Welcome back to Authentic One Air. I am your host, Bruce Alexander, and today is a very special day because I'm still here, and that's amazing. Today we're gonna be talking about something that is very, very special to me right now. It is the all or nothing mindset, and I wanna talk to some about how it is destroying your business and possibly your life if you haven't identified how it is affecting the way you operate on a daily basis.
So we're gonna just hop right into it, and we're gonna talk about you know, the core four and how everything is going with me across my body being balanced and business. We're going to start with business today because there are some exciting things happening right now. I'm not going to put my foot in my mouth and overexpose what may or may not fully come to fruition, but I've got an amazing opportunity to work with another coach who's got an established presence. He's got the attractive figure.
He's got like all of the things that I want to have. in a coaching business already going, but he is not quite as tech savvy as I am. So I'm hoping to work with this person to help build some of his technical back end and learn from this coach and really kind of bolster my skill set, be of service, kind of, you know, just do something with somebody else for a little while while I continue to build my business, continue to find my people and learn how to serve you all. the best I possibly can.
So that's huge news and I feel like I'm definitely on the precipice of a major breakthrough for everything that I've been working for for so long. So continue, please if you're listening, for me because this is, it's a big moment in my life and I really want everything to go well. My body, continuing to work, walk at least a mile and a half, I think closer to two miles every day, sometimes up to three and a half miles a day, loving it.
I've learned to really love what used to be such a struggle to me and I actually really enjoy getting out every morning and pounding the pavement. I'm excited to take the dogs on a walk every morning. It helps to be in Vermont right now where the air is so freaking fresh and the weather is just absolutely beautiful every morning. It is, I feel like I'm living in a movie. So really enjoying that. balance. Kate is continuing to carry our family financially because she's doing all the work.
She's showing up in a way that I never would have expected her to have to, but she's doing it. She's doing it big. I am doing my best to step up as house husband as I'm, my schedule is extremely flexible right now and I'm learning to get good at things that I used to say, I'm no good at that. I refuse to allow myself to be who I used to be and to... to shirk responsibility wherever possible. Like that's not who I am anymore.
And you know, as much as I want to just be the breadwinner and provider, that's not how things are working right now. So that means I've got to step up in other ways to allow her space and her capacity to expand and be supported by me being what she needs in this moment. So I've gotten really good at doing the dishes every day. So pat on back for me. I used to hate it. Moving on. My being, feel like God has been really working to put all the pieces in place for me.
Like I'm starting to see things I used to only be able to see in retrospect. Like if I look back at my life, there are a lot of things that happened where it was like, man, God was removing this obstacle or God was putting these pieces in place for this thing to happen. And I didn't appreciate it at the moment, but now I'm starting to see some of those things as they're happening.
things that I could see as missed opportunities or failures or challenges I'm seeing as the chessboard being set up for me to win. obstacles are being removed, people are being brought in to my life, being taken out of my life. I see all those things happening and I'm appreciative of the process as it's continuing and I'm focusing on how these opportunities are helping me. leave scarcity in the past and really develop into the person that I've meant to be.
And I encourage all of you to start changing what you focus on. It is really easy to be in the midst of struggle and focus on your obstacles and everything that's going wrong whenever there is just as many things going right, if not more, if you were just change what you focus on. So make sure you're trying to focus on what's going right and how what you think has gone wrong. can be turned on its head into something that is actually in your favor.
So let's jump right into all or nothing thinking. I didn't realize that this was something that I needed to explain to people. But sometimes you start to get a higher level understanding of something and you forget that at once you had no idea about it either. So I'm stepping back to explain in a little more depth what all or nothing thinking is. It is the... the mentality of living in extremes, of seeing everything as a black and white success or failure.
It also has to do with perfectionism and not being able to move forward whenever you're stuck in these extreme mindsets. Either I win or I lose. Either it's perfect or I can't move forward. Those are the types of things. Like if I can't be the best, then I must be the worst.
Those are the types of things that it... that really kind of poisoned your mind towards trying new processes, towards scaling your business, towards like trying something that you're not great at, which may be getting on camera, which may be doing a sales pitch or trying to learn a new software. You may be getting frozen or paralyzed by those things because you think that if you're not doing it at the highest level, you can't start. The simple fact is that is simply not true.
