Stop asking these 2 questions

Music (00:00:00) – She’s dreaming, she’s drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else than she would rather be.

Koren (00:00:19) – Hello and welcome. This is Koren Motekaitis. And you’re listening to how she really does it, the place where inspiration and possibility meet. All right. Before we get started in today’s show about these two questions to stop asking yourself. First I have an announcement. If you haven’t heard, I’m going to be hosting dinner parties, dinner party connections with you all. These are going to be small dinner parties, like 8 to 10 people. And I’m going to come to you. I know that we have this desire to connect with others, especially after the last few years. People want to be in person and connect with others and to be in spaces and have enriching conversations. And I want to make this easy for you to do this. We’re all you have to do is sign up and show up. When myself and my team will take care of the rest.

Koren (00:01:18) – So what I need your help with is tell me where you want me to go. I’m willing to come to you. So we have a form. Go submit it. Hit pause now. Tell us where you are, where you live. If you have, like, your favorite restaurants or an event venue, give us some ideas. And then we can create idea babies of where to go. And we’re going to be doing this over the next year where I’m going to be traveling and coming to you. And these will be dinner parties where we’re going to connect. There’s going to be some coaching. It’s going to be so enriching and fun. I’m so excited. I started this back in 2019 where I hosted them locally here in town, and then Covid happened. And so I’m bringing them back. The other announcement is for those of you that are like, I really you’ve been sitting here going, I want coaching, I want to coach with Koren. There’s a couple of opportunities. One is private coaching.

Koren (00:02:11) – Go ahead and apply. And then the other one is I’m going to have some groups coming up this fall. So you definitely want to get involved in that. So you either have group coaching or private coaching or dinner parties. Those are your three options for right now. Okay. Now to today’s show. Stop asking these two questions. Stop asking yourself these two questions. The first question is, and I get asked this quite a bit from my clients, one of the things that happens is that with my clients, I’m a trusted partner in their life, right? This is a judgment free zone. They show up and it’s really raw, right? Like they get to fully show up. And over time, we’ve built a lot of trust. And so then they finally get to this. Koren, what am I missing? What is it that I need? What is it that I don’t see? And that question dialed up so much shame for my client because it was this lack. It was going back to I’m not enough or there’s something wrong with me, or why can’t I see this? And when we’re in shame, what typically happens is we don’t like that uncomfortable feeling.

Koren (00:03:21) – And so then we typically either numb ourselves out away from it. So we don’t even want to ask it. So just my client asking that question to me was such a brave thing to do because my clients are intelligent, they’re hardworking, they achieve shit in the outside world. They look like they’ve got it all together. So to not know what’s going on, to not be able to understand and to say like, what am I missing? But here’s the thing. It’s not about what they’re missing. It may be the question of what is this here to teach me? What am I struggling with? What is this here to teach me? That is such a better way to do it. Because instead of having that shame where you want to hide away. Right? Or where you’re going to approve a whore or people, please, because you want to be like, No, no, see, look at me. I’m so fantastic. I know these answers, but never really allowed to look at what the problem may be for you.

Koren (00:04:17) – Or maybe you just beat yourself up and see. See? It’s not possible. I’m just a loser from Loser Street or whatever your story is like, you know, I’m just this dumb shit who can’t figure it out or this is just as good as it gets. Oh, you know, you all know how much I do not like. This is as good as it gets, right? So instead of asking ourselves, what am I missing, the invitation is to look at it from the windows of possibility. And it can be. What can I learn from this? What is this here to teach me? Right? Really looking through that lens and notice, how does that shift inside of you? Is there more curiosity versus judgment? Right. Versus that like, what’s wrong with me? What am I missing? But what can I learn from this? What do I need to learn? Maybe there’s certain skill sets and that’s always the problem to solve. Like, what is it that we really need to learn versus what are we supposed to learn? Right? The other is, what do I have time for? I just went through this with my assistant.

