The Deals You Make and Break: The Secret to a Life You Wildly Love
In this inspiring conversation, Leanne Letica, Self-Creation Coach and founder of The Self-Creation School, discusses the importance of the deals we make and don’t make in shaping our success.
Leanne explores how every decision, action, and belief forms a deal that either propels us toward a life we love or keeps us stuck in the past. She shares personal anecdotes, including her journey through weight loss and overcoming fears of public speaking, to illustrate how mindful, intentional decisions can transform our lives.
Listeners are encouraged to pay attention to their daily deals and ensure they align with their future aspirations, ultimately leading to a more fulfilling and expansive life.
In This Episode:
00:00 Introduction: The Power of Deals
01:52 Understanding Everyday Deals
02:45 The Cost of Impulse Decisions
04:13 Breaking Free from Comfort Zones
04:57 Personal Story: Overcoming Weight Challenges
07:32 The Importance of Small Deals
08:26 Saying YES! to the Right Deals
17:16 Reprogramming Your Brain
19:23 Honoring Your Future Deals
21:04 Final Thoughts and Conclusion
YES! Moments:
“Every decision you make is a deal.”
“Success is as much about the deals you don’t do as it is about the deals you do.”
“When you say YES! to any kind of deal, you are also saying no to another.”
“The real cost of the deal is either you stepping into your future, or you staying stuck in your past.”
“If you want the reality you’re living to change, you need to change the type of deals you are making and breaking.”
Must-Have Resources:
- Discover your YES! Block here.
- Steal My Self-Creation Secrets here.
- Get My Personal Manifesto here.
- Grab My Daily Journal here.
- Join Week of YES! here.
Connect with Leanne:
Episode Transcript:
Transcript
Years ago, a friend said to me that success is as much about the deals you don’t do as it is about the deals you do.
And I shared this idea with the other coaches in my mastermind group this week, when we were talking about working with the right clients in our business. Because our success as a coach and your success as our client really does rely on us being the right fit.
Since then, I’ve been thinking a whole lot about this concept and how I’ve seen it play out in so many areas of my life over the years, not just in business. And how I see it playing out in the lives of women just like you.
So today, I want to share why your success in creating a life you wildly love is as much about the deals you don’t do, as it is about the deals you do.
I can’t wait for this one, so 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 and thanks so much for joining me for a conversation today that I hope will inspire you to think about the deals you are doing in your life and start saying YES! to the ones that will lead you to an everyday you love living.
Now you might not have ever thought of yourself as a deal maker, but every single day you are making deals—some big, some small—with yourself, with others, and even with your future. And these deals shape the direction of your life in ways you might not always notice.
Every action, every choice, every boundary, every standard, every belief about yourself and your world that you choose to uphold or not is essentially a deal you’re making. And that’s why the reality you experience is as much about the deals you don’t do, as it is about the deals you do.
In fact, often the most powerful deal you can make to move your life in the direction you want is the one you choose not to do. Take that impulse buy from Amazon, for example. When you click that buy now button, you’re not just making a deal with Amazon to make a purchase and with your credit card company to pay the bill, but you’re also making a deal with yourself. And the real cost of the deal is either you stepping into your future, or you staying stuck in your past.
The deal you’re making might be continuing to live in a cluttered environment of clothes that you don’t really need or that don’t align with the future you that you want to be. Gadgets you’ll probably never use. And lotions and potions you never take the time out to use. Instead of making a deal to create the spacious living environment of your future self, that energetically matches the more expansive life you desire.
It might be having less money for the things that will actually help you create the life you want. And so you stay stuck, recreating your past. Money for things like eating better quality food, maybe that gym membership, or a course that will help you up-skill and get the promotion, better quality clothes and a tailor to make them fit your unique body, or a coach or mentor to help you learn and grow.
Some of you are making the kind of Amazon type deals that keep you stuck, recreating the past and cost you your future every day of the week.
And listen, I get it. Making these types of deals keeps us living in a life we are familiar with. They help us to recreate a life over and over that keeps us nice and safe inside our comfort zone, even though our comfort zone may not actually be all that comfortable.
