Hey, welcome to Lessons from a Quitter, where we believe that it is never too late to start over. No matter how much time or energy you've spent getting to where you are. If ultimately you are unfulfilled, then it is time to get out. Join me each week for both inspiration and actionable tips so that we can get you on the road to your dreams.

Hello my friends. Welcome to another episode. I'm so excited you are here. I am gonna go on a little rant today. . I felt a little ranty after I got off a coaching call and it was about a topic I've wanted to talk about. And here's the thing, when I rant, just know that the rant is just as much for me as it is for you. And I typically try to bring things that I learn in my own life. I apply these tools in my life all the time in every area, and then I learn things and I observe it and I observe my clients.

And when I see or I'm reminded of something, I love to share it with you guys. And that's exactly what this rant is about today because it's a lesson that I just relearned again and I am relearning. But I want us to talk about the fact that our brain loves to believe that it's just easier. It's just easier to not do it. It's just easier to stay here. Now, you may consciously be thinking that thought often, most of the time you're not. But it's the reason you are not going after the big thing. You're not investing in yourself, you're not doing the project. You're procrastinating on your work tasks, whatever brings up negative feelings, right? Whatever makes you feel icky in the moment. Our brain loves to believe it's just easier not to do it. Let's put this off and scroll. Instagram, let's just watch some Netflix.

Let's go get a snack. It's so much easier to not deal with our taxes or to not finish this project or to not call back that person I'm supposed to call. And I don't wanna have that tough conversation. It's easier to not start that business or find a job I like because yeah, you don't have to go out of your comfort zone. You don't have to have the uncomfortable feelings that it requires for you to do new things or for you to do hard things. And so we believe, whether we're conscious of it or not, that it's just easier to stay here. I've talked often about this, that your comfort zone is not comfortable. It is familiar. That is, that's it. It should be called a familiar zone because oftentimes it's not comfortable at all. A lot of us are miserable in our comfort zone.

We're in relationships we don't wanna be in. We are in living situations, environments. Maybe we don't wanna live in that state or that city or with those people or in that house or wherever it is. We're in jobs we don't wanna be in. We have so many things in our lives that are making us unhappy. But the momentum it takes to change, it seems so hard and it seems so daunting. And so we believe falsely that it's just easier. It's easier to stay here and not find a new job. I don't have to then have the uncomfortable feelings of applying and putting myself out there and getting rejected. I don't have to have other people judging me. When I start a business and put it on Instagram, I, I don't have to have the pain or the embarrassment or the discomfort or the rejection or whatever I have to feel to leave this cubicle and try something else.

It's easier not to invest because then I get to save my money if I don't put it in this program or in this coach or therapy or buy the books or go on that retreat or that vacation or whatever it is that I need for myself. It's just easier not to do that. It's easier to not do this project than I can rest. The thing is is that our brain loves instant gratification, right? That's what it's built for. And that is typically what our primitive brain looks to obtain at all times because it keeps you alive, right? I'm hungry, get food, I'm tired, rest, I'm thirsty, find water. And oftentimes our brain is now seeking dopamine cuz that was what it was meant to do in order to keep you alive. And so we still want that instant gratification. When I'm doing something and it's hard and it's bringing up a ton of negative emotions, I would rather go and get a flood of dopamine from scrolling my phone or from eating that chocolate or from doing whatever it is that I wanna do.

And the thing that I wanna rant about today is I just want us to simply stop lying to ourselves. It's not easier here. It's actually much harder when you put off the things that you want to do. You are simply prolonging the dread. You can stay and you can avoid the feelings of discomfort or embarrassment or judgment or whatever it is that you are trying to avoid. You can try to avoid those, but instead you'll feel unfulfilled and you'll feel restless and you'll start feeling angry and you'll start feeling bitter and you'll start feeling sad and you'll start feeling resentment. Those don't feel good when you start putting off a task because of procrastination because you think it's just so much easier to go watch Netflix. It's not as though you escape that negative emotion like now it's gone. You no longer have to do the project.

This happens oftentimes when we're putting off work projects where we know we're gonna have to do it. You're simply creating more stress for yourself. You're prolonging the stress now you have to think about it. And I have to constantly think about the thing that you had to get done. And then on top of that, now we add on the shame and the self-judgment and the self-loathing, which we should never do. And I will help you not do that if you join the quarter club. It's like our number one rule, but we do it cuz then we beat ourselves up. Why did I wait so long and the week that we have to get this? So there there's a deadline now. Now the added pressure and the panic is so much more. That negative emotion is so much more because it has to get done by a certain time.

