What most people get wrong is they think they can’t… they think they can’t make the changes they desire in their lives.
But the truth is, they WON’T.
Because it’s hard.
Creating a transformational change is challenging. And in today’s show I’m being 100% transparent with what’s hard and how it’s hard so you’re ready for it.
When we know what we’re getting into and can see the obstacles ahead we’re more prepared to tackle them head-on instead of giving up and jumping to the inaccurate conclusion “it’s not for us” or “we don’t have what it takes.”
Because YOU DO! 100%. I’m sharing all the details inside. I’ll see you there. xo, Janeen
If you’re interested in more information about The Burnout Breakthrough or Become the CEO of Your Life, let’s connect! https://www.janeenalley.com/breakthrough.
>> CLICK HERE to Watch on YouTube
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TRANSCRIPT:
[00:00:00] Janeen: Well, hey you guys. Welcome. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I am Janine Allie, and you are listening to the Mamas Who Do podcast. Today we’re talking about how joyful productivity is hard. And this is one of the things that I want to be really transparent about in the show today is that there are certain things that make becoming joyfully productive, really easy in your life, and there are some things that are really hard about it.
[00:00:25] And so if you’re going on this journey with me, I want you to go in with your eyes wide open about what to expect. One of the things that Mel Robbins said one time that I remember is she said, it’s really important to know where you’re going for sure to have a vision and maybe even create that vision board if that is what works for you.
[00:00:43] But more importantly than that is to be really aware of what the obstacles are so that you are prepared to overcome those obstacles. And that is kinda what we’re talking about today on the podcast. But before I dive into the content today, I have a few things. It’s [00:01:00] been kind of a weird week if you are watching this podcast on YouTube today. You’ll notice I’ve got my gym stuff on today. I’m recording this podcast earlier in the morning than I normally do before I head to the gym. As soon as this is over, I’m gonna go do a legs class at the gym that I love every single Wednesday. but the reason for for that is because, Isaac, my 16 year old now is getting his driver’s license this afternoon, which is a big deal around here, and my daughter Emma, has had a stomach bug.
[00:01:31] I don’t know if that has hit your house yet this spring, but we have had stomach flu here and it has not been fun. It’s one of those sicknesses that you kind of wanna die. It’s short. It’s short, but it is not fun. And so she has experienced that, I think for the first time in her life and it is not, not been fun, not been pretty for sure.
[00:01:53] So those are some of the things that are going around here, but also, In my business, [00:02:00] I am super excited because things are always shifting. Things are always changing, and I am rolling out a brand new program. It’s actually a mastermind. And it’s all about becoming the c e o of your life.
[00:02:10] And I feel like it really segues beautifully with the burnout breakthrough. If you’re struggling to get things done and you’re feeling super burned out, that’s where you start. And once you’ve kind of mastered that, you’re becoming joyfully productive and you have this extra time. In your life. Now what are we going to do?
[00:02:27] And this is geared specifically for people who have a big vision or who want to have a big vision in their lives, but they talk themselves out of their greatness frequently. I think this is something that we subconsciously do all the time, is there are certain things that we think are off limits to us just because
[00:02:47] of the beliefs that we have about what is possible for us in our lives, or we just don’t have the infrastructure or the systems in our lives in order to get there. And so that is what this Mastermind is about. It’s about [00:03:00] creating freedom to do the things that matter the most and making an impact in either your world or the world at large.
[00:03:06] And it’s about developing the mindset to get there and the systems to make it sustainable. So if that sounds like something that you are interested in, Book a call with me, or if you’re interested in solving for the burnout that you feel in your life, book a call with me. Just go ahead and go to janeenalley.com/breakthrough.
[00:03:25] You’ll get to a quick little survey about you, and then you’ll get to my calendar. Very easy, super simple. Just book a call if you’re interested in either one of those programs. Okay, so like I was saying, this kind of comes back to what it is that we’re talking about, how joyful productivity can be hard sometimes. It’s really easy for us to exclude ourselves from achieving something because we think it’s not for us.
[00:03:51] I mean, this is something that’s super common for all of us. We tell ourselves things like we don’t have what it takes, or that we’re not a certain type of person, or that we’re not in the right phase of [00:04:00] life.
[00:04:00] I mean, there’s so many ways that we talk ourselves out of achieving something that we feel like is important to us. But we feel like it’s not for us because of all of the things that we are experiencing in our lives.
