The Workday Mindset Podcast

For the past few months I’ve had a couple of metaphors on my mind that I think have the potential to be a great vehicles for thinking about some pretty powerful mindset concepts - and the three metaphors are bridges, tunnels and doors.

In this episode I want to do something a little different and invite you to think about how these three visuals might be a way for you to process challenging moments you encounter in your day, and at the same time I think they’re a way to open yourself up to receiving opportunities that are all around you and that are ripe for the taking.

Routines are a great vehicle for change. But sometimes we get so caught up in whether we’re doing the routines right that we can find ourselves unintentionally stuck inside of them.

And what I mean by that is we can get trapped in our desire to strictly follow the process of the routine, instead of really pausing to notice whether the routine is actually helping to deliver what you need, in that moment, and whether the routine is actually aligned with your purpose for creating the routine in the first place.

In this episode I’ll guide you through a simple thought process you can apply to your current routines to make sure that the routines you have are truly serving you, and that you’re not caught up in serving them.

Many of the big, meaningful changes we want to experience take time. They unfold over time and in a way that we almost never can quantify or completely influence or accurately predict.

And sometimes when we’re working toward a change that takes time, one of the challenges we face is that we get caught up in waiting for the big change to happen.

In other words, we’re so focused on waiting for the entire change to materialize in full that we end up overlooking all of the signs and indicators along the way that are confirmation that what we’re doing day after day is actually working - and we end up missing opportunities to acknowledge and celebrate all of the indicators that precede that big change we want to see.

In this episode I’ll introduce you to a concept that will help you tune into the progress that you’re making each day, and that will help you develop an enthusiasm for not just for the end result, but the entire process.

We can learn a lot from the success stories of other people. But if we’re not careful about how we process and relate to those stories, we can start to get caught up in them and use them as a template to measure our own success - instead of studying the through lines or the nuggets of wisdom they contain.

In this episode, we discuss how we can avoid getting caught up in other people’s success stories, and use them instead to promote our own growth.

We have a tendency to tell ourselves to not get our hopes up about something that we really want or something that we’re excited about that involves a level of uncertainty.

And we tend to tamp down our excitement through the words we use by adding qualifying statements - something like “This would be perfect for me, but it’s a long shot” - and we do that because if we don’t get our hopes up, then we don’t have to feel the perceived judgment of others or our own disappointment if it doesn’t work out.

In this episode, we talk about why you absolutely must get your hopes up - even when there’s uncertainty - and how you can simultaneously get your hopes up and hold space for how you might feel if things don’t turn out the way you want.

When we think about a potential future scenario that makes us uncomfortable, our mind wants to “confront” the thought. It wants us to meet the thought on the thought’s terms and to accept the future scenario as true - even if it has no basis in fact - so that we can come up with a solution, just in case that future scenario actually happens.

And when we confront thoughts like this, the one’s that don’t suit us, what we end up doing is breathing life into them and giving them power over us.

So instead of “confronting” a thought and meeting it on its terms, in this episode we’ll talk about a better way to address these types of thoughts - a way that helps us loosen the grip that a challenging thought has over us.

Here we go.

We all spend a lot of time trying to be consistent and trying to project a sense of consistency to other people. And we do that both because we think that inconsistency signals to others that we’re unfocused or undisciplined, and also because inconsistency can make us feel uncertain.

But in truth we need to embrace and make room for inconsistency in our life - because if we don’t make room for inconsistency, we leave no room for growth. By definition, growth is a state of consistently being inconsistent. Growth means that you are a version of yourself that is inconsistent with a previous version of you.

In this episode, we talk through why we cling to consistency, but also how we can start to embrace inconsistency and see it as the powerful mechanism for change that it is.

When we think about what we want for ourselves in the future, it’s natural for us to try to issue spot and for our mind to want to solve any problems that we see coming down the pipeline.

Our mind wants to think through all the little nooks and crannies related to events in the future so that we can feel like we’re prepared for everything that might come up - because if we feel like we’ve thought through things then that gives us a level of comfort and it helps us feel safe.

But the challenge we face when we look into the future like this is that it forces us to lose touch with the present moment. When we’re pulled into contemplating and trying to predict and solve for a future version of events, we shift from the present, where we have the ability to actually take action, to being stuck in the uncertainty of a future thought, where all we can do is think.

In this episode, we talk about how you can take a different approach that will leave you feeling empowered instead of stuck - and it involves shifting your mindset to a place where you’re taking ownership and responsibility for how you’re thinking moment to moment.

When we’re envisioning how a future version of events will play out, we tend to associate those events with “The Struggle.” We constantly hear messages about how “Life is hard”, “No pain no gain”, “Nothing in life is free” - and we also are instinctually wired to look for the warning signs of potential future struggles so that we can avoid them.

But this type of mindset can significantly impede our progress because if we believe that we have to struggle, our attention is drawn to the struggle - and we tend to find all sorts of evidence in our day to day to confirm that things must be hard, and in turn we make them hard.

