Reparenting Yourself for Joyful Productivity

A crucial piece of guidance that I often find myself needing to tell my clients that they don't like to hear. Most of them don't like to hear this. And I wonder how you feel about this too. Is that the path to your success in your business, particularly your authentic business, where you are doing what you truly deeply love and making a good living from it? The path there requires a lot of experimentation. Experimentation means that you will also experience a lot of so called failures or things that you did not expect going the way that you hoped it would. Now, a lot of my clients don't like to hear that because they say, gosh, that sounds really scary. And George, I wish that you could just give me the answers for I need to do this and this and this, and then I will inevitably succeed. And in fact, this is how a lot of programs are sold to you. Courses, coaching programs, workshops, masterminds, you know, they sell their, their marketing is so effective because they say you can't lose if you follow our, you know, 12 step program or are, you know, forced, you know, you do these things, you will for sure make six figures, seven figures and have an easy, wonderful life. But having been a full time solopreneur for 16 years now and, and still going strong, and having coached thousands of people in how to be a successful solopreneur, I will tell you again and again and again that the most reliable path I've seen to success is the path of experimentation. And like I said, a lot of you don't like to hear this. And I'm, I'm hoping that this video will help you unlock something that will allow you to really hear that and take that path and therefore reach your success with much more likelihood than if you believed that there was some perfect path you were supposed to follow. Which most of the time when you try to follow someone's prescribed path for you, it either feels inauthentic or it doesn't work for you. And so ultimately, no matter which way you go, I believe that you will discover, oh, it turns out I needed to do a lot of experimentation. So let me first say, why is it that many of us don't like to hear that advice? Don't. It doesn't sit well with us. It feels scary. You know why? Because of how we were parented. Yes. And by parented, I don't mean just our birth parents. You know, whether you were raised by mom and dad or by one parent or by grandparents, your parenting also includes how your society and your school system trained you in your formative Years. And this is how most of us were trained. Okay? We start off going to school where every class, every test has the right answers and not the right answers, okay? Everything else that's not the answer that the teacher said is correct or the textbook says is correct is wrong. And you will be punished if you give those answers. You will only be rewarded if you give the right answer. Which means you have to study hard enough and get to the right path. That which, funny enough, and you know, now that I think of it from an entrepreneurial standpoint, funny enough, everyone else has the same right answer, okay? And lots of people who don't study hard enough don't get the right answer. Then you know you. And it's not just that you have to know the right answer. You have to practice and know how to get to the right answer and just know that, okay? And just follow that. So some people might even call this the fixed mindset. I know the Carol Dweck fixed mindset growth mindset is kind of different, but I'm going to maybe co opt that a little bit for. Because I think it's, it's related and it's useful for our discussion here. So we, most of us, maybe all of us here watching this, grew up with parenting and training within a fixed mindset of there is for whatever chore you are doing and whatever homework you are doing, whatever job you are applying for, there are certain right answers. And you have to follow those right answers. Otherwise you won't get good grades, you will be punished at home, you will be punished at school, you'll be punished in your job, etc. And then what happens once you become a solopreneur and particularly a sol preneur, someone who's trying to create an authentic livelihood from your soul and not just doing it to make money. There's many ways you can make money, but you want to make money in a way that deeply fulfills your soul's calling. Where you could possibly express your soul and have a decent livelihood from doing that. So you'll realize that in the entrepreneurial world, there is never just one right answer. And some of you call yourselves creators. Creators. And in the creativity world, there is never just one right answer. There are many answers. And even with for there, there's a different answer for everybody. And even for one person, there are many possible answers that could be, that could be in alignment with what you know, you could do today with, with any particular client, there are multiple answers. Client. Your client comes to you with a problem. There isn't usually just one solution, there's probably multiple solutions. And oftentimes, if they can come up with the solutions themselves instead of you giving it to them, they'll probably be much more fulfilled by pursuing that answer, applying it to their lives rather than doing just what you tell them to do. Right? Because they will feel more empowered and they'll