Transcript

Ani
Hi and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. Hey there, Brian. Hey, Ani, how are you?

Brian
I’m doing well. And you?

Ani
I’m good. Ready for episode 131. Today, I’m certain that everybody’s gonna really like it.

Brian
We’re gonna jump right into it. Going to take a leap.

Ani
Oh, I knew we were talking about certainty, but I didn’t know the rest. So we’re talking about taking a leap into certainty today?

Brian
Yes. Yeah. Well, we’re talking about the mindset behind taking a successful leap of faith. You know, oftentimes people are in a place in their life where they know it’s time to make a change and they’re having a hard time doing it and they’re like, should I just take a leap of faith? But. But there’s resistance to that. And there’s a reason why there’s resistance to that. Because some coaches and influencers out there can just say, basically, just take the leap. You just gotta do it, just do it, do it. But there’s real reasons inside of a person’s nervous system why that’s hard and why it’s actually not always successful and how you can actually make it successful. That’s what we’re gonna talk about today.

Ani
Yeah. It seems really irreverent too, to the fact that the leap of faith very often will confront things that matter a lot in our lives. Responsibilities, relationships with people we care about. And so I think that just do it kind of attitude is quite a lot of bs.

Brian
Yeah. And can be really naive sometime and undermining. And so that’s what we’re going to talk about.

Ani
Great.

Brian
Yeah. But maybe before we start jumping into that, maybe we can just talk about what are some signs that it might be time for you to actually make a change. And maybe there’s pressure building, building, building, building, where it feels like for you, the only way out of your current circumstances is to take a leap of faith.

Ani
That seems like a sign right there. A lot of pressure.

Brian
A lot of pressure. Right. So one of the things is, you know, I think about if you’re in a situation where you’re frustrated, where you’re frustrated like, like chronic more than 50% of the time with your current life situation and that could be a work situation, it could be a relationship situation, it can be a health situation, it can be a financial situation, whatever it is. But if in your life like more than 50% of the time that you’re like frustrated about it, I think that’s probably a pretty good, pretty good sign that it’s time to create some change. Yeah. And that pressure will keep building.

Ani
Yeah. Continued frustration like hey said more than 50% of the time. I think that’s a really good kind of way to gage it.

Brian
Yeah. Now you brought up a couple days ago, Ani, when we were chatting, you know, in our, in our kitchen about the idea that sometimes you can have frustration in your life and it can be more than 50% of the time, but there can be some built in mechanisms to decompress that frustration that would then somehow convince you that maybe you don’t need to make a change.

Ani
I did.

Brian
Huh.

Ani
What did it say?

Brian
Well, it was something along the line of vacation.

Ani
Oh. Oh. Well, I think basically I said if you can afford to take enough vacations that you might be able to ignore the fact that you really do have this thing that you really want to take a leap of faith on. But because yeah, you’ve been able to depressurize the system like and it’s kind of like a privilege thing to some degree. Right. Like enough. Maybe financial privilege is a, is one way to think about it. I’m sure there’s multiple ways to think about it, but not everybody has the luxury of working a few days a week and then taking off the weekends, for example. Right. So let’s say that you can work during the week, but you actually have the luxury of taking off on the weekends. You don’t have to work two or three jobs. Well then you have some kind of privilege around being able to decompress so that the pressure around making the leap might not feel like as big of a deal. I think it’s important to think about because sometimes people come to us and they say I’m in a really tight spot or I have quite a bit of urgency, whether it’s around a relationship or a job or money.

Ani
And you know, the laws, the natural laws would tell us that it’s actually good to that such a bad situation. Like there’s got to be a good part to that situation too, because there’s not really inherent good, bad, right or wrong. So the part of the benefit to think about it, rather than good, bad, right or wrong, to think of it in pros and cons more. Part of the benefit of that situation is because you have urgency. You probably will actually do something about it, or you need to do something about it. But when you don’t need to do something about. Can be harder to take that leap.

