Ep. 30: 5 Tools to Help You (Finally) Make Your Pivot
Whether you want to change careers, start a business, lose weight, pay off debt, adopt a child, move cities, write a novel, feel less anxious and more confident in your everyday life, or make any other pivot, these 5 coaching tools will help you get there. In this episode, Stephanie gives you an overview of the 5 tools offered in her free training which are designed to help you go from self-doubt and indecision to taking the action steps you need to take to get you to where you want to be.
Welcome to the I'm the Problem podcast. It's episode 30. I don't know why that number feels significant, but I don't know. It does. It feels like a nice number. I am excited to be here. I'm Stephanie Finigan. I'm your host and coach. On today's episode, I'm going to be talking about five tools that will help you finally make your big pivot. This is actually a new free training that I have over at makeyourpivot.co. So I'm going to encourage you here to go over to makeyourpivot.co and sign up so that you can get access to the training that's going to give you these five tools.
The training is designed so that the tools are just in five videos, really short modules. They're super short actually and they're very digestible and they're going to be easy for you to kind of understand and then figure out how to apply to your own life in real time or as soon as real time as you can, which is really the goal, right? I want to give you things that are practical and useful that you can start applying right away so that you can actually get moving on whatever your pivot is, whether you want to make a big career change or you've got a big change going on in your relationship or your family life or you want to move cities or whatever the changes that you want to make. These are five tools that are going to help you do that.
All right, so I'm going to go through them at a high level here on the podcast today but then again I'm going to really encourage you to go over and download the trainings where I unpack all of these in more detail. But here we go.
Making fast decisions is the first tool when it comes to your pivot. This one doesn't sound so earth shattering, I know, but the reality is most of the time we don't make fast decisions. And if you're thinking about making decisions regarding your pivot, whether it's like, oh, my God, I want to quit my job, and I want to launch my business, or I want to write a book, or I want to do all these things, what we tend to do is overthink and delay and procrastinate making these changes, making these pivots, it feels responsible to do that, right? It feels responsible. It's like, well, I'm going to study the industry and I'm going to, you know, talk to do a lot of informational interviews or I'm going to like we try and say all of these things so that it feels like we're making a big decision or a small decision in like a thoughtful way when, and again, that feels responsible to us, when in reality, what's happening is we're just procrastinating making the decision.
Most of the time, we're just scared to make the change, and therefore, we don't want to do it, and so we're delaying it, and we're trying to sort of hide that delay, hide that procrastination in something that feels responsible, which is like really considering what's happening and kind of tossing it around in our brain, going over every possible scenario. Way more useful to just start making decisions and taking action. So if your pivot is related to a career change, you're going to need to make a whole bunch of decisions and you need to make them quickly if you want to actually see if they're going to work for you. It's not only like, what's the pivot? What's the new job or career that I want? But when is, when are you going to do that by? And what's the first step that you need to take? And who do you need to speak with?
This is not about overwhelming yourself with lots of questions. It's about asking yourself a question, making a decision, seeing what the result is, and then making another decision. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. The reason we wanna do this and why this is such an important skill is because the only way to actually make your pivot is to make your pivot. The only way to actually see what's gonna work for you is by taking action. You can sit in hypotheticals and indecision all day and spin out in every scenario or you can just start taking action. Understand that most action is not irreversible, which is to say everything is written in pencil. There are very, very few things in life that can't be undone or reversed or corrected if you realize like, oops, I went the wrong way. So stop letting that be a fear, this idea of like, if I make this change, I can never go back to X and Y. That's not true. So make fast decisions because that's the best way you're gonna get yourself moving, build some momentum, and most importantly, build some data so that you can start to see what is working for you and what isn't. Do it today. Decide today. Make a fast decision today that you are actually going to make a quick decision on something regarding your pivot. Decide right now what that's going to be. Give yourself a deadline of end of day today or first thing tomorrow morning. Make that decision and move forward. All right, that's tool one.
Tool two is all about having an abundance mindset. And this is really its own training in and of itself, scarcity versus abundance, but it's also something that you can start practicing now, even if it's something that you've struggled with in the past and you might want to spend more time on later. So an abundance mindset when it comes to making your pivot looks like this. Rather than thinking, I don't have enough time to figure out what my pivot is, I don't have enough time to study for X or go back to school, or I don't have enough time left in my career to make a change. Like I'm already, I'm in my 40s, I'm in my 50s, I'm already so far along. I don't have enough time left to make a pivot. I don't have enough money. I don't have enough support from my partner. Whatever it is, whenever you're hearing your brain say, there's not enough, I don't have enough, that's a red flag, because right there you know you are in a scarcity mindset. You're telling yourself there's not enough. When the reality is, that's just a thought. And you could just as easily decide that you are going to have an abundance mindset.
The way you can start to do this, and again, I get into this more in the training, it's this idea of saying to yourself, okay, I know I don't think I have enough time to make this pivot. I know I don't think I have enough time in my day to figure out what I do next. I know I don't think I have enough money saved or I don't have enough childcare support to make this actually happen. Whatever it is, you stop and you ask yourself, okay, but if I did, what would I do next? If I had enough support from my partner, if I had enough money in the bank, if I had enough time on the clock and I knew that I could make this change, what would I do next? Start there because that will open up your brain to the idea that it's possible and then as other ideas come to you, you're going to start to realize that there is way more possibility for you to be able to do the things you want to do than is ever available to you when you're sitting in a scarcity mindset. Alright, that's tool two.
