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Ep #88: It’s Working vs It’s Not Working 2.0

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I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about a pattern that shows up not only for my clients but for me and my peers too. It’s something that can get in the way for everyone at any level of business, so listen in and take notes. 

What inspires you to keep moving towards your goals? Is it the belief that what you’re currently doing is working, or that it’s not working? Believing it’s working feels dangerous to us, and we think we won’t take action from this place, but I’m offering that focusing here is exactly what will spark inspired, consistent action towards the life and business you want.

Join me this week as I invite you to consider what would happen if you chose to believe it’s always working. I’m showing you why believing it’s not working will keep you stuck in a cycle of inconsistent, unsustainable results, and how to be onto your brain when it wants to offer this up. 

Anything but Average is opening for enrollment from January 5th to the 11th! If you want to become a great coach, start your coaching business, and sign clients, make sure to click here and join the waitlist to be put on an exclusive email list where you’ll get sneak peeks inside the program before it reopens!

The next round of the Anything but Average Coach Mastermind opens on February 23rd for the spring of 2022 class! If you missed out on this current round, make sure to mark your calendars so you don’t miss out!

What You'll Learn on this Episode

  • What I’ve discovered about the power of believing whatever you’re working towards is working.
  • The results you will create when you believe it’s working versus it’s not working. 
  • Why our brains automatically believe it’s not working.
  • The difference between feeling motivated when it’s not working and feeling inspired when it is working.
  • How to bring awareness to the belief that it’s not working.

Featured on the Show

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Click to Read Episode Transcript

Hey guys, before we jump into today’s episode, I want to make sure you know the next enrollment dates for Anything But Average, my program that teaches you how to become a great coach, start you coaching business, and sign clients.

Anything But Average will open for enrollment January 5th and close January 11th. Make sure to mark your calendar. If you are ready to join this round go to lindseymangocoaching.com/anythingbutaverage. Click the button that says join the wait list, it’s right at the top, and you will be put on an exclusive email list where you will get sneak peeks in the program, sneak peeks of our live coaching sessions, as well as bonus content until the program re-opens. I love you guys and I can’t wait to see you on the inside. Let’s jump in.

Welcome to the Anything But Average podcast where I will teach you how to create a coaching business one step at a time. I’m Lindsey Mango, a life coach passionate about helping you create the life of your wildest dreams by creating a coaching business. Let’s get started.

Hey guys, welcome back to another week and another episode of Anything but Average. Oh my gosh, I’m cracking up. Have you guys ever known like a phone number or garage code by heart and then you consciously think about it and you’re like, “What is that number?” I just did that with the intro. I was like, “Is this what I say?” So if that wasn’t the same, that’s why. Got in my head a little bit.

Before we jump into today’s episode, I want to share a testimonial from one of my students, Victoria. Victoria actually started in Anything But Average and is now in the Anything But Average coaching mastermind.

Here’s what she had to say. “Before joining the program Anything But Average, I was treating my coaching business as a hobby. And that was showing up in my results. I had only made $2,000 per year for two years in a row. I was at a point where I was all in on changing and ready to treat my coaching business like a real business. I knew Lindsay could help me do this.

One of the biggest issues Lindsay helped me identify was I was seeking everyone’s approval, secretly thinking please like my posts, follow me, find my content amazing. Do you want to work with me? What I realized was I didn’t need to be validated by others to succeed and get what I wanted. I leaned into the fact that there were 5 to 10 of her, her ideal client, out there reading her content and that it would only take one.”

For those of you guys listening, this is one of the biggest concepts I teach. It can be very overwhelming and you can speak very broadly when you’re thinking about all the people. What we work on is signing one client at a time and focusing on one person at a time. The more you speak to that one person directly, the more you attract of that one person. And that’s what creates 5, 10, 20 clients.

