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, it's 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 am so excited to have you here. If you haven't signed up for the Love It or Leave It Challenge, it is happening today. So if you're listening, when the podcast comes out on the 23rd, May 23rd, 2023, if you're listening in the future, it won't be happening. But on May 23rd, we are starting the Love It or Leave It Challenge and it's gonna run for three days starting today. It's not too late to join.
Even if you get this kind of a little bit later, you can sign up and get the replay for the next week. So go to quarter club.com/challenge and sign up. This is where we're gonna learn how to make decisions even when we don't know the right one, where we're gonna decide what we're gonna do so we can actually start taking steps towards it. There's so much we're gonna do in this challenge and I'm so excited to dive in today. So that is happening. If you're not in, you should be. So go to critical app.com/challenge. Okay, because I have been talking in the last couple episodes in that bonus episode about decisions and how to make decisions and the cost of not making decisions. I wanted to do an episode about taking action even when you don't know what the quote unquote right decision is, right?
Why you should constantly be taking what I like to call massive action big moves because it's not what our tendency is to do. For most of us, we sit and spin in our heads, and this is why so many of us are so exhausted all the time, is like we're just spinning at high speed in our head but not doing anything. And the travesty in that is that all of your clarity that you are seeking is comes from taking action, okay? And yet so many of us don't take the necessary action to ever learn. So then we just stay stuck forever. Here's what I want you to understand about learning how learning works. You try something, you gain some information, you gain some data, you analyze and evaluate that data, you learn from it. You try something else, okay, you're gonna try some things and it's not gonna work the way that you want it.
That's some data and you're like, huh, I actually didn't like this or this isn't what I wanted. Then you learn. Then you pivot, you evaluate, you realize, I don't wanna do this anymore. You figure out something else that is just as valuable as getting the result you wanted as you trying it and it working and you being like, oh, this is great. This is what I wanted. Both are equally valuable and both are equally important in the endeavor of learning anything. Learning how to do a new skill, learning more about yourself, learning what you wanna do. I want you to think about science. Think about the entire field of science and what it is based on. All of science is based on a hypothetical idea that is then tested, right? The entire field, which so much of what we have gained in our world, medicine, technology, innovation, just an understanding of the law of physics, what happens in our world.
All of it has come from someone taking a guess, being like, I think these two things are related in this way. Let me test it. Nope, that's not how it works. Oh, this is how it works right now. Truly like that is the only way to kind of learn the relationship between two different objects or things in nature. Like anything that we are trying to get data from comes from like an idea of maybe this will work, maybe I'll like this, maybe this is the way, maybe this is what I should do. Whatever it is, whether it's about you, whether it's about science, whatever. Like it starts with an idea and then you have to test that idea. You have to see, is this what I think it is? Will it go the way I think it will? I have some kind of an idea, but I'm not sure.
And then I test it and I analyze the results, I evaluate it. I decide, are we gonna pivot? Is this working? Is it not? I learn and then I move on imaginative. In science, they just like decided, well, I tried it once. It didn't work. It means I can't do it. Probably means I'm dumb. Just too stupid to figure this out. We would have none of the advancements that we have because somewhere along the way we just decided that like, okay, I'm gonna try something. I'm gonna gain info. And if it doesn't go the way I want it, if I gain that data and it doesn't and I don't get the results I want, that means I'm a big fat loser. That just means I'm a failure and I knew I would do this and it's never gonna work. And I was so stupid to think I could do this and I'm just gonna spend the rest of my life beating myself up.
And so of course I'm not gonna try anything else. Why? Why did we decide that trying something, seeing if it doesn't work, means anything about us? I mean, I know why, but I, I want us to kind of start analyzing why, right? Our society has this obsession with perfection, this obsession with doing things the right way. That there is some kind of right way. If you think about the roles that our schools have played in this, it's been pivotal in getting us to believe that there is some world in which we can get a perfect score on everything, right? School is this manufactured situation whereby you are given a finite amount of information. You are given a limited amount of a subject to learn, and then you are told that only objective is to learn everything about that subject for a specific test. So you can regurgitate it and your only goal is to get as close to a perfect score as possible.
