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, and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited to have you here. As you can probably hear, I'm a little stuffed up. I have been sick going on about two weeks now. Uh, my family and I got the flu last week, and it was brutal. It was a very rough illness. I haven't been sick like this in a really long time, and it just isn't going away. And so I did a replay last week. I'm sort of piggybacking off that replay and I think I'm gonna talk about why this topic kind of relates to that.
But I figured instead of recording an entire episode sounding like this, I'll give you one of my favorites because I think the concept is really important to understand. And hopefully I can come back next week with a normal voice, not coughing, and give you some more concepts that can help you change your relationship in your life and with your work. So thank you for sticking with me. This topic is called Thoughts about yourself. And if you've been around here, you know, everything that we work on is the, the thoughts that you have. And one of the most important areas of thought work that you can focus on is your own self-concept. And what I mean by self-concept is the thoughts that prise, how you view yourself. Last week I shared an episode called Self-Love, and I would highly recommend you listen to it if you haven't.
'cause it really talks about what the root of all of our problems are. And for so many of us, we have learned to be our own biggest bully. And this was a defense mechanism, a way to survive a lot of our childhoods. Like we learned that if we police ourselves, if we just make sure that we're never slipping, if we make sure we never make a mistake, then other people won't get mad at us, won't harm us, won't make fun of us, uh, but we will be safe. But in order to keep ourselves safe, we've now become the meanest bully that could be out there. And it's time to change that. It's such a exhausting and depressing way to live, to constantly be mean to yourself. And so I think one of the best uses of thought work is really changing how you think about yourself because it not only makes life more pleasant, but it also really impacts everything you go after.
Every goal you set, how you view yourself, and what you think you're capable of. Those thoughts that you have, change what you think is possible for you. So without further ado, I'm gonna roll it back to my 200th episode, and I will be back next week, hopefully with a new episode. So your self concept or your self identity is built by the beliefs that you have about yourself. And obviously these are formed, you know, throughout your life, throughout your childhood, through experiences with other people, what people relay to you. And we all have created a self-concept, but it's always a good reminder to realize that it's just a story. It's part of the truth. It's never the whole thing, and it's never static the way that we like to think it is, right? We love to like pigeonhole ourselves and create like I am statements like, oh, I am just lazy.
I am a procrastinator. I am really spontaneous, whatever the thought is. But it's not that we are any of those things, it's just that sometimes we engage in those behaviors and there's always equal evidence to the fact that we are not those things. We just tend to ignore them, right? We have like this attention spotlight and we place it when we tell our brain something. Um, I think there's a saying what, like the, the eyes will see what the mind looks for. So when you tell your brain, I am this, it will keep giving you evidence that you are that and keep ignoring evidence of everything else that you are not, right. So for instance, I hear this all the time when people tell me that they're not motivated or that they're not disciplined enough or they're lazy. And if you've listened to the podcast for a while, you know that my personal story is that I'm lazy and I'll, I'll talk about that in a minute.
But it's always fascinating to me because when you tell yourself you're lazy or you're not disciplined, you are looking at all of the pieces of evidence that confirm that, right? Like the fact that you have to press the snooze button five times every time you wanna wake up, or the fact that you want to take a nap on weekends, or you said you were gonna work out and then you didn't go, or whatever, you know, whatever. There's evidence that confirms that story. Your brain wants you to be, right? So it'll be like, yeah, you know what? We think this idea and we're gonna have this confirmation bias where we're just gonna go look for evidence for that and then keep confirming it and keep solidifying this loop that we're playing that like, see, I told you, I'm just a lazy person. This is the type of person I am, right?
And we ignore everything else. So I always love to point out to people who tell me they're not disciplined. If you just go through a day and you realize how absurd that is, because like humans are the most disciplined animals ever, it's like you wake up, even if it took you five times to press snooze, it's not like you just decided to stay in bed for another four hours. You got up, you brushed your teeth, you, you know, got in your car, you stayed within the lanes, you stopped at the stop sign. You get to work on time. Like, all of these things just show how disciplined you are. You're doing things every single day that are disciplined. But you're picking out the couple of times throughout that day where maybe your willpower wanes are, you're just tired and you don't wanna do these things.
