Hello worklifers,
I love engineering. I love all things to do with creating frameworks that can be applied to solving problems. So much of the work we produce and offer into the world is built and leveraged on the great work done by others. When I started to put the concepts together I had learnt and applied as a life coach, I came to a place where the formula around the “worklifeunstuck” program started to emerge.
Today, I want to share this formula with all of you. I am test driving this formula with an amazing set of technology leaders. It is truly magical to see how this is transforming their thinking and allowing them to accelerate their goals while sustaining their wellbeing in similar ways that it has helped transform my thinking.
Life is 50/50 – Living a full work life at the center & not on the fringes
Let me take an example and start to put this together concept of explaining. Life is 50/50 and what does it mean to live at the center of this vs at the fringes. When we live on the fringes we are choosing to not honor ourselves and our true goals and desires. We are not expanding ourselves to see what the possibilities could be.
Let’s put this into perspective.
One of the most sort after milestones in a career is a promotion. Promotions bring with them recognition of ones skills, validation from peers, rewards, and opportunities. The organization incentivizes and keeps employees motivated towards the next promotion target as soon as they get to one. However, as soon as you achieve that milestone it now becomes part of your past. It simply becomes yet another circumstance, just like every other event or previous promotion.
Then there are feelings. The feelings such as fear, frustration, self-doubt, shame, guilt, which continue to exist across all promotion stages. In short there is no escape to feeling these negative emotions. The common thought error, is this statement I hear often.
“If I get that promotion and that new role I will feel better.”
“ If I get these kind of rewards it will make me feel better.”
“ If I do this and complete this project, or hit these numbers then I will feel less stressed.”
We often associate feeling better with these events – promotions, roles, targets associated with projects we take up. Also we realize somewhere along the career path that no matter how much money or success, or milestones we achieve, it doesn’t change the fact that we are born human.
This means we are bound to feel all of that negative emotion due to our thoughts around these and other events. These events are outside our control. When promotions show up, what rewards we get, or even how other people behave. What is even more wonderful is the realization that if you choose to grow and evolve yourself and take on bigger goals you are bound to bring up these negative emotions even more. More self-doubt from newer goals, more chances of failure, more overwhelm from increased scope, and more frustration when things don’t go as we have planned.
We are never taught in school or at work to learn how to allow and manage our thoughts around these negative emotions and stop indulging in them. Our primitive brain and limited beliefs keep us stuck. We often resort to take that dopamine shot and feel instant pleasure and go about feeling better in the moment. Our primitive brain guided by our limited beliefs, offer us to just taking the same actions and doing more of what we know from our limited beliefs. Our ego kicks in and tells us to be superhero and not ask for any help. Resisting, avoiding and buffering become the more comfortable choice when we are stressed and anxious. We are afraid to stay longer in the uncomfortable state and allow these negative emotions. Our tendency to move past them or put a blind eye is the comfortable choice only to realize they keep surfacing back again. If we know the path to feel better is to feel worse then why avoid these feelings and delay that process of managing our mind around them. Instead why not learn the mindset way to feel better? This is what we are learning to master in the “worklifeunstuck” program.
So here is a leading question for this week
What if you removed or eliminated a lot of avoiding, resisting, and buffering of negative emotion? What if you instead took a “bring it on” attitude for all emotions and choose to live at the center (embrace the 50/50) vs. on the fringes of life where you are afraid to feel these negative emotions. Have you thought what would start to happen?
All the thoughts that caused these emotions would start to surface. You get that chance to become the scientist and start exploring what’s beneath that first layer of thoughts and start to uncover your beliefs that may be keeping you stuck. Once you identify them then you could use all that time you used for buffering to start feeling instead. Once you learn how to allow that emotion and uncover the beliefs that don’t serve you then you can start to move to the intentional mindset faster. You can start to ask yourself what do I want to think and believe instead. All that time gained from not indulging in those negative emotions can be put towards managing your mind around them. The gained speed keeps you accelerated towards your desired state instead of slowing you down.
