was a very trending term for a while. But I haven’t heard it in a while.

But do you quietly quit, just get more and more inconsistent as time goes on? Or do you set a different goal, so you can cycle back to the more exciting, non-messy part of goal setting, the planning part, the intention setting part? That’s where everything is still pristine and very perfect. You haven’t actually embarked on the progress making portion of pursuing the goal; that’s the messy part.

So, are these the things that you do when your pursuit doesn’t go as planned? Or do you stay the course, evaluate the action that you took, learn from that evaluation, and then get back to work and improve? Do you do that instead?

Now, if that’s not what you do, if you do the other things that I mentioned; the beating yourself up, the quitting, the quietly quitting, the being inconsistent, the replacing the one goal with a new goal; in order to distract yourself from the imperfect mess of what you’re currently doing.

If you do those things instead, I want you to ask yourself: Why? Why do you do that? More specifically, what is your expectation that you have for yourself that drives you to do those things? What do you expect your learning process to look like? I find this to be such a fascinating question. I bet most people haven’t asked themselves that question, and they haven’t taken the time to answer it.

So, what do you expect your learning process to look like? If you do those things that I just mentioned, you’re expecting yourself to be perfect, much more perfect than the process actually is. So, be honest here. How do you expect your learning process to go? You wouldn’t quit or get more inconsistent if you were expecting it to be clunky and messy. You wouldn’t.

You’d stay the course, you’d evaluate, you’d learn and improve, if you expected it to be clunky and messy and imperfect. But you don’t expect it to be messy, imperfect, and clunky. Instead, you make the clunk and the mess of it a problem.

Now we’ve got a disconnect between your expectation and reality. We’ve got a mismatched expectation. So the disconnect between what you expect the process to be like, versus what the process is actually like, creates this negative emotional experience for you.

Of course, this is just coming from your thoughts, right? Your thoughts cause your feelings. So, if you’re experiencing a negative emotion as you’re learning something new, building a habit, developing a skill, working towards, and pursuing a goal… If you feel a negative emotion, and are having that negative experience, it’s coming from your thinking.

What you’re thinking is what I mean by this expectation. Your expectations are just a thought that you have about what the process and experience should be like, what you expect yourself to do, how you expect yourself to perform in this pursuit.

So, if you feel frustrated and discouraged, or embarrassed and inadequate, or incapable, number one, that’s coming from your thoughts. And we get to change those thoughts by changing the expectations that you have for yourself. But typically, if that’s how you’re feeling, then what you’re typically going to do from those emotions is withdraw from your pursuit of the goal.

But doing that only ensures that you never make consistent progress. So, if you want to make consistent progress, if you want to reach the finish line with these habits, with these skills, with the goals that you’re setting for yourself, we need to change this. Okay?

In order to make consistent progress, we first have to start with changing the expectation that you have for yourself. So, take a second, what do you want to choose to expect of yourself when you’re learning something new?

What if, I know this is a wild and radical idea, but what if you expected it to be imperfect and clunky and messy? What if you expected yourself to stumble and fall? What if you expected yourself to fail your way forward and learn with each fail, to leverage each fail?

What if none of this; the imperfection, the clunkiness, the messiness, the stumbling, the falling, the failing; what if none of it was a problem? How would it change the way that you pursue your goals? That you develop skills? That you build habits? How would it change the way that you will learn and improve? What would be different?

Let me walk you through some examples, because I want you to see how it would be different in practice. So, let’s start with, because September is time management month, let’s say you’re learning how to manage your time. When you resist the imperfect messiness of learning how to manage your time, what you end up doing is you start and you’re going to struggle immediately.

Because that is just what happens when someone who struggles with time management starts to work on time management and building the skills necessary to properly manage your time; it’s going to be a struggle up front. What happens when you’re resisting the imperfect messiness of learning how to manage your time, when you struggle, you give up almost instantly.

Then you end up beating yourself up in the process, and you double down on the behavior that isn’t serving you. You just default back to that status quo. It’s your expectation that’s a problem here. Your expectation is that you make a schedule day one, stick to it perfectly, and never mismanage your time ever again.

Even if you don’t think that that’s what your expectation is for yourself, if you embark on learning how to manage your time and then you don’t stick with it, I promise you, that is what your subconscious or unconscious expectation is. That’s what you’re expecting of yourself: perfection, right out of the gate.

And then, when reality doesn’t match that, because you’re learning how to do something new, something you’ve never been taught how to do before, you’re going to struggle and stumble. Then, when you encounter that struggle and the stumbling, you quit.

So, when reality doesn’t match that expectation, you allow yourself to get discouraged. What would be different if you expected the process to look like this? First up, you make a to-do list, you estimate how long tasks take, you put all of the appointments that you have on your calendar. So that way, you have an accurate reflection of the time that you have available and the commitments that you have, that you’ve already committed yourself to.

Then, you decide start and stop times for work; when’s your day going to start, when’s it going to end? From there, you see how much available time you have. After you factor in the book ends, with your start and stop time, and you subtract all of the appointments that you put on your calendar, you’re going to come up with a number of the time you have available for work the rest of the day.

Then I want you to look at your to-do list, and plan less than what fits in the time you have available. So, if you have six available hours, I want you to plan five of them, okay? Now, when you make that plan, you’ll implement the plan by starting on time, working without interruptions, and ending on time.

At the end of your day you can evaluate, you’ll take the insights from your evaluation and apply them the following day. So, you consistently get 1% better. That’s the process for how to become someone who manages their time well. That’s the process that you need to improve in this area.

Now, that’s the pristine process, right? The textbook version of what it looks like to manage your time. But in practice, it’s not going to be that pristine; it’s going to be imperfect, clunky, and messy. You’re going to forget to put things on your to-do list.

If you expect perfection there, you’re going to stop managing and keeping your to-do list up to date, and because you didn’t update at once, you’re just going to quit. Or you’re going to fail to break up big projects into small enough tasks. And instead of getting better and better and better at that you’re just going to quit and stop using the to-do list.

You’re going to underestimate how long tasks take you, and when you underestimate it and you’re incorrect with your original guess, instead of continuing to get better at this the perfectionist in you is going to tell you it’s not worth it to estimate the time. That you’re just bad at it. That it can’t be done.

You’re going to plan best-case scenario and then feel behind because your schedule won’t go best-case scenario. Okay? Things won’t go according to plan. You’ll learn that you need to plan for the worst-case scenario. But if you’re being a perfectionist, you’re going to use things not going to plan as a reason to not stick with this. You’re going to fail to start on time by procrastinating or reshuffling your schedule, and putting out fires, tending to “emergencies.”

You’re going to distract yourself. You’re going to let other people interrupt you. You’re going to people please, not set boundaries, and you’ll distract yourself with things that are more exciting than the work in front of you. Maybe Instagram, LinkedIn, games on your phone, TV, snacks, coffee, whatever.

If you let all of this deter you, because it doesn’t match the expectation you have for yourself, you’re never going to get better at managing your time. If you make these mishaps a problem, and a good enough reason not to go on, you won’t be working on time management for very long. You’re going to quit quickly.

Because these mishaps and mistakes are going to happen. You can take that to the bank. You’re not going to master this right out of the gate. This requires practice. It requires being messy because practicing is messy. But if you adjust your expectations and you expect it to be messy, then you’re going to make a to-do list, estimate how long tasks take, put appointments on your calendar, decide your start and stop times, and see how much available time you have in the day.

You’ll go to your to-do list and plan in less than what fits, implement the plan by starting on time, working without interruptions, and ending on time. Then, you’ll evaluate, you’ll apply the insights from that evaluation, and put them into practice the following day.

As you do that, in a very, very messy manner, you’re going to forget to put things on your to-do list, you’re not going to break up project small enough, you’re going to underestimate how long stuff takes, and you’re going to plan best-case scenario.

Then you’ll get behind because it doesn’t go according to plan, you’re going to procrastinate and reshuffle and distract yourself, and you’re still going to get better, because you’re going to evaluate and take those insights from your evaluation and apply them the next day.

It’s going to be clunky as hell. And you’re not going to make the clunky messiness of it all a problem, okay? If you commit to embracing the clunk, embracing the mess, you can solve your time management problems; I promise you.

This is coming firsthand, from someone who used to struggle with every time management problem you can think of; that was me. I committed myself to figuring this out for myself so I could leverage what I learned from doing this work myself, and give my lessons, give my insights, my breakthroughs, to other people. So, they could learn how to overcome their time management struggles, too.

This is just one example of needing to embrace the mess in order to make progress. Maybe you’re working on putting in your time every day. And I swear, I’ve said this already on the podcast, but I swear, I’ve got an episode series coming out on that topic soon. I know, I keep saying that, but I really, really do.

But let’s talk about it briefly here. If you expect perfection of yourself when it comes to entering your time, that’s something you want to work on. You’re going to make one day of missing time entry send you into a complete tailspin. Then you’re going to miss all the other days in the month, and be stuck at the end of the month entering all of your time. Just like you always do. Even though you promise yourself every single month, “This month is going to be different.”

Let’s say it’s September 12th, and you’ve been doing okay on entering your time since the beginning of the month. Then you have one really busy day, and you don’t put in your time. You let that be the reason that you don’t stick to working on this goal, to building this habit.

Instead of quitting and getting more and more inconsistent and letting all of your time, the rest of the month, September 12th through the end of September, accumulate and build up, what if you didn’t expect perfection of yourself and you let it be messy?

What if you aimed for putting in your time after every task that you complete? Once it’s completed, you enter the time. Then sometimes, even though you have the best of intentions, you forget. So, instead of saying screw it, because we’re not being perfectionistic, we’re letting it be messy. You decide to put in the rest of your time at the end of the day.

So, you’ve been doing it contemporaneously throughout the day, but you miss one, or maybe you miss a couple, and instead of saying, “Screw it, I’m not entering any more time that day,” or for the rest of the month, you just decide to put it in at the end of the day. And if, for whatever reason, you end up falling asleep without putting in the rest of your time, you just start again tomorrow.

Now, the perfectionist in you is going to want to enter yesterday’s time before you give yourself permission to enter the new day’s time. Okay? But if you let it be messy, you don’t have to do that to yourself. I watch people day in day out, month in month out, do this to themselves because they miss a day, or they miss half a day.

Instead of just allowing themselves to start fresh, instead of giving themselves permission to do that, they have to be perfectionistic about it. They make up this arbitrary rule that is written nowhere. It’s not in your law firm’s manual. They don’t teach it to you in law school, that you can’t dare enter today’s time before yesterday’s time, because you absolutely can. It’s just going to feel messy as hell. So, you can just start the new day and worry about yesterday’s time later.

You can just focus on what’s right in front of you by letting your process be messy. But people don’t want to do that. They want it to be perfect. They don’t want it to be clunky. They want it to be pristine. By requiring that it be perfect and pristine, they don’t make the progress they want to make. They self-sabotage, they screw themselves, the rest of the month. Don’t do that. Let your process be messy.

Same thing if you’re working on weight loss or working out. Be honest. Do you expect yourself to stick to your workout routine perfectly? So, that if you choose to miss a day… and I’m picking that word “choose” very intentionally here, because I do want you to recognize that you’re always making a choice, all right?

But if you choose to not stick to your routine, that choice doesn’t mean that you should stop working out altogether. Because, “Screw it. What’s the point?” All right, that’s the perfectionist in you. Instead, if you let it be messy you can pick right back up tomorrow and not miss a beat. That’s available to you.

