Ep #76: Doubt Intolerance

You are listening to episode 76 of The Confident Coaches Podcast, the one where you stop with the doubt. Let’s go.

Welcome to The Confident Coaches Podcast, a place for creating the self-confidence you need to do your best work as a life coach. If you want to bring more boldness, more resilience, and more joy to your work, this is the place for you. I’m your host, Amy Latta. Let’s dive in.

Hello, hello my confident coaches. How is everybody out there today? How are you coaches? Is everybody having a good week? So I just have to share with you, I have just wrapped up two days of CCM bootcamp and for those of you who don’t know, CCM is Confident Coaches Mastermind. That’s how you can work with me outside of the podcast.

And bootcamp is kind of a kickoff two-day event that I do with brand new members to the mastermind where we actually meet online, over the course of two days, and we go through most of the concepts of confident coaches. We go through the workbook, we do the work together, they set their BHAG, their big hairy audacious goal. We talk about how to believe, how to feel uncomfortable, how to have your own back, how to keep going, how to become your own best mentor and confidence in business over the course of two days. Just wrapped up.

And what’s great about CCM bootcamp is it’s far enough ahead, it’s a whole week ahead before our very first coaching session together. So we haven’t even had our first group coaching session together by the time this episode comes out. So all of that content is recorded, coaches are able to go back to it and review it over and over again.

Coaches that come in after bootcamp are able to go back to it and watch it in the time that they need. And it just ensures that the new members or any members of Confident Coaches Mastermind understand all of the tools that are available to them.

It’s also one of the few times where I work all day and I do it two days in a row. And so this right here, you guys know that I do a shout-out to listeners or to a review or to specific clients every single week, so this right here is a shout-out to the April class because you guys are amazing, you showed up, you were vulnerable.

And yes, we did blow some minds as far as how much you can cover in a short time period, but also do it in a fun, in an energetic, and an empowering way. And so I cannot wait for this class to see what they create. And I do want to offer you that as of right now, our first call is still in a couple of days.

You can still join us. If you want to do this work that you hear me talking about on the podcast, and particularly today’s episode, today’s episode we’re going to talk about something from a different angle than I ever have before. If this is your work coaches, I invite you to connect with me outside of this podcast and let’s get you into the April Mastermind.

Now, I know you all know that I love to have fun on this podcast and I love to laugh all of the time. I laugh constantly. And it’s who I am. I have a model – there’s a sign on my wall that says we’re not doing it if we’re not having fun. Actually, it actually says we have fun in all that we do, but I interchange the two.

Fun, enjoyment, laughter through tears, learning how to become a more confident coach by focusing on what is working and what is amazing about you. What I love to do. But I want to give a heads up to my listeners out there that this is going to be a podcast about a topic we’ve talked about before but from a very different angle.

We’re going to be talking about being abusive to yourself and how to stop that. And I want to honor my listeners who have had relationships or encounters with real abusers in their life. And if hearing about being abusive to yourself and analogies to what that would look like, if your Helga brain was a real person, if that’s not something you want to hear today, I completely understand.

I want to make sure that you know that I am sensitive to this topic. And that some of you may have experienced a real life in human form Helga brain. So here’s what I did. I created a short worksheet for this episode, so you get the value and the points of the episode without sitting through something that may trigger a past abusive experience.

Because I’m just fully aware from experiences in my life as well as dear friends that what I will share is much easier to do when the abuser is your own mind, when it is you yourself, and there are any number of reasons why women are not able to or not willing to in a certain moment leave an abusive situation in their real life.

So I want to be really clear that I understand that, that I don’t mean to simplify what could be a complicated topic. We are talking about being abusive to yourself and if that’s not what you want to listen to today, please go visit the show notes for this episode or send me an email at amy@amylatta.com because I still want you to get the value and the overall message and the tools that I’m going to share with you in this episode.

So Latta loves, at this point, what are we, 76 episodes in? You’ve probably picked up that Confident Coaches is largely a belief program. How to believe you can do what you’ve never done before, how to believe you can do the audacious, how to stop believing what’s kicking your butt, what’s holding you back, what’s keeping you inside the cave.

It’s also very much a how to fail program too. I often say that too. It’s going to teach you how to believe and then it’s going to teach you how to act on that belief and be willing to fail. But if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times. When we’re talking about belief, when we’re talking about how to believe new things, when we’re talking about how to believe you can create what you’ve never created before, how doubt is not a problem.

