Have you ever felt like your challenges are simply bigger than you? Like you just can't see how you will ever push past them to do the things you want to do and have the life you dream of. And you stay stuck constantly and exhaustingly trying to move these challenges out of your way. Or you give up and resign yourself to what you want, simply being too hard and out of reach for you.

Or maybe you're doing the thing, making really good progress and then wham, something unexpected comes up that takes you by surprise and stops you dead in your tracks.

I know all too well what all of that is like and honestly, I think most of us have experienced all of this at one time or another. So today I want to talk about how you can plan for your obstacles so that when they come up and they will, you can push past them faster and more easily to keep yourself moving forward to the life you want. Let's dive in.

Welcome to The Self-Creation School podcast, for women who are ready to ditch mediocrity, step up and get more of what they want, and finally say YES! to a life that sets their soul on fire. I'm your host Leanne Letica, Self-Creation Coach, founder of The Self-Creation School AND Queen of YES!. If you're ready to play life by your own personal rule book, and give yourself permission to say YES! to yourself and your wildest dreams, this podcast is the place for you.

Hello there, my beautiful friend, and welcome to the weekly conversation that helps you create your SELF, so you can create a life you love one YES! at a time.

I'm so glad to have you join me for a discussion today about planning for your obstacles, because whenever you reach out for something new, for something different, there are going to be obstacles and challenges that stand in your way. Your ability to overcome these obstacles and challenges with ease and confidence depends largely on how you set yourself up to face them. And what I mean by that is how you plan to deal with them ahead of time before the obstacles and challenges pop up.

Now you may be thinking, but Leanne, how can I plan for an obstacle or a challenge that I don't yet know exists? And that would be a really great thing to wonder because it's true, and I've said this before, you cannot know everything you need to do to get to where you want to go until you've done it. Only when you have achieved something, when you've reached your goal, can you know for sure everything that had to take place for that to happen, including the obstacles and challenges you had to overcome along the way.

But here's what I've found. The most important obstacles and challenges you will ever face are the ones you likely already know exist and can readily identify. For example, your beliefs, the stories you tell yourself about being able to do the things you want to do. For most of us, we have limiting stories and beliefs that affect the way we deal with the situations we are faced with as we take action or attempt to take action towards our goals. The reality is the situation at hand is not so much the challenge. It's your beliefs about your ability to deal with it, your ability to overcome it. That is the obstacle.

So that is an example of an internal obstacle, but there are also external obstacles you can likely readily identify as well, which I'm going to be talking about in just a moment.

The point I want to make is if you can readily identify many of the obstacles and challenges that are likely to come up for you, you can plan ahead of time for how you will deal with them. You can put a strategy in place ahead of time so that when you encounter these obstacles or find yourself face to face with challenges, you are going to be armed and ready to deal with them like the future you and keep yourself moving towards your goals and the life you want to experience for yourself.

For me personally, like perhaps for you too and a lot of other women listening in, I used to be a drifter. Someone who drifted from day to day at the mercy of whatever was thrown my way in the moment. Meaning whatever situations would arise and whatever thoughts, stories and emotions would come up for me in those situations.

I went through many years when I was trying to avoid myself in the mirror, not planning out my days, not planning out my life, not planning who I wanted to be or how I wanted to show up in my world, how I wanted to feel about myself and my life. I just let it all run on autopilot, because listen, it just all seemed too hard.

I was quite stuck in this constant state of overwhelm and indecision. So planning intentionally how my days would go and who I would be in my day was something that felt easier at the time simply to leave to chance. But in not having a plan, my world decided my plan, other people decided my plan, my emotions of the moment decided my plan, my storyteller decided my plan. And I probably don't need to tell you how all of that was working out for me.

Planning who I be and the life I live ahead of time has been an absolute game-changer for me and a big part of that plan involves knowing exactly how I, as my future self, deal with the obstacles I know likely stand in my way from being able to show up how I plan and create the life I see for myself.

So, let's look at the kind of obstacles that exist, how you can identify yours, and importantly, how you can make a plan to deal with them ahead of time.

As I mentioned a moment ago, there are both internal and external obstacles that most of us can readily identify. I want to kick off our conversation today by coming back to the internal obstacles. And firstly, your beliefs and the stories that create those beliefs. Because like I said, a lot of our external obstacles only exist because of our internal obstacles.

Whenever you attempt to step outside what it is you know, to do new things, to think in new ways, to see yourself in new light, to feel in new ways about yourself and your life, you are going to come up against your internal storyteller who is going to try to convince you to stay running the race inside the lanes you've been running in.

To do this, your storyteller will pull out every story it can think of that it knows will make you feel afraid of changing lanes. And it pulls these stories from your collection of limiting beliefs, those negative beliefs you have about yourself and what's possible for you. Now your beliefs, whether they are negative or positive, inform you how your world works and what your place is in your world. And it's from that information that you do or don't take action.

So when your beliefs are mostly negative about the action you want to take, these beliefs are going to present a significant obstacle when it comes to taking that action, to stepping outside what you know and running the race in a different lane or perhaps running an entirely different race for that matter.

And these are the beliefs that sound like, “I'm not good enough to tackle this”, “I always fail so this probably isn't going to be any different”, “other people can do this or have this but it's not possible for me”, “I'm not cut out for this”, “I'm just not the kind of woman who does, has or experiences things like this”. And so on and so forth.