And your worth is somehow also tied into this that if you can't do that, if your brain doesn't work that way, that there's something defective in you. And so we all internalize this from a very young age. Like, okay, getting a hundred is good, not getting it less than that is not. And that makes me bad. And so I have to constantly try to guess or memorize or learn all the information before I ever take that test. But the thing is, is that the real world doesn't work that way. There isn't a finite amount of information, there's an infinite amount of information, there's an infinite amount of possibilities. There's so much information that you can never actually have it until you will go out and try things. And if we go past school and you just look at our nature and you look at children before work on kind of all indoctrinated in this way of thinking, think about children and how they learn.
Think about how ridiculous it would be if a child decided while I tried walking, I got up, I wobbled around, I fell. That means it's, I'm just too dumb. It's not meant for me. I can't figure it out. Think about everything a child learns. Even if you tell them, even if you tell the child or try to teach them, they mostly will not remember and they will have to learn through experience. They will have to learn through doing it and seeing and seeing if it, you know, that is really hot and it's gonna burn them or if this is gonna hurt or if how they're gonna have to get stability. All of it is learned through trial and error. That is how learning works. But again, somewhere along the way we decided, no, no, not for me. That means that I'm just fill in the blank, A terrible human being dump a failure.
When I was talking to my niece at the time, this was a couple years ago now, she was 13 at the time and she was having a lot of anxiety attacks around her swim practice. And I was trying to kind of figure out what was going on and I was talking to her about it, about why she was so upset about it. And it turned out she just didn't like swim. She didn't wanna be on the swim team. And so I asked her why she just doesn't quit, like stop doing swim team then because I knew that her parents didn't care and it was really just like the self-imposed pressure that she felt that she had to do it. And I was trying to figure out why. And as we were talking, she said she had been on really competitive gymnastics teams, like from when she was four years old up until, you know, I don't know, 10 or 11.
And she got hurt and hurt herself, her foot to such a degree that she, the doctor told her she couldn't do gymnastics anymore. So she had stopped gymnastics and then the year before she had tried basketball and she didn't like basketball, so she quit that. So she told me like, I've already quit gymnastics and basketball. If I quit this too, then I'm gonna be a failure. And when I tell you, I mean I'm sure your reaction too is like what? You know, like so, such a shock. Like when she said it to me, my jaw literally fell to the floor. Like, what? Why would you think that? Why would you think that trying? First of all, how would you know It's not as though if you try basketball, then you're gonna know what you're gonna think about swimming. Or if you try swimming, then that means you're gonna love or hate tennis.
Like they're not even related. You could try every single sport under the sun until you find the one that you like. And that still wouldn't make you a failure. Even if you don't like any of 'em, it wouldn't make you a failure. It literally means nothing about you. And yet this idea is seeped so early on into our psyche, into children that if you quit something, if you try something and it doesn't work out the way you want, then it makes you a failure. And again, it's easy to see in a child and in a sport, let's say that really doesn't matter. Like you know, in the grand scheme of things, like she's not going to the Olympics, we're not talking about that level of like athletics. She's just doing a sport for fun. So it's like wh why does it even matter? Why would you even consider that?
And yet, this is what all of us do with everything. This is why so many of you are stuck for so long because you are terrified to take a step because you don't know how it will turn out. Of course you don't because there's no way to predict the future. How could you know even if you learn everything about it? I can learn everything about swimming. I can watch YouTube videos for days. I can know the right way to train until I get in that water every day and I swim those laps. I can't know if I will love it or hate it. I can't know how much I'll love it or hate it. I can't know what enjoyment or fulfillment I'm gonna get out of it. I can't know what enjoyment or fulfillment I'm gonna get out of it. It's not until I do that, I start learning that I get the data back.