That doubt is not ever really going to go away because it’s not a sign that anything has gone wrong. It’s not a sign that you don’t believe at all. It’s just an emotion that you feel from something that you’re thinking. I actually created an entire podcast just on the belief meter, how you will have a mixture of belief and doubt at the same time at any given time throughout your life, throughout your business.

In the middle of a coaching call sometimes, in the middle of a consult call sometimes. You’re not either 100% in doubt or 100% in belief. It’s always this fluctuating meter, and how can we gradually move that meter needle closer to that 100% mark?

And here’s the thing about the fact that doubt is never going to go away. The reason doubt is always going to be with you is because you will always be bringing your Helga brain with you. Your Helga brain is that primitive brain, the one that wants to keep you safe, the one that’s like, I really think we should stay in the cave today because the saber-toothed tiger might eat us.

But there are no saber-toothed tigers. There’s just negative comments on the internet or plans that you put together that don’t create the result that you want. But to your Helga brain, it’s all dangerous and we’re all going to die. And she’s going to live with you for the rest of your life.

If you ever don’t have a Helga brain, then you have some form of – a non-functioning brain. You might be a sociopath. You don’t listen to that part of your brain, it’s very normal, it’s very natural, there’s no magical point in your life or in your coaching business or anywhere, your marriage, your parenting, literally anything that you do, where your Helga brain won’t offer up thoughts that create a feeling of doubt. Doubt in and of itself is not a problem. It’s just a feeling coming from a thought that you’re choosing to believe.

So why am I recording an episode called doubt intolerance? Because this episode is all about helping you develop an intolerance for doubt. Like what gives? Why is Amy talking out of both sides of her ass in this episode?

Because some of y’all move past understanding that doubt isn’t a problem, you move past how not to entertain it. I can’t remember how long ago it’s been but it’s been some time probably in the past two to three months that I created an episode about how to no longer entertain your doubt, how to no longer engage with it.

I just don’t engage with that line of thinking anymore. This was that concept I share where it’s like, I hear you, you’re cute, I love you, but it’s going to be a no from me. So this is kind of like, Helga keeps coming in the room, this is my cute teenager who keeps insisting that I buy him the latest iPhone. And I’m like, I love you so much, you’re so cute, and that’s going to be a no.

But there comes a point where you’re still letting that doubt in the room and it’s got to stop. Your Helga thoughts creating doubt, and it’s no longer that cute teenager insisting that you buy him the latest iPhone, but it actually becomes an abusive friend or lover who you need to set a boundary with and maybe even a restraining order.

I’m not tolerating this. Where you are past the point of no longer entertaining it and you’re flat-out not letting it onto the grounds anymore. Where we stop loving our Helga brain while still telling her no, like you would with a toddler, like you would with a teenager, and now we’re moving into no, this is not allowed. Not in here. Not in my house you don’t.

So let’s break this down a little bit more and then let me show you how to develop an intolerance to pervasive, abusive doubt. So some Helga thoughts that create doubt come up through the course of coaching and it’s pretty easy to create a model, see how that doubt drives how you show up in your coaching business or don’t show up.

So as a for instance, let’s say you put together a webinar, you’ve never done one before and you’re just not really sure if people are going to show up, if they’re going to get value from it, and we can run models on that. We can do coaching on that. Why are you choosing doubt when you can choose belief? What’s creating your doubt? Let’s really put that in the model for you. When you think that how do you feel?

So if you aren’t familiar with my coaching tool, the model, when you think something, how does that thought make you feel, when you feel that way, what do you do on the terms of actions, what kinds of actions do you take, what kind of inactions are you engaging in. And then when you do those things, what kind of results are you creating for yourself?

And we have what, 60,000 thoughts a day? And most of them are doubt-producing thoughts, so we have lots of thoughts. Most of them are not a problem, some of them we engage in and we need to run models on, some of them show up a lot or frequently or have been around for a long time so we need to go into the process of unbelieving them.

And I have a lot of different tools that I offer inside of Confident Coaches, many of which I’ve talked about here on the podcast but you actually learn how to utilize and apply and master those tools inside the mastermind. Things like fault obsession, running thoughts through the I see you, I see you, I hear you, it’s possible you’re not true, I don’t have to believe you anymore, I don’t believe you anymore, hula hoop thinking, where you just kind of spin in hula hoops and what it takes to drop that hula hoop.