Let me summarize the formula
Accelerating your goals = Reduce the time to process negative emotion
- Reduce time by learning how to allow emotions vs. buffering/avoiding/resisting them
- Manage and process negative emotion by moving from unintentional mind state (uncovering limited beliefs) and moving to intentional mind state (create new beliefs/rethink limited beliefs)
Let us take two more examples to really nail this down.
- One of the most common obstacles I hear is: “I want to change my job because I don’t get along with my manager”. You may be suffering from emotional childhood where you are expecting your boss to do certain things or change his behavior to make you feel better. You may also be hurt because he has broken your manuals (your manual of how you believe managers should behave). You decide to change your job because you feel these thoughts will change or even better go away when a new manager and job shows up. Now let’s say your new manager shows up and breaks your manuals again. You now are stuck again. What if you examine why you felt hurt and figure out how you want to feel even when someone does not behave per your manuals. What if you learnt the skill of mastering how to work with situations where manuals are broken and learn how to take your power back by managing your thoughts. What if you learnt to create healthy boundaries instead of weak boundaries for yourself? You would gain so much time in your career and propel towards the right decision faster from your intentional mindset.
The way to manage and process negative emotion is by leveraging the power of your intentional mindset invoked from your prefrontal cortex. (I will talk about this more in subsequent newsletters).
- Let me explain this with another example. One of the ways many techies cope with stress and anxiety is by overeating and overdrinking. That quick dopamine shot and buffering with food or alcohol makes us feel better in the moment at the end of a stressful day. However, it keeps us delayed from processing that anxiety and stress for a very long time. When I decided to process and allow that stress and anxiety and stop overdrinking and overeating, I uncovered beneath it was hidden a lot of guilt, shame, frustration from people pleasing, coming from my thoughts of not showing up myself in an authentic way. When I learnt the skills to allow my urges instead of giving into them, a magical thing happened. I was not indulging in those emotions every day and I created a lot of mental clarity and space to work on how I want to intentionally think around certain obstacle situations that come up. I started to use that intentional mindset to accelerate towards my true goals. When I kept buffering, I kept delaying that accelerated motion.
There is no short cut to feeling better. One has to feel worse before they can feel better.
So why delay feeling worse or more accurately why delay the discomfort that comes from feeling the negative emotions. All emotions can exist at the end of day. All emotions are manifest as a mere vibration in the body. So if you are willing to feel the discomfort from them, then you can accelerate your way to the intentional mindset and unleash the power of your prefrontal cortex.
For me understanding this formula and applying it to the situations I encounter during work & life has been the game changer. When I stopped overworking & overdrinking it opened a bank of thoughts and emotions. I sure felt uncomfortable. However, what I also saw was how naked and stripped down my brain felt by allowing them and not being scared of feeling them. When I lifted this fog, I uncovered many illogical and crusty beliefs that were no longer going to serve me for where I was headed. I was able to hang out with these beliefs for a while and as I got better, cut short the time that I used to indulge in them. I started the amazing journey to create new beliefs from my intentional mindset and take action from them. I had so much time. I could now utilize it to accelerate my learning on emotional management. While the process and putting the formula into practice may seem hard and slow initially, you quickly see there comes a point where your speed doubles, then triples and becomes 10X in managing your mind around them. Yes there are new challenges but path remains accelerated.
Within the worklifeunstuck program you not only going to learn this framework but also put it into practice across as you move forward on your goals. The visual that comes to mind is that of a spacecraft that is headed towards a new destination. No doubt there are going to be obstacles, the fuel may seem low at times, one may hit across space storms, parts of your spacecraft may stop working or need an overhaul. However, when you learn and put the framework into practice you can get yourself unstuck, keep accelerated towards your goals, while sustaining your wellbeing. There is no reason to slow down and aim bigger and higher.
See you all next week.
Maithili Vijay Dandige