Everybody's new at some point. Everybody makes mistakes. You have to be comfortable making those mistakes because those mistakes are feedback. That feedback is how we can make better decisions and those better decisions are how we grow. Strongly encourage you to take a look at your life and see if there are situations in which you are adopting this all or nothing mindset. and you've been kind of sleeping on it.
Like my last client, just shared a tutorial on my Instagram, I'm sorry, I shared a testimonial on my Instagram today. She had no idea about all the different places where this kind of thinking was showing up in her life. And until we worked together and I kind of helped her identify some of those things, she just wasn't able to see it. And as soon as she had those outside eyes, she was able to make some major course corrections that for one, in her business brought her more money.
It expanded her capacity and her time. It took so much stress off of her shoulders because she stopped trying to be perfect because she understood what was at the root of it. And for a lot of people, it's fear of not being enough, fear of not being good enough, fear of not being attractive enough, of whatever. It's a fear of not being enough of something. But if you can look at it in a real... logical sort of way, everybody starts somewhere.
And we're talking about business growth and development here. Nobody was born with a business already in hand, already great at everything. So if you can look at it that way, it will encourage you to just take some action. And we'll talk about taking messy action a little bit at the end, but that's one of the strategies to overcoming this. Another one, let's talk about, so now that we've talked some about what it is. Let's talk a little bit more about how it affects your life.
Like, so one of the like the biggest things about all or nothing thinking that is really, it's really instrumental in destroying business is that it can hijack your decision making. It can take over your brain and like, like throw gum in the gears of logical thinking because you just, it just over overrides all that because you don't see that there is a a multitude of options between failure and success. There is, know, maybe I win a little bit, maybe I win this way, but not that way.
You know, there's so many different things that lie in between winning and losing. But whenever you are thinking that winning and losing are the only two things, your mind will only allow you to see those two options as outcomes. If that's the case, then you're not going to be willing to take any action because I mean, if you only have the option to win or lose and it's something you've never done before. Why are you gonna try that? Because you're likely gonna lose.
But what if, what if you just want, like if you could change your mentality to see that even trying is winning to a degree. That is completely different than thinking like I have to succeed at implementing this completely and it has to make me so and so many dollars. Like that is unrealistic to always get the first time. So. And like something else is it's often at the source of ADHD paralysis because of this this mindset poisoning the the number of routes you see that you can take.
It often causes you to just freeze. Understandably, if there's only two paths and one of them sucks, totally understandable why you'd want to not move. It's often easier just to stay in the the discomfort that you know, because it is comfortable in its own way. But if you were able to then be shown that there are many other routes that lead to success besides the one of complete winning 100%, then it's gonna allow you to be more active and to take action easier.
Also, it can easily infect not just your business, it can affect your relationships, it can affect the way that you take care of yourself and your body. Like if I don't work out five times a week, three hours a day, then I might as well quit because I suck and I'm a fatty. Obviously, that is an extreme way of thinking. If you were like for me, whenever I was injured, I had to start very slowly back into working out. It had to be, if I can just walk 10 minutes today, then that's a win.
If then from there is like, if I can walk double what I walked two weeks ago, that's a win. If I can walk a mile today, that's a win. I had to stair step myself up to where I am now to slowly get my way back up to where I used to be where I can lift heavy. I can bench press, you know, almost 400 pounds. I'll get there, but I no longer see that as success. I see success as making progress. And so I'm always winning and I'm always happy that I'm winning versus always afraid that I'm going to fail.
So the last thing about about this mindset is that it produces big, huge, messy emotions. It is often going to just like get inside everything that you're doing and make you feel so frustrated, so down, so upset, so angry because once again, whenever you feel trapped in, in your decision making, it's frustrating. It's going to make you angry. And that anger is just like a mask for the sadness of feeling like you don't know what to do next.