So what happens is when you take action and start running the race in a new lane or start running the marathon instead of taking the walk in the park, your storyteller pulls out all of your negative beliefs to create an obstacle that your storyteller hopes will force you back into your old familiar ways.

If you have never run a marathon before, and this is your goal – I'm not sure why I'm on this example today because I actually know nothing about running marathons, but let's go with it – if you've never run a marathon before, you know there's probably going to be some challenges, right? You're going to need to be fitter, stronger, healthier, maybe leaner.

That means you'll need to find time to train every day. You might need to hire a personal trainer and figure out how to make your budget work for that. You might have to change the way you eat. Get up earlier. You might be injured along the way, which might delay your progress. These are all external challenges, by the way.

Now, all of these challenges can be overcome. These are not impossible challenges. Many people before you have done these things and many people after you will too. But they will be extremely difficult to overcome if you don't first overcome the obstacle your beliefs place in your way about your ability to run the marathon, more specifically your ability to be the kind of woman who runs a marathon, and overcome all of these external challenges that will inevitably pop up along the way.

If you believe you can't lose those extra pounds, that you're not a morning person, that you aren't capable of running a marathon, not just now but ever, it's these beliefs that are your biggest obstacle. It's these beliefs that will ultimately stop you from taking action you need to take to become the fitter, stronger, healthier, leaner version of you who runs marathons. It's these beliefs that would dictate how you negotiate the challenges of changing who you be and how you show up each day to become a marathon runner.

And this brings me to the second internal obstacle, which is your identity.

The easiest way to change the action you take and the outcomes you create is to change who you be. It's to become the kind of woman who naturally takes the action you want to take and does the thing you want to do. When you start with being, the doing becomes so much easier, and that means overcoming your external obstacles and challenges also becomes so much easier.

I think our marathon example demonstrates this really quite nicely. If you've never before run a marathon, then you've never before been a marathon runner, and you've probably never identified yourself as someone who runs marathons. Because you haven't ever identified as a marathon runner, you've never gone about your day thinking and behaving like someone who runs marathons.

And the thing about your beliefs is, what you believe about what it is you are capable of, about your ability to succeed, actually comes down to who you believe you are, who you believe you are not, and who you believe you can be.

If you believe you are not the kind of person who can run a marathon, that's exactly who you will be. You will take action to confirm your belief, which means you will self-sabotage getting up for those early morning training sessions by staying up late at night scrolling on social media or watching Netflix. You will self-sabotage eating healthy by not making time to go shopping for fresh food, so you find yourself reaching for that unhealthy frozen pizza that is the only thing available. Your challenges will feel really hard to negotiate.

Whereas, if you believe you are a marathon runner, even though you haven't yet achieved that, but you see yourself as the kind of woman who is a marathon runner, you can close your eyes and vividly visualize yourself being that person, you'll choose to do things differently.

You'll set boundaries for your screen time at night to ensure you get a good night's sleep. You'll have your gym clothes laid out the night before, ready for your training session. You'll choose the healthy salad at lunch over the fatty fried food, and so on. And not because you are forced to do these things, but because it's simply who you are and what you do as a result of identifying yourself as being the kind of woman who runs marathons.

The challenge is of becoming a marathon runner don't disappear. You still need to get fitter, healthier, stronger, leaner. Those obstacles are still there. But the effort required to take the action to move beyond those obstacles becomes a whole lot less. So the things that feel like insurmountable challenges to the woman who doesn't identify herself as the kind of woman who runs marathons becomes just a natural part of the deal to the woman who does.

Now, a lot of us think that who we are is fixed, but this simply isn't true. Who you believe yourself to be is what forms your identity, and your beliefs are not fixed because they are not facts. They are what you have at one point in time decided to believe are your facts.

The truth is these beliefs are formed from the stories you tell yourself about the things that happen in your world and what they mean about you. They are not facts. They are the meaning you gave to the facts. Which is great news because if they are not set in stone, that means you can change your beliefs by changing your stories. Changing what you decide to make things mean about who you are and what's possible for you.

The other thing that comes into play here is your emotions and they are the third internal obstacle most of us face.

Here's what I want you to understand about your emotions. It's never anything outside of you or anyone outside of you that causes you to feel anything. Your emotions are caused by your thoughts, by your internal conversation, your stories and your beliefs.

It's not the deadline you miss that causes you to feel panic. It's what you make missing the deadline mean that makes you feel panic. It's never the forgotten anniversary that makes you feel unloved. It's what you make your partner forgetting your anniversary mean that makes you feel unloved.

But since you get to decide what you make things mean, you can therefore manage your emotions around the things that do and don't happen in your life and in your world.

And this is important because when you are faced with your external obstacles and these trigger your internal obstacles – your beliefs and your identity because of those beliefs – and that triggers negative emotions like panic, overwhelm, fear, dread, doubt and so on, these emotions are going to affect how you deal with your challenges, how you approach tackling them.

Imagine how differently you would act from a place of calm versus panic, from a place of happy anticipation versus dread, from a place of confidence versus doubt.