Same thing with weight loss. If you’re expecting perfection of yourself, then here’s what you’re going to expect: You’re going to expect that the scale only goes in one direction, the direction you want it to go in. You’re never going to build in room for maybe a little weight gain. Maybe you go on vacation and the scale goes up a pound or two. Maybe you have a holiday weekend with family and friends, and the scale goes up.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t work to guard against those things. But expecting 100% perfection of yourself is going to lead you to quit because you’re going to be so discouraged and frustrated. Also, if you expect yourself to only eat what you intentionally decide to eat, and to never splurge, to never veer off course, you’re going to set yourself up to fail.

You’re not going to be able to sustain that because you’re human. That’s not realistic. You’re going to have slip ups. You’re going to have messy human moments, where you eat a bigger portion than planned. Where you have a snack that you typically wouldn’t eat. Or you have an extra glass of wine, or a bite of someone’s dessert, or fries or whatever.

You’re going to eat off protocol. You’re going to make a decision that isn’t aligned with the goal that you ultimately want to achieve. If you allow yourself to be messy and imperfect, you’re not going to make this a problem. You’re not going to let it be a reason to quit.

But this is a choice you have to make. You can learn from your slip ups, or you can weaponize them against yourself; it’s up to you. I highly, highly, highly encourage you not to weaponize your learning, not to weaponize your mess.

I want you to really think for a second. Where did you get the expectation that you do everything perfectly right the first time? Who gave that expectation to you? Where does it come from? Now, a much more important question: Do you want to keep that expectation for yourself? And if not, why not? What if you expected and allowed yourself to be messy? What if you wore your messiness as a badge of honor?

I don’t mean clutter, I mean unabashed, relentless pursuit of learning new things. The only way humans really know how to learn them, the imperfectly, clunky, messy way. What if you wore that as a badge of honor? As something to be proud of your mess?

You let it show how brave you are, how courageous you are, how willing you are, how determined you are, how dedicated you are, how committed you are, how capable you are, of feeling all the emotions that come along with learning new things.

You know what would happen if you made that your expectation? If you changed your relationship with learning to look more like that than what it currently looks like? You would learn so much more, so much faster, and you’d make so much more progress. So much progress. It will truly blow your mind.

So, I hope you take me up on this invitation to really embrace your mess, the imperfect messiness of learning something new. Life gets so much more rewarding, fulfilling, and fun when you do.

Alright, my friends, that’s what I’ve got for you this week. Two quick other orders of business. First things first, at the beginning of the episode, I mentioned that I’m teaching a masterclass this month; it’s free. It’s all about how to manage your time. So, I want you to go register for that. It’s linked in the show notes.

If that’s too complicated, and you don’t want to deal with going to the show notes, you can just go to LessStressedSessions.com/signup and register for How to Manage Your Time. It’s September 29th, that’s a Friday; last Friday of the month, at 12pm Eastern, okay?

Tell your friends to come, tell your work besties to come, share the wealth with your colleagues. So many people, low key, struggle with this issue. Be the person that really helps them overcome it. They will be so thankful that you were the one who helped them get a handle on this issue, I promise.

Now, number two, if you are just loving the podcast, and I really hope you are, if you’re loving the podcast, can you do me a favor and leave me a rating and review? My goal is to get in front of as many people as possible to help them start living lives with less stress and far more fulfillment.

As a part of that plan, I’ve set a really extreme goal for the number of people that I want to have register for the How to Manage Your Time masterclass later this month. When you leave me a rating and a review, it helps me get the podcast in front of more people. It gets more eyeballs on what it is that I’m doing, so it helps me achieve this goal that I’ve set for myself, this really outlandish goal.

It would mean the absolute world to me, if you get value from what I teach on this podcast, if you could help me out with this by going and leaving a rating and review. Now, as a thank you, because I really do appreciate this more than you could possibly know; it means the world to me. I’m going to do a giveaway, because I want to thank you for taking time out of your busy day to leave me a rating and review.

So, I’m going to do a giveaway. I haven’t done this before. I’m so excited about it. At the end of October, I’m going to randomly select five listener reviews, and I’m going to give away a prize to each one of those reviewers. Get your reviews in before the end of October, so I can select, and hopefully you will be one of the lucky winners. All right?

That’s what I’ve got for you this week, my friends. Thank you so much. 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 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.

You’re listening to The Less Stressed Lawyer podcast, Episode 69. Today, we’re talking all about the labels you assign other people. 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, my friends, how are you? Things are good. I’m over in my neck of the woods. I just made it to Nashville. I got in yesterday, and I am here to work with my business coach, because even coaches need coaching. I think everyone could benefit from coaching. So, I get coached myself and every six months I go to a different city, and I get to meet with my business coach.

I get to meet with all of my entrepreneur peers, and I just soak up several days of learning in an immersive environment. It’s one of my favorite things. I am a retreat person, that’s why I host my own in-person events. I just absolutely love the experience of being in community with people and being able to immerse myself in the learning and be fully focused.

I just touched down here yesterday. I’m getting acclimated. It’s pretty warm in Nashville. I’m so excited to meet and mingle with everyone, and I also have the pleasure this time of being one of the instructors for the program that I’m a part of. So, I’m a student and an instructor this time, which is so, so fun. I absolutely love teaching people how to make money, and I get to do that as part of this program.

I teach my own clients how to make money, how to build successful law practices, and how to market, and then I get to do that here with coaches and entrepreneurs. So fun. That’s enough about me. I hope wherever you are in the world listening to this, all is well with you.

I’m super excited to talk to you about today’s topic. It’s actually a special request from one of my clients, who is an avid listener of my podcast. She reached out to me and said, “Hey, can you please do an episode on this?” So, I went back through the archives of my podcast, and I did an episode on this before, but it’s slightly different. Let me explain.

Today’s topic is about the labels you assign other people. Episode 14 of this podcast is all about the labels you assign yourself. Even though the concept is the same, the framework is still the same, I want to give you some specific examples of what this looks like in practice and why it’s problematic, specifically when it comes to other people.

This is what I mean by assigning a label to someone. Labels are just thoughts that we have about other people. The thought is a judgment that we have about them, and it’s a characteristic that we believe that they exhibit. So, examples of this would be thoughts like, he’s irresponsible, he’s aggressive, she’s disrespectful, she’s lazy, he’s immature, she’s unprofessional, he’s non-responsive, she’s rude, he’s flaky, he’s narcissistic, she’s unreliable, she’s bitchy, he’s arrogant, or she’s selfish.

Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list, right? These are just examples of the types of labels that you might be assigning to the people in your life. And you have to remember, our thoughts are not true; facts are true. So, in this instance, there would be behavior that someone exhibits, the factual behavior. The actions that they take, that everyone in the world would agree upon if we all listened to what they say, or we watched what they did, it would be in the most factual way possible.

“She said…” blank, you would insert the direct quote. Or “He did this… He said no to attending…” something. Or “She showed up 30 minutes after the start of the event.” Those are facts. Then, you place a judgment on the facts you observe. We label people, we assign them these characteristics, based on our own belief systems and the facts that we encounter.

We end up taking these labels and use them as a lens, where we view people through the label that we assign them. Our brains are so, so powerful, they’re such incredible tools, and they’re so effective that when we assign these labels to people, our brains essentially say, “Roger that, I’m going to go out and find evidence to prove this belief true.” Even though our thoughts aren’t true, our brain accepts the assignment. It’s like, “I’m going to go confirm this for you. I’m going to close the loop.”

So, when you’re thinking that someone is irresponsible, when you assign them that label, your brain says, “Roger that,” and it goes out and finds all the evidence that this person is irresponsible. So, everything that they do, you view all of their actions through that lens of believing that they’re irresponsible. You’re like on hyper alert, looking for evidence and more proof to support your initial belief, that they’re irresponsible.

You’re going to bypass and ignore anything to the contrary. You’re going to miss seeing the ways in which someone might be responsible. And of course, it’s always a subjective opinion on whether someone’s responsible or irresponsible. But you’re going to miss things that you would perceive to be responsible, and you’re going to hyperfocus and look for proof of someone’s irresponsibility.

Same thing when you’re believing that someone’s aggressive. You’re going to look for all the ways that someone’s aggressive. You’re going to miss the ways where they’re mild in nature, and soft or welcoming or thoughtful or caring. You’re going to look for all the ways that they’re aggressive.

If you think that someone’s disrespectful, you’re going to search for all the ways in which they’re disrespectful, and your brain is so good, it will find things to support this. You’ll make the argument subconsciously or unconsciously, to fit your initial assumption about someone.

Same thing with believing that someone’s lazy. You’re going to look for all the ways that they don’t show up the way that you want them to. You’re going to look for the ways that they dropped the ball, when they don’t put in the extra effort, and when they phone it in.

Again, these are all just your opinions about the person and what they’re doing. None of it is actually true, but we believe our thoughts. Especially when you’re not actively engaged in the process of identifying your thoughts, examining them, and questioning them. Which is something that we do when we coach together. You learn that skill set. You learn how to do that.

Now, I want you to take a few minutes, and basically, we’re going to workshop this, during this episode, because I want you to start to create some awareness around the labels that you’re assigning the people in your life. So, maybe you have a boss. What are the labels that you assign to your boss? Maybe you think they’re demanding. Maybe you think they’re toxic. Maybe you think they’re not respectful of your time or your boundaries.

When you think those thoughts, when you assign those labels to them, do you see how you search for and find more evidence to support that initial belief? I also want you to think about how you feel when you think those thoughts about this person, and when you assign these labels to them? It’s going to cause you to feel a negative emotion. Then, get clear. How do you show up when you’re feeling that way? Probably not in a great way, right? So, think about that.

Or if you have someone who reports to you directly, someone that you supervise, what labels do you assign to that person? Do you think that they’re unreliable? Do you think that they’re not responsive enough?

I see that a lot with some of the higher-level partners that I work with. They typically think the associates that work for them aren’t responsive enough. Then, when they think that, every single time they’re interacting with the associate it reinforces their belief that the person’s not responsive enough. So, they’re searching for that evidence, and they find it.

One of the things that I teach my clients to do, is define what “enough” means in the first place. So, we have to go through and figure out what you mean by responsive enough. Does that mean people respond within 24 hours, eight hours an hour, a half an hour? It doesn’t matter what your standard is, everyone gets to have their own standards. You just want to know what yours are.

When you don’t define what “enough” is and you assign someone the label that they’re not responsive enough, even though you haven’t defined it, you’re measuring them against an unclear standard and you’re always going to think that they should have responded faster than they did. Then, you’re going to be really frustrated and annoyed with them.

Then, think about how you show up with your direct report when you’re feeling frustrated and annoyed. It’s not going to be in a way that supports your collaborative relationship with this person. It’s not going to be in a way that supports them to continue to improve and grow and be an integral part of your team.

Same thing if you have an assistant; maybe it’s a paralegal or a legal assistant, a secretary. If you have negative thoughts about them, if you’re assigning negative labels to them, maybe you think that they’re incompetent, or they aren’t attentive enough to detail, that’s a big one that I see with my clients, you will always look for the ways that they’re not competent, or that they miss those details.

Again, you’re going to be frustrated and annoyed. So, if you label a person that you work with this way, you’re going to keep searching for evidence to meet and fill in this belief. It becomes a self-fulfilling cycle. You think it and then you find it and you see it in them, and then you think it some more and then you find it, and you see it in them, and you think at some more.