probably be able to apply their right answer in ways that you never even thought of because you don't have the context of their life. And so whatever answers you might have might not be your client's best answers. So in the entrepreneurial and the solopreneur world, we have to continually repeat this new truth to ourselves, which is there is no one right way of doing whatever it is I'm doing right now. There are an abundance of pathways to fulfillment and success, and it is your job as an entrepreneur, as a solopreneur, it's your opportunity and your responsibility to experiment enough so that you discover what the pathways are for you. Like I said, as a coach, I always noticed, you know, I observe my clients and try to help them discover the right answers for themselves rather than me having some right answer for them. Because it's almost always in the fixed mindset of those right. No, there's many right answers. And if the client can be empowered to discover the right answers for themselves, they will have a much more fulfilling experience and probably more successful business as well. And that mindset is why we need to re parent ourselves. We need to revise our mental conditioning and our emotional conditioning away from. I have to study hard enough to find the right answer to. I have to be courageous and playful enough to experiment with many potential pathways so that I could experience what each of those pathways are like and then take the pathway that feels most fulfilling and then continue experimenting to see where that pathway really should go for me, which could be one of multiple directions that could be all fulfilling, but which one is most aligned and fulfills me at this time. Let me keep experimenting. We need to reparent ourselves, to be open and playful enough and courageous enough and patient enough also for that. And we were parented with a different kind of patience about working hard and studying what other people's answers are. What other the teacher's answers, the textbook's answers, so that we can give that, regurgitate that answer. Boring. Honestly, compared to the entrepreneurial opportunity is to play more, experiment more, and then create the right pathway for ourselves. So when I say reparenting, what do I mean? Well, it is to understand and to allow the inner Child, which we all have within ourselves, which is, you know, I'm not an expert in, in psychology and inner child healing. Some of you watching this are much more well versed in that. So please feel free to comment below. But so I'm. The way I'm going to say it is this. We are retraining our mind and our heart reactions to the idea of experimentation and also when experiments don't work. So this is the process I call, and I'm sure other people call reparenting ourselves. Because like I said, our natural reactions to trying to achieve success is, oh, I got to figure out that one perfect way, which means I got to take enough courses, I got to read enough books again, studying hard, right? I gotta. I gotta study hard enough to find the right one right way, and I'll follow that one right way and everything's gonna go great, very smoothly. I don't have to make mistakes. And we need to reparent ourselves so that we. We recondition our mind and our heart to be open to the actual. In my experience, the actual one right way is the way of experimentation. We need to retrain ourselves and our heart to be open to that and to even enjoy it, to enjoy the playfulness of it, to allow our inner, our childlikeness to play and so that we can be truly creative and find the fulfilling, the most fulfilling path for us, which you're going to have to experiment a lot to discover. Okay, so now that you hopefully understand a bit more. And by the way, why do I call it reparenting? Well, it's because of how we were raised is why our mind and heart reactions are the way that they are. We've been raised by our parents, educational institutions, our companies, and life itself in early days. That's just how we are now. We still carry a lot of the old patterns until now. And no matter how old you are, I don't think there's ever someone who's too old to reparent themselves. So by reparenting ourselves, we bring a new kind of training and upbringing to ourselves now with more wisdom for what works now. Now, how we were parented may have worked in an earlier time, but in this time, as an entrepreneur, we need a different kind of mind and emotional default to how we react to things and how we proactively implement things. So how do. How do I. Okay. The funny part about all this is that even how you reparent yourself will take experimentation. And so I welcome this as a conversation in this little community of viewers of this video how might you reparent yourself? Comment below, what might that mean for you? I'll share with you what works for me after some experimentation. This is what seems to work. And then I invite you to experiment and then share with us what seems to work for you. Now, another way that I could say this is, and a lot of you will recognize this language is how do you regulate yourself so that you can be more open to experimentation? And when the experiments don't work, which most experiments don't work, but the experiments that do work really allow you to succeed and the experiments that don't work teach you a lot. So that's point number one is proactive reparenting