Ep 224: From Stuck to Unstoppable: Transforming Your Perspective in Midlife

It's about having the clarity , self-confidence and unstoppable belief to go after and get everything you want . If you'll come with me , I'll show you how Well . Hello , my friend . I hope you had an amazing week .

Today we're going to talk about learned helplessness , and that is a very interesting topic , one that applies to both your career and your personal life , so I'm going to put it in both contexts in this episode .

I think it's super , super interesting because , for me , I have definitely observed in my 30-year corporate career there are some cultures that are stuck cultures . Right , they're just not cultures that move forward . They're not cultures that easily transform themselves . They're not cultures that are sort of open to reinvention and change .

They pushed hard against it , even though lots of things are broken . Not every company is like that , but I have been in some that are . You may have as well , but there's also a component of this that impacts , or can impact , our personal life .

We can have learned helplessness in our life and we get stuck in situations or relationships or financial situations , whatever it is , where we can feel like there's just no way out , you know , and we tell ourselves that we just have to kind of live with it and learn how to deal with it .

So I wanted to explore the topic on this week's episode , and in the episode I'll give you several examples , some from my life , some from a couple of clients that I'm coaching , and I'll also just share with you the perspectives of the University of Pennsylvania , which has a practice area in positive psychology , and I think they're the authors of this learned

helplessness theory . Super interesting , it's good to know .

So when I'm walking you through this , I really do encourage you to look at it through the lens of your own experiences , whether that be on the personal side or the corporate , business side , and I'll give you some tools if you're a leader , and I'll give you some tools if you're a leader ways to think about it and perspectives on how to notice it and maybe

how to be a catalyst for change in an organization that might find change a more challenging proposition . So , with that being said , I hope you enjoy this episode on learned helplessness . This week we're going to talk about changing perspective and midlife , and to illustrate this , I want to talk about it in both ways .

I want to talk about it through the lens of career , of course , because that's primarily what we talk about on this podcast , but we also talk about the whole person . So I want to talk about this concept of perspective through the lens of something that they teach at the University of Pennsylvania . It's called learned helplessness , and I think it's really valuable .

This is something that Dr Seligman pioneered in the 70s at the University of Pennsylvania , and he actually founded the Positive Psychology Center at UPenn , and when I went through the certification , this really resonated with me . I instantly saw through the lens of myself as a leader of teams and functions in my past career as well as in my own life .

I thought , oh my goodness , I see how this is a factor , and so I want to talk about what is it , and I want to share his view of the things that make up learned helplessness . And I want you to challenge yourself , as I'm talking about some of this , to look at your own life the way I did when I first heard it .

I think we all have it to some degree . Think about your corporate and personal life and look for how learned helplessness might be showing up in you . So let's talk first about what is it Learned ? Helplessness is when a person is unable to find resolutions to difficult situations .

Even when a solution is there , even when it's accessible , they just don't see it , don't act on it and they stay in this suboptimal situation that usually they don't want to be in right . So we remain passive in negative situations , despite our ability to change or remove ourselves from the situation . Now , this is super important .

Let's put it through the career lens first . If you are an organizational leader whether you lead a team , or whether you are a functional lead or a company lead this is incredibly important because , like if you look at my own career path , it's been somewhat nontraditional .

As I got into the specialty of brand Brand , especially in the 2000s to 2010s , it was a very highly sought after . It still is , but those time periods were the age of brand and they were always looking for talent , and so I looked at my own career . I would say this is the opposite of learned helplessness . I looked at my own career as being up to me .

This is a good way to look at the antidote to learned helplessness . I looked at it as it's up to me to have the career I want . No one's going to do that for me .

I'm not going to stay with a company for 30 years and try to sell them on what a great person I am If I'm not getting the opportunities that I want , if I can't fully optimize , if I can't fully bring my skill set to an organization . It's kind of the way I looked at it when a headhunter would call and they would talk to me .

A recruiter would talk to me about a potentially great situation where I could go in and lead a team and drive change and make a difference If it made sense , and I would put it through the specific filter that I won't really talk about now . But if it made sense , I did it . I have a series of moves .

Sometimes I stayed three years , sometimes five , sometimes two . It depended on who called next and what I decided to do . And because of that my point is I think that is a very powerful way of looking at your own career .