And then you build your identity around it. And I, I say this like, I very much did this. It's just like, it's part of human nature for us to do this. But it's good to catch yourself. So if you are a new listener, I've talked about this before, but like one of my pervasive stories my whole life has been that I I am lazy, okay? And it was like the joke within my family always, because I'm somebody who loved taking naps. I was always very low energy, even as a child. Like, I would like to come home from school and take a nap. Well, throughout like high school, like I didn't stop when kid stop at, uh, like four or five years old. No, no. Like I always loved taking naps. I liked sleeping in. I'm not very like, uh, outdoorsy. So even as a child, like I just wasn't, I would rather sit inside and play with my toys or, you know, watch TV or color or do something much more low energy than I would to go outside and, you know, climb things or ride bikes all the time.
I mean, I did that stuff when I was a kid, but you get the picture. Like, I'm not this very adventurous, loving exercise type of person. I've never been that. And so my brain within my family too, 'cause my family is, has a lot of people with a lot of high energy, like my mother and sister. So when I compare to that, it was like, yeah, I'm very lazy, right? Obviously I ignored tons of things, tons of facts that when it gets that, like the fact that I was always a straight A student and at that I, you know, got into a top 10 law school and I worked at a top 10 law firm and I worked 80 hours a week and I built two businesses. Like all of that stuff just takes a backseat to this narrative that I've had until a couple of years ago, which I still have this narrative, by the way.
Like, I enjoy rest. And when I started not making that mean a bad thing or making that mean, that's my personality, then it started shifting what I thought was possible. Because a lot of times when you create the narrative, I am lazy, that's gonna limit a lot of the things that you think you can or can't do, right? There is the Henry Ford quote. Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right. It's the most profound quote because truly the beliefs that you have about yourself and your ability is going to color everything you do. Like we're not insane, right? If you think you are not capable of doing something, you're not gonna go after it. So everything that you've done in your life, every job you've gone after, every degree you've gone after, every project you've started is because it started with a thought that you believed you could do it.
If you've counted yourself out. I mean, maybe you didn't want to do it, but there's times where we want to do things and we don't because we believe I'm not good enough for that. I'm not smart enough for that. I don't have enough energy for that. And so, so we just don't even try. And so that's why these beliefs are so important, because it truly just determines what you go after, what you decide, right? And then how you feel about yourself, how you treat yourself as you go through it. Now, like for me, part of this narrative has changed. It hasn't changed that I like to rest and I now wear laziness kind of as a badge of honor because I've realized, holy moly, like my laziness has been such a superpower for me. It's been such a, uh, savior for me. And I'll explain like, part of the reason I quit law was because I was like, I can't keep this up.
I can't work like this, like all these other people are doing it, but I, I physically can't. And I think a lot of people that are used to pushing themselves will just stay in it. Like I, I'm very grateful that I couldn't do it because that's what forced me to quit and deal with all of the identity stuff and the fears and all of that. Because physically I was like, I, this ain't me, right? I look about at it with my business now. I see so many entrepreneurs that burn themselves out because they try to do everything. They try to be on every platform. They try to like, you know, they think they need to have everything done and everything needs to be perfect. I just don't subscribe to it because I don't have the energy. I'm like, you know what? This is as good as it's gonna be.
I can send out an email, I can do my podcast. That's about it. If I get to social media, great. If I don't, I don't care, right? Like, I don't have a ton of pressure that I need to do more that I, like, I don't burn myself out in that way. I constantly am checking in to realize like, yeah, my energy is not going to be okay with this. So, okay, so how do I create it in a way that works for me, right? But part of that was just changing my beliefs that even like that laziness, like why is that a bad thing, right? Why did we attach morality around peop Like some people may just be more high energy. That's just the way their body works. Okay, great for them. That's amazing, right? Maybe my body just doesn't work that way. When I started accepting that instead of shaming myself for it, instead of thinking there's something wrong with me, which I did for a very long time, and I went to a million doctors and tried to do a million different things to regulate my blood sugar or whatever, because I thought I needed to have all this more energy.