Brian
Yeah. So I think so far what we’re building to here is when it comes to taking a leap of faith, that there’s something. There’s an important component of pressure, urgency kind of thing. Right. And that’s building into our. What we’re talking about today. But to your. To your point. Yeah. If that. If you have the privilege to be able to take. Depressurize the system, then the system doesn’t pressurize itself enough to the point where you have enough frustration to say, I’ve got to change something about this. Right. Because some of the scenarios that happened. It happened for me for a really long time. You know, for. For a while, I spent a lot of time knowing that, like, a longing, like, I had a longing that there was something else that I was supposed to do with my life. There was something more that I was supposed to do and have in my life. I couldn’t name it. I had, like, vague ideas around it sort of thing. Um, I wasn’t ready to take a leap at that point because I didn’t have enough urgency in order to do it. But I did feel like I was kind of like dying on the vine in some ways too.

Brian
So. And that. So that might be an experience that, like, our listeners are having too. Like, how do you know that it’s time to create change? Well, if. If on a regular basis, like, you wake up every day on a regular basis knowing that there’s more to life than you’re living right now. Yeah. Well, that’s a pretty good sign that it’s. You need to create enough urgency actually to change something, because if you don’t, you’ll just keep withering.

Ani
Yeah. And, you know, this might lose me some friends here, but I feel like there’s a level of, like, victim consciousness, which is different than victimization. Different consciousness that can come around where we’re just, like, waiting for the universe actually to take more responsibility for us to make the change or not. Then we’re willing to take for ourselves, like, to just kind of, you know, wait for it to get Worse, because the universe will knock on your door. The universe will do a little tap first and those are those like nudges and those, those kind of like that longing. And then it’ll start to knock a little louder. Right. And then it might get the two by four.

Brian
Yeah.

Ani
But a lot of people are waiting for the universe to give them a two by four when, like, take some responsibility for your life, you know?

Brian
Yeah.

Ani
Anyway, I mean, I remember time when I wasn’t willing to take the knocks on the door. I was in the, in my job as an occupational therapist. This was a while ago, my 20s, and I was so frustrated and miserable, I’d cry on my lunch hour and then go back to work.

Brian
Yeah. So that’s like one of those signs. Right?

Ani
Come on. You know, and so I would cry, I would call people, I would tell them how much I hated it. I knew there was something more for my life. I didn’t know what it was. I wasn’t willing to leave. And I had started learning about holistic practices and I was starting to do them in my practice. They were working great. They were getting great results. People were giving me hairy eyeballs. This was 20 years ago when that kind of thing happened even more often than now. But Brian, I waited to get fired. I mean, talk about a two by four. I took no responsibility for my life and my condition. And it wasn’t until I got fired that I decided to like, hey, this is an opportunity to do something a little bit different. I had the opportunity all the time, but I didn’t take it.

Brian
Yeah. And we’re going to talk about that in a minute. How sometimes, like, losing your job is actually the greatest gift you can receive from the universe. When you know you have more to do with your life, you’ve been longing for something to change.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
You don’t have enough energy. I’m not saying you personally, but you know, we, you know, as the individual doesn’t have enough energy to act on it.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
And so like I was dying on the vine too. And so I had to get to myself to a point where I had to position with enough pressure to be able to again, create change or create that urgency.

Ani
Losing your job, losing your relationship.

Brian
Sure, yeah.

Ani
Losing a colleague, losing a member of your team, like getting a huge tax bill, getting in a car accident, getting in a tax bill, losing a client,

Brian
like whatever it is.

Ani
Exactly.

Brian
Yeah. So there’s some.

Ani
Those are doorways.

