You're listening to the Time to Level Up Podcast. I'm your host, business life coach, Andrea Liebross. I help women in business commit to their own growth personally and professionally. Each week, I'll bring you strategies to help you think clearly, gain confidence, make your time productive, turn every obstacle into an opportunity, and finally overcome the overwhelm so that you can make money and manage life. Let's create a plan so you have a profitable business, successful career, and best of all, live with unapologetic ambition. Are you ready to drop the drama and figure out the how in order to reach your goals? You're in the right place. It's Time to Level Up. Let's do this.
Hey, my friends. Welcome back to the Time to Level Up Podcast. How are you in this middle of August? Can you believe we're in the middle of August? I bet some of you have kids that have already gone back to school. Some of you don't. Some of you might not have kids at all. But this time of year, usually adult women who have kids, no matter what age they are, start to crave a little freedom; freedom from all of the responsibilities that they may have had over the summer, perceived or real, in entertaining their kids, making sure that everything they need and getting them back to school safely.
But today, I'm going to talk about freedom in all sorts of ways. That's just one way. Those of you who don't have kids also crave some sort of freedom, usually from something. I've been thinking about the women I coach and there really are two groups of women, two categories of women, when it comes to this thought of freedom.
We're just going to get right into it, the women inside Committed to Growth, my coaching program Committed to Growth, who usually are relatively new to coaching, they come to me almost afraid in a sense to commit to their own growth, i.e. commit to coaching or investing in themselves because they're afraid that they will lose some freedom because it means that some of their energy is going towards something that they themselves want.
For example, if someone said, “Yeah, I'm really going to work on me now, it's my turn,” then that means that they might have to say no to some of the things that they're currently saying yes to, and they feel as if that is stealing their freedom. But I'm going to show you today that was actually the opposite.
Then I've got the women inside Runway to Freedom, who usually have figured out how to create some personal freedom, but they have committed to so many things inside their businesses that they feel as if they have lost the freedom that they want inside their business. That's why I call that group Runway to Freedom.
Freedom can occur at all stages of your growth. It can occur in all sorts of situations. But here is what it really boils down to, the concept I want to introduce you today is the idea that taking more accountability, the more accountability we take over our own experience, over our results, over every single thing that happens to us and that we do, and over what's around us and the way we experience these things, the more accountability we take for them, the more choices we actually have and then really, the more freedom we actually have.
Another way to think about this is the more that we own what's going on or not going on in our lives, the more we own what we've created, and we recognize our own role in the creation of it, then the more freedom, power, or choice we have in what we want to create going forward. Pretty interesting, isn't it? Yeah, it is.
I'm going to go through this concept with you and give you tons of examples in how it plays out with my clients who are all in different stages of their own personal growth and growth of their business. But before I do that, I want to make sure that you're clear that I am not saying I want you to view everything in your life, whether it's going well or not going well, as your fault. There's a difference in my mind between making it your fault and making it your responsibility.
Taking accountability for it is not the same as blaming yourself in some way. I think that thought right there, like whether or not this happens or not happens is a reason why people don't want to say yes to themselves, or try to attempt to change something because they're afraid that if it doesn't go like they want, they'll start to blame themselves.
But here's the difference in my mind, if I'm blaming myself or making it my fault, then there's an implied negative association with it. It's sort of saying, “I created this because I'm weak or because something's wrong with me or because I'm not strong enough.” That's not what I'm saying at all, and I don't want you to start judging yourself.
This is the challenge for many of my clients. As soon as I try to give them accountability for the results in their lives, they immediately want to judge themselves for it, and that doesn't feel so good. Sometimes they reject the accountability for it and they try to project it outward, outside of them because it doesn't feel great to deal with it inside. It doesn't feel great to beat yourself up about it.
What do we do? I find this plays out often when it comes to women who are very interested in growing or changing something, and they schedule a consult call with me. This is a great place where this shows up; people wanting to change something, wanting more freedom, but yet a little afraid because it means that they’ll have to be accountable.
Think about this, someone who says, “Hey, Andrea, I'm interested in coaching.” They are willing to spend 30 minutes on Zoom with me, exploring if this is something they think will help them and if they think I'm a good fit. Often, we go through the entire call and we talk about what's going on in their lives and I think they see that they could actually change this. We agree that yes, Committed to Growth coaching or Runway to Freedom or just a VIP day, that will definitely help them. A lot of times, they say, “Yes, I am all in.”
