Unlock Your Potential with Self-Energy & Slow Productivity
Transcript of the episode recording:
Hey, big f*cking dreamers. So pumped to be here with you today. And actually I have been hearing from a few of you, friend of the podcast, Katie Clinch. Katie, if you're listening to this, she sent me a video of her the other day and she was like, I'm a big f*cking dreamer. And I was like, yeah, you are. Yeah, you are. So I love that. So if you're out there and if you're a big f*cking dreamer, send me a DM. I want to hear from you. I want to know that you're getting value from this podcast. I want to hear more of what you want to talk about. Or what you want to hear about. If you want to hear less of this, well then I guess just don't listen.
But today, really excited, I've got a great topic for you guys. And it's a little bit about manifesting. I don't really use the term manifesting a lot, but essentially that is all I ever do with my clients and with myself. They want something in their life. They want to fulfill their potential in their career or be better in their relationships or get better health and then we figure out a way to do it. And that is essentially everything I really do as a coach, but you could call that manifesting, you could call that creating your ideal life.
So we're gonna dive into that today, but first I wanna give a personal update. So I've spoken a bit about, I think I spoke about this in an episode a few weeks ago on five productivity hacks, but that is Cal Newport. So I'm a very big fan of Cal Newport's work. And Cal Newport is a nonfiction author. He's published in The New Yorker. He's a regular contributor to The New Yorker. also has quite a few books. I think he's published 12, maybe, nonfiction books. And he's a professor of computer science at Georgetown University. And he has just released, well, probably about a few months ago now, a book called Slow Productivity.
The subtitle is something like the lost art of achievement without burnout or something like that. And it really intrigued me because I have had burnout before. some ways, I think I am still recovering from burnout. I think it will always be there. As one of my therapists, my therapist Lynn a few years back said to me, burnout is like a concussion and it's something that once you have it, you will always be more at risk for getting it again than someone that has not had burnout. So it's something I always have to monitor in terms of how much I'm working in terms of my energy level. So I really don't go into that state again.
So I was very curious about Cal's book and I've read it. I've read it two times now and I'm going back through it again and reading it. I'm just such a little nerd. I've got all my little highlighters and my little pens out and I'm like taking notes and implementing these things right away. But principle one in slow productivity is do fewer things. Doing fewer things is not something that I am necessarily good at. When I was recovering from burnout, I I started a master's degree in creative writing. I wrote a novel. It was like, couldn't, I couldn't just do nothing. And I am consistently doing a lot of different things.
For me now, just sharing a little bit of peek behind the curtain, the difference between corporate and running your own business is like, I mean, there are so many differences, but I'm essentially, I'm the boss. I make all of my decisions and I look at how much work I take on. I look at how much work I don't take on.But I also look at all my different strategies.
And what I really realized reading slow productivity and principle one of do fewer things is that I had so many different competing priorities in my business, but they all needed their own separate strategy. And so it was really looking at, what's effective? What's not effective? What's gaining results? Not gaining the results. Do more of those things. Do less. But it's quite easy in life I find to just think more is more. Like more is more, more is better. If you do more, you get more results. But as Cal talks about, that's not actually true. So when you can do fewer things, then the quality of your work greatly increases. The cognitive load also decreases because then able to put out work at a much higher standard. And you don't have so much cognitive load and cognitive overhead that your brain is consistently on overdrive because it's trying to do a million different f*cking things, which I've definitely been there before. And I think that that really contributed me for burnout. So it's a great book. I highly recommend it.
I'm really implementing the principles in my life. And this actually, on that note, I listen to so many podcasts. I read a lot of different books. And I've been very intentional about what I listen to what I implement. I found I was listening to too many business podcasts. There were too many strategies coming at me. And so I just decided to shut all that off. I I work with coaches. I have mentors. I need to be working with those people. I don't need to be just taking any of that ad hoc advice in. So that is my personal update of the week, doing fewer things. I will keep you updated on that, how it goes.