Brian
Yeah. So there’s some other signs to look for that you might be building to the point where A two by four may be coming sort of thing in that change. Because if you’re longing for something different, it’s just not coming. You personally feel like you’re dying on the vine. But it’s also the universe kind of calling you to create some change for yourself. So another one is, you know, you’ve real. You’ve built a relatively secure kind of cage for yourself to live in.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
You know, and you’re just not really fully living your life. But it feels. But you’ve built a really nice cage. Yeah, right. Yeah.

Ani
A nice couch, nice cushy blanket. Why would you leave?

Brian
Yeah, there’s that visual. There’s that visual I love to kind of show and think about with, you know, the. The bird inside of the cage with the door wide open.

Ani
It’s not good.

Brian
But the bird’s not leaving. Right. Staying in the cage because it’s really, really comfortable in there.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
Even though there’s so much amazing stuff outside of the cage.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
To go. Another one is. And I think you kind of spoke to this with your crying on the lunch hour. I think another one thing is you dread Mondays.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
Like the Monday dread. Like so, you know, we’ve. We’ve met people who are still working in, like in jobs and. And they say Sundays are like the worst day of the week. Dreading going back to work on Monday. I remember having those experiences when I was in a job.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
Sort of thing, too. So if you’re dreading Mondays, especially when coming back after one of those decompressing vacations.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
If that feels like dread to you, then that’s a pretty good sign that you are not fully living your life.

Ani
I would say dreading whatever. Fill in the blank, like, check out what you’re dreading because there’s something there.

Brian
Yeah.

Ani
For you to decode in terms of what’s going on.

Brian
Yeah. And then my last kind of example is if you’re counting the years to retirement.

Ani
Oh, yeah.

Brian
Right. So we’ve worked with people who are like, I only have 10 years left. Only 10 years left. I retired. I’m thinking 10 years.

Ani
Have you ever had like a lifetime? Have you ever had somebody tell you, like, months, days, hours?

Brian
Oh, yeah.

Ani
That freaks me out.

Brian
I’ve had people who know exactly how many years. Months, days.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
Minutes until they retire.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
And I think, wow, like that.

Ani
And again, that’s retiring. You can also think about it in terms of whatever other things in your life you’re counting down towards. So I’ve had other. I’ve had Other instances like that in terms of things like relationship challenges and stuff like that. Yeah, I know how many days I’ve got to tolerate, suffer through whatever until it’s over.

Brian
Yeah. So there’s so any of those kind of things that we kind of mentioned around the Monday dread and you built a comfortable cage for yourself or you’re frustrated more than 50% of the time. Like all those things are basically just signs letting you know that it’s time for you probably to make a change before a two by four is entered into your life from the universe. Because that typically happens like that. And then the universe creates the urgency for you. And often when that happens, it comes along with a whole bunch of other stuff as well that you have to kind of deal with that we wouldn’t have to deal with if you just felt the nudge rather than the two by four.

Ani
Yeah. It reminds me of, you know, you’re going to have to surf this thing or get crushed by the wave and it’s easier to serve a smaller wave that it is a big tsunami.

Brian
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So here’s what we want to know about the mindset around all this in terms of maybe you’re getting the. Maybe you’re getting the new news flash right now that you may be on this list that you might be experiencing this list that we’re talking about, and you might be saying, oh, my God, yes, I know I’ve been. I know it’s time for me to make a change in something. I can feel that. I can feel I’m dying on the vine. I can feel the frustration on a regular basis. I can’t stand Mondays. I know I need to make a change. Well, what mindset do I need then to make that change?

Ani
All right, I got to take a short detour here about mindset, Brian, because there’s a lot of people out there talking about mindset, and we have a certain way of talking about mindset here at this medicoaching academy. You’re going to get it here in a second. Sure. That Brian’s prepared for us. That is trauma informed and trauma sensitive. And not everybody here talking about mindset out there is. I think it’s just really noisy around mindset, Brian, because there are so many people who cannot tell you how it works, and they just say, do it. And I think that is. That does not work for most people. For a lot of people, that doesn’t work. And I think that then it perpetuates fear within ourselves that we’re not good enough and we’ll never be able to do it. And I just want to say, listeners, if you have ever had a instance for yourself where you’ve had some kind of mindset advice, whether it’s free online, you’ve paid a whole lot of money for it and you haven’t been able to do it and you’ve thought, you know, what’s the matter with me? Hey, maybe it’s the fact that the person who is teaching you the mindset stuff didn’t know how it worked and isn’t trauma informed or trauma sensitive, and then in that regard, it wasn’t used.