I experienced many situations where I was dropped in at a fairly senior level and was able to see the functioning of different organizations , and many organizations have learned helplessness .

Sometimes it's just within a team , sometimes it's just within a function , sometimes it's just within a team , sometimes it's just within a function and sometimes , in general , it's the entire organization .

But what I mean by that is that there are things that are broken either definition of roles , you know , within and across teams , ill-defined or broken processes between functions and broken relationships , usually at the top , across functions , but sometimes within teams . Those are ways of being that the organization has .

One of my big values in my corporate career is that when you're responsible for a team or a function , it is 100% your responsibility to stop the learned helplessness and to raise awareness of where things are broken and to be the one that's there first , with starting to figure out how to get a new way of being established in the organization .

Now , this is not easy to do . It's emotionally exhausting , having done it many times and to lead that because you've got to do it at every level . You've got to first talk to your peers across other functions who interact with you . You've got to get them aligned on a different way of being , and they may not be open to that . That's tough , right .

Even just as tough is convincing your team . It's possible for things to change and to have the courage to come with you as you're shaping the new way of being .

And it's just like anything in life as a leader , as you drive out that change within your team and you're showing up differently and things are optimizing and work's getting done faster , it sort of forces the entire organization to start doing their own optimization , because it shines a light on what's really broken .

Until there's an organizational leader willing to do that , nothing changes . Everything stays broken . To organizational leaders , functional leaders , ceos , c-suite , it is 100% your responsibility to make sure that the learned helplessness in your organizations

stops permanently . There are too many forces in the outside world . It is not 1980 , 1990 . It's not even 2000s anymore or the 2010s . We are now in an era where change is quantum and there are too many things .

I mean , just look at we've gone from talking about AI like artificial intelligence , as an abstract thing that'll happen in the future , to now there's these high functioning chat bots and things chat , gbt chat , gbt4 , like all kinds of things little apps now that are powerful and quite good .

They're already changing how students learn , how students research , how organizations marketing departments are expanding their own ideation capabilities by leveraging some of these things . It is quickly going to change everything . That's just one little component of what's changing .

So I feel like we can't stay stuck in old ways of being , and I believe that organizations that don't find ways to break the learned helplessness within their own organizations or teams or whatever , are going to be increasingly left behind at a fast pace .

I truly , 100% believe it and I believe that , while it can be difficult to be the one that raises your hand first questions , established ways of being questions , the status quo , power structures it doesn't necessarily earn you friends , but all that will fall to the side as you start to sell it in , as you approach it in a way that's not threatening , as you

keep the olive branch extended to other organizations around you . I believe you can galvanize change within an organization and completely reinvent . I've done it a lot of times .

I haven't always been in a role that allowed me to do it , I wasn't always high enough to do it , but in many organizations the teams that I worked for would tell you how they function when I came in and how they function and thought about their roles when I left were completely different , because we started to question everything .

We started to question the learned helplessness , the established ways of being that weren't working , and found new ways that did work . That's how you optimize and drive change in your leadership role .

So that's to me , the antidote to the learned helplessness , the stuckness , the brokenness of an organization is for someone to come in and say I'm going to start questioning all of the ways of being . But I want to talk to you about how this shows up in our personal life , because it is very much something that isn't just showing up in our career .

You definitely can see it in organizations and with people in your career , but also in your personal life . Dr Seligman says that there are really three things that

make up learned helplessness . So if you want to double click into the concept , the three things are that we have a sense of permanence about the problem , that there's a sense of pervasiveness about the problem and that we make it personal .

So I want to talk about each of those in a minute , because that's really what is underneath feeling stuck , whether you're in an organization or whether you're talking about something in your personal life . So this feeling that we believe that it's permanent .

He said that when we look at our life or career or whatever through a lens where we believe things are permanent .

It is the belief that this negative thing , whatever it is , and their causes of the negative thing are always going to be there , that it's never not going to be the way things are so like , for example , I'm coaching someone right now and we're talking about her problems or her challenges .

She's in the tech sector and she kind of feels like she's like in her mid to late thirties and she's got this way of being in her career and she's starting to recognize that she needs to change some things about how she shows up .

