You Have To Be Sh*t To Grow; So Embrace It

Be shit. Accept the joy, the beauty, the freedom in being a bit shit. 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 life lit. I'm your host, Ryan Spence, the big law 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 do 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, and allow me to guide you towards living a life that's lit. Hey. Hey. Welcome to episode 94 of the Triple C Project. Me, your host, Ryan Spence, integrative life coach, yoga teacher, author of the Triple C method, and guy who's here to just help you get from survival mode to thrival mode. I'm here to help to make you make decisions that make your life better. To make your life the way you want your life to be, not the way somebody else wants your life to be. And how do I do that? In many, many ways. You're listening to this podcast so you're in the right place for that. But for anything else, you can head to iamrynespence.com and find out all the different ways that I can help you over there. And a new way is yoga. I've been teaching yoga off and on since 2020 when I did my yoga teacher training back in Singapore and I recently started teaching again. If you follow me on social media, you'll have seen the beautiful new space that I now teach in on a weekly basis and I love loving the regular students that coming in and just loving getting back in to teaching on a regular basis. But I'm also now offering private yoga classes. So as well as one to one coaching, which I've been doing for a while, you can now come and practice yoga with me, whether that's in person or virtually. So to find out about that, head to iamrinespence.com yoga and book yourself a consultation and let's have a chat about what you want from your yoga practice and how I can help you to get that. Okay, so this week's episode is all about being shit or more or more actually being comfortable with being shit. What I see is listen. You'll listen to this, right? You are seen outwardly as being successful. You know, you've done all the right things you're on that career train that's leading to where everyone expects you to want to go, to want to be. And even if you're not entirely happy with where you are, you can, you can do what you do, right? You've been doing it for long enough and you're pretty accomplished, you've achieved a lot, so that can be a good thing. But it can also hold you back from doing the things that you really want to do, from exploring new things, from following your curiosity. Because you're so used to doing things, quote unquote, right, that you're scared of doing things wrong. You're scared of being seen to be a little bit shit. And here's the thing, everything that you can do now you were once at is true. It can be hard to remember that, particularly if you're 10, 15 years, 20 years into a career. It can be hard to forget what those early days were like, when you knew nothing. Now, I remember when I was. When I first qualified as a lawyer, my first week after qualification leave coming back. And now my email signature no longer said trainee, it said associate. And so anybody who was reading that externally didn't know how qualified I was. They. I was just an associate, even though it was only a few days qualified. And I remember being on a call with a client or client emailing and wanting to have a call. And the partner that I worked with was out of the office, he was on paternity leave. And so I sent him this email saying, look, they want to call, can you join? And he was like, nah, I mean, I'm at home with the baby, my wife's out, you'll just have to take the call. I was petrified in my head. I'm like, I'm literally a few days qualified. Like, I cannot take a call with a client on my own. A few days qualified, I just can't do it. And I was terrified. I was terrified of being a bit shit, I was terrified of getting it wrong. But in that situation, I didn't really have a choice, right? Client wanted a call and I had to get on the call. And it just by that, I actually knew more than I thought that I did. And the client was very happy and everything that I said was right and it was all fine. But in that situation, I had to do the thing right. It was my job. There was nowhere for me to hide, there was no, oh, well, I'm a little bit scared. I don't want to get embarrassed. So I'm just going to kind of sit this one Out. I didn't have a choice. So why can't you follow that same path in your own life? Treat the thing that you want to do as if you don't have a choice, like your job, as if you have to do it, instead of letting this fear of being seen to be a little bit shit hold you back. And I reminded of this by a conversation I had with a client who literally said, I don't want to be shit. We were talking about something that they. That they were kind of wanting to do, they wanting to do for a while, but hadn't really got around to it. And when we kind of got down to the crux of it, that was what they said. They just don't want to be seen to be shit. And the thing is, when they spoke about this thing that they. That they wanted to do, like, everything changed about them. And this is what I love about my work as a coach. I can see these shifts in clients as they're talking, which they don't always see. And so I could tell that this wasn't just a surface level thing that they thought they should say. They were really passionate about this thing that they wanted to do that they had been thinking about for quite a long time. And it involved a change of direction, and it involved a leap of faith, as a lot of change does. And it was going to be in alignment with the values, their values that we