And so since you can choose what you make things mean, you can choose the stories you tell yourself about everything, especially about who you are, that means you can manage the emotions you feel. You can make a plan for how you'll clean up your stories about who you are and therefore clean up your emotions to ensure that whenever negative emotions set in, you can tap into more positive and empowering emotions that will support you in overcoming your external obstacles.

Can you see how these internal obstacles all work together as a team? The trick here is to get them on the same team as the future you.

So here are my tips on how to make a plan for dealing with your internal obstacles.

And number one is awareness. We've already discussed, you cannot plan for the things you don't yet know about. So spend some time to become aware of your stories and beliefs, your current identity, and your future identity, and your emotions.

Think about your goal or goals and ask yourself, what do you believe about who you are that doesn't align with who you need to be to do, have and experience the things you want? What do you believe about your ability to do, have and experience the things you want? What story do you tell yourself about your worthiness to do, have and experience them?

Start paying attention to how you feel and what thoughts are behind these feelings. Start noticing the negative self-talk that plays on repeat whenever you think about the things you want.

You may also find it helpful to think about who you are being that your future self, the you who has, does or experiences the things you want, who are you being that your future self is not being? And then vice versa. Who is she being that you are not being?

And then start to piece all of this together to uncover the emotions that are running on default for you, the stories that you are telling yourself about who you are and what is possible for you that is causing those emotions, and the identity you have taken on as a result that is going to make it very difficult to take the action you need to take. These are your internal obstacles and once you know what they are you can make a plan to overcome them.

How will you deal with your internal obstacles? How will you tackle your storyteller and the negative stories that pop up whenever you try to run the race in that other lane? How will you manage your negative self-talk? How will you clean up your negative emotions? What will you do to challenge your negative beliefs when they challenge you?

Let me share with you the kind of things that I have in my plan of attack to give you some ideas.

Firstly, when I catch myself feeling a negative emotion, I know there is a story behind this that is likely to be feeding into who I believe myself to be and therefore, affecting the action I will or won't take in that moment. This is what we just talked about. So now you know this too, right?

So when this happens, I know ahead of time, I want to clean this up and if I have time, I will stop and do the deeper work to rewrite my stories, transform my beliefs, and tap into my future identity with my new beliefs. But chances are, I don't have time right then and there.

So what I will do is take a few minutes to stop and run through my quickfire Self-Creation Shift process to help me separate the facts from the fiction in that moment and shift the story I'm telling myself to a new more empowering truth, and therefore also shift my emotion. I know that will help me move forward and take the action I need to take, and I can come back and do the deeper work at another time.

So that is my plan and accordingly, I make sure that I keep that process handy at all times. So that no matter where I am or what I'm doing, I have access to quickly cleaning up my stories and my emotions. Truthfully, I know this process by heart because I use it all the time to shift my stories and to help my clients shift theirs.

And it's not a difficult process, it's very easy to learn how to use it, and I have made it available for you to download when you take my free YES! Block assessment over on my website, which helps you to discover your most predominant YES! Block stopping you from saying YES! to the life you want. So I won't go into it here, but I'll leave the link in the show notes for you to that free assessment if you'd like to learn my process.

The other thing I have available in my plan whenever my storyteller starts pulling out all these old limiting stories is to stop and read things like my Unapologetic YES! Story, my Self-Created Woman's Manifesto, my I AM affirmation statements. All of these things remind me of my future identity. They remind me of what I am choosing to believe about who I am and what's possible for me. They put front and center of mind who I am choosing to be. And they help me remind my storyteller that we have a new story to tell.

Now, I have talked about I AM affirmations I think back in episode six of the podcast, and I explained the concept of my Unapologetic YES! Story and how I use my manifesto in episode 17 just a few weeks ago. So you can check out these episodes if you want to know more about my approach on these things.

The third thing I keep in my plan is good quality questions that help me tap into my future identity.

Sometimes I know I just need a reminder of how to think about what it is I'm tackling like the future me. So I might just ask myself questions like, how would the future me think about this? What decision would she make right now? what action would she take? What would she believe about her ability to do this?

So spend some time and think about what kind of questions you could ask yourself that will help you tap into your future self identity so that you can take action to overcome your obstacle from that place instead of from your current identity.

Now those are all an in the moment plan of attack I have for dealing with my internal obstacles, my beliefs, my stories, my identity and my emotions.

I do also keep a regular routine for doing mindset work like this on a deeper level, which helps me be far more resilient in the moments when I am faced with my internal obstacles. So this is time, for example, every morning when I look at my day ahead and the things I have planned, and how that makes me feel, and the story behind that feeling. And if it's negative, I spend time right then and there to clean that up before my day gets started.

I also have regular time for deeper reflective journal sessions to rewrite my limiting beliefs, to do future self journaling, to visualize the life I want, and so on. So I definitely encourage you to plan regular time for doing this mindset work on a deeper level. It will help you be so much more resilient when you are faced with the challenges of your internal obstacles.

So the other thing I've been mentioning is your external obstacles. Now there are two kinds of external obstacles. Those you can readily identify and those you cannot.

The ones you can readily identify will be the things like needing to get up for those early morning gym sessions and not being an early morning riser. Being constantly interrupted by your family while you're trying to work. Getting sidetracked on social media instead of doing the things you said you would do. Being tempted by those unhealthy snacks in your fridge at 4pm. Knowing that when you need to present or talk in the boardroom, you are going to feel nauseous, and so on.