And so now we are going to get in the meat of the episode, which is shaping your ideal life and getting into your self-energy.
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So this is really going to be good for you if you're unsure of what to do next in your life and career and you feel like you're stuck, you feel like you're stagnant or you also don't feel like you've got inner mastery over yourself. So maybe there is intense procrastination. Maybe you've got anger issues. Maybe you feel like you don't do a lot of your healthy habits. Like it's really hard for you to work out consistently and you really just want to be better.
You could potentially not even know what fun is. So you might want to say, okay, I want to be better. I want to achieve my potential, but I don't really know what that looks like. I don't really know when I feel good. I don't really know what is going to drive me forward, but I know that right now I'm stuck and this isn't working. When clients come to me with this issue, which is, when clients come and they're seeking clarity, they want to feel good in their life, they want to feel good in their career, but they don't necessarily know what good looks like. I always start with understanding what they are in their self-energy.
Self-energy is a term that Richard Schwartz coined. So he's the founder of IFS, Internal Family Systems Therapy. It's a method I've spoken about a lot on the podcast and a method I see an IFS therapist. I've had multiple trainings on IFS. do it with my clients as well. think it's an unbelievable. It's my absolutely f*cking favorite tool for transformation. This sh*t is like the crack of transformation. I love it. And it works. It's an extremely, extremely effective tool. So in IFS, the first thing that you almost want to do is actually find your self energy.
And so self -energy, has a lot of different, it has similar names. In the Buddhist tradition, it could be the non -self. In Martha Becks work, if you're familiar with that, one of my mentors who I trained with, it's the essential self. But your self -energy is really the essence of you when you are, you're already whole, you're already unburdened, can't, nothing's damaged.
And so it doesn't have to develop. It has its own wisdom on how to heal yourself. It's really that deep inner knowing. So a lot of people say, you know, my intuition, although side note on intuition, if you're a highly traumatized person as well, or if you have had significant trauma in your life, either a big T trauma or a little T trauma, I really don't like the concept of intuition because a lot of times what we think will be our intuition will be almost self -destructive patterns and we'll be like, our intuition told us. Well, if you have come from any sort of trauma or any background with addiction, your intuition often will be f*cked. So that's just a side note. I really hate when people say trust your gut, trust your intuition because there should always be a caveat with that. Sometimes you don't actually know what is best for you and your gut and your intuition may lead you down the wrong path.
But anyway, that is a totally separate topic, totally separate episode. I might get into that later on. It's a personal pet peeve of mine, the topic of intuition, because it is it is actually quite nuanced. But anyway, going back to your self energy. In this theory, what Richard what Richard Schwartz says is you can see you're in your self energy when you feel the eight seas.
So when you're compassionate, when you're calm, when you have clarity, when you have curiosity, when you're confident, when you feel creativity, when you feel connected, and when you feel courage. So those eight Cs are really what I'm looking for. And when people are stuck, when people want to move forward, first I try to anchor them into their self -energy. Because if they're not anchored into their self -energy, then what happens is you design a life that actually isn't your ideal life, it's someone else's ideal life, likely your parents' ideal life, or what society thinks is good for you, and you end up in tech or in finance or in a career that you don't love doing things that aren't necessarily of your talents, of your interests, you're not using your superpower, just because it's quote unquote the right thing to do.
This is extremely important, and I always say, you know, even in my course, The Life and Work Transformation, it really is rooted around this whole concept. We wanna get people into their self -energy, get them into the eight Cs. Each month we have something called Courage Days. So it's where people take action in accordance to their ideal life. So it's really fulfilling all this. And I truly believe once you're embedded in your self -energy, once you feel, once you understand what is self -energy and what is in IFS, which is called AAPART, which we won't get into today. But once you start understanding, okay, this actually starts feeling really good in my body. This actually start, I feel very calm. I feel very present when I make this decision. That's what you wanna get into before you start quote unquote designing your life.