Think about your clients. What labels do you assign to your clients? A lot of my clients think that their clients are difficult and needy. When they think those thoughts about their clients, they are constantly in search of evidence to prove that true. So, every time that the client messages them after business hours, they’re going to reinforce that belief that the person’s difficult or needy.

Every time they have to explain something to a client a second or third time, they’re going to reinforce their belief that the client is difficult and needy. Because they’re bringing everything that the client does through that lens of the client being difficult, of the client being needy, so it just proves it true. Even though, as I’ve said multiple times already in this episode, your thoughts aren’t true. But they feel true, especially when you are on the hunt, subconsciously, for evidence that supports your initial belief.

Think about the labels that you assign to your parents. I coach a lot of my clients on their relationship with their parents. No one teaches us in life how to have relationships with adult parents, or how parents should have relationships with their adult children. I find there to be a lot of tension and conflict in adult-child parent relationships.

So, take a second and think about how you think about your parents. Do you think that they’re intrusive? Do you think that they’re judgmental? Do you think that they’re unsupportive? Do you think that they’re slow? I actually… My mom, hopefully she’s not listening to this. But this is a label I’ve assigned to her with how she drives.

I notice, I hyper focus, on the speed at which she drives and then how she gets in and out of the car. Kevin Hart has a really funny comedic skit about this, about someone preparing to start driving and someone exiting a car.

It’s a silly label that I’ve assigned to my mom, and then every time I drive with her, I reinforce this belief because I’m hyper focusing on how long it takes her to get her purse together, get in and out of the car, get her seatbelt on, put the car in drive, and do all of that stuff.

If I wasn’t assigning this label to her, none of this would be a problem. But it’s because I’m viewing all of her actions through this lens, through this judgment, that I hyperfocus and I upset myself, right?

So, if I were to get rid of this thought, and choose to think something else instead, I wouldn’t be nearly as annoyed when I drive with her. Because I’m not having this negative thought and viewing everything that she does through that lens of negative belief.

How about the thoughts or the labels you assign to your romantic partner. Do you think that they’re selfish? Do you think that they’re unsupportive? Do you think that they are unhelpful? If you are thinking these things about the person that you’re romantically involved with, notice how you constantly search for evidence that they’re selfish. You’re going to look for all the ways that they’re not holding their own in the relationship.

You’re going to look for all of the ways that they put their needs before you. You’re going to look for all the ways and all the times that they don’t help you versus looking at the times that they do help you.

Now, what’s the problem with assigning these labels? Number one, if you’re assigning a negative label to someone, you’re making yourself feel like shit, okay? I tell my clients all the time, feeling like shit feels like shit. So, you’re causing your own emotional suffering when you do this.

I think a lot of people, the pushback they give me when I invite them to stop assigning labels to the people in their lives, to change the way that they’re thinking about the people in their lives, they’re like, “What am I supposed to do? Just tolerate other people’s behavior and just put up with everything?” It’s not about letting someone else off the hook, it’s about letting yourself off the hook. It’s about not forcing yourself to suffer emotionally when it’s really unnecessary.

So, if you want to feel better, we can’t control what other people do or say. The only thing we can control is how you think about other people. I highly encourage you, and I invite you to entertain the idea of changing the labels that you assign people or just stop assigning labels to them, so you don’t cause yourself emotional suffering that’s completely optional and completely unnecessary.

I also want you to think about, again, how do you show up when you’re feeling these feelings? I want you to get really specific with the emotion that you feel. Remember, it’s a one-word emotion that you feel when you assign these labels to people and when you think these thoughts.

Then, ask yourself, how do I show up in relationship with this person? How do I respond to this person when I’m thinking this thought, when I’m feeling this feeling, if it’s not positive? Then, the label that you’re assigning really doesn’t serve you and you’re doing yourself a disservice by continuing to assign it to someone, because you’re upsetting yourself. You’re not showing up in the way that you want to be showing up.

I want you to be really specific here and get clear when you think that someone is unresponsive or not responsive enough, and you feel that negative feeling, frustrated or annoyed or disrespected. How do you show up when you’re working with them? When you think that your partner is unhelpful, and you feel resentful or disappointed or disrespected or neglected or unsupported? How do you show up?

What do you do? Do you argue with them? Do you withdraw? Do you get passive aggressive? Do you lash out? What do you do? Do you argue more? How does it create more conflict? How does it create more tension? How does it create more of what you don’t want when you’re thinking that your parents are intrusive, and you feel annoyed? What do you do? Do you get combative with them? Do you withdraw? Do you avoid them?

You’re going to start to see how you show up in ways that really don’t create the results that you want, in these different relationships that you have with people. So, what’s the solution here if these thoughts and if these labels don’t serve you?

You’ve got two different options. The first option is that you can just choose to not assign label. You can get rid of the label altogether. One of the ways that you can do this is you can recognize that the way that you’re labeling people assumes that that label is true 100% of the time, right?

It’s not that we’re telling ourselves that they’re sometimes selfish, we’re telling ourselves that they’re selfish 100% of the time. The 100% part is just assumed in the way that we label them. It ends up being really inaccurate because there’s probably plenty of evidence, if you were to look for it intentionally, that you’d be able to find proof to support that someone is selfless. Just like you can find proof to support that they’re selfish.

If you’re thinking that someone’s irresponsible, you can find plenty of proof to support your belief that they’re irresponsible. But if you flip it, you can also find plenty of evidence to support the fact that they’re responsible, or to support the opinion that they’re responsible. So, as an opinion, not a fact.

The truth is, is that people are dynamic, they’re nuanced, and they’re all things. They’re both things, right? We’re a mix. It’s not all or nothing, it’s not black and white, it’s not zero or 100%. So, if you think about that, can you allow yourself to get rid of the label altogether, recognizing that no one is 100% anything? That’s one option, recognizing that your labels are just inaccurate, so can we just get rid of it?

The other option, I call this coaching Mad Libs, that’s just the fun little phrase that I came up with for this, or the way that I think about it in my head. But if you identify the labels that you’re assigning to people… and I like to do this by writing them out. This is one of the times that I do invest the time, and it only takes a few minutes, to just write out what you’re thinking about someone so you can see it in front of you.

When you write it out, I find it so much easier to see it in front of you, written on paper, and to identify all the ways in which that belief is not true. I see it in such a different way when it’s written in front of me, rather than when I do this exercise in my head. So, take the time and write this out.

Pick one person and write out the labels that you’re assigning to them. You’re quickly going to be able to see how the opposite is true, or how something different is true. Again, it’s not actually true, it’s just your opinion. But you’re going to see how you could make an argument in support of a different belief, versus the belief that you’re currently holding.

When you’re doing this, it gives you access to start to try and switch up the way that you’re thinking about this person. What I do, after I’ve written down the labels that I’m assigning to someone, I play the Mad Libs version of this. So, I circle the word. You’re going to circle the term that you’re using to describe the person, you’re going to circle the word that’s the label.

So, “he is arrogant,” arrogant would be the label here that you’re assigning, circle that, and see if you can plug and play different words to change the way that you feel about someone. You’re essentially replacing the label with a label that better serves you.

I recently did this with a client of mine. She was getting ready to do an in-court appearance, she was arguing a motion, and it had been the first time that she was going to be in front of a judge, arguing this type of motion, in a really long time. Because of the pandemic, it had been a while, and she had had a negative experience in front of this judge before. So, she felt particularly anxious about preparing for this motion hearing, going into court in front of this judge.

As we talked about it, I realized that she was assigning certain labels to this judge. One of the labels that she was assigning to this judge was that he was “very aggressive.” So, we circle very aggressive, right? That’s the phrase that we want to swap out. We played with different word choices here, and we ultimately came to, instead of thinking he’s very aggressive, what if you thought he’s very emotional.

It totally changed the way that she felt about the motion hearing and about being in front of this judge. It actually made her giggle, because arguably, you can make the same argument that the person who’s being very aggressive is also being very emotional, right?

There are different ways to think of emotional. I think there’s a feminine connotation often associated with the word “emotional,” with that kind of label. There’s the masculine interpretation of thinking that someone’s very aggressive, but flipping it to something more feminine… This isn’t a knock on feminine attributes, but just the play on words here and replacing “aggressive” with “emotional” made it so much less intimidating for her to appear before the judge.

Rather than being scared or nervous, it’s like almost mildly amused. “Oh, look at this judge not being able to get a handle on their emotions, and not being able to control themselves.” Rather than being something that she needed to be intimidated about, it was something that she almost felt sympathetic about. “Oh, poor judge, not being able to control themselves, and not being able to keep their response controlled or at bay.”

It really empowered her to show up, and prep for that hearing, in a way that felt so much better to her. She ended up killing it. She knocked it out of the park. And part of that is because she chose to assign a different label to this judge in advance of this hearing.

Think about doing the exact same thing with your romantic partner. If you’re thinking that they’re really unhelpful, you’re going to look for all the evidence that supports that belief. But try and swap out a different word, other than “unhelpful.”

For me, one of the ways that I can often get to a different label, get to a different word in the thought Mad Libs, the coaching Mad Libs game, would be to ask myself why I think that they’re that way. Why I think they’re unhelpful. I might be able, in this instance, to get to a thought like, “Oh, well, they don’t know what I need help with.”

So instead of thinking that they’re unhelpful, I might choose to swap that out with “they’re unaware.” They’re unclear on the help that I need or would like. From there, it just puts the onus on me to be better at explaining and asking for the help that I would like. Then, they have more clarity and they’re better informed as to what I’m asking for.

Because no one’s a mind reader. No matter how long you’ve been with someone, they still don’t know what you’re thinking. It’s so much easier if we just tell them and we just ask for what we want, rather than expecting them to read our minds. So, I would just choose to think that they’re unaware or they’re uninformed, and that I can solve that by informing them, just being more clear, and asking for what I want.

Same thing with someone that I might supervise. I might think that they’re incompetent, and that’s not going to make me feel good. I’m going to show up in a pretty negative way when I’m feeling whatever feeling comes from that; frustrated, annoyed, disappointed, discouraged.

Instead of thinking that they’re incompetent, I might think that they’re confused or they’re inexperienced. Then that would make me feel more patient or more curious about how I could approach this situation differently, in order to create a different result.

Okay, so again, try this coaching Mad Libs. Where you identify the sentence, you circle the word that causes the negative emotion, causes you to experience that negative emotion that is your subjective opinion, and see if you can replace it. Try and assign a different label, a more useful, helpful label, to that person.

I promise you, doing this work, identifying the thoughts that you’re thinking about other people, the labels that you’re assigning them, is life changing, and it is simple to do. It has such a massive impact. Just creating awareness around this, alone, will really transform your relationships. How you show up in them, and how you feel about the people in your life on a day-to-day basis.

It is some of the most important work you can do. Okay, from there, just creating that awareness is powerful enough, but you can also choose to stop assigning the label altogether or assign a different one, one that’s more useful, one that’s more helpful, one that’s more positive. Those are your options here. Okay?

So, go out, take some time, and start to identify the labels that you’re assigning to the people in your life. I highly encourage you to knock it off. Stop doing what you’ve been doing, and your relationships will really improve.

Okay, that’s what I’ve got for you this week, my friends. 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.