had worked through in our sessions, to kind of get to their core values. So everything about this thing was like, do it, get on with it, get started. But in the same breath of talking about how they're excited about this thing and how much they would really love to do it, they also then said, but I could never do that. It's just not something that people like me do. And as in my own way, I push them to tell me why, because I don't let you off the hook in my sessions, right? So I want to know why. Because it's only when we get to the real reason that we can kind of figure out a solution. And so when I pushed them to tell me why, and they watched as they kind of shifted nervously in their seat as I left them to kind of stew in that silence, they eventually said, because they're good, because I'm good at what I do now, and I don't want to start something new and be shit. And really what they meant was, they don't want to start something new and be seen to be shit, be seen to fail, be seen to make mistakes. They didn't want to be embarrassed, they didn't want to be laughed at, and so they just didn't do the thing. And I had a little laugh to myself because I've heard this before and it's something that I've said before as well. So in the example, I just shared my story, I just shared about being a baby lawyer, junior lawyer, you know, I was kind of forced to do the thing and it turned out fine. It had to. But as I said, that was work. But in other aspects of my life, I've told myself the same thing. I, as I said, I talk about yoga, practice yoga for a long time. I love yoga. It's given me so much, and that's why I now teach it. But I always wanted to do, always like the idea of being able to do a headstand. And I remember in our teacher training, we were taught the sort of fundamentals, doing a headstand and how to teach people to do a headstand. And I would kind of take every opportunity to assist my fellow. My fellow training teachers rather than attempt the headstand myself, because I didn't want to look stupid, I didn't want to fall out of the pose. And this was before I'd kind of gone deep down the rabbit hole, deep on my own personal quest to get to where I am now. So there was still this sense of caution, this sense of. Of kind of not fully being vulnerable yet. I hadn't quite got to that stage yet. And so that fear of being seen to be shit, of falling out of a headstand, of making a fool of myself, of other people seeing that I couldn't do this, just kind of stopped me from even attempting it for quite a long time. And then as I got more clarity, as I got more confidence, as I got more courage, I had a word to myself, was like, you want to do this, so just do it. I mean, it's not as if being able to do a headstand is going to define me as a person or as a teacher, but it was just something that I wanted to do, I wanted to achieve. So I resolved to just try it. So I did, and I started trying it, and I fell a lot. I struggled a lot. It looked very inelegant, but, you know, I kept trying. And then last year, there was a teacher whose class I started going to, and her classes are very hardcore, but it's very much about fundamentals of some of these more challenging poses, headstand being one of them. And initially I got to the stage where I Could do headstand if I kind of hit it just right, if I kind of got my knees onto my arms first and then slowly tried to get, get my legs up, but it was still, there's still no real flow to it. But the more that I went to her classes and the more that I practiced myself outside of class, the more that I release this attachment to what it might look like to being a bit and not wanting to feel that way. The more I let that go, the better I became. Until one day I just effortlessly flowed into headstand, legs straight up, no bending, the knees first, no kind of reticence, nothing, just straight up. And I was like, oh, this is quite cool. And then I did it again, I did it again and, and now it's just something that I do. But the thing is, I've been telling myself for a long time that I didn't want to be seen to be shit at it or be thought of as being shit because I couldn't do headstand, that I just didn't try it. So therefore it never happened for me. And so this story was going around in my head that I couldn't do it. And in telling myself that I couldn't do it, it became this self fulfilling prophecy that I couldn't do it because I wouldn't try to do it, because I didn't want to look shit, I didn't want to look stupid. I didn't want to fall out of the pose and have people laugh at me. And so when this client said that to me, that's why I laughed, because I knew I'd been there. I knew other clients that have been there as well. And I fully get it. I fully get that when you have reached a certain status and you are seen as being successful at one thing, it can be very hard to be a beginner in something new. But being a beginner is beautiful because it frees you from the shackles of this Persona that you have built up in another world, in another realm. And especially when you are clear on where you want to be. And you know that in order to get there, you have to take new steps, steps you, I mean, steps you haven't taken before. Do you have to do things that you haven't done before. That beginner's mindset is what's going to allow you to approach these things in a way that serves you. So everything that you have, everything that you do, you, you were at, at the start, you know, some more than others, but you didn't know you had to keep doing the thing in order to learn, in order to get better. And that's what allowed you to progress. And so if you think back to