Ani
You don’t have to take that extra responsibility on. Yeah, all right. Thanks for that public service.

Brian
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I love that. That’s great. So the way that it works and the reason that you’re. The reason that you’re haven’t made the move yet. Let’s just say we talk a lot about the subconscious mind on the podcast here. And one of the things that we’ve talked a lot about the subconscious mind is that the subconscious mind kind of craves safety and which is, which is true. So if it doesn’t feel safe to make the change, whether the subconscious mind is not going to get on board with the change. But I want to just insert a different word for our conversation today, and the word is certainty. The word is around certain rather than safety. Now, they can be synonymous in a lot of ways, but let’s just kind of chip that word for a moment just for our conversation. Here’s the idea. Even if you consciously don’t like the situation you’re currently in, even if you consciously don’t like whatever’s going on where you’re dreading Mondays, or even if you consciously don’t like whatever’s happening, you’re frustrated more than 50% of the time, whatever. If there’s something you consciously don’t, don’t like, even if what you’re experiencing is more certain, more certain than the alternative, then your subconscious mind will not get on board with the change.

Ani
Right on.

Brian
So it’s really about certainty. So even if consciously you don’t like it, if it’s more certain than the alternative, then your subconscious mind is gonna. Is gonna have you stay put.

Ani
I like how you change that around because I think there’s a lot again of pressure out there with, like, do the thing that scares you. And you know, again, people don’t know how that works in the physiology, so they don’t know how to talk about that intelligently. And we can put A lot of pressure on ourselves around that. So just that that switch there, I think takes some of the pressure actually out of the conversation to allow somebody to take a deep breath and not feel like they’re on a ledge.

Brian
Yeah, yeah.

Ani
So I like that.

Brian
And that’s because, you know, the opposite of is uncertainty. And uncertainty requires a lot more energy physiologically than certainty does. So if we just go back to, again, the basis, the basic kind of function, the current basic currency of the physiology is energy. And the subconscious, the brain does not like to spend any more energy than it has to. It’s really, in a lot of ways, is one of its priorities is energy conservation, just based on millions and millions and millions of years of evolution, where humans, this is probably all animals in that matter, but humans like you never knew when your next food source was coming from. And this is how we still work metabolically. So there’s a lot around energy conservation. So uncertainty requires a lot of energy to navigate. So certainty, less energy. And that’s one of the reasons basically why your subconscious mind really digs certainty. And going back to what you were saying, Ani, is this is often why losing a job is one of the best things to happen if you are interested in a change in your job. In your job change. Yeah. Or a relationship. Relationship change, health, health, problem, health change.

Brian
Right. There’s a great saying from traditional Chinese medicine around health that enlightened enlightenment comes through a sick stomach. That the way to really create urgency for enlightenment is when you’re sick sort of thing. And so this goes to really, I think the idea of anything that we want to change in our life, that losing something actually creates the urgency. And part of the reason that is. I’m going to do a little segue here is that when you lose the job or when you feel like you lose the relationship, it kind of feels like your backup plan got taken away. And that kind of feels like that. That idea of burning the ships, which is another mindset that a lot of people purport in the mindset industry, right. They say, listen, you just have to burn the ships. You just have to go all in.

Ani
Right. That’s what burning the ships means. If you haven’t heard that before, like, you just go all in. So you don’t have a backup plan.

Brian
Yeah. So let me just really quick, quick history lesson around burning the ships. Where does that. Where’s that phrase come from?