These are the obstacles and challenges that you can readily identify when you think about your day and all the things that stop you or make it hard to do the things you want to do that will move you closer towards your goals.

Now, you can absolutely make a plan ahead of time to overcome these kinds of challenges. It may be that you need to establish stronger boundaries to protect your work time and teach your family to respect those boundaries and stop interrupting you. You might find a gym buddy to help you stay accountable to showing up to your early morning gym session.

You can use your environment to help you avoid those unhealthy 4pm snacks by either not keeping them in your fridge in the first place, perhaps you could set an alarm for 3:45pm to get up and have a glass of water, or even place a reminder of your future self on your fridge door. Maybe you have a list of quality questions on your fridge door that ask what would your future self be doing right now. You get the idea.

But what I'm going to suggest is that you come full circle with me here because the easier way to deal with external challenges like these is by tapping into your future self identity. It's focusing on who you be first so that what you do comes naturally. And as we've already discussed, your stories and beliefs determine who you believe yourself to be. So this really is where the work lies.

When you wake up in the morning, who do you choose to believe yourself to be? The woman who hits the snooze button and lets another week pass by without working on her fitness goals? Or the woman who is invested in her health and loves that she gets to go to the gym to improve it. The action you'll take from each of these identities is going to be very different. And so too is the energy behind how you take this action, by the way.

When your family constantly interrupts your work, do you believe yourself to be a woman who deserves space to do the work that is important to you? Or do you believe yourself to be a woman who comes second place to the demands of everyone else? Again, the action you take from each of these identities is going to be very different and produce vastly different outcomes.

The other kind of external challenge I mentioned are the ones we can't necessarily foresee. These are the things like not knowing exactly all the things you'll need to do to accomplish your goals.

For example, if you've never run your own business before, maybe you have some ideas of the kind of things you'll need to do to get up and running. But I can guarantee you that you will not know all of the things you'll need to do and some of those things are really going to challenge you. They will push you past your comfort zone or your skill set, and so on.

There are also things like getting sick, for example, losing your job, maybe losing your life partner unexpectedly. Things like global pandemics. These are all obstacles and challenges you might face that you simply cannot plan for.

What you can plan for though, is who you choose to be in the face of unexpected challenges and obstacles that come your way. And so once again I come full circle back to your beliefs and the stories you choose to tell yourself about who you are and what you can do. You might not be able to plan for losing a job, but you can plan for who you be in that kind of difficult situation and how you show up in your world as a result.

Are you a woman who gives in to her anxiety and overwhelm when faced with challenges? Or are you a woman who knows you are resilient and can handle anything that comes your way? This all comes back to who you decide you want to be. And doing the work on your stories and beliefs to help you be her. And you can plan for the unexpected obstacles and challenges that you can't foresee, by planning who you be.

When you plan for how you overcome your internal obstacles, you make overcoming your external obstacles so much easier, both the external obstacles you can identify and the ones you can’t.

So a quick recap on what we've discussed, because we have covered quite a lot of ground here today.

There are two types of obstacles, internal and external. Your internal obstacles are things like your beliefs and the stories behind those beliefs, your identity because of those beliefs, your emotions, and your negative self-talk.

You can plan to deal with these obstacles when they arise by doing things like using my Self-Creation Shift process to shift your stories in the moment, so you can keep moving forward. You can also use things like I AM affirmations, manifestos, and so on, to help remind you of who you are choosing to be. The other thing I mentioned was having a list of quality questions to help you tap into your future self and take the actions she would take in the face of challenges. Then setting time aside to do the deeper mindset work on a regular basis.

When it comes to the external challenges, there are the ones you know about, and you can plan to overcome these by tackling the obstacle itself like getting that gym buddy to hold you accountable, or more powerfully using your identity to help you take the action you want to take. Using your identity is also a really powerful way to help you deal with the challenges you don't yet know about and deciding ahead of time the kind of woman you are in the face of hard times, in the face of unknown circumstances and so forth.

As I said right back at the start of this episode, when I refused to have a plan, I left my plan open to chance, to the ebbs and flows of my world and the people in it. Failing to have a plan is, quite honestly, planning to fail. Although I don't really believe in failure, only lessons. So what I mean here is that when you don't have an intentional plan, you make it very hard to have an intentional outcome, to create the results you want for yourself.

I hope you can now see how it is possible to plan ahead of time for the challenges that you face, those you know about and those you don't, by managing your mindset, your emotions, rewriting your stories and beliefs, and choosing your identity, choosing who you be.

That's all I have for you today. Remember to head over to my website and take the free YES! Block assessment and download your copy of my Self-Creation Shift process, if you haven't already done so. Also, take a listen to episode 6 for my insights into I AM affirmations and episode 17 for learning about my Unapologetic YES! Story, manifesto and daily journal practice for cleaning up my emotions.

If you found this episode helpful, please share it with someone who may also benefit from it and help me make these tips and strategies available to more women, so we can all create lives we love to wake up to every single day. I'll see you next Wednesday.

Until then, be the woman who says YES!

Hey, want to know what's stopping you from saying YES! to you and a life you love?

Head over to https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock and take my FREE 60 second quiz to find out what's standing in your way today and I'll send you my Self-Creation Shift process for shifting it. That's https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock. I’ll see you there.

