774. Own Your Day: Tips to Disrupt Your Self-Sabotaging Patterns
1 Sept 2021 · 13 min
Lori Harder breaks down how to spot emotional triggers and stop taking the bait. She shares Jack Canfield's E+R=O formula: your event plus your response equals your outcome. Swap self-sabotaging stories for intentional ones to protect your energy and chase what matters.
Chapters
I want you to take a minute and just scan your life right now for what story you are choosing to take the bait on what right now that you could actually just unhook from. You could just take your hook right out. You could breathe and you could say over and over today when this comes up, I'm going to keep choosing again and again that I am not going to hook into this and I'm going to choose something different.
Welcome to the Earn your happy podcast. I'm Lori Harder, founder of Light Paint, best selling author, three time fitness world champion, and I'm a crazy, multi passionate entrepreneur. My journey has taken me everywhere from being a broke waitress, barista, retails associate and personal trainer with massive anxiety and no belief in myself to later becoming a multi millionaire in love with my life. In 2007, my husband and I lost everything. We found ourselves hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. At rock bottom, we had no and I had no education to fall back on. This is when I found personal development and learned everything I could about business. Not by choice, but because I realized no one was coming to save me. The conversations on this podcast are going to let you know that you're not alone and that we all feel like we don't know what we're doing. We're going to give you the tools to help you face your fears, take action, start your business, and grow those massive dreams that are keeping you up at night. It's time to create a life that you can't hide from and put so much on the line that your higher self is forced to come out. You're going to stop waiting for someone to approve of you and you're going to anoint yourself. Because I'm obsessed about building businesses that give women a platform, I want to feature you. So if you text the word podcast to 310-496-8363, you can get your questions answered on our Q and A segment along with a shout out. And if you rate, review and subscribe to this podcast, we're choosing someone every month to get coached and featured on our show. It just might be you. So let's get started.
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Earn your happy podcast. It's time for another quickie because there's always time to fit in inspiration. And it is another week of me sitting in the RV after I had my cup of coffee and we are on the road. We're spending a month in Wisconsin and with that, that means a lot of time with family and it is magical. It's incredible. And as you know, it also brings up a lot of emotions and a lot of your old tendencies. And for me, it's people pleasing and never wanting to disappoint people. And not only am I going to talk about this a little bit, but is about triggers and reactions, because this is one of the most important things you can learn in relationships, in life and in business. So I remember I was sitting at a conference, and Mel Robbins happened to be one of the speakers who I absolutely love. She's coming on the podcast soon, and she was talking about how when she goes home, her sister never seems to get irritated with her mother. But for some reason, Mel was just like, I can't handle the way that she talks and the passive aggressiveness and they always get into fights. And the sister said to her, she said, mel, just don't take the bait. And she had a moment where it was like, wait a second, you're saying I can choose to not take the bait that's out there. And I think what we are resisting and what we're pushing against is wishing that the bait or the comment or the action never existed. And that would be our perfect expectation in our perfect scenario. Except we are working with years and years and years of history trying to change other people. And we know that when we try to change other people, we are going to be miserable because it's absolutely not possible. So when you think about don't take the bait, it's really looking at what the trigger is and choosing not to get hooked by it, right? So we can only get hooked by the thought. We can only get hooked by the fear. We can only get hooked by the trigger if we choose to do it. And let's think about reaction times in sports, in emergency situations, reaction time is pertinent. You want to be able to react on a dime. You want to be able to, you know, get yourself out of a sticky situation or something that is not safe, right? In relationships, in business. And in business, you want to have a pause before your reaction time. You want to take a minute and just breathe. And this is something that I've been doing throughout business, throughout family time. Because are these things triggers? Are they meaning to be triggers or are these truly things that you've turned in to triggers? Are you turning everything that somebody says into a certain way, looking at it through a certain lens, are you turning everything someone says because you feel like you have a story of what they think of you? So everything that they say to you, maybe you're defensive. I know that this has definitely Been something in my life where I feel like sometimes everything someone says is maybe trying to pick on me or make me feel a certain way. And because of that I only look at what they're saying through a certain lens instead of pausing to stop and say is this true? Is this true? And if it's not, then you're reacting and you're feeding into the story and you're keeping it into the storyline. You're continuing to feed it so that it stays in the storyline of what you are used to. Because we all have a story about how we show up in business, in family and in relationships and when anything starts to stray from that story, we actually self sabotage to try to make sure it fits that story. It's just like in business, if