Hi girl, welcome to Soul CEO; a podcast for women who know they’re destined for more. I’m Lindsey Mango and I’m going to show you that you can have it all and teach you how to get it by becoming the CEO of your soul, life, and business. Let’s get started.
Hey guys, how are you? I’m so happy to be here, and I’m so pumped because today I actually head north to Chicago. My sister just had her first baby a couple months ago, I think you guys heard me talk about it, and she is off work, obviously taking care of her precious little daughter. And it occurred to me the other week that how many times are we going to have the opportunity to just hang out, a whole week at her house while she’s home and with my niece, Demi.
And so I’m super pumped because I’m just going out there and I’m just going to spend the whole week loving on my niece and being with my sister and just relaxing and working a little bit, playing a lot, you know, doing all the things. So I’m super excited, and I always feel extra grateful when I get to exercise the freedom that I created in my life.
I think that’s what a lot of you guys are working to create and I just have this deep sense of gratitude because one of the things that really inspired me to create my business other than impacting and helping all of you and serving my greater mission is to have freedom.
I remember a time when I actually had to miss Christmas at home because I live – I grew up in Chicago suburbs, and I didn’t have – I’d just started at a new job so I got like – I had no PTO days until I’d been there for a few months. So it really sucked and honestly, it was one of those moments that really, really helped me push me forward to create the freedom.
I was like, this is not going to happen. It’s actually something that drives me a lot in my business and to serve all of you guys is whatever it is that you’re creating in the world, I want you to feel like you have freedom to create the life and design your life the way that you want.
So anyway, super excited about that, obviously. But today, I am excited to talk about the topic that I’m bringing to the table, and it’s something that I feel like is super important to cover, it’s something I wrote a really powerful email about this past weekend, and it’s something that I’ve done a lot of deep work on and it’s something that I think is super important for you guys to understand and implement in your own lives.
And the idea of this is ownership and taking responsibility for ourselves and our thinking and the lives and businesses and the things we’ve created in our lives and businesses and in our relationships. Because something that I’ve realized is the most successful clients that I have are the ones that take ownership.
And I really started to dig into this. In fact, it’s kind of crazy but I was like, up at three in the morning this past weekend and I – like, I just had this deep revelation about it and how much really seeing this and taking ownership over myself and my thoughts and my mindset and my beliefs is what has allowed me to create the life that I have and continues to be what allows me to create the life and business that I have. And it’s what I teach and it’s just at the foundational level of everything.
And so I actually started writing a book about it. Like, I almost have like, all the chapter names. I had the introduction started. So yes, we will see where that goes. I think I told you guys I started a book a while ago. That book kind of got put on the bookshelf, but this one I’ve started writing a little bit more in detail, so we shall see where it goes.
But anyway, it’s this idea of ownership and something that I think is super powerful for all of you guys is to take ownership over yourself, over your life, over your thinking, over the results that you guys currently have. And it’s something that changed my life drastically. So I’m going to tell you guys a quick little story and then I’m going to help you connect the dots in how you can take more ownership over yourself and your life and how you can do this work.
So my parents actually have been really, really powerful in teaching me about taking ownership over myself and not placing blame on things outside of myself. So I’m super grateful for that and like, in fact, I remember when I was 16 years old, I tried out for my club volleyball team and I actually made the second team when my goal was to make the number one team.
And I remember bawling my eyes out in the car and my dad just turned and looked at me and said, “You know, you have a choice right now. You can use this as fuel, you can use this as motivation,” and he didn’t place any blame on coaches or politics or anything like that. He gave me power in that situation and he said, you know, “You can walk into the gym tomorrow and talk to the number one coach and you can say, what do I need to do to be on the number one team? Like, next year, or this year if it’s possible, what needs to change, what do I need to do in order to become so good that without a doubt I’m on the number one team?”
And he told me. I did it. I was scared crapless, I must tell you, but he told me, and for an entire year, I went into the gym extra every day on top of my four-hour practices to practice on the skill set that he told me I needed to work on. And I think what’s so powerful about all of it this is yes, I was working on a skill set, but I believed that I was going to make the number one team next year, and I took all the action that I needed to based on that to create it.