And actually, Martha Beck and Andrew Huberman. Andrew Huberman is a bit divisive for some people, but that's fine. I think he's still quite a master of his work and podcasting and neuroscience, et cetera. But Martha Beck was on Andrew Huberman's podcast and Martha actually spoke about you need to get into your self energy before you start shaping your ideal life, which was highly validating for me because these are two concepts that I've always started with in my group coaching course. And Martha Beck, you know, she's got three degrees from Harvard. A bachelor's, a master's, and a PhD in sociology. And I was like, OK, I'm thinking like Martha Beck. This is excellent. If we want to start, if we want to shape our ideal life, first we need to see, OK, when are you actually present? When are you calm? When are you curious?
An example from my own life when I was deciding to retrain as a coach. I was looking at multiple different certifications. And there was one which was more around executive coaching. And at that point, it was like I wasn't sure what type of coaching I wanted to do. I mean, even now, my methods, it's highly personal. It's highly professional. I kind of do straddle both life coaching and career coaching. But at that point, I was looking into an executive coaching certification.When I looked at it, I didn't feel calm. I didn't feel connected. I felt my whole stomach shrink in. I felt my body almost collapse. And it was like there was a pit in my, I have a pit in my stomach thinking about it now. But I knew that, you know, my ego thought it looked really good. It was like, ooh, I'm an executive coach. I'll only be working with executives, know, blah, blah, blah. And it was thinking and it was actually listening to my body of what felt good.
When I was picking, when I looked at Martha Beck's life coaching certification, I felt expansive, I felt calm, I felt grounded, I was so curious, I felt connected to the mission. And I was definitely in the eight C's. I was in my self energy and I decided to do this training, do the life coaching certification over an executive coaching certification. Even though there was a part of me that was like, maybe you'll make more money with executive coaching, maybe you'll do this, it didn't feel good to me.
So that's an example of look and pay attention to how things feel in your body. you're if you're deciding between two things and you've got one thing that kind of closes you up and collapses you and then another thing that expands you, that is an indication. The expansion is when you're more in your self energy and you want to be in your self energy before you start making big decisions on your life.
Once you're in your self energy and once I get clients kind of grounded in that, once they're grounded in their eightsies, once they feel understand what is in their bodies, understand when things start feeling good, when things don't feel good, then we actually look at your ideal life. And so this is an exercise and it's quite a beautiful exercise. And what I do with clients is I actually take them through a visualization and you can do this yourself and you can easily journal about it or even do a little meditation on it. If you think about what your ideal life is and you think, you know, your perfect life, but you want to imagine just an ordinary day in your perfect life. That starts with thinking, you know, how, who are you waking up next to? Where are you? What are you smelling? What are you experiencing? You go into the bathroom. What does your bathroom look like?
You start eating breakfast, then you head on to work, or maybe you drop the kids off at school. Do you have a family? Do you not have a family? And when people are really stuck in their career and they don't know what options to take next, this is a great exercise to just get them thinking, okay, you've got absolutely no limits here. What do you do for work? Do you work with people? Do you work alone? Are you in a team environment? Are you away in the woods?
When I thought about my ideal life, and Chris and I were at dinner the other night, and I've been just getting more into this topic, and it's always the first topic that I kick off with, but when I was hearing Martha Beck and Andrew Huberman talk about this, I went back to my ideal life. I also realized that I already had a lot of it. And my ideal life, it's waking up. love the mountains. I've always loved the mountains. I mean, from LA, being in Sydney now, I really miss the mountain ranges.
But I was in the Blue Mountains with Chris, with our dog Apollo, I woke up, I meditated, I did some journaling, I drank some tea, and then I got on, I taught a group coaching program, I worked on my novel for an hour, I then did some deep work designing more courses or designing a brand strategy.
