Ep #33: The Confusion Pool

You are listening to episode 33 of The Confident Coaches Podcast, the one where I save your life by pulling you out of confusion.

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’s everybody doing out there? We’re doing okay. We’re getting through this year, right? We’re doing this thing. I don’t want to alert anyone. If you are listening to this in real time, it is June of 2020. We had some stuff go down this year.

We’ve talked all about it on the podcast the past few weeks and now we’re back in another Mercury Retrograde cycle. So you know, it’s also summer time. We have officially hit summer and it’s hot. It is hot, hot, hot. I live in the mid-West. I live in St. Louis. We have all four seasons here. It is freezing cold and snowy in the winter time. It is hot and stinking humid in the summer time. A gorgeous fall, a gorgeous spring.

I mean, you kind of have to have the two extremes to appreciate the middle, right? We’ve been spending tons of time lounging in our backyard. Obviously, this is the year of the coronavirus, so lots of swimming in the neighbor’s pool. One thing we don’t have that we totally have lots of room for but we don’t have is our own pool.

So we’ve been swimming in the neighbor’s pool. Next best thing to having your own pool is a neighbor with one who lets you use it for free. And speaking of pools, we are actually going to be talking about a pool that a lot of y’all keep swimming in. I know you. I see you. You can’t hide from me, but you really need to stay out of it no matter how hot it gets. We’re going to be talking about that in just a moment.

But first, I actually – we have not checked in with reviews for the podcast in like, since April. Now, I realize that it’s June and April seems like it was about three years ago, but it was actually just a couple months. Back in April, we were celebrating my birthday. My birthday was in April and I had a big push for – if you guys are listening to the podcast, if you love the show, if you’re getting value from the show, would you please leave a review on Apple Podcasts?

You can do it right on the Apple Podcasts app or you can – even if you have an Android phone, you can go online and create an iTunes account and leave a review on Apple Podcasts on your computer, even if you don’t have it on your phone. And I haven’t checked reviews because shit’s been hitting the fan.

I kind of forgot that reviews were even a thing. And I just realized that I’ve actually had a couple of new ones and I just wanted to leave a quick shout-out to the latest one that I found. It’s short, it’s sweet, and it just kind of reminded me, yeah, this is why I’m here, this is why I do this.

Jen9999, Jen, I do not know who you are, but I love the 9999. Jen9999 wrote that, “Amy’s podcast is exactly what I was looking for. I love her willingness to be authentic and vulnerable in order to help others. Her process for creating confidence works and she’s a lot of fun too.”

Jen, thank you. That reminded me right there, we’ve been putting out all of these episodes in all of this kind of mess of a situation that we’ve had, like multiple things going on this year in 2020. And that simple review just kind of reminded me why we keep showing up every single week, why I do the work that I’m doing here, why I keep looking at my own brain and the cluster that’s in there to work through that, to grow myself, to create transformation for myself so that I can share it with you guys in full authenticity, in full vulnerability.

So Jen, thank you for recognizing that. And again, I invite you guys, I would love to read your podcast reviews on the air if you have any to offer. If you don’t include your name, I’m just going to get your iTunes name and some of y’all got some really funny iTunes names, but I’m happy to read them on the air.

Alright, so we were just talking about pools just a moment ago, and some of y’all are wallowing in a certain kind of pool right now that you need to stop wallowing in. So here’s what I know. If you are a life coach, y’all life coaches right now, even if you aren’t a life coach by the way, I hope you’re getting so much value from listening to this podcast.

Obviously, everything that I’m sharing is written around being a life coach, but I know y’all can take what I’m sharing and apply it to whatever you’re talking about. But I am talking specifically to you life coaches who want to sign more clients. You got to start doing things.

That’s kind of part of the gig. Clients don’t just magically arrive on your doorstep. You have to start showing up in the world and start doing things in order to feel more confident and sign more clients. It’s part of the gig, my friends.

And I help you, the reason I am here is to help you with your belief in your ability to do all the things you’ve never done before so you can sign the clients that you want. I’m going to teach you how to feel confident beforehand, how to feel confident that you can do these things without the results beforehand.

So that means you’re going to be taking action. And as you’re taking action, you’re going to be getting feedback from other people. You might be taking a course with plans on what to do. You might have that book that tells you step one, step two, step three. Do all of these things.

If you are a client of mine, you’re going to be hearing go make an offer a day. I do this with my Confident Coaches mastermind clients. I challenge them to make offers every single day so that we can uncover the yucky stuff. That’s what we do inside the mastermind is we work on your belief and we do that through taking action.

But I know that so many of you, as you’re taking action, as you’re getting feedback from others, as you’re being told exactly what to do in someone’s step one, step two, step three business course, as you’re being told to make offers every single day, y’all are swimming in a pool of confusion.