You’re listening to The Less Stressed Lawyer podcast, Episode 68. Today, we’re talking all about the most important question you can ask 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. Man, I am so excited to record this episode. This is one of my absolute favorite things to talk about. I mentioned in the last episode, in the episode that I talked about setting money goals, when I gave you all my little life update… which I love to do at the start of each podcast episode, like I said, just to bring you along with me, and give you a little behind the scenes look at what’s going on in my life… I talked about how I recently spent some time in northern Michigan.

I got away. I really listened to myself. I knew that I needed a little bit of a breather. I needed some downtime. I just wanted to be with people that I loved. I wanted to catch my breath. I just wanted to chill and enjoy my life for a second. Have some fun, relax, get out of my routine, get away, and just be. Just be with people that I care about. Just be with myself. Just be. I did that. I listened to myself, and I created that opportunity for myself.

I rented a place up north. I took friends up on an invitation to go stay with them for a few days. I made the drive. I took time off of work. I rescheduled some client sessions. I made myself available for those opportunities. I created that opportunity actually, by giving myself the time and the bandwidth and the availability to go spend my time that way.

One thing that was truly not lost on me, and I guess it’s a little coincidental, because all of this was going on around the Fourth of July, which is all about freedom, I realized that I have truly created a life where I’m free to do what I want with my time. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have obligations, that I don’t work, and that I don’t have to work in order to make money. All of those things are still true.

I choose to have those obligations in my life. I’m happy to have them. I’m proud to have them. I love the business that I’ve built for myself. But I also love the freedom that I’ve created for myself. To be able to not have to answer to someone, and to be able to reschedule something when I need to.

To be able to get away. The financial freedom to rent a cottage on a lake at the last minute, and to be able to impulsively drive up north, and do all of that stuff to be able to get away. I’ve created a life that affords me the freedom to spend my time how I want to spend my time.

Because this all coincided with the Fourth of July, and the whole let freedom ring theme, I was thinking about this concept. It made me think of my favorite question, which is what this episode is all about. I’m going to ask you my favorite question.

But I want to give you some background as to where this question came from, how it came to me, how I came to know it, why I ask it of myself, why I think it’s so powerful.

So, to give you a little backstory, y’all know I love a good backstory. But every year I pick a word of the year. One year I picked “Intentional.” I think another year I picked “Sufficient,” and I meant that in a couple of different ways. I meant self-sufficient, as in I can take care of myself and be very reliant on myself. I also meant sufficient as in feeling sufficient. Like, feeling like I had enough of the things that I had, enjoying what I had, rather than feeling like I needed or wanted more.

So intentional, sufficient. I’ve picked different words, but those are the two that really come to mind when I think of the words of the year that I’ve chosen. Then, in 2020, I read a book. It’s a sobriety memoir called We Are the Luckiest.

I read it, actually, while I was detoxing from taking Adderall. For those of you who don’t know, I used to struggle with Adderall addiction. I will do a whole episode all about my struggles with that, and how I overcame it, because I know that a lot of people in the legal industry struggle with that as well. I want to be a resource and an open book about my own struggles with it.

But as I was going through detoxing from Adderall, I read this book called We Are the Luckiest. I’ve also talked, I think, a bit on the podcast about my relationship with alcohol. I’ll do a whole episode on that, as well. But that is something that I’ve also struggled with.

Those two things really went in tandem with one another. I would take Adderall to stay awake, and then I would drink in order to be able to fall asleep. A very ineffective way to cope with my stress. So, those two things really went in tandem with one another.

I’d been sober curious, for a while. I’ve really done a lot of work on my relationship with alcohol. I still do consume alcohol. I don’t like to glamorize drinking alcohol. Again, it is something that I’ve done a lot of conscious, intentional work in addressing my relationship, getting it in a place that feels more maintainable, feels more within my control, feels safer, and sustainable.

As part of that, with my sober curiosity, I chose to read I follow this woman on Instagram. The author’s name is Laura McKowen. She came out with a book called We Are the Luckiest. I forget who else read it, maybe it was Glennon Doyle; who I also love; the author of Love Warrior and Untamed. Love Warrior absolutely changed my life. It was the first time I was ever introduced to the concept that discomfort is something that you need to embrace rather than avoid.

So, I believe Glennon reviewed, We Are the Luckiest. She said that the book was going to save lives, because Glennon’s also sober. Again, there was just a lot that resonated with me, coming from Glennon reviewing this book. So, I decided to order it, and I was reading it as I was detoxing from Adderall.

And I frequently refer to We Are the Luckiest as probably my second favorite book of all time. It’s one of the rawest, most honest, candid, beautiful things that I’ve ever read. I also love a memoir, so it falls right in line with kind of my preference, as far as it comes to literary categories and whatnot.

So, I read, We Are the Luckiest, and as I worked through and addressed my own relationship with alcohol, one of the things that Laura talks about in her book is this fixation with throwing a label on your drinking. So many people struggle with addressing their relationship with alcohol, because they don’t want to label themselves to be an alcoholic. Because that word has a lot of negative connotations with it. It tends to have a lot of judgment with it.

She explains that the proper thing to focus on really isn’t whether or not you consider yourself an alcoholic, that there’s a better question to ask yourself. The question that she poses is the question: But are you free? Regardless of what you want to call yourself, do you have a problem, do you not have a problem, are you an alcoholic, are you not an alcoholic. That really doesn’t matter.

The question is: But are you free? Do you feel like you’re free from alcohol, it’s hold that it has on you? Does it feel like it controls you sometimes? Do you feel out of control with it? Or do you feel free? And for me, because I’ve struggled with that word, it doesn’t feel like it’s the right fit for me, alcoholism, or being an alcoholic, that never felt like it aligned for me.

The question, but are you free, was so powerful. Because for me, especially at the time where I was reading this book, my answer was no. That also, especially, rang true with my relationship with Adderall as well. Although, I do use the word addiction when it comes to my use of Adderall in the past. I don’t take it anymore.

I didn’t mean to make that sound like I take it now, and that I’ve fixed my relationship with it. I have fixed my relationship with it by abstaining, completely, from taking it. Because I do consider myself to have an addiction with it. That’s not something that I can take sustainably, or that I would even want to take sustainably, because my life is so much better now that I no longer take it.

But anyways, I’m reading this book, We Are the Luckiest, and the author Laura McKowen poses this question: But are you free? Honestly, when I read it, I knew in that moment that that question is probably the most important question any of us can ever ask ourselves. It doesn’t just need to come to the topic of substance abuse or drinking alcohol or anything else that you take.

It’s such a beautiful question for, really, each and every area of your life. So, after I read this book, I decided that “Free” was going to be my word for the year. I want to say it was my word of the year in 2021, although I can’t remember if that’s true or not. I know it was my word in 2022, and I know it was my word this year, for 2023.

Honestly, I think it will be the word of the year for the rest of my life. It really is like the word of my life. It’s the pursuit of my lifetime; to become freer and freer. To ask that question of myself, but are you free, in whatever area of my life I’m examining at that time. The reason that I love this word and this question so much, is that I think it really articulates and captures the goals that I’ve set for myself.

So, one of my goals is to be financially free. This year, my goal is to make a million dollars. That’s just the tip of the iceberg for the financial goals that I have for myself over the course of my lifetime. But I’m striving to become financially free.

I also want to be geographically free. I’ve done a lot of work this year, especially since December of 2022, to become more geographically free. I now move every six months. I am in furnished condos. It makes it a lot easier for me to travel from place to place, because I have the goal of being geographically free. I want to move closer and closer towards a more nomadic lifestyle.

It doesn’t just stop there. Those are two of the main goals, that I’ve set for myself within the past 12 months, that I’m actively working towards and making extreme progress on. But it doesn’t stop there. For me, to be truly free includes being free from the weight of other people’s opinions. Being free from the excuses that people make for why they aren’t where they want to be.

Being free from crutches and coping mechanisms like alcohol, Adderall, or other things like that, that people use to tolerate the parts of their lives that they don’t love. Being free from judgment and ridicule and doubt. Or from being free of my own self-judgement, self-ridicule, and self-doubt. Being free from regret and worry and fear.

Or free from society’s expectations. Those external pressures that we put on ourselves, that we take on, when we think that we need to do things because it’s how we’re “supposed” to do them, how we should do them. Being free from traditional norms that might not serve me anymore, or ever, for that matter.

Being free in my body is a huge goal of mine. I’ve spent a lot of my life, more than I care to admit, criticizing and going to war with my body instead of being grateful, loving and at peace with it. That’s something that I’m really working to change, and to become free of, that self-criticism. That unnecessary judgment. That meanness that we can all direct at ourselves. I want that to end. I want to be free of that. That’s one of my goals.

Being free to love, boldly, passionately, uninhibitedly. Free of embarrassment or of making a fool of yourself. Free of worrying about that, is what I mean. Being free to explore this world, every part of it that I want to explore; nature, hobbies, adventures, myself, all of it. Being free to be unapologetically myself, to really know myself, to love myself, to enjoy being myself.

To become more me, and more free to be me, every single day. That is what I’m pursuing in my lifetime, this year, last year, next year, in all the years to come. I am pursuing free. That’s my goal from this point forward for my life.

The way that I’m going to get there is really quite simple. It’s by asking myself this question over and over and over again. You know I always say this, if you want better answers, you’ve got to ask better questions. So, the question that’s going to guide me is very simple. I got it from Laura. It’s the question: But are you free?

So, whatever area of my life I’m working on, whether it’s free of other people’s judgments or free in my body or free in relationships, free to love, free to travel, financially free, free of other people’s expectations. No matter what it is, my question is, but am I free? But are you free?

If the answer in any particular area of my life is no, then I know exactly where my work is. My work is to focus on addressing my mindset, and changing my mindset, to feel freer, to change the way that I think, to change the way that I feel. Ultimately, to change what I do. Right? To take the action that enables me to become more free.

What do I need to do to become more free? To create the result of being freer? So, I’ll use this question to guide me. I currently use it, and I’ll continue to use it. It is so, so impactful. This is going to be a short episode because this question is so powerful, I don’t need to overcomplicate it. But now I want to ask you this question: Are you free?

Really be honest with yourself. I want you to take a second, if you don’t want to be… I almost get choked up when I ask this question. It’s such a powerful question. It’s the secret. It’s like the key to unlocking the life that you’re meant to live. It’s so, so powerful.

When I got the idea to record this episode, I was just so excited to record it and to ask you this question. So, you can have this question, and you can bring it into your own life. The same way I’ve brought it into mine once I borrowed it from Laura. I hope you borrow it from Laura. I hope you borrow it from me.

Are you free? Are you free to do what you love? Are you free to work when you want to work? Are you financially free? Are you free from the weight of other people’s opinions? Or do you still care what they think? Are you still letting their opinions, their judgments control you? Are you free from making excuses for why you aren’t where you want to be?

Or are you taking radical ownership of why you are where you are? Why you have what you have? Why you don’t have what you don’t have? Are you owning that? Are you being radically honest with yourself? Are you free from the crutches and the coping mechanisms that people use to tolerate the parts of their lives that they don’t love?

Or are you buffering with the booze, with the food, with that social media addiction of yours, with the Netflix, with sleeping? Are you buffering, are you escaping the parts of your life that you don’t love? Are you tolerating aspects that you don’t enjoy? That you don’t prefer? Are you free from judgment, ridicule, and doubt?

