Ep #22: How to Let Go of “Normal”

You are listening to episode 22 of The Confident Coaches Podcast, the one where we talk about how to let go of normal.

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, my Confident Coaches. How are you all doing out there? Listen, I’ve been coaching so many life coaches this past couple of weeks, and I know that y’all are having thoughts ranging from, “People need me now more than ever,” to, “People will never pay me for coaching, at least not until this is over,” and everything in between.

The cognitive dissonance between knowing that you have something that people need right now and your fears and worries about people committing to coaching and will they spend the money – and just remember, y’all, all of this, I’m hearing you. I understand what’s going on in your head. Make sure that you understand what’s going on in your head, that you have an inner cavewoman and you have an inner evolved woman and they are both arguing very loudly in your head right now. And just remember that it’s your choice in who you choose to side with.

If you’ve not already done it, make sure you listen to last week’s episode, Confidence in the Time of Coronavirus, on the five lessons that have stuck out to me so far about creating self-confidence in your ability to sign more clients, even when the coronavirus pandemic is a circumstance and is a fact of our life right now.

Make sure you go back to listen to that, and make sure – are you paying attention – whose thoughts in your head are you believing? It’s always a choice. And today, I’m actually going to talk about a topic that should help you, even if you are feeling paralyzed as to what to do next.

But before I do, I want to give a shoutout to The Confident Coaches Podcast listener, AKAChristie; that’s her iTunes name. So, hey, AKAChristie, whatever your full name may be. AKAChristie left the most awesome review on the podcast this past week and I wanted to share it with you guys.

Christie says, “I must say, Amy delivers above and beyond. This podcast has so much useful info that I feel like I’m getting a coaching session every time I listen to the podcast. It is a gem for coaches. Amy teaches skills and has a lot of fun doing it. I absolutely cannot say enough good things about the podcast. Do yourself a favor. Subscribe, then do the work that Amy teaches, then watch your business change.”

I love it. Thank you so much, Christie, because she encapsulated exactly what I set out to create when I started this podcast just six months ago. It’s not even been six months at this point, 22 episodes ago, right?

So, I am hoping that you view this like a coaching session with me. I am hoping that you take what I’m teaching you and apply it to your life and to your business and that you are able to watch your business change, even right now. And actually, even more than ever.

So, here’s the deal, my friends. I did not talk about this last week because I wanted to make sure that I spent all my time just talking about the lessons, but I wanted to remind you, this week is my birthday. It’s my husband’s birthday too. Actually, today is Tre’s 48^th birthday and my 46^th birthday is on Friday, April 7^th and April 10^th.

And we were supposed to take the train, sleeping car and all, from Saint Louis to Chicago this past weekend, where I’d booked a luxury hotel downtown, right on the river. And we had tickets to a show and we had dinners planned. And obviously, the entire trip was cancelled. No birthday celebration for us.

So, I am asking all of you, there are about, give or take, 400 of you listening every single week. And 85 of you have left a review. And I love those 85 of you. I love you so much. I love all 400 of you. But I’m looking for 15 specifically.

So, yeah, you right now, listening right now, it’s Amy talking. If you get value from this podcast, if it’s keeping you sane right now, if you’re taking more action now than you were before, if you’re feeling more confident about signing more clients, if any of that is true, I invite you to pull up Apple Podcasts on your iPhone or on your browser on your android phone, and with your iTunes account, subscribe, rate, and leave a review for The Confident Coaches Podcast.

Alright, so, can we talk about normal, or lack thereof? Listen, I know that so many of you are feeling paralyzed right now because thoughts like this might be swirling in your head; what am I supposed to do next? I’m not sure what to do. I’m not sure of the best way to make an offer. I don’t want to sound opportunistic and I can’t wait for things to get back to normal.

And that’s when I realized that so many people are grappling with this idea of normal and what normal is and how to be normal and, “Maybe I need to wait for the new normal.” And we’re using this idea of normal to stop us in our tracks. So many of us are feeling paralyzed right now.

We know that people need us, but we’re not sure how, why, what to do, do people have money. We have all of these thoughts and we’re just paralyzed and we’re really just hoping for some sense of normalcy so that we can move forward. So, let’s talk about normal and what are you making normal mean, and why this concept of normal might be killing your confidence right now.

So, first and foremost, I think it’s really important to understand that we are not going back to “normal.” Because coronavirus is changing us. It’s changing the dynamics of how we work, how people interact with each other is changing, how we view what we’ve always believed and what we’ve always been sure of, that is changing.