It’s really quite ironic, right? As humans, we love to stick with what we know because it feels so much safer than stepping into the unknown. But it’s an illusion of comfort that if we really start peeling back the layers on, is actually causing us a whole lot of discomfort that ends up costing us far greater in the long run than the initial discomfort we might be feeling.
When I was at my heaviest ever weight, I had just finished a course of fertility treatment, which resulted in two miscarriages. And the doctors told me that my best chances of a successful pregnancy was to lose some weight, come back and try again.
Now, the thought of what I would need to do to lose all this weight I had piled on, like going for a regular workout at the gym and changing my diet, all those kinds of things, that felt really quite painful. It felt overwhelming. But the alternate choice was staying overweight, continuing to miscarry, and not ever holding the baby I so desperately wanted in my arms.
That is a much more painful outcome in the long term than the short-term pain of giving up some couch time to take a walk, feeling the sore muscles from lifting weights at the gym, or eating less sugar and swapping out the creamy dressing on my salad.
Here’s the thing. Every time I looked outside the window at the chance of rain and decided not to go for that walk, I was making a deal with my past at the expense of the future I wanted. Every time I had that extra piece of cake, I was breaking the deal with my future.
And I think you’ll agree that the deal to become a fitter, healthier version of me that would provide the best possible environment for a baby to survive and thrive is no small deal. It’s a pretty big deal to make, a life-changing deal. Yet it is only through all the small deals I either did or didn’t do every single day that I would honor the deal that was my best chance at ever becoming a mother.
The reality is rain didn’t have to be a deal breaker for taking that walk. I didn’t need to do a deal with the weather at the cost of honoring the deal with my future. They make raincoats and umbrellas for occasions just like rainy days.
And yes, it might get a little wet and muddy. And yes, it’s tempting to break a deal with yourself and your future in those kinds of moments. It’s easy to tell yourself this one small moment doesn’t matter. But it is in these exact moments when the deals that matter most are being decided.
A life you wildly love happens as a result of the small deals you make in the moments that don’t seemingly matter to say YES! to your future and NO to the things that pull you back into your old habits and your old ways of being.
When you weigh up the pain of taking a wet and muddy walk versus the alternative, it becomes a pretty easy deal to make to walk out the door and take that walk.
That walk followed by the next walk and the next is how I made a successful deal with my future and became a fitter and healthier version of me who eventually became a mother. And it’s how you make a deal with your future too. One intentional deal forward at a time.
And here’s what I want you to realize. When you say YES! to any kind of deal, you are also saying no to another. You may have heard me speak about this concept before. I can’t remember the exact podcast episode, but I shared a little while back some criticism I received about encouraging women to always be saying YES!, when they really needed to say no. Like in the case of setting healthier boundaries or stopping people-pleasing and so on.
What I had to say was, that I would keep encouraging women to be the woman who says YES!, because the problem is not that you need to say no. If you are a people-pleaser, you are already very good at saying no. You’re just saying no to yourself. The problem is that you need to be more mindful and intentional about what and who you are saying YES! to.
This really is the principle behind the deals you do and don’t do. It’s about being more mindful and intentional about the deals you say YES! to making, understanding that when you say YES! to those deals, you are also saying no to, or perhaps breaking another.
And that for me is key to making new ways of being and doing feel effortless.
When you understand why it is you are choosing to make one deal over another, why you say YES! to making one choice or taking one action and in turn, why you say no to another, this is when the effort required to step outside your comfort zone and into something new becomes a whole lot less painful.
Me not taking that rainy day walk was not just me saying no to the walk, it was me saying no to my future, to the possibility of being a mother in my future. And it was me saying YES! to staying unfit, unhealthy and childless.
But every YES! I said to taking that walk, come rain, hail or shine, was me making a deal that championed my future and me breaking a deal that championed my past. A deal that had prioritized more couch time and less active time, which is what led to that unfit, unhealthy version of me in the first place.
So, next time you find yourself negotiating with yourself about making a decision or taking an action, pause just for a moment and consider the deals you are actually making in that moment, and which pain you are saying YES! to.
Clicking that buy now button might give you a dopamine hit in the moment, but what is it really costing you? When you say YES! to not taking action that will move you closer to the life you say you want, think about what is your inaction really costing you? What is the cost of the deals you are making?