of myself is to continually remind myself, remind my clients and therefore be in a community of people who understand that experimentation is necessary. Experimentation is important, it's necessary and it should be celebrated rather than saying, well why are you experimenting? No, no, you should experiment. Don't just do what I what works for me. Try something else too. Okay, so that's proactive reparenting is to say, dear child, dear one, I want you to play, you know, I want you to experiment. I want you to so called make mistakes. Okay? Mistakes are going to be fine. You're going to learn a lot from them. So this proactive reparenting says good on you for experimenting and let's see what your mistakes are. Let's learn from them together. So before I do anything, right, particularly anything that has risk, like launching a course, reaching out to somebody who is a potential client, meeting with a client, you know, the, hopefully the meeting goes well. Sometimes meetings don't go whatever, right? Anything that has risk, I do my proactive reparenting and what am I doing here holding my hands, hands to my heart is I do what I call the energy reboot. And if you don't know what that is, you can, you can do an online search or ask ChatGPT what is George Cow's energy reboot and it will be able to give you it knows thankfully what, what, what I do and I have several articles out there, several videos out there about how I do my energy reboot. So you can go check them out if you like or talk to chat GPT about it. So that's how I reparent myself proactively before a project that has some feeling of fear or anxiety because of risk, even creating content. I don't know if this video will work. Before this video, I did my proactive reparenting by doing my energy reboot. Okay, that's proactive and then there's reactive reparenting, which is when things don't go as I hoped. When I put some content out there and I put a video out there, it only got a few views. When I thought it was a great video, I thought this is going to serve a lot of people. But the market says this is not that interesting or not that helpful and only got a few views or whatever. Okay, I put a course, I'm launching a course. And you know, I, the number of enrollments didn't meet my hope, my expectation, right? My preferences. Then reactive parent reparenting. You know, usually how we were trained is, you know, we bring back, we bring back home a bad report card. And well, certainly in my, in my upbringing, in the particular, the East Asian upbringing, what you only got to be, you should be getting A's, you shouldn't be getting Bs, right? And maybe you had the gentler set of parents and they said, oh, you got a B, good job, but maybe you brought home a report card that says D, you almost failed a class. And maybe you got blamed or shamed or, or maybe even punished for, for getting a bad grade. Maybe you failed the class. And in, in our jobs, right? And this is different from being an entrepreneur, but in a job, if you didn't do exactly what the boss said or what the expected, you get, you know, blamed, shamed, maybe punished, maybe fired, right? All of us have had experiences. Those of us who have had jobs haven't done everything perfectly okay in school, right? If you, if you didn't get the right answer, you speak up in class, it's the wrong answer. Maybe your, your classmates are, are laughing or they look at you go, it's kind of a dumb, dumb, dumb classmate or whatever, right? All of us, myself certainly have had that experience. So the reactive reparenting is knowing that that's how we were raised, how people around us and our, and therefore training ourselves to respond to making mistakes, things not going as we hoped. Reactive reparenting is to say, oh, let's first take some deep breaths and say, okay, this didn't go the way we hoped. We. What can. So this is how I do it. I say, what can I learn from that? Get. I get curious. Instead of getting, getting feeling shamed, I get curious and say, hm, huh. It's data. What can I learn from that? And what did I even enjoy, by the way? What part of that process did I enjoy that I can bring into the next experience? But also what can I do differently to experiment differently so that it can have a maybe different result. So I do reactive reparenting which by the way I first do my energy reboot. As always, I take some deep breaths, do my energy reboot so that I can have the have the energy and the wisdom to do my reactive reparenting to say what can I learn from it? What did I enjoy? What can I keep doing that I enjoyed? And what can I do differently so that I can maybe get a different result? So I I really hope that this gives you some a perspective that's healthier, that allows you to experiment with more playfulness and courage and more prolifically experiment so that you can get different results, so that you can see which way is most fulfilling and most likely to lead to your success. May you start to reparent yourself today. Maybe you've already done this kind of thing and then you keep doing it with even more intention, with more enjoyment and therefore with more success. That's true, truly fulfilling for you. Thanks for joining for this and I look forward to seeing your comments below. Blessings to you and reparent yourself with love, with compassion and with enjoyment in the reparenting process as well. Thanks for joining me.