It's going to make you feel anxious because you don't know what to do next. Anxiety is often just a lack of hope or a lack of a plan to do something else. Like you don't know what to do next. So your body just manifests it into nervous energy because it's confused and it's scared. So if you can. start to work past that all or nothing mindset. It makes a huge difference to getting those emotions a little more in check, are in check.
And there's a process I've developed a framework that will help you kind of identify and move through this. It's called the four a framework and it is your process for processing. is these four a's, you write this down, get your notes, aware, alert, ask, assign. Those are your four A's. Aware, alert, ask, assign. Your first A, aware. What thoughts and feelings are you having that are in the driver's seat?
Take a minute, like if you're feeling that overwhelming, that overwhelm, that paralysis or that procrastination, ask yourself, what are the thoughts and feelings that are in the driver's seat at this moment? Alert, you have to be mindful of the fact for one, now that you know what all or nothing thinking is, You have to be mindful that it may be the root cause of that frustration or that big emotion that you're feeling. Identifying it is important.
that's, then you have to ask yourself, does this serve my goals? Is this helping? Thinking this way, is this gonna help? And if it's not, you need to assign, I mean, either way you need to assign if this is, Like assign a label to it. Is this an empowering thought or is it a disempowering thought? Does this thought empower me or does it enslave me? If you can start to assign those labels to these thoughts, you can start to see how often it becomes a problem.
it'll like the more evidence you can give yourself that this is a problem that you're dealing with, the easier it becomes to take action against it. But that takes mental like you have to start taking mental inventory. If you're not doing the work to to process your emotions and kind of catalog them as you're dealing with them, you're gonna have no idea that this is something that's coming up over and over and over again.
And this is some homework that I gave my client and she was able to like identify a few things, but sometimes it takes outside eyes. And then immediately as soon as I was like, so what happened here? I was like, okay, doesn't that sound like all or nothing thinking? And she was immediately like, yep, I don't understand why I couldn't see that. Sometimes you're just too close. once again, you try to make it an all or nothing categorization of all or nothing thinking. It's like, does this fit?
It doesn't fit exactly what you said, but there's so many ways that you can fit your thought process into just thinking in extremes. just think about that and really try to dig into your thought process and catalog. Is this something that is empowering or disempowering? Just doing that is going to help you train your mind to identify which thoughts serve you and which thoughts harm you. That in itself is a very powerful process.
From there, there's another strategy in which you bolster the beliefs that serve you and you start to dismantle the ones that harm you. But that's that's a whole nother episode. So I think that just covering that One or well, let me talk about the other strategy real quick. So another strategy for dealing with all or nothing thinking is committing to messy action. When you get to a point of.
I can't do this because I need it to be so and so, like it needs to be perfect or it doesn't look quite right or I can't. I'm not qualified to do this or I've never done that. Commit to messy action. messy action is one of the most powerful weapons in our arsenal because it allows you to take off that harness of perfection and to just move forward. If you're able to just move forward, once again, taking a step forward gives feedback.
That feedback is how you, if you get the feedback, you evaluate and you take action again, that is how you get better. That's how you inform your decision making processes and how you evaluate and grow. If you fear what might happen if you do so you don't, you learn nothing. The fear grows. Inaction is the perfect food for growth or for fear to grow. Action stars fear because it has nothing to feed off of except for the facts and the facts aren't scary. The facts are facts.
You take action on those facts and it will change your life. that is today's whole episode. It went a little longer than I planned on, but it's a really exciting topic to me. If you are like listening to this and thinking, man, this sounds really familiar. I didn't realize this was something I struggled with. You're not alone, but also I have a really great resource for you. It's my free mini course on dismantling all of my thinking and you can go get it at realcoachbruce .com.
That is realcoachbruce .com. and it's totally free. All you have to do is put your email address in and you'll get this three page document, which is like a mini course that guides you through some education and some action that you can take to immediately start to dismantle this mindset and take action in your life today. I really hope you'll do that. And then also I hope you will like and review this podcast episode because I would like to start trying to reach more people again.
So do that on your favorite podcasting platform. And if you're listening on YouTube, please leave a comment and smash that subscribe button because I always love saying that. yeah, I hope you enjoyed this episode and I will see you next week for another episode of Authentic On Air.