And let’s talk for a moment about these internal negotiations we often have with our storyteller at times like this. That voice that pops up to remind us of all the reasons we can’t or shouldn’t do the things we want to do.
Our storyteller is a master at helping us stay very firmly planted within our comfort zone. Its role is really to be an intermediary between our brain and our conscious, and it tends to side with the brain more often than not. And here’s why.
The role of our brain is to sense any kind of physical or emotional danger and keep us safe from harm. But the thing about our brain is, it’s very lazy. It doesn’t like to have to work too hard and so it assesses the risk of a situation based on what is usually a very old and invalid set of danger signals that are often stored as far back as our childhood.
I remember in my early school days really messing up a classroom speech. What happened was, I dropped my palm cards just as I started talking, they scattered everywhere out of order, and basically for the rest of the speech, well pretty much the entire speech, I fumbled over my words, not really remembering what it was I wanted to say.
The kids in the classroom were laughing and making all kinds of sniggering remarks. And my teacher told me to go away, get my palm cards in order, practice a little more, then come back the next day and try again, which only made the kids in the classroom laugh a little more.
I felt super embarrassed. Thinking back to this, I can still feel the burn of embarrassment in my flushed red cheeks. And I felt so ashamed of myself and the sniggering remarks and laughter from my peers made me feel really quite rejected. Like there was something wrong with me.
And with my immature child brain, that’s exactly what I made this whole experience mean. That there was something wrong with me. That I wasn’t good enough to speak in front of the class, which became in short, I’m not good enough.
Now my brain said, okay, noted. And it stored this experience, the emotions I felt and the story I gave it of not being good enough, away for future guidance on the things it needs to protect me from because of their potential for emotional harm.
How do you think future classroom speeches went for me with my brain sensing danger based on this one event that occurred in my life? Let me tell you, not all that well. And I mastered over the years avoiding being in situations where I needed to speak or be on public display.
Fast forward to today and whenever I’m faced with the task of speaking in public, my brain says:
“Oh, I know how this turns out. Let’s not go there. People will laugh, snigger, reject you. And that’s only going to remind you that you aren’t good enough, which causes you a whole lot of emotional pain like embarrassment and shame. So best, we just don’t do that.”
And it enlists my storyteller to fill me with fear and doubts so that I don’t step outside the boundaries of what my brain thinks will keep me safe.
Your brain is operating just like this too.
The problem with this is if I don’t show up and tell women like you about my business and all the ways I can help you change your life, the chances of me being a successful coach are going to be pretty slim, right? And that would mean I end up giving up on something that really fulfills me and makes my life feel like it matters. That’s a pretty big price to pay.
And the reality is, the only way I can become good at public speaking is to practice public speaking. It serves me really quite well to take a chance that I might muck up, fumble over my words, have women reject my message, sometimes very vocally I might add.
It serves me very well because it helps me improve my skills, become a much more powerful speaker. It builds my emotional resilience. And importantly, my SELF Wealth, like my self-trust, self-confidence and self-belief. And there is no true physical danger in doing so.
But my brain doesn’t consider this. Remember, it’s lazy and it’s quite happy to keep operating from the set of danger signals it stored way back when I was a child in my speech gone wrong moment. At all costs, it wants to protect me from potentially feeling the embarrassment and shame of not being good enough.
Now, letting your brain run your life according to these kinds of rules, is basically running your adult life with the brain of a child. I know that sounds pretty harsh, but this is what so many of us are doing.
We avoid saying YES! to the deals that would help us experience the life we truly want because our storyteller convinces us to make a deal that keeps us stuck in our past, out of fear and doubt, that is based on a traumatic event our child brain stored, that it wasn’t even equipped to process.
As an adult, knowing that you now have a much wiser and more mature ability to apply logic and reason to the things that happen in your world and to decide what you make things mean, it’s your job to take your decisions off autopilot and re-train your brain. You must start reprogramming your brain’s store of danger signals. That means making your storyteller work for you, not your brain.
You do that by being intentional about the conversations or internal negotiations or debates, if you like, that you are having with your storyteller. You do that by paying attention to the fears and doubts your storyteller is trying to convince you to have and reminding your storyteller that those are the fears and doubts of your child brain, and not your adult brain. Then you tell your storyteller, this is going to be the deal moving forward.