But when it actually comes down to committing, kind of like my dad would say, “Put the pedal to the metal,” when it comes down to choosing—because it is a choice—to say yes, they turn to a no. They turn to a no and say, “Well, I'm not sure.” I go back and sometimes I say, “Can I put my coach hat on right now? Can I coach you right now? Can I show you what's happening in your brain?” They say, “Sure.”
I would say to them, this is me talking, “A few minutes ago as we were talking, you told me that you were ready to change X, Y, and Z or to grow in ABC,” whatever they wanted to grow. Basically, they said, “Yes, I am ready to feel better.” I explained to them the process of how we work together to make it happen.
We follow a four-part process in Committed to Growth. First, I help them find some clarity about what they're working towards. Then we work to develop the confidence that they need or they desire to do these hard things. Third, they become a master at managing their time. Then the fourth step in the Committed to Growth process is really getting good at turning obstacles into opportunities.
In this consult call, I might say to them, “Hey, a few minutes ago, you were all in on this. Why are you a no now?” Often they say, “Well, it's not in the budget,” “It's not the right time,” “I have to ask my husband,” or “I have to get a few other things in order first.” I find this super interesting. Their brain is coming up with all sorts of reasons why now, five minutes later, they’re no.
Here's the thing, my clients that do say yes, and are now inside Committed to Growth coaching, they did not say no, they said yes, what they find is that just the opposite has happened. Meaning, what these people on the consult call, the nos thought was so limiting or scary, they felt like committing was limiting or scary or now that they were going to have to take accountability, they're turning that into all scary, which makes them a no, what the people who did say yes found was that very thing (committing and taking accountability for things) is so freeing.
To know that you can change anything I want in my life, that I can create anything I want is freeing. Once I say yes to coaching or to working on myself, what happens is really up to me, but my chances of creating what I want have now quadrupled because I am giving myself the support I need to make it happen.
In my brain I flipped a switch saying I'm all in. I'm giving myself permission to make it happen and I am giving myself the resources to make it happen. I am giving myself the community and tools to make it happen. Like, “Hallelujah. This is so freeing.”
I want you to know that you can take accountability for everything in your life no matter what and you don't have to beat yourself up for it. Nor do you have to be scared to take accountability. You don't have to make it mean something negative or positive about you.
My favorite thing is to make anything mean about me. My favorite is that yes, I am a human. That's so compassionate. That is a much more compassionate way to think about myself than to judge. Rather than think I should be perfect and should get it right the first time and should already know all of this, I don't know why we all think we should be better than we are, we should be more perfect, we should have more things figured out, we should be able to overcome our bad habits and our negative thinking, and all of that drama.
Why do we think all those things? That's nonsense. What we should think is we're human. We're always going to struggle with it in this life. We're never going to get to a point in this life at which we are perfect, but we don't need to. We don't need to. What we need to do is to take accountability without taking blame. Take accountability and own what's happening. Own your results without telling yourself “This is your fault, because you should be better than you are.” Are you guys with me on this?
The women that say no to coaching, they are so afraid of the accountability. In a matter of minutes, they go from, “Yes, I so want this. I want to create change. I want to feel better. I want to commit” to “Wait a minute. This wouldn't mean that I'm now going to be accountable for my own life. No way. I don't want that.”
But this, my friends, is the beautiful thing. It is the amazing part. I want to tell you about two conversations I had last week with two different women. One is an attorney and one works in sales, training other salespeople. Here's the thing. The attorney set up a consult call. She was ready to create some change in her professional life and she told me it was a great time, her kids were kind of at the age where she could spend some time on this. Her husband just had got a new job. Everything was going well for them. They didn't have any financial worries.
She was all in but then when we got to the end of the call and it was time to decide—because I like to say what I do as a coach is I help you make decisions—she all of a sudden turned to a no. When I coached her on it and asked her what was actually going on in her brain, she told me, “Well, I don't know. I think I need to take this slower. I think it needs to happen over a two-year period of time.”
