724: (5 of 8) Self-Limiting Beliefs: How to Find the Career Possibilities Your Brain Has Been Filtering Out | What Fits You

[00:00:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: That's not realistic. That seems unreasonable that someone like me doesn't do that. Okay, so you might have never ever said these words to yourself, but your brain has been running that filter subconsciously, automatically on almost every career possibility that's ever crossed your mind. Specifically, the possibilities that lit something up for you for just a moment before it gets dismissed as unrealistic.

[00:00:24] Here's what that filter is actually costing you. The best career possibilities, the ones that would genuinely fit who you are at this stage of your life, are almost always the first ones your brain is going to rule out, not because they're truly out of reach, but because they're unfamiliar, and your brain treats unfamiliar as dangerous.

[00:00:41] Today, we use that knowledge to override your subconscious for your own good. This is day five of the What Fits You eight-day mini course. If you're just joining us, I want you to go back in your feed and start with the introduction before working through days one through four, 'cause every single day builds directly on the last one.

[00:01:00] And if you haven't already registered for the complete course experience, including getting the emails, the guided exercises, I want you to go over to happentoyourcareer.com/8day and enter your email, and then you'll get all of those, plus future resources, all the emails from Happen To Your Career. This link is in the show notes, by the way.

[00:01:20] The very first time I realized that you could hack your brain's normal functions, my mind was blown, for sure. It sounds super weird, but as a kid, I taught myself to become aware when I was dreaming, to wake up inside the dream, so that I could control those dreams. Now, that wasn't the light bulb moment, though.

[00:01:36] That came much later when, in my college psychology class, my professor taught us about lucid dreaming. And then when he asked the class who's experienced this before, mine was the only hand that was raised. This led to the question of, well, what else is possible when you can override the normal default functions of your brain?

[00:01:55] That was the very beginning of my obsession with psychology and human behavior. Now, the fascinating thing here is that for most humans, when you start thinking about what you want, typically what goes on in your head is that your brain auto-filters out possibilities before you ever really consider them.

[00:02:10] Your brain says to you, "That's not realistic, so don't consider it." "That seems unreasonable. Don't put that down." The worst part is it happens so quickly and naturally that most of the time you don't even recognize that it's occurring. Now, I'm not gonna go full nerd on you on the explanation just yet, but the bottom line is it does happen.

[00:02:29] Now, what this means is that you're capable of so much more than your brain will often let you believe because the really great thoughts, great ideas, the really great careers, and the really great life gets filtered out as unrealistic or not logical or unachievable or not for me almost as quickly as they come into your brain.

[00:02:49] Now, this isn't a character flaw. It's just how our brains work. The problem is that at the professional level that you might have reached, the filter's been running for a lot of years, maybe 20 or 30 years, and it's being reinforced by every promotion, every identity confirming success, every time the world has rewarded you for being exactly who you've already become, which means by the time you sit down to think about what else might be possible, you've already subconsciously ruled out most of the options worth considering.

[00:03:18] Today's exercise is designed to help you acknowledge where that filter is happening and start to practice moving around it. So here's today's action step. I want you to write down three things that you want to be, do, or become in your career that seems wildly unrealistic.

[00:03:36] Okay, my definition of wildly unrealistic. These are things that you have no idea how you'd accomplish them, that the people in your current professional world would probably raise their eyebrows if they knew that you wanted them. That's the bar. Not slightly ambitious, not a stretch goal, wildly unrealistic. Let me tell you something crazy about this exercise that is fascinating to the psychology nerd in me.

[00:03:59] Years ago, when we actually first started Happen To Your Career way back in 2013, my good friend Mark Sieverkropp and I created the first version of this eight-day mini course to help people begin to figure out what they really wanted to be doing for their career and life. Okay, you probably already know that part, but now that we've had almost 100,000 people go through this, we'd started to see some patterns along the way.

[00:04:20] 'Cause when we first created this exercise, we started collecting responses from people working through the course, you know, that happened immediately. And over time, across tens of thousands of answers, and these are ranging from, you know, senior-level executives to people just starting out, we noticed something that really stopped us in our tracks.

[00:04:38] Every single item people wrote down as wildly unrealistic was achievable. Not easy, not guaranteed, but very, very achievable. This wasn't just one response. This was across all of those people. Now, what does this tell us? It tells us that wildly unrealistic is almost never a description of the thing. It's a description of the story we're telling ourselves about the thing.

[00:05:02] The good news here is that stories can change. So on that note, it's time. Don't filter, don't qualify, don't censor, just put your three things down. Here are some ideas to get you going. Might be what you wanted to do as a kid, and you're still a little bit fascinated with. It might be something you read about in an article or blog post or magazine or someplace else where you thought to yourself, "Hey, that would be pretty great."

[00:05:24] It might be one thing that you like doing for a hobby that you've previously thought, "Hey, I could never earn money doing this." Or maybe you've seen something recently glamorous and had judgmental thoughts about that person and their occupation, but when you thought more, you realized there was just a tinge of, "Hmm, I wish I could do that."

[00:05:41] Maybe it's something that you've always had curiosity about. Maybe it's something that you can't stop doing anyways, and you thought, "Hmm, this would be amazing if I could make a career out of it." And I'm not talking about the, "I can't stop eating the peanut butter pretzels from Costco," but instead things like, "I can't stop seeing the good in people and telling them about it, even though sometimes it gets me into weird and awkward situations," which by the way, is how HTYC started here, which at the time building this company definitely seemed unrealistic. But then, you know, so did pulling our kids out of school for a month at a time and traveling or starting a family vacation rental business.

[00:06:15] All those things seemed impossible or wildly unrealistic before doing them. If you want further evidence, just on this podcast alone, we literally have hundreds, hundreds of examples of our clients sharing their stories of how they made their moves, and you can go back and listen to them. There's many, many, many over the years.

[00:06:34] All of them felt like what they were wanting out of work and life might not be realistic back before they did it. Remember, everything you write down will seem unrealistic until you can actually do it. Write it down anyways. Another pro tip is you don't actually have to get locked into these things. If you put down, like, "Ah, I love playing golf, so it would be amazing if I could do this with golf," you know, you don't have to get locked into it.

[00:06:56] What's important later on is we're gonna look at what are the clues that those wants or desires are creating. That's the real gold. So hopefully that takes the pressure off just a little bit. But here's what I want you to do. Once you're done, put it in the comments. What's one of your three, and what made you almost not write it down?

[00:07:13] Day six is next. I want you to click subscribe or follow wherever it is that you're listening so that it shows up automatically in your feed the next day. And as always, if you're tired of trying to go this alone and you want real expert help defining what creates a phenomenal fit for you, well, then send me an email, scott@happentoyourcareer.com.

[00:07:33] Put conversation in the subject line. What we'll do is I'll connect you to me and my team. We'll be able to ask you questions, understand more about your situation, and help you create a custom plan for where you want to go. Until then, I'm Scott Anthony Barlow. Adios.