some of those things, maybe the job that you do now, maybe you've got a hobby that you're particularly skilled at now, maybe you play a sport, maybe you go to the gym, you know, maybe you speak a language, whatever it is that you do, whatever things that you do, think back to when you first started, and think back to how shit you were when you first started. But also think back to the joy that you probably had in those early stages, because there's a freedom to being a beginner. There's a freedom to knowing that you're a little bit shit because it means that you can only get better. And that's actually quite fun. Whereas when you kind of feel that you've achieved what you set out to achieve, there's this concern, this worry of holding on to what you already have. And that's a whole other straight jacket, a whole other shackle around your arms and your legs. But that beginning stage, that early stage, that first step of trying something new, knowing that eventually it's going to lead you to this bigger vision that you have for yourself, that's beautiful if you look at it the right way, if you allow yourself to release that fear of what other people might think, of what other people might say. So I want to leave you with this takeaway from this episode. Be shit. Accept the joy, the beauty, the freedom in being a bit shit. So try that new thing. If you know where you are isn't where you want to be. If you know the path that you're currently on isn't leading to where you want to get to. If you know that there are certain shifts or changes you want to make to enhance the quality of your life, of your relationships, then do the difficult thing to make that happen and accept that it's going to be difficult. Accept that you're probably going to make some mistakes. Accept that other people might look at you and think, what the hell are you doing? Look at you as a failure, look at you as an embarrassment. It doesn't matter. Because they're not living your life. They are not you. So why are you going to let this fear of what they think, of what they say, of what you look like, hold you back from the bigger thing that is out there for you, from the bigger thing that you're trying to get after, from the thing that you have gain clarity on, feel excited about, and really want to work towards Makes no sense, right? So everyone started somewhere and everyone, when they started was a little bit shit. And it's only through accepting that and continuing to show up. As I've said before, consistency beats intensity. That consistency allowed them to get better, a little bit better each time they tried. So can you start your thing today? Take that next smallest step towards the mission, the thing, the purpose that you're working towards. Accept it's going to take time to figure it out, but enjoy that process, enjoy embracing that beginner mindset because you will get better, you will become more accomplished and you're going to miss those days when there was the freedom of just playing around and trying to figure it out. So that's what I want to leave you this week. And I'm also going to leave you with a question I'd love for you to answer me via social media or email. And my question is, when was the last time you felt a bit shit at something? What was it you tried and was like, this isn't great and did you carry on with it? Let's start a conversation around this because the more that we can embrace like we did as children, embrace this beginner mindset, accept the fact that we'll be in it shit. The more things we'll try, the more we will follow our curiosity and the more joy that's going to bring to our lives. Thanks as always for being here. Shoot me a message and answer that question over on Instagram @IM Ryan Spence or over on LinkedIn Ryan Spence or drop me an email. Hey at I am Ryan Spence.com and I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to hear what you take away from this episode, what you will do differently after listening to this episode and if you would like some personal one to one support in helping you to get on the path towards your lit life, head over to im Ryan Spence.com coaching and check out what I do, check out how I can help you, how I have helped others and get on that path of living life lit and iamrinespence.com Yoga for all things yoga. And if you're anywhere local near where I live here in good old Sheffield in the uk, come and join me in a class. Love to see you there. And mention the podcast until next week. Thanks for being here again as always. It's. It's amazing to be able to do this and to be able to have people all over the world tune in and listen to the show, rate and review. If you get any insights from the show, if you like the show, share it with a friend and until next week, stop living a life of lethargy. Start living life thanks for tuning in to the Triple C project. In the spirit of the Triple C, here's three things that you can do to support the show. Head to ratethispodcast.com Triple C or over to your favorite podcast app and leave a review. Reviews really help people checking out shows to see what they can expect and how this show can help them. Second thing you can do Share Share this episode Share a previous episode with a friend. Someone who you feel could benefit from what I'm throwing down on this his show and number three me. Head to iamrinespence.com get on the main list. I'll be sharing news about the show, news about what I'm up to, my new book start writing soon. So to be the first to be in the know, you need to get yourself on the list. Really appreciate you being here and until next week, stop living a life of lethargy. Start living life lit.