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Hi and welcome to episode five of the scary goals podcast. Today I'm going to talk about why you are not taking action. I'm going to break it all down [00:01:00] and explain exactly why and what you can do to move through it. Okay, now this could be if you've not set your goal, if you're not taking action towards even setting it or deciding or committing to a time frame or how it's going to be measurable.
Or if you have your goal and you're not actually doing the things that's going to move you forward. Okay. I'm going to explain why.
So I just want to offer if you are not taking action towards your goal, it is completely normal. Okay. Because our brains are wired for us not to go after big, scary goals. Now, what do I mean by that? It's like, but I want to go after these goals. Like, Oh, that doesn't even make sense. Why would our brains be wired for that?
So I'm going to talk a little bit about how our brains work and why this is getting in the way of you going after the goals that you want.
So we have two key pieces of our brain that are, we have lots of amazing pieces of our brain, but two pieces and two parts of our brain that are really helpful when we're thinking about why we do things and why we don't do things.
Okay. So [00:02:00] the first part of our brain is what's known as the amygdala. So it's in the middle bit of your brain. It's this like tiny little part of your brain. And I often call it the survival part of your brain. So it's very much focused on survival.
It's like a mini fire alarm. So it's very sensitive. It can often be quite inaccurate and it's constantly scanning, looking for danger and then it very quickly will sound the alarm.
And when it signs this alarm, it will say, okay, there is danger. It quickly puts your body into action. You will go into what's known as fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Like, you will have a stress response. You will feel your heart rate go up, your breathing will quicken, your palms will be sweaty, and your body will be in a stress state.
It will think that there is some danger that you're in. And if you think about it, Like, back millennia ago, the reason that this has stayed with us and has evolved is it's kept us alive, like, it's worked very well. When there used to be something that was going to chase us, or we were going to be in [00:03:00] danger, the amygdala's calling the shots, it's making very quick, reactive, emotional short term decisions.
It's also very useful today. So say you're on your bike and a car pulls out in front of you. It's that very quick reaction to be able to kind of shove on your brakes and maybe your heart rate's gone up and you're like, Oh, that's the amygdala working and your body responding and you're alive. You didn't get hit by that car.
Like it's something that we want. It's amazing. But there's other quirks of it that haven't really caught up to modern day life and how we live at the moment. So we will have the same stress response, we will have the same physiological response in our body, whether we're about to hit a car or whether we are thinking about publishing the book or whatever your scary goal is, right?
Whether we're literally going to be in physical danger and possibly die, or whether we are thinking about publishing the book, we will have the same physiological [00:04:00] response. Our brain is telling us we are in danger right now and it's just not always that helpful to have this little fire alarm going in our brain and us getting like, Oh, into this fear.
Because oftentimes when there's, there's fear, we are holding back taking action. We're not going towards the goal because we have been wired to avoid discomfort, avoid emotional discomfort
because we've also been wired to want to be part of a tribe and we're looking to others, like we're looking for their opinions, wanting to feel part of a tribe. When we are doing scary goals, a lot of them require us to take bigger action, to put ourselves out there, to maybe risk other people saying things about us that we don't want them to know, or that we don't feel are true.
Thinking about publishing a book. Someone could comment on it. Someone could have a judgment about it. What if it doesn't get good reviews? Like all of these fears that we have, they will stop us from taking action.
And so as well as being [00:05:00] wired to avoid this discomfort, we're also wired to conserve energy. And thinking about this, like it made sense millennia ago, right?
When we didn't know where our next meal was coming from, you wouldn't just go out and expend energy. Like these brains take a lot of energy.
Of course, our brains have wired to be very efficient, be very effective. We very quickly build habits. Like everything that you're doing at the moment , so much of it is habitual. You don't have to actively think about it. You don't even realize it's a habit, but you're just doing it.
But it is, it's a, a habit that your brain has built to conserve. Energy because it can just take that quicker action. And it's the same when we're thinking about going after a bigger, scarier goal. It's going to take energy to come up with new ideas, to dream up new ways of doing things, to change our habits, to do things differently, to become a different person.
All of that is going to require. energy, cognitive energy, physical energy, whatever it is we're doing. And it's always going to be harder to do that than just [00:06:00] to do what we've always done. Our brain is literally wired to keep us doing what we've always done because it's familiar. It uses less energy.
It feels safe to our brain. So it's very much about safety. Our brain thinks as a scary goal, something unknown, something where. We might quote unquote die, or get separated from the tribe and be different. That feels very scary, so we will move away from that.
And we're also wired to seek pleasure. . So again, back millennia ago, this made sense. We're wired to go and get food to eat the food, to procreate, to do things that bond us as a tribe. Like all of that made sense. Now seeking pleasure, we have the same release of dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter.