And then I just realized like, maybe this is just the level of energy I'm gonna have. Can I accept that? And when I started doing that, and by the way, this has only happened in the last couple of years as I started doing thought work, it just lifted so much of the dirty pain, right? It lifted so much of the shame and the guilt of like, why am I like this? I should have more energy. I should be, you know, should, should, should. And I was like, well, this is what we got. So okay, can we be okay with it? Can we still love ourselves? Can we not shame ourselves? Can we look at why this is a positive thing? Can we look at all of the reasons this is not actually true? Like, I am not actually lazy. I do tons of things. I get tons of things done, whatnot.
I just choose to also rest. I choose to honor my body and what a beautiful thing that is, right? And so when I started reframing those beliefs is when I became empowered with them, right? It's when I started deciding this isn't gonna stop me from doing the things I wanna do. This doesn't mean that I can or can't do anything. It just means I have to do it within a way that works for me and my body. Like I have to tune in more and reject what everybody else is telling me I have to do, and constantly realize what is it that I can do? What is it that I want to do? And so that was part of my lesson before I really went through this shift of self-concept and mindset work throughout these years. But part of when I, where I started again, when I was nervous about starting it, even in 2018, this podcast was because I have a limited amount of energy.
And I had started another business and it didn't really make sense to start this podcast because I don't have a ton of energy to spend on both. But again, that sort of worked in my favor because I had to decide to put the other business on the back burner and focus on one, like somebody else may have been able to drive both, you know, ships and maybe it would've been great for them. Maybe they built two businesses. I am not that person, and that's okay, right? I think it, I got more clear on what I wanted and where I wanted to spend my energy. And 200 episodes later, here we are, right? But the reason I really wanted to do this episode is because I recently had the same kind of shift happen in a very powerful way. And it happened in, in two different things.
So first was the lovely TikTok, which uh, I am obsessed with. I started kind of self diagnosing. I've talked about this a little bit more. I started becoming awake to the idea that maybe I have a DHD. Okay? Now I'm gonna preface this. I have not been diagnosed. I am now currently in the process of seeking that and seeing if I really do. So I may not have it, but that I'll explain why that that doesn't actually matter for the purposes of what I wanna talk about. It's that when certain TikTok started coming up on my for you page and I started listening to these women who had a DHD, it was something that was never on my radar, right? Like, it was just never something I had ever considered about my brain. And like I said, I mean, I've been fairly successful, right? Like I made it through law school.
I've, I became a lawyer. I was able to function as a lawyer, um, until I chose not to. I could have kept my job, right? Like I've built a business. I mean, and I think the way that maybe we think about A DHD is different in how it presents in women. And so we typically think about it with the way a lot of boys present, which is the hyperactivity, which clearly I don't have. So it was just nothing that was ever on my radar. And I remember the first couple videos that I saw, and I'll actually try to explain the feeling that washed over me. So one of 'em, I'm going to explain like what some of the symptoms or I don't know, behaviors that I have that I didn't realize could possibly be a part of this neurodivergent way of your brain working. So one is that I have a very difficult time tuning out like auditory stimuli.
And how that has shown itself from my childhood is that again, there's like a running joke within my friends and family that like, if we go to a restaurant, there's very little chance that I can focus fully on what's happening in the conversation at the table because I'm so distracted by what's happening at the rest of the restaurant, right? And I have very good hearing. I don't know, it's because I can't tune out certain auditory stimuli. I pick up on what is happening a lot. So the joke was always like, like I know what's happening at every table. I know what every conversation is happening throughout the restaurant. And I do. And for the longest time in my life, like we joked about, it's because I'm so nosy. Like I need to know what everybody's doing because I didn't realize that that's not what's happening, right?
And this was something that I felt really bad about my whole life because I never wanted people that I am with to think that I'm not interested in them or to think that like I don't care about what they're saying or I'm distracted, or it's not, you know, exciting enough. It's just that I truly cannot tune it out. And this is why, like, I never understood how people could work in coffee shops or even like coworking spaces because I'm just so easily distracted. Like if I'm working and somebody walks into the coffee shop as they do, I will have to look up, I'll have to look at what they're doing. Like I'll hear the noise and I can't keep my focus on what I'm doing, you know, in my own work. So it never worked for me through school, you know, through work. It's like I have to be alone somewhere in order to be able to concentrate on the work that I'm doing.