[00:04:13] And the truth is, is no matter what phase of life you’re in, no matter who you are as a person, making change is hard. It’s hard for me, it’s hard for my coaches. It’s hard for my clients that I coach who are doing it. It’s hard for friends that I have are interested in growing and changing and becoming, for sure.
[00:04:32] I think this is something that is a universal experience anytime we try to change. And I want you to realize and understand that the current results that you’re getting in your life are because of your current thoughts. And this is something that I say probably every podcast. It’s about your current thoughts and about your belief in yourself and what you feel like is possible.
[00:04:50] And so if you wanna change your results, you need to figure out how to change your thoughts. And I think the hardest part of changing or reaching a goal or becoming [00:05:00] something different than you are right now is, is dealing with the drama and what’s going on in your brain.
[00:05:06] I had someone ask me the other day if I really journaled, like if I really did it and I have to say,
[00:05:14] I’m not a robot. I’ve never claimed to be perfect at doing anything, but I am consistent at a lot of things and that is what has created a lot of success for me in, in my life, But yes, I totally have a consistent habit of journaling and doing models and all the things that I teach my students and talk about on the podcast because it works.
[00:05:33] And the more that you do, the better you get at it over time, and if you have a coach to help you you’re gonna get results faster. If you’re doing the work alongside of the work that your coach is helping you do, for sure. You can’t just rely a hundred percent on your coach.
[00:05:46] You’re not gonna get very far doing that. You have to be doing the work alongside of the coaching, and you’re going to pretty much explode the results that you get in your life. So if you’re new to starting models, Be patient with [00:06:00] yourself. Doing models can be tricky sometimes. I think sometimes when we’re brand new to doing thought work, we’re not exactly sure how to navigate specific nuances. But the only way to get there and to become more aware and to understand the model, is to practice doing it. What’s hard is always going to be the thought work. But thought work can also be very simple. When you see the problem, when you remove the drama, when you see your thoughts for what they are, something that is optional. Then thought work can become easier for you, but when you believe thoughts as being something that’s true, that’s when things are a little trickier.
[00:06:37] For sure. One of the things that I’ve mentioned before on the podcast, something that I say to my clients all the time is when you’re trying to analyze your own brain, it’s like you’re on the inside of a bottle and trying to read the label on the outside, and this is why having a coach is so helpful is because they can help you read that label on the outside.
[00:06:53] They can see what your thoughts are a lot easier than you can. What I believe a hundred percent is that [00:07:00] everybody can become joyfully and peacefully productive no matter what phase of life that you’re in, but the truth is most people aren’t gonna do it. One of my coaches just told me recently, and I think this is so true, life coaching is the easiest thing to do and not do.
[00:07:16] It’s easy to be reactive. It’s easy to believe that life is busy and that we have lots of things going on that are preventing us from reaching our goals. It’s easy for us to believe that we are the exception to becoming joyfully productive in our lives because we believe all of our excuses, right? It’s easy to procrastinate and put things off.
[00:07:35] It’s easy to do all the little things first and not get to the hard thing. It’s easy for us to talk ourselves into doing just a minimal amount. It’s easy to focus on things that feel urgent and not important in our lives instead of building our lives and our schedules around things that are most important to us, but not urgent.
[00:07:55] Steven Covey talks about the time management matrix inside of his seven Habits book, [00:08:00] and the thing that he talks about that we neglect all the time are the things that are important and not urgent. They’re the easiest things for us to put off. That is my focus, that is my life’s work, I feel like, is to help people to bring those Q2 things, the things that are important to them and not urgent into the forefront of their lives.
[00:08:19] So they feel like their life is exciting. They feel like their life is purposeful and that it has meaning, and it’s so easy for us to get distracted and to move away from these things. And I totally get it. It’s easier for me to get distracted. What’s hard is being intentional and being aware of what you’re doing so that your primitive brain doesn’t drive the bus all day long.
[00:08:43] I also feel like short-term gratification is easier Not necessarily in the long run, right? And although people want the long-term benefits of thought work, they want to be living their lives from their highest selves,
[00:08:56] they won’t do the work to overcome the short term gratification of what’s [00:09:00] in front of them because the excuses are so easy to believe. One of the ways that you know you’re doing this is that you end up blaming, you blame circumstances. We tell ourselves, well, it’s just a phase of life I’m in, or it’s just the financial situation that I’m in right now.