She said, “My favorite part about the program is that whatever effort you put in, you get back exponentially. If I’m trying to work through something in my business, I might present one or two thoughts and then the group shares even more. Then my growth and learning skyrockets even more than it would have on my own. Which means I get results faster and faster on a grander scale in a shorter period of time.

I don’t have to hit my head against a wall going through all my phases of growth. The group catapults me through them quicker because they see things that I don’t and many of them have been there before and know what’s coming next. It just makes business sense to be in this room, and it doesn’t hurt that all the women are really fun and inspiring too.

Since enrolling in Anything But Average this year, I made $12,000 compared to the total of $4,000 I made in the last two years. With that said, my results are only compounding because I’ve made $5,000 of that in the last month and clients are flowing more consistently than ever before.

I’ve finally gotten to a place where I feel 100% worthy of these results and I’ve never been so calm and relaxed about my business and my goals. I can’t wait to see what I do in the last quarter of this year.” So good, Victoria, I am so freaking excited for you.

All right, so today I’m super excited about the topic. I know I say that at the beginning of almost every episode. Well, you guys can learn from that too, right? You have to be your own hype girl. But genuinely today’s topic is a concept that I’ve spent lots and lots of time thinking about and working through in my own brain and helping my clients work through.

And I’m not just saying clients in Anything But Average, which is that first step of getting started. I’m saying my clients who are making six figures in my mastermind and beyond that. This is a pattern that shows up for me and even my peers in the $2 million mastermind that I’m a part of. So this is gold, prepare yourself. You’re going to want to listen to this episode more than once. Get a piece of paper out or journal, whatever and take notes.

So what we’re going to talk about today is the difference between the thought and the belief that it’s working versus it’s not working. And when I say this, what I mean is believing that your business is is working. Like it’s working that you’re signing clients. It’s working that you’re getting consults. It’s working that you’re creating the results that you want and you’re moving forward your progress every single day.

Even at the beginning it’s working that you’re building the skills to be a great coach and that you’re going to start putting it out there and launch your business. Versus believing it’s not working. It’s not working that you are not signing the clients you want or getting the results you want, any of that.

Now, here’s what I realized, believing it’s working versus it’s not working is the difference between creating the result of it working versus it not working. Now, I know conceptually you might be like, “Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.” But here’s the thing, our brain is naturally wired to go to a place of believing it’s not working, even when it is. When we have a two day lull or a one week lull, our brain’s automatic thought is it’s not working.

And today, what I want to talk about is the results that you create when you believe it’s working versus it’s not working. Why our brain actually does this so you can be on to yourself and bring awareness to this. And how to actually change it.

All right, so let’s jump in. I want to ask you guys a question, when do
you feel most inspired to keep going and continue to take action towards your goals? When you believe it’s working or when you believe it’s not working? I’m going to give you guys a couple examples.

When you are working towards losing weight, do you feel more excited and inspired to keep going when you see the scale go down? When you start making offers in your coaching business and people start reaching out or you start signing clients, do you feel more inspired to keep going and continue to take action?

Versus when you try to lose weight and the scale doesn’t move or you’re making offers and no one says anything. And you’re trying to sign clients but it’s not happening and you’re believing it’s not working. Do you feel inspired then?

What I’ve realized is we feel inspired to continue to take consistent action when we believe it’s working. Now the examples I used were circumstantial, right? You’re like, “Well, it’s easy to believe it’s working when you lose weight, people are reaching out, you’re signing clients.”

But the key is learning to believe it’s working when you’re not losing the weight yet, when you haven’t had people reach out, when people aren’t buying yet. Because that’s going to be what creates the result of it does work, that you do lose the weight, that you do sign the clients, that you do have people reaching out, because exactly what we just said. You will be inspired to continue taking that consistent action when you believe it’s working.

Now the reality is some of you might be thinking, “Well, when I believe it’s not working, like when I think I’ve gained too much weight after the holidays, or my business feels like it’s in shambles, I get this like surge of motivation.”