And I didn't realize, like I, I truly just thought that I'm very nosy. I just like really care what everybody is doing and I can't not distract myself. And like I said, I mean, I actually recently realized this again when I was at, I went on a trip to Austin for a mastermind for the life coach school. Now that I'm more aware of this, that it's a part of a DH adhd, I, I notice, I didn't realize it until too late, but I'd be having a conversation with someone like at, at a hotel bar. So it's obviously very crowded and I don't even realize that I'm looking around or that I'm seeing, you know, I'm seeing somebody behind the person I'm talking to. Let's say I don't even catch that my eyes have maybe darted away for a second, but then the person I'm talking to looks back to see what I'm looking at.
And I feel terrible because I don't actually care what's happening behind them. And I'm truly trying to concentrate on what's going on in front of me, but I just can't. So I say all this to say, when I saw this TikTok and somebody was talking about this, I remember it was as if like this feeling washed over me. And it was such a feeling of relief and validation. Like I felt seen for a second, right? And I remember the thought was like instantly like, oh my God, maybe there isn't something wrong with me, right? Like, maybe it's not because I'm nosy or just a bad friend or a bad listener. Maybe my brain really just can't do this and I've shamed myself and beat myself up for my whole life for not being able to do something that my brain just maybe the way that it is wired, it just can't do, right?
There's a lot of other things that have come up that I'm like, oh, I, I'm almost certain I have a DHD If it falls within these categories, like the fact that I am a very messy person no matter what I try, I cannot create a system that will keep me organized in my house. I have the best of intentions. I have looked up every system I have bought every planner, my poor VA that works for, for me, Hannah, I try to be a good boss, but it's like we'll create a system where I have to go into, you know, click up and post something and I'm, I always tell her, I'm like, God bless you. I'm not going to, there's no way I can get myself. I mean there's not that, it's no way. But it's really difficult for me to remember every time something comes up to like go into like I can train myself, but that's just not the way that my brain naturally works.
And because of that, I forget things constantly. So like another thing that I have is like I lose my phone, my keys, I lose things every single day, multiple times a day. I always like walk into rooms and have no idea why I walked in there. I forget mid talking to people what I'm talking about. I was gonna explain this like very stark example that happened last week when I was drop, I had to take supplies to my daughter's school to drop off. It was the most unbelievable situation. I will spare you the details, but like I had to take some donation stuff. I put reminders in my phone, I set alarms, I packed the stuff. Like I kept forgetting. Like I would get a reminder in my office. I would get a reminder that said I need to take the donations today. I was like, oh, I should go downstairs and do it.
By the time I got downstairs, I forgot what I was doing. So I took her to school and completely forgot. Then I came home and I saw the reminder on my computer and I was like, oh, I forgot to take it. I gotta take it when I pick her up, right? So I'm gonna go put it in my car, like put it by the car right now. I went, put it by the car. I literally got in the car to go and forgot. And then once I pulled out of the driveway, I remembered I stopped. I came back and got it. Then I get there to pick her up and I go to pick her up. I've completely forget it in the car, right? Like these kind of things happen over and over again. And now I'm learning about, I'm just starting to research this more.
But I'm learning that like maybe even this whole laziness for me has been a part of this my whole life, right? Like part of it is that my brain doesn't stop. It's just constantly going and it physically exhausts me af like by midday. So anyways, the point was that one of the really beautiful things about social media or how we learn more about the brain and how we learn about thought work is that it, it provides relief. It lets us know like, huh, maybe there's nothing like wrong with me morally as a person. Like I'm not a shameful person for doing this. I'm not a bad person or whatever. Maybe my brain just doesn't work the way that everybody else's brains work. And like, could that be okay? Right? It helped me feel really validated because I thought for so long that something was wrong with me, right?
And I think that part of the lesson I took from that though is like, why do I need that diagnosis in order to stop beating myself up? Like what if I just decided that however I do things is just the way I do things? Like there is no morality behind how we do things. We think there are because the society has like put those values on them, but there you're not a morally better person if you're more organized versus not being organized. Or if you're a morning person versus a night person, or if you're shy versus outgoing, whatever. Like none of these things are like one is better than the other. They're just different ways of human beings being human. And I felt like when I learned this, it was just another really stark example for myself. Like, I have spent so much of my life hating myself or trying to beat certain parts out of me instead of really having compassion and trying to understand like, why does my brain work this way?