[00:09:15] Or we blame other people. We blame kids, we blame spouse. We even blame ourselves. We tell ourselves we don’t have what it takes. This is just life with kids. Anytime we do this, anytime we blame someone else, even ourselves, it’s disempowering. One of the things that is also coming up I notice from my clients also
[00:09:33] for me, this is something that I’ve dealt with all the time, is we try to be vague in our goals, we try to be vague with our thought work. We try to be vague with the things that we want. Because we tell ourselves, well, the details are just too hard. Okay. I was coaching somebody on this yesterday. Okay. You wanna get really specific with what it is that you want, so you know whether or not you’re hitting it.
[00:09:57] And I think we don’t do this for a lot of reasons, and I think one [00:10:00] of them is because, well, what if we fail? What if we don’t get it a hundred percent right? Having self-control and being aware of your thoughts is hard. But here’s the truth. You can believe you can do this.
[00:10:13] You can believe you can’t do this, that it’s inconvenient. You can also believe you won’t do this, that you won’t do the work. And I think two of these options are empowering and one of ’em is not. The one that is not empowering is I can’t do this. That is a disempowering thought, but the two thoughts that are empowering is I can totally do this and I won’t do this because you’re making a decision.
[00:10:40] You’re not giving your power away. You’re just saying, it’s not for me, and that’s okay. What I choose to believe about myself and about my clients and all of you, is that you can totally do this work. I want to be able to find my full capacity and I want the same thing for other people because I have found that [00:11:00] this is what makes life magical.
[00:11:02] There isn’t an upside to believing that you can’t do something. Why not believe you can? I think that the hard thing, like I said, is because we might fail. That is a subconscious thought that’s there. That trips us up and keeps us stuck and keeps us playing small for sure. But this is what our brains do.
[00:11:20] Welcome to being a human being, right. One thing to understand is that if you embark on this journey, you will be more of an outlier because although a lot of people want to change, they won’t. Because they either choose not to, which I think is a very small percentage of people, or they just tell themselves they can’t.
[00:11:41] I am committed to believing that women can be joyfully productive no matter the situation because it has everything to do with what it is that we’re thinking about and what it is that we’re believing, right? And our, our thoughts are the things that create joy and create [00:12:00] peace. It’s where our emotions come from, right?
[00:12:03] So let’s go back to this place where it’s hard and it’s easy for a moment. There are some things that are really easy. And some things that are really hard about becoming joyfully productive, and I’ve talked about some of the things that are hard. I think the secret to success, and this is something that I just heard my coach Brooke Castillo talk about, and it is totally true.
[00:12:22] The secret to success and becoming joyfully productive or to start a business from home or to focus on your health or to lose weight, or start a nonprofit or become the c e o of your life, whatever it is that you want. This is the secret. You’re gonna try something and you’re gonna take massive action to get a result.
[00:12:39] And if it works, you keep doing that thing. If it doesn’t work, you stop doing it and you take massive action to do something else. It’s not complicated. It’s very simple. You go after something with all of your heart, my mind and strength. You do all the things that you possibly can to get a [00:13:00] result, and if it works, awesome, keep doing it.
[00:13:02] If it doesn’t, you gotta try something else. You have to stop doing that thing and pivot. Okay? Very simple. It’s not easy. Okay, so let’s talk about how this is hard. Number one, I mentioned, you have a brain, right? And we want to live in confusion. It’s easier for us to stay distracted. It’s easier for us to downplay the things that we want and to buffer on our phone.
[00:13:27] When you’re going for something, you’re going for the goal with all your heart might mind and strength. You can’t tell yourself you don’t know how. You can’t stay confused. You have to make decisions and you have to try things, and then you have to face up to yourself.
[00:13:40] You can’t blame someone else. You have to take ownership. You have to own it. You have to own when you fail, and we don’t like this. The truth is about this is you’re gonna fail way more often than you succeed. And when you’re in the thick of it, you’re gonna tell yourself This isn’t working and it’s gonna be really frustrating.
[00:13:59] And you have to [00:14:00] own the whole thing. That’s what’s hard. You have to show up and you have to do things differently. Differently than you’ve ever done. Differently than what you’re seeing other people doing. You have to allow your friends and your family and strangers to judge you and say mean things.
[00:14:16] When you say no, or when you put your foot down, or when you change yourself, when you don’t do things the way that you did them before. When you don’t pick up the slack when other people drop the ball, I know some of you have a habit of doing that. One of my clients has a part-time farm. When I say part-time, it’s pretty big actually.
[00:14:33] They have jobs, they have lives, they have things, and they have this farm, and she and her husband have kind of split up farm chores, farm chores as if they’re little chores. No, they’re big responsibilities. And the other day he called her and he is like, Hey, I didn’t feel the cows or whatever. The husband didn’t get to it.
