Stop self-sabotaging your dreams

There will be all of these stories that you tell yourself based upon stories that people around you tell, based upon the conditioning that you have. But I want you to start to become more adept at questioning those stories, but not only questioning those stories as to whether they are true, but questioning whether they're true in relation to what it is that you want. You're listening to the Circle C Project. Welcome to the Triple CE Project, the podcast that helps you gain clarity, boost confidence, build courage so you can live lifeless. I'm your host, Ryan Spence, the big Lord dropout, life coach, author, speaker, lover of hoodies, hip hop, and big, hairy, audacious goals. If you're tired of living the life you think you should want and ready to start living the life you want, this podcast will help you get from where you are to where you really want to be. So now with friends, I invite you to grab a drink, take a seat. Allow me to guide you towards living a life that's lit. Hey. Hey. Welcome to episode 25 of the Triple Seat Project with me, your host, Ryan Spence, former big law lawyer, now coach for lawyers and corporate professionals just like you, and author of the Triple Seat Method. Gain clarity, boost confidence, and build courage so you can live life. L Lit. The book is out now. If you haven't got your copy yet, go and pick it up. It's really going to help you. It's not only part memoir of my journey from big law lawyer to the big law dropout. Got my words mixed up then. But it's also a pop blueprint, a toolkit if you wish, in helping you move from a life of lethargy to a life that's lit. Go ahead, grab the book. Paperback, ebook. Also now on audio law, the usual places you would get your books from. And don't forget to download the workbook. The workbook is going to allow you to do the work, answer the questions, do the journaling that I talk about in the book. All exercises that have helped me get from where I was on the path to where it is that I want to be this week. I want to talk about self sabotage. Self sabotage is something that I was definitely guilty of and something that I see clients play into as well when they. When they come to sessions. What do I mean by self sabotage? Well, let me set the scene and show that actually it's not really your fault, especially if you're a lawyer, as I was. We're trained to think in a linear manner. We are trained to look at things logically and that logic is good for the job that we do. It's good when you're looking at and reviewing documents. It's good when you've got to solve a particular problem, which there is a formula to solving. You just work through the steps. But it's not really good always in the wider aspects of your life, particularly when you're not happy with where you are and you're trying to create and design a different vision, an alternative life for yourself. Because the way that you're trained and the way that you think is going to keep you thinking in the same manner. So it's going to keep you stuck in what you already know and what you think is already possible. And this is something which I had in my last five years, as I've talked sort of quite openly about before. I had limiting beliefs in terms of what I believed that I could do, what I believed was possible for me. So with self sabotage, that's basically what that means. It means that you talk yourself out of something before you've even had a chance to try it out to see if it works. So that manifests itself in various ways. So, for example, when I thought I wanted to be a yoga teacher, um, I would tell myself, I can't be a yoga teacher because you can't make any money being a yoga teacher. I see clients come to me saying similar things. I can't do X because I'll never make any money doing it, or I can't do Y because I'm too old, or because I can never get the skills, or because nobody will take me seriously. There are lots of different narratives that we tell ourselves. And I've talked about this a little bit before in relation to confidence and asking yourself, where's the evidence? But with self sabotage, it's. I want to explore this a little bit deeper because you're telling yourself stories that aren't true. They may be true to an extent, but they may not be true in relation to what it is that you're trying to do. And the reason I paused this because it's a. It's a little complex to explain, but I'm going to try because I think this is really going to help you get out of your own way. So let's take, for example, yoga teachers don't make money. Okay, that's, that's a bold statement. The thing about that statement is it's not true. There are yoga teachers who don't make much money at all. They are running around cheating 20, 30 classes a week, taking as much as they can just to make ends meet. And in some cases even failing to do that, and they're burning themselves out in the process. That is true. There are yoga teachers who are up at the top, who have got endorsement deals, who are hosting high end retreats, who are what you might call your quote unquote, celebrity yogis, although I'd hate that term. They're making tons of money and there are people in between, you know, I mean, who are teaching yoga as a side hustle, something that they love to do. And it's not really about making money, it's just something that they enjoy and they do on the side. There are other people who are teaching in a sustainable way and are making a living, you know, are kind of living life. They're not making millions, they're not making the hundreds of thousands that they may have made in their corporate career if they had one, but they're, they're making what they need to make to live life