We have the same release of that in anticipation of going on social media and seeing what other people are up to in the tribe. we are wired to want to do the easy thing to check a few more emails or do something that feels familiar that we know how to do or we busy [00:07:00] ourselves with stuff that feels comfortable rather than spending time and going after the scary goal, publishing that book, whatever it is, that feels uncomfortable. It feels scary. It feels new. And so it's easier to avoid doing all of those things by focusing on the quick wins, the busy stuff,
Rather than carving out that time and going after what really matters to us. Also seeking pleasure can be. Not just being on our phone, but having another cup of tea or having a snack that feels way more pleasurable and our brain is wired to be like more of that than sitting down and doing our scary goal.
Even this morning, I have been in that place. So I've come into the workspace. It's like, I'm going to record this podcast and. It took me a good 20 minutes to start. I was like, Oh, maybe another coffee. So I had to like another coffee and I was like, maybe I'm a bit hungry.
Had a snack, checked my phone, did all these things because that was easier for my brain than risking not [00:08:00] communicating in a good way or. Thinking about what I was going to say or like standing up and chatting right now about it, like that feels harder to my brain than like sitting, scrolling on my phone, drinking a coffee and eating some oat cakes.
So much easier, right? So it's easy to slip into that because our brain defaults to that. And also nothing has gone wrong. So we have this survival part of our brain, it is wired to keep us safe, wired to keep us doing what we've always done, and doing the easy thing.
We also have this other part of our brain, what's known as the prefrontal cortex.
So this is at the , front part of our brain, this is where we can imagine into the future. We can imagine building bridges and then designing them and creating them, like putting them out into the world.
We can imagine future society, how we want it to be. We can create this vision for our lives, for the impact we want to make in the world. We can dream up a scary goal and imagine what that could be like, and then actually take the action towards it. Like, this part of our brain. Is what I call the human [00:09:00] part of our brain or executive part of our brain or CEO part of our brain.
It makes more strategic, longer term decisions that have our best interests at heart. So in the moment, our survival brain is often calling the shots. It wants to do the easy thing. When we can shift out of that, out of that fight or flight, freeze or fawn, bring ourselves into a more calm state. We're able to access our prefrontal cortex, our smart part of our brain, our human part of our brain, and we're going to make just way better decisions about what we are spending our time on.
Including carving out time to go after these scary goals, because ultimately we know that we want to go after them. You know, there's that impact you want to make in the world. You know, you want to publish that book.
Only reason that you're not, that you're not taking that action is because you're letting your survival brain call the shots. Okay. So I just want to offer your survival brain. If it's giving you fear and this could happen, this could happen. It's [00:10:00] totally normal. Okay. It means you're working just fine. And just because it is offering you a thought doesn't mean you have to believe it.
So I want to explain a little bit more about what thoughts are. Thoughts are sentences. Our brain offers us. We have thousands and thousands of them every single day. And I imagine it almost like a conveyor belt of thoughts. So it's just kind of like going past and it's like there's a bunch of thoughts just kind of going past.
Now we know that we are not our thoughts. Because we can observe them. And if this feels like a bit alien to you at the moment, if you've never done meditation, if you've never had counseling or coaching or never been able to watch your brain, it will just take practice. That's all. But once you get into slowing down and observing your brain, you'll see it's like your brain will offer you a thought, offer you another thought, and you can be like, Oh, look.
There's a sentence, it's offering me that. So again, it's like the conveyor belt, like it's just going past, like your thoughts are not you. That's [00:11:00] so important to understand. Just because your brain offers you a thought, it doesn't mean it's you. It doesn't mean it's true. It doesn't mean it's helpful. It's just your brain trying to make sense of the world.
And it's offering you thoughts based on your past beliefs, your upbringing, what we've been conditioned by society to believe. And a lot of times, like the work I do with my clients, they're I don't even believe that. It's like we have these beliefs that we just take with us and we don't question them.
And then when we do question them, which is what we do with coaching, then we can decide, is this actually something I want to believe? And if not. You can let it go just because your brain offers you thought doesn't mean a you have to believe it or be you have to think it. It can be offering you the thoughts, but you can just notice it as a thought and let it be there and decide instead that there's something else you want to believe.
So there's a really good analogy . One of my clients used to call it the doom cupboard. It was like such a good, such a good phrase. So if you've ever seen that episode of friends where Monica, who was very tidy, had [00:12:00] the doom cupboard, there was that cupboard that had just all this stuff like shoved in it and piled in it and she'd like shut it and then they discovered it.
We're like, what is the same with our brain when we ignore it? Like, we still have all those thoughts and those may be negative beliefs or unhelpful beliefs. They are still there when we just ignore them when we don't look at them. It doesn't mean they go away. They are still driving our behavior and I'll get onto how that works.