That's it. That's all it is. It's data. No more nor less. You try something, you get some data, you evaluate, you pivot. That's it. That's the whole equation. And yet we've overcomplicated it so much and we've terrified ourselves of like trying anything new. And so, so many of us live these lives that are so much smaller than what we want because we're so afraid of what it will mean, what we will make it mean, what other people will make it mean. It honestly makes me so sad. And I was really thinking about like what I would love to see in the world because I've talked to so many people, friends, people I coach that wanna try these things. They just like want to try their hand at having a side hustle. They wanna sell their ceramics online, they wanna start making ceramics, they whatever. It's, and they have these like ridiculous false beliefs.
These thoughts that, well I've tried these other things and it didn't work. And what if I don't like this? Or what if people think like what is she doing? Why would she just try that random thing? All of these ridiculous beliefs that when I hear, I'm like, and so what? Let's say they do think that. Does that mean they're right? I really dream of a world where we are all just trying things all the time. Like picked up another ho hobby, tried that for a month, didn't like that. I'm gonna try something else. Look at this art that I wanna sell online. I'm gonna try this. Don't really like it Now I'm gonna try doing that. Like now I'm gonna be a coach. Now I'm gonna, who cares? Try it all. Do it all. Like imagine how full your life could be if you just allowed yourself to show up and experiment.
If you allowed yourself to constantly take action and learn about yourself and become more acquainted with what you like and what you don't. Because so many of us have lost touch with who we are. We've lost touch with what we like because we've been told for so long that we have to be a certain way. We've been told for so long that we should like certain things and it requires this phase of exploration. And exploration requires you doing things without knowing how it's going to turn out. It requires you doing things and it not working out. That's the only way to explore if you go in without an agenda of it has to work because it doesn't have to work. And the irony in all of this is that the clarity that you want so badly is in that action that you're not taking. I'm gonna say that again, that clarity that you want, that you wanna know so badly, who you are and what you like and what you wanna do and what lights you up and the passion that you wanna have and the purpose you wanna fulfill and the contribution you wanna have that only will come in you taking action that you are not taking right now.
So many of us are waiting thinking that we're gonna think our way to the end of it. We're just gonna sit in our house and all of a sudden the inspiration gods are gonna strike down on us and we're gonna know exactly the thing that we're gonna love doing for the rest of our lives that's gonna be successful. Like it sounds ridiculous and we don't consciously think this, but this is what you're waiting for. You're like, once I know that I'm absolutely gonna love it, that it's gonna be a guarantee that I'm gonna make it successful, that everyone will see that I was right to leave, then I can finally do this thing. And so I don't have to tell you that you're gonna wait forever because it won't work like that. It's like saying like the analogy for that is like saying, I'm gonna just wait in my house until the perfect person shows up on my doorstep and I know we're gonna get married and we're gonna be in love forever and we're never gonna get a divorce.
And ev it's gonna be my, you know, prince charming. That's what I'm gonna wait for. I don't wanna date, I don't wanna meet other people and have it not work out. I don't wanna have to put my heart on the line, I just want the conclusion, I want the results and I want it to just magically show up. I don't have to tell you how that's gonna work out cuz it's not. You have to put your heart on the line. You have to be vulnerable, you have to be willing to get hurt, you have to be willing to have those negative emotions. You have to, you know, for lack of a better saying, kiss a lot of frogs to find your princes. Not because it's like obviously not because they're actually frogs, but not even because they're like bad in a certain way. It's just they might not be the right one for you and you will never know that until you go out and you figure it out.
How can you know? And what I really want you to understand, get ready to have your mind blown, I want you to really think about this. Clarity is a result. Okay? So if you've, if you are new to this podcast, you might have to listen to some other episodes to understand what I'm saying. But if you've been around here, you know that I talk a lot about how our thoughts create our feelings and our feelings drive our actions, right? And our actions create our results. It's the model that I use in my programs. It's what I teach you how to manage your minds. Okay? So we have a thought that thought causes a feeling. Our feelings drive us to do whatever we're gonna do or not do. And then all of the things that we're doing and not doing is what creates our results. And what so many of us think is that that clarity comes in the thought line.