Tool three, befriending anxiety. General day-to-day white noise and anxiety that we all have. What tends to happen when we're talking about making a pivot is that that anxiety often flares up because our brains don't like change. Change is scary to our brain, and so it's gonna throw up a lot of anxiety so that we stop ourselves from moving forward. Remember, your feelings create your actions. So if you have a feeling of anxiety, it's likely gonna slow down any action that you have when it comes to making a pivot or prevent you from doing it altogether. We tend to kind of resist, avoid, ignore, fight against any emotion that comes up that we're uncomfortable with. And anxiety is one of those emotions. But rather than kind of resisting it and saying like, nope, it's not there, I'm just going to like feel the fear and do it anyway, which can work for some people. But if that doesn't work for you, or it doesn't work in this situation, rather than try and ignore the feeling or suppress it or run from it, pretend it's not there.
What is much more useful is just befriending it. And I guess this is a little bit what they mean when they say feel the fear and do it anyway. But it's, hey, there's my anxiety again. And just kind of recognize, like, it's just like an old friend that's trying to help you, even though it's not that helpful anymore. So you probably have a friend who you like, you were close with when you were little, and maybe you've outgrown each other now, but they're like a nice person. So you can kind of think of anxiety as like, you're just, you know, I know you're trying to help me out, but you don't fit in my life right now. Like, I know you're trying to keep me safe, but what I'm doing, it's not life or death. It's just changing a career. It's not life or death. It's just moving cities. Like, it's okay. And you just befriend the anxiety. And I talk about this a lot in the training. Actually, in the training, I think I talk about it as kind of an annoying friend, right? But you can think of it however you want. Befriending the anxiety is just recognizing when the anxiety shows up, talking back to it, and letting it know, like, I see you, and I appreciate what you're trying to do here, but you're just not that useful, because what I'm doing isn't a life or death thing, and then make the change that you wanna make with anxiety there. If you wait for anxiety to be gone, you will never make a pivot. So don't wait for it to be gone. Befriend it and then you move forward.
Tool number four, I call this one gifting opinions. Basically what I mean by this is, look, everyone around you is going to have an opinion about your pivot. Everyone's going to have an opinion about the change that you're trying to make. And you can listen to them or not. But what I recommend is just letting people have their opinions without needing to argue back, without needing to prove them wrong, without needing to correct them.
So if you want to make a career change and your partner is not supportive and he or she is like, look, I don't think you should do this. I think it's too risky. I don't think it's a good idea. You know, you can say like, look, I fully understand that that's your opinion. And you get to have that opinion. I'm not gonna try and change your mind. I'm not gonna try and convince you otherwise. And you gift that person their opinion, and you go ahead and make the pivot anyway. You go ahead and do the thing you wanna do anyway. Because the reality is this, whether or not they're vocalizing it, everybody has an opinion. And sometimes you might wanna listen to those opinions, and sometimes you might not. And I talk more about that in the training. But no matter what, everybody's going to have their opinion. You can just decide, hey, I hear you. You know what? I'm going to do what I want to do anyway. But like with love, you get to have that. Arguing back and trying to convince people that you're right and they're wrong is not only usually futile, it's just fucking exhausting. I want to see you put your energy into your pivot, not put your energy into convincing your mother or your friends or your co-worker that what you're doing is a good idea. So gift other people their opinion and the gift is you just give it to them without you arguing back and then you spend your time and energy on something that's much more useful which is making your actual pivot.
Alright, number five. This is my favorite one. It's the self-confidence tool. It talks about the difference between having confidence in what you're doing and self-confidence in what you're doing. Confidence is built on evidence from the past. So that's you saying, like, I know I can drive a car because I've driven a car a million times in my life. Whereas self-confidence is you saying, I don't have any evidence that I can do this, but I'm gonna choose to believe I can anyway.
When we're making a pivot, when we're making a big change in our lives, when we want to change how we're working out or how we're eating because we want to lose weight or we want to change where we live because we want to save money and pay off our debt, we want to change our lifestyle, we want to quit drinking, we want to do all these things. If we've not done them before, it might be really hard for us to sort of imagine that it's possible and believe that it's possible. And that's where the self-confidence tool comes in. You look to the future, you look to your future self, the one who's made the pivot, and you make decisions from that place. You choose to believe that it's possible without evidence under you that you've done it before, and then you say, what would my future self do? What choices would she make in this position? And then start making those decisions. That's how you get there.
I love the self-confidence tool because it really does allow you to sort of do anything that you want, make any change that you want, make any choice that you want without that old thought in your head where it's like, well, I've never done this before, therefore it's scary. It's like, no, if you can see yourself in the future having done it, then all of a sudden it's like, oh yeah, no, that's where I'm going. I'm looking forward, not backward, and that's where I'm going. So now all I have to do is figure out what the steps are to get there. I don't have to worry about what I did or didn't do in the past. My focus is on the future. I love that tool. There's so much energy behind it.
All right, that's it. Those are the five tools. So I went over them quickly and at a very high level. That's what I wanted to do today because I do want to encourage you guys go over to MakeYourPivot.co and sign up to get the training so that you can get these tools in more detail and start applying them to your lives, to your pivots today. There's so much good stuff there and so I really want to encourage you to take advantage. Alright, if you've got any questions about anything, you can reach out to info at makeyourpivot.co. I would love to talk to you guys more about your pivots or anything else you have going on. on. So message me there and I will talk to you guys next week.