“Well, I just need to create some funds in the budget for this now,” but she had just told me that the budget wasn't an issue. “Well, I think I need to get my kids back in school.” But she just told me she was ready. Notice her brain was coming up with all sorts of reasons not to be accountable to herself. That actually was creating the freedom she desired.
Then here's a story of a woman that I also had a consult call with recently, different person. She told me all the reasons why she was ready to create change and she was a 10. Then when it came time to decide, she said without hesitation, “Yes, let's go. I'm ready to own this.” I'm going to tell you in about two weeks time of working together, probably for only two weeks, maybe three, the change that she has created in three weeks, the freedom she has found is tenfold the freedom she had a month ago.
It's possible. It is all in just what you decide. If you decide to be accountable to yourself, things happen and they always happen for the good. I don't think I've ever had them happen for the bad.
Here's another person I want to tell you about. My clients who we’ll just call L, something that L really wanted was to create time every single day for herself. There's really zero reason why she couldn't do this. She would admit that. Once she has taken accountability and responsibility for making that happen, the freedom which she has found has not just led her to create time for herself each day, but oodles of time for herself in all parts of the day, not just once a day.
Here's another client. We'll call her R. She wanted to get a grip on her finances and we've been spending time working through her finances, setting up—you need a budget, which is a program that I love that I'll tell you more about or you can Google it, and the freedom, although it's been kind of scary, taking accountability for how she's spending her money, when she's spending her money, where she's spending her money, it's actually freeing because she sees that she has so many choices.
Now, these women, the ones that have said yes, they have a whole new lease on life. Let me tell you about the women inside Runway to Freedom. They're usually a little further along in their own growth. They have all taken responsibility for themselves and see how freeing it is and what they want to work on, now is creating freedom in their business.
They're at the point where they are feeling so tied to their business that they have no room or headspace to work on what they want to work on or no time to go on vacation without being bombarded with questions from the office, or no freedom from the day-to-day and they are ready to create what I call a Runway to Freedom in their business.
What does this mean? This means that they now have to take their accountability a step further. They know that ultimately, the buck stops with them as the business owner, but what they haven't realized until now is that the way they are doing business, the way they started doing business on day one is not how they have to do it today.
They don't want to do it that way anymore because they know that if they do it in a different way, if they change something, if they revamp things, they will create the freedom they're looking for, so they shift a little and they start being accountable to create the change in their business. That might look like getting everybody on board, changing up their operating system, reconsidering how they hire and fire. It might actually mean looking at their numbers and being accountable for them.
All very scary, I might add. But they are ready to find that freedom they are looking for in their business. If it doesn't work out right away, if something doesn't happen instantaneously, instead of judging themselves, they look at it as a learning experience. Since they have already seen how they can experience freedom in their personal lives, they're up for the challenge in their business.
Now, do some of them say “No, I don't want to be in Runway to Freedom” once they realize that this would mean being accountable? Yes, some do say no. But I’m going to tell you that most do say yes once they see the vision of where they could go, they see the possibility.
How do you actually find this freedom in the first place? I want to share with you three areas that I have found give us such freedom once we take accountability for them. Now we're going to get to the how of this. For those of you that have listened to me or have coached with me before, you know that I love Brooke Castillo’s model. There are three areas of the model that I want to focus on today that can help you gain some more accountability over what's happening in your life.
This is the kind of work, my friends, that we do inside coaching. I'm going to talk to you about why we sometimes don't give ourselves the accountability for these three things, and how to give yourself back the accountability for each of them. That's why it's such an amazing and powerful gift to give to yourself, giving yourself back the accountability for each of these three things which leads to the freedom you want is such an amazing and powerful gift to give to yourself.
The first thing I'm going to start with is your actions. The actions are things that we do, and it's how we co-exist in the world. Sometimes our actions are things that we don't want to do. All of that goes in the action line, our actions, inactions, reactions, how we show up and interact with the people around us.
Sometimes I'll be coaching a client who will say to me, “Hey, I keep doing this thing that I don't want to do. I don't know why I keep doing it, and I don't know how to stop. Can you help me?” Or they might say, “There's this thing that I want to be doing, but I can't get myself to do it. Can you help me?” Kind of like “I want to be a better planner”, for example, or “I want to create time for myself” or “I want to have a better understanding of my spending.” All those things.
