#62: Creating the Life You Want

You're listening to the Proteus Leader Show with Erika Andersen, where you'll get practical tools and insights for leading, managing, and staying ready for the future. Erika is the founding partner of Proteus, a firm that focuses uniquely on leader readiness. A nationally known executive coach and bestselling author, you may already know her as one of the most popular leadership bloggers on Forbes.com. Ready for something you can use today? Here's Erika.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Proteus Leader Show. My guest today is Dr. Tracy Stein, a Columbia University trained psychologist, certified clinical hypnotherapist, and health educator in private practice in New York City. She's an award-winning author and a topic expert for psychologytoday.com. She is also a core faculty member at the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at Columbia University. She's the creator of a number of audio programs focusing on a variety of topics ranging from conquering procrastination, achieving a healthy weight and body image, to enhancing self-compassion, building healthy self-esteem, and developing a mindfulness meditation practice. So welcome to the show, Tracy.

Thank you for having me, Erika. It's so exciting to be here with you today.

I know, I'm really excited too. So, uh, listeners, Tracy and I met when I was a guest on her podcast a couple months ago. and we just enjoyed the conversation so much and got to talking. And, and I really thought that your insights into whole-person wellness and personal power would be really fascinating and useful to our listeners, especially during these challenging, wild times that we all find ourselves in now. So we decided to talk specifically about manifestation, that is, making envisioned futures a reality, Which you explore in your latest audio program, which is called Manifesting During Deep Sleep. So let's, let's explore. And as always, I have some questions I want to ask. So the first question is, you noted to me that you see this idea of manifestation as a place where the mystical and the mundane meet, which is such a great sentence anyway. So can you tell us more about that?

Yeah, absolutely. So I want to start by just mentioning that manifesting is a really popular topic. Now you almost can't throw a rock without hitting somebody talking about it. Um, but sometimes it's reduced to, I think, the least helpful understanding, which would be, I have a desire, maybe I make a vision board, and now I'm expecting the universe to just deliver success to me. Now, sometimes that actually happens, which is pretty exciting, but I think for the most part, manifesting works best when we have this combination of this, the mystical part being the belief that things are possible beyond what we can imagine right now, the belief that there is a benevolent universe, that good things can happen even if negative things have happened to us, and so forth. And then the mundane part is really, I have kind of 5 things that I'll go over super briefly, and then I'll talk a little bit more about those. But The super quick version would be, you know, we have to set a clear intention about what we want. Because it's very hard to bring anything into being, whether you think about it in a mystical or mundane way, if you don't know what you really want. Right? You wouldn't go to a restaurant and have the waiter say, what do you want? And you say, I want food, because it wouldn't be super helpful.

Yeah.

Who knows what you would get? The second thing is keeping an attitude of what I like to call open willingness. And the reason for that is because we might have this very detailed understanding of what we want, but it might present somewhat differently. And it's important to be open to opportunities that might be equivalent, but slightly different or even better than what we imagine we want for ourselves. And the third thing is we need to commit to doing the work, right? Because for the most part, if we sit home in a dark room, not a lot of success is going to unfold for us, right?

Yeah.

If we get a promotion at work, we're going to need to be able to say yes and do the work required of us. Related to that, we want to notice resistance that comes up because most of us have things that, even things that we're not fully conscious of, that can get in the way, right?

Yep.

We, we get a great job. And then if there's a part of us that feels we don't deserve good things, or that it involves, maybe the job involves public speaking and we hate public speaking, Yeah. We're either going to say no to this great opportunity we wanted, or we might sabotage it.

This one I really love. And I talk about this a lot with people about just seeing and acknowledging that resistance, not pretending that it's not there. And I think of it as competing vectors, you know, and physics, like you, when a force all goes in one direction, then the thing happens. And so if you're saying, Yes, this is what I want. This is what I want to make happen. This, but then you have an invisible vector going in the opposite direction. It will keep you from moving forward. So I, that's a great, great thing to add to this. I love that you're saying that.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as a psychologist, I might say there are different parts of us, right? And there might be the part of us that really like wants to step into the spotlight or bring great things into being. And the other part of us that maybe feels small or inadequate or, you know, undeserving.