Every time your storyteller pops up with those old stories, you thank it for doing its job and ask it to remind your adult brain that you are operating from a new set of rules and that everything is perfectly okay.
Eventually when you’ve said YES! to enough deals that support your new way of being and acting, your adult brain will replace your child way of reacting, essentially, with this new set of benchmarks.
Now, will it feel a little uncomfortable? Yes. But you’ll be surprised how quickly your storyteller and your brain will jump on board with the deals you want to make, when you give them no other option.
Remember, the brain is lazy. It’s not going to want to fight you on this for all that long. When it senses that you’re not budging ground on this deal, it is going to say once again, okay, noted, so that it can get back to using far less brainpower.
The thing I want you to take away from today’s conversation is this. Every decision you make is a deal.
Every action you take or don’t take, every boundary you uphold or compromise, every standard you stay accountable to or let slip, every belief about yourself and your world that you buy into or change, is a deal you are making with either your future or your past.
If you want the reality you’re living to change, you need to change the type of deals you are making and breaking.
So this week, I challenge you to start noticing the deals you do and don’t do. And ask yourself, are you honoring the deals you’ve made with your future? Or are you breaking them to stay stuck in your past? Are you making deals that align with your dreams? Or are you making deals out of comfort and the illusion of safety? And most importantly, what is the true cost of saying YES! to the wrong deals?
My friend, the secret to successfully creating the life you dream of lies in the hands of the deals you do and the deals you don’t, both big and small.
So get clear on the deals you’re making, especially those small everyday moment deals. Make sure they’re the ones that move you towards the life you want to live. And then get your storyteller and your brain on side and make honoring those deals a non-negotiable.
And that is all I have for you today. Of course, I’ll be back next Wednesday with more of my Self-Creation secrets to help you create a life you wildly love. Don’t forget to hit the subscribe button so that episode is queued and ready for listening right inside your library.
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.
The Deals You Make and Break: The Secret to a Life You Wildly Love
In this inspiring conversation, Leanne Letica, Self-Creation Coach and founder of The Self-Creation School, discusses the importance of the deals we make and don’t make in shaping our success.
Leanne explores how every decision, action, and belief forms a deal that either propels us toward a life we love or keeps us stuck in the past. She shares personal anecdotes, including her journey through weight loss and overcoming fears of public speaking, to illustrate how mindful, intentional decisions can transform our lives.
Listeners are encouraged to pay attention to their daily deals and ensure they align with their future aspirations, ultimately leading to a more fulfilling and expansive life.
In This Episode:
00:00 Introduction: The Power of Deals
01:52 Understanding Everyday Deals
02:45 The Cost of Impulse Decisions
04:13 Breaking Free from Comfort Zones
04:57 Personal Story: Overcoming Weight Challenges
07:32 The Importance of Small Deals
08:26 Saying YES! to the Right Deals
17:16 Reprogramming Your Brain
19:23 Honoring Your Future Deals
21:04 Final Thoughts and Conclusion
YES! Moments:
“Every decision you make is a deal.”
“Success is as much about the deals you don’t do as it is about the deals you do.”
“When you say YES! to any kind of deal, you are also saying no to another.”
“The real cost of the deal is either you stepping into your future, or you staying stuck in your past.”
“If you want the reality you’re living to change, you need to change the type of deals you are making and breaking.”
Must-Have Resources:
- Discover your YES! Block here.
- Steal My Self-Creation Secrets here.
- Get My Personal Manifesto here.
- Grab My Daily Journal here.
- Join Week of YES! here.
Connect with Leanne:
Episode Transcript:
Transcript
Years ago, a friend said to me that success is as much about the deals you don’t do as it is about the deals you do.
And I shared this idea with the other coaches in my mastermind group this week, when we were talking about working with the right clients in our business. Because our success as a coach and your success as our client really does rely on us being the right fit.
Since then, I’ve been thinking a whole lot about this concept and how I’ve seen it play out in so many areas of my life over the years, not just in business. And how I see it playing out in the lives of women just like you.