And what’s so crazy is the next year I actually made the number one team, and it was a pretty insane thing because I made the 18s team, the 18 one team when I was 17. If you get sports, you might get this. So it was a pretty awesome thing, and it’s something that I’ll never forget. And it’s something that I’ve learned from a really young age, but after I stopped playing volleyball – and this might end up being a little bit more story time than I expected, but I think it’s really important.
And so after I was done playing volleyball, I’d really learned how to do that in that instance. But what’s really crazy is our minds and our egos like to protect ourselves, right? Like, it doesn’t feel good to feel like we’ve created some of the things in our lives that we’re not happy about. Like, our ego totally wants to protect us. It wants to make other people responsible. It wants to make our bosses, our coaches, our situations, our upbringing, our financial situation, it wants to make other people, other things responsible because it really feels like shit.
Pardon my language, but it really feels like shit sometimes to be the person that has to take ownership over all of these things. And I think what happened over time is that I had learned to do this with volleyball, but as I got older, my mind started to do what our minds always do, which is try to protect me, and I started to take a little less ownership over myself and my life.
And so I’m going to circle back around to kind of where I started this story, but in my mid-20s, I had switched jobs, I would say, five to six times. Completely different fields, completely different bosses, completely different companies. And in my fifth or sixth or seventh job, who knows, I don’t even remember, I should probably really sit down and count, but I started to feel the same way I always had, which is that something was missing.
Which was I was unhappy, which was, so many different things. I just like – I just did not feel good about it. And what was also interesting was my relationship at the time, I had started feeling the same way I had in a previous long-term relationship. And I was dating two very different guys – not at the same, not simultaneously. Some of the crazy things I say.
Like, the guy before the guy I dated in my mid-20s, the one I dated in college was different than the guy I was dating in my mid-20s. And I started to feel the same way, and I was able to take a step back and see that I had changed job so many times and I was in a completely different relationship and I was starting to feel the exact same way I had before.
And so I had this moment of realizing that I obviously was contributing to this in some way. All of the circumstances had changed drastically in completely different ways and my relationships were completely different but I was feeling the exact same way. So I’ll never forget having this moment of like, I’m doing this. I’m creating this somehow and I better work through this now or I’m going to leave this job and leave this relationship and end up in the same situation in four more years.
And I was like, oh my gosh, that can’t happen. If this keeps happening, I can place blame on the guy, I can place blame on the jobs and be like, it’s their fault, they’re not the right thing, or I don’t like this, or they’re not treating me the way I want to be treated, they’re not making me happy, all these things. I can do that all day long, but somehow, I’m contributing to this, right?
So that moment I really took my power back in my life and I decided okay, I have to get to the bottom of this. And so through this string of events, I had hired a coach and I started working on myself and I started to see some of the behaviors and the thinking and the beliefs that were creating these results, that were keeping me from feeling happy, that were keeping me from feeling really good, that were keeping me from feeling loved.
And things started to drastically change with some simple things that I started to work through in my mind like having gratitude and allowing another person to be who they are and being able to love myself and love them for who they are and not trying to change them and not trying to believe that they need to be better or different. And starting to see my job from a totally different perspective, and it changed my life.
Like, it changed my life so drastically that it’s actually what inspired me to get into coaching. I was running a different business at the time and so that moment I realize looking back now was the moment I really took my power back for the first time in a while and said, you know, like, I’m in charge of this, I’ve created this. And through changing my mindset, I started to experience my life in a completely different way.
And what’s so powerful about this is I didn’t try to change the circumstance. I didn’t try to quit my job again. I didn’t leave my relationship at that time, and I decided I was going to change the way I thought about it. I was going to change what I believed about it and about myself and about the world.
And so slowly, I started to grow. Now, I think what’s so powerful about this is that I did end up leaving that relationships and I did end up leaving that job, but it wasn’t from a place of running from like, these things and saying that they were causing me to feel a certain way. It was because I took ownership and I grew so much, and I felt so amazing and so happy in my life that I realized that they were no longer aligned.