If we don’t emerge from this circumstance having changed, then we probably didn’t experience what is really happening. There are friends who are out of work. There are friends and family that are getting sick. We are going to know people who have died because of this. It’s changing so much of what we’ve always been sure of.

This can be terrifying to your brain because your brain likes homeostasis. It likes stable equilibrium. And a circumstance like the coronavirus pandemic, people getting laid off and sheltering in place and loved ones getting sick and not being able to visit them, that will mess up some stable equilibrium, right?

But also understand that change is normal. A lack of change isn’t normal. It’s like this battle between our brain and the realities of life. Our brain may be seeking homeostasis, but homeostasis isn’t conducive to survival during change. And life is always offering change.

So, we’re not going back to normal. Too much is going to happen and too much of change for us to just go back to the way things always have been in the past. Industries are shifting, things are shifting. We’re not going backwards and we don’t necessarily desire to go backwards.

The evolved part of your brain, that prefrontal cortex, that front part of your brain, it is designed for evolvement and for growth. So, just watch your brain’s desire to go back to some sort of normal that doesn’t really exist anymore and instead look forward to what’s possible.

So, we’re not going back to normal, our next instinct may be to focus on the new normal. I mean, that’s looking forward, right? And we’ll focus on what the new normal will be post-coronavirus. I mean, we can’t go back, so let’s create a new normal.

And we find comfort in the idea of a new normal, that things will settle down and people will go back to feeling a certain way and looking forward to a certain amount of things. Sure, we’re going to shift. Sure, we’re going to change. But some sense of normalcy will come back.

And unfortunately, this is a problem for two reasons. First, it tricks us into waiting for the new normal to emerge. I had a client in my current Confident Coaches Mastermind tell me today that she absolutely believes that people need what she’s offering and that the clients are coming, but, and I quote, “Only after the coronavirus passes.” It’s like putting your confidence on hiatus as well as your life coaching business.

“Oh, I’m confident this will all work out. I’m confident that I have something that people need and that the clients are coming, but maybe not right now.” Listen, friends, confidence doesn’t just go into quarantine. That’s not possible, under some shelter-in-place order, right?

Remember, confidence is a feeling. Confidence comes from belief. Where are you on your belief-meter? It comes from learning. You can feel uncomfortable and still take forward action. You can still make offers for coaching, even though people are telling you they’re worried about their finances, action that you decide by mentoring with you in the future. Your best mentor is future you and that you’re going to have your own back when things may not go the way that you want them to and that you’re going to evaluate the actions that you’re taking and you’re going to keep going.

So, don’t put your confidence and your life coaching business on hiatus until some sort of new normal emerges because doing that means that you’re not helping the people who need help right now.

Remember that we talked about, in last week’s episode, that the humans of the world that not only have their stress and anxieties about the pandemic to deal with, but all of their normal struggles; the reason that they would hire us any time. Those problems are still there too.

So, while you’re putting your confidence on hiatus and your business in the process, you aren’t helping the very people who need your help right now. And right now, we don’t know how long this time that we are in right now is going to last.

Someone listening to this episode in the future will already know the answer. But as of today, April 7^th 2020, we have no idea when the “New normal” will emerge. Is it going to be in a month? Six months? A year? What if it’s two years?

Are you willing to put your confidence and your life coaching business on hold for that long? If you are, then you definitely need to come talk to me. But I don’t think most of us are willing to do that. So, waiting for this new normal to emerge, we have no idea how long that’s going to take. And what if it’s possible that we could do something different?

And that brings me to the second reason that the new normal idea doesn’t really work for us – because we just talk about things going back to normal and that there really is no such thing. And that’s because there also is really no normal.

Life is always throwing curveballs at us. There’s no such thing as normal because this “New normal” will emerge, but your brain will still see that some things just aren’t quite right. Waiting for the new normal to emerge is not unlike thinking, “I’ll finally go all in on myself as a life coach when I leave this job, or when my kids go back to school, after this big wedding, after this big home remodel,” after this project of some kind, after this thing, then I’ll dive in.

And we’re using the coronavirus in the same way. After the coronavirus, then I’ll go all in. There is no normal. There is not just right. Life is always changing. There’s always going to be events in our life that could distract us from serving our people. There’s always going to be things, whether big or small, that our brain will use as a reason not to go all in on ourselves.

And yes, once we emerge from this coronavirus pandemic, we may find a bit more homeostasis, but there will still be change in our life. Yes, it will be change on a smaller scale. It will be the same bullshit, the same small changes that catch you from going all in on yourself before.