The last couple of sessions she started to connect the dots out on well , this is the way I am and this is how I show up and , as a result , this is how my career is going .

She's extrapolating that out now into oh and , by the way , this is why my relationships are always a hot mess , because I'm always the girl with the bad guy or the wrong guy right . So she's got this narrative on who she is in relationships , how she chooses partners and how she shows up within those relationships .

That may not be the best for her and she believes that it'll never not be that way . She looks at her friends' lives and they're starting to choose their long-term partner . They're starting to make decisions around children or houses , making their life what they want long-term . And she feels stuck in her college years and it feels like she has not progressed .

And it's because she has this view of herself and her relationship choices where there's this sense of permanence around something that she knows like on one level is not optimal , but she doesn't feel empowered to change it , right ?

So that's what I mean by permanence is that you believe that there's these things in your career or your life that aren't the way you want , but you believe that , for whatever reason , you're powerless to change them . They're happening to you and your response to it is what it is and that dance is never going to change , right ? So that's permanence .

Second thing is pervasiveness . We can look at a problem in our career life it's kind of what my client was doing and you can look at it as the problem is everywhere . It's not just one part of my life , it's in my whole life . Everything is terrible . You know , I failed at this thing , so I'm always going to be a failure at things like that .

So I'm not going to try anymore , like it's a very limiting way of being , because it takes something that might've been true about one part of your life or one situation and it extrapolates it out into other things and you have this sense of looming negativity or doom .

It's like , well , this didn't work in this area , it's not going to work in any area , right ? That's pervasiveness . And the third thing is making everything personal . So if something's happening that's negative or that you don't want , you're making that about you .

Now , it's important to take responsibility , of course , for our own mistakes , but people that have this sense of learned helplessness tend to blame themselves for everything , and the truth is we're not responsible for everything that happens to us . We'd like to be , we'd like to be in control of all of that . It would make our life easier .

We could avoid all the unpleasantness and all the things we don't want and just have life unfold in our grand vision .

But that's just not the way it works , and there's other people , there's other factors , there's circumstances that happen that we don't want , and the truth is that when we face those circumstances , it's very important to do it with a clarity of am I responsible for this , what part am I responsible for , and take accountability for that , so you can learn right .

That's important but don't take accountability for the whole thing . Don't say to yourself this would have never happened if I hadn't been involved or this would have never happened if it wasn't for me , because that's just usually not true .

There's other things going on besides you , and so when you tell yourself things like that , the problem with it is that it can really do a number on your self-worth , your self-esteem and the degree of optimism or lack thereof that you look . You know the lens you view your life through .

If you think everything bad that happens is your fault , you're not going to shape the life you want , and it's really important to avoid the omnipotence of self-blame .

Look at things with clarity and be clear about the things that you caused and the things that you're accountable for , that you might want to do differently next time , and the things that are caused by someone else .

I related to this one because in my past I've had a relationship or two where the person was suffering from like in one case like substance abuse , in another case it was more just like self-sabotaging behavior and there were periods of time in those relationships where I thought it was my fault .

When you're in a relationship with someone you care about and they're doing things like that . I think parents go through this a lot . You think it must have been my fault . I think parents go through this a lot . You think it must have been my fault . It must have raised the kid in a way that caused this . Right If they've got an addiction problem .

Or I know I was coaching someone else whose grown children were on their second divorce and what came up in the course of the conversation was they've been married twice in 10 years and this must have to do with this must be my fault , something with the way I raised them . We have to give people responsibility for their own lives .

Yes , we can always do better . Everybody can always do better at everything . So that's probably true . But at the end of the day , your children are going to make mistakes , right ? Your partners are going to make mistakes , and those mistakes are theirs to make . Those are their choices to make .

You don't control everything that other people do , and so , while you want to be there to support people , there has to be a clear boundary around what you're willing to take accountability for and what is theirs to own , and that line is very clear . It's the same thing on how you look at other parts of your life . This is happening because of me .

That kind of thing it's not a great possibilities oriented way of looking at your life .