lit, to be fulfilled, to be happy. So there's a whole range within that sphere. If you start by telling yourself, I can't be a yoga teacher because I'll never make money, you're effectively cutting off all of that. When really what you need to be doing is asking yourself, what kind of yoga teacher do I want to be? How do I want yoga to be part of my life? And I'm only talking about yoga because this is my experience and this is kind of the process I had to go through. But this can be applied to anything. Do you want to be a personal trainer? Do you want to quit big law, move to a small firm? Do you want to leave your senior management role in the corporate and go and join a startup, whatever it is? There'll be all of these stories that you tell yourself based upon stories that people around you tell based upon the conditioning that you have. But I want you to start to become more adept at questioning those stories, but not only questioning those stories as to whether they are true, but questioning whether they're true in relation to what it is that you want. So to go back to the yoga analogy, if you want to be a quote, unquote, celebrity yogi, superstar yogi, making millions of dollars, traveling the world, hosting high end retreats, that's one path that you can go down that in and of itself, because the people doing that negates the story that you can't make money teaching yoga. But if you know that that's what you want to do, then you can start to figure out the steps that you would need to take to carve out and create that life for yourself and start to make decisions that will support you on that path. If you just enjoy teaching and you maybe want to teach a couple of classes at the weekend and that's all that you want to do and that will help you to live life lit, that will help to give you another outlet, another area of fulfillment. Then again, you can start to make decisions to allow you to follow that path. And those decisions could be things like blocking time out in your calendar at work so that you have time to go and do your own practice, you have time to go and study, you have time to prepare your sequences, committing to yourself, treating it like a meeting and making use of that time. Because we all have times throughout our workday, even in the most intense jobs, even when I was in big law, there was definitely down periods between deals that quite frankly I wasted that time and I could have actually used that time to be better prepared for exiting the world of big law. Because yeah, I certainly wasn't prepared. I kind of just took the leap and figured I'd sort it out on the way down, which I don't advise, but hey, it is what it is. But what I mean is that when you get curious, when you start questioning why you want to do these things, how you want it to look for you, then you can make decisions based upon the path that you want to follow, not the path upon what you think that you should follow. Because people will tell you not to do things because you won't make money doing it. And in their mind they're looking at you maybe leaving a six figure salary to go and do something which they have never seen anybody make a six figure salary doing it. Now maybe you don't want to make a six figure salary doing it, maybe you don't even need to. Once you've got curious and asked yourself what kind of lifestyle you want, what living life lit means to you, maybe you don't need that. And even if you do need that, I'm sure if you do your research you can go and find the people that are living that lifestyle which you think you might want to live or live some aspects of and then you can study how they made that happen and try to figure out how you can carve the same path for yourself. So what I'm inviting you to do is to just not self sabotage, to just not accept the stories that you're telling yourself or that you are being told because everything was impossible until it was done. Everything. So question be curious. It was funny, I was on a guest on a podcast once and I was talking about curiosity and the host said to me, well, that now that makes four C's. And I laughed. And yeah, I'm not, I'm not writing another book called the Four C's because I don't want to, but it could actually be a fourth C Curiosity, because with self sabotage, you're, you're disempowering yourself. You're accepting a narrative without testing whether it's true in relation to what you want, in relation to your life. But with curiosity, you can start to get into the wheeze and really kind of see how things could be and how that would feel for you and how you would want it to be. So I think that's all I wanted to say for this week. Although actually no, one thing I wanted to talk about is just to leave this thought with you about being curious and about not accepting a narrative, not accepting the preconceived ideas of what's possible for you and what you should be doing and should be thinking about. So you probably heard because he's been all over the news over the last year or two, there's a tick tocker, a guy called Carby, lame Senegalese guy who is. He now lives in Italy and during the pandemic he lost his job. He works in a factory. I'm not sure what type of factory, but yeah, he lost his job pre pandemic. And during the pandemic he started to post on TikTok and I don't think he speaks English or he doesn't speak English that well. He's, he's, he speaks Italian and he speaks Wolof, which is the Senegalese language. So his, his videos didn't even have speech. They were just him sort of parodying other things that he'd seen online or things that he'd seen people doing with his trademark hand gesture. Now he is now the most followed creator on TikTok with, I think