And the thing that I want to offer you guys is that this motivation is very different than the inspiration you feel when you believe it’s working. This surge of motivation comes from more of like an urgent energy and pressure and force.

Now that might feel useful, it does feel useful to your brain. I almost think of it as like your brain is like nothing’s working, it jumps into fight or flight mode. It’s like we’ve got to jump into action and do all this crazy stuff and force ourselves to get out of bed at 5am so we fix this problem because it’s not working.

And temporarily it does, it lights that fire under your ass. But what ends up happening is, I’ve actually used this example before, is it’s almost like you’re trying to light a bonfire using 1,000 little matches. You’re using this pressurized motivation, this urgent motivation to get yourself going. And that only lasts for so long.

That’s why when you believe it’s not working, you might get a surge of results, you might get a surge of motivation. But then what ends up happening is when you start to believe it’s working again, you go back into this pattern of, “Oh, I don’t need to do anything” because you only know how to use pressure and force and urgency. And you fall back off and you stop taking consistent action because you can only maintain, just like with a fire, you could only keep a fire going for so long using like thousands of tiny little matches.

It’s the same thing here. And so what this does is just to show you how this shows up in results with the same examples we used, you might lose 20 pounds, but then you gain it all back. And you might sign a client, but then you go on a two month streak where you’re not. And what it does is it creates this roller coaster ride of emotions and inconsistency in the results that you’re creating.

Over time, what this does is it gets you so fed up you usually don’t end up losing the weight for good and creating the lifestyle and the consistent results you want. And you don’t create the business that creates consistent results that you want. And then what you do is your brain gets stuck back in thinking this isn’t working.

And it’s only because you’re using the thought and the belief that it’s not working to motivate short, quick bursts of action that aren’t sustainable over time. And again, you create the result of it not working.

Now, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why our brains want to do this. Why do our brains want to believe it’s not working, when we could believe it is working? And here’s why, our brain thinks it’s useful to tell you it’s not working.

It thinks if I tell you it’s not working and you’re worrying about that, you’ll jump into action, and you’ll do something about it. And when you do something about it, then we will get it to work.

But what ends up happening is our thought ends up in the outcome as we create more of it not working. We go on that up and down cycle that keeps us from continuing to increase our outcomes over time. It’s really crazy, I catch my brain doing it all the time. It’s like let me convince Lindsey that it’s not working so she can get her ass off this couch to go do something about it.

Now I’m really onto myself so I catch myself and I see what’s happening. And I bring awareness to it and I’m like, “Hey, brain, this isn’t helpful. I know that believing it’s not working is going to create more of that outcome.” And that’s what I really want you guys to take away from this, believing it’s not working, even if your brain thinks it’s going to help push you into action is going to create more of that outcome.

On the flip side, believing it’s working feels very unsafe to your brain. Your brain thinks if I believe it’s working, even if I don’t have tangible evidence of it working yet, what’s going to happen is I’m going to sit on this couch and I’m going to eat bonbons all day and I’m not going to do anything to fix it.

But what did we talk about earlier? It’s easier to continue to take action consistently when you’re feeling inspired, when you feel like it’s working. That’s what helps you hit the same nail with the same hammer over and over again, instead of like putting 5,000 nails in the wall and trying to do 100 million different things to try to get it to work.

And do you know what creates results over time? It’s taking that consistent, focused action until you create the result that it works. So again, if your brain thinks if I believe it’s working then I won’t do anything to fix this. And if I don’t do anything to fix this then I won’t get the outcome I want.

Again, it’s such a funny function of our mind because the result you create when you believe it’s working is more of it working. And the result you create when you believe it’s not working is less of it working. So again, your brain basically is doing the opposite. It’s trying to convince you of the opposite and it will end up creating the result that you don’t want if you’re believing it’s not working.

