Ep #95: Get Unreasonable

Hi, you are listening to episode 95 of The Confident Coaches Podcast, the one where you get unreasonable. 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.

Hi confident coach. How are you doing out there today? I’m doing fabulous, as always. I just got back from Mexico, Cabo San Lucas, just a couple of days ago. I was a guest instructor for my coach’s lower level mastermind. And then we attended the mastermind that I am a member of. And it was fabulous and amazing.

I have my own mastermind, Confident Coaches Mastermind, that you can all apply for and join. I already know the amazing value of being around a bunch of like-minded people all striving for a similar goal, all dealing with the same crazy Helga thoughts, and us working on it all together. But I have to tell you, it was like people coming up to me and saying, “This is like meeting a rock star.”

And then because I was a guest instructor, outside of our rooms are these giant banners that were as tall as I am with my face on it. And then coaching in a small group, teaching the concepts of my coach to her clients. And then I even had the opportunity to get up on stage and teach one of her concepts to the entire group.

The entire thing was incredibly unreasonable. Amy of five years ago would have been like, “Get out of here!”  And people are like, “Did you see you on stage?” And I was like, “Absolutely.” This is where I rock. This is where I shine. And it’s just so funny, because I know that me of a few years ago, everything you hear on this podcast, everything that I coach inside Confident Coaches is like my own work.

And Amy of three to five years ago would have been mortified. Would have thought that’s crazy, that could never happen. That would be so unreasonable for me to think that I could get on my coach’s stage and teach one of her concepts even better than she had. Which is why she’s having me come onstage. Which is why she’s going to have me coach to the group again.

And the interesting thing is, is I’m like, “Why was that so unreasonable at the time, and it’s not now?” So I kind of already had that noodling in my head. And then I had a consult call this week for the upcoming October group, shout out to Ana. Sorry, Anna, we had a whole conversation about how to pronounce her name. Shout out to Anna, our new October member.

And she was sharing some of her big, hairy, audacious goals. And reasonable and unreasonable came up again. Because one of the things that she said was, “Well, that’s just not reasonable. It’s just not reasonable to think that I can still create that much between now and the end of the year when this is the only thing that I’ve created so far this year.”

And so this is going to be your short, but sweet kick in your rear end today. Because we’re going to be talking about getting unreasonable. And I think this is a perfect swift follow up to the work that we’ve been doing for the past few episodes.

So I just really want you to think about how it is our default, how it is our inclination to strive for what’s reasonable. We talked a lot about this two episodes ago, and what are the rules you were following that you don’t have to follow?

And so much of our upbringing, so much of our society says we should shoot for realistic goals. We should be reasonable. We’ll even hear that in an argument, “Now, Amy, come on now. Be reasonable.” Or when thinking about goals, smart goals, that R means realistic, right?

We want to be realistic; we want to be reasonable. We want to only stretch just a hair farther than uncomfortable. We don’t want to go too far out there. Because as you might have heard two episodes ago, we are pushing against society’s boundaries of what people have determined is okay and is not okay. And reasonable is the only thing that we are really – Like the society is only comfortable when the other people in the society are being reasonable. We don’t like unreasonable; it makes us very uncomfortable.

But I really want to make the case for being unreasonable in this episode. So the first thing I’m going to share with you is a case study in unreasonableness. And she does not know I’m going to do this. This woman doesn’t even know who I am. And this is an unsolicited plug.

So last fall, probably closer to like Thanksgiving and Christmas, I caught wind of this Instagram account called Sharon Says So. And this is just a Minnesota woman, who is a former US government teacher, who has a wealth of knowledge of what is in the constitution and not in the constitution and a love of all things facts.

She’s a government teacher, constitutional specialist. And she just trades in facts. Like if you were to follow her Instagram, as soon as you think you know which way she leans, she’ll post something that’s the opposite because she does not give her opinion on things. It’s only like, here’s the factual information and then she leaves it up to us to make our decisions from there.

And she’s really just provided a huge sense of calm for me, because I’m very passionate about politics. I’m very passionate about policy and what people are doing. And it’s been a little crazy these past few years, right? So she has brought just such a sense of calm for me as somebody who does love to follow politics.

So that right all of there is fairly unreasonable. But one of the biggest unreasonable things is when I first found her, she just had like, I actually don’t even know what her numbers are, I probably could have come a little bit better prepared for this podcast.