Have you ever felt like your challenges are simply bigger than you? Like you just can't see how you will ever push past them to do the things you want to do and have the life you dream of. And you stay stuck constantly and exhaustingly trying to move these challenges out of your way. Or you give up and resign yourself to what you want, simply being too hard and out of reach for you.

Or maybe you're doing the thing, making really good progress and then wham, something unexpected comes up that takes you by surprise and stops you dead in your tracks.

I know all too well what all of that is like and honestly, I think most of us have experienced all of this at one time or another. So today I want to talk about how you can plan for your obstacles so that when they come up and they will, you can push past them faster and more easily to keep yourself moving forward to the life you want. Let's dive in.

Welcome to The Self-Creation School podcast, for women who are ready to ditch mediocrity, step up and get more of what they want, and finally say YES! to a life that sets their soul on fire. I'm your host Leanne Letica, Self-Creation Coach, founder of The Self-Creation School AND Queen of YES!. If you're ready to play life by your own personal rule book, and give yourself permission to say YES! to yourself and your wildest dreams, this podcast is the place for you.

Hello there, my beautiful friend, and welcome to the weekly conversation that helps you create your SELF, so you can create a life you love one YES! at a time.

I'm so glad to have you join me for a discussion today about planning for your obstacles, because whenever you reach out for something new, for something different, there are going to be obstacles and challenges that stand in your way. Your ability to overcome these obstacles and challenges with ease and confidence depends largely on how you set yourself up to face them. And what I mean by that is how you plan to deal with them ahead of time before the obstacles and challenges pop up.

Now you may be thinking, but Leanne, how can I plan for an obstacle or a challenge that I don't yet know exists? And that would be a really great thing to wonder because it's true, and I've said this before, you cannot know everything you need to do to get to where you want to go until you've done it. Only when you have achieved something, when you've reached your goal, can you know for sure everything that had to take place for that to happen, including the obstacles and challenges you had to overcome along the way.

But here's what I've found. The most important obstacles and challenges you will ever face are the ones you likely already know exist and can readily identify. For example, your beliefs, the stories you tell yourself about being able to do the things you want to do. For most of us, we have limiting stories and beliefs that affect the way we deal with the situations we are faced with as we take action or attempt to take action towards our goals. The reality is the situation at hand is not so much the challenge. It's your beliefs about your ability to deal with it, your ability to overcome it. That is the obstacle.

So that is an example of an internal obstacle, but there are also external obstacles you can likely readily identify as well, which I'm going to be talking about in just a moment.

The point I want to make is if you can readily identify many of the obstacles and challenges that are likely to come up for you, you can plan ahead of time for how you will deal with them. You can put a strategy in place ahead of time so that when you encounter these obstacles or find yourself face to face with challenges, you are going to be armed and ready to deal with them like the future you and keep yourself moving towards your goals and the life you want to experience for yourself.

For me personally, like perhaps for you too and a lot of other women listening in, I used to be a drifter. Someone who drifted from day to day at the mercy of whatever was thrown my way in the moment. Meaning whatever situations would arise and whatever thoughts, stories and emotions would come up for me in those situations.

I went through many years when I was trying to avoid myself in the mirror, not planning out my days, not planning out my life, not planning who I wanted to be or how I wanted to show up in my world, how I wanted to feel about myself and my life. I just let it all run on autopilot, because listen, it just all seemed too hard.

I was quite stuck in this constant state of overwhelm and indecision. So planning intentionally how my days would go and who I would be in my day was something that felt easier at the time simply to leave to chance. But in not having a plan, my world decided my plan, other people decided my plan, my emotions of the moment decided my plan, my storyteller decided my plan. And I probably don't need to tell you how all of that was working out for me.

Planning who I be and the life I live ahead of time has been an absolute game-changer for me and a big part of that plan involves knowing exactly how I, as my future self, deal with the obstacles I know likely stand in my way from being able to show up how I plan and create the life I see for myself.

So, let's look at the kind of obstacles that exist, how you can identify yours, and importantly, how you can make a plan to deal with them ahead of time.

As I mentioned a moment ago, there are both internal and external obstacles that most of us can readily identify. I want to kick off our conversation today by coming back to the internal obstacles. And firstly, your beliefs and the stories that create those beliefs. Because like I said, a lot of our external obstacles only exist because of our internal obstacles.

Whenever you attempt to step outside what it is you know, to do new things, to think in new ways, to see yourself in new light, to feel in new ways about yourself and your life, you are going to come up against your internal storyteller who is going to try to convince you to stay running the race inside the lanes you've been running in.

To do this, your storyteller will pull out every story it can think of that it knows will make you feel afraid of changing lanes. And it pulls these stories from your collection of limiting beliefs, those negative beliefs you have about yourself and what's possible for you. Now your beliefs, whether they are negative or positive, inform you how your world works and what your place is in your world. And it's from that information that you do or don't take action.

So when your beliefs are mostly negative about the action you want to take, these beliefs are going to present a significant obstacle when it comes to taking that action, to stepping outside what you know and running the race in a different lane or perhaps running an entirely different race for that matter.

And these are the beliefs that sound like, “I'm not good enough to tackle this”, “I always fail so this probably isn't going to be any different”, “other people can do this or have this but it's not possible for me”, “I'm not cut out for this”, “I'm just not the kind of woman who does, has or experiences things like this”. And so on and so forth.