How to run it up and down a thought elevator where you really own what thoughts are creating for you, this is a big part of my how to unbelieve process that I’ve talked about here on the podcast. All of those tools are absolutely available to you and most of the doubts and most of the thoughts that are creating those doubts can be cleaned up and practiced over the course of a couple of weeks to really help you move forward.

But sometimes there comes a time where you are just consistently allowing an abusive asshole voice inside of your head and you keep letting it show up and it’s time to stop. It’s time to stop letting them in the door. At some point when you have allowed your Helga brain to turn into an abuser and you don’t have to do that.

I want to be clear. It can be so many different circumstances too. So everybody’s kind of abusive Helga can be triggered by a variety of different things. It won’t all be the same things. And so some sample circumstances might be you try Facebook ads for six straight months and you don’t get one client from it.

So then you start thinking about the money that you’ve spent on that. You start thinking about all the money that you spent on all the coaching you’ve ever paid for and all the training that you’ve ever done. There might be a specific mistake that you made. I did this thing and it broke; it didn’t work at all; I did not get the result at all.

I can actually tell you, just like a subtle mistake that I made this week in my two-day bootcamp is that it totally didn’t occur to me that I was also having a regular coaching call. I hired the guest instructor to run that call but I didn’t think hey, we’re using the same meeting room and that’s not going to work.

So I set up a second meeting room and it worked the first day but on the second day when it came time for us to be in our meeting room for the bootcamp, and then for my January class to be in the other meeting room with the guest instructor, that my Zoom account doesn’t allow you to do that.

I don’t pay for that feature. I didn’t realize that was a feature you needed to pay for. So me and the bootcampers, we got completely kicked off and for 10 minutes my assistant and I were running around – we were sitting in our chairs texting each other. We both texted each other at the exact same time and said uh-oh.

We had to come up with another solution in the moment while I had a brand-new class, it was only their second day really working with me and really coaching with me. And here they are trying to show up to a room that isn’t existing. It was super fun, let me tell you, and it was a mistake on my part. It was a 100% human error.

Literally five minutes’ worth of research would have shown me that this is a thing that we needed to take care of and it totally didn’t happen. 100%, I made a mistake.

Sometimes a circumstance might be somebody disagrees with you. It’s very possible that one of the people in that group could have come back around and been like, listen, if you can’t figure this kind of shit out, I don’t know if I want to work with you, right? That can happen.

Maybe a client fires you, maybe somebody says, listen, I think the way you handled the situation was really terrible and I don’t like it at all and I have a real problem with it. It might be getting 10 nos in a row or posting 14 days in a row and no one comments or engages at all.

Maybe it’s just one of those days. I think last week’s episode I talked a little bit about having one of those days. But one of those days where something breaks and you don’t connect with the person you have a conversation with and you leave a situation unresolved. Maybe your kid is late or maybe you miss an appointment and you burn dinner.

Maybe it’s one of those days where just a whole bunch of small things don’t happen. And at that point, we’ve gone far past the regular old I’m not sure I know what to say in this next post, and we’ve moved into the nothing I do ever works, I cannot be anything less than perfect, I have to be put together, I cannot be a mess like this, I don’t know why I bother, all I do is waste time and waste money.

You’re being a complete asshole to yourself. Straight up mean pants. It’s not even just doubt at that point, that’s really what we’re talking about. We’re talking about more into guilt and shame and some of those really super low vibrating feelings that we try to avoid so much. Humiliation, embarrassment, shame, maybe even grief sometimes, right?

And I want you to imagine for a moment that if you had a friend who came over every day and pounded on your door, shouting these things to you, can you imagine? Can you imagine putting those words on an actual person ranting and raving on your front lawn?

Not just a voice inside your head, not just a thought going across your thought scroll in your brain. That you’re engaging with and you’re allowing to be there. I want you to actually visualize, this is a person pounding on your door, screaming at you, nothing you do ever works, you can’t be anything less than perfect, I don’t even know why you bother. It’s absurd. It becomes absurd, doesn’t it?

You would not tolerate that. You certainly wouldn’t let them in to hang out with you and yell these things in your face in your living room while you’re serving them tea and crumpets, right? We would put our foot down. Listen, this isn’t okay, get out of my house, get off my lawn, I’m calling the cops if you try to come back here, I’m filing a restraining order. You are not welcome here.

I will no longer tolerate you talking to me this way. It’s simply not okay. And yet every single day, we let those asshole thoughts enter our brain, grab a chair, and sit in the room with us. So the first question I have for you is why?