So today, I want to share why your success in creating a life you wildly love is as much about the deals you don’t do, as it is about the deals you do.
I can’t wait for this one, so 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 and thanks so much for joining me for a conversation today that I hope will inspire you to think about the deals you are doing in your life and start saying YES! to the ones that will lead you to an everyday you love living.
Now you might not have ever thought of yourself as a deal maker, but every single day you are making deals—some big, some small—with yourself, with others, and even with your future. And these deals shape the direction of your life in ways you might not always notice.
Every action, every choice, every boundary, every standard, every belief about yourself and your world that you choose to uphold or not is essentially a deal you’re making. And that’s why the reality you experience is as much about the deals you don’t do, as it is about the deals you do.
In fact, often the most powerful deal you can make to move your life in the direction you want is the one you choose not to do. Take that impulse buy from Amazon, for example. When you click that buy now button, you’re not just making a deal with Amazon to make a purchase and with your credit card company to pay the bill, but you’re also making a deal with yourself. And the real cost of the deal is either you stepping into your future, or you staying stuck in your past.
The deal you’re making might be continuing to live in a cluttered environment of clothes that you don’t really need or that don’t align with the future you that you want to be. Gadgets you’ll probably never use. And lotions and potions you never take the time out to use. Instead of making a deal to create the spacious living environment of your future self, that energetically matches the more expansive life you desire.
It might be having less money for the things that will actually help you create the life you want. And so you stay stuck, recreating your past. Money for things like eating better quality food, maybe that gym membership, or a course that will help you up-skill and get the promotion, better quality clothes and a tailor to make them fit your unique body, or a coach or mentor to help you learn and grow.
Some of you are making the kind of Amazon type deals that keep you stuck, recreating the past and cost you your future every day of the week.
And listen, I get it. Making these types of deals keeps us living in a life we are familiar with. They help us to recreate a life over and over that keeps us nice and safe inside our comfort zone, even though our comfort zone may not actually be all that comfortable.
It’s really quite ironic, right? As humans, we love to stick with what we know because it feels so much safer than stepping into the unknown. But it’s an illusion of comfort that if we really start peeling back the layers on, is actually causing us a whole lot of discomfort that ends up costing us far greater in the long run than the initial discomfort we might be feeling.
When I was at my heaviest ever weight, I had just finished a course of fertility treatment, which resulted in two miscarriages. And the doctors told me that my best chances of a successful pregnancy was to lose some weight, come back and try again.
Now, the thought of what I would need to do to lose all this weight I had piled on, like going for a regular workout at the gym and changing my diet, all those kinds of things, that felt really quite painful. It felt overwhelming. But the alternate choice was staying overweight, continuing to miscarry, and not ever holding the baby I so desperately wanted in my arms.
That is a much more painful outcome in the long term than the short-term pain of giving up some couch time to take a walk, feeling the sore muscles from lifting weights at the gym, or eating less sugar and swapping out the creamy dressing on my salad.
Here’s the thing. Every time I looked outside the window at the chance of rain and decided not to go for that walk, I was making a deal with my past at the expense of the future I wanted. Every time I had that extra piece of cake, I was breaking the deal with my future.
And I think you’ll agree that the deal to become a fitter, healthier version of me that would provide the best possible environment for a baby to survive and thrive is no small deal. It’s a pretty big deal to make, a life-changing deal. Yet it is only through all the small deals I either did or didn’t do every single day that I would honor the deal that was my best chance at ever becoming a mother.
The reality is rain didn’t have to be a deal breaker for taking that walk. I didn’t need to do a deal with the weather at the cost of honoring the deal with my future. They make raincoats and umbrellas for occasions just like rainy days.
And yes, it might get a little wet and muddy. And yes, it’s tempting to break a deal with yourself and your future in those kinds of moments. It’s easy to tell yourself this one small moment doesn’t matter. But it is in these exact moments when the deals that matter most are being decided.
A life you wildly love happens as a result of the small deals you make in the moments that don’t seemingly matter to say YES! to your future and NO to the things that pull you back into your old habits and your old ways of being.
When you weigh up the pain of taking a wet and muddy walk versus the alternative, it becomes a pretty easy deal to make to walk out the door and take that walk.