Those would be action items. Or they might say to me, and this is an example Jody Moore uses all the time, but it happens inside Committed to Growth all the time, “I keep getting mad at my children. I don't want to yell at them, but I can't help it. Can you help me?” Here's another example that I hear, “I want to get up earlier in the morning but my alarm goes off and then I hit snooze and I go back to sleep and I can't get myself to get up.”
Or they may say, “I feel like I'm drinking too much and I don't want to” or “I don't want to be on social media and scrolling. How do I stop all of this?” These are just a handful of ideas or things that you might be saying to yourself. Does any of that sound familiar? Anything you are doing or you don't want to be doing, anything you want to change in your life goes in the action line.
What I ask my clients when they lead with something like this is, “Why? Why are you doing what you're doing? Or why are you not doing what you want to be doing?” If you don't want to be doing it, you want more freedom. Now, do you know what the number one most common answer is that I get when I ask why? The most common answer is “I don't know. I don't know why.” That's what they tell me.
Notice, as soon as we say I don't know why I'm doing it, we are pushing ourselves further away from taking accountability for it. We’re pushing ourselves further away from having freedom from it. We sort of describe it like it's just the thing that happens. Like you're watching yourself doing it. It just happens to me, I can't help it. Something comes over me.
Those thoughts are completely disempowering. It's completely disempowering to think of it in that way. It gives us no awareness over what's going on and it gives us no accountability of what's going on. When we have no accountability, then we feel like we have no choices. We have no alternatives. We feel powerless to choose something different or change that action. We feel like we have no freedom.
If you find yourself answering “I don't know” when you ask “Why am I doing that? Or why am I not doing it?” again, one of two things is happening. Number one, you're just rejecting the accountability. Your brain doesn't want to take the time to slow down, think, and figure it out.
Or number two, as soon as you identify the reason why you're doing it, if you actually got to that point, you start to judge and you drop into shame and guilt over it. You beat yourself up. You tell yourself something's wrong with you. You tell yourself it's your fault. That doesn't feel good either. So we go back to the unconscious thought which is “I don't know.”
Now, neither of those things is necessary. Neither of them are serving you. Let me give you the answer. The reason that you're doing what you're doing or the reason you're not doing anything, is because of how you're feeling. Always. Your feelings are the fuel for your actions. They're driving your action. They're driving you to a place of no freedom.
When I ask my client “Why are you doing that?” what I'm checking to see is are they aware of the emotion that they're feeling? A lot of times they're not. As their coach, as your coach, it's one of the things I help them do; identify their emotions. Think about this, why do we get angry at our children? Because we feel frustrated. Or why do we yell at our children? It's because we feel frustrated and angry.
Why do we over drink? Because maybe we feel bored, we feel a desire or an urge, or we feel anxious. Why do we hit snooze in the morning? Because we feel tired or we feel unmotivated in the morning. That's why we don't get up when we say we're going to. We're not feeling committed. We're not feeling determined. We're feeling lackadaisical. We're feeling indifferent.
There's always an emotion behind any action, inaction, or reaction, anything that goes into your action line. When you identify that and you don't beat yourself up over it and say, “I shouldn't be feeling angry. I shouldn't be feeling lackadaisical. I should be feeling motivated. I should be feeling committed. I should be kind and compassionate,” don't be in a rush to get there. We just won't work if you're in a rush.
If I thought it would work, I would say to my clients, “Hurry up. Get yourself to feeling better. But what you have to do is you have to slow down long enough to really observe yourself in your current patterns with compassion. Remember, that you're human, and to really get enough accountability for something, you have to understand that you have choices about what you want to create in the future. You have to take accountability for the choice you make.”
Now, this might take some time, which is why I never tell a client, “Yes, let's just meet for one hour, one day only, and we're going to solve everything in your life in just one hour.” I don't do one hours of complete change. It really is a journey of understanding, and eventually, you will get to the place where you say, “Huh, I think the reason I am annoyed at my children is because I feel frustrated with my children.” That's pretty interesting, isn't it?