We think I'm gonna, I need to be clear in my thoughts to then feel certain or feel confident or feel motivated. And then I will go out and I will build the business and I will try this new position and I will ask for the raise and I will do all these things and my result will be, I will live happily ever after or whatever the you think the result is, right? I'm gonna have that success. The problem is is that you have it backwards and your clarity is the result. So you have to take action. You have to think and feel certain things that will allow you to take action. And that might just be that you have a feeling of curiosity instead of certainty. Cause you're not gonna have certainty. You might just allow yourself a feeling of curiosity to experiment. And you have to think about what thoughts you have to think in order to feel curious or to feel calm or to feel excited or to feel motivated.
It could still be motivated but just not from a feeling of certainty. And that leads to actions where you go out and experiment, you try things, you learn, you get the data, you evaluate and that leads to the result of feeling clear. It doesn't come first, it comes at the end and the more action you take, the clearer you become. It's amazing how that works. I wanna like look back. You can look at this with your own life, but let's just take an example from my life. I thought I wanted to become a lawyer, okay? I took a lot of action that was like the premise that I thought a lot of us have had this. You thought you wanted to get married to this person, you thought you wanted to have this job, you thought you wanted to live in this city, you thought you wanted to have kids, whatever.
You had some kind of hypothesis about yourself that you wanted this thing, you had to take action in order to learn whether you actually wanted it or not. Okay? The only way I learned was that I became a lawyer. Now I likely could have learned this faster if I had known how to do this stuff earlier and like really evaluated and learned what my beliefs were and where my self worth was tied into. But that's for another podcast. On another day when I look back, I look at, okay, I went into law school and even there, the data that I got was that I actually loved it. I was really enjoying it. It was very intellectually stimulating. I really loved the theory of it. So obviously when I have that as data, it led me to believe that I was on the right path. And then I got more data.
I went and I started working at a big law firm and I realized very quickly, this is not for me. As I was working in it, as I was kind of like, well this is the pay, it's really nice. Like I don't like these hours. I was evaluating what works for me and what doesn't, what's worth it to me and what isn't. And then I was like, maybe my next hypothesis was maybe I work for a government agency, maybe I do something I'm really passionate about something that I feel like I'm contributing and I became a federal public defender and I got some more data. I went there and I was like, huh. I thought working in something that I'm super passionate about would make me love it. Turns out I actually still just don't like the day-to-day. That helped me solidify this idea that like it's not just the job, it's the actual profession.
I'm not gonna be happy here. Great, good to know. That's how I decided that it wasn't for me. Now in hindsight I say this very cleanly and like without a lot of thoughts. Clearly as I was going through it, I had all of the thoughts of like, I'm a failure. This is embarrassing. Everybody's judging me. I couldn't hack it. All of that was just dirty pain that I was adding on. None of it was true. And I look back now, and this is why I think like a lot of people ask me like if I regret getting my law degree. And I've talked about that and the fact that you can make decisions without ever regretting it cuz it's regret is a thought and it's a choice. But I look at this and I'm like, how else would I have known this was my journey that made me, do you know how much I learned, how much my thinking changed?
Do you know what I know about myself now? That was my path and I learned, I experimented, I tried, it didn't work back to the drawing board. That was the only way I could know. I noticed this now, um, I actually have a baby cousin who just got accepted into law school and it's fascinating having conversations with her cuz as you might be able to guess, I have strong thoughts about it. And um, I have talked to her, you know a lot about law, which like I didn't have when I was gonna law school, I didn't know anybody, nobody in my family, nobody, family friends were lawyers. So I didn't really have anybody telling me what it was like. She obviously knows like my podcast, she knows this whole thing. So we've talked a lot about it and her situation is a little bit different and the reason why she wants to go and she's at a different age.