That walk followed by the next walk and the next is how I made a successful deal with my future and became a fitter and healthier version of me who eventually became a mother. And it’s how you make a deal with your future too. One intentional deal forward at a time.
And here’s what I want you to realize. When you say YES! to any kind of deal, you are also saying no to another. You may have heard me speak about this concept before. I can’t remember the exact podcast episode, but I shared a little while back some criticism I received about encouraging women to always be saying YES!, when they really needed to say no. Like in the case of setting healthier boundaries or stopping people-pleasing and so on.
What I had to say was, that I would keep encouraging women to be the woman who says YES!, because the problem is not that you need to say no. If you are a people-pleaser, you are already very good at saying no. You’re just saying no to yourself. The problem is that you need to be more mindful and intentional about what and who you are saying YES! to.
This really is the principle behind the deals you do and don’t do. It’s about being more mindful and intentional about the deals you say YES! to making, understanding that when you say YES! to those deals, you are also saying no to, or perhaps breaking another.
And that for me is key to making new ways of being and doing feel effortless.
When you understand why it is you are choosing to make one deal over another, why you say YES! to making one choice or taking one action and in turn, why you say no to another, this is when the effort required to step outside your comfort zone and into something new becomes a whole lot less painful.
Me not taking that rainy day walk was not just me saying no to the walk, it was me saying no to my future, to the possibility of being a mother in my future. And it was me saying YES! to staying unfit, unhealthy and childless.
But every YES! I said to taking that walk, come rain, hail or shine, was me making a deal that championed my future and me breaking a deal that championed my past. A deal that had prioritized more couch time and less active time, which is what led to that unfit, unhealthy version of me in the first place.
So, next time you find yourself negotiating with yourself about making a decision or taking an action, pause just for a moment and consider the deals you are actually making in that moment, and which pain you are saying YES! to.
Clicking that buy now button might give you a dopamine hit in the moment, but what is it really costing you? When you say YES! to not taking action that will move you closer to the life you say you want, think about what is your inaction really costing you? What is the cost of the deals you are making?
And let’s talk for a moment about these internal negotiations we often have with our storyteller at times like this. That voice that pops up to remind us of all the reasons we can’t or shouldn’t do the things we want to do.
Our storyteller is a master at helping us stay very firmly planted within our comfort zone. Its role is really to be an intermediary between our brain and our conscious, and it tends to side with the brain more often than not. And here’s why.
The role of our brain is to sense any kind of physical or emotional danger and keep us safe from harm. But the thing about our brain is, it’s very lazy. It doesn’t like to have to work too hard and so it assesses the risk of a situation based on what is usually a very old and invalid set of danger signals that are often stored as far back as our childhood.
I remember in my early school days really messing up a classroom speech. What happened was, I dropped my palm cards just as I started talking, they scattered everywhere out of order, and basically for the rest of the speech, well pretty much the entire speech, I fumbled over my words, not really remembering what it was I wanted to say.
The kids in the classroom were laughing and making all kinds of sniggering remarks. And my teacher told me to go away, get my palm cards in order, practice a little more, then come back the next day and try again, which only made the kids in the classroom laugh a little more.
I felt super embarrassed. Thinking back to this, I can still feel the burn of embarrassment in my flushed red cheeks. And I felt so ashamed of myself and the sniggering remarks and laughter from my peers made me feel really quite rejected. Like there was something wrong with me.
And with my immature child brain, that’s exactly what I made this whole experience mean. That there was something wrong with me. That I wasn’t good enough to speak in front of the class, which became in short, I’m not good enough.
Now my brain said, okay, noted. And it stored this experience, the emotions I felt and the story I gave it of not being good enough, away for future guidance on the things it needs to protect me from because of their potential for emotional harm.
How do you think future classroom speeches went for me with my brain sensing danger based on this one event that occurred in my life? Let me tell you, not all that well. And I mastered over the years avoiding being in situations where I needed to speak or be on public display.
Fast forward to today and whenever I’m faced with the task of speaking in public, my brain says:
“Oh, I know how this turns out. Let’s not go there. People will laugh, snigger, reject you. And that’s only going to remind you that you aren’t good enough, which causes you a whole lot of emotional pain like embarrassment and shame. So best, we just don’t do that.”