Koren (00:05:16) – She was thinking about taking a course on something and we went to evaluate was this something that was going to solve one of the problems we were working on solving in our company, Right. And instead of spending, you know, 10 or 20 hours on this course, what was going to be something that was actually going to help her and support her solving the problem, These are really important things to have that discernment for. Right. And understanding. What do I have time for realistically? Not oh, well, I’m going to, you know, work really late at night and work really early in the morning and have no brain juice and be really low functioning and thinking that I’m going to have this great learning. Probably not, right? So what is this here to teach me? Maybe it’s here to teach you that you need to put some systems in place or maybe that you need more support in certain areas, or it’s about the ability to have discernment. Or maybe it’s about making a brave decision.

Koren (00:06:15) – This is the path I’m going to go down and I’m going to be committed to learning and we may go down like I can’t tell you how often, and my company will go down a path thinking like, okay, we’re going to do this. And then as we get more data, we look at it and we’re like, huh, What problem does that solve? Does that really make an impact on our business? Does that really matter? And then we pivot and it can look like a waste because we didn’t execute on it. But it really wasn’t valuable. Like in instances a couple of years ago, we went and looked at revamping and doing, moving our website onto different platform, right? We’re going to do that. And as we went through and looked at that, the amount of energy that my team was going to take, the amount of resources both money and time, and then the amount of energy is going to take from me. It wasn’t worth it, right? It wasn’t necessary for us to do it right now.

Koren (00:07:12) – And I was okay with that. It was more of a, well, this is what I should be doing. But it wasn’t necessarily in terms of the business that we do. Right. And being really clear about that. So having that discernment instead of what am I missing, what is this here to teach me? And so there’s lots of things that can teach you. And I just gave you some examples maybe that you need systems in place, maybe that you need support, having the discernment, being able to get clear of what’s the problem you’re trying to solve and what would be the solutions to solve that problem, The possible solutions and being okay like we were in terms of we are going to go and we’re going to spend all this energy, we’re going to move our website to another domain or another hosting platform or whatever it’s called hosting company, which is really complicated when you have close to nine hundred podcasts. Even though we have a hosting company for that, but then there’s links and all of that, or do we stay where we’re at? And we chose to stay where we’re at.

Koren (00:08:06) – We didn’t create a change that was significant, right? In terms of like, we can make this announcement, but it also didn’t create other problems when we didn’t say that it was wasted energy. The other question that I get all the time too, and this is the other question I invite you to stop asking yourself is, am I doing it right with this binary thinking it’s right or wrong, good or bad, and we need to let go of it? Life is not zero sum games. There’s constant ability to learn, right? Letting go of Am I doing it right? One is that. One is. Are you leading? Are you making decisions according to your values? According to your company’s values, according to what your team has said? Are you in integrity with that? There’s not a right or wrong. And if you’re not, because there is always kind of like the sway we start to move, right? We get off kilter a bit and we need to come back and get an alignment.

Koren (00:09:04) – But letting go of am I doing it right? Instead, it’s about asking ourselves what is working well? And then the other one is what can be improved? Or what can I learn from this? We need to let go of am I doing it right? There’s not a right way or a wrong way, right? That’s one of the myths that we’ve been culturally programmed to believe. Instead, it’s what can be improved. And instead of like, am I doing it right? Do I have people in my life? Do I have people on my team? Do I work with people? Do I lead people that will give me feedback versus take me down? Do I have a boss that will give me feedback? It’s not about doing it right, but give me feedback so that I can grow and get challenged. Or do they sit there and nod their head and tell me, you’re doing great, you’re doing great, and then eventually fire the people because they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing.

Koren (00:10:04) – Right. So instead of am I doing it right? It’s about asking those two questions What is working well? What can be improved? And then on the external, it’s looking around and taking inventory. Do I have people in my life that will give me feedback versus take me down or be silent and then execute? Right. So that’s really, really important. And if you have people that aren’t going to just give you feedback, part of it is for you and going and asking for the feedback, not am I doing it right, but saying like, what’s working well? So this all comes down to and you’ve heard me say this before many times, the quality of the questions that you ask yourselves are the windows to our emotional state. I guess I’ve never said it in that way. I’m going to say that again. It’s a new quote for me. The quality of the questions are the windows to our emotional state. So when you ask yourself these questions and it’s okay if you ask yourself these crappy questions at first because there’s going to be learning, right? There’s an unlearning of asking ourselves these crappy questions and new learning of asking ourselves better quality questions.