So, rather than seeking normal or seeking a “new normal,” what if instead we focused on fostering the skills you need to take on whatever life is serving up to you, all the time? Sure, it’s serving up a little bit more right now than it normally does, but life is always going to be sending dishes your way, my friends.

So, rather than ask for a normal or a new normal, ask for the ability to not only manage your way through it, but to thrive your way through it. Now, what are those skills? What skills should you be fostering so that we don’t need a normal or a new normal in order to thrive and grow?

I have actually already taught them to you in previous podcast episodes. So, first, you want to practice that emotional strength training. This is the episode I shared two weeks ago, episode 20. Now, since I recorded and released that podcast, I actually renamed the technique that I share with you the CALM technique.

There is an innovative idea that came out of the coronavirus pandemic; how to go from panic and get yourself calm. It’s the same technique I already shared with you; I just gave it a fresh name. So, I’ve taught you this practice before on the podcast. Get CALM.

C stands for center. Stop your brain for a moment. Draw attention to your body. Where do you feel a sensation? Where is it centered? Is it heavy or light, soft or hard, fast or slow? Is there sound, texture, color? Direct your brain to the sensations you feel in your body.

Once you’ve done that, A is for acknowledge. What one-word emotion would you put on this sensation? Give it a name and stay in the sensation. Emotion is just energy in motion. It’s just vibration in your body. Ask your brain, does it see that in this moment you are safe while experiencing this sensation?

Then L is for lean in. Stay in the sensation. Take deep breaths while you do. Your brain’s going to want to draw back up into your head. Stay in your body, taking deep breaths, allowing the feeling that you are feeling. And lean into it long enough so that whatever you’re feeling sits down next to you rather than laying on top of you.

And then M stands for mercy. Show yourself some love, some mercy. Your brain is wired to freak out. It’s wired to keep us safe from danger. It’s going to believe all of the panicked headlines that it’s served up. That’s why we need to remember that your brain’s doing what it’s supposed to do, so when it wants to return to panic, when it wants to return to discomfort, you can lovingly bring it back to calm.

So, fostering the skills you need to take on whatever life is serving up to you, first and foremost, get calm. After you get calm, where are you in your belief? What do you need to think in order to believe that you can serve people, that you can offer a value, that you can attract your ideal clients, that you can sign your ideal clients?

Where is that belief on your belief meter? We discussed this in episode 17, The Discomfort of Belief. Check in with you and your belief. Be honest with where you are. And then, once you’ve acknowledged where you are on that belief scale, sit in that daily practice of believing.

This goes all the way back to episode two, How to Believe on Purpose. Remember that you have these skills. You know how to feel the emotions of the situation that’s happening right now. You know that you know how to check back in with where you are in your belief. You know that you know how to purposefully sit in belief. Practice saying the belief out loud and breathing into it; sitting in the belief until it feels rooted into your gut.

And the fourth step here, which will be a little new today, don’t be afraid to shift the words of those thoughts and beliefs. You might need to adjust them. You might need to make them a little bit more powerful. Is it creating the grounded sensation that you’re really looking for? Be willing to say, “If I were to believe at a 10 out of 10, what would I need to think?”

So, this is your work, my friends. Let go of normal. The concept of normal sounds good in theory, but it shuts you down. It puts your confidence and your life coaching business on hiatus. And it’s not even real. It’s not even something that’s attainable.

So, instead, practice the skills that you really need right now in a global pandemic, and any random Tuesday years from now. Because life is not going to stop throwing the goods at you. Emotional strength-train to feel all the feels that are coming your way. Check in with your belief. Sit in your belief and be willing to make adjustments to those thoughts that you sit in, in order to believe, so that you get stronger in your belief.

This is the practice to foster every single day. And that’s how you maintain homeostasis is using that even when life continues to serve up big dishes of change. Alright, until next week, my friends.

Hey, friends, the doors for my next Confident Coaches Mastermind are open. Confident Coaches is what happens when you mix powerful self-confidence tools with your specific business goals. Feel confident marketing, selling, and coaching your ideal clients.

In Confident Coaches, you will have access to the brand-new Confident Coaches member volt with every confidence-creating concept and tool I have created and that I personally have used to take my life coaching business from four figures to multiple six figures. And you’ll get the coaching that you need to apply the information – not just learn the information, but apply the information – in weekly group coaching sessions with nine of your life coaching peers.

We start the first week of May and there’s only 10 spots. Two are already taken, and it will sell out. So, fill out the application to see if you qualify. Go to www.amylatta.com/mastermind, and I cannot wait to see you there.

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