you have this idea that you can never be successful and you'll always fail, you'll take that first hurdle and you'll look at it and say, see, this is why I'm not successful. Instead of looking at it through a creative lens and saying, even though this happened, I'm going to keep pushing. Or when somebody says something to you, you're looking at it through the lens of see, they're always being passive aggressive when they said this, look at that. Instead of saying, well that's okay, that doesn't have to be my story. And maybe, maybe they didn't mean it that way. Maybe I could respond differently and see if I could change the outcome. So Jack Canfield talks a lot about, he has a formula. He says E plus R equals O, event plus response equals outcome. And because you don't have control over the event, right? The event is the thing you have no control over. R is the thing that you do. Your response. If you keep having these events in your life, in your business and your family and your relationships and you keep getting the same outcome, it's because your response is not changing. This is a tough one because you can be like, well, why should I have to turn the tide? Why should I have to keep responding a different way? Why should I have to keep turning the cheek? It's not necessarily about turning the cheek, but it's about responding differently. You can stand up for yourself and you can respond with love and stand up for yourself and share a different belief and have a different conversation done in a much more loving way. Or maybe not at the time where the trigger is high. So really looking at our amount of energy that we have throughout the day, I can guarantee you that major, if you are tired, if you're feeling like you can't accomplish goals. If you're feeling like you're just exhausted all the time and your brain is always stressed out, it is probably because we are responding in a way that is consuming so much energy. And you're getting hooked into every little thing. So that's what it's like. It's like we have the fishing pole. You're casting out 15 lines and you're getting hooked into everybody else's story. And you're wondering why you're feeling exhausted and pulled and bent all day long, bent on a shape, right? When really your hook should just be in the one thing that you want. It should be in that vision, it should be in that dream. It should be into getting better. But instead we're hooked into all of this bullshit, all of these other fish that we absolutely do not want, right? Like all of the bottom feeders on the and they're stories. We're hooked into the stories. We're not even hooked into the humans. We're hooked into the stories that we're telling. And it is exhausting. So you can't be catching what you want. You can't be thinking about what you want. You can't be putting your energy where you want. If you are getting hooked into all of these triggers and you're taking the cheap bait left and right, that's probably not even real. It's probably a story that you are maintaining from your past or from your childhood. Because our brains are wired for safety. And if we keep sabotaging ourself, we're not gonna go into the scary, the true scary places, right? We're gonna stay and that safe little pond, hooked into all of those little stories and all of those minnows and all of those body bottom feeders. Instead of going out and looking for or going for that big vision.
2026 is the year that you launch your business. It's the year that you've become the boss, you become the leader. That idea that you have that has been eating at you forever that just will not leave you alone is going to come to life. Maybe it's something that someone tells you you should always sell or a store you've already designed in your head. And with Shopify, 2026 is when you finally make it happen. Shopify gives you everything you need to sell online and in person. Millions of entrepreneurs have already made this leap from household name to first time business owners. Just getting started, you guys. I use Shopify for glossy and I remember when they sent me my little shopping bag celebrating my 10,000 sales and I literally cried because I was so scared to take the leap. And I'm so glad that I did and that I use Shopify. It gives you all the tools to easily build your dream store. You can choose from hundreds of beautiful templates that you can customize to match. Your brand setup is fast with Shopify's built in AI tools that write product descriptions and headlines and help you edit photos. So marketing is built in too. You can create email and social campaigns that reach customers wherever they scroll. So as you grow, Shopify grows with you. You can handle more orders, expand to new markets, and do it all from the Same dashboard in 2026. Stop waiting and start selling with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com happy. Go to shopify.com happy that's shopify.com happy. Hear your first cha ching this new year with Shopify by your side. Too many people finish their workday feeling frustrated, drained and unfulfilled. I know that. I have experienced that myself. And the good news is it doesn have to be this way. And you don't need a new job to fix it. Patrick Lencioni, author of the Five Dysfunctions of a Team and more than a dozen other bestsellers, created the working genius assessment to help you pinpoint the kind of work that gives you energy, the kind that lights you up, and it also shares the kind that drains it. So over a million people, including me, have taken it and completely changed how I lead and show up every day. If you're a CEO, an entrepreneur, or someone who just wants to level up in business and in life, working genius is going to give you the clarity and confidence to operate in your strengths and find greater joy in what you do. Because confidence isn't pretending to be good at everything. It's knowing where you're truly gifted. Take the working genius assessment today and get 20% off with code Earn at Working genius.
Com.
That's Working genius dot com. You'll be glad you did it.