Yes.

And as these things come up, and I'll talk a little bit about how we can notice them more easily, um, we want to address them appropriately. So for the resistance piece, maybe that is talking to a friend or journaling about it or, or a colleague. Maybe that's consulting with a professional coach. Maybe that is speaking with a counselor. The, the 5th one would be when you get something good, be joyful and grateful.

Yeah. Yeah.

You know, because if you're thinking about it from a mystical perspective, the universe wants to know that we are really glad we got what we got. But even if we're just thinking about it in a mundane way, you've probably seen this, Erika, where, you know, when people feel optimistic and abundant and joyful, it shifts their demeanor. And people are very attracted to that. People listen to that.

1,000%. I was talking to somebody recently, and we agreed that the best— our favorite emotion is gratitude, because it's just so generative. And so, as you say, it creates this whole attractiveness around you when someone's grateful. And this is not only true in our personal lives, but as managers and leaders, when something good happens, the team does something, something good happens for the business, and you as a leader are grateful, And express that gratitude, it just creates a really fantastic positive ripple effect.

It absolutely, absolutely does. And, you know, there's a, there's a body of literature on gratitude that's growing, talking about all the internal and social benefits of being grateful. And I'm sure that that radiates throughout the workplace as well. Yeah. And the 6th thing would be allowing yourself to kind of believe in magic. And now some people will say, oh, you know, I bought the first And this is too woo-woo, and that's okay. You can just discard that if that feels too out there. But, you know, you don't have to be religious or even particularly spiritual to, again, allow for the idea that, you know, good things can happen even when we haven't gone through the typical earthly steps to get there. And I have an example of that. So, you know, a lot of the people who, you know, find me do it because of my audio programs, which you mentioned. That's kind of what I'm known for. And I remember 2016 was a bit of a challenging year. I won't go into detail about that, but I remember towards the end of the year, just kind of reflecting a lot more. And I thought, you know, I know these things work because the science has shown support for things like hypnosis and guided imagery for a variety of things. I've seen this work in clinical practice. I use this in my own life. I know it's helpful, but it would be— wouldn't it be great if more people discovered my work? And benefited in some way. And I had this weird, just like, like minimal daydream, this very brief moment of thinking, oh, wouldn't it be great if like Oprah discovered my work and then, you know, more people would be able to benefit? I honestly didn't give it much more thought than that. And I laid down to do a half-hour manifesting meditation at the time. And I am so hypnotically suggestible. I go really deep. I didn't even remember the middle part of it. Then I went about my day. And I, and I've saved the email so it doesn't look like I'm making this up. After the fact.

Yeah.

Yes. So within about 2 weeks, I got an email out of the blue from this woman, Melissa Goldberg, an associate beauty editor at O Magazine, who said, you know, I have this intractable and severe nail-biting habit. I go to— I get invited to all these events and I can't wear jewelry or nail polish. I'm hiding my hands. Nothing has helped. I was looking into hypnosis for this and your name kept coming up. Would you be willing to work with me? And then I want to write about our sessions for O Magazine. And in fact, she had great results, um, and wrote about this, and this was published in the, um, January 2017 O Magazine.

Wow.

So, you know, I still get calls about people who came across that article, but the reason I'm mentioning that is that's one of those things where your hair stands up and it's like I wasn't seeking this out. It was a thought before manifesting meditation. So that, you know, once in a while these things happen.

Yes.

But the mundane part is that I had laid the groundwork for years with training and producing these audios and writing about these things and talking about them on like, you know, podcasts and radio shows. And then I had to agree to do the work. Now, the number 2 thing of openness and willingness— Oprah herself, to my knowledge, has never listened to any of my stuff. And if I had said, well, if it's not Oprah, I'm not doing this, I would have missed out on a good opportunity. And people would have maybe who could be helped by my work wouldn't have heard about it. So, you know, it's just kind of, most of the time things don't happen like that, but a lot of times, you know, we're surprised in some way.