They're still there. They're still influencing our life. They're influencing the lens that we're looking through. They're influencing like how we are seeing the world, how we are interpreting the world just because they're there and we're not looking at them. Doesn't make them go away. And so what we do, and this is what we dive into with coaching, is like opening the cupboard and taking everything out, looking at it all, and then deciding on purpose, okay, what do I actually want to put back in?
What is intentional? What do I want to believe about myself? Because here's the other thing, you get to believe anything about yourself. Anything. There's no thought police. [00:13:00] There's no rules about what you have to believe and what you don't like. You get to decide to believe anything you want about yourself and your life and your goals just because you want to.
If it's helpful, then you get to believe it. What I've known to be true is you can find just as much evidence for a negative belief as you can for a more helpful one. And the more that we are focused on one way of thinking, our brain loves to prove itself true so it will find even more evidence that that's true.
So equally, you can decide to believe whatever the hell you want and you will find evidence for that. Just because your brain offers you a thought doesn't mean you have to believe it. And it doesn't mean it's true. And the reason that understanding what is going on in our brain, understanding what we are thinking, what our brain is offering us is because when we believe a thought, so your brain can be offering you thoughts and you can notice and be like, Oh, I sometimes.
If you're watching this on video you can see I'm holding up like a whiteboard pen and I'll watch it like go past and be like oh that's interesting like I'll [00:14:00] approach it with curiosity be like oh there you go brain okay I've seen this one before here's that old story here's a little thought that's interesting and then you can just put it down like you don't have to get caught up in it when we are swept up in the conveyor belt of thoughts and we're not questioning them and we're not separating ourselves from them.
And we believe them, like our brain is offering us a thought and we are believing it. The reason this is so important to know is then it makes us feel a certain way. Okay, so feeling is just a pattern of energy we feel in our body and it's caused by a sentence, a thought that our brain is offering us and when we believe it, we feel that somewhere in our body.
So, for example, if you feel joy, it's going to feel different than if you feel anxious. For me, joy, I feel like it's kind of light and bubbly and expansive in my like chest. Anxiety feels like someone's like got their hands in my throat and it feels quite heavy and it's pressing in on my chest.
It's just energy in our body because whatever is going on in our brain, but we [00:15:00] believe it, our body changes its physiological state and it's just energy moving around our body. Okay. Feelings are not good or bad. They just are. They're just a pattern of energy caused by a sentence in our brain. And the more that we can understand what we're feeling and just be okay with it and not try and change it, but just notice it.
The less power these feelings have over us, I'm going to do a whole episode of this oddness in the future. It's so important. And this is work I've got into a bit more recently is like really understanding the signals that the feelings are telling us and what it actually means. Because in 2019 I got completely burned out and I had counseling that really helped me move through it.
I still remember the therapist being like, okay, and how are you feeling? I only had the language for good, bad, or like meh, good, bad, meh. That was the vocabulary that I had. Whereas now I have a much richer understanding of [00:16:00] what I am feeling in any moment, why I am feeling it because it's a sentence in my brain.
And knowing that I could decide actually if I want to feel something different, like that's the amazing thing about understanding your brain. And then you can be intentional with how you want to think, you can be intentional with how you want to feel. It literally changed my life, like even in quote unquote stressful situations.
I always know I can bring myself back to a place of calm because of these tools. Like it's so powerful knowing that anything can be happening around me and I can bring myself back to feeling calm. Or I can be scared of taking action and I can still take action.
Okay, so feelings are a pattern of energy in our body caused by a sentence in our brain. The reason that feelings are so important to understand is they are the fuel for every single thing that we do in our life. So if you are not doing something, and I'm going to give a specific example, okay, relating to a scary goal.
If you are not taking action towards your scary goal, you are not doing something or you're doing something that you don't want to be doing, or you're doing something else. [00:17:00] It's always because of how you are thinking and feeling. Okay, so anytime you are not taking action, it's because of a sentence in your brain, how you are thinking and how you are feeling always.
How amazing is that to know now that you know that your brain is wired to keep you safe. It's going to be offering you these thoughts that are going to. Stop you from taking action towards your scary goal. Always. It doesn't want you to go after your scary goal, so it's going to be offering you all these thoughts that are maybe going to cause uncertainty or fear or confusion.
Or overwhelm and it doesn't want you to go after your goal. That's okay. Just by knowing this, it's going to just shift so much because you're going to be able to observe your brain to understand what it's doing and it's like, huh, I don't have to believe this. I don't have to get caught up in this. The reason this is so powerful to understand is everything that we are doing and not doing, that's going to determine whether you create your goal or not. Like if you're going to. Okay. If you're going to be taking [00:18:00] action, if you're going to start writing the book, if you're going to be reaching out and finding a publisher, or if you're going to be avoiding it and doing something else and being like, Oh, I don't have time.