So, you guys, I. I want you to take a minute and just scan your life right now for what story you are choosing to take the bait on what right now that you could actually just unhook from. You could just take your hook right out. You could breathe and you could say over and over today, when this comes up, I'm gonna keep choosing again and again that I am not gonna hook into this and I'm gonna choose something different. Because you wanna hook right away into the story that you want. So what we wanna do is we wanna replace that old story, we want to let go of that old trigger or come up with a solution. So if somebody truly is trying to trigger you, it's hard to be like, okay, I'm just gonna ignore it. We need to come up with a solution. You're either gonna spend less time with that person or you're gonna come up with the time that you're gonna talk, or you're gonna come up with the engaging or the way that you're going to engage into a conversation that is solution based. And if they do not want to engage in that solution based conversation and you ask again and again, let's say you ask three times and you say, you know, there's something I really want to talk with you about because I want to preserve this relationship and because it means so much to me. And this could be a story I'm telling myself. This may not be true, but I have to share it because it comes up every time we're together. And I don't want it to be this way anymore for me. I want to clear this because you're so important to me. And if they choose to not do it, if they choose to not respond and it's worth it, the relationship is worth it, then you keep trying until you feel like you've tried enough. And that's when you have to have the conversation or you don't have the conversation and you slowly stop responding. You slowly ease them out of your life, or you ease them out of your life quickly and it doesn't always go well. And this is the thing that people don't want to hear is a lot of times when we're ending a very toxic relationship and you've tried all of this, it's not going to end the way that you want. They might talk about you, they might be so mad at you, they might send you terrible texts, emails, you know, try to destroy your reputation. They're not going to be able to because one person cannot take you down. You can take you down. You can be a bad person, you can be malicious, but as long as you are a person with good intentions, you will not be taken down. It will eventually go away. We absolutely have had this happen, Chris and I, with some people who, for about a year, up to two years, they were trying to definitely tarnish our reputation and gossip about us. And we just kept saying prayers and we just kept on, you know, showing up as best as we could in every area of our life. Of course we're imperfect, so we Weren't perfect everywhere at all. Far from it. But we had good intentions. We helped people. We just said, you know, what if we know it's the. If we know that that is not the truth, we just have to keep showing up in our truth. And eventually it went away. And people actually came up to us and said, you know, you know, when these people were talking about you, it just looked so bad on them because everybody knew that that wasn't the truth because there were no experiences like that with you, and that's what will happen for you. It was horrible. While we were in it, we had to say prayers 10 times a day because we felt awful. We were in fear that, you know, all of these things were happening behind the scenes. We wanted to go and try to fix our everything, fix what they were saying. And you can't do that. You can't waste your energy there. You can only put your energy in the good and know that that is going to be what is going turn the ship into the direction that you want, and it's going to be what is going to get you out of that situation. So this is all about not taking any triggers or bait and taking time to respond. And this is unavoidable in life. I really think that we get these triggers to learn. I don't think we get them. I know we get them so that we can learn to let go and just move through life with less resistance. Resistance is up to us. It's a choice to unhook, and it really feels that way. It's not easy. It's probably what it feels like to unhook a fish. It's not very easy. It's probably not gonna feel good, and it's just gonna be easier to leave that hook in. It's gonna be easier to dangle on that line. But I'm telling you, the work around it is unhooking. Resisting the temptation to take the bait of the trigger. This is gonna give you all of your energy back and all of your creative energy to come up with the ideas and the solution to create the life that you want. I'm so grateful for you. Thank you for hanging in there with my super not awesome audio on the road right into my iPhone. It just shows that you can literally do anything from anywhere and that you can let go of your stories. Like I had my story of God. It's not a good time. It's not going to sound good. It's inconvenient. What about my wifi? Like, so many stories of why I should just take a break on the podcast and why it's hard for me to work on the road, but I'm doing it, and I'm growing, and I'm not taking the triggers of it's not the perfect time. It doesn't feel good to work in here all day. And I'm just gonna say, okay, this is for my growth. This is for my expansion. If I can do this, if I can work through this, if I can come up with solutions, this is only gonna make me come up with more solutions in my life. And you know what? I don't have that story anymore. I can make it happen anywhere. So I'm sending you so much love, and I hope, hope that this podcast helps. And until next time, earn your happy. Bye, everyone.
More from Lori


How to Stop Overcomplicating Wellness and Feel Good Again with Stephanie Gambetta


The Enneagram, AI, and the Leadership Skill Technology Can’t Replace with Tracy O'Malley


The North Star Framework for Leading a Stronger, Self-Sufficient Team with Ashley Thomas


Feel Better at Every Age with the Pilates Principles That Actually Work with Vanessa Kelly