And I think that that’s a really big difference. And I talk a lot about highest self and making decisions from our highest self and all of those pieces, but there’s a huge difference between creating our reality and creating the results that we have and feeling good about them and doing our work like, cleaning up our own side of the street, which is what I teach, which is what I hold my clients accountable to, which is what I implement in my life every single way and work to implement at every single level, versus saying like, that side of the street doesn’t work for me anymore, I need to do something different.
Or I don’t have the results that I want so I need to do something different, or I haven’t gotten clients yet so I don’t feel the way that I want to feel. I need to change my circumstance or I need to change the actions that I’m taking, instead of taking ownership over that.
And I will tell you guys, it is not easy. Like, there have been things at every level that I’ve had to learn to take ownership of, but I realize that this is what has allowed me to create the life that I have. The things that I’ve decided to take ownership of, meaning my thinking, my beliefs, the way I show up in the world is why I have the life I have.
And success leaves clues, and that’s what I’m here to share with you guys and teach you guys about. So like, there are totally times where I want to blame other people, things, circumstances, for whatever, for the way that I feel, for the way that I maybe got a result, maybe for the way that I – who knows? But in all of those moments, when you do that, when you make your circumstance responsible for how you feel, when you make your action responsible for how you feel, when you make your result responsible for how you feel, you are giving your power away to those things.
Which means that if you want to create another new feeling, if you want to create another new result, you’re going to have to change all of these things instead of changing you. And I’ve always said that if you don’t grow the brain, if you don’t grow your mind and you change the circumstance, you change the action, you do all these things, and you haven’t changed the mindset, it will create the same problems, which is what showed up in my past life.
And it might be why you guys have changed certain things in your life but you keep feeling the same way. You haven’t actually taken ownership over how you are the one that’s creating the result and you’re the one that’s creating the feelings that you have about your life and your business and all of these pieces.
So how do you start to do this? And why do we not do it? I kind of talked about that a little bit at the beginning, we don’t do it because it feels better for our ego to say like, it’s someone else’s fault, it’s my circumstance’s fault. It’s my upbringing’s fault, it’s my financial situation’s fault, it’s my chronic pain’s fault.
I’m not saying like, I haven’t had all of the – maybe the shit that you’ve had in your life, but the thing is that we can all have different circumstances and create totally different results, and it’s the people that take ownership that will create different results. So why we don’t do it is because it feels a lot better to wallow in something else being responsible for how we feel because it takes some guts, it takes some freaking hard ass work to take a look in the mirror and say how am I contributing to this?
And how we know this to be true – and I’ve used this example before and it’s super powerful – is to look at like, if there’s been two people in the world who have gotten the same exact cancer diagnosis, maybe terminal, maybe they have three months to live, and there have been people who handled those three months like the worst three months of their life, and I don’t blame them at all, I want to be clear on that one.
Like, I don’t blame that. That’s terrible. That would be awful, I can’t even imagine, I can’t even begin to try to like, think about what that would be like. But I just want to show you guys how our thinking will create the results that we have, which is that someone who gets that diagnosis could spend the last three months like it’s the worst months of their life. And on the other side, there have been people who have spent the last three months of their life creating the best experiences of their life and inspiring others and just doing the most mind-blowing things.
Now, the thing is the circumstance is exactly the same, and yes, the circumstance is really, really crappy. But two people handled it in completely different ways and they both experienced their lives in completely different ways. And so all that I’m saying here is that when you take ownership, you get to change your life. You get to be the one in control. And if you make other things responsible for your current life, whether it be good things, whether it be bad things, then you don’t really get to take a good, hard ass look in the mirror one day and go, “I created this. Me. My thinking. The way I showed up in the world.”
You’re going to make these other things responsible for it. So we can actually be a victim in a positive way, right? You can say like, “Oh well, I just got this result because I grew up with money,” and you take all your power away and you take your ability to celebrate yourself away. Or you can say, “I’m in this position because my boss fired me and it’s all their fault.”
That feels really good. You want to blame your boss, you want to blame these people. But it takes all your power away and then you don’t get to look at yourself in the mirror and really take full responsibility for what you’ve created.
So if you want to take credit, if you want to feel this sense of unshakeable inner trust in knowing that you’ve created the life that you have and you feel good and can celebrate the amazing things you have in your life, you also have to take responsibility for the crap you’ve created in your life.