I've got all these other things on like making excuses for it. Usually there's the underlying fear, which is caused by sentence in your brain because your brain is wired to keep you safe and not doing what ultimately you want to do. So just knowing that you want to go after the goal ultimately, because it is like calling to you like these soul whispers.
But your survival brain is like, uh, I do not want to be separated for the tribe. I do not want other people judging it. What if my writing is terrible? What if no one reads it? Like it's going to be offering you these thoughts. And I just want to offer that it's not that you're scared of writing the book.
It's not that you're scared of publishing the book. So it's not your goal that's causing the fear. It's just a sentence in your brain such as someone might judge it. It'll get terrible reviews. Okay? And knowing that, you can decide if you want [00:19:00] to be focusing on that, if you want to have that as a thought, oftentimes it might not be that helpful.
Maybe you do want to explore the thought and question it. But knowing that any time you are not taking action, it's always, always down to what's going on in your brain. And if you, if you're not aware of what's going on in your brain now, grab a piece of paper or do this later. Anytime if you're taking action towards your scary goal and then you're hesitating, grab a piece of paper and just get everything out of your brain.
So clearing out that doom cupboard, right, get everything down and see what is there and just know that everything you've written down, that is a thought. That is a sentence, a story, an opinion that your brain is telling you. Remember your brain is scared. It wants to keep you safe. It's going to be offering you all these thoughts that are stopping you from taking action.
It's completely normal and you don't have to believe them. Okay? So really, I encourage you to do this exercise now because the more separation you can have, and that's why writing these thoughts down is so [00:20:00] powerful because you see that it's not you. You know that they're thoughts because you can read them, you can read them back to yourself.
And once I started really doing this work, it literally shifted everything. And so now, like, if there's a reason that you're not doing what ultimately you want to do, ultimately you want to publish that book. If you're not doing it, it's. always, always down to your brain and the thoughts that it's offering you, which is amazing news because you have full control over what you want to tell yourself and what you want to believe and the story that you want to tell yourself on purpose.
So if how you're thinking at the moment isn't helping you move towards the goal. You can just notice that and then you get to think on purpose with anything that you want. And again, this is what we dive into with coaching is like rewriting some of these stories, deciding a new way of thinking. And there's this amazing thing that our brain has and does, and it's called neuroplasticity.
Literally, we can rewire our brain. How freaking amazing is that we [00:21:00] can rewire the connection, our automatic nervous system. So the connection between our mind and our body, the default thoughts that your brain offers you, like, Oh, what if it gets terrible reviews? I'm not going to be good at it.
Like all of those . The only reason your brain keeps offering you it is because you've practiced them more. Imagine it's almost like super highways in your brain. They've just been practiced. The neural pathways have been practiced way, way more. So it becomes a default thought your brain offers you.
Again, it doesn't mean it's true. It doesn't mean it's helpful, but once you understand that you can literally rewire your brain, you can start practicing a new way of thinking, a new way of seeing, thinking about your goal that's going to help you take action. And when you start practicing, it's going to feel a bit weird.
I always imagine you're going for a hike and you're like through the Heather. You're tromping a bit of a path or maybe there's a little bit of a deer track and you're kind of following it. And, initially it's a lot of work. It feels a bit clunky, like it doesn't come naturally, but the more that you practice it, like the more that you walk the path back and forth.
The [00:22:00] quicker it is to shift away from the more unhelpful ways of thinking about your goal that's stopping you from taking action and the easier it is to focus on helpful ways of thinking that are going to help you stay motivated and put yourself out there and be okay if other people comment or judge and I'm going to get and speak about this in a future episode like what to do when you think about what other people might say.
But you're in full control over rewiring your own brain and yes, it takes work. You can't just think of something a new way and like it changes, but you can decide and keep practicing thinking about your goal, thinking about yourself in a different way. And it's going to change everything.
It's going to help you. Show up in a bigger way, take more action and actually create the goal. And your brain will still give you all these thoughts like it's a scared brain. And it doesn't mean stop.
Remember, your brain offers you thousands of thoughts every single day, like a conveyor belt of thoughts, and [00:23:00] they will drive how you're feeling. They will drive whether you are actually taking the action forward or not. And ultimately whether you're taking action towards your goal and then when you create that goal or not.
So if you are not doing something you want to do, if you are not writing your book, if you are not taking action towards your scary goal, it's always, always, always down to what's going on in your brain. And what's amazing news is you are in full control. of shifting that, of rewiring your brain, of thinking something completely different, and changing your whole outlook and perspective and how you were showing up, and creating the scary goal.
I hope you have an amazing rest of the day, and I'll catch you next week. Bye!