Koren (00:11:14) – But instead of what am I missing, it’s what can I learn? What is it that I need to learn? Right. What is it that I want to learn? What is the problem that I am working on solving instead of what am I missing? Because that can be such a shameful question. In the name of am I doing it right? That’s a fixed mindset. Going back to Carol Dweck, and we’ll put those interview links in the show notes. I’ve interviewed her a couple of times where she talks about fixed mindset and growth mindset. Fixed mindset is when we make a mistake and then that defines us and that’s who we are. And there’s no growth that comes from that, a growth mindset. We make a mistake and we look at what can we learn from it. And I remember when I interviewed her back in the day, probably 2009, 2010, and I said, Well, how do you change this? And she said, Well, you change the way you think. And I’m like, But how do you do this? Like, now we know we’ve talked a lot about it.

Koren (00:12:06) – It’s about how do we manage our mindset? What are the stories we tell ourselves really questioning? Is it really true what we’re telling ourselves? Because we can be a bit black and white with ourselves, right? With our thinking. And then some years ago she came to Davis and I asked her, I said, you know, do you find in your research now there’s a correlation with emotions. And most definitely fear and shame are correlated with fixed mindset, compassion. Curiosity is correlated with a growth mindset, right? So that’s why that emotional state is so important and being able to identify how we feel and being able to pay attention to it versus numbing. We’re so good at numbing, right? Our world is built up to really numb. Well, whether it’s with alcohol, digital devices, overworking, really busy schedules to do lists that are extraordinary, right? That really being able to feel and listen to our bodies, that’s something that we get to relearn because we’ve learned how to disconnect and remembering that we want to live more in this growth mindset.

Koren (00:13:08) – Of course we’re going to go into a fixed mindset. You know, as she had told me, she goes Koren, nobody’s all growth mindset and it’s a continuum fixed to growth. And it depends on the arena. You know, you could be sure when I’m sitting here as a coach with my clients, I’m definitely in that growth mindset. When I’m on the pool deck with the aqua monsters and the parents and the kids and the staff, I’m definitely in a growth mindset and there are times that I can get triggered into a fixed mindset and it’s usually not around pools and performance. It’s done around performance or swimming can be in other areas. So being able to recognize that and learn and grow, that’s how you can create the life of possibilities that you want for yourself and for those that you lead. But the first small step is to start by Stop asking yourself these two questions. All right. Remember, go fill in that dinner party connections form. And if you’re looking for coaching, go fill out our application for coaching.

Koren (00:14:06) – Let us know about you, and my team will be reaching out to you. I’m smiling big for you. Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you’ll love my weekly emails. I know you’re thinking Koren, Really? Do I want another email in my overflowing inbox? Yes, you do. Yippee, skippy, you do. These are short. They’re sweet. On Fridays, I send out the Friday podcast. It’s a great reminder that there’s a new show and it comes straight into your inbox of the latest episode. Awesome. You click on it, you go straight because we all need reminders. We have busy, full lives. And then on Sundays I have my Sunday Love column and these are emails I write from the heart. They’re filled with love. We need more love. We all do, myself included. These are short emails where you get a quick take away so you can incorporate this into your life because people often want to know what to do and how to do it. And maybe sometimes it’s a story that you get.

Koren (00:15:10) – Or there’s like one time I wrote about the ten ways to Practice Gratitude, and that became such a great tool when one of the readers was struggling and the middle of the night, because it can be a scary place in our brains in the middle of the night. And she remembered the email that I sent about ten ways to practice gratitude, and she was able to practice gratitude and fall back asleep. And that was an awesome lesson for her to incorporate into her life. Go to the show notes and there’s a link in the show notes where you can sign up and get these emails in your box on the link.

Music (00:15:46) – She’s dreaming, she’s drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else than she would rather be.