And it enlists my storyteller to fill me with fear and doubts so that I don’t step outside the boundaries of what my brain thinks will keep me safe.
Your brain is operating just like this too.
The problem with this is if I don’t show up and tell women like you about my business and all the ways I can help you change your life, the chances of me being a successful coach are going to be pretty slim, right? And that would mean I end up giving up on something that really fulfills me and makes my life feel like it matters. That’s a pretty big price to pay.
And the reality is, the only way I can become good at public speaking is to practice public speaking. It serves me really quite well to take a chance that I might muck up, fumble over my words, have women reject my message, sometimes very vocally I might add.
It serves me very well because it helps me improve my skills, become a much more powerful speaker. It builds my emotional resilience. And importantly, my SELF Wealth, like my self-trust, self-confidence and self-belief. And there is no true physical danger in doing so.
But my brain doesn’t consider this. Remember, it’s lazy and it’s quite happy to keep operating from the set of danger signals it stored way back when I was a child in my speech gone wrong moment. At all costs, it wants to protect me from potentially feeling the embarrassment and shame of not being good enough.
Now, letting your brain run your life according to these kinds of rules, is basically running your adult life with the brain of a child. I know that sounds pretty harsh, but this is what so many of us are doing.
We avoid saying YES! to the deals that would help us experience the life we truly want because our storyteller convinces us to make a deal that keeps us stuck in our past, out of fear and doubt, that is based on a traumatic event our child brain stored, that it wasn’t even equipped to process.
As an adult, knowing that you now have a much wiser and more mature ability to apply logic and reason to the things that happen in your world and to decide what you make things mean, it’s your job to take your decisions off autopilot and re-train your brain. You must start reprogramming your brain’s store of danger signals. That means making your storyteller work for you, not your brain.
You do that by being intentional about the conversations or internal negotiations or debates, if you like, that you are having with your storyteller. You do that by paying attention to the fears and doubts your storyteller is trying to convince you to have and reminding your storyteller that those are the fears and doubts of your child brain, and not your adult brain. Then you tell your storyteller, this is going to be the deal moving forward.
Every time your storyteller pops up with those old stories, you thank it for doing its job and ask it to remind your adult brain that you are operating from a new set of rules and that everything is perfectly okay.
Eventually when you’ve said YES! to enough deals that support your new way of being and acting, your adult brain will replace your child way of reacting, essentially, with this new set of benchmarks.
Now, will it feel a little uncomfortable? Yes. But you’ll be surprised how quickly your storyteller and your brain will jump on board with the deals you want to make, when you give them no other option.
Remember, the brain is lazy. It’s not going to want to fight you on this for all that long. When it senses that you’re not budging ground on this deal, it is going to say once again, okay, noted, so that it can get back to using far less brainpower.
The thing I want you to take away from today’s conversation is this. Every decision you make is a deal.
Every action you take or don’t take, every boundary you uphold or compromise, every standard you stay accountable to or let slip, every belief about yourself and your world that you buy into or change, is a deal you are making with either your future or your past.
If you want the reality you’re living to change, you need to change the type of deals you are making and breaking.
So this week, I challenge you to start noticing the deals you do and don’t do. And ask yourself, are you honoring the deals you’ve made with your future? Or are you breaking them to stay stuck in your past? Are you making deals that align with your dreams? Or are you making deals out of comfort and the illusion of safety? And most importantly, what is the true cost of saying YES! to the wrong deals?
My friend, the secret to successfully creating the life you dream of lies in the hands of the deals you do and the deals you don’t, both big and small.
So get clear on the deals you’re making, especially those small everyday moment deals. Make sure they’re the ones that move you towards the life you want to live. And then get your storyteller and your brain on side and make honoring those deals a non-negotiable.
And that is all I have for you today. Of course, I’ll be back next Wednesday with more of my Self-Creation secrets to help you create a life you wildly love. Don’t forget to hit the subscribe button so that episode is queued and ready for listening right inside your library.
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.
EPISODE release date // February 26, 2025
By Leanne Letica
By Leanne Letica
SHARE THIS EPISODE
DOWNLOAD TRANSCRIPT