“Let me observe myself, and when I'm yelling, let me observe what I'm feeling.” “Oh, look, I'm frustrated. Let me see where this is all coming from. Let me understand it a little better. Let me be kind and patient with myself.” Again, this might take a little bit of time, but from there you will gain so much leverage over it and freedom to create change, freedom to change it.
This, my friends, is accountability for your actions. Nothing just comes over you. Nothing forces you, for example, to put alcohol into your body. I promise you. Maybe you're feeling uncomfortable and then you want to put something in your mouth. Maybe you're feeling confused. Maybe you're feeling like you're not even paying attention. You're unconscious. That could be it. Alcohol just doesn't go into your mouth. There's always the decision you make to put it there. There's always the decision that we make to yell at people. There's always the decision we make about whether or not to get up in the morning.
Now, I do want to mention to you that you're taking all kinds of amazing and useful action in your life too and I want you to take accountability for that as well. My guess is that 99% of the time, you're showing up amazingly well and you're doing the things that you want to be doing in your life. You're taking care of your kids, you're doing the dishes, you're going to work, you're helping your colleagues, you're serving your clients. All very useful.
But sometimes not though, sometimes you're people pleasing and you're stuck in perfectionism. We've gotta question that. All of the things that are serving you well and that you want to keep doing and you enjoy doing, those are all also driven by feelings. Keep being accountable for them. But now let's take accountability for the things that aren't serving you, that aren't giving you the life you want, that aren't giving you the freedom.
That was about actions. We went a little bit into feelings and I just want to mention with feelings, if you're feeling overwhelmed, I coached a woman the other day who I've been coaching for a while and she's made huge progress in so many areas. But right now what we're dealing with is addressing her business that she wants to create or the fact that she hasn't created it. She's wanting to move from corporate to doing her own thing and she's been talking about this probably for a year and a half.
She said to me, “I just come home from work and my kids want me and I'm exhausted and I'm drained and I feel overwhelmed. I just don't feel like starting to work on this new thing. But I so, so want to. I feel guilty for feeling this way.” We played around with it. Maybe the reason that she's not doing what she wants to be doing and she's not holding herself accountable is that she feels insecure or inadequate, or maybe she does feel exhausted.
These feelings or these emotions, I want you to recognize all of these feelings and these emotions are created by us 100% of the time. They're created by our thoughts. When you recognize that, then you get all kinds of power back to choose how you want to feel, which leads you to take the actions you want to take and be accountable for them to give you the freedom that you want.
As long as we delegate that freedom to things outside of us, or to people outside of us and we don't take accountability, then we don't have a lot of choices. She's giving all this power to her kids, or to the situation at night, then she is giving away her freedom. We have zero freedom to do what we want.
For my Runway to Freedom coaching gals, they're at a point where they recognize that they have been giving all of their freedom away to their business versus not getting freedom from their business, and it doesn't feel good, or it's not how they want it to feel. The reason they own their own business, if I go back to, “Hey, why do you own your own business?” is because they know the freedom it could give them and they are not creating that freedom right now. They're blaming the business for making them feel trapped.
They need to take control of how they feel and identify how they want to feel which is free and they need to make it happen. Controlling the universe, controlling the world outside of us isn't going to happen. It's super challenging to do and it limits our choices of how we want to feel. But if we take accountability for our feelings, we can let go of trying to control the universe and we can understand what we need to do when we're feeling overwhelmed or inadequate. We need to change our thoughts.
Here's another example. Recently, a Committed to Growth client brought to me that she was really feeling annoyed that her teenage son was not talking to her more and she believed he was being rude. She asked what she should do about it. My answer was, “You should do nothing. There's no such thing as a rude teenager. There are only people. When we become annoyed with them, when we feel annoyed about them in the way they're behaving or showing up, then we suffer. If you're feeling annoyed, then you're going to suffer because annoyed doesn't feel very good. It's like a tightness or something that many of us try and manipulate outside circumstances to change.”
In this case, when I asked her, “How do you think your son feels? You feel annoyed but how do you think your son feels?” She said, “Oh, he feels perfectly fine.” Notice, trying to change him is fruitless because he's fine. The one that has to change here was my client. Believing that she could manipulate something outside of her, manipulate her son to create a different feeling inside of herself is going to get her nowhere. She's still going to feel annoyed, maybe even more annoyed.