So what happens is when you take action and start running the race in a new lane or start running the marathon instead of taking the walk in the park, your storyteller pulls out all of your negative beliefs to create an obstacle that your storyteller hopes will force you back into your old familiar ways.

If you have never run a marathon before, and this is your goal – I'm not sure why I'm on this example today because I actually know nothing about running marathons, but let's go with it – if you've never run a marathon before, you know there's probably going to be some challenges, right? You're going to need to be fitter, stronger, healthier, maybe leaner.

That means you'll need to find time to train every day. You might need to hire a personal trainer and figure out how to make your budget work for that. You might have to change the way you eat. Get up earlier. You might be injured along the way, which might delay your progress. These are all external challenges, by the way.

Now, all of these challenges can be overcome. These are not impossible challenges. Many people before you have done these things and many people after you will too. But they will be extremely difficult to overcome if you don't first overcome the obstacle your beliefs place in your way about your ability to run the marathon, more specifically your ability to be the kind of woman who runs a marathon, and overcome all of these external challenges that will inevitably pop up along the way.

If you believe you can't lose those extra pounds, that you're not a morning person, that you aren't capable of running a marathon, not just now but ever, it's these beliefs that are your biggest obstacle. It's these beliefs that will ultimately stop you from taking action you need to take to become the fitter, stronger, healthier, leaner version of you who runs marathons. It's these beliefs that would dictate how you negotiate the challenges of changing who you be and how you show up each day to become a marathon runner.

And this brings me to the second internal obstacle, which is your identity.

The easiest way to change the action you take and the outcomes you create is to change who you be. It's to become the kind of woman who naturally takes the action you want to take and does the thing you want to do. When you start with being, the doing becomes so much easier, and that means overcoming your external obstacles and challenges also becomes so much easier.

I think our marathon example demonstrates this really quite nicely. If you've never before run a marathon, then you've never before been a marathon runner, and you've probably never identified yourself as someone who runs marathons. Because you haven't ever identified as a marathon runner, you've never gone about your day thinking and behaving like someone who runs marathons.

And the thing about your beliefs is, what you believe about what it is you are capable of, about your ability to succeed, actually comes down to who you believe you are, who you believe you are not, and who you believe you can be.

If you believe you are not the kind of person who can run a marathon, that's exactly who you will be. You will take action to confirm your belief, which means you will self-sabotage getting up for those early morning training sessions by staying up late at night scrolling on social media or watching Netflix. You will self-sabotage eating healthy by not making time to go shopping for fresh food, so you find yourself reaching for that unhealthy frozen pizza that is the only thing available. Your challenges will feel really hard to negotiate.

Whereas, if you believe you are a marathon runner, even though you haven't yet achieved that, but you see yourself as the kind of woman who is a marathon runner, you can close your eyes and vividly visualize yourself being that person, you'll choose to do things differently.

You'll set boundaries for your screen time at night to ensure you get a good night's sleep. You'll have your gym clothes laid out the night before, ready for your training session. You'll choose the healthy salad at lunch over the fatty fried food, and so on. And not because you are forced to do these things, but because it's simply who you are and what you do as a result of identifying yourself as being the kind of woman who runs marathons.

The challenge is of becoming a marathon runner don't disappear. You still need to get fitter, healthier, stronger, leaner. Those obstacles are still there. But the effort required to take the action to move beyond those obstacles becomes a whole lot less. So the things that feel like insurmountable challenges to the woman who doesn't identify herself as the kind of woman who runs marathons becomes just a natural part of the deal to the woman who does.

Now, a lot of us think that who we are is fixed, but this simply isn't true. Who you believe yourself to be is what forms your identity, and your beliefs are not fixed because they are not facts. They are what you have at one point in time decided to believe are your facts.

The truth is these beliefs are formed from the stories you tell yourself about the things that happen in your world and what they mean about you. They are not facts. They are the meaning you gave to the facts. Which is great news because if they are not set in stone, that means you can change your beliefs by changing your stories. Changing what you decide to make things mean about who you are and what's possible for you.

The other thing that comes into play here is your emotions and they are the third internal obstacle most of us face.

Here's what I want you to understand about your emotions. It's never anything outside of you or anyone outside of you that causes you to feel anything. Your emotions are caused by your thoughts, by your internal conversation, your stories and your beliefs.

It's not the deadline you miss that causes you to feel panic. It's what you make missing the deadline mean that makes you feel panic. It's never the forgotten anniversary that makes you feel unloved. It's what you make your partner forgetting your anniversary mean that makes you feel unloved.

But since you get to decide what you make things mean, you can therefore manage your emotions around the things that do and don't happen in your life and in your world.

And this is important because when you are faced with your external obstacles and these trigger your internal obstacles – your beliefs and your identity because of those beliefs – and that triggers negative emotions like panic, overwhelm, fear, dread, doubt and so on, these emotions are going to affect how you deal with your challenges, how you approach tackling them.

Imagine how differently you would act from a place of calm versus panic, from a place of happy anticipation versus dread, from a place of confidence versus doubt.

