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Hello my friends and welcome to another episode. I am so excited to have you here. I am diving into all things goal setting in the club with the club members and I love it so much. I love seeing everyone's like big dreams, little dreams, the things they're working on. We're doing both impossible goals this month in January, as well as 90 day goals. We have workshops for both. We have accountability pods starting. There's a lot of really exciting things happening in the Quitter Club. If you're new here, the Quitter Club is my monthly membership and if you want to see where you are kind of on this quitter journey and what you should be focusing on, you can take a quiz that I have, especially for you, that has a guide that's sent to you that tells you what stage you're in, what you need to kind of be working on.
So you can decide what 90 day goal you wanna pick. You can go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quiz to take that quiz. But going through these goals and talking about goal setting always brings up this topic for me. And it's something that I've wanted to talk about because I think it's something that a lot of us maybe unconsciously have or know about, but we don't really talk about it as a strength or as a skill. And I think it's one of the most important skills that you can keep working on and that is on the skill of being resourceful, on resourcefulness. And what do we mean by that?
If you look up the definition of resourceful, there's a bunch of different definitions, but a couple that I just saw is the ability to find quick and clever ways to overcome difficulties or able to meet situations capable of devising ways and means. What I've realized is that for a lot of us, when we are stuck in, for lack of a better way of saying it, victim mentality, I don't love that term. But what I mean is when so many of us go through our lives and the world thinking that we are victims to the circumstances that are happening all around us all the time and that there's nothing that we can do, it creates these situations where we don't come up with things that we can do. We don't come up with solutions. We don't figure out what we can do within the circumstances that we have.
And one of the most powerful abilities to develop is this ability to be resourceful, the ability to come up with a solution. So not the ability to create a life where you have no problems, right? I think for a lot of us, we get stuck in this fantasy or dream that we will someday get to someplace where all of a sudden we have no problems where everything just is rainbows and butterflies where everything goes our way. We don't think this consciously, but I think for a lot of us, when we go after goals, when we go after achievements, we
Go with the kind of desire, the unconscious hope that once I get that, then everything will fall into place. Once I get married, once I get the degree, once I get that promotion, once I make this much money, once I buy the house, then I can sigh, you know, give a sigh, a relief and enjoy my life. And underlying that is this false belief, false pre presumption that like once I get there, then I won't have problems, then things won't arise that will knock me off my feet. Then I won't have to figure anything out, let's say. And so we constantly rack up these achievements and we all know how it goes. We've all had those achievements. We all got the degree, we all got that job. We maybe married that spouse. Maybe we had kids. And then we just got more problems.
We got different problems because that is the human experience. You will never find a place where you don't have any problems, where you don't have any stress, where everything goes your way. I want us to think about these, these assumptions we make. Like oftentimes when we're making decisions, we make these assumptions that like there will ever be a time where we can make all the right decisions all the time, every decision we make turns out exactly the way we wanted it. It sounds absurd 'cause it is, it sounds absurd when you say it out loud, but a lot of us are operating under that assumption that that's the way it should be. And that's why we get stuck forever in making a decision. That's why we stay stuck. That's why we don't ever make a change. 'cause it's like, ugh, do I quit? Do I leave?
Do I stay? Maybe this isn't the right job. Maybe I go to the, you know, maybe I shouldn't end this relationship. We're constantly one foot in, one foot out, back and forth, back and forth because we think there's this false belief that there's some way to know what the right decision is. And then I have to make the right decision all the time. And if I make the right decision, then I don't have to deal with the ramifications of it not turning out the way that I want. And so much of your stress and anxiety about the future can be handled if you learn to lean on your resourcefulness. And what I I mean by that is that regardless of what happens, I will figure it out. I don't know how this is gonna go. I don't know what's gonna happen if I leave this job and take another one.
I don't know what will happen if I marry this person. I can't predict the future. I can't know all of the circumstances that are gonna happen, right? I couldn't predict that we were gonna go in a pandemic. I can't know everything that's gonna happen with the economy or the world or my family or my health. There's no way for me to know what's gonna happen. And so instead of trying to somehow make my life, you know, shrouded in this bubble wrap, that nothing ever goes wrong and wear myself thin doing that, trying to constantly worry and trying to constantly be ahead of any problem that could ever happen, I can simply get grounded in understanding that I will figure it out. And the way that you get grounded in that is in becoming a resourceful person.
It's in stopping the belief that it should be easier, that I should not have problems and leaning into the I identity that I will figure it out. There will always be problems. I don't need it to be easier. I need to be stronger. I need to know how to like deal with it when I accept that reality, which is the reality for all of us. The other way is just an illusion. Thinking that you have security anyway. Thinking that you can predict the future. Thinking that you can ever create a life that doesn't involve problems for you is an illusion you're living under, which creates so much stress. It creates so much anxiety when something goes wrong. For so many of us, we panic because we've spent so much time trying to prevent anything from going wrong. And truly one of the ways that I found myself most liberated was releasing that illusion, that false belief and gr like grounding myself down in this thought of like, I can't know what's gonna happen.