Ani
From Columbus, actually.

Brian
From Cortez. So close. So Cortez was also a conquistador, a Spanish conistador. So in like, the 1500s, when Cortez was leaving Cuba, and he left Cuba with, like, 11 ships and, like, 600 men to go invade Mexico and the Aztec Empire, the conquistadors around the Aztec Empire. And so the. These 600 men land on the Mexican peninsula somewhere, and when they get off their ships and they start to kind of invade Mexico, they’re met by thousands and thousands of indigenous people who are defending their homeland. Right. But Cortez was, like, wanted to commit his soldiers to the task. He actually burned their ships so that the. The soldiers could either fight or die. That was basically talk about urgency.

Ani
That sounds like exactly the kind of message that people purport when they talk about burning. The ship has that, like, that kind of energy behind it.

Brian
Right. And so that’s. That idea of a leap of faith is I’m leaping, but I don’t have a plan.

Ani
Right.

Brian
I’m leaping, but I don’t have a backup plan. I don’t have safety measures in place. That’s very, very difficult for the nervous system to navigate.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
Right. Now, some people can do that, but some people can’t. But I would say the majority of people are not built for that. And by the way, I don’t think the people who aren’t built for that aren’t the normal people. I think it’s the other way around. I think the people who are. Who are able to burn the ships are actually atypical. It’s a small percentage and potentially, potentially neurally wired in a way that isn’t advantageous for social. For socialization.

Ani
Like Mark Hamill kind of thing. The famous rock climber who can climb.

Brian
Alex Hamill.

Ani
Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. I always do that. I always want to say the Star wars guy.

Brian
Oh, yeah. Mark Hamill.

Ani
Mark Hamill. I just. Different guy, just screw up. Why do I screw anyway? Yeah. Alex Hamill, who climbs all kinds of things without ropes. Like, they’ve studied his brain. Like there’s some kind of.

Brian
We have. He has like a kind of depressed, atypical fear mechanism. Yeah. His amygdala is not as activated as quickly.

Ani
Right.

Brian
As the normal.

Ani
As a normal person. Right. So I think it’s kind of like what you’re.

Brian
Yeah. In some ways.

Ani
So.

Brian
So we want to say if you feel like. Like burning the ships and taking leaps of faith is really frightening for you, then welcome.

Ani
You’re.

Brian
Welcome to the. Welcome to the Human club. Welcome to the human experience sort of thing. So we’re not going to tell you you need to burn the ships, but so some people can do that, but. And by the way, burning the ships does not guarantee it’s going to work out. No, we want to say that too, because the idea, if I could just burn the ships, then I could. Well, maybe, yeah, maybe, maybe not.

Ani
You’d figure something out.

Brian
Because the thing with like burning the ships, the thing with taking that leap of faith is it requires a few things. And one of the things it requires, it requires you to abandon things that you might really care about.

Ani
That’s true. Yeah.

Brian
Because you got to burn the ships. It means there might be things on that ship that you really value.

Ani
Yeah. I’m just having a personal moment because there was a moment when I was told to burn the ships with something and there was valuable people on the ship burning. And it was a really pivotal moment in my life, actually to tell that person who I respected so much and had a lot of clout and all that stuff to say, to say no, because what’s on that ship matters too much to me. And I had to grapple with myself for a moment around that. But in hindsight, it was absolutely the best decision for me.

Brian
Yeah. So there you go. Right, so that’s a great example. So there might be things on the ship that are really important to you and in that case, burning the ship may end up leaving you with more trauma. Trauma and regrets and things. And you might feel like that’s not really a choice I want to made, which is going to make it difficult for you then to move forward.

Ani
Which again leads me to this. Watch it with the mindset work that isn’t trauma informed and trauma sensitive. Because mindset, traditional kind of mindset can actually traumatize and re traumatize people. And it’s part of how people expect it to work. But if it doesn’t work, throw up their hands and say, oh, well, didn’t work. But I mean, now you’ve got to deal with your trauma. All right, go ahead.

