Hello worklifers,

Yesterday, April 24th 2021 marks the completion of my one year impossible goal. I am most proud of creating massive action towards my belief that I created a year back. My belief was the one that was going to serve me the whole year.

“I was going to have my back no matter what transpires across my work & life day.”

This meant a full year of putting into practice allowing urges, massively reducing buffering, and learning how to feel. This meant blowing my own mind and raising the ceiling and becoming a person who is not afraid of feeling emotion.

The way I was going to measure my goal was to stop overdrinking & overeating for a year. Why choose this measure and not something else? I had two thought errors that were tripping me. One was around overworking and one around overdrinking. One around overdrinking came in this form “I deserve a glass of wine and good food at the end of a work day”.  I wasn’t able to keep to my protocol of eating or drinking over the weekend or on special occasions.

Mind drama

I learnt I had a lot of mind drama like so many do around buffering with food, overworking, and overdrinking.  The mind drama looked like this for me. The way to relax and unwind at the end of the day was associated with a glass of wine and good food. A fun evening with friends and family always had wine be part of it. Somewhere along the line, me having and me being fun also had wine and food in it. With coaching I got to become aware of these as thought errors. We introduce these errors in our brain and create so much evidence for it in our lives from simply giving into our urges. We choose instant comfort over delayed gratification.

One thing I uncovered through my experiments is that whatever I choose as my drink or food plan, it had to come from a place of not feeling deprived. The reason being the feeling of deprivation always put me right back into a scarcity mindset and the actions that followed weren’t giving me the results. I had enough data from my many failed attempts that willpower ran out at sometime.

I wanted a different feeling. A feeling of abundance and choice from a place of extreme love for myself. I also wanted to crystalize the  “why” for me? The “why” and believing in it has to be much bigger than the “how” or actions for an impossible goal.

Completion list

I want to describe the process to you about how one can approach and go about figuring out the why? I knew I had run out of willpower in the past and it came with a limited quota.

Making a completion list is a great skill and tool. A completion list puts you in the mindset of abundance vs. a “don’t” list that cites the reasons for why alcohol is not good for you puts you in a deprived mindset and one of scarcity. One of the big reasons for burnout is that scarcity mindset and in order to get out of it, I had wanted to approach this from a place of abundance.

Think of completion lists as gifts to yourself from your future self.  I also love that one can feel complete with aspects of one’s life. You are giving permission to yourself to move to new experiences and possibilities from a place of abundance when you feel complete about something. I love that one has the power alone with their mind to say you are not giving up anything. You are simply just completing chapters and moving to new experiences as those serve you more towards our future self. You can also think of this future self of yours who is the version you want to become and honor your true desires. If this future you were to hand you some gifts what could they look like. If she shipped these gifts (new beliefs) and you were to open them and take massive action in your now what could your life be now. Just imagine what could be the possibilities and experiences you would start to unlock.

Here is how my completion list looked like.

This is dated a year back :-). I am listing some notes from my last years completion list as inspiration. I feel great being complete on these today.

  1. Cutting down on wine – I am complete with the lethargy that are associated with you.
  2. Processed foods – Just eating for the sake of it; the not so mindful choices that I used to make at 4:00pm when I was stressed and hungry. I am complete with you.
  3. Overworking – I feel complete with using work (checking emails at non scheduled times.
  4. Forgetting things – It was adventurous while it lasted. I want to have new experiences that doesn’t include forgetting the things I love and own.
  5. Not being mindful with the family during the work week – Past 2 years it was hard for me to full be present with my family during the work week.
  6. Friends/Co-workers – Don’t let their behaviors burn me out. I am complete with emotional childhood. I will be choosing emotional adulthood. We will share some examples and talk about this more in subsequent posts.

Allowing 100 urges

Once I came from a place of abundance and the why was compelling it was setting the target on the first checkpoint. Allowing 100 urges. My goal was to allow emotions like stress and anxiety and be uncomfortable instead of buffering with work, food, or wine. What you notice is that by allowing urges you can start to see that simply being uncomfortable and allowing the urge nothing harmful happens. Urge jars are great way to learn how to allow emotions. If you have an urge to indulge in worry, confusion or overwhelm see what can happen if you allow that vs. resist, react or avoid. You will learn that the worst that happens is a feeling. Now it is not important to just allow an emotion it is also deciding upfront what you are going to do.

Here you use your prefrontal brain to make decisions ahead of time.

My prefrontal brain helped see two compelling reasons to stop feeling deprived and instead feel great. It offered me the reward in terms of experiencing delayed gratification. The feeling of not being mindful and present was a huge one for me. The way you can hack your brain and teach it to think was to imagine how the next morning and day would feel like when you successfully allowed an urge. I loved the feeling of being fresh, enjoying my morning routine, and being mindful and alert with my brain all of the day. Once I got to this place, then the choice I was making was trading the instant gratification of overworking, overeating and overdrinking to all those rewards that I would unlock the next day.

Also you can reward yourself with all the natural comforts like taking a walk in the evening, cooking, meditating, reading, and going to bed early. I had planned my evening routine during the 100 urges with these natural comforts. When the urge appeared I strictly followed my protocol which included reminding me of the delayed gratification waiting the next day. Every evening that I allowed the urge instead of resisting or buffering with it, I put a marble in the jar. This is how I got to completing my 100 urges.

The path from a 100 urges to an Impossible goal

From 100 urges you can start to create massive evidence of learning the skill to not indulge in worry, stress, anxiety, and overwhelm. When you stop buffering you open yourself to start feeling and when you learn to manage your mind and not indulge in emotions you start to accelerate your goals while sustaining wellbeing.

Here is a recap of how the year of my impossible goal looked when the acceleration began while sustaining wellbeing

  1. Completing urges of 365 days of the year by cutting down drinking wine.
  2. Added to it cutting down urges for meat and dairy & turning vegan.
  3. Added to it cutting down urges to check email at random times of the day.You can create a protocol and stick to it and allow the urges. Really unleash that power of your prefrontal cortex which is what I coach on a lot with worklifeunstuck programs we offer.
  4. We welcomed Molly our beautiful yellow lab. I fulfilled one of the items on my bucket list which was to create and offer this experience to my gorgeous boys. Time spent with Molly and boys and helping bake that to upfront into the weekly planning has been a great way to maintain personal boundaries and not let them flow through work.
  5. Certifying as a life coach from the life coach school & creating worlifeunstuck.com. I love everything about the model and offering it many more people through the valuable programs we are creating with worklifeunstuck.
  6. Completing more than a 100 dares and created massive evidence for my belief in my own self-confidence. My dares came in all forms from stopping the urge to people please, to taking massive decisions at work and home, and embracing my worthy fails. These dares can also be done with urge jars.
  7. When I experienced the sudden loss of my father, I felt the rug being pulled off my feet. In the days and weeks that followed what brought me immense gratitude was practicing self-coaching and emotional management with this new circumstance.One aspect is clear when you embark on the impossible goal. Even though you constrain yourself on the goal, your experience and growth is boundless.

    I invite you to take up that impossible goal and if you want to learn more you can reach me at [email protected].

Maithili Vijay Dandige