And so since you can choose what you make things mean, you can choose the stories you tell yourself about everything, especially about who you are, that means you can manage the emotions you feel. You can make a plan for how you'll clean up your stories about who you are and therefore clean up your emotions to ensure that whenever negative emotions set in, you can tap into more positive and empowering emotions that will support you in overcoming your external obstacles.

Can you see how these internal obstacles all work together as a team? The trick here is to get them on the same team as the future you.

So here are my tips on how to make a plan for dealing with your internal obstacles.

And number one is awareness. We've already discussed, you cannot plan for the things you don't yet know about. So spend some time to become aware of your stories and beliefs, your current identity, and your future identity, and your emotions.

Think about your goal or goals and ask yourself, what do you believe about who you are that doesn't align with who you need to be to do, have and experience the things you want? What do you believe about your ability to do, have and experience the things you want? What story do you tell yourself about your worthiness to do, have and experience them?

Start paying attention to how you feel and what thoughts are behind these feelings. Start noticing the negative self-talk that plays on repeat whenever you think about the things you want.

You may also find it helpful to think about who you are being that your future self, the you who has, does or experiences the things you want, who are you being that your future self is not being? And then vice versa. Who is she being that you are not being?

And then start to piece all of this together to uncover the emotions that are running on default for you, the stories that you are telling yourself about who you are and what is possible for you that is causing those emotions, and the identity you have taken on as a result that is going to make it very difficult to take the action you need to take. These are your internal obstacles and once you know what they are you can make a plan to overcome them.

How will you deal with your internal obstacles? How will you tackle your storyteller and the negative stories that pop up whenever you try to run the race in that other lane? How will you manage your negative self-talk? How will you clean up your negative emotions? What will you do to challenge your negative beliefs when they challenge you?

Let me share with you the kind of things that I have in my plan of attack to give you some ideas.

Firstly, when I catch myself feeling a negative emotion, I know there is a story behind this that is likely to be feeding into who I believe myself to be and therefore, affecting the action I will or won't take in that moment. This is what we just talked about. So now you know this too, right?

So when this happens, I know ahead of time, I want to clean this up and if I have time, I will stop and do the deeper work to rewrite my stories, transform my beliefs, and tap into my future identity with my new beliefs. But chances are, I don't have time right then and there.

So what I will do is take a few minutes to stop and run through my quickfire Self-Creation Shift process to help me separate the facts from the fiction in that moment and shift the story I'm telling myself to a new more empowering truth, and therefore also shift my emotion. I know that will help me move forward and take the action I need to take, and I can come back and do the deeper work at another time.

So that is my plan and accordingly, I make sure that I keep that process handy at all times. So that no matter where I am or what I'm doing, I have access to quickly cleaning up my stories and my emotions. Truthfully, I know this process by heart because I use it all the time to shift my stories and to help my clients shift theirs.

And it's not a difficult process, it's very easy to learn how to use it, and I have made it available for you to download when you take my free YES! Block assessment over on my website, which helps you to discover your most predominant YES! Block stopping you from saying YES! to the life you want. So I won't go into it here, but I'll leave the link in the show notes for you to that free assessment if you'd like to learn my process.

The other thing I have available in my plan whenever my storyteller starts pulling out all these old limiting stories is to stop and read things like my Unapologetic YES! Story, my Self-Created Woman's Manifesto, my I AM affirmation statements. All of these things remind me of my future identity. They remind me of what I am choosing to believe about who I am and what's possible for me. They put front and center of mind who I am choosing to be. And they help me remind my storyteller that we have a new story to tell.

Now, I have talked about I AM affirmations I think back in episode six of the podcast, and I explained the concept of my Unapologetic YES! Story and how I use my manifesto in episode 17 just a few weeks ago. So you can check out these episodes if you want to know more about my approach on these things.

The third thing I keep in my plan is good quality questions that help me tap into my future identity.

Sometimes I know I just need a reminder of how to think about what it is I'm tackling like the future me. So I might just ask myself questions like, how would the future me think about this? What decision would she make right now? what action would she take? What would she believe about her ability to do this?

So spend some time and think about what kind of questions you could ask yourself that will help you tap into your future self identity so that you can take action to overcome your obstacle from that place instead of from your current identity.

Now those are all an in the moment plan of attack I have for dealing with my internal obstacles, my beliefs, my stories, my identity and my emotions.

I do also keep a regular routine for doing mindset work like this on a deeper level, which helps me be far more resilient in the moments when I am faced with my internal obstacles. So this is time, for example, every morning when I look at my day ahead and the things I have planned, and how that makes me feel, and the story behind that feeling. And if it's negative, I spend time right then and there to clean that up before my day gets started.

I also have regular time for deeper reflective journal sessions to rewrite my limiting beliefs, to do future self journaling, to visualize the life I want, and so on. So I definitely encourage you to plan regular time for doing this mindset work on a deeper level. It will help you be so much more resilient when you are faced with the challenges of your internal obstacles.

So the other thing I've been mentioning is your external obstacles. Now there are two kinds of external obstacles. Those you can readily identify and those you cannot.

The ones you can readily identify will be the things like needing to get up for those early morning gym sessions and not being an early morning riser. Being constantly interrupted by your family while you're trying to work. Getting sidetracked on social media instead of doing the things you said you would do. Being tempted by those unhealthy snacks in your fridge at 4pm. Knowing that when you need to present or talk in the boardroom, you are going to feel nauseous, and so on.