Brian
Yeah, I think, you know, on the mindset and the mindset kind of topic here, Ani, I think what would probably be important to do is I think as a, as a, as an industry is actually start naming the mindset because there’s more than one mindset. Right. It’s not like we have bro culture mindsets, we have, you know, trauma informed

Ani
mindset, mindset, financial freedom mindset.

Brian
It’s not like mindset isn’t one thing,

Ani
Mindset isn’t one thing. But there is this idea of how to navigate your mind and the way we would say, I’M sure is navigate your body mind, like navigate change and navigate transformation. Like there is that because there’s mechanisms and ways to navigate a change. But you’re totally right. If you’re talking about mindset, I always ask my clients this. They say, I need to work on my mindset. And I’ll say, well, what mindset would you like? Well, I don’t know, you know, like, let me think about that. It’s very important.

Brian
Yeah. To identify what kind of mindset we’re actually talking about.

Ani
What mindset do you want?

Brian
Right. Okay. So the. So again, when you take a leap of faith, the one thing that could get in the way is there might be really important things on the ship and you don’t want to burn the ship. And that’s. That’s great to kind of consider that the next thing you have to realize when you’re taking a leap of faith or burning the ships is that the, the chaos potentially and the uncertainty that ensues from that requires a tremendous amount of energy. And you have got to have that energy in deep reserves in order to succeed. If you’ve done that. Right. Because we’ve both been in places in our life where we were, we got the two by four and we were like, we need to figure it out. And there were some long days and long nights and long weeks and long months. You need to figure long years of like, staying in action constantly in order to not drown.

Ani
And you have, we have responsibilities. I mean, listeners, I don’t know about you, but we’ve got kids in a house and pets and moms and dads and sisters and brothers and things like that.

Brian
We’ve got mortgages, all that kind of stuff.

Ani
We don’t have endless savings accounts where we can just quit our jobs and, you know, do our transformation. Go to the monastery and where we’ve got three square meals and. No, we’ve got responsibilities. We’ve got to live this life. And so to your point, all of the energy that it requires, plus you still gotta wake up and like, do your job and take care of your kids.

Brian
Yeah, right. Yeah. So that leap of faith requires lots of energy. And so again, you have to have that energy in deep reserves. And if you don’t, then it’s gonna be hard to succeed and you could end up finding yourself off in a worse place. Now, I’m not making a case here, by the way, for not changing something. I’m actually gonna show you. I’m gonna show you the mindset trick here, the hack. Actually, mindset Hack. In order to succeed with this leap of faith. I’m just kind of setting up. You have to set it up a certain way to be successful is basically what we’re saying. Yeah. We’re going to say something. Okay. So. And then here’s the other thing. Because the chaos requires so much energy and commitment that even if you get to the other side, you may just collapse at that point.

Ani
Yep.

Brian
So as soon as you get to actually a place where, oh, my God, I finally feel safe, then what we’ve seen before happen with clients is they just basically collapse.

Ani
They have to recuperate.

Brian
Right. They go.

Ani
Nothing left.

Brian
They’re burned out. Something happens in their health. Then something else happens in the relationships that they’ve been ignoring for so long because of the ships that they burned. Something else happens because of that.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
Decision that they made.

Ani
Dude. I mean, it just makes sense. Right. Cause and effect. You burn the ship, you got to deal with the consequences.

