The Power of Limiting Beliefs

Limiting beliefs and gloom-and-doom predictions are more powerful than we care to admit. However: YOU CAN bust through these roadblocks. 


Links where I can be found: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/2023/01/30/updates-housekeeping/

Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/ 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com, and now here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In the last episode, I talked about job market drama, job market bad behavior, how to potentially deal with it, what I'm seeing in real time. And I also mentioned as a completely unsolicited plug Greg Brent's program stopped taking BS from eff-ers, funny, cheeky name, but it gets the point across. And I wanted to piggyback off of that in this sort of follow up episode to that, because I'm here to say that in my experience, when you really get into that space, in the little five minute meditation that he offers for free, one of the things that he says is, even if that person is you, if you are the person giving BS to yourself, you have to stop doing it. And I'm here to say that, in my experience, when you really get to that place of enough is enough. I'm done taking BS from ephors, even if I'm the one that's doling it out to myself, I'm done. The energy around you and around the stuff that you've been dealing with can shift so quickly. I mean, almost overnight. It's really unreal when you get to that space of doneness, and I want to pull the curtain back, you know, I've always said, even though this is a business related daytime type of podcast, I've said that I wanted to be honest, as transparent as I could be and just authentic. I don't want to get on the air and give people a bunch of hot air and hopium or tell them lies and nonsense. You can find that anywhere it's plentiful. Whenever I did a soft launch, a soft, quiet launch of this business, back in 2019 I was still working a corporate level management job, and I was super busy, but I knew that I wanted to get out of corporate America, and it was really funny. It's kind of like the old phrase Never say never. Because when my first business folded, I slammed the door on it hard and with malice, I felt like I had been betrayed. It felt like a best friend or a spouse had betrayed me, and this thing that was supposed to be my freedom, my ticket out of corporate America, failed and left me teetering on bankruptcy in a dark night of the soul, a deeply depressive episode, and it was terrible. So I found to myself never again. I will never try self employment again? Whatever it is that helps other people succeed with it? Apparently I don't have that. Maybe it's a gene I was born without, but I will never do that again. I was wounded, and I was hurt. I was so deeply hurt. I've heard it said before that a lot of times, if we're in a space of intense anger. It's really not so much anger, it's hurt. And for me, looking back with years of hindsight now, I realized that's exactly what it was. I was hurt. I was wounded. I felt so sad and so disappointed that I gave everything that I thought I had to this business, and I worked myself like crazy, ran on fumes, and it failed anyway. Never say never. So by 2019 I'm like, Okay, this ain't it. This corporate career is not it. I'd made it to the corner office. I was in a big management position, and I I'm sitting there looking out the windows of this corner office, and I'm like, This is what I was always told by the boomer generation that I was supposed to want. And now that I'm here, it feels like a period victory. This isn't what I want. And I decided, well, maybe, maybe I can figure out what it is that helps other people turn a side hustle into a legitimate, full time business. It can't be that there's a magic gene I was born without. There has to be something I can do. So I started a soft, quiet launch of a coaching business while I was still in corporate America by 2020, when the happened, and there were shutdowns and lockdowns, and everybody was sent home with a laptop to work from home. I was like, You're not gonna get a clearer opportunity than this. It's almost like the universe is sending you a monogrammed invitation saying, hey, look, hey, hey, hey, here's your opportunity to get out of corporate America. And do what you would rather be doing, which is self employment, but successful, financially feasible, self employment, enjoyable, self employment that doesn't make you miserable and make you feel like an indentured servant in your own life. Yes, it was scary. Yes, I had mixed emotions about pulling the band aid off when the time came, but once I landed a long term contract with my first real client, I knew I'm out. It's time to go, it's time to roll it's go time. And that passion overcame that fear. So fast forward a few months. I'm on this long term contract, and they call me up out of nowhere in the summer of 2020 and they tell me, Hey, we need to furlough you for a couple of weeks. We don't think it's going to be any longer than a couple of weeks, but we just we need you to lay off for that period of time because we're behind. We have some clients that haven't paid us, and in turn, we might struggle to pay you. We don't want you to work for that period of time and then not be able to pay you. So it would be easier on us to get back in the black if you just laid off for a couple of weeks and then you looped back in. So of course, the panic sets in. Oh my god. You know, I've never been a professional Freelancer before. Is this normal? Does this happen? How am I going to handle it? And I allowed myself to have, I mean, my mindset was really in a good place back then, I allowed myself to have a solid five to 10 minute panic attack, like I need to let the emotions out. I need to feel what I'm feeling instead of repressing it, which is dangerous to do. So I had my little five to 10 minute panic attack, oh, my God. What if? What if? What if? What if? And then I said, All right, that's enough. That's enough. That's not going to help you. Whenever we try to make big life decisions from that place of fear, they tend to not be smart decisions. I call it spaz mode. My friend Eric refers to it as beast mode. Same thing. It's just, ah, everything feels very hairy and very scary. And it's like you can't see the forest for the trees, because you're just in this what if. What if? What if? What if? Panic, panic, panic, oh my god, type mood. It's hard to get