And when you have been forced to view your worth and your self-identity by what you've accomplished by the winning, right? Like when you have quote unquote won for so long under society's standards, it makes it really difficult to let that go.

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Hello, my friends. Welcome to another episode of Lessons From a Quitter. I am so excited you are here. It's the end of September. What is happening? Is time flying by? It's crazy, we’re entering what? Q4 and going into 2022. Did anyone even realize what happened with 2021? Anyways, it's all happening very quickly. And I say all this to say that I'm going to be opening doors next month. I'll give you guys some more um special news as we go along too, some fun workshops and stuff that we're going to do before we open doors. But if you know that next year, 2022, you don't want to be in the same place and you know, sort of what you want to do, right? Like this round of Stuck to Strategy, we're going to change it up a little bit. And I want to focus a little more on getting things done. So if you are like listen, I know what I want. I have an idea, but I'm scared. I don't know if it's the right one. I don't know how to get there. I have a lot of doubt. What if I make the wrong decision? How do I trust myself? All that crap that we all deal with. I want you to sign up for the wait list and get in to Stuck to Strategy. Let's bang out 2022 so you're not in the same frickin spot that you are over and over again every other year. We're going to start in January, so doors are gonna open in November. We're going to enroll in November, but you know, it's all the holidays and stuff. So we're gonna wait. And then we're gonna hit the ground running in 2022 for the first six months. Imagine hanging out with me every week, guys. It's a lot of fun I promise you, if I do say so myself. No, I'm kidding. Um, but it is very powerful. It's weekly. It's for six months. You will transform your life. And I don't say that lightly. So if you just want to know more about it, I would get on the wait list because we will open it up to the wait list first. And I don't know if there will be any spots left. So, um, you can go to quitterclub.com/group and sign up. I hope to see you there. Okay. Now onto the real important stuff. I'm so excited about this topic. I just talked about it with my group and I felt like this is so important that I need to talk about it with you guys, because we all need to understand this paradigm shift. Okay. So first, what is a paradigm? Why are you getting all esoteric on us, Goli? These are big words. I actually had to look up like what is the paradigm? If I'm going to teach on this, I should maybe know what this word means. Okay. So a paradigm is a standard perspective or set of ideas. Okay. So basically when you change your paradigm, you're changing how you think about a certain thing, right? So a paradigm shift is a major change in your worldview, concepts or practices of how something works or is accomplished. Basically what I try to do with this podcast all the time is it just reframe the way that you look at your life, the world, the way you look at your career. So we're trying to shift the paradigm, but I want to talk about a specific thing that I was realizing and noticing and seeing how much harm we have all caused by the paradigm, the lens with which we look at our life. Okay. So another thing to understand is like there are multiple paradigms, right? For every situation, or let's say concept or different concepts, there's going to be different paradigms with which you have to look at that concept. And I think that when we get confused, where we mess up, where we create so much suffering for ourselves is when we are looking at one set of things through the wrong paradigm, through the wrong lens. Okay. And so what I mean by this is like let's take an example. We have like the win lose paradigm. Okay. Now for certain things that paradigm makes sense. It's not like a bad paradigm, right? When you look at sports, you want to have win or lose, right? You want to have objective standards by which you're going to measure everybody to the same standards and rules. And that's how you can have a competition, right? That's how you can have a match or a game or whatever you want to call it for each sport. Let's say, you're going to have a race. You can objectively say who won and lost that race. Right. And that helps us enjoy, judge, uh, witness sports, you know, most types of competitions. If you can have an objective standard, it makes sense to use this win lose paradigm. Right. And unfortunately, or fortunately, however you look at it. A lot of our