And so we're frantic and we might make more mistakes and we cause more negative emotion. When people say, you know, it's easier to not invest, it's easier to save your money and not invest, right? In the short term you save that money. But what are you giving up by not propelling yourself forward, by not doing the things that might give you an edge, by doing the things that are gonna teach you the skills to do what you wanna do in the long term. You might have some money in your bank account but you're still in a job you hate or you're still doing life the way you've always done it, feeling unfulfilled. Or you're still constantly not managing your mind and letting your mind run wild. And you're constantly feeling tons and tons of negative emotion all day, every day. And so is it easier to save that money?

Is it in your best interest? And when you really start thinking about that equation, when you are making a decision to put something off, it's not to say that you're never gonna make the decision to put something off. And again, let me give you a a, let me give you a caveat. Like I said, this rant is for me, this isn't meant to be something else to beat yourself up about. This isn't meant to say like, oh yeah I am. I shouldn't have put it off cuz now I'm creating more future pain. The next time I do that I'm gonna like constantly tell myself how terrible I am and why I shouldn't have done that. Like that's not never the point. It's simply to become aware, it's to become aware your, when your brain is sort of trying to trick you when your brain is like trying to get that instant gratification, trying to get that dopamine hit, trying to get that good feeling right.

Now it's simply to be onto it, to really ask the question, what pain is it going to cause to put this off? What negative emotions am I doubling by not doing this now? Like you could even think about it like a tax, you know, like you could do the the task right now and pay a certain amount of of money. Let's make the analogy of let's say you'd have to pay $10 but if you do it next week or in two weeks cuz you've put it off, you'll now have to pay $20 cuz you'll have that double the negative emotion that you're gonna have to pay. Is that worth it to you? Sometimes it might be, sometimes $20 is not that big of a deal, but maybe the cost is, you know, years down the line when you haven't changed anything. Maybe that cost is hundreds of thousands of dollars, right?
Maybe it's what you end up paying is so much more than what you would have to pay if you were willing to feel the negative emotion and just do the hard thing. Right now, I see this a lot happening again, unfortunately for people in in corporate America where there's mass layoffs and I've done tons of interviews with people that got laid off and that was kind of the beginning of their quitting journey. But I always think about this then too, is that we love to think it's easier to stay because it's safe, it's secure, quote unquote. That's what we love to believe about our jobs until it's not. And then oftentimes that pain that you have later on, the panic, the scrambling, the anxiety, the figuring it out when you think it's too late or whatever the thoughts are, is much more painful than deciding on purpose if you don't wanna be in your job.

It's a different thing if you wanna keep your job. But so many people don't leave because they think it's secure, because they think it's easier to stay and then it is until it isn't. And the pain of that, of figuring that out when it's not by choice and when you don't have a runway and when you haven't planned things is much more painful. Like pick your hard, which hard do you want? Do you want hard right now where you control it? Or do you wanna put it off and wait for a level of hard that you're not gonna be able to manage or you're not gonna be able to predict? And the reason I even, I'm even talking about this, and this is why I'm saying is like I recently had a situation happen for me that just re reminded me of this. I've already learned this lesson many a times and even really going through what I've gone through, quitting the law and getting here, I look back and one of the really points of pride for myself is doing the hard thing is doing this and hooking my future self up, right?

I look back at my past self and I'm so proud of her and I'm so grateful to her for quitting when I had no idea what was gonna happen when I had to answer to people. And that asked me what I was doing and I couldn't come up with an answer. And I felt like a failure. And it was the easiest thing to do was to get another law job. But it wouldn't have been easier because now my life is much easier. It's much easier because I'm doing something I love and I'm making more and I have more freedom and I have a life I really like want versus I would've still been in a job because it was quote unquote easier to play it safe. And so I've learned this lesson, but I'm relearning it again. I think if you listen to, uh, my year end review and some of my goal setting episodes, I've talked about how my goal for this year is focused around my health and I'm on this health journey.

And it honestly wasn't by choice. Uh, I took the easy way out for a lot, a lot of years. The quote unquote easy, what I thought was easy. I did that for a number of reasons and I've talked about, part of that was healing my thoughts around food and exercise. But I decided to stop working out. I rarely really ever took care of myself. I, I, I think generally I'm someone that like isn't very an extreme person. So I, I tend to eat moderately healthy, but not all the time. You know what I mean? I, I definitely indulge in sweets and fried food and fast food and things I, you know, that aren't the best for me. And uh, I started noticing very quickly in the last year that my health was deteriorating and it was both physical and symptoms. I have talked a lot about how I've been tired my whole life.