I know you are and you know that you’re in a pool of confusion, that you’re in the confusion pool when your brain is a hot jumbled mess, and you are like, even too terrified to go in there. It’s like, do not go in there. It is a hot mess, people.

It’s like you’re just swimming in the thoughts that are creating this variety of emotion, and all of these emotions, your brain just kind of pools them altogether and labels them as just confusion. It’s just so confusing in there. So here’s what I want to do. We’re going to pick a specific circumstance through the course of the rest of this podcast episode so we know what we’re talking about here.

This can be applied to any circumstance but I’m going to pick one so that you understand how you’re in the confusion pool, why you’re in it, and how to get out of it. So let’s model this out with a specific circumstance, and that circumstance that I’m going to use is make an offer a day.

It’s the challenge like I just mentioned, that I give to all my Confident Coaches mastermind clients. So I run small group masterminds. I’m constantly starting new ones so the Confident Coaches mastermind, I have multiple going on at the same time. I’m working in small groups of life coaches, helping them feel more confident and sign more clients.

And they have to be making offers in order to make that happen, so we can find out why they’re not confident, so we can create the confidence that they need. I’ve done a podcast episode on making an offer a day. I’ve actually just done a live training.

This is coming out next week, but I literally did the live training just today on how to evaluate your offers and how to make an offer every single day. So let’s put make an offer a day as your circumstance. And here’s what happens. I want you to imagine this right now, I’m talking to you right now. You, life coach, listening to this.

This is me Amy telling you, commit to making an offer every single day. Ready, go. Now, what’s happening? Your cavewoman brain is probably throwing a ton of thoughts at you all at once. I don’t know exactly what an offer is, I don’t know what will work, I’m not sure I can connect with people. I don’t even know if I know who my people are.

And even if I did know who they are, I make offers all the time and no one ever responds. All of this comes at you like a rapid fire. It’s like, have you ever seen an old cartoon? My youngest kiddo was talking about this. He was like, in old cartoons, they eat watermelons and then they just spit watermelon seeds at you and plough down the enemy.

That’s what your cavewoman brain is doing inside when I say go make an offer a day. It just, a million thoughts all at once bombarded with a ton of thoughts at one time. And let’s be honest, none of them are good. There’s none in there that are going to help you create the result that you want.

So here’s what happens. We have the circumstance of make an offer a day. You have just this ratatatat of all at one time bombarded with a ton of thoughts. So you kind of want to skip that feeling line because it’s a quagmire.

So if you remember, when we’re talking about modeling thoughts, so we’re talking about C for circumstance, T for thought, F for feeling, A for actions, what you do and don’t do, and R for results. This is like, the basis of all of the coaching that I’ve talked about in all 33 episodes that you’ve had so far.

And when you have those just bombardment of thoughts all at one time, we don’t even want to talk about the feeling line because each of those thoughts actually creates a slightly different feeling, but it’s all coming at us at once like an avalanche. And so we just kind of like – that’s the technical coaching term.

So you just want to skip it because it feels terrible, and then you immediately try to figure out what to do on that action line. Like I don’t want to deal with the feeling line, this is a quagmire, I don’t even want to go there, so what do I want to do?

And then your brain just shuts down. It’s like, I don’t know, I don’t know what to do, it’s too confusing. And so you end up with a hot mess of a coaching model that you don’t even know where to start with. Because we don’t want to address the feeling line because we got a million and one thoughts going on. We’re trying to solve it on the action line.

You can go Google right now how to go sign a client, but your brain can’t do that. Instead it just shuts down. It throws up the I don’t know wall. This giant barrier, it just decides it doesn’t know, it’s too confused to figure it out, which is bullshit, my friends. But I’m going to help you see how that’s bullshit right now.

Because what’s happened is as soon as that ratatatat started, added a few ratatata’s. You jumped into the confusion pool like you were jumping for cover. It was all coming at you at once, your brain shuts down, said I don’t know, and you were like, boom, I’m just going to go jump in this pool, I’m going to go hide here.

And why not, right? Because the confusion pool, it kind of feel safe there. There’s totally a reason that your brain wants to indulge in confusion. I mean, it’s not the best reason, and we’re going to get to that in a moment here, but there is a reason that we want to hang out and lounge around in the confusion pool.

Because confusion keeps you safe. Really see, there’s no shame here if your brain is indulging in confusion. Because your brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It’s trying to protect you; it wants to keep you safe. And confusion keeps you safe because it keeps you where you are. It keeps you from making a decision, any decision, and it keeps you from doing something. It keeps you from doing anything. It keeps you from moving forward. It keeps you stuck where you are.

And if you don’t make that decision then you just get to stay here and you get to just float in that pool, right? You’re like, bring on the unicorn floatie and a cocktail. I’m just going to spend my summer in the confusion pool. It’s hot outside anyway.