I read, 142.1 million followers. But more important than that, he now has a net worth with reportedly 13, no, 15, 15 million US dollars in 2022. And he has a multi year endorsement deal with, with Hugo Boss. Now I'm telling you this because the wisdom, the convention would be that if you lose your job, you run and get another job doing the same thing, you know, because that's, that's, that's the logic, that is the logical way of doing things. You follow the linear path of I've lost this job. So I go and look at other other employers in the same field and I try and get myself another job. Now in his case, probably because the pandemic, that wasn't possible. And I don't know the ins and outs of his story, but I use this as an example. By not following the linear path, by being curious, by exploring other opportunities, he's now carved out this career which he probably didn't think was a possibility before. Nobody would say to you if you lost your job, oh it's fine, go ahead and be a tiktoker, you know, I mean, and that can be a career. No one would say that because it's not, it's not logical and it's not within their purview, it's not within the vision of what they see for you. But by being curious and by not self sabotaging, you allow yourself to try a whole range of things that you may not have thought about. You allow yourself to explore opportunities, you allow yourself to. And the analogy I like to use is pull the many different threads that are hanging and see where they lead. So that's why I'd like to leave with you today. Don't self sabotage. Don't write yourself off before you've even started. There's a whole world of opportunities out there. There's so many things that you can do that you can try and there are so many different ways that you can do them. It doesn't have to be burning down the bridges and jumping out of one career and doing something completely different and then trying to sort of figure out how you're going to make money doing. It doesn't have to be that. It can be if that's what's right for you. And if you're in a particularly toxic environment and it's affecting your health, you probably need to do that. You just need to get out and do something else or get what they call a bridge job to kind of tide you over before you get to the real thing you want to do. But maybe you just need to be more intentional and think, this is something which I like. I don't necessarily need it to be my main thing, but I'm going to carve out the time of intention about doing that. And therefore your, your calendar becomes more intentional. You know, you're carving out that time and using that time intentionally to do more of the thing that you love, the thing that's going to you to create those moments of joy, allow you to live life lit. But you can only do all of that if you get curious and you stop self sabotaging. Stop accepting the narrative and start creating your own cool. That's about all for me this week. If you're looking for a space to just brainstorm some of these ideas that you have with someone who's. Who has no judgment, who's only here to see you succeed, to see you win, whatever your vision of success and winning looks like, that's what I can help you with as your coach. I had a client say to me once, well, multiple occasions, that just actually having that space to sit and brainstorm in a way that what they weren't being judged and they didn't feel silly was extremely valuable to them. Sometimes that's all that we can do. But what I'd also do is challenge you. Challenge these assumptions that you have so that you stop self sabotaging. You stop accepting these narratives as true and really explore where they came from and whether they are true or whether they're actually just things that you are. You are giving into. Coach, I'm here to empower you. I'm here to allow you to recognize your own power and to use that power for good, for the good of you, for the good of your life. So head to iamrinespence.com hit the button for coaching and check out the page and book a call. I mean, we'll get on a call, we'll chat, we'll see where you are, see what you need and see if we're a good fit and explore how we can work together. There's multiple ways that we can do that and yeah, it's not one size fits all. We will make it happen. Whatever works best for you and what you need at that given moment. So I am Ryan Spence.com hit the burden for coaching and book a call. Look forward to speaking with you and helping you move from a life of lethargy towards living a life. That's it. Thanks for tuning in to the Triple C project. Before you go, I want to share something with you. When I was in Big Law, I struggled with limiting beliefs. I didn't have a confidence, confidence to believe that I could change my life, that I could leave Big Law and do something differently, that I could move from a life of lethargy and create a life that's lit. That's why I created a confidence journal for people like you who are in the same position that I was, who are struggling with that confidence and need a boost to allow you to believe that you can do the things that you want to do. Confidence Journal is six journal prompts that I've used and I still use to help me get from the guy who's too scared to post on Instagram, to the guy who is now committed to giving a TED Talk, to the guy who wrote a book, to the guy who launched a podcast. You can do any of this too. All you need to do is start boosting your confidence. So to do that, head to iamrinespence.com and download the Confidence Journal. It's free, it works, and it's going to change your life. Thanks for tuning in. See you next week. And remember, stop living a life of lethargy and start living life.