In this episode, we cover how to notice when you’re telling yourself a story about your future that involves “The Struggle”, and how to reroute this thought away from internalizing The Struggle and toward processing challenges in a healthy way, and in a way that leaves room for inspiration and growth.

Buffers are actions, routines, habits or thought patterns we engage in that help to keep challenging situations or things that we don’t want to confront at an arm’s length.

Our minds are incredibly skilled at inserting buffers into our day as a way to avoid and push away things that we know will cause us to experience some level of discomfort or that we think have the potential to cause discomfort.

Buffers allow us to hide behind something pleasurable or non-threatening that will put distance between us and emotions that we don’t want to experience.

But when we use buffers, we miss opportunities to cultivate strength, wisdom, knowledge, resilience, and to learn information that is essential to our personal growth that can only be learned through periods of discomfort or unhappiness.

In this episode we talk about how to identify buffers, how they’re holding you back, and what you can unlock if you choose to limit the number of buffers in your day.

Here we go.

Sometimes we become so consumed with whether we’re following a rule that we’ve set up for ourselves that we lose sight of the ultimate benefit we wanted to experience through having the rule in the first place.

While rules are of course helpful, sometimes they don’t account for the day to day, mini-fluctuations that are a natural part of our human experience we should be paying attention to. And even though we may have an inclination to deviate from the rules, we can view deviation as a sign of weakness or a lack of dedication.

In this episode, we discuss how instead of filling our day with hard and fast rules, we might benefit from a different approach: establishing a set of work principles.

Sometimes when we’re feeling a lack of motivation or focus, we tend to immediately think that it’s due to a lack of discipline - that we’re not doing a good enough job of buckling down and just staying focused.

But we feel undisciplined over a long period of time, it often means that something is out of alignment in terms of our day to day connection with our work. It usually means we aren’t currently in touch with the source of excitement or motivation or joy that comes from, or could come from, the work we do.

In this episode, I want to invite you to consider whether there’s an even more powerful way for us to get back on track: reconnecting with our intention.

In many areas of our lives, the idea of control is an illusion because it suggests that through enough training and discipline and focus, we’ll have the ability to restrain or direct or command anything that we want. It suggests that there is a place we can arrive at where we can regulate or influence every single outcome, if we get good enough at exerting control.

But we know from experience that that’s not possible because life is a mix of things we can influence and things that influence us.

We’re “participants” in a very natural push and pull.

The illusion of control sets us up for failure because there will always be something outside of our sphere of influence that impacts our reality and disrupts the illusion.

Instead of control, we can shift to a mindset that’s focused on Active Participation.

Active participation is the idea that you move through life with the ability to impress your innate influence upon things you can influence, and at the same time you are participating in and adapting to things that happen that you do not have the ability to influence.

In this episode, we discuss why being an active participant is such a powerful way to approach your day to day, and I’ll give you a few action steps you can use to start to flip from someone who’s focused on control to someone who’s looking for opportunities to actively participate instead.

Sometimes when we create something that we’re proud of - something that gives us a sense of true satisfaction - that feeling is immediately followed by wondering what people will think about it.

And in that moment where we start to seek validation - where we start to wonder what other people will think about our work - it pulls us down from the high vibration that allows us to enjoy what we’ve created and continue to show up at our best.

There’s a part of us that still gets caught up in wanting validation from others in order to legitimize how we felt in creating what we created.

In this episode, we explore how to start noticing when we’re seeking validation from others for our work, how validation seeking can interfere with our ability to show up at our best, and the difference between validation and feedback.

One way to navigate a challenging moment is to envision what your “future self” would tell you about how to approach that challenge.

Oftentimes when we’re struggling to figure out how to move through uncertainty or something difficult, we get so caught up in the details that we lose sight of the bigger picture.

We forget that we actually do know ways we can help ourselves through difficult times.

In this episode we discuss how you can think about challenges through the lens of what your “future self” would tell you about how to approach them, and how it can lead to processing circumstances with a clearer, deeper level of understanding.

When we’ve made a decision, one of the things that impacts our ability to fully get behind that decision and move forward with intention is our tendency to experience decision regret.

And we generally experience decision regret because as soon as we make a choice, we start to process new inputs, emotions, and experiences that come with that choice, and if we experience any kind of resistance, or if our experience doesn’t match what we had envisioned our life would be life after making that choice, then our mind immediately starts to question the decision.

And we also start to romanticize what it would have been like to live out other options, the ones that we didn’t choose. We start to build a story about “how good life would have been” had we chosen option 2 or option 3.

So in this episode, I explain how to recognize when you’re sitting in a place of decision regret, and give you a few ways to pull yourself out of it, gradually and judgment free.

One way we’ve been conditioned to view opportunity is through the lens of competition.

And here’s what I mean by that: If we believe that there is a limited supply of opportunities, then that kind of thinking leads us to further believe that the only way to receive or acquire those opportunities is to compete for them.

Our mind tells us to believe that there is only so much of it to go around. And when we believe there is only a finite supply of opportunities, that impacts the way we pursue them.