I can only make this decision from here. I can only take, decide if I wanna take this risk or not. And then I can rely on myself to know how to figure it out. That's the secret to overcoming so much anxiety about the future. It's not in trying to control the future. 'cause you can't, it's not in trying to make sure, of course you can make plans, of course you can try to like make sure you avoid major pitfalls. Of course you should do your research. All of that stuff is not to say that you shouldn't think about or you know, try to plan decisions. It's simply when we go beyond, you know, there might be a useful period of time to think about something and then you just have to kind of take the jump and then you have to do it without knowing how that future is going to turn out. And you can then rely on the fact of like, when it happens, I will figure it out. Now, in thinking about resourcefulness, I will say we all have it. You are already a resourceful person.
One in general, if you think about humans, human beings are species is just incredibly resourceful. We can live it literally in any climate. Like we have figured out ways to maintain life in places where human life should not exist. Whether that's a good thing or not is a debate for another time. But if you look at human ingenuity, if you look at everything that we have created, somebody had to create that with their thought. There had to be a thought about it before, right? There had to be somebody had a idea like, hey, there's probably an easier way to do this or maybe we can solve this problem by doing something else, by doing it this way. Humans in general, and you notice this a lot it's unfortunate, but in times of tragedy or when you look at the human spirit in places, and oftentimes when you, you're not in those, tragic events, it's very easy for us to look at them and think like, I could never do that.
I, I don't know how those people pushed through and survived or figured out how to, you know, live really like figured out how to get food for themselves or make it. And the reality is, is that if push comes to shove, most humans can dig deep and be resourceful. Luckily, a lot of us don't have to. We have the privilege of living in places where there is maybe an abundance of food and peace and whatnot. We don't have to come up with those things. But what I realize is a lot of times we think we can't handle it because we don't want to, because of course it would be hard. But we could, we could be resourceful if push came to shove and we had to, we could. And I already, when I say that, you already have it. All of you, every single person, every single person who has ever achieved anything in their life, all of you who are high achievers professionals, you have been incredibly resourceful already in your life.
What happens in our brains is that our brains love to focus on the negative. And so you have likely trained your brain to only see when you've made kind of the poor decis a a bad decision or a decision that you would have made differently had you gone back. You focus on the times that maybe you didn't act in the way that you wanted to or whatnot. And so you create these narratives, these stories that, you know, I, I can't figure it out or I am again like weak, I'm not strong enough. I'm whatever the story is you like to tell yourself. But it's not true because every single one of us has learned to survive whatever life has thrown our way up until now. And we've done it in, even if it's not the preferred response that you want it to have, maybe the trauma response you have or however you dealt with something is not the way that you wished you would've done it.
It's not the perfect way. Sure, it's still a way that your body and your mind figured out in order to keep you alive, in order to keep you safe through that period, right? It found a way to solve a problem for you. Whether that meant it needed to shut down your nervous system, right? Maybe you go into this is why when you think about like freeze responses, fight or flight responses, that's your body's resourceful way of like, Hey, there's a threat. How do I respond to this? And so humans do it. You've already done it tons and tons and times, whether it's through your education, through your career, through your family life, through whatever it is. We all have this. But the reason I say this is that a lot of us do this obviously subconsciously because like again, we may not have had a choice, like a circumstance is sprung on us and we had to deal with it.
And we do. But I want you to see it consciously. I want you to start noticing like, hey, that solu like problem came up and I figured it out from small to big every single week. I want you to look for one thing that you figured out, right? Even if it was just a small problem that your boss brought to you. The reason this is really important is what you tell your brain to look for. It will look for. There's that saying the mind sees, I'm sorry I the eyes see what the mind looks for. So like it you, you'll notice like if you're gonna buy a new car, you see that car everywhere, right? There's a reason like you've told your brain like, hey, this is important to me. And so your brain seeks it out. All of a sudden when you're pregnant, everybody around you seems like they're pregnant because you are looking for that piece of information.
Otherwise your brain filters it out. 'cause there's just too much information every single day that's coming at us, right? And so when you start telling your, your brain, like for now, a lot of us have trained our brains to look for how we always fail. How we're never reliable or resourceful or whatever. Or how we're we, you know, look, whatever story you have, how you're not smart enough, how you're not good enough. That's how you've changed your brain. And so your brain will keep showing you evidence like, look, here's another piece of evidence that you didn't figure it out here. You didn't figure out fast enough or whatnot. You simply want to change that attention spotlight. You wanna move that spotlight to like, where have I been resourceful? And when you start seeking it, even from small places, like when you see like, hey, maybe it wasn't a huge thing but something came up in the presentation.