But she had, like, you know, I don’t know, 100,000, 2, 300,000 followers. And at this point Sharon has a very unreasonable amount of followers. I’m actually going to really, really quickly pull it up. Okay, she’s at 680,000 followers. So she’s easily, if she was like, 150 and now she’s at like, 650.

Here’s the thing that’s so unreasonable, her following has raised millions of dollars since the start of this year. And again, I probably could have taken some time to find out what that is. That she has, she and her people like me, you, between donating like $5 here and $10 there have wiped out millions of medical debt. They have sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to multiple people. Like single moms with medical needs, or this family whose son needs this. Like just hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If you know the thought leader Carlos Whittaker or Loswhit is his Instagram handle. He had a series of misfortunate events and we sent him hundreds of thousands of dollars. She’s literally raised millions of dollars just since the start of the year with her kind of like a ragtag crew of people like me, and you might follow her too, just donating 5 and $10 here and there.

And the whole thing, she has based this whole thing around like, “This is so unreasonable. Let’s be more unreasonable.” Because of this work she’s now been on The Daily Show. She’s been on Good Morning America. I mean, she’s practically her own little celebrity now.

I mean, she’s no Jennifer Aniston with millions of followers. She has a very loyal group of people who follow her every day, who are learning government from her. She’s got a class called Government for Grownups, I think is what it’s called. Her mantra is like, facts don’t care about your feelings, and let’s be unreasonable. And be unreasonable in the best possible way.

Her being unreasonable has not only raised millions, millions, millions of dollars for people in need and people who are struggling. I think she just did like a whole fund of a teacher campaign. Like this whole month of August she’s been funding teachers wish lists all over, just through donations through her followers.

And it’s very unreasonable, don’t you think, that in today’s political climate here’s somebody who actually shares, “Here’s what the conservatives of my following say. Here’s what the liberals of my following say. Here’s what the moderates of my following say. Notice how everybody all wants the same outcome, we just have a slightly different approach.” That’s very unreasonable to be a presence in this world.

So this idea of unreasonable has been planted throughout this year. And then there I was in Cabo going, “This is so unreasonable to Amy of five years ago, that she has a place on this stage.” And I’m like, “Let’s make the case for unreasonable.”

In this episode, to get really unreasonable in the best possible way with what you want to create in the world. To dream big, to be audacious. What is it that you really want to say that you’ve been holding back? Who are the people you really want to help that you’re afraid to speak out for?

How much money do you really want to make? How big of a coaching Empire do you want to create? What is completely unreasonable for you to create by the end of this year? By the end of next year? In the next five years?

And I want you to really think about this, the last two episodes were about I asked the question, “If there are no rules and there is no judgment, what would you create?” What would you say and who would you say it to? And how much money do you want to make saying it to those people?

Here’s my unreasonable, I am the confidence expert. This is what I’m creating here on Confident Coaches Mastermind. This is what I’m creating on The Confident Coach’s Podcast and in my Confident Coaches program. That I am the eminent expert, I am going to be the person that media reaches out to when they want to say how can you help people believe they can do what they’ve never done before?

What’s true Confidence? Amy Latta, let’s get her on the line. Oprah Winfrey, she’s going to be like, “Oh, Amy Latta, you are the confidence expert. I’ve studied all of your stuff, it’s brilliant.” Like this is the $25 million Empire.

That number came to me a couple of months ago and I was like, “That is so unreasonable.” But I like it. I have no idea how, but I know it’s possible because it is in me. It came out of my mouth, it came out of my pen. It’s in me to dream about, therefore, it must be achievable. It must be achievable because I wouldn’t be able to conceive it if I couldn’t create it.

It’s completely unreasonable that not only am I going to take this confidence program and I’m going to deliver it to the coaches, but I’m going to deliver it to so many other people too. This goes far beyond Confident Coaches in that large unreasonable vision that I have.

Does it scare the hell out of me? Oh yeah. Do I know the How? Nope.
But it’s in me, I know it. It’s big. It’s audacious. And it’s totally not reasonable at all that this little girl whose biological dad left her before she was born, who grew up in California, and Texas, and Missouri, quiet, meek, timid, people pleaser extraordinaire, procrastinator, perfectionist, afraid of her own shadow half the time. It’s very unreasonable that I would become the woman that would create that campaign, that empire, right?

Maybe you want to invent something. Maybe you want to take what you’ve learned from others and say it in a different way. Like if it were me, I would say it this way. If you want to create something that’s never existed, it’s a completely brand new idea. Maybe it’s just your take on an idea that might be controversial or it might be just something nobody’s ever heard before.