And so I don't in any way try to ever talk her out of it. We just talk through it. And what's fascinating and she really has a lot of thoughts that like I really think I can love this, which is great. She might be able to, how can I know there's tons of people that like being lawyers, I just didn't, and I can relay my experience, but that doesn't mean my experience will be hers and she will have to go and get some data and figure it out for herself and figure out if there is a field within it that she can love. And if there is a way for her to utilize it in a way that's gonna make her happy. And so there's no way for me to know whether it's gonna work for her or not because that's her experiment. That's her hypothesis, right?
And here's the thing. I'm not saying you have to do this with your job right now. No one is saying that you have to like quit your job and go experiment and try all these other jobs and no one's saying that you have to do this in really big bold ways that that might feel really scary to you or might not be possible for you right now. Might not be able to quit your job if you're in my programs. You know that. Like I don't actually even encourage that because I think it brings on too many thoughts and too much stress. But you can do this in other ways on a smaller skit. Start with things that you just wanna try and experiment just for fun. Try with a hobby. So many of us, I realized for myself like I didn't have any hobbies because we're so obsessed with figuring out like the next thing we should have, the next thing we should do, how we're gonna create our career and our whole lives are passing us by and we're not doing anything we love to do.
We're not doing, we're not finding new things. I realized how much I had lost touch with who I was. What do I even like? What are the hobbies I wanna have? And so I started allowing myself to do this with hobbies. Like let me pick it up for a month, see if I even like it and if I don't, can I just drop it without any guilt and can I learn from it? What did I not like about it? Like this is the part where I think a lot of us miss is the evaluating is actually looking at like, we're sort of like, okay, that didn't work onto the next one, that didn't work. And so we keep searching like I have to search for 14 different things to, to make sure each, like one of them is right. You don't have to do that if you actually slow down to be like, what worked with this and what didn't work?
What did I like? What didn't I like? You can mine so much information that will help you on the next one. You can start saying like, okay, if I didn't like this from the law or if I didn't like this from this one hobby, it's likely that this whole swath of other hobbies I also won't like, because I don't wanna have a hobby where I'm just sitting by myself. Let's say I wanna do a team sport type thing or I wanna do something that's more active, or I wanna do something that's more chill. I don't know. Once I evaluate, it helps me figure out, I've been actually doing this a lot lately, um, with how I wanna spend my money. So as my business has been doing better, my husband's business has been doing better and we have more disposable income, we have done some things like we do things that we think we should do or we do things that we always thought we wanted to do and I let myself do it without guilt.
Like I let myself buy things that I wanted to buy or that I thought I would love and I let myself go on the vacations that we wanna go on or whatnot that we can obviously afford. But I'm always really observant of like, is this actually making me happy? What am I gaining from this? What parts of this do I love? What parts of it do I not? Because I might do something, I might like buy myself something and then realize like I didn't actually care. Like I got this designer purse or I got this piece of jewelry or whatever it is. And it was fine for like a second, but I didn't actually love it, but I went on this vacation and I did actually love it and I did, it did infinitely make me happier and I have these memories or whatnot. Okay?
That gives me data to think about as I go in the future of like, do I wanna spend my, where do I wanna spend my money? What are the things that bring me joy? Can I tap into those things that bring me joy in other ways too? Can I bring that same thing that brought me happiness in this, like in my work, in my hobbies, it's all an experiment and I realize how little I knew myself or how little I know myself now cause I'm constantly changing. And how a lot of these things that I thought I wanted, now that I have them or now that I can't have them, I don't really want that much. And that's okay too, right? A lot of things we think we want because society tells us we should want it. And we get there and we're like, mm, I don't actually care.
I don't actually care about the car I drive, or I don't actually care to live in a house like this, or I don't actually care to go on these types of vacations and for everyone's gonna be different. Some of us are gonna care. It's like, no, I really love having an nice car and it gives me so much joy every single day. Great, fantastic then you should spend money on an nice car, right? And other people shouldn't. And it's only through this experimentation that you start learning that, that you start getting back in touch with yourself. And so my plea for you through all of this is start taking action. Start taking massive action every single day. It doesn't matter where it's going to lead you because I promise you it will lead to data and that data will lead you to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.