They couldn't get the, you know projector to work and everyone was kind of freaking out. 'cause we had a big presentation for a client and like I was like, Hey, I think I can figure this out and I did it within 10 minutes. Like that's me becoming resourceful. Like maybe I didn't do it the way that they thought or I knew another way of doing it and whatnot. I wanna just highlight that to my brain. I wanna like constantly. 'cause then as I'm going through my workday, my brain is constantly showing like, look how many things you figure out for all of you all day long. All you're doing is figuring out problems, right? And the reason I say this is because I think for a lot of us, we really want someone else to give us the answer. We want someone else. We've been trained this way, right?
We've been trained through school and our society that like somebody else has the answer and you just follow along with what they say. And in certain times, yes of course, like you have to do it a certain way, let's say at work or whatnot. But I think for a lot of us, we delegate that to other people. Like somebody can somebody else just tell me what to do here? 'cause that's easier instead of me figuring it out. And what we do when we do that is we become a lot less, a lot more risk averse because if I need someone else to tell me every step of the way what I have to do, then it's a lot harder when I'm on a path that there is no path where I don't know what the next thing is. So of course I'm gonna be terrified to do that because I'm not confident in my own ability to figure it out.
And the more you start creating these opportunities for you to just figure it out, the more you start building the confidence in that that like, yeah, not that it's going to be some like you don't know what the problem in the future is gonna be, but you can be confident in the fact of like, Hey, I'm pretty good at figuring things out when they go wrong. I'm pretty good at being able to remain calm. I'm pretty good at being able to, you know, give myself a little pity party and then move on and figure out how I'm gonna handle whatever that situation is that's going to apply whether the problem is big or small.
So I want you to start thinking about like, this is a muscle that you can flex. And so a lot of times when we are really upset that like, ugh, I don't know what to do here. And we're really like scared about the fact that like this is a situation that I don't know how to handle. I want you to understand that that is an opportunity for you to lean into your resourcefulness and grow that muscle, right? Whether that's taking smaller risks, something that's not as big to prove to yourself simply that you can do it. Not because the end result matters that much. This is why actually, like I'm so ex like get so geeked out about goals. I don't think you don't need goals in order to prove that you're a good enough person. You don't need goals to change yourself to be able to love yourself.
You don't need goals in order to somehow become whole 'cause you're not broken. You need goals because they are. It's great practice to create these skills of like discipline and resourcefulness and commitment and being able to handle negative emotion. Like it's the side effects of those goals. It's who you become going after those goals. And so setting a goal is really great to show yourself. Like of course problems are gonna come up when that goal, when you set that goal, right? Of course if you could've done it, you would've done it by now. Of course there's gonna be obstacles and this is an opportunity for me to be resourceful and figure out how to overcome that. And when you look at it that way, for so many of us that get discouraged as soon as there's an obstacle or discouraged as soon as there's a failure, when you start looking at your failure as like, huh, this is the part where I get to be resourceful.
This is the part where I get to learn how resourceful I am. I have to tell you, like when I look back at my life now, when I was a lawyer, I obviously worked very hard. It was a lot of hard work. I was a very much an achiever, but I realized that I definitely wasn't, it wasn't required of me. I just was not as resourceful as I am now after being an entrepreneur for so many years. When I was a lawyer, everything was laid out. I just literally did what other people told me. Whether that was in school, whether that was to get a job, whether that was in my job, whatever it was, somebody else just told me what to did and do and I did it. And I think that that also is what makes, I dunno, sometimes I feel like the mundaneness of corporate life is that, is that somebody else is.
You're just kind of this cog in the wheel and you're just doing what someone else tells you. And your brain sort of needs a little bit more stimulation than that. But I mean, that's kind of another point. But I just realized I just kind of took the easy way out. Like someone else laid that path. I followed that path and I got the quote unquote success, but it limited me. It didn't strengthen my own confidence in myself. Which is why even when I left I was racked with imposter syndrome. Like I was racked with like, even though I knew I was smart, I knew I was a good lawyer, I knew I obviously handle, I had the great reviews. I had done really well as a lawyer. I constantly felt like the rug was gonna be pulled out from under me. Like I wasn't gonna be able to handle if something went wrong or if, you know, like thinking on my feet, that kind of stuff.
Like I was terrified of that stuff because I never had to do it. Somebody else was always there. Like I had to get my stuff double checked and triple checked and whatnot. And so, I always doubted my own abilities. And when I became a, an entrepreneur first with my photo booth business, and then now with my coaching business, it's all resourcefulness, right? Because the thing is, is like constantly figuring out, like with my photo booth, like I remember when I had to start that, it was constantly like, okay, well I need a design, but I don't have this much money to get a design from. So how can I solve that problem? Instead of thinking like, well I don't have a money for a designer, so I guess that's done. I can't do this business. I kept being like, okay, maybe I can find a student that's in design school.