schooling system was developed through this win lose paradigm. Okay. Whether we realize it or not, we have a grading system, whatever country you're listening from, most of my um listeners are from America. So I'm just going to go with ours. But you know, we have an A is the best and an F is a fail. Right? You lose. And you were meant to feel bad if you got an F, like it wasn't like oh, you know, look, you looked at this outside the box, look at how you came to this conclusion. That's not what we wanted you to come to. Good job. No, it was like you are failing. There is something wrong. You were given a standard to try to recreate to as near perfect as possible. Right. The goal is to get as close to a hundred as possible. And we were, uh, compared on that scale, right? So like if your friend got an A, and you got a C, it was like on this objective standard test, this is where you measured up. Right. And what has happened, I think like first of all, even within school, that's just a misinformed paradigm. It depends on maybe the subject. And that's a conversation for another day about our schooling system. But when you look at really like some of the things that we were graded on, you think about it like how ridiculous it is to even have. There is no objective standard. When you think about something like with creativity, we're going to talk about like that win lose standard paradigm does not fit. And the bigger problem is that we start looking at our whole lives through this paradigm. And this is why I think so many of us are messed up or so many of us feel like we're quote unquote, failing. Have you heard this? Like I feel like I'm failing at life. I want to stop for a second and just let you know that that's not possible. Did you know that? It doesn't work that way. That's not the way life works. There is no winning and losing. You cannot fail. It's not a test. There is no objective standard by which you have to measure yourself. And yet, because from such an early age, we were brought up in this society that we've created and fine, like you know, schooling serves its purpose for our society in certain ways. We just took that paradigm and we're like well, I guess I got to apply this to everything in my life for the rest of my life. I'm just going to keep going. And it's no wonder that so many people feel as though they are failing or that they're not measuring up or that we, you know, there's so much comparison. And now going back to like talking about, let's say creativity, we can see, like you can instantly see that putting that in a win lose paradigm is just a recipe for disaster, right? Like there's just no way to do it. There's no objective standard for creativity. It doesn't serve us to look at it through that paradigm. Yet we keep trying, we keep trying to fit it into that. Like look at awards shows for, you know, music, even acting or whatnot, you know, like any type of arts, how ridiculous they are when you start like really thinking about this. Think about it for a second, right? Why is it that, you know, they can have like a best new artist award. And there's always tons of uproar afterwards because people have different opinions on who was the best artist, because it's not a race where you can say, this person ran faster than that person. Right? Like how do we determine who's the best singer? Is it like pitch? Is it range? Is it their songwriting skills? Is it their style? Is it the emotion they evoke? I don't know. Right. Every one of us is going to have a different answer because it doesn't fit in that paradigm. And yet we just try because it's like well, we've decided there's going to be winners and losers so I guess there has to be for everything. And you see so many creatives, I mean, so many people, like every one of us is creative. And so many of us suffer so much because we're constantly trying to view ourselves through a lens that doesn't fit. Right? Like we're constantly trying to compare and win, I don't know, I don't even know what we're trying to do. Like it's like if I could just be like this other person or they're better in some way or whatnot. And I just think about how different it would be, if as children we were taught that like there's no competition there. Like sure, competition is fine and it's healthy and it can be fun. And it can invoke a lot of wonderful emotions in us. And it can make us strive for different goals in certain situations, but not in others. What if it was like listen, you just have to run your own race. And we say those things now but I think we still have a hard time understanding that like you have to switch the paradigm. You have to like take stock with, how am I assessing this right now?