I was having much more brain fog, much more memory loss. I was having a lot of stuff go wrong and I was having a lot of tests as I've talked about before. I had my gallbladder removed last year and so it's been a year of like, I I joke that like I turned 40 and my health just fell off a cliff. And so it was a very stark change in the last year. I've always been relatively healthy. I've never had really too many issues. But in the last like year, year and a half, it started causing a lot of problems. And for the longest time I had the thought that it's just easier. It's easier to not care about what I eat. It's easier to like stuff my face with something fast at lunch so I don't have to make food for myself. It's easier to just eat what I want when I go out and not feel deprived and be able to not inconvenience anyone else.

I love that I, you know, we people please with our food. Like, oh, I don't wanna ask the waiter for any modifications. I don't wanna say no because everybody else will think I'm boring. Um, I should just eat whatever everyone else is eating. I don't wanna be a problem. So that was like a big factor for me. It was obviously in my mind easier to not work out. It's just easier to sit on the couch. It's easier to not do anything. And that's true. It was easier in the moment and often it was more enjoyable in the moment. And so I started this health journey back in December and I've started working out three days a week and I have gone to many a doctors and I've started a regimen with my functional medicine doctor and I am taking 4 million supplements and I am drinking these god awful enzyme drinks two times a day.

That is just the most horrible thing you could probably think about. And I'm on a very strict elimination diet for three months. And here's the thing. I was dreading this and I'm gonna give you as two observations. One, I've been shocked at how easy the diet has been for me because I've learned all these mindset tools. I would not have been able to do this two years ago. I know that for a fact. But it's fascinating for me to watch myself now and realize that I thought I was gonna have a ton of more urges that I was gonna have to like constantly watch myself to not cheat on a diet. And it just hasn't been an issue. It's been actually pretty pleasant. I put in the time, which takes a lot more time to fix all my supplements and prep food and buy different meals and I had to look up recipes cause I didn't even used to eat this much veggies.

I didn't even know what to do with it. I was like, oh, I can't eat salads all day long, so like what am I going to eat? And I started figuring this out and I only started the diet portion, the supplements about two weeks ago, two, no, now it'll be three weeks. I've been doing the exercise for a couple of months now. And what is fascinating to me, and I really wanted this to not be true, like part of me was like, I just wanna go back to the way that I used to live and I, how I ate and how I drank and how I sat on the couch because it was so much easier. And in the couple months that I have been doing this, let me tell you, it was not easier to live the way that I used to live. I had back and leg pain every single day from sitting and not working out.

I would constantly wake up with my neck feeling stiff. I had constant gut and stomach issues that I just thought were normal. And until it started getting worse and worse and worse until I, I had a gallbladder issue and I had to take that out. And then I, that continued. My sleep was off all the time, but I just thought that that was normal because I have two young kids and they wake me up and who sleeps anyways these days. And I had anxiety all the time and I was tired all the time. And I've talked a lot about that. And it is mindblowing to me than in the last like three weeks. Like really in the last week I've just noticed such a stark difference in how much energy I have. I don't need coffee anymore. I don't drink any coffee and I am completely fine all day long to the point where I'm not tired at night.

This is never happened to me in my life. I'm like, what is going on? I have to like really wind myself down because I could keep going. I have, and I'm like, is this what people feel like? Is this what people have felt like their whole life? They have energy like this. Do you know what I could have done with this type of energy? I sleep like a rock. I sleep the best sleep I've ever had. I don't wake up at all, which I used to wake up frequently in the middle of the night. My gut issues have like seemingly completely gone away overnight, which is just unbelievable. I don't have stomach pains, I don't have nausea, I don't have any of the issues I was having for months on end. I don't have any back and leg pain. It's fascinating to watch how strong my body can get, how quickly in just three months of like sticking to it.

Like I don't see any physical changes in the sense, and I'm not really looking for that like weight loss or how my clothes fit or anything like that. But I am noticing how strong I feel. I am noticing as I lift weights every, you know, other day how much easier it becomes for me. I am noticing how much more flexible I'm getting when I'm stretching. I am noticing that like my body just feels better. Like when I sit, when I stand, when I walk, it just feels better. And so now I, I'm still in the early stages, I have to say my memory is still not great. My brain fog comes and goes kind of the same. I haven't noticed a ton yet, but I'm in the beginning of this. So we'll see. You know. But what has been really interesting to me was to realize how difficult it was to live the way I had been living.