out of and to really make a good decision from that place. So I had my little panic, and then I took a deep breath and said, All right, well, what next? Decide what you want to do next. One of my What if fears was, what if this is longer than two weeks? What if they don't come back at all? What if this is the beginning of the end, and I've gone out on this limb, and now the limb is about to be sought out from underneath me, and I'm going to land on the ground and splat, been there, done that, before. It was surely unpleasant. The first week I just took off, the first week of furlough, I was like, my god, I haven't had proper time off in a while. Those of you who've done it before, you know what it's like when you're working a full time corporate job and you're quietly hustling behind the scenes to get a side hustle going and to have it sprout wings and leave the ground and be able to really provide for you and your family. It's a lot of freaking work, and it's tiring. So the first week, I was just like, hey, I'm not going to panic. I'm going to take a week off. There's plenty to do around the house, plenty to do around the farm, and I need a break. And it was so nice to just be present, to get things on my honey do list done, and to just be present in my personal life, much more than I had been for a while. And then the second week, I got up and decided I will just find something else. There are other freelance opportunities out there, and within a matter of days, I had landed another project, and here's the sort of testimonial that I'm giving to you. That project that I landed was the same exact hourly rate that I was being paid by the other people. And it wound up that for a little period of time, there was an overlap between those two projects. So in the wind up, I didn't lose any money at all, I wound up making the same amount of money that I would have if the long term project had carried on without a furlough. Plus, I had one week off to just enjoy life and to be present around the farm. It worked out. There was no need to panic, there was no need to freak there was no need to spaz. It worked out, and I really think a lot of that is because I wasn't approaching the situation with a white knuckle grip on the steering wheel. I just let things flow, and I let things be, and I expected a good outcome by 2021 as you know, the great resignation really was happening. It really was legit. And if you were a real estate agent, or you were somebody involved in HR staffing and recruiting work during that time, my God, the money was easy. It really was. You could make money hand over fist, if you were even moderately good at what you did, you. However, as we know, these artificially manipulated boom, bust cycles, the FOMO and the YOLO, after you've been through it, you understand that it doesn't last forever. You know the markets are being hyped up. They're being propped up with Bs and fiat currency. So you know that fever pitch is not going to last forever. By 2022 I was on the leading edge. If I wasn't the first commentator, I had to be one of the first warning people in my audience. Hey, the great resignation. It's over. It's done. So these employers, they're not putting up with it anymore. Bank of America, in a leaked memo that was on the intercept that I pointed to. I don't even know how many, umpteen million times they had very clearly said, we want the balance of power to come back to corporate America. We're tired of the insanity of the great resignation that needs to end. And I knew like they're not going to put up with it anymore. They feel like the serfs and the peons have had their little one year rebellion, and now it's over and done with. So 2022 was really this year of like contraction and pullback. It was employers saying, Do we really need to hire you know, we're getting tired of these candidates demanding top dollar. We're tired of the peons getting too uppity, so we just don't want to deal with it anymore. By 2023 the contraction had gotten a lot more significant and a lot more noticeable. And I really think for me, that's about the point when my mindset got into a poopy place, just being honest, just being totally real with you. I think that that's about the time when it happened. And I just thought to myself, not consciously, though, this was all happening in some type of subconscious program that I wasn't even aware of in my conscious mind. On some level, I said to myself, well, if you want to continue to make a living doing HR and staffing work, you're seeing this contraction. You're seeing this pullback. You're seeing these employers that want to punish employees and job seekers as some sort of vindictiveness for the great resignation. Beggars can't be choosers. You're just gonna have to take what's available to you. And as a result of that kind of scarcity mindset and that feeling of lack, I wound up with some deals in 2023 as I've said before, publicly on the air, where I feel like I got my ribs kicked in, people that did not treat me well, companies that were just ugh. There was one company, you know, I'm gonna have to be necessarily vague here it is what it is, guys, but there was one company that I can honestly say to you, it was the worst company culture that I had ever seen. There was not a single person in that organization that wasn't a jerk, top down and bottom up jerks. I've just never seen anything like it. It was, you know, the word toxic workplace is so overused, it's so hackneyed, it doesn't even mean anything anymore. But my God, that place was toxic. It's like the meme, if you've seen it, of 1989 Joker gets thrown in a vat of toxic waste, whereas 2019 Joker just gets thrown into society. Same thing. This was sort of like the 1989 Jack Nicholson Joker getting thrown into a vat of chemical waste. I just got it was that environment was awful. It was really awful. I had to deal with a billy the backs in 2023 who I just don't even know sometimes, like, what kind of code of ethics do people like that have? How do they sleep at night with the way that they treat other human beings. I don't get it. So suffice it to say, I don't want to belabor the point too much here, but suffice it to say, I got myself into some deals in 2023 just to make money that I never should have dealt with. I never should have been dealing with any of those people. I should have aimed higher and set a better standard. But I didn't. All right, so come this year, come 2024 It was sort of a