I would say that the thing that's really missing in my ideal life is that I have a giant library that's like full of books and like deep, rich velvet couches and books, floor to ceiling, extremely high ceiling, but there's a fireplace crackling and I'm just surrounded by books. in my ideal life, Apollo also does embark, which would be great.
But when I was speaking to Chris about it, I realized, wow, I actually have so much of my ideal life already besides my library. But I will get there. But it was also realizing in the ideal life, actually, what do you already have? And I have coached a lot of people who have come to me and who have actually been pretty unhappy with their career and thought that they needed to make a really big career transition.
And sometimes what happens is that when they go through these types of exercises, they actually realize that they have a lot of what they already want and they don't really need to make a career transition. I do coach a lot of people in tech, but if you have been long -tenured in tech and if you're in a sales career where you have been long -tenured, know, typically your schedule is pretty good and you can make your own schedule, can make your own hours, you can work 20 to 25 hours a week making great money. And so what a lot of my clients have realized is that I actually have my ideal life and I was pretty unhappy with my life before or I thought I was unhappy with my life.
But now looking at all these different components, this life actually affords me the ability to have great balance, the ability to work out. And it's actually just the stress that I'm putting on myself to be an extremely high achiever. And that I really also relate to because in my life, I've always had an extremely relentless ambition. And I've always just wanted to be the best, be a star, you know, nonstop. And the more that I do this work, and I'm definitely not perfect and I'm definitely not fully self -actualized, but the more that I do this work, the more that relentless ambition eases and calms down and the more my work is about what can I provide with my clients. But I know that I'm off in life if I'm always thinking like more, more, more, I need to expand, I need to grow bigger versus if I'm thinking, wow, look at that client transformation. Wow, I can't believe that they came to me and they were stuck and then they've.
Now, like they're in a healthy, beautiful relationship or they left their toxic relationship or they moved countries or they've moved careers or even they just feel amazing in their life and they're at calm and at ease and that feels so good. When I'm focused on that, I know that I'm in the right place. But again, when I'm just like more, more, more push, more, more growth, I know that something's not right here. I know I'm not in my self energy.
Looking at you know, how do you your life? This is a really good indication Do you feel calm do you feel grounded or do you feel like there's not enough? Do you feel like you're in scarcity all the time? Do you feel like you're never calm? You're always just thinking, you know, what's next? What's next? Maybe even waiting for something bad to come around the corner That's a good indication that you're not in your self -energy , if you do feel like that, send me a DM because I have an exercise for you on this about how to get into your self energy.
So if you send me a DM and you just say self energy, then I can give you the exercise and I can actually take you through this meditation of what it's like to go through your ideal life. There's a beautiful journal exercise afterwards that will feel great.What we really want, like when we talk about manifesting or when we talk about self energy, when we talk about creating your ideal life, something that gets lost, I think a lot of the times, especially in the hustle culture or the culture of more, more, more, is that it's actually good to feel good. You want to feel good in your life. What f*cking good is having all this sh*t? What f*cking good is having the promotion, the job, the relationship, if you feel horrible, if you feel like this, what was this all for?
I do get a type of client that say, you know, they built this whole life and they're just wondering, what is this for? What have I built it for? It feels terrible. So ultimately what we want is for you to feel good in your life, for you to feel good in your body, for you to feel good in your career, for you to feel joy. And that's what this work is really all about. How can we recalibrate you more toward joy, more toward goodness? That's what the world needs more of. That's when the creativity and the magic really starts happening. So if you got anything out of that, I feel like I was just on a little bit. I'm so passionate about this because I know, I know that this stuff actually works.
So if you love that, send me a DM. I'd love to hear if you're a big f*cking dreamer. Also, please share this. If you are getting any value, I'd love it if you shared it to your Instagram story and linked it, or if you share it to your LinkedIn profile, that would be really amazing.I will take all the help I can get right now to grow this little baby. So anything you could do would be really great. But big f*cking dreamers, I hope you keep dreaming those big dreams and I will see you next week.