Because when you’re floating in that pool, you won’t have to fail at making an offer. You won’t have to get rejected when no one responds or worse, they do respond and it’s a no thank you, I don’t want what you have to offer. It prevents you from sucking out in the open.

And not only does wallowing in confusion, like floating around this confusion pool, not only does it protect you from this perceived failure that it’s so afraid of. It also protects you from success. So many of my clients have a fear of success. This comes up way more often than you would expect it to.

Will I have what it takes to be successful? Do I have what it takes? Am I really equipped to be a business owner? Will I have the time? Will I be able to balance success and work and relationships and my family? And if I’m successful, that means more people are going to know about me, which means that’s more people who might disagree with me.

By the way, yep, absolutely true. So the confusion pool protects you from all of that, or so your cavewoman keeps telling you. Because the confusion pool doesn’t actually protect you from failure. What? No. Because by floating in the pool, you are simply failing ahead of time.

You think you’re spending the summer in this glorious pool on a unicorn floatie with a nice cocktail in your hand, but all you’re doing is avoiding the work and you’re guaranteeing failure. You are guaranteed not to sign the clients you want as long as you keep hanging out in the confusion pool.

And as for that fear of success, the confusion pool actually prevents you from your growth here. From exploring why you have these fears and how you are going to overcome them. There’s so much growth potential in this fear of success and by hanging out in the confusion pool all summer, or all year, or however long you’re going to choose to do that, you are totally preventing yourself from some beautiful growth that is waiting for you.

So you may find comfort in the confusion pool, but it’s not actually that comfortable. It’s comfortable in the way that that old scratchy wool blanket your grandma had, right? There’s something familiar about it, but if you really think about it, the blanket sucked. You don’t actually work through your fear of failure or your fear of success.

And the thing is that you don’t work through it, therefore it’s still there. So while you’re in the confusion pool, it doesn’t actually make those things go away. And in fact, it just stuffs them down under the water. These fears that you have, these fears of failure and all that that entails, these fears of success and all of what that entails.

Those are just shoved down under the water of the confusion pool where they will lurk and stay there like the creature from the black lagoon. They’re still down there, right? Or like Jaws, ready to strike at you when you least expect it. There’s stuff down under the water but they’re going to come back up again. You’re not clearing them up, you’re not avoiding them. You’re just stuffing them down.

So I know that that pool looks refreshing on a hot summer day, but friends, it may just eat you alive one day. So let’s not get eaten alive this summer. So what are we going to do here? Because I don’t want you to get eaten alive by swimming in the confusion pool. I’m just mixing all my metaphors today. It’s super fun.

Okay, so what I’m going to share with you are two coaching tools that I learned from two other master level coaches that I love and admire so much, and I kind of married them into something that I use all the time to help my clients get out of their confusion pool. So this is exactly how I would coach a client in my Confident Coaches mastermind.

I’m going to save your life right here, so lean in. So the first tool that I use is to help you untangle that quagmire that created the confusion in the first place. So this is the coaching tool that I learned from my amazing coach friend Carrie Marshall. I met her in master coach training.

We are such kindred spirits and the first time she used this with me in one of our peer coaching sessions, I thought, oh my goodness, this is genius. Full disclosure, I have no idea what she calls it. I mean, I might know, she might have told me. I just don’t remember.

So I call it the feeling finder because I don’t remember what she called it. So here’s what you do. You have a piece of paper, you have your notebook of some kind. And right in the center of the piece of paper, you draw a big circle. Because we’re going to put the circumstance in the center of that circle.

I know right, this isn’t quite modeling like we’re used to. It’s a little bit different. We are untangling all of the feelings that are creating confusion. And side note, you can use this with overwhelm or with worry or with generalized anxiety.

Any time you’re feeling like a clusterfuck of emotions, you can use this emotion. So you put that big circumstance in the center. So imagine a blank piece of paper, the big circle in the center, and I want you to draw a line across the piece of paper from left to right through that circle.

So you’re kind of dividing the circle, but it’s going all the way across the piece of paper with the circle in the center of it. So there’s a top half and a bottom half, and those two halves are going to be very important in just a moment. So now, each of those thoughts that your cavewoman brain bombarded you with, you’re going to draw a line out from that circle in the top half.

So the top half of your circle is going to start getting some little sticks coming out from it, or it’s going to start looking a little spiny. Now, for each individual thought, I want you to name the feeling that each of those individual thoughts creates for you.

So the top half of your circle, it’s going to have these lines coming out with each individual thought attached to that line and then each feeling. So as a for instance, in our make an offer a day example, that’s written in the center and then coming off in lines, off the top half of that circle, you’re going to have I don’t know exactly what an offer is.