Are you flinching a little bit when you think about that? Hell yeah. I can feel, like even right now I can feel that queasiness as I share with you all right here on the podcast my unreasonable. I’ve put it out there, I can’t pull it back in. Oh no, the Helga brain is like, “Put the words back in your mouth, Amy.” No, that’s completely unreasonable. It makes no logical sense.

Let’s do it. Let’s see how we’re going to do that. Because I want you to consider how many things exist in this world today that were totally unreasonable at the time. Flying an airplane. The telephone. Indoor electricity. Plumbing, modern plumbing, you go to the bathroom, you sit on a toilet, you do your business, you flush it, and it goes someplace else. Right?

These things were so unreasonable at the time. Imagine, and I’m probably going to mix up some history, history buffs don’t yell at me. Like was Edison lightbulb, Nikola Tesla radio waves? There could be some mishmash in there. I know there’s some controversy, so historian buffs don’t get mad at me when I simplify this example.

I want you to think about it, like people thought Tesla was crazy when he was talking about radio waves. That you’re going to be here and you’re going to speak into something, and it’s going to broadcast through the air, like on some magic carpet somehow, and it’s going to come out the other end.

That somehow, we would have light inside of a building and it wouldn’t be fire, and it wouldn’t be a candle, it wouldn’t be a flame. Like they hadn’t even conceived of that, right? It didn’t even exist in the world until it did.

An even more modern, like there was the telephone. That’s pretty wild, right? But that was at least along a line, right? Like a telephone line. But think about the cell phone.

I know this is crazy and I’m dating myself, but I still remember marveling at the fax machine in the 90s. Wait, I’m going to put a piece of paper on this tray. And this machine’s going to make a really high pitched awful noise, and it’s going to scan it. And that image is going to show up on another machine 3,000 miles away? That shit still blows my mind. Nobody even faxes anymore and I’m still marveling at the fax machine.

But the cell phone, the internet, Facebook, Instagram, live video. These things were very unreasonable in our lifetimes. Okay, I guess at this point, 10 years ago, Facebook existed. But think about what didn’t even exist 10 years ago that we all engage in now.

You are listening to me on a podcast. Like if you’re listening on air pods, wireless headphones that you can carry in your ears all of the time. These things didn’t exist, they were so unreasonable. And these are more inventions, I even want you to think about how unreasonable is it that we now have LGBTQ people with voices.

We have given rise to marginalized voices. And there are pride flags all over this country. And it’s no longer this thing that we kind of tuck in a corner like we did when I was a little kid in the 80s.

How unreasonable is it that we had a black man as a president in a country founded on slavery? How unreasonable is it that there’s a woman of color in the vice presidency office right now? How unreasonable is it that women can vote, that women can get our own credit? How unreasonable is it that we can now make claims of sexual harassment and actually be listened to?

I watch a lot of cold case, which is a TV show from the 2000s. And it’s they solve cold cases. And how many of the episodes that took place in the 50s, and 60s, and even the 70s have so many cultural standards and so many cultural ideas that we now say this isn’t okay. But back then that would have been so unreasonable to think that society could change that much.

But what did it take? How did we become unreasonable? We had to be willing to do three things. I want you to think about the people that made these technologies possible, these ideas possible that we take for granted today. But as recently as 5, 10 years ago, my lifetime, your mother’s lifetime, your grandparents’ lifetime, your great grandparents’ lifetime, think about all of the things that we would never even have conceived of. What did it require?

It required, the first two things are what we’ve talked about in the past two episodes. That there are rules that you’re going to have to be willing to break. Now I did an entire episode two episodes ago on this, so I’m not going to dive into it here.

But what rules, what societal rules are you following about what’s allowed and what’s not allowed? What is okay and what’s not okay? Remember, rules are just other people’s thoughts that a whole lot of people decided to adopt. But it’s still just optional thinking.

So you have to be willing to break rules. And remember, from two episodes ago, if you’re not sure how to break, like, if you’re not breaking rules, then how are you operating by? What are your values? What’s important to you? What do you see as valuable?

So you had to be willing to break rules. You had to be willing, last week’s episode, you had to be willing to possibly have people think things about you. You had to be willing that people are going to say things, they’re going to think things, and you will not be able to control that. And you becoming okay with that. You becoming okay that people are going to say and think things and they are not going to agree with you.

I mean, I know this sounds crazy, but women have only been allowed to vote for like 101 years. Women died for that right. I can’t imagine there’s anything you want to do that would put your life on the line. But really think about how unreasonable people were willing to be to really say things that angered people.