When I say created, what I mean by that is yes, there are circumstances, there are lots of circumstances that are beyond our control. But we always get to dictate how we show up to them, always. We can change our thinking drastically to create a completely different experience.
And so how you start to take ownership is you start to look at your thinking. This is why I coach the way I do. Like, there are so many different ways to do this, guys, and you can do it a different way and that’s okay, there’s no judgment in that. You can do it however you want.
But I teach you guys based on how I’ve created my life and my results and how I continue to do that, and I do it by taking ownership. I do it by saying like, what thinking is creating this negative result in my life? What is that creating? How am I showing up to it? What actions am I taking?
And then I get to say, ooh, what thinking has created this positive result? What ownership can I take in this? And so every time I do that, I get the opportunity to evaluate and say okay, well, what would I have to think or believe differently about myself or about the world or about this circumstance to feel differently? Instead of making it responsible.
And that is when your life will drastically change. At every level, it’s our work to take ownership, and this is why I’ve never gotten caught up in so many different pieces like, feeling like I have to know all of the things about business to be an amazing business owner, or feeling like I have to have it all figured out. Like, I have an unshakable trust within myself, and the reason I have that is because I take ownership over my thinking and what I believe.
And that’s what I want to teach you guys to do. So I want you guys to look at your life, and I want you to look at two to three things that you’re not really happy about. And I want you to like, take a step back, and I want you to say like, how have I contributed to this? What am I thinking about this particular result or circumstance in my life?
You can do results or circumstances, whatever you want. And how can I see that the way I’m thinking about it is making me feel the way the way I feel about it? What thoughts do I have? How am I showing up to it? How am I contributing to this thing that I’m not happy about?
And then you guys can say, okay, so what would I have to think differently to feel differently about this thing, without actually changing the circumstance or the result? Because that’s the thing is we have to create the feelings and the beliefs ahead of time to get to the next level. If you make your circumstance, your action, your result responsible for that, that’s going to be really hard. You’re going to be waiting around to have evidence of that, to be able to take action and do the things you want to do.
So anyway, I’m giving you homework today. So I want you to write those three things and I want you to look at how you’re contributing to it, what you’re thinking about it, how that’s creating what you have, and how you would have to look at it and think about it differently to feel differently. And then potentially, create a new result. That’s how you’re actually going to create a new result.
Then I want you to look at three things in your life that you love and you’re really happy about, and I want you to take ownership over the fact like, what thoughts do you have about that? What beliefs do you have about that? How have you contributed to creating that amazing freaking result?
And here’s what I want to tell you guys today is when you can take ownership over everything, when you can take ownership over that person that really pisses you off and say like, how am I contributing to this? What am I thinking about this? What do I believe about this that is making me feel like crap? They’re not the ones that make me feel like crap. I’m the one making me feel like crap.
And I really want you to practice just spending all day taking ownership over yourself. Not blaming anyone or anything else for how you feel in the life that you have. And the moment you guys start to do that, your life will change. It will change drastically. It’s what changed my life so drastically, and it’s what I do at every level.
So I love you guys and I want to honor you for doing this work because taking ownership is not the easiest thing in the world. And I think that’s also another layer to this is seeing that just because you take ownership doesn’t mean you have to make yourself feel bad about it. Doesn’t mean you have to go, oh my god, this is all my fault, I’m a crappy person. You also get to be in control of how you think about that. You can just say like, oh yeah, I did contribute to this, now how do I need to think and be differently? Who do I need to be in order to create a different result?
So I love you guys. Your lives will change when you start to take ownership over everything, and I just want to honor you for doing this work. And thank you guys so much for posting on your Instagram stories. I love it. Keep tagging me. Keep telling me your thoughts. Give me your feedback. Share with the world. If you know that somebody needs to hear this episode, please share it with them. I love you guys. I hope you have the most beautiful week and I will talk to you soon.
Thank you so much for joining me for today’s episode of Soul CEO. If you want to go even deeper into how to create a vision of the life you really want, how to become the woman in that vision and how to deal with the roadblocks we all face along the way, head over to lindseymangocoaching.com/high-vibe-formula to get your free training of my High-Vibe Formula.