If I'm looking as though my life has a win or lose, then of course, I'm constantly going to feel like I'm losing because there's going to be, there's the 50/50. There's always things in my life that aren't going great. There's negative emotion. I'm not knocking it out of the park every time. And if my only paradigm was that I have to get close to a hundred every single day in everything I do, well, of course, I feel like I'm failing at life. There's the quote, you know, it's attributed to Albert Einstein, but I think it's not him. They don't know who it is. Anyways, it's everybody is a genius but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid. I mean, it so beautifully encapsulates this whole topic of really looking at how we're judging or measuring ourselves in life, right? Like how different would your life be if you realize that it's not a win or lose game ever, it's not a zero sum game either. Which is another thing that we all think for some reason, which is why I think there's so much jealousy and comparison. If I make money, it does not mean that you can't make money. Like it's not a pie that I'm taking a slice of that doesn't leave some for the rest of you or whatever we thought, but it's like if somebody else is getting ahead, that means it's taking from my happiness or whatnot. And we start like constantly trying to compare, like finding ways of how can I judge whether I'm winning or losing. Maybe it's this timeline, right? This made up of timeline of like well, I was supposed to be married by this point and have kids by this point. And that person does. And I haven't so that clearly means that I'm failing at life. And so I just want you to start opening your mind to a different paradigm, just shifting a little. You don't have to give up the win lose. I’m not saying there aren't places where it comes in handy. There are. It's just a matter of like how do you want to look at your life, right? What paradigm can you choose to start viewing the rest of your life as? What if you looked at it as just a series of experiments or chapters or whatever you want to call it. There's no right or wrong decision you can make. There is no getting ahead. There's no race to be won. You're on a path by yourself and your path is going to lead to a different place than anybody else's. Getting there faster won't do anything. Cause there'll just be more of the path that laid laid in front of you, right? There's no end point. And so what if it was just the lessons that I have to learn from each decision, from each chapter, from each experience. How would you approach your life differently if you viewed it that way? If you kind of put down the armor or the weight or whatever it is that you're carrying, on like having to win this race and you just realize like your life is going to be created by a certain number of chapters and somebody else's is going to have a different number of chapters and they're all going to be filled with different things. And it makes absolutely no sense to look at and/or compare to this other person's, so what if I just look at my own? And I think for so many of you, so many of my high achievers, myself included, when you've been in this paradigm of win or lose for so long, and when you have been forced to view your worth and your self-identity by what you've accomplished, by the winning, right? Like when you have quote unquote won for so long under society's standards under, you know, the the rules that society has created, it makes it really difficult to let that go. And the thing is is that so many of us are creating so much more harm because we want to let it go, right. I want to walk away from this job. I want to walk away from this title. I want to walk away from this life I had created, that chapter. I want to walk away but I've spent so much time thinking I was winning cause that's what everyone was telling me. Right? Like I got the job, I got the promotion, I got the salary. This is, you know, the measurements, the objective measurements that society has created in order to be able to like uphold this win lose paradigm. Like you have to have some standard to measure it by. So we've measured it by prestige and by money and whatever else. And you so desperately want to close that chapter but you can't because if you walk away from that winning, what does that mean? Well if you're looking at it in that same paradigm, it means you’re losing. Course it feels terrible. Course it's hard to say hey, I'm not going to strive for that A anymore because it doesn't actually frickin matter. And other people are going to then look at oh, now you have an F or you have a C or whatever. Other people are still going to operate under that paradigm. Right. And the other people are going to have their thoughts and yes, hopefully we will collectively have like a paradigm shift, but that's not happening anytime soon. So part of why it's so difficult to put down this paradigm and look at other things is because you've spent so long quote unquote winning in the other one, by everyone's standards. And it feels super scary to walk away from that, to walk away from how you viewed your life up until now. I mean, you know, we see this all the time with religion or politics when somebody is presented with new facts or a new way to think about something or a way in which what they believe doesn't actually, I don't know, fit with the evidence. When there's that cognitive dissonance, we actually dig our heels in further, right? We become more solidified in our belief as opposed to changing our mind because we don't change our minds easily. And so I just say that to like that is the way human psychology works. And part of it is knowing that. I think part of really the reason I'm so obsessed with mindset work and understanding our brain is that you can overcome these primitive ways or the way, I mean, your brain is created to run, you know, as much automatic thinking as possible and conserve energy. And it's incredibly powerful so it's going to find shortcuts and think the way that it's always thought. And part of undoing that is learning these things, is to recognize these thought patterns, is to see where you keep engaging in these types of