Now, again, when you believe it’s working, what you do is you make higher quality decisions. Believing it’s working doesn’t mean putting your head in the sand and pretending that it’s working. It’s actually believing and focusing on what is working. What invisible evidence, if you haven’t listened to that episode go back and listen to it, you have. How you are laying the foundation to lose the weight, to sign the clients, to make more money.

And what that does is it provides you and puts you in a position to make higher quality decisions to evaluate your business and make adjustments. It creates inspired action.

Again, when I believe my business is working I don’t just sit on the couch and watch Netflix all day. I feel really excited, I want to keep going. And I still problem solve, like figure out okay, if I have a goal and I’m not hitting it, what else can we do? But not from this place of believing it’s not working. Not from this place of like low quality thinking and decision making, of I have to like force myself into action to fix this problem. And instead evaluate from a place of curiosity to improve it.

It’s like problem solving from a place of it’s working allows you to problem solve at a higher level and again, create more of what’s working. Problem solving at a place of it’s not working puts you in lower quality thinking, lower quality decision making. And then you’re just trying to solve these giant problems that create more work, more grind, more burnout, that doesn’t create the massive results that you could get from doing it another way.

So in conclusion, the work to create better results in starting your coaching business, is to focus on what’s working. Is to work on believing it is working and then evaluate what you want to adjust from there.

Most of the time I see this happen people will message me all the time and they’ll be like, “It was working. I signed two clients last month and then I went a couple of weeks and I didn’t sign a client. And now it’s not working, I need to solve all these problems.”

And I’m like, the only problem that happened is you stopped believing it was working. The only problem is you got in your head and you stopped believing that you were going to sign two more clients this month even if they didn’t reach out the first two weeks of the month. That is the only problem.

Because imagine how you would have showed up the last two weeks and the next two weeks believing it’s working. Believing someone is one centimeter away from buying from you, from reaching out, from signing as your client.

Now, just like everything else we work on, this requires building a level of trust within yourself. Building a level of trust in something that feels very scary to your brain. It will feel very scary to believe it’s working when it feels like it’s not. And again, we’re not talking fake it till you make it. I mean, actually deeply in your body believing it is working. I’ve probably said it’s working 100 times, my apologies.

But it’s like in your bones actually seeing how it is working and believing how it’s working. That requires trust. Your brain is literally going to be like “Guys, we should freak out. Don’t do that. You’re never going to change it if you do that.” But it’s not true. It’s a survival mechanism of the mind that does not work to create the coaching business that you really want.

So to build this trust you have to make small decisions trusting in this new way of thinking. And eventually that muscle gets bigger. Eventually you get to the point where you’re like me and I’m really onto my brain. It still does this because my brain is still a brain and it’s trying to do its job of surviving and keeping me alive. But I’m like, “Oh, I see what you’re doing there. We need to go back and focus on how it is working, and then evaluate and make decisions from there.”

This is something we work on in Anything But Average all of the time. Even at the beginning. You might be thinking, “Well, if I haven’t even launched my business yet, how is it working?” There are things that are working, there are things that you’re laying the foundation for. And believing that is going to help you build that confidence to get out there and get started.

So I just want to offer this, what if you never again chose to believe that it’s not working? What if you chose to believe it’s working all of the time and your only job is to look for evidence of how that’s true? Build belief in that, build thinking that supports that, all of which we do in the program. And here’s what I will tell you, it will work. And it will work better than ever. And you will work less than ever and create bigger results than ever.

All right, I love you guys. Make sure to join the wait list for Anything But Average so you can create a business that consistently works. Be onto your brain, it’s trying to keep you safe and hold you back. And truly believe it is working so you can be inspired to take action in your business and in your life every day and create more and more of what you guys want.

I love you guys. I will talk to you next week. Bye.

If you’re ready to take this work deeper and create your own coaching business, join us in Anything But Average where I will walk you through the step by step process to become a coach, start your coaching business, and start signing clients. Go to lindseymangocoaching.com/anythingbutaverage and I will see you on the inside.

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