As I'm talking about this learned helplessness concept , you might be recognizing things in your career , things in your life where you might have had a belief that this was permanent or felt like that bad thing was everywhere pervasiveness and you might have recognized in yourself your tendency to make things personal , to make them your fault or to assign full

responsibility for everything bad that happens to yourself . Right , and you might be wondering if you recognize that now . What you might recognize

intellectually that's not the way you want to be . But by the time we get to midlife , we tend to look at our way of being in the world as permanent . We don't really think about ourselves going forward as being fluid , not in the same way we did in our growth years from zero to 18 , where we're becoming and being shaped .

I think 90% of us take that default way of being that we learn through our environment , the people around us and stuff like that .

That's who we are in the world and that becomes who we are for the rest of our life , but I'm telling you it doesn't have to be that way and why I wanted to talk about this today changing perspective in midlife it's like , well , what's the fix for learned helplessness ?

What's the fix for having a set stuck way of looking at the world and what Dr Seligman teaches ? And I believe it is possible to change your default style so that you replace any learned helplessness tendencies that you see with something called learned optimism . This is derived from cognitive behavioral therapy .

It's important to have awareness of where this is showing up and examining , I think , narratives that have happened or built over your life , like my client who said I'm always the girl in the bad relationship . That is an established narrative for her , but is it true ?

No , it's been true , maybe because of the choices that she's made , but does it always have to be true ? No , how would she change that ?

Well , that's what we're working on , but she would change it by fundamentally , before she even gets into a relationship , really gets clear on her own worth and her own identity , such that she knows what she wants and starts to make choices about future relationships through that lens .

And as she does that , she finds herself probably down the road in a different relationship that serves her better , one that isn't consistent with her narrative of I'm the girl in the bad relationship , right , and so that can be true for any part of your life . So learn optimism .

So I would say , like apply it to what I was talking about in your career so broken ways of working in an organization . That's one of the reasons people hate their job . It's one of the reasons people leave their job because they're tired of the inefficient , dysfunctional , non-helpful ways of working in the organization .

They feel it'll never change and want something better . People say they leave bad leaders . I think they leave dysfunctional organizations . The way to fix it .

In your career , if you're a leader but you can do it even if you're not you can take to your leader ideas of changing things that you see that are broken , not settling for the way things are working because you believe that that's the only way the organization's ever going to function , but instead to say how can I change this part of it ?

Don't look at the whole thing . Look at your functions , your team . How can you start functioning better ? What can you change about the roles ? What can you change about the roles ? What can you change about the processes ? What can you change about the parts where you touch other teams . That is how change starts .

It starts from the inside out in organizations in a micro way . The ripple effects of that change affect the people around you . Then they have to change and that's how the ripple effect of change can go through the organization without having to blow anything up , without having to fire half the workforce , without having to fire all your organizational leads .

Change it one tiny nucleus of a team at a time . That's how broken things are fixed . I've done it myself and it can be uncomfortable for the leader because as you start to change and those ripple effects change , it does upset . You've moved other people's cheese and they get upset about that .

But when they start living in a new , more highly functioning organization where things are actually getting done and all of the negative unpleasantness starts to diminish and die down , I think everybody enjoys it more . Right ? Everybody does better work , everybody gets praise . The company does better .

That's how it starts is by believing first that things can change and by focusing on the inside your team , your function and then let the ripple effects of those be felt across the organization and take a leadership role in helping to make that happen , extending the hand to other people that might be at your peer level or higher and helping them see how the

connectivity points between your two teams could change and become more high functioning . The same is true in your life the learned optimism of believing that you might have these established ways of being that have always been there since you were young . But none of it has to be set . You are not set .

You are able to approach life in a different way , and you can do that first . Just like I said , in an organization you don't start by blowing things up in your life . You don't have to sell your house and move . You don't have to leave your partner . You don't have to do any of those things first . What you need to do first is change yourself .

You don't have to do any of those things first . What you need to do first is change yourself . Change what you believe is possible for yourself and who you believe at the nucleus of yourself that you are .

That's why , in my practice , I start with self-concept and we're always working on that , because if you believe that you are the girl in the bad relationship , just keep going back to my client or whatever you believe .

You know you're the one who can't manage their money , or you're the one who can never lose weight , or whatever your issues are , you will never do it . You will always be that if you believe that's who you are .

But if you change that and you allow yourself to see the truth , which is this is maybe a trend in your life , maybe you're at a weight you don't want to be at , maybe you've had these patterns of behavior and ways of being in your life , relationships or with money .