These are the obstacles and challenges that you can readily identify when you think about your day and all the things that stop you or make it hard to do the things you want to do that will move you closer towards your goals.

Now, you can absolutely make a plan ahead of time to overcome these kinds of challenges. It may be that you need to establish stronger boundaries to protect your work time and teach your family to respect those boundaries and stop interrupting you. You might find a gym buddy to help you stay accountable to showing up to your early morning gym session.

You can use your environment to help you avoid those unhealthy 4pm snacks by either not keeping them in your fridge in the first place, perhaps you could set an alarm for 3:45pm to get up and have a glass of water, or even place a reminder of your future self on your fridge door. Maybe you have a list of quality questions on your fridge door that ask what would your future self be doing right now. You get the idea.

But what I'm going to suggest is that you come full circle with me here because the easier way to deal with external challenges like these is by tapping into your future self identity. It's focusing on who you be first so that what you do comes naturally. And as we've already discussed, your stories and beliefs determine who you believe yourself to be. So this really is where the work lies.

When you wake up in the morning, who do you choose to believe yourself to be? The woman who hits the snooze button and lets another week pass by without working on her fitness goals? Or the woman who is invested in her health and loves that she gets to go to the gym to improve it. The action you'll take from each of these identities is going to be very different. And so too is the energy behind how you take this action, by the way.

When your family constantly interrupts your work, do you believe yourself to be a woman who deserves space to do the work that is important to you? Or do you believe yourself to be a woman who comes second place to the demands of everyone else? Again, the action you take from each of these identities is going to be very different and produce vastly different outcomes.

The other kind of external challenge I mentioned are the ones we can't necessarily foresee. These are the things like not knowing exactly all the things you'll need to do to accomplish your goals.

For example, if you've never run your own business before, maybe you have some ideas of the kind of things you'll need to do to get up and running. But I can guarantee you that you will not know all of the things you'll need to do and some of those things are really going to challenge you. They will push you past your comfort zone or your skill set, and so on.

There are also things like getting sick, for example, losing your job, maybe losing your life partner unexpectedly. Things like global pandemics. These are all obstacles and challenges you might face that you simply cannot plan for.

What you can plan for though, is who you choose to be in the face of unexpected challenges and obstacles that come your way. And so once again I come full circle back to your beliefs and the stories you choose to tell yourself about who you are and what you can do. You might not be able to plan for losing a job, but you can plan for who you be in that kind of difficult situation and how you show up in your world as a result.

Are you a woman who gives in to her anxiety and overwhelm when faced with challenges? Or are you a woman who knows you are resilient and can handle anything that comes your way? This all comes back to who you decide you want to be. And doing the work on your stories and beliefs to help you be her. And you can plan for the unexpected obstacles and challenges that you can't foresee, by planning who you be.

When you plan for how you overcome your internal obstacles, you make overcoming your external obstacles so much easier, both the external obstacles you can identify and the ones you can’t.

So a quick recap on what we've discussed, because we have covered quite a lot of ground here today.

There are two types of obstacles, internal and external. Your internal obstacles are things like your beliefs and the stories behind those beliefs, your identity because of those beliefs, your emotions, and your negative self-talk.

You can plan to deal with these obstacles when they arise by doing things like using my Self-Creation Shift process to shift your stories in the moment, so you can keep moving forward. You can also use things like I AM affirmations, manifestos, and so on, to help remind you of who you are choosing to be. The other thing I mentioned was having a list of quality questions to help you tap into your future self and take the actions she would take in the face of challenges. Then setting time aside to do the deeper mindset work on a regular basis.

When it comes to the external challenges, there are the ones you know about, and you can plan to overcome these by tackling the obstacle itself like getting that gym buddy to hold you accountable, or more powerfully using your identity to help you take the action you want to take. Using your identity is also a really powerful way to help you deal with the challenges you don't yet know about and deciding ahead of time the kind of woman you are in the face of hard times, in the face of unknown circumstances and so forth.

As I said right back at the start of this episode, when I refused to have a plan, I left my plan open to chance, to the ebbs and flows of my world and the people in it. Failing to have a plan is, quite honestly, planning to fail. Although I don't really believe in failure, only lessons. So what I mean here is that when you don't have an intentional plan, you make it very hard to have an intentional outcome, to create the results you want for yourself.

I hope you can now see how it is possible to plan ahead of time for the challenges that you face, those you know about and those you don't, by managing your mindset, your emotions, rewriting your stories and beliefs, and choosing your identity, choosing who you be.

That's all I have for you today. Remember to head over to my website and take the free YES! Block assessment and download your copy of my Self-Creation Shift process, if you haven't already done so. Also, take a listen to episode 6 for my insights into I AM affirmations and episode 17 for learning about my Unapologetic YES! Story, manifesto and daily journal practice for cleaning up my emotions.

If you found this episode helpful, please share it with someone who may also benefit from it and help me make these tips and strategies available to more women, so we can all create lives we love to wake up to every single day. I'll see you next Wednesday.

Until then, be the woman who says YES!

Hey, want to know what's stopping you from saying YES! to you and a life you love?

Head over to https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock and take my FREE 60 second quiz to find out what's standing in your way today and I'll send you my Self-Creation Shift process for shifting it. That's https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock. I’ll see you there.