Are you free from your own self judgement, self-ridicule, and self-doubt? Are you free from regret? Are you free from worry? Are you free from fear? Or are you beholden to those things? Are you letting them control you? Are you free from society’s expectations? Or are you living under the “should?” Is the “should” just suffocating you? Are you free from the traditional norms that don’t serve you?

The expectations, the rules that you no longer want to subscribe to, are you still subscribing to them? Are you still living your life in accordance with them, even though they don’t align with the life that you want? Are you free in your body? Or are you like I have been in the past, criticizing it endlessly, going to war with it? Or are you grateful for it, loving of it, and at peace with it?

Are you free to love who you want to love, the way you want to love? Free of embarrassment? Free to love boldly, passionately, uninhibitedly? Are you free to explore this world, nature, hobbies, adventures, yourself, all of it? Are you free to be unapologetically you?

Are you free to be yourself, the version of you that you like the most? The version of yourself that feels the most authentic? The version of yourself that you prefer? The one that you want to be the most? The version of you that you’ve been longing to step into? Are you free to be that you?

Being free is the pursuit of a lifetime. It is the thing that I want most for my life, and every day, I become more of it. Because I work at it. I ask myself this question, and then I pursue it relentlessly. Being free is also the thing that I want most for your life, too.

I want you to take a second and answer this question: But are you free? If you don’t like your answer, you know where your work is. Let me be clear, it’s time for you to get to work. If you don’t like your answer, the time is now. It’s time to get to work.

I promise you; nothing changes in your life if you don’t change it. If you don’t decide right this minute to do something differently, to pursue free the same way I pursue it; intentionally, every single day, with this relentless passion to become more of the most beautiful thing that you can become; freer each and every day.

Make the decision to pursue the life where you get to be free. The life where you are free. In all of the ways that I mentioned in this episode. That’s what I want for you, to be free in each and every one of those ways, and in more. I’m sure you can think of your own ways, the areas of your life where you currently don’t feel free right now.

I want you to think what would be different about your life, what would your life be like, if you were free in those ways? If you were free in those areas? freedom is available to you, in every single one of those areas. I promise you.

You do have to work for it, though. I do not want to be unclear about that. I want to be as direct as I possibly can be. It is available to you. Freedom is available to you, but you have to work for it. It is waiting for you, but you have to claim it. That is what’s true.

If you want to get started, if you answered your question, and you don’t like your answer, and you want to do something about it, and you want to take me up on the invitation to do something about it right now, right this minute, I want you to join me inside the August class of The Less Stressed Lawyer Mastermind.

That is the place where you are going to learn how to relentlessly pursue free. The place where you’re going to learn how to live a life on your own terms. How to stop caring about what other people think. How to work when you want, how to do what you love, how to accept yourself and be more of yourself, and get rid of all of the “shoulds” that have been holding you back and limiting you.

To get over the buffering, all of the ways that you self-sabotage, and the ways that you cope and tolerate the parts of your life that you don’t love. I’m going to teach you how to be free from all of that. To be more authentically and unapologetically you; the you that you want to be.

If you are ready to get to work, and I know you are, I know you’re ready to make this change; you’re sick of doing it the other way. You’ve got to join me inside the August class of The Less Stressed Lawyer Mastermind. I cannot wait for the next time I ask you this question, but are you free for you to have a different answer. An answer that you love.

Alright, my friends. That’s what I have for you this week. I hope you have a beautiful week. I’ll 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 67. Today, we’re talking all about setting money goals. 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.

Hello, hello, hello. How are you? I hope you are doing well. I feel like it’s been forever since I’ve talked to you. I’m so excited to continue the Money Mindset series that I started. This is the last episode in that series. Before I dive into that, I just want to give you a little life update and talk about what’s been going on in my summer because I love to just take you with me along with my travels.

I’ve actually been traveling a decent amount for pleasure, not for work. Most of the travel that I do is for work. I decided to just take a chance to catch my breath, and take some time off, both before, during and after the Fourth of July holiday. So, I went up north to Lake Huron, on the east side of the state of Michigan, and rented the cutest Airbnb right on the water. It was absolutely amazing. I did that before the Fourth of July.

Then, I just got back from going up to visit friends of mine at their cottage in Baldwin, Michigan. If you’ve never been to Northern Michigan during the summer, or just Michigan in summer, really, I can’t rave about it enough. You’re absolutely missing out if you’ve never experienced the Great Lakes. Put it on your bucket list, your travel to-do list. It is really, really incredible here.

Every time that I get to one of the great lakes, or even the lake that we go to in Baldwin, which is called Big Star lake, it always blows my mind how magnificent Michigan is. I know that there’s been an influx of people from the West Coast, buying up property in Michigan because it’s pretty inexpensive comparatively speaking. They’re seeing what all of the magic is about. It is really incredible here.

Y’all know I don’t like being cold, and I don’t love Michigan winters, but summer in Michigan is truly magical. So, if you’ve never experienced it, put it on your list. Make sure that you make it a point to get here. If you want recommendations reach out, I love talking travel tips. That’s what I’ve been up to lately. I’ve really just been giving myself a chance to catch my breath.

I have had a really full 12 months since I kicked off The Less Stressed Lawyer Mastermind. My first round of that was the end of June last year. So, it’s been a full year, and a little bit extra, that I’ve been creating them, putting them together, hosting them, selling them, marketing them, all of that stuff. So, it feels like it’s been a really full year in that respect because I added that component to my business.

I’ve also just had a little, I don’t know, emotional turmoil is probably the best way to phrase it, having lost one of my pets. So, I just gave myself a chance to decompress, catch my breath, and spend time with people that I really, really, really love. I’m wishing you the same if your summer hasn’t included enough of that yet. I hope you make time for it.

If you want help making time for it, then you’ve got to binge this podcast because I talk a ton about how to make time for yourself and what’s important to you. You can also take this work to the next level by working with me inside The Less Stressed Lawyer Mastermind. But I highly encourage you, if you don’t feel like you have the freedom to spend your time the way that you want to spend your time.

That’s a skill that you can learn to develop. It’s a skill that I teach you inside my program. So, I want to make sure that you give yourself that gift, and have that opportunity. I’ve been taking advantage of it. It’s a skill I had to learn how to develop, and I’ve been able to do that.

Now that I’ve had a little bit of time off to catch my breath, we’re back. We’re in full swing recording this podcast episode for you, and getting ready to really dive in deep to the last two weeks of open enrollment for the mastermind. So, I’m ready to kick it into full gear again.

But it’s really good to have that ebb and flow, and to be able to tune in and check in with yourself and pay attention. What do I need in this moment? How can I give that to myself? Taking advantage of the freedom that you have to give yourself. Whatever it is that you need to meet the moment.

So, for me, it was a little fresh air, getting out in nature, getting up north, and now we’re back at it. Without further ado, let’s dive in to today’s episode. Like I said, we are continuing the Money Mindset series that I started.

We’ve talked about money habits that you have, overspending, underearning, your money mindset, and the thoughts that you have about money. Shame around spending money was what we talked about in the last episode, and I’m concluding the series with setting money goals, okay?

I’m really a huge advocate of setting money goals. I watch a lot of people have drama about setting money goals. People avoid it. They don’t do it. I wanted to make sure I address this head on because it’s really hard to go somewhere quickly… And when I say go somewhere, I mean, achieve a specific goal. It’s hard to do that intentionally if you’re not intentional about setting the goal in the first place.

It’s much harder to arrive at a desired destination if you don’t decide where you want to end up on the front end, right? Think about driving somewhere. If you don’t know where you’re going, it’s going to be really hard for you to end up at a particular location. So, we don’t want you setting out and embarking on money goals haphazardly.

We want you to be really intentional. The reason that we want you to be intentional is because it’s going to help you arrive at your desired destination when it comes to your money goals, so much faster than if you just fly by the seat of your pants and wing it.

This is not an area in life that we want to wing, we do want to be intentional when it comes to setting and achieving the goals that you set for yourself when it comes to money. Now, a big reason people don’t like to set money goals is because they’re afraid to fail at achieving them. This is where your perfectionism really pops up and makes an appearance here.

So, if you’re resistant to setting money goals, if you think about setting it, and then you avoid actually picking a goal and working towards it, it is likely because you have a fear of failure. You’re afraid to set a goal and not hit it. I was recently working, in person, with my business coach; we have breakout instructors. The coach that is in charge of my breakout room, her name’s Lindsay Dotzlaf.

One of the things that she said, which was really jarring to me… Because I tend to not use the word “failure.” I truly believe that you can always only be winning or learning, and that you have to quit in order to fail, because failure requires an endpoint from which to measure. That’s my philosophy on failure.

Her philosophy on failure was a little bit different. She said that she loves to fail. That was such a different way than I think most people think about failing. It really struck me and opened my eyes that you could actually fall in love with failing.

The reason she said that is because she learns so much when she fails, that she really does see failure as the path forward to achieving what she wants to achieve. She just wants to fail as quickly as possible, to learn from it, and then leverage that learning in order to improve and get to her goal more quickly.

Now, most people don’t adopt that mindset, they don’t have that mindset. Then, when they think about setting a goal, they freak themselves out. They worry about not hitting it, instead of not using it as a weapon against yourself, but using it as a way to learn, evaluate, audit, adapt, and continue to improve until you get where you want to go.

People also like to say that having a money goal doesn’t make a difference, that they will make the same amount whether or not they set a money goal. Or they’ll save the same amount, whether or not they set a money goal. I want to encourage you to explore the truth behind that. My guess is that is likely not true. Actually, I’ll go so far as to say that’s just not true. I don’t even need to guess. That’s not true, and that’s really just your brain protecting you from that failure that becomes possible when you set a goal.

So, you want to make sure that you’re not letting your perfectionism drive the bus here. All right? Allow yourself to get out of your own way and focus on setting a specific goal that’s measurable, objective, and attainable.

Now, the reason that it’s important to set a goal, one that’s specific, measurable, objective, and attainable, is because you get so much more intentional when you know what you’re working towards. When it comes to money, money is a math problem. I like to say that with money and time, there are two different categories.

There’s the math, and then there’s the mind drama. The mind drama is the thought work, the mindset, the thinking, and the feeling, that drives action that you take and produces the results that you have. So, that mindset is one category, and that’s where coaching comes in.

But with the math, numbers don’t lie. So, you want to get clear on the math. When you’re not clear on the math, because you haven’t set a goal, it’s so much easier to lose sight of the progress that you’re making, to get discouraged, to get frustrated, to get confused about how to get where you want to go.

You really want to make sure that you will eliminate all of that, as much as you possibly can, by just setting an intentional goal. So, I’m going to give you some examples of goals that you can set, and how to set them specifically enough to where you get really clear on the math.

Okay, so the biggest goal that I think people make when it comes to money is making a certain amount of it. You want to be clear on the math here, all right? There are multiple reasons why you can’t just say, “I want to make more money,” and leave it at that.

Number one, as you make progress, and as you make more, your brain is going to get in the way and it’s going to discount the progress that you make. So, you will end up being underwhelmed or feeling unaccomplished. Like you haven’t made enough, that you haven’t made enough progress, that you haven’t gotten where you want to go, because you were never clear on where you wanted to go in the first place.

In order to keep track of your progress and to feel accomplished, to just even enable yourself to feel accomplished, you want to make sure that you set a specific money goal. How much more do you want to make this year?