But that can stop right now and it stops by you looking at yourself in a different way , realizing that you're the one who can just decide to become great at managing money . You're the one who becomes the person who's living at their ideal weight , and you're the one who becomes the person who's choosing the right relationships or showing up

differently in your relationships . Or you're the one who's the wonderful parent , not the bad parent , or whatever you're telling yourself .

And it's like when you start to look at yourself through that optimistic lens and you start to think about not who you are through the lens of your past , but who you are through the lens of who you want to be in the future , that is a very powerful thing because you can sit in that that moment of self-concept creation and you can look to your future you

that you want to be in five years , in 10 years , and say , okay , like , how do I become that ? And like , in my case , like , how do I move from something I've always identified with , like being the brand strategist for , you know , x corporation , into the CEO of my own business ? That shift has been shockingly hard for me .

It's not that I think I can't do it , because I tend to look at my business capabilities that I believe I can do anything . But shifting who I am has been a journey for me , and so it takes time sometimes to change established ways of being .

But the germ of the idea starts with what you believe is possible in your life and when you believe that , yes , I might have always been this thing , but I choose to be something else in the future .

I'm going to start right now figuring out who I want that to be and then starting to align my way of being today with what that future thing is , not the past . My client says she's the girl in the bad relationship . It's like , okay , well , now we know you've got patterns of behavior there that you don't want the future .

Who do you want to be in three years and five years ? What do you want that to look like ? And then come back to today and say how do I change how I'm showing up ?

Not with what I've done in the past , but how do I break that old behavior and start showing up as something new , something that serves you and heads you in the direction that you want to go ? So that's what I mean by changing perspective at midlife .

The concept of learned helplessness and learned optimism is the perfect way of thinking about it and talking about it , because the thing that I want you most to take away from this episode is , even if you're 45 , 50 , 60 , 70 , it doesn't matter your age If there are things about your life that you don't like , I want you to cultivate a way of looking at your

life that is optimistic , that sees the issues for what they are , but that then gives yourself permission to say that doesn't have to be permanent . That might've been my old patterns of thought , but I can change it . I'm going to start looking to who I want to be in the future and letting how I show up today align with that . That is self-concept work .

It goes a lot deeper than that . But that is why that's where my practice focuses , because I believe when we are constantly working on our self-concept , that's when we start optimizing

everything about who we are , how we show up in our world and the results and things that are possible in our life . I hope you found this episode on learned helplessness helpful . When I first heard the theory , I could immediately identify so many examples from my corporate experience and even my personal life .

It was really helpful to understand the three components of it and it's a really great way to use those three components to kind of check yourself .

Sometimes , because we just have these learned patterns of thought that become ingrained over time and when we find ourselves in different situations , maybe more challenging situations , either in our corporate or personal life , it can make us feel stuck .

If we settle into a default way of thinking that has this learned helplessness pattern to it , it can really become this thought prison that we stay in and don't allow ourselves to kind of shake ourselves loose so we can move forward in our life in the way that we want . So I hope you found this perspective helpful .

I certainly did when I heard it and I also want to thank you . If you are here today for the first time , welcome . I published a new episode every Sunday and if you've been here with me since the beginning , thank you so much .

I appreciate each and every one of you and I would be so grateful , if you enjoy this podcast , if you would please go out to Apple or your favorite podcast platform and give me a rating or review . It just helps with the algorithm , we get served up more when we get ratings and it's very challenging to get people to go out and give you a rating .

So if you enjoy the episode and you listen every week , I would be so grateful if you would do that . Or , you know , if you're so inclined , I'd love your feedback via email . Feel free to please email me if there are topics that you want me to address or questions that you have .

I would love to get to know you , so you can always reach me at Carla at the purposeful careercom , and with that I will leave you till next time . Make it a great week . My friend ,

do you have a life coach ? If not , I'd be so honored to be your coach . I've created a virtual coaching program and monthly membership called Next Level . Inside , we take the material you hear on this podcast . Study it and then apply it . Join me at the purposefulcareercom backslash next level . Don't forget the purposefulcareercom backslash next level .

Join me and together we'll make your career in life everything you dream of . We'll see you there .