[00:14:51] And instead of taking it on and having it like totally change her day and create this upheaval in her life because her husband dropped the ball. She just asked him, what are you [00:15:00] going to do? How are you gonna solve that problem? She didn’t make it Hers. And as someone who is a recovering people pleaser, somebody who wants to be helpful, somebody who loves her husband, this is really, really challenging to do.
[00:15:14] But she realized it’s his responsibility. He didn’t ask her to help, but she would’ve taken it on her past self would’ve taken it on, but she didn’t. That’s hard to do cuz we wanna help, but we also want peace. We also wanna be in charge of our lives. And if we want peace, we have to be thinking and doing things differently
[00:15:34] because we’re wired for connection, we’re wired for sameness, we’re wired to fit in. And when you start to make changes, you are going to be different.
[00:15:42] Oftentimes too what’s challenging is we have grown up being told what to do and how to do it. The way that we are educated, the way that our culture runs, we look to other people to figure out how to do something right. This has, this has been a challenge. A [00:16:00] really big challenge for me to overcome is Taking the reins in my own mind and in my own life, and asking myself, how am I gonna do this? If I am doing something that I’ve never seen anyone do before
[00:16:12] how am I going to do this? And getting really creative with that process, and allowing myself to have fun with that process where I’m not freaking out all the time. Emotions are hard. Right. When we’re used to people pleasing, we might feel guilt. We might feel selfish. We might feel shame or humiliation when we try to change.
[00:16:34] So managing your mind for sure, like I said, is challenging because oftentimes when you go a different route, when you do things differently, when you become the c e o of your life, or when you start telling yourself, I’m not going to succumb and be influenced by this burnout society that we live in, this go, go, go culture that we’re surrounded in,
[00:16:53] you’re gonna find yourself standing alone. You’re gonna find yourself making mistakes and letting people [00:17:00] down and not doing things right. I remember when I first started telling people no, I was just bulldozing over people. I was like, no, you can’t have any of my time. I was like, mean about it cuz I was like so protective of that time for me and my family.
[00:17:16] I didn’t want anyone to have it. It wasn’t awesome. Not proud of the way that I showed up, but that was part of my journey. I look back on myself there and I’m like, you were trying. You were doing it. You didn’t do it perfectly, but you’re still amazing. Following through is hard and you don’t want to. But the truth is, is over time you become more resilient.
[00:17:39] You become less fragile. You learn how to not quit on yourself. You learn how to keep your word to yourself. You learn how to let other people’s opinions of you mean less to you. All of that is good stuff, what’s amazing about this process, Is you start to feel better.
[00:17:59] You start to [00:18:00] feel more joy, more peace, more empowered in your life because you’re not burned out all the time. You start to take life by the reins for sure, and that is so exciting. You start reaching goals that you didn’t think were possible for you. You become more present and more intentional.
[00:18:17] These are things that become easier for you in your life, but you have to pay the price in order to get those things. But I’m here to tell you, it changes your life, it changes you. But you have to decide to go for it, and you have to let it be amazing, and you have to let it be hard at the same time.
[00:18:37] But you have to understand what the trade-offs are, because truth is, I’ve said this before, life is hard either way. If you’re reactive to your life, if you’re letting yourself not follow through on things, if you’re letting yourself procrastinate, that is hard. But it’s hard by default, instead of letting it be intentionally hard, letting the [00:19:00] management of your mind and showing up when you don’t want to.
[00:19:04] That piece of it is hard. But if you decide not to, if you decide not to go for the goal, if you decide not to become peacefully productive or joyfully productive in your life, you wanna understand the reasons why you aren’t gonna go for it, because you decided not to. Not because of your circumstances around you, and not because you can’t do it, not because you’re not capable, it’s because you decided that you weren’t going to, and that makes all the difference.
[00:19:33] And it’s fine either way. You just wanna take ownership for it. Let it be an empowered decision instead of reactive decision. All right, my friends, I am off to the gym. It’s gonna be a great day today. It’s gonna be amazing. I hope you also have an amazing day today.
[00:19:51] Now listen, you are interested in becoming the c e o of your life and go on this wild, amazing journey with me. I want [00:20:00] you to reach out, go to janeenalley.com/breakthrough. It is going to be an incredible experience for the people who are there. You’re gonna level up in ways that you didn’t think were even possible for you in your life.
[00:20:12] So if that sounds amazing, reach out to me, janeenalley.com/breakthrough and I will catch you guys next week. We’ll see ya. Bye.