Brian
Yeah, exactly.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
So so far we’ve set up is, you know, you might be in a place where, you know, it’s time for you to make a change. You also might be in a place where you’re like, I can’t do this burning the ship stuff because I have responsibilities, I have obligations, I have all those kinds of things. So how do I actually make this work for myself? How do I actually get myself moving forward? How do I get myself out of the place where I’m longing and I’m inside of a cage with an open door and I want to create something new for myself, but. But I’m just stuck in here. Well, here’s. So here’s the little trick, and we’ll give a couple examples around this. Is that the certainty. Because a lot of people, when people make a leap of faith, they want to have a backup plan. And that’s important. Right. You actually do want to kind of have a backup plan, but it needs to be in a certain, kind of, certain way. Okay. Because the certainty of your backup plan, if you want to do this really well, the certainty of your backup plan needs to be much less desirable than the uncertainty of moving forward, which is

Ani
not how people usually do it. Because usually the backup plan is some kind of fantasy world where you get to sit pina coladas on the beach.

Brian
Right.

Ani
I’m serious. And I’m laughing to myself because you remember the training we were on when we were talking about backup plans.

Brian
Yeah.

Ani
So we were on it. We were on a training, and we offhandedly, just as a part of the training, Mentioned something about backup plans. I don’t know. There must have been maybe 50 people on the call or something like that. And people start popping into the chat. My gut backup plan is this, and my backup plan is this, and my backup plan. And we had to actually say, like, hang on, everybody. Y’ all just took a left turn at Albuquerque. And it was not, like, pay attention. But the backup plans were all, like, sipping pina coladas on the beach.

Brian
Yeah. They’re kind of more. I’m gonna buy a coffee shop in Mexico. I’m gonna do this or this.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
Yeah.

Ani
If this doesn’t work out, then my. My plan B is so awesome. I’ll be off doing that.

Brian
Yeah. So you get. Now you can realize, like, what that does to your mindset and to your nervous system when your backup plan is more desirable than you’re moving, than the actual plan you have moving forward. Yeah. So you need to actually change it around. And I’m gonna give you an example. Two examples from my life that kind of talk about how the nervous system works, and then. And then a work example. So one of the first times I actually realized this, I didn’t realize. This is what I was learning. But back in the days where I did a lot of rock climbing, I remember a situation that was. That was happening. So I was on. I was on lead, which means I was. I was climbing. I was climbing with a partner, but I was climbing first. And as you climb up, you. You know, you put protection in the rock, and you clip in, and you keep climbing up and climbing up and climbing up. And then eventually you build a belay, and you bring your partner up behind you, and then you climb again sort of thing. So I remember I was on the last pitch of this rock climb on this high cliff face.

Brian
I don’t know how many pitches we were up. We were like, a thousand. Fifteen hundred feet off the ground. And there’s this. The last pitch. It means we’re getting to the top after this. And about halfway up that pitch, it was a very challenging, difficult route. And about halfway up that rock pitch, I came to, like, actually a pretty comfortable ledge I could stand on and catch my breath and rest. And as I’m on that ledge, resting and breathing, I got pretty comfortable there. I got so comfortable there, I didn’t want to leave it. And I’m looking up at the. At the. I have to. I have to step back off of this ledge into this overhanging rock face, and of course, you know, 1500ft off the ground and. And and the. The next part above was the most difficult part of the whole rock climb. So I know, like, I’m stepping in the most difficult part. And I got pretty comfortable on that ledge, and I honestly, I didn’t want to get off that ledge. And so I’m like, I could just stay here for a while. And so I’m just standing on this ledge and, you know, I don’t feel like I can move up.

Brian
I’m getting more scared. The more stand, the more comfortable I’m getting on the ledge, the more scared I’m getting of actually stepping off of the ledge, continuing this rock route. And then it starts. The sun starts to go down, and I realize, okay, the worst thing is if I stay on this ledge and it gets dark, then that’s really gonna suck. My partner’s down there, like, what’s going on? Are you okay? What’s happening? You know, did anybody come up and he’s, you know, he’s yelling to me about things, and I’m like, it’s okay. I’ll be all right in a couple of minutes. But I’m up there for like a half an hour. I’m standing on this ledge because I’m getting freaked out, more and more freaked out. And it’s just started getting darker and darker and darker. And then I realized that the. The certainty of staying on that ledge was very quickly eclipsing the discomfort and the uncertainty of finishing the route. And that was what actually then got me going again, was when I realized if I stayed there any longer, we were going to be finishing this route in the dark. And I don’t think any of us had headlamps.