Like I'm now a convert and I don't think I'll, I'm, I definitely won't stick to this kind of a diet. This the strict of a diet for the rest of my life. But it will substantially change a lot of what I eat and how I eat. And for a long time I used to quote unquote just diet for weight loss and that kind of stuff. And now I see it as such a loving way of treating myself. Like how much love and nourishment I can give to myself through food. It's like what my body needs to fuel myself and I'm not gonna become some kind of health guru, I promise you that. But I have had to swallow my pride because for a long time I really kind of rolled my eyes at all of that. Obviously I realize if you eat Whole Foods , it's going to be better for you.

But I have my issues with the wellness industry and I really wanted nothing to do with that. And I pushed so far from that I think, and it was only to my own detriment. It didn't change anything in the wellness industry, but it really shut me off from like what could have been a much more enjoyable, healthier lifestyle that would have afforded me a lot more energy and a lot of benefits. And I see that now and I'm really like curious to myself like, why was I so against this? Why was I pushing so far away from this? And I know that one of my predominant thoughts was it was just easier. I was just quote unquote lazy. What I like to call myself. I was tired. I didn't want one more thing to think about. And again, when I tell you this, like in the beginning, this was more work, but what's fascinating to me is that actually cooking this way is so much easier than a lot of what I used to eat and a lot of the what I would crave and like my sugar cravings and the need for food all the time.

And the fact that I would eat to the point where my stomach hurt and like my body hurt every single meal, you know? And now I look at it and I'm like, that wasn't easier. I felt terrible all day long. I didn't move my body, my back hurt, right? I wasn't doing things that felt good. It just felt easy in the moment, like getting over that momentum to go work out or to make my healthy food or whatever. That's what was difficult. Now obviously this isn't a podcast about like health and food and exercise, but I just say that because like it's been so eye-opening for me and humbling and I've really realized like, wow, I've spent so much of my life not feeling well and obviously I didn't know better and now I know better. But I realize now like I was putting off the hard and I was just making it harder for myself.

I was making everything harder. And you know, who knows where that would've led, what other health complications, medications, things that would've led to. And I'm very fortunate that I have the privilege to be able to go to a functional medicine doctor and be able to pay for these things and be able to have these supplements. And I don't take that lightly. And I, that is a privilege that comes from my business and the fact that I can make so much and that I have the freedom to be able to go in the middle of the day to a functional medicine doctor. I'm very aware of that and I'm very grateful for that. And I really see though that if I didn't take advantage of that privilege, if I didn't use that to my benefit, then I likely would've created much more problems for myself in the future.

And so this is the only message I have from this podcast is that we all have to stop lying to ourselves. You can still choose not to do things. You can still decide that like, I can't go change my career right now, or I can't go on this health journey, or I can't write that book. Whatever it might be. Bad timing. You might not be in a season in your life or you can take that on, you might financially not be able to. All of that's okay. But don't let it be because you think it's easier not to do it. I've talked a lot about this, about knowing the reasons why you're doing things. What you're doing is not as important as knowing why you are doing it. So if you're not doing things because you think, oh, I, I just don't think I can, that's too hard.

It's too hard for me to go after this dream. It's too hard for me to start that program. It's too hard for me to part with this money. I want you to think about how hard it is to not do it. Both versions are hard. Pick your hard and pick wisely my friends. That's all I have for you this week. Now if you are on my email list, then you know that the doors of the Quitter Club are open until tomorrow night. That's it. If you're not on my email list, get on there. What are you doing? But if you didn't know, you can go to lessons from a quitter.com/quitter club and you can join until tomorrow night. If you listen to this in the future, get on the wait list at at that same U R L lessons from a quitter.com/club and you can be on the wait list for the next time we open.

Get in there so we can work on these things. So you can figure out why you're putting things off. So you can go back through the how to follow through class and figure out how to actually feel those feelings and do it anyway so you can stop putting things off just because they're hard.

All right, my friends, I hope you enjoyed this and I'll be back next week with another episode. Hey, if you are looking for more in-depth help with your career, whether that's dealing with all of the stress, worry, and anxiety that's leading to burnout in your current career or figuring out what your dream career is and actually going after it, I want you to join me in the Quitter Club. It is where we quit what is no longer working like perfectionism, people pleasing imposter syndrome, and we start working on what does, and we start taking action towards the career and the life that you actually want. We will take the concepts that we talk about on the podcast and apply them to your life and you will get the coaching tools and support that you need to actually make some real change. So go to lessons from a quitter.com/quitter club and get on the wait list. Doors are closed right now, but they will be open soon.