But remember from last week’s episode, people cannot actually judge you and cancel culture is not really a thing. It’s just people having thoughts and a lot of feelings when they don’t agree with you. And you learning to be okay with that.

So then, really the last thing that you have to be willing to experience is failure. You have to be willing to fail. How many times did the Wright brothers crash an airplane? I actually don’t know.

You can tell this is a really well researched episode. I really looked up numbers and facts for this. Historians everywhere are cringing as I’m like, “Wright Brothers crashed tons of planes.” I actually have no idea if that’s true.

But really, when you’re thinking about how many times did they have to fail before they got Kitty Hawk up in the air? Or was Kitty Hawk where it was located? Do not turn to me for history.

How many times did Steve Jobs fail before he introduced the iPhone? How many failed experiments, how many people stood on a pulpit to say, “Hey, I’m gay and I have the right to be here. I think I should be able to have my own credit without having my husband or my father sign for it.” How many people said these things and set them out into the world before people started listening?

They were willing to keep saying it over and over again until they were able to express what they wanted to say in a way that other people started to listen.

This is what we’re doing in Confident Coaches. We are being unreasonable. We are setting goals that might scare the crap out of you. They will make you uncomfortable, but it’s okay because you’re going to learn how to experience that discomfort.

You’re going to learn what are you believing that you don’t have to believe? What rules do you need to break? What judgment are you trying to avoid? What do you want to believe about you instead? How to use your own brain for the answers.

How to have your own back through that entire process. How to build resilience as you put something out there, as you put your message out there week in and week out, and you tweak it and you test it, and you’re feeling all of the feels.

Using my brand new, I’ve just created this Confidence to Clients Formula that I just developed, that I just shared with the latest group in July. And I just keep making it better. The actual step by steps of working towards those big audacious goals while you feel the feels, while you learn to have your own back.

You’re going to be the Wright brothers of your own coaching and of your own ideas. Testing and trying and figure out how to help people understand that you understand their problems and you have the solution to their problems. And how many different ways you are willing to say your message and share your message until your people say, “That’s the one,
that’s who I need to work with.”

And lastly, if you listened to this entire episode and you’re like, “Amy, I don’t have anything unreasonable. I can’t even think of anything right now. I know a couple of tools I learned from listening to somebody else and I think I can help other people.” And that’s like the most that you have. That’s okay too. It really is.

I want you to trust me that there is a God rod inside of you. That’s an episode from a couple of episodes ago, Unleash Your God Rod. You just haven’t tapped into it yet. It’s just buried under layers of fear of judgment, fear of success, fear of failure, believing a lot of rules that you probably don’t have to believe.

And being inside the mastermind will help you uncover all of those layers so that you can unleash that God rod. That was me. I want to offer you, your unreasonable is inside of you. Because you are here as a life coach wanting to change the lives of people and run a business doing it. That right there is reasonable enough, right?

I spent years uncovering mine. Years uncovering my unreasonable. And if I can do this, you can do this too.  All right, so if you have not already, I want you to go back and listen to Unleash Your God Rod. I’ll have a link to it in the show notes. I can’t remember the episode number but it’s sometime in the past two months, Unleash Your God Rod. And then listen to the last two episodes, episodes 93 and 94 about breaking rules and the end of judgment.

And then make plans to be in the next round of CCM, we start in October. I’m already pre-selling spots. We’ve got a couple of paid people in it already. There’s absolutely a spot for you. And if you love this, share it. Share you’re unreasonable on today’s podcast post.

So go on Instagram and find the post for this episode, episode 95, Get Unreasonable. And share what your unreasonable goal is in the comments. Share it with me on Instagram. You can also, if you get emails from me, you can reply to the email that goes out for the podcast. You can find the post on Facebook. Share it in your story. and tag me at I am Amy Latta.

Let’s encourage other people let’s say, “Hey, we are getting unreasonable over here. And we are learning the tools of how to do it by listening to Confident Coaches.” All right, I can’t wait to see what kind of unreasonable goals, dreams, ideas that you have. Because all of it is inside of you already and we know this because you would not be able to name it if you did not have the ability and the capacity to create it. I can’t wait to see what you create.

All right confident coach, remember until next week, let’s go fuck shit up.

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Thanks so much for listening to The Confident Coach’s Podcast. I invite you to learn more. Come visit me at amylatta.com. And until next week, let’s go do epic stuff.