We could put every single one of those thoughts that I mentioned into its own model and see what terrible feelings that they create. And then how do you act? What kind of things do you do when you feel that way? Do you shut down and hide? That’s my favorite by the way. In case you’re wondering what Amy does, I shut down.

I’m a shutter downer. I shut down, I hide, I check out. And me hiding and check out is scrolling Instagram scrolling Facebook, leaving my office altogether and maybe going to clean something. Maybe I decide to pick up the remote and see what the latest Netflix binge is.

Any number of things and it’s certainly not getting to work thinking about my clients and serving them and figuring out how to solve what’s going on. Maybe you do the opposite. You move into hustle overachiever mode. So then you ramp up action like a mothertrucker, You’re actioning all over the place, there’s spaghetti flying on the walls and sticking to every surface in your office right now.

But it’s coming from this graspy, frenetic, scared and terrified energy. It’s very hustly. It’s very overachiever. So it might look like tons of action but the energy that’s fueling that action is trying to escape that voice in your head, trying to escape the asshole.

Maybe if I do enough stuff, I can escape this person who’s pounding on my door and telling me what an awful horrible person that I am right now. Or sometimes it’s not either one of those two things. Are you just suddenly questioning literally every decision you’ve ever made?

Sometimes that’s what my A-line looks like when I let the asshole in the office with me. Maybe it’s just suddenly questioning everything. Maybe that wasn’t the right choice, maybe I should just have said something different. That sounded like a good idea at the time but apparently, it’s not a good idea at all. Maybe I should just scrap the whole thing, maybe I should start over from scratch. Maybe I shouldn’t even have become a coach. Maybe I shouldn’t even be here today.

Do you literally just start questioning every decision you’ve ever made? And here’s the thing; you can argue with me why there is some truth to what that asshole is saying to you, and let’s be clear. It’s not that there’s truth to what the thought is, it’s that you are seeking out and finding evidence in order to prove that it is true, which is crazy because you could just as easily go seek out evidence to prove that it’s false.

You will always find evidence for whatever you want to believe in, no matter how ridiculous the thought is. People are finding evidence that the Earth is flat even though we have satellite images of a big round orb. You can always find evidence to support whatever crazy theory you want to believe, including whatever that asshole is telling you inside your head. But why?

Why? Why do you want to do that? What is the point in doing that? Why do you want to protect that abuser in your head? Because listen, there are other ways to get you to stay in the cave without being a complete asshole about it. Helga can still do her job of keeping me safe without turning into an abuser. Don’t make excuses for Helga.

Like she doesn’t know better, this is her way of protecting me. That might be true, but that doesn’t mean you have to tolerate it. There’s a difference. I’ve used the reference of Marge’s sisters on The Simpsons before. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s the blue hair – their hair is flat, her hair is really tall, their hair is flat, they sound like they smoked their entire lives.

There’s a difference between Marge’s sisters always pointing out what’s not working, “I don’t think that’s going to work, I think that’s a terrible idea.” There’s a difference between that and then shouting and screaming at her and calling obscenities to her, just berating her.

There’s a difference between those two things. One’s kind of like, the naysayer who’s pretty sure nothing you’re ever going to do is probably going to work, or whether that’s a good idea, versus the person who’s just like, listen, you’re terrible, you’re awful, nothing you ever do works.

It’s very different energy. And there is no point in tolerating that. There is no lesson there to be learned. And it creates a terrible feeling and it creates all kinds of actions that don’t get you anywhere closer to the result that you want and gets you a result that actually has you farther than where you want to be.

So if there’s no point in it, I also want you to consider this angle when it comes to doubt intolerance, which is imagine that this is your daughter or your child. Imagine those words were being screamed at or being said to six-year-old you.

You would not tolerate someone saying that to your kid. My kid can come in here and ask for an iPhone 12 and I’m like, listen, you’re cute, I love you, and it’s a solid no from me on this one. But if someone else came after him with those words, uh-uh, mama bear 100%. Nope, not tolerating that. Out, go. Nope, don’t want to hear it, leave. You will not treat my child like that, you won’t say those things to them.

And there’s some version of you in that right there. You would not tolerate that if it was six-year-old you, you would not tolerate that if that was your toddler or your teenager. If some stranger came in and was ranting and raving and pounding the door and saying what a horrible person they were and how this was never going to work and everything they do is a failure and nobody cares and how many other things that come up.

So even if you struggle to see why you should not tolerate it, at whatever age you are, as soon as you see that innocence, that worthy human that you have always been through the lens of more of a childlike image, you would not tolerate that.