beliefs and slowly wading the waters, you know, wading into the waters of can I change my thoughts? Can I change my beliefs? How can I start becoming a person who has the courage to change my mind and stand in that conviction? You know, and not, I think a lot of us feel as though people will judge us or that we'll be hypocritical or whatnot. And really, I think the strongest and smartest thing you can ever do is normalize changing your mind because of course, as you grow, of course you don't know everything, right? Of course, as you learn things and experience things, you should change your worldview. And yet we don't because our automatic response is to protect that ego and to dig our heels in further. And so I say that to say like we are talking about programming that has been going on for decades for us, right? From most of us from when we were children in school where we have been taught fiercely to believe in this win lose paradigm. Where we have been taught that some people quote unquote succeed at life and other people fail. Where we have been taught that certain timelines and certain success markers, it's what winning is because we had to come up with some kind of an objective standard so that we could keep people in line so that we could keep society functioning and letting go of that is painful. You know, I think a lot of times this stuff sounds so wonderful and it's like oh, of course I should give up the win lose paradigm. Why would I want to hurt myself? Right. Like why would I want to constantly feel like I'm not measuring up? And in one sense, it is extremely liberating once you can do it, but you sort of have to go through the river of misery in order to get to that other side because you're giving up everything that you've ever known, right. You've given, you're giving up the way that you have always thought. And for most of you listening, you benefited largely from that way of thinking. And I don't mean benefited in the sense that you didn't have negative emotion. A lot of you also have suffered, right? Because you've held yourself to these ridiculous standards and you can never actually win. But what I mean is, in society's eyes, you've been quote unquote successful. And so when we have suffered in that paradigm and we were the successes, it's absolutely terrifying to think about like and you want me to be considered a failure by other people? Like you want people in that paradigm to now think I'm walking away. And that I, you know, quote unquote lost or whatever the thing is they think, and yes, yes I do. Because I think once you go through that discomfort, which if you didn't listen to last episode, go ahead and do it and get better at feeling discomfort.

Once you can sit through that, once you can truly like change that paradigm, it's the most liberating thing you can do because you open yourself up to actually experiencing life, to letting yourself try things, to letting yourself experiment and fail and not have the outcome you want and try again. And there's no story that's attached to it. It doesn't mean anything about your worth. You don't create these like narratives that harm you and continuously self-loathe and beat yourself up in order to try to like beat other people in this imaginary competition. You're free to try things and just be a full human. And I've said this a million times, I will keep saying, it's the greatest gift I've ever been given from this work. Nothing else compares, not the podcast, not the money, not the business, not the like time freedom. None of it compares to having really like the freedom to know that I have the rest of my life to try whatever I want, to allow myself to be creative, to allow myself to try things without caring what other people are going to think, to allow myself to try things just because it's fun even though it's not going to go anywhere. And when I talk to my clients and I see so many people that are still so hung up on this making the right decision, the quote unquote right choice. What's the next right decision? And it's again, just because they're looking at it through the wrong paradigm and they're going to stay stuck forever because there is no right decision. And when the stakes are that high, that if this doesn't work out, then I'm a failure and I've lost this game and I'm going to live to regret it. And I'm going to beat myself up forever and I'm going to hate myself and I'm going to create really painful stories and I'm going to attach to them and I'm going to increase my suffering for decades. Like of course you don't want to make that decision. It's terrifying. And a lot of people come to me because they think that the solution is like me helping them find the right decision. And I'm like that's impossible. How would I ever do that? How would I know what the right decision is for you? There is no right decision. And I know it's hard to wrap your head around that in the beginning. It's like we're not searching for the right decision, we’re changing our paradigm. We’re changing how we view the world. We’re changing our relationship with failure. We're changing our relationship with ourself. We're learning to trust ourselves again. We're learning to have self-compassion. We're learning to let ourselves show up. That's the shift, not in making the right decision. So my friends go forth and change your frickin paradigm. There is no win or lose. There's just an experience. And I hope that you let yourself show up fully. I hope that this episode helped. And if you want help reframing your paradigms and you, if you want me to beat over your head how your thoughts are what is creating all of the suffering and you're allowed to put that suffering down. Then I invite you to join me in Stuck to Strategy. You can sign up for the waitlist at quitterclub.com/group. And I will see you next week for another episode.

Thank you so much for listening. If you liked this episode, share it with someone else. I promise you know somebody who also hates their job and wants to quit, so why not share the love? And if you want to come follow along for more, come join me on Instagram at LessonsFromAQuitter and make sure you say hi. I'll see you next week for another episode.