To change how she feels or to feel better or freer, she needs to change her own thoughts. I asked her, “Do you think he's acting like a 16-year-old usually does?” She said, “Yeah, but I don't like it.” If you don't like it, then you have to change your own thoughts or beliefs around what 16-year-old boys act like. If you want more freedom and don't want to feel exhausted by the situation or trapped, if you want freedom from the annoyed feeling that you're experiencing.
Same goes for a Runway to Freedom client who complained that she's frustrated about how her employee is not grateful for all she does for her. What else does she have to do to make this employee feel grateful? That sounds good, doesn't it? The business owner, my client, couldn't stop thinking about it, which made her angry at herself because she's spending so much time thinking about it and energy that she could be spending on other things in her business that really do deserve attention.
As I coached her through this, she realized, again, that she can't change the employee. She can't change the thing outside of her. The employee right now thinks she's just totally fine. What my client can do is change her thoughts about the employee. Every feeling that we have, my friends, is created by our thoughts, our own thinking. When you keep the accountability for that, you suddenly open up the ability to feel any way you want to, anytime you want to.
A lot of people out there are not taking accountability for their feelings because they're too busy trying to take accountability for other people's feelings and we get it all backwards. We label taking accountability for other people's feelings as kind, empathy, or caring, or something that sounds pretty. At times, these are very useful attributes. But there are other times when we create problems instead of owning our own emotions and we try to control the emotions of people around us. That does not lead to any freedom.
Other people's emotions, we can't control them and we can't say, “Oh, I wish they would feel better. I wish they weren't unhappy with me. I wish they weren't mad at me.” No, that's not going to work. You've got to change your own emotions and you've got to allow the other people to claim their own emotions. Sounds really good that you don't want them to feel bad, but they in fact, are the only ones that can be responsible for their own emotions.
I'm going to wrap up here. I have so much more to tell you in my outline here of this podcast, but I think that's enough for today. That's enough for today. I want you to think about this. Ask yourself, are you getting stuck in not feeling the freedom that is available to you as a human? If you're in the beginning of this journey, then maybe you should consider joining us inside Committed to Growth. If you want to feel more freedom, and not feel so stuck or trapped, I want you to consider joining us inside Committed to Growth.
Doors to join us next month, and if you're listening to this in real time, doors to join us in September of 2022, doors closed on the last Thursday of the month like they always do, so that would be August 25th, if you want to join us in September in Committed to Growth, you need to apply by the last Thursday of the current month.
If you think that you're more of a Runway to Freedom person and you want to work on your business, then I invite you to apply to join us in Runway to Freedom by September 30th. I only open doors to Runway to Freedom twice a year. If you want to join us before the end of this year, this is your last chance. Now is the time.
You can find out more about both of these opportunities if you go to the Work With Me tab on my website. If you are feeling like things right now aren't right for you and you don't feel freedom with finances or you don't feel freedom with the way you want to feel with your own health and wellness or your relationships or your relationship with yourself, if you don't want the current results that you're getting, if you feel like you're always blaming others or judging yourself for it, you need some more freedom, and I encourage you, my friends, to come join us. There's no better time than now.
This is what leveling up really means. What would it be like if you got the support you needed to make all of this happen, if you surrounded yourself with other women who are doing the same thing? I will guarantee you that things would be different. Go check out the client-success stories and results. Go check out that tab on my website and you'll see what it can look like. I want that all for you. I crave that all for you and I hope to see you inside Committed to Growth.
Hey, share this episode with someone who you think needs to be inside Committed to Growth or Runway to Freedom. Share it with them, share it on social media, see what kind of response you get. You're going to be the smart one in the room. All right, my friends. Have a good week. See you next week.
Thanks for listening to the Time to Level Up Podcast with me, your host, Andrea Liebross. If you know someone who could benefit from listening to this episode, I encourage you to take a screenshot and share it with them. Okay. Now, what about you? You've listened to the podcast, and if you now know that you're ready to upgrade your life, upgrade your business, upgrade you, then stop being only a listener and start being a liver living that upgraded life. Head over to my website and schedule a call. Right there on that call, we'll start changing the way you think and act so that you can have the freedom to achieve the impossible in life and business, and have the resources to do it. You deserve an upgrade. Let's do it.