Then, once you’ve got that number in mind, you’ve got to make the math work. So, you have to get clear on how exactly will you make that amount. What do you sell? How much of it do you need to sell? What’s the price that you sell it at? You need to come up with all of those specifics.

How frequently do you need to sell the thing that you’re selling? How much of it do you need to sell? It’s a specific math equation that ultimately adds up to whatever your money goal is. So, you have to make sure that the math works.

If you’re like me, at least in part of my business where I do one-on-one coaching, I have a finite amount of time that I can sell. I am still in the space where I’m exchanging time for money. That’s very true with most of the lawyers that I work with, as well.

There’s a specific number of hours that they’re likely to bill, or they have a goal for the number of hours that they want to bill, and they have a billable hour rate. That’s a mathematical equation that comes out to a certain number of dollars that you’re going to make each year. At least when it comes to the gross amount that you’re going to create from the bills that you send out to clients.

Same thing if you do flat rate work. You’re still essentially exchanging time for money. Because the flat-fee work takes a certain amount of your time, and then you’re maxing out what you’re charging for that flat-fee arrangement.

What you’re making, with the time that you spend, it’s essentially still a billable hour model, even if it doesn’t feel like it. You’re going to be capped on the number of hours that you can work to deliver that flat-fee service.

So, when you set a specific goal, you can get clear on whether or not your math works. Now, if you’re also like me, which this is the second part of my business, you have a scalable business model. So, my group coaching program, The Less Stressed Lawyer Mastermind is a scalable program, which means I don’t exchange time for money.

That group can just get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, without me needing to devote more and more and more time at that same exchange rate. Okay? That is a scalable offer.

Most attorneys that I work with don’t have scalable offers unless they have a legal subscription service. Which is more of a newer type business model that is becoming more popular in the industry as of late, because it is scalable, and it doesn’t require you to exchange time for money.

So, if you have that, you still need to make the math work because you need to be clear on what can you expect to make, how many people can you expect to sign into whatever program it is that you’re offering. Are you just picking numbers out of thin air?

I see that happen a lot, especially with newer business owners. They just pick numbers that sound good rather than basing it off of what they can expect; past data, their experience, what it’s taken them to sell thus far, how much they’ve sold in the past, whether they’re likely to repeat that in the future, whether it’s likely to increase, by how much is it likely to increase.

Those are all data driven decisions that you’ve got to conduct some experiments in order to gather the data in the first place. But then, once you’ve got that data, you can use it to inform the projections you make and the goals that you set moving forward. You want to make sure that you’re being realistic. Otherwise, you’re going to set goals, not hit them, and it’s going to feel terrible.

This could have all been avoided, but you set a bad goal to begin with. So, you want to make sure they’re specific, measurable, objective, and attainable. I recently had a conversation with someone, and they were just getting ready to start a new business. I asked them what their goal was for the year. They gave me a number that was in the multiple six figures by the end of the year.

I’m not saying that that’s completely impossible, but I coach a ton of people, both in my own business and in the contract work that I’ve done for several years now, helping brand new entrepreneurs make their first dollars in their business.

What I know to be pretty common, is the ramp up period that it takes when you’re marketing yourself in a new business, marketing a new offer, or selling a new service. It’s going to take time for people to come to know you. For them to come to trust you in order for them to work with you. You have to account for that ramp up time.

You also have to figure out, what am I selling? How much of it am I likely to sell, when I’m being brand new in a business? I just realized that the number that this person had chosen was wholly unrealistic, for where they were at in their entrepreneurial journey.

So, when you’re starting out, if you’re brand new at whatever it is you’re selling, rather than setting a lofty money goal, I suggest that people start with much smaller increments. Because you just need to learn how to create money in the first place. Okay?

I learned something sort of similar from my business coach when I first joined her entry level program. She has a program that’s called 2k for 2k, and she teaches you how to make your first $2,000. I know $2,000 may not sound sexy to someone, but this is what I’ll tell you. If you learn how to make it once, you’ll know how to make it again. That’s the whole concept, you just want to learn how to create those initial dollars.

You want to learn how to make your first sale. You want to learn how to sign your first client. So, if you are doing family law services and you do flat rate divorces, whatever amount that you charge in the very, very beginning, rather than setting $100,000 or a $250,000 monetary goal for the year, I would just focus on making whatever that first flat rate is.

Let’s say it’s $5,000. I would just focus on making your first $5,000, and then I’d see how long it takes you to make it. Then, I would set the goal to make it again in half the time, or to make double that in the same amount of time. Okay? I like to set the goal of never doing more than double what I did previously. It keeps me out of hustle, and it keeps my business feeling very calm.

So, if you made $100,000 one year, the next year, make your goal $200,000. Or make $100,000 in half the time. But either way, you’re learning how to grow at a pace that is sustainable, and it doesn’t break your business model.

When you get into a situation where you can scale, whatever it is that you’re offering, if your business or your practice is set up that way, then you’re in a little bit of a different boat. But if you’re exchanging time for money, you’re either increasing your prices to do double or you’re increasing your workload to do more than double.

So, you don’t want to exceed that. It just gets you into a place where you’re likely to overwork and be at risk of burnout. Now, like I said, when you’re just getting started, start with that smaller monetary amount. You can set that goal, “Oh, I want to make this amount in a month. I want to make this amount in a week. I want to make this amount in this quarter.” But start small, that way you don’t overwhelm yourself and get discouraged.

What I typically see people do, is they’ll embark on a goal, it doesn’t go the way that they want it to, they get frustrated, they get discouraged, they start to feel inadequate and confused about how to get to where they want to go, and then they abandon the goal rather than staying curious and sticking with it.

So, you don’t want to weaponize really lofty goals against yourself. I’m all for dreaming big, but your big dreams need to make sense. You’ve got to be clear on the math. Like I said, you want to make sure that your goal is measurable, that you’ve got a specific monetary amount, that it’s specific, and it’s objective and attainable. Attainable is really important here. You have to make sure the math works.

You’ve got to figure out whatever your equation is, to make sure that you can sell enough of the services that you provide, in order to hit that monetary amount. If you don’t have the time available, you don’t have enough hours in the day, in the week, in the month, in the year, in order to hit your goal at the current rate that you’re selling your time or your services at, something’s got to change.

You either need to increase your prices, you need to reduce your goal, or you need to work more. But obviously, time is finite so you’re going to eventually cap out. You want to make sure that you’re not setting yourself up to fail right off the get go because your goal isn’t attainable, because the math doesn’t work. Make sure you get clear on the math.

Then, from there, once you’ve set the goal, you want to manage your mindset. You’ve got to do a thought download. Get clear. What are all of your thoughts about your ability to reach your goal, to achieve your goal? Are your thoughts positive or are they negative?

If they’re negative, you’ve got to clean up your thinking. You can’t reach a goal with negative thinking; it’s not going to work because our thoughts create our results. So, you want to get clear on what is it that you’re currently thinking, and then, the better question, what do you need to think instead, in order to achieve your desired result? In order to make the money that you decided to make?

Now, this should go without saying, but I will just reiterate it here. When you’ve gotten clear on the math, you should have come up with a plan for how you’re going to achieve your money goal. But if you have not come up with a plan yet, if getting clear on the math didn’t involve any planning, you’ve got to come up with your plan for how you’re going to get across the finish line.

How exactly are you going to create that money? Do you need to market yourself? Is there something that you need to do? Do you need to increase your rates? Do you need to stop underearning in all the ways that I talked about a few episodes ago?

You’ve got to be clear on what it’s going to take for you to achieve your goal. And then, you’ve got to put that plan into action. Remember, whenever we’re setting and achieving goals, we’re really just conducting a big experiment. So, you’re going to try and achieve your goal by implementing your plan. But it’s just a hypothesis.

You’re going to also evaluate. Once you’ve started to implement your plan, figure out, is it working? What’s working? What’s not working? Is there anything that you need to do differently? If you do need to do something differently, rather than getting discouraged and quitting, you want to stick with the same money goal. Don’t change the goal. There’s nothing wrong with your goal.

If your goal is specific, measurable, objective, and attainable, it’s a perfectly fine goal. Don’t change it and move the goalpost, move the horizon. You don’t want to do that. Stick with the same goal so you learn how to create that amount of money. All right?

If you need to audit and adapt and make changes, tweak your hypothesis, and give it another go, do that, stick with it. That’s how you achieve money goals. You’re not going to achieve the goals that you set for yourself if you constantly keep changing them. So, set the goal, set it once, and leave it alone. Then, just get to work on finding new ways to solve for how you cross the finish line with whatever goal you set for yourself.

Okay, so that’s what you need to know when it comes to setting money goals, when it comes to creating money. There are also some other ways that you can set money goals. Let’s talk about those briefly. I think they tend to be easier. Probably the most complicated type of money goal is where you’re in the money creation process.

Now, other ways that you can achieve money goals might be with paying off debt. You want to make sure that your debt payoff goals are also specific, measurable, objective, and attainable. I need to be able to come in and measure the progress that you’re making. So, it can’t just be to have less debt.

Be specific; how much debt do you want to pay off? Do you want to be debt free? When do you want to be debt free by? How much would you like to pay off this year? What type of debt are you paying off? Is it credit card debt? Is it your mortgage? Get specific. When are we going to do it by? Include the time element here so we know we can run that math equation and get clear on the numbers.

How much do you need to pay off each month? You can measure your progress. Are you on track? Are you behind? Are you ahead of schedule? Also, you need to make sure it’s attainable. So often, what I see is that people will want to pay off debt at a rate that is not consistent with the amount that they earn.

Then, they feel discouraged that they still have debt. Well, of course, you’re still going to have debt. You can’t pay off as much as you want to pay off based on your current earning capacity, your earning ability. So, you have to make the math work.

How much money do you need to live off of? You net a certain amount in a paycheck, or in the money that you create in your business and your practice. Your take-home, what comes out of it?

There’s going to be your non-negotiable expenses, the ones that you’re going to incur every month, and they’re not going away. You can’t cut that spending, or if you could you don’t want to, so it’s pretty static. What is that amount of money? What else do you need to live off of? Are there other things that you need to put money towards?

Then, after that, you’re going to have money left over. Based on the money that you have left over, what can you devote to paying off debt? You want to make sure that the amount that you decide to put towards your debt payoff strategy doesn’t exceed the amount of money that you have available. Again, we have to make sure the math works. We have to make sure that the goal you’re setting is attainable.

Sure, it might sound lovely to be debt free by the end of the year, but you have to make sure that you have the financial capability to actually achieve that. Otherwise, you’re going to feel really discouraged and frustrated.

The same thing is true about saving money. So, you want to make sure it’s specific, measurable, objective, and attainable. It can’t just be ‘I want to save more money.’ How much do you want to save? In what time period do you want to save it? What is it going to look like? How will you save it? Where will that money go? Is it possible for you to save at that rate?

Again, it’s a mathematical equation. There’s a certain amount, divided by the time periods. So, per month, per year, per week, whatever that is for you. But you’ve got to make sure that you have that money available to you in order to achieve the goal. Again, get clear on running that mathematical equation so you can set yourself up for success.

Now, another big way that perfectionism pops up here, especially with paying off debt, saving money, or investing. If you want to invest in the stock market, or invest in retirement accounts, or any other type of investing that you want to do. People will often get discouraged that they’re not able to make as much progress as they would like to make.