It does not have to turn out any which way. There is no pressure for it to succeed. It doesn't have to be an indictment on who you are or what your future will hold. It's simply information. It's simply getting out there and experimenting with your life and letting yourself fully show up and letting yourself get back in touch with like, what sparks my joy? What lights me up? What keeps me fascinated? What boards me to death? What do I hate? And being honest about that. And the more you do that, it's amazing how clear it starts becoming. What are the things I wanna do? What do I want more of in my life? What kind of jobs and careers support that? What kind of jobs and careers directly allow me to do that? The clarity that you want comes from the action you're not taking.
So go out there and take action. Stop staying stuck. Nothing will come from you sitting in your house and thinking about it forever. And I'll say this, unlike a last note, I've realized this through my business. I was actually thinking about this, this last trip I did to Miami for a business conference. Um, I talked about it a couple months ago. It was like in March I went and it was, it's always so helpful and always so illuminating. But one of the f most fascinating parts of it is that I'm now like four years into my business and I was with a lot of really powerful, incredible women who have much bigger businesses than mine who have been doing this even longer. And we all keep having the same questions. And what was funny to me is that like I thought when I started my business, okay, I'm kind of confused about a lot of this stuff.
I don't have a lot of clarity. Who am I helping? How do I help them? Is this really helping them? And then when I was at this conference, we, I was chuckling about it with a, a bunch of the women and I was talking to them about how the fact that like, I love that it never becomes fully clear in the sense that like there isn't a time that you arrive and you're like, now I know everything, how to do everything for my business and I know exactly what I should do for them at the next product and I know how to market all of this. It's constantly these questions, it's constantly these hypotheses that I test out. Should I do a product this way? Should I launch it this way? Do these launches even work? And as soon as you start figuring things out, everything changes.
The market changes. People's like buying habits change, Instagram changes. And so you're like, all right, I guess I have to practice more. I have to, I have to experiment more. And if you make that mean, like I don't know what I'm doing as a business owner, I don't know what I'm doing in this business, I'm never gonna be able to make it like you will not stay in business. Wait, if you start making me like, yeah, I just need more data back to the drawing board, constantly gonna need more data. As soon as I learn something and I wanna go to the next level, it's like I have learned how to make a couple hundred thousand dollars in my business. Okay? If I want to go to a million, I have to learn a whole new thing. Now I can make that mean that I don't know what I'm doing and I, I need to get clarity and I need everyone else's opinions or I can just start experimenting.
I can let myself just show up and try and see what works and see what doesn't. And it not only is the only way to learn and get that clarity and figure out what works for your people, but it's so much more enjoyable. It takes so much of the pressure off to have to figure things out, to even think that you will get to a point where you will figure everything out. When you start realizing how fluid you are as a human, how multifaceted, how much you're gonna change every year, every five years, every decade, how things will constantly change. And so like the only thing you can do is continue to experiment. The only thing you can do is allow yourself to show up and try and just learn and take more information and pivot and change your mind. My God. Learn to change your mind.
Allow yourself to change your mind. Like then you can actually start having fun. You can start liberating yourself of this idea that there's one answer and you have to find the perfect one and you have to get a perfect score every time. And you can't take a step until you can do that, that doesn't exist. And it's just keeping you a prisoner and it's keeping you staying small in this life. There's so much to learn, there's so much to experiment with. Go out there and take action. And the first action you can take is joining me in the challenge so that we can learn how to make these decisions so that you can start planning. The first step is to make a decision. Cause if you don't make a decision, you're gonna stay stuck forever. You knew what you knew that was coming, okay? So go to quitter club.com/challenge and join me for the three day Love it or leave it challenge. And if you're listening to this later, then just join me in the Quitter Club so that we can help you start experimenting, analyze the data, not make it mean anything about you, manage your mind and get out there and live a full life. All right, my friends, I hope you found this helpful and I will 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.