Right? And so I say this to you guys, for a lot of you who maybe there isn't a diagnosis or there, you know, there's so much about the brain that we haven't learned. And for me, honestly, I wasn't even gonna get diagnosed. And I'll talk more later about it once I go through that process and I'm doing it for other reasons, but I didn't really even need it after that. 'cause I was like, oh, you mean I can just accept that maybe my brain just works like this? And maybe even in other ways, maybe this isn't even a DHD, this is why I'm saying this. Like, but can I take this as an example of like, it doesn't matter, it's okay that you are the way that you are, that your brain works the way that it does. And like for all of the things that I forget, let's say again talking about this attention spotlight, as I focus more of like, well I, you know, this is the way I am or this is my brain is obviously there's a million things I don't forget.
There's a million things I do every single day that allows me to, to build my business and take care of my children. Like clearly for me, and I know that these types of neurodivergent ways of being can be very disruptive to a lot of people in a lot of different areas of their lives. I think for me, like it, it doesn't disrupt me to that extent where it has, you know, ruined my life and I know it, it has for other people. So I, but I just say this is that it allowed me a feeling of acceptance of myself. And that's the first thing I really want all of us to maybe try on, right? Like what if I just accepted that the way my brain works is just the way that it is wired, okay? Like this is the way my brain is and sometimes I do this thing or sometimes I, this is how I react.
And like there's nothing wrong with that. Like how much more bandwidth could we have to maybe figure out how we want to use our brain in a way that will serve us how we want to set ourselves up for success. Maybe we wanna create systems that help us not forget things or help us tune out noises or whatever instead of spending the time just telling ourselves like, there's something wrong with me because I'm not like everybody else. And so while that was a very powerful and wonderful thing and it was a wonderful experience for me to change my thoughts about myself, like it was a way of me changing the thoughts about the way my brain works. So like there is, let's say that those symptoms like the A DHD, and then there's my thoughts about the A DHD, right? There's my thoughts about why is my brain like this?
And so it allowed me to take off a lot of the dirty pain and come to a place of more acceptance and figuring out like, what do I wanna do with this? How do I want to start treating myself? Do I wanna get diagnosed and try out medication? Do I wanna try SY systems? Like I can actually get into more, um, not even problem solving, but figuring out how my life can work best for me if I'm not in a place of just shaming myself. But here's the other part that this all ha has happened in the last couple of months that was really like profound for me. Is that part of that validation? Oftentimes I think the dangerous part gets to, especially if there's a diagnosis or if there is, you know, some kind of collective, this is the way we are, whatever mantra it can cause you to sort of accept, well like this is it then this is the way my brain is, right?
And so I'm now gonna put myself smack tab in the middle of that box and there's nothing else I can do, right? Like I have a DHD, sorry, this is just the way I am. And the last six months I did one of the hardest things I've ever done. And I went through a master coach certification process at the life coach school. It was transformative. And it was literally the toughest thing. It was tougher than law school. I mean, it was a very , truncated period of time. It was very intense. It was basically all consuming for my last six months. And it was very much focused on changing our own beliefs about ourselves. And so it brought up a lot, and I worked through a lot in a very short period of time. But one of the aspects that was fascinating for me and really blew my own mind was we had to pick a project to do over the six months that we thought was impossible for us.
And like we thought it would make the biggest difference in our lives, but it's something that we think is impossible. And what I chose was to only work four hours a day and do that through a system called Monday Hour One, which is a scheduling system where you schedule out your whole week and have exact times when you're gonna do certain things and you're gonna get everything done within those times. And like I said, I have never been one to be able to be organized. I have never been able to schedule as much as I try. And I'm not one that because of the way I think that my brain has worked in the past, focusing is very difficult for me in short periods of time. Like, I like to give myself a lot of time 'cause I get distracted. And so, you know, saying like I'm gonna get all of my work done in a two hour block is terrifying to me.
And so I, I just truly was like, my brain just doesn't work that way. Maybe I could do it through willpower for like a week or two, but I'm not gonna be able to do this for six months. And I had picked other parts of my project that don't pertain to this, but that was like the main gist of I really just thought my brain doesn't work this way. And so all these people that do scheduling and it's so great and they're so wonderful at it, that's great for them and their business. And I, I did have thoughts that like, well my business suffers because I can't do this. So I thought that it really would make a difference. And I am here to tell you that I absolutely could do it. And I did do it. And it transformed my life. And I'm gonna tell you how I did it in the beginning.