Sometimes they do. And it really, I love this. And I've had, I could, we could trade stories about this for hours. I've had many, many things happen like this in my life. And, um, There's a wonderful saying that was from— it's from this guy Branch Rickey, who was a very seminal figure in American baseball. He started the farm team system, and he brought the first Black player and the first Hispanic player in the major leagues. Kind of an amazing guy. And he used to say— you'll totally get this— he used to say, luck is the residue of design.

Wow.

Isn't that fantastic?

Pretty amazing.

You're talking about it. It's like you had done the groundwork, you had done the thinking, and you had the body of work, you knew how to— when that thing happened by, you were able to respond to it. It was the residue of design. So I love that. That's fantastic. Well, so talk to us about— let's, let's connect the dots a little more. How does cultivating this ability of manifestation, how does it help people become better leaders and managers, which most of our listeners are leaders and managers?

So I think, I mean, in multiple ways, I think both in terms of managing your personal stuff and just feeling more centered in general, because the more centered we are, the better we are in every aspect of our lives, including at work. But even if you're trying to imagine presenting something to your team and having, you know, receptivity and cohesion and collaboration, Personally, I think that as you envision, that's the number one thing, the clarity of what you want to manifest. See it play out. See yourself responding well to questions, engaging with people, being open to possibility and suggestions. See, see that spirit of collaboration as this all unfolds, right?

Yeah.

And the openness and willingness. People on your team might have great ideas that you haven't thought of, and you want to be receptive and see it as a gift, not as a horrible deviation from, you know, your idealized image of what you want.

Yeah, one of the things I really love about the way you approach this is combination of mundane and mystical. You're very practical. So what— so if someone's listening and they're like, oh, I want to start trying this, how would you suggest that they start playing with and experimenting this?

So I would say, you know, pay attention to your daydreams, because our daydreams often reflect our desires. They can reflect our fears as well. So be aware that as those things come up, you want to deal with them as well. But as you do that, I personally think it's helpful to concretize these desires, because you'll get a lot more clarity, the details will start to fill in themselves. So things like journaling, I think that's why things like vision boards actually work. I used to think that was a, you know, You know, hokey, but it actually can work for people. It takes these amorphous desires, um, and, and makes them more tangible and actionable.

Yeah. Yeah.

So I would start there. Some people do benefit from things like guided imagery so that they can mentally rehearse the idea of success, because your brain really wants to create the experience for you in real life That you have been imagining. So as you imagine what you want to bring into being, do so in a multisensory way. Don't just imagine a video, you know, visual experience, but how do you feel? What does your day seem like? What are the emotions? How do you carry yourself? Who are you interacting with? All of those things also create a positive expectancy.

Hmm. Okay.

And it's more actionable.

Yes. When you 3-dimensionalize it like that. Yes. Yes. Oh, this is so— there's so— this is such a rich area for exploration. I wasn't kidding. I know that we could just go on here. And I always do promise listeners that this will be short and sweet. So thank you so much. And I really, you know, it's lovely that you were able to come and have this conversation with me. I really appreciate it.

Oh, it's so great speaking with you, Erika, as always.

Yes. So listeners, to find out more about Dr. Stein and her work, you can go to drtraciestein.com, which is D-R-T-R-A-C-I-S-T-E-I-N dot com. And you can also find her audio programs on Apple Music or Amazon Music. And if you'd like to find out how Proteus supports leaders to manage their mental monologue, you're welcome to go to proteusleader.com. Click on Topics and choose Self-Talk. So thank you again, Traci. Thank you.

Great seeing you.

Yes. And thanks everyone for listening. And until next time, here's to creating the life you truly want.

We hope you're feeling better equipped to create the career, the business, and the life you want. For more insights and tools for leadership and management, join us at theprudentiouseader.com. Have an excellent day, and thanks for listening.