But there’s another way to view what it means to spot and pursue opportunity - and that’s through the lens of a creator.

In this episode, I explain why it’s so important to view opportunities as a creator and not as a competitor, and how you can start to make that shift.

When we think about something that’s going to happen in the future, our mind is very skilled at turning our thoughts about a future version of events into a story about what might happen if we fail, if we try something new, or if we’re criticized.

And we know that our mind uses this story-telling ability as a defense mechanism because these kinds of stories that we tell ourselves about how a future event might turn out help keep us safe and prevent us from taking risks.

In this episode, I’ll introduce you to a question you can ask that will help you start to move away from telling yourself a negative story toward envisioning a future version of events that exceeds your expectations: What if it turns out better than I think?

When we express to other people that we want to make changes, or that we want to do something new or different, it’s natural for us to be met with some disagreement and disapproval - including from people we respect or trust.

And when we’re met with the disagreement or disapproval of people we trust or anyone else for that matter, sometimes it causes us to question our decisions - even if we believe that what we decided is best for us.

But if we look closely at the nature of the disagreement, we find that what’s often at the heart of it is something that has nothing to do with us and has everything to do with that person.

In this episode, I give you a few reasons why people disagree with us, why ultimately that’s ok, and how we can start to move past it.

One way that we rob ourselves of meaningful experiences each day is by trying to constantly walk a perfect line. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves each day to strike the perfect balance between two competing desires or interests we have that seem to be on opposite ends of the spectrum. 

Things like walking the line between work and play, healthy and unhealthy, and responsible and irresponsible. 

In this episode I explain how this kind of mindset can be a total pitfall and offer three ways you can start to shift your perception towards a place where you’re aware of what’s happening throughout your day without judgment.

In physics, there’s a concept attributed to Aristotle that roughly translates to the phrase “nature abhors a vacuum.” In layman's terms, the concept means that nature requires every space to be filled - and that there are no naturally-occurring empty spaces because denser surrounding material immediately and always fills a void.

In this episode we’ll discuss how we can apply this natural law to create space for bigger, better, more productive thoughts by clearing out what’s currently occupying those spaces first. Let’s talk about how to do it.

Here’s one of the most limiting thoughts you can have throughout a day: “Why did this happen to me?” When we have this thought and ask the question this way, we get in the habit of looking at life and our workdays from a passive perspective.

In this episode I give you a few common situations where you might be asking this limiting question, and I offer you a new question that will help you flip this thought and approach each day as an active participant.

If you’re looking to make big changes to your workday, one way to do that is to practice the concept of addition through subtraction - which is essentially asking the question: What can I take out before adding in something new?

This can be a powerful concept but in practice it’s hard to implement day to day for two big reasons. In this episode I talk you through those roadblocks and give you a two-step process for how you can start improving your workday by subtracting first.

If we take stock of how we’re thinking throughout the day, we find that we’re just bouncing from thought to thought all day long. And as we’re bouncing from thought to thought, we often don’t realize that many of those thoughts are stressful ones that are triggered by very specific workday situations we encounter.

In this episode I’ll teach you a concept that will help you identify a stressful thought that’s connected to a specific workday situation you encounter, and teach you how to come up with a plan for how to reframe that thought the next time the situation arises.

One thing that prevents us from making progress or moving through our day with confidence is our tendency to mistake thoughts for facts. We often let thoughts that have no basis in fact stay top of mind for us all day long. And not only that - we often end up accepting these thoughts which have no basis in fact as true. In this episode we talk through how you can catch yourself mistaking thoughts for facts, and I’ll give you a simple way you can flip those thoughts to action steps that will help you move throughout your day with confidence.

Repetition, in any form, can be an incredibly powerful way to cultivate change. In this episode I’ll introduce you to a concept that will help you capture and steer the power of repetition when we apply it to the way we think about ourselves and our abilities, and that concept is called a workday mantra.

At the heart of any change you want to see is an originating thought that sets an idea you have into motion. But sometimes when we’re trying to make big changes or accomplish a goal that seems complex or uncertain, we lose sight of the fact that every outcome we want is driven first by a powerful thought, followed by consistent actions. In this episode I’ll give you a simple formula you can use to remember that the key to taking meaningful actions and changing our day to day reality is our ability to first have a powerful, originating thought.

Our ability to make plans is an important skill and a key part of our personal and professional growth. But what’s even more important than knowing how to make a plan is being skilled in the art of planning, which includes the ability to acquire and process new information so that you can move past the friction points you’ll encounter as soon as you set a plan into motion. In this episode I share three steps you can take to strengthen the way you approach planning.

There’s a common misbelief we have about how to approach our workday: in order to be productive, we constantly have to be in a state of stress. But it turns out that in many ways that belief is backwards. When we’re able to identify the root of our stress and strip it away, and when we stop equating stress with productivity, that’s actually when we’re able to do our best work. In this episode we’ll talk about a 4-step process for how to do it.

At any given point in time, you can only keep a single thought in your mind. And if any time we experience a thought that doesn’t suit us, we always have the ability to choose to create space for a better one.