Would you say that to your best friend? If your best friend on Earth did the same thing that you have done, if their circumstance was the exact same circumstance as yours, would you say those things to them? If you would, they probably shouldn’t still be friends with you. They should not tolerate that, right?

This isn’t constructive criticism. This is being an asshole to yourself and you deserve better. And that line right there, I know I’ve heard so many different coaches say that but you inherently know that that is true. Because if that was your best friend, if that was your kid, you would mama bear that shit all over the place and you would absolutely not tolerate it for them, so why tolerate it for you?

So I want you to consider instead that if you agree that being an asshole to yourself is not okay, then what? Then what do you do? I always come at this from a feeling line because normally if we are in this state, we’re probably not thinking super super clearly, so what do I need to think instead is a question you kind of want to throw punch someone with.

So that’s not how we’re going to approach this. I’m going to approach this instead from how do you want to feel? And here’s what I want to offer you. What would love or grace or compassion look like? Circumstance is the same thing. The same mistake was made, the same feedback happened, same client fired you, same 10 nos in a row or whatever the thing is.

Circumstance is the same. We’re going to skip the thought line for a moment because right now in this state, having somebody screaming and yelling and pounding on our front door or breaking in the door and they’re in our living room screaming and yelling, it’s very hard to think our way out of that. So we’re going to try feeling our way out of that.

What would love or grace or compassion for yourself in the face of that circumstance look like? What might it look like? What’s possible? Go to the feeling line and I want you to feel. I’m not even going to go into your head yet. I really want you to go into your body here.

What would love or grace or compassion for yourself feel like? Because doubt and shame and guilt and grief and humiliation feels terrible in your body. That vibrates, a truly uncomfortable vibe. A truly uncomfortable energy. So what would love or grace or compassion feel like?

And then from that space, now I invite you, what are some possible things that you can think? And if it’s still not coming to you, don’t worry about it. Stay in the feeling of love or grace or compassion and then go the other way. What might you do from this place? What small next best step might you go do?

Inside Confident Coaches, this is the kind of thing that you would get coached on specifically. We would use Gigi thinking, we would tap into your best mentor. We would look at your self-concept. We would go to who are you in your future. Maybe we would evaluate what was done, maybe we’d do a what worked, what didn’t work, what can I do differently next time.

Maybe you’re not quite ready to move on to the action line and we might do some have your own back work here from a place of love or grace or compassion, let’s revisit your I am worthy statements. We actually just did this in the CCM bootcamp these past two days. I am worthy statements and this little Jedi mind trick that I teach my students to help you see your own worth and value, even when you’ve done something you wish you hadn’t. How to love yourself at your worst is one of my favorite concepts to teach.

Then from there, we might be able to find a go-to thought that you want to remember when a circumstance like that happens. And then lastly my friends, I just want you to consider that what I’m offering to you in this podcast episode, more than anything is just learning how to build your intolerance for doubt. This is a muscle to strengthen and it will get stronger in as much time as you practice it.

The more you practice, the stronger it will get. So if you’re not excellent at this at first, that’s totally okay. Really, I want you to more than anything, when you find yourself in this situation, this isn’t okay, I am intolerant of this behavior. I will not tolerate this from you anymore because this isn’t okay to say to my best friend, this isn’t okay to say to six-year-old me, this isn’t okay to say to my toddler or my teenager, it’s not okay to say to me.

I’m not tolerating this, this isn’t okay. And then from that place, what would love or grace or compassion feel like for you with the circumstance being the exact same thing? Spend some time in that feeling, explore what you may or may not do from that feeling.

And I’m just going to tell you right now, my favorite go-to thought when Helga is beating down the door and screaming at me and telling me all the horrible, awful things, and I say listen, not okay sister. Out of here with that bullshit. Grace or love or compassion for me sounds like I’m just so very human in this moment. I’m just being so very human right now and that’s okay.

This is about loving the human that you are, my friends. Doubt intolerance is about loving your humanness in all of its glory, in all of its messy, messed up, amazing, brilliant, hot mess, rockstar, and every single thing in between. That’s what this is about and not tolerating that abusive voice that you allow to come in and saying that is enough.

I don’t have to tolerate this anymore because I love the human that I am. I’m learning to love the human that I am. I’m just being so very human right now and that is okay.

Alright my friends, let’s go build some doubt intolerance, let’s put Helga in her place, say uh-uh, no more, and until next week, let’s go do epic stuff.

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