Instead of proceeding anyways, and just being a little underwhelmed by the progress that you can make and moving forward regardless, people will choose to not move forward at all. They won’t pay off debt. They won’t save money. They won’t invest any of it. Because it’s not sufficient, it’s not “enough,” they don’t get started at all.

That is, as they say, ‘penny wise, pound foolish.’ Don’t do that to yourself. That’s your brain really being committed to all-or-nothing thinking. It’s a very perfectionistic tendency to want to do that. To want to be in that all-or-nothing, black-and-white space. But don’t allow yourself to indulge.

Getting started and making progress is better than not getting started at all. Even if it’s underwhelming, even if it’s not what you want it to be, you will be so glad that you moved forward in spite of your discouragement, or your disappointment or your frustration that it’s not “enough.”

So, be on the lookout for that. Future ‘you’ will thank you for gagging and going through your frustration and disappointment, and just getting started. Even if it doesn’t look like exactly what you want it to look like. You’ll be okay. It is fine for you to be slightly dissatisfied with it not looking exactly like what you want it to look like. All right?

So, check in with yourself now. We’ve gone through why people don’t set money goals. Why you want to make sure that you do set money goals. Then, how to set them. You want to make sure they’re specific, measurable, objective, and attainable. So, now check in with yourself.

What do you want your money goal to be? I don’t want you to leave this episode without one. It doesn’t have to be the “best” money goal ever. Don’t give yourself a lot of time to indulge in this. Also, don’t allow yourself to say, “I don’t know.” You do know.

It doesn’t have to be the “right” answer. There is no right answer to this. It’s just arbitrary. You just get to pick the number that you want to pick. So, pick a number, whether it’s with creating money, paying off debt, saving money, or investing. Pick one of those four. You don’t have to pick all four, just pick one for now, and set a money goal.

Pick the number. Pick the first number that pops into your mind, if that’s what comes up for you, if that’s what’s easiest. Get out of your own way. Let this be easy and just pick the number. Now, once you’ve picked the number, check and make sure that it’s attainable. Check and make sure the math works.

How will you get to that number? Does it work? It’s a quick, easy, little mathematical equation. I think I’ve said this once, but if not, I’ll reiterate it just to be safe and sure; you are not allowed to say that you don’t like math. I hear that all the time from attorneys. We’re not going to repeat that anymore.

What I like to say is, “If you don’t like math, you don’t like money.” My guess is you probably like money or you want to like money, and you want to have more of it. So, if that’s the case, you have to get over that limiting belief that you’re not good at math, that you don’t like math; that’s got to go.

You want to like math, so you can like money. You want to like math, so you can have more of it. Run the mathematical equation. What are you selling? How much of it do you have to sell? In what timeframe? What does that look like? Is it feasible? Is it possible? Can you get there?

If it’s saving money, paying off debt, investing, how much? In what timeframe? At what frequency? What’s that going to look like? Where do you want to be by the end of the year? Where do you want to be by the end of 2024?

These are really fun things to think about. So, take a second and just give yourself permission to decide what is your current money goal. If you need to pause this episode and take a second before I wrap up, go ahead, and do that. But I want to make sure that you’re very clear on what it is that you’re working towards, from this point forward.

Then, once you’ve got the goal in your head, you can figure out exactly, what’s my strategy in order to achieve that goal? What’s my plan? Come up with that plan and put it into place.

Now, I will just say this, if you need help coming up with a plan to get yourself across the finish line that you just identified for yourself… If you want to learn how to be better with money, how to save more money, how to reduce the debt that you have, how to pay off debt, how to earn more money, how to create more money, if you want help with all of that…

If you haven’t been great at hitting your money goals in the past, and you want to learn how to do that effectively, I am the person to help you. This is exactly what I teach people how to do in The Less Stressed Lawyer Mastermind. So, make sure, while enrollment is still open… It closes July 21… Make sure you go to TheLessStressedLawyer.com/mastermind and apply to join the August 2023 class, all right?

We will work on getting you across the finish line when it comes to your own money goals. We’ll identify them together if you need help with that. We’ll formulate the plan that you’re going to implement, in order to achieve it. Then, I’m going to support you every step of the way as you implement those plans, in order to earn more, save more, and have less debt. Really get you to where you want to be when it comes to money.

The time of you not having a money goal is behind you. No more of that. We’re going to get intentional when it comes to making, having, earning, and spending money. That starts now. Like I said, if you want my help, that’s what I’m here for, all right?

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

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 66. Today, we’re talking all about shame around spending money. 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? I hope your week is off to a marvelous start. I’m so excited to talk about today’s topic. We are continuing on in our Money Mindset series. So, I talked to you about your thoughts about money. And then, we talked about some of the problems that come up with money, specifically overspending. And then, even more importantly, underearning.

I broke down all the different ways in which you might be underearning, and we went through how to stop overspending and how to stop underearning. Today, I want to talk about another problem, which is a little bit more of an ancillary issue than the main problems that we’ve discussed thus far in this series. But I do see it come up pretty frequently from my clients.

I think it’s really important to talk about, because people who struggle with this really end up depriving themselves of some really meaningful experiences, of a lot of transformation, of a higher quality life. I know that money can get a bad rap, right? People tend to say that money doesn’t buy happiness. But money buys a lot of things that makes happiness more easily attainable.

I’m not saying money, in and of, itself makes you happier. But money provides you with access to different experiences, a lot of different support that you might not otherwise have, different help that can help make your life easier or more simplified or more streamlined. It buys you freedom, which in a lot of cases does actually lead to happiness.

But one of the problems that I see that people encounter when they’re not dealing with overspending or underearning and they have the money to spend on themselves, or they have access to the money in some way… Maybe it’s through credit or something like that, pulling money out of savings. It’s not budgeted, right? So many people struggle to spend money on themselves if it’s not “in their budget”, but they do have access to the money in some way.

What ends up happening is they don’t spend money on themselves to buy experiences or things that they want. And they don’t spend the money because they have shame around spending it on themselves. Okay, so this episode is actually inspired by a conversation that I had with someone who’s become a really good friend of mine.

We actually weren’t that close at the time. But last summer, I was in Florida, in Orlando, with my business coach and a bunch of other coaches and entrepreneurs that are all part of that business coaching program. I was walking up to the pool; it was after the event had ended. I always stay a couple extra days just to soak up all the learning, really let it sink in, and spend some time with my peers.

So, I’m walking up to the pool and one of the women who was in the program, who I had gotten to know over the course of this trip, she asked me a really frank question. She was like, “Hey, I want to pick your brain about spending money because I have a lot of shame around spending money. And I think you don’t. I think that you don’t have a problem spending money. I really want to adopt your mindset when it comes to spending money on myself.”

I said, “You are absolutely right. I don’t have shame around spending money. I’m definitely the person that you want to talk to.” So, we had a really long talk. We discussed some of her fears that she had around spending and how she was raised, which was very similar to the way that I was raised. So, I really understood her mindset and where she was coming from.

Then I explained to her how I think about spending money. We compared and contrasted our different viewpoints, and she could see how I don’t have shame because of the way that I think about it. Because remember, our thoughts cause our feelings.

So, if you’re feeling ashamed around spending, the spending itself is neutral. It’s just your thoughts that are creating that shame. Because we have different thoughts about spending. We have different emotions that come when we do.

Some of her concerns were the exact same concerns that I see time and time again, with my clients. They’re also some of the concerns that I’ve had to unpack myself. I don’t struggle with this a ton, but every once in a while it does make an appearance.

I have the tools, through coaching, to be able to unpack it, understand what’s going on, and to be able to work through it. To decide if I want to keep the shame, which I very rarely ever do. If I think the shame doesn’t serve me, of course, I want to get rid of it. And I want to transition my thinking to cultivate a different emotion instead.

So, if you feel like you frequently deprive yourself of the things that you want in life, if you’re digging deep and you’re taking that internal inventory, and you know when you do that, you find that shame is the reason that you don’t spend money on yourself.

You feel ashamed spending money on yourself; guilty, indulgent, unworthy, undeserving, impractical, irresponsible, selfish. Any of those emotions, if you feel that way, that really is the more specific version of just feeling shame around spending. Shame is this big category. And then, there are all these different other emotions that kind of fall within that shame framework.

If you feel those emotions, when it comes to spending money on yourself, this episode is definitely for you. Okay? It’s so important to unpack this, to unravel it, and to dismantle it, so you can start providing yourself with the things that you want in your life. With the experiences that you want in your life. With the type of life that you want to live.

A really good friend of mine, she’s also a coach, she actually is a money coach. She works with people on their money mindset. One of the things that she says, and I love this. Her name is Nicole, she likes to say that life is bought. I tend to agree with her. Our lives are bought.

Think about everything that you do, all of the experiences that you have. A lot of people even like to think, “Oh, some of my most precious memories were when I wasn’t spending any money. I was just fishing with family members. It was Christmas morning.”

If you think about all of that, money allows all of that to happen. Money buys the fishing poles. Money buys the presents under the tree. Money buys the time off, right? You don’t have to work extra shifts. You don’t have to work on holidays because you are financially secure. So, money really does provide us with the lives that we want to live.

And if there are certain aspects to a life that you would like to live, and you’re not allowing yourself to have that life because of the shame that you experience around purchasing that life, I want to unpack that with you. So, you can free yourself of that emotional burden, ad give yourself permission to spend money that you have on the things that you’d like.

Now, a lot of this is based on how people were brought up, or what they were taught to think about spending money. So, check in with yourself. You can think back to that episode that I just did on your thoughts about money. But you might think that money’s hard to come by, you need to be responsible with your money, you shouldn’t spend frivolously, that you should only spend money on important things or on things that you need.

And if you don’t need something, then you shouldn’t buy it. That it’s impractical to spend money on things that you don’t need. You might have been taught that being frugal is more responsible than spending money. You might have just learned subconsciously, over the course of a lifetime, that you don’t deserve to spend money on yourself, that it’s selfish.

So, if you believe these thoughts, you can quickly see, by running them through the model, that when you think one of those thoughts you’re going to experience one of those negative feelings that I just mentioned. Okay?

Then from there, you’re going to avoid that discomfort. You’re going to avoid those negative emotions and not spend. Not provide yourself with that thing that you want. You end up depriving yourself of those experiences or those objects, those things that you would like to have in your life. Get clear on what thoughts you’re thinking that make you feel ashamed when it comes to spending.

Now, here’s what I want to do. I want to clue you in on something. So many people are using these thoughts against themselves, so start by asking yourself: Why did you learn this? Why did someone else teach this to you? Who taught this to you? It was probably your parents.

It could have been someone else, but it was likely the people who raised you. And if that’s not your parents, if it’s someone else who raised you, check in with yourself. What did those people teach you about spending money?

I grew up, big-time, learning that you should be practical with money, that it’s hard to come by, that you have to work hard to make it, and that you have to work even harder to make more of it. And therefore, you should be very, very careful with it. Okay? And that it’s impractical and irresponsible to spend it on things that you don’t need. Things that are expensive, especially.

Which is funny, if you actually do a deep dive here and you look at some of my parents’ spending. My dad likes to fly helicopters, and he buys and sells them pretty frequently. He’s had sports cars and a bunch of other stuff. So, one could argue that he doesn’t even follow the rules that I just referenced with you.

But what I really learned from examining the way that he spends money, is that he only likes to spend money on things that he finds very valuable. And a lot of things that I find valuable, he doesn’t find valuable. I had to unpack that in order to unravel and dismantle the shame that I felt, or the guilt that I felt, around spending money on myself. We just have different preferences, and that’s completely okay.