Brian
And I was like, this is going to get really, really bad. So that’s what kind of got me moving. And so that’s when I first kind of realized using that kind of idea consciously in my life. So fast forward then to when I left the very last job, the very last job I worked in when I left healthcare for good and stepped out on my own in 2008. So that is how many years ago now? Like 2008. So almost 20. Almost 20 years, right, that I’ve been, like, running my own business. And so the thing is, I remember when it happened, one of the. One of the instigators, instigations for me leaving was the hospital that I was working for put biometric sensors in that we had to punch a clock every day. So I had to put my thumb on a biometric sensor to punch in and punch out every day and listen I was a salute professional. I worked more than 40 hours a week. I gave everything I had. And for me, it felt like a massive insult to have to put my finger on a thing to punch in and punch out.

Brian
By the way, if I was seven minutes late, I get docked. But if I stayed seven minutes extra, I didn’t get it paid anymore. So all of a sudden, I’m like, am I. Am I really salaried, or am I actually punching the clock hourly? Like, what’s going on? And so it was really antagonizing for me. And that was finally one of the things. I had some other. I was sitting. I was sitting waiting for other things to happen. And that’s the thing that kind of finally is like, I just got to get out of here. I can’t do this anymore. It’s just so agitating every single day. So I finally decided to launch my own thing. And here’s the thing. So once I launched my own business, the first few years were hard. They were hard. Hard. Bringing enough money. I was working my butt off, seeing patients, investing a lot of money. I had a new family. I mean, like, all that stuff, it was hard. But I’ll tell you what, every time it got really hard, what I imagined myself doing was punching that clock with my thumb. I can still see it.

Brian
Putting my thumb on a biometric sensor. And like, eight minutes after saying, you know, you just lost 15 minutes of pay or something. And I was like, I am never doing that again, ever. And so my back, because that was my backup plan, I was like, I can always go back to being a pt. I could always go back to being a staff pt. But I positioned it such that. That that option was so unpalatable for me that there was nowhere but going forward. I could still do that, though, if something happened, I could. I got cutting on back now the job, you know what? And I’d be punching the clock, and I’d still be bringing money in. So there was a backup plan, but it was so unpalatable. There was nothing for me but going forward. So that’s really. If you really want to kind of make that leap of faith, the idea is that you need to make the certainty of staying where you are far worse than the uncertainty of the possibilities moving forward.

Ani
And all that requires is a few questions. Well, I’m still hanging out on that rock ledge with you. From that story. I’m like, just. That sounds terrifying. Oh, my gosh.

Brian
So what. So what are the questions? You said you have to ask a few questions.

Ani
You just have to ask yourself some questions to be able to, to see the perspective in a different way. Be able to function after the rock climbing brain is done.

Brian
After that.

Ani
Oh yeah, it’s like on pause now.

Brian
Yeah.

Ani
But yeah, you just, you just need to ask yourself some, some questions about. To be able to change your perspective on that and check out what you think. Like, like we were saying,, what do you think your plan B is, because so often it is the pina colada instead of. We’ve said that all the time. Because I have, I have a similar plan B. Well, the same scenario, really, but we’ll just, you know, when things get rough, we look at each other and go, well, it’s either we do this or we go back to the hospital. There’s no question about what’s going to happen next.

Brian
Yeah. Yeah.

Ani
Never.

Brian
Yeah. So be mindful about how you set that up, and that’s the way that you can set up your mindset in order to take a successful leap of faith.

Ani
So without further ado, we’ll let you get to it. Thanks for listening to today’s episode, and we’ll see you next week.

Brian
Bye-bye.