And make that creates inadequacy. I feel inadequate. I don’t know what will work. That makes me feel unsure. I’m not sure I connect with people. That makes me feel disappointed. I don’t even know who my people are. That actually creates disconnection for me. No one ever even responds to my offers. That feeling is rejected. This isn’t working. Despair. I don’t know what to do. For me, that creates incompetent.

Now, your thoughts and feelings might be different than mine, but you can kind of get the picture of what we’re creating here. And we see just a bit of a clearer picture than what we had just a few moments ago. Our brain wants to go jump into the confusion pool. That prevents us from really owning what each of these individual thoughts are creating for them.

So this feeling finder, this method helps us see them, acknowledge them, see what these thoughts are creating for us. It’s the only way to get out of the confusion pool and to save your life. Now, when you see them on paper like this, no wonder you were confused because it was just this quagmire of awful emotions. It’s like a shit cocktail.

That’s actually how I’ve named this before. I’ve also called it let’s unmix your shit cocktail, but feeling finder is a little bit nicer of a name. But it’s like, no wonder you were confused because now that it’s all separate, just seeing it separated on the piece of paper, the confusion starts to dissipate just looking at it.

Now, on a separate piece of paper, absolutely finish each model on those after the fact. Like, do that in a separate thing. Because each thought and feeling combination will create specific actions and results, and it’s always good to own what your thoughts and feelings are creating.

But for this purpose, we’re going to stay with the feeling finder with just the thoughts and feelings outlined. And now, we’re going to ask our inner cavewoman to sit down for a moment and we’re going to fill in the bottom half. Now, this is where I pool in another tool that I’ve learned from my coach, my brilliant, amazing master coach, Stacey Boehman.

This is a tool that she taught us in our mastermind, and I just find it so helpful. And when she taught this to me, I realized that this was the best tool for teaching or for utilizing when your brain says I don’t know. I see this as the I don’t know buster.

So when our brain is swimming in the confusion pool and it’s telling us I don’t know, let’s redirect it to what it does know. So in regards to making an offer, remember, that’s still a circumstance in the center. Start asking yourself questions like this. What do you know? What are you sure of? What is clear to you? What do you believe to be true?

And then you can put each of those thoughts that you came up with when you are asking yourself those questions, what’s coming up for you, and those become new spikes on the bottom half of the feeling finder. And then you can label each of those with their respective feelings.

And that’s what I want you to do here. So when it comes to making offers, I want you to think about this, you specifically. When it comes to making offers, what is clear to you coaches? What are you sure of? What do you know? Maybe you might find thoughts like I know I have something of value to offer, I know there are people who want what I have to offer, I know there are people right now that I can help, I know that I am the perfect coach for my ideal client.

What are you sure of? And then for each of those thoughts, what do they create for you? Assuredness? Determination? Commitment maybe? So we’re going to banish the confusion pool. We’re putting a closed sign on the confusion pool this summer.

So whatever you are confused about right now, maybe making an offer a day isn’t the thing that you’re confused about right now. Whatever you’re confused about right now, use the feelings finder and then use that I don’t know buster.

Draw a circle in the center of the piece of paper, put your circumstance that’s causing you confusion in the center. Draw a line to separate the top half from the bottom half. Put each of those negative thoughts that you’re having in the top half, identify the feelings that it’s creating, see it, own it, and then ask your brain what does it know, what is it sure of, what is clear to you, and put those thoughts, those answers in the bottom half and what feelings do those create.

And then you can just see that you don’t have to feel the top half. You can choose the bottom half. Absolutely separate from this exercise, see what kind of actions are going to come from those thoughts and feelings and what kind of results you’re creating with them.

But right here, just use this tool to get out of confusion so that you can get moving forward, so that you don’t have to stay stuck. And huge thanks again to two of my fabulous coach friends, Carrie Marshall, my own personal coach, Stacey Boehman for teaching me these concepts and now I have married them and created a tool to get you all out of the confusion pool because honestly, you could die in there. And I just don’t want that to happen to you.

Alright my friends, we are not dying in the confusion pool this summer. Let’s go make some offers, let’s go feel more confident, let’s go sign more clients. Let’s go do epic stuff.

Friends, I am so excited to offer you a podcast-only treat. I am sharing with you the five-day Unblock Your Confidence mini course. It is only available to The Confident Coaches Podcast listeners and the only way to get your hands on it is right here. Why do you need this course?

Well, in this five-day mini course, you will learn why it seems like you struggle with confidence when others don’t, how to build trust in yourself, how to get over your fear of failure, how to stop caring so damn much what other people think, and the best thing you can do to unblock your confidence today.

All of that in just five days. This is some of my best work waiting for you. Visit www.amylatta.com/unblockconfidence to get yours. Again, that’s www.amylatta.com/unblockconfidence. Go now and get started today.  

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.