I thought I had to do it through willpower, right? And it felt terrible. And I would do the scheduling and I would try to stick to it and I wasn't able to stick to it. And I would get mad at myself, blah, blah, blah. Like I had weeks of this, of me trying every week failing miserably, figuring out like, why did this not work? Where is it that I needed a little bit more flexibility? What was coming up for me? But as I did that work, I started realizing like, oh, I have to schedule in a way that works for me. So for me, maybe it doesn't work to do four hours of a block and I do get everything done in that time, but maybe it does work to do like smaller blocks and actually give myself more of a break. Could I do that?
Like I started playing around with like, how does my brain work? What is gonna be the way that sets me up for success? And I only got there by taking, I actually got coached very hard and I was very defensive and I was very upset during this coaching, but it did change my life. And um, I got called out by my coach that basically I was choosing to think these thoughts that I couldn't do this and it was letting me off the hook, right? I was by sort of being resentful and angry that I, my brain just can't do it and other people don't understand me. I was like playing the victim for myself. And I realized that I actually like being resentful. And that sounds terrible. It's not that I like it, it's just that it felt normal to me to constantly be mad at the world, to be mad at my husband, to be mad at everybody else that like, I can't, I don't have the time I need.
I don't have enough whatever bandwidth for my business. And when I dropped a lot of that, and that happened through a lot of coaching, I really decided like, okay, if I start taking full responsibility for my schedule and telling myself like I can get whatever I want done in a week, what would that look like? How would I have to do that? How would I have to show up for that? What would I have to believe about myself to do that? And when I started shifting that and realizing, like even for instance, one example was the fact that like, well, I have my kids at home and it was Covid, OVID. And sometimes, you know, like I have a nanny that comes in part-time while I work. And so she couldn't come in 'cause somebody in our family was sick. And so there would be like weeks when she wouldn't come, come in and obviously like I thought, well that clearly affects what I can get done, how many hours I have to work on it.
And something that was pointed out to me was, but does it, like what? What are your thoughts when she doesn't come in? Right? And when I started exploring part of it, I realized like if I have something very important to me, I will always get it done. Like if I have a coaching call I have to do, if I'm gonna get interviewed on a podcast, let's say, even if the kids are home, I'll figure it out. I'll take responsibility. So I'll either call my husband and tell him he needs to come home. I'll ask family members to watch them. I'll put them in front of the tv, right? And so I was still choosing not to do those things when let's say our nanny wasn't, couldn't make it. I was choosing that. Like I would rather not have my kids in front of the TV for four hours than get my work done.
And that's a totally fine choice and it's a totally valid choice. And no one's saying it's a fair choice, right? Like our circumstances, it's not that life is fair and everybody gets the circumstances they want. It was like, these are my circumstances. I don't have an nanny coming in. I have a couple of hours that I needed to get work done. What do I wanna choose? Do I wanna decide that? Like, no, I'd rather not put my kids in front of the TV today. Or do I wanna decide like, no, my business is important to me and if they have to watch some more screen time, then that's what it is and I'm not gonna guilt and shame myself. And when I started making that shift and just deciding like I get to decide what I do with my weeks. I get to decide how much I ask for help, how much I demand help, how much I delegate, how much I hire other people.
Maybe I get a backup nanny, maybe I do. I mean there's a million other things I can do if I step out of like the resentment and the anger and start problem solving and figuring out what is important to me, what needs to get done. Like I could wake up super early and do it for those weeks. I could work at night. I just was not wanting to do any of those because I was sitting in my pity party of like, this isn't fair. And when I shifted that, I started shifting even the idea of like, I get to choose what I do with my schedule. And yes, for my brain, maybe I'm not gonna be as hyper-focused and maybe in that focus time, somebody else can get three things done in that hour and I'm only gonna get one thing, okay, then that's what it is, right?
But I can stop telling myself that I can't do it. I can stop telling myself like that my brain doesn't work this way or that I can't get it to work this way. I started like figuring out, well, what can I do? What can my brain do? How does my brain work? What if I partnered with it instead of being against it all the time? What if I realized I need more rest throughout the day than other people? And if instead of shaming myself, like what I was doing, I remember in the beginning when I was scheduling, I mean I was scheduling eight hours back to back with not even a break to go to the bathroom. Like when I saw the schedule, I was like, this is insane. Of course you're not getting through this and then you're frustrated every day because this is like an inhuman amount of work to do.