Maybe I can, you know, what are other solutions to this? Like this is not a like roadblock. This is not a complete like detour. It's just like something I have to go around. And when I began thinking like that, and that's probably every day in my life is like as an entrepreneur is just that is like, well here's another problem. Here's 10 more problems here. You tried this and then that didn't work. Or you put this up and that created another problem. Now what are you gonna do? And in the beginning I used to be really exhausted by it thinking like, when is it gonna get to a place where there just isn't as many problems? And I realized like never, never, like why are you waiting for that? And why are you making yourself so miserable waiting for that? That thought of like, it shouldn't be this hard.
I shouldn't have to figure this out. Somebody else should tell me what to do. Is what was making my business so heavy for me was what was making it so hard. 'cause I kept thinking like I'm doing something wrong. I don't know, I don't know why there's always problems or I don't know how to figure out the next step or Okay, well once I get to this, well how do I scale it? When I started realizing, oh, this is the whole game. It's like whack-a-mole. As soon as you hit one problem, another one comes up. If I can not get upset about that or not make it mean anything about me or not use it as like a reason why there's, you know, something wrong with me and just use it as like, okay, here's where we're gonna get resourceful again. Here's where we're gonna come up with a solution.
And I'm telling you, I'm so grounded in my confidence in myself to figure it out Now. I truly feel like this level of confidence that I've never had in my life. I think back now, I'm like, oh my God, if I went back and I was a lawyer with this like unshakeable confidence, it would've been game over. I wish I had this when I was a lawyer, but it was truly, it wasn't just from like obviously there's thought work and there's a lot of work that I've done on my like, thoughts about myself, but one of the most powerful tools that I've developed is just this idea, this thought, this one thought that I want you to practice. I will figure it out. It's as simple as that. Think about how calm you feel, how much more at peace you feel when you've adopted the thought. I will figure it out. I don't have to have it all figured out right now. I'll figure that out when I get there.
It is an incredibly grounding thought is an incredibly grounding feeling to not have to have everything figured out right now, right? To know that you can do it. The thing that I will say too is that like what I've realized, and I realized this when we do goal setting a lot and when I did this, so I'm not in any way saying like I, I learned this from my coach is that when I was trying to learn business, I realized I was constantly running to other people to learn like how, how, how, like tell me how to do this. Which is, I'm not saying that's a bad thing. It is really smart to try to get people that have done it to tell you how to do it. That doesn't mean it's gonna solve all your problems. There's no like magic ticket. There's no one path that they're gonna lay out for you.
And then you're gonna follow that path and it's gonna be exact. It's not, it's not gonna be exact. You're gonna have different problems. And I remember getting really frustrated and constantly wanting like specific hows. And even when I got those specific hows, and then it didn't work the way like they would gimme a social media strategy and I would try it and it didn't work maybe with my audience as much. And I kept thinking I need to figure out some other how, like somebody else, and one of my coaches used to call it how greed, where it's like I just, you just constantly want the how, how. And she had talked about it in the sense of like, what if like there is no, no, like the how's not your business is none of your business right now, right? And nobody can tell you the how, but what if you just rely on the fact that you have to figure it out and you will figure it out as you go.
And I've realized this like with goals with my business and stuff. It's like if I am not as desperate to have someone lay out a path or gimme all the answers, and if I really do think about like I am resourceful enough to figure this puzzle out, I'm resourceful enough to handle whatever problem comes up, I'm resourceful enough to come up with a solution. I will like figure out whatever step there is to figure out, no matter how long it takes me, there's really nothing that stops me. There's nothing that can get in my way, right? Because no matter what failure it is, I'll figure out a way to pivot from that. I'll figure out a way to come back from that. I'll figure out a way to try another thing. And it takes off this edge from failing. I think for so many of us that are so desperate to like not fail and have this like visceral reaction to that.
I think when you realize like the point is not to not fail, the point is can I figure it out once I do, can I get back up and do it again and learn something? And so I want you to think about like maybe where you're not being resourceful in your life. Like where is there a problem that you have in your life that you're waiting for someone else to come help you with? Where is there a place where you haven't wanted to make a decision because you're so scared about what's gonna happen and how can you rely more on your resourcefulness in just making that decision? And I want you to start by thinking back to all of the times that you have been resourceful. I want you to start looking at like all of the things that you did figure out that you did accomplish, that you were able to do on your own. And I want you to be in awe of yourself because like you are a very resourceful person and you can keep growing that resourcefulness. You can keep leaning on it, you can keep proving to yourself that no matter what happens, you will figure it out. All right, my friends, I hope this was helpful 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 lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitter club and get on the waitlist. Doors are closed right now, but they will be open soon.