resolution, like, I'm done with that. I'm not going to deal with any more of those people. You know, Greg Brent says, Stop taking BS from efforts. I'm going to, I'm not, I'm not going to deal with that anymore. That's insane. But the subconscious program was still running, and the way that it changed was, all right, if you don't want to deal with jerks and really terrible company cultures. You know, there's nothing out there right now, so you're just gonna have to go without you're gonna have to make less money in order to have more peace. That was the trade off that I thought I had to make, again, not in my conscious mind, but in my subconscious mind, in order to have peace and to not deal with jerks and backstabbers and weirdos and creeps, you're just gonna have to make less money because the backstabbers, weirdos and creeps, that's all that's available right now. Nobody else is hiring. Nothing else is going on. Womp, womp and i realized i. So now, having listened to Greg's meditation and really thinking about it like it's not just about not taking BS from other people. It might be that you're taking BS from yourself. It might be that your negative self talk and the negative beliefs that you have about yourself or about others or about work or the economy, that stuff could be slowly poisoning you too. That's a big assignment that I've had. Yes, I've been busy writing the book, and I think all of these things somehow have interlaced together, because as I've been writing my book about DAG, and thinking about him and his life, and the things about him that I just genuinely adore. It's also like holding up a mirror, because you start looking at the ways that you're the same as someone, the way that you're different from someone, the things you have in common, the things that you don't and it really spurred in me this notion of self reflection. That was something that dag was so committed to, was relentless self reflection and really thinking about less than desirable character traits that he might want to get rid of. And I started doing the same thing, like there's a limiting belief here. There's something going on in my inner workings that needs to be flushed out. Because if you go around saying, well, the economy, well, the job market, well, the election year, well, the Fed, well, the inflation, these are all things that I don't have any control over. I have no personal control over any of that. And I also thought about like 12 step programs and the serenity prayer. God grant me the serenity. Grant me the knowledge. Like the things I can change versus the things I can't how to accept and deal with the things that I can't change. I can't change the economy. I don't control the Fed. I and I don't control who's going to go in in November or what's going to happen between November and January. I don't control any of that. I think it's important to be aware and to have a certain amount of Emergency Preparedness at the same time, if it becomes an obsession and it becomes something that's dragging you down and making you feel horrible, then you might be overdoing it. So that's a big like block that I want to bust in my life is getting rid of this limiting belief that, well, you know, things are in the dumper right now. And if somebody posts a job within two hours, they have 1000 applicants that right there tells you that everything's in the pooper. Yes, okay, but at the same time, if you sit and brainwash yourself that the only work that's available to you is from scumbags and weirdos. Guess what? That's what you're gonna get. And I don't want that. That's not, that's not my vision for the remainder of 2024 and it's definitely not my vision for 2025 so look, I don't have some neat, tidy package that I can hand you tied up in a big red ribbon. All I can really say in this episode is that I feel that Greg is on the right track when he's talking about even if the person giving you a steaming load of Bs is yourself, you need to stop taking that. It doesn't do anybody any good. Whether you're an employee, whether you are an intrapreneur, you want to plug in at a company and really improve the situation for ownership and be recognized and maybe get stock options or a big promotion. Whether you're an entrepreneur, whether you're a professional freelancer, and you're like, I don't really want to have employees. I want to be a solopreneur and just do for myself, but I want to make good money doing it. There's not a good way to get there from the gutter. I'm thinking now about Esther and Abraham and the idea of stair stepping your way up with better feeling. Thoughts. It's difficult to get from abject terror to complete an utter bliss, utter misery to Nirvana. You have to take some steps in between. And that's what I'm doing, is like I need to reach for a better feeling thought, because if my mind is just Oh, my God, this is terrible. And what are these people thinking and what is going on? And because I feel like people are really tired, I talked about that earlier this week over on the job market journal, people are worn out, and people want out. I'm seeing so many like attempted mergers and acquisitions, so many small to medium sized companies where it's obvious that ownership wants out. They're trying to polish up the books, they're having layoffs, they're trying to do whatever they can to look good on paper so they'll be bought out because they want out. They're tired this hyper inflationary cycle. This poo poo economy. It has squeezed people for several years now, and a lot of folks are like, I'm done. To hell with it, I'm done. I want out, and I get it. I totally do. And I feel like, in my own way, I want out also, except I don't want out of my business. I don't want out of my life. I want out of the stinking thinking, because that, for me, is what has really poisoned my relationship with money this year. It's poisoned my relationship with being able to attract in the types of people that I want to deal with, and the types of opportunities where I feel like I do my best work and everybody walks away happy again. I don't have some trite cliche to give you. I suppose I would just end this episode with what Greg talks about, stop taking BS, even if the person that's trying to hand you the Bs is you. Stay safe, stay sane, and I will see you in the next episode.

Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a quick second to subscribe to this podcast and share it with your friends. We'll see you next time.