It’s totally fine that my dad likes to spend money on the things that he likes to spend money on. My mom spends money on the things that she spends money on. And I like to spend money on the things that I spend money on. Now, neither of my parents would spend the money that I spend on hotels. My mom is not one to buy luxury items like purses, or things like that, or super expensive shoes, just not her thing.

She doesn’t have to understand that, I just get to understand myself and we get to have a difference of opinion on the value of those expenditures. Similarly, my dad thinks spending lavish amounts of money on really exquisite, decadent meals at incredible restaurants is just wasteful. So, he doesn’t see the same value in it that I see.

He’s not willing to spend on it… We go out to nice dinners as a family, we do that. But I like to do it at an even more extravagant level and at a higher frequency that my parents do. And that’s okay, it’s my preference. Okay? I also am currently renting a condo even though I own a house. I wanted to do that because I wanted to live in a new space, and I could afford to do it.

That was really an area of my life where I had to examine my own resistance to spending money on myself, because I kept hesitating. I finally realized, the thought that I was thinking, that was causing me to hesitate, was that I thought that I was being impractical.

My mortgage payment on the house that I own is so inexpensive. It’s very easy for me to live there. I was going to be increasing my monthly overhead so significantly, by running a condo in the city of Detroit, where I wanted to live, that has all of the things that I wanted it to have.

I don’t need to do that, right? I have another place to live. So, it’s definitely not something that I need to do. It’s just something that I want to do. And I realized, that I was thinking that I was being impractical, that I was being frivolous, that I was being irresponsible, if I was going to move forward and spend that money on myself. That was causing my hesitancy. I was feeling irresponsible. I was feeling foolish.

Then, I was avoiding those emotions by not spending the money on myself, by not moving forward with the move. I finally realized I was living in a place that I really don’t prefer. Sort of being punitive to myself, punishing myself, depriving myself of something that I really, really want, that I think I work very hard for.

It dawned on me that there is no deserving police. No one’s going to come around and give me permission to spend my own money on myself. That’s not going to happen. So, if you have shame or guilt, or you’re feeling irresponsible, or selfish or impractical, when it comes to spending money on yourself, you have to realize that there’s no arbiter of what is worthwhile to spend money on.

You’re going to have to make that determination for yourself. Because no one’s coming and writing you a permission slip. They’re not going to tell you, “Yes, absolutely. Go make that expenditure.” There is no king or queen of “right” when it comes to your spending decisions.

You have to be the one who gives yourself permission. You have to be the one that gives yourself the green light to spend the money. Okay? No one else is going to do that for you.

And that’s one of the things about being an adult, you have to make these decisions. You want to make sure you’re making a decision from a clean space. So, you want to take a look and see what your model looks like.

What are you thinking about making that expenditure? How does that thought that you’re thinking make you feel? And then, what action are you taking when you feel that emotion? And then ultimately, do you like the result that that produces in your life?

A big part of this, if you start to break from the way that you were brought up, the way that you were raised, what you were taught about spending money on yourself, you’re going to have to likely feel misunderstood. Because one of the reasons that people don’t spend money on themselves is because they’re afraid to be judged by other people.

That was a big reason, my friend, when we were having this conversation by the pool that day, she said, “I don’t like to spend money on certain things, because I’m afraid people in my life will judge me. My family members, my husband, they might think that I’m being irresponsible, or that I’m full of myself. That I’m too extravagant. That I’m leaving them behind.”

The reframe that I offered her was, “What if you inspired people? What if you showed other people that spending money on themselves is safe? That it’s acceptable, that there’s nothing wrong with it, that it can be fun, that it can be enjoyable, that bad things don’t happen when you do it, that more money is leftover, that more money comes your way; you don’t run out of it.”

That’s another reason people don’t like to spend money on themselves, they’re coming from a place of scarcity and they’re coming up against that fear. And then, they end up hoarding money instead of spending it to buy the things that they want in their lives.

So, when we talked about that, we were specifically talking about spending money on hotels, especially five-star hotels. Which are pretty pricey, even in my opinion. And as we were talking about that, she said, “Oh, my husband would just really think that it’s frivolous, that it’s wasteful. He just wouldn’t see the value in it.”

I said, “Yeah, I’m sure my parents would probably think that too, until they got here.” When you get to the Four Seasons, you’re like, hey, this is kind of nice. The surface is incredible. The linens are amazing. The pillows are exceptional. The bathrooms gorgeous. The mattress is sublime. The food’s excellent. The pool is breathtaking. Everything is next level.

Really, whatever you want is there for you. They even clean your room twice a day. They come and they do a turndown service, they put out your little slippers, they normally leave you like a little treat, and they give you a million different water bottles. It’s just really lovely.

They also wrap all of your cords, for all of your chargers, up in this really lovely way where everything’s tidy and orderly. If you wear makeup, every time they clean your room they organize all of your makeup, and they lay it all out for you. It’s just exquisite.

And my point to my friend was that if you give people a window into what it’s like on the other side of that expenditure, if they get to see what the experience is like, they may not like it, they may not think it’s worth it. But you may turn them on to a life that they would have never otherwise experienced. And they may realize this is kind of nice.

I just did that with a friend of mine. We went to Boston together and I wanted to splurge on a hotel. So, I offered to pay for it because I really wanted to stay in this one specific place. She got introduced to a lot of that five-star luxury that I tend to experience pretty frequently, because I travel so much and that’s how I like to travel now.

She liked it. She really enjoyed it. She got to see a lot of what I experienced pretty frequently. And she may not choose to spend what I spend on hotels, but just to see the value in it; that it’s special, that it’s a little something extra, or a lot something extra, and that it’s nice, that it’s fun to treat yourself, that it’s not frivolous, that there’s value in it.

So, if you’re worried about what other people think, I want to offer you that you get to invite them along with you, and they can experience it alongside you. It can be something that’s really beautiful that you do together. Now, with that being said, I’m also going to offer to you that you may just need to let yourself feel misunderstood, okay?

They may not get it. They may judge your expenditures. They may judge what you do with your money, and that’s also okay. You can just let them judge you and you can have your own back. What would you need to think, to feel loving and trusting of yourself when it comes to how you spend money, rather than creating that shame and guilt and sense of irresponsibility?

What if you thought that spending money on yourself was responsible? How might that be true? How might it be the most responsible thing you could do with your money? What would be different about your life, if you stopped depriving yourself of the things that you want?

I bet there’s even some things that maybe you don’t need, but they’d really, really, really make an impact on your life if you finally gave yourself permission to spend money to purchase them. What would be different about your life? What would change? What would get better? It’s so fun to think about.

My life is so much better, now that I moved and I’m in spaces that I love, that I feel more at home in. That’s so exciting to me. I feel more comfortable having people over because I feel more comfortable in my space. It helps me feel more connected to people.

So, it’s not just about spending money to have things, it’s about spending money to get to feel a certain way. To create certain connections or certain experiences that you wouldn’t otherwise have.

Another example of this is being able to treat people to things that you wouldn’t otherwise get to do with them, like going on vacations. I’m getting ready to take someone on vacation, in my life, and I’m so excited to be able to do it.

Now, we don’t need to go. We’re just choosing to go because I’m choosing to spend the money. And I’m so excited to get that experience with them and to get to be with them in that moment. It’s such a good use of money, as I see it.

So, what I’m doing here, is I’m offering you a lot of the thoughts that I think about spending money on myself. About spending money on things, about spending money on experiences, just to offer you a different perspective. To get you thinking about spending money in a way that doesn’t create that shame or that guilt for yourself.

Think about it. What emotions would you like to think when it comes to spending? Maybe you want to feel carefree. Maybe you want to feel at ease. Maybe you want to feel calm. Maybe you want to feel responsible or assured. What would you need to think to feel each one of those emotions? Think about that.

And then, think about the different action that you’ll take when it comes to spending money, and the different result that you’ll create in your life when you do. All right? A huge area that I see this with, is with people’s decisions about whether or not to work with me, about whether or not to invest in coaching.

They feel irresponsible spending the money on themselves. They think that it might be frivolous. That they should be able to get the same transformation on their own if they just work hard enough. If they just dig deep enough themselves, they can get the same results. And I just want to offer you, very rarely is that true.

Coaching, and working with a coach, provides you with a completely different perspective. You get results a lot faster, and you get results that you just can’t access on your own. Because you can’t see the areas that you’re struggling in.

You can’t see it with the perspective that a coach gets to bring to your life. They’re going to help you find your blind spots, work through them and problem solve, and give you the tools that you don’t currently have in order to do that. And when people finally get out of their own way and they invest in themselves, and they work with a coach, it’s incredible to see how significantly their lives changed for the better.

But people prevent themselves from experiencing that result, because they’re so hung up on spending money to begin with. They feel like they’re taking money away from their families, taking money away from their kids. That they could do something more “responsible” with it. Maybe pay off their student loans, pay off their mortgage, put more money aside in savings or in their retirement.

I just want to offer you; those are all things that you can do with your money. But what if you just invested in your own transformation? Why might that be the best thing that you can do for yourself? One of the things that I teach my clients is if you want better answers, you’ve got to ask better questions.

So, let’s start with this one: How might investing in your personal development and working with a coach be the most transformational thing that you can do? How might that be the best use of your dollars this year? All right, brainstorm that. And if you have questions about it, reach out to me.

The Less Stressed Lawyer Mastermind is currently open for enrollment. We start in late August; August 23 – 26^th, in Big Sky Montana. I just want to invite you to give yourself permission to give this gift to yourself. The gift of coaching, the gift of transformation, the gift of living a different life; the life that you’ve been wanting to live. You get to join me in Big Sky.

Talk about giving yourself permission to experience luxury, at a very discounted rate, mind you. The rate that we have for the hotel that we’re staying at, where the in-person live event is, is extremely discounted. Which is so much fun, that people get to experience some of the luxury that I talked about on the podcast pretty frequently. You’re going to get to experience for yourself.

But aside from the luxury that you’ll get to take part in while we’re together in Big Sky, Montana, you’ll get to experience the transformation that comes when you invest in yourself. Okay? It’s the most selfless thing that you can do. It’s the most responsible thing you could do. It’s the most practical thing you can do. I truly believe that.

I invite you to spend some time brainstorming how that may be true for you, as well. Then, when you figure out that I know what I’m talking about, go to TheLessStressedLawyer.com/mastermind and apply to join the August class. All right?

I hope this episode helped you. I hope it helped unpack some of the shame that you might feel around spending money on yourself. I just want you to know that that’s optional. Anything that you’ve ever learned about spending money on yourself, is just someone’s opinion. And you don’t have to keep carrying it with you.

If you don’t like what you were taught, you get to leave that. You get to put a pin in it, put it on the shelf, and you never have to think that again. You can choose to think whatever you want about spending money on yourself. You can choose to think that it’s a good idea or a bad idea, or the best idea you’ve ever had. All of the options are available to you. Choose wisely, my friends. The life that you live, ultimately depends on it. All right?

That’s what I’ve got for you this week. Next week, we’re going to talk about setting goals when it comes to money. Which people hate to do, but it’s very important that you do it. So, I’ll talk to you all about why people don’t like to do it, how to overcome that, and then why it’s so important that you do set goals in the first place. HINT: It makes it easier to achieve them.

All right, my friends. That’s all for now. 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.