And I had to let go of that. I had to let go of the idea of like, okay, what is one thing I need to do today to move the needle forward? What is like if I have to half it every week, like I only get half the things I wanted to get done. All right, let's like make that the standard. I'm still at least getting those half done instead of being frustrated and not doing anything. And when I started shifting that, it just changed the way I looked at scheduling. It changed the way I did things that for me work. Like for instance, when I did the scheduling blocks, a lot of people like schedule in exactly what they're gonna do. I do that sometimes and sometimes I just leave like focus time. So depending on what I feel like doing that day, I need to give myself a little more flexibility.
So I have a list of everything I need to do for the week. And let's say it's a Thursday, you know, or it's Tuesday at 10, and I can look at the list for my focus time and be like, you know what? Today I wanna record a podcast or today I wanna write my newsletter. It allows me to tap in a little bit more into like how I'm feeling, what I have the energy for, what I feel like focusing on what I think I can get done. Instead of being so rigid where it's like, nope, Tuesday at 10 you said you're gonna do a podcast, so you have to do a podcast. But again, these were just like little tricks that I started learning like, oh, I'm allowed to do it this way just because they told me I have to put in like do a podcast at 10 on Tuesday.
I don't have to do it that way. I can schedule in a way that works for me. But what I had to shift was my idea of like what I am able to do. And I realized what was really hard, especially once I had like now found this quote unquote like diagnosis where I found some kind of this validation of this is the way my brain works. I wanted to dig my heels in deeper to be like, no, you don't understand. I can't schedule because I have a DHD, you know, because I'm like this and I'm so grateful for that certification program only because it forced me to push myself to really ask like, is that true? Maybe it's like maybe there are things that I can and can't do, but how much of it is it me telling myself that I can't? Or is it me thinking I should do it like somebody else?
Or is it me thinking that the way I'm doing it is not good enough? And how much of it is it really that I can't do it? And so I say all this because as I come up on this 200 episodes, I really think about what I thought I was capable of four years ago and how much that has changed in four years, right? What I thought was available to me, what I thought about myself, how I showed up, the standards that I held myself to, how cruel I used to be to myself, how much I used to shame and beat myself up before I started doing all this. And all of that has changed only because I have decided to change my thoughts about myself, right? And this didn't happen in a vacuum. Like my thoughts changed as I took action. As I started building the podcast, as people came to me and started asking me for help, I started questioning like, can I be someone that helps people?
Can I coach? Like I used to have the thought, I could never be a coach. I'm clearly that thought was not true, but it was through that action that I started just questioning constantly, why am I keeping this thought about myself? How is this serving me? Do I wanna keep it? And part of it is that I wanna keep certain thoughts, right? Like I said, like I now wear my laziness as a badge of honor. I don't actually think of it as being lazy, but again, just like you know with this podcast, I feel like I wanna change the connotation of the word quitter. I also very much wanna change the connotation of laziness. And I'm just realizing, okay, I've rejected a lot of what society has told women and mothers and just workers and capitalism like what we're supposed to do. And I'm like, yeah, no, I don't have that energy for that.
I'm just gonna change that term for myself. And so I want you to think about the thoughts that you have about yourself and what that is creating in your life, right? What you think is available to you or not available to you based on who you think you are and what you think you can do. Because a lot of times, again, not only are we just looking to our past, we're looking to a small subset of information that we have about ourselves that we are now taking on as our whole personality. Like I am this, I am that instead of like I am a person who enjoys taking naps, right? It's not like I am lazy, it's just like this is part of something that I do. And I want you to get very clear. I want you to take the time to like sit down and write like what are my thoughts about myself? What are things I think I can and I can't do? Where did those thoughts come from? What is evidence that I'm ignoring that shows that I can actually do those things? When have I been able to do those things? Why am I ignoring that information? Get super clear on what the thoughts you have about yourself, because that will determine everything. Thank you all so much for hanging with me for 200 episodes. This is incredible and I can't wait for the next 200. I love you all and I'll be back next week with another one.

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.