Good team. It's Harps Today. I want to talk to you about overthinking the propensity we have to overthink things, to keep ourselves awake at night, to not do things that we should do because we're overthinking it, to overthink and underdo and underperform and cripple ourselves with fear and anxiety and self doubt and imposter syndrome. Because we are scared of something. We are scared of failing sometimes, we are scared of fucking up. We are scared of looking silly.
We are scared of not belonging or being loved or valued or respected or heard. We are scared of pain and discomfort and messiness and uncertainty. And so we just stand on the sidelines and do nothing, the metaphoric sidelines and do nothing. So what I don't have day is a three step solution. Because we are all different, there is no for virtually anything in life. There are very few three step solutions to any problem, challenge, sickness issue
that works universally as effectively for everyone. So rather than give you a solution, I might give you some thoughts and ideas around it. But I want to talk to you about why we do it. And I think if we can understand why we do it, how we do it when we're most likely to do it, then we can figure out, perhaps for ourselves, a strategy or a path that we can take that might turn down the volume or eliminate or reduce the analysis paralysis that we
have going on. So I have been an overthinker. I've spent a lot of my especially younger life, not longer life, as I almost my younger life overthinking things because because I was scared, let's just be absolutely transparent and honest, I was scared of not being good enough, and then by not being good enough, other people would know that I wasn't good enough, that I wasn't you know what one of my big fears was for a very long time. I don't even know that I've ever said this out loud.
And this really stopped me. This really stopped me from doing a lot of things. And I spent a great deal of time overthinking, over analyzing things because I thought this sounds weird. It's true. I had a deep seated
belief that I wasn't very smart. And I don't really even know from where that came, but I just thought I wasn't smart and I thought that if I said something, or if I made certain decisions or I took certain action, that people would know, that people would discover because I felt like, for a long time I was getting away with it. And you know, there are still times when I feel that, and I'm a bit self deprecating in some of the shows and all of that, but I
genuinely feel at times not smart enough. But there was a long period of my life, I would say, until my mid thirties, where I genuinely thought I was relatively stupid and I was kind of lucky I was getting away with it and people hadn't figured out how stupid I was. And so part of that that fear, that self doubt, that self loathing, that lack of self belief that led me to over analyze and overthink so many things and so many things that I could have done
that I didn't do. Opportunities I could have taken or could have created, and results I could have produced I didn't. Because I overthought everything. I created my own form of psychological, emotional, and behavioral paralysis. I overthought the shit out of everything. So I think there are a couple of things to factor in or think about and one is, you know, like what can I do and what can't I do? Or perhaps a better question is what's in my control
and what's not in my control? And we spend a lot of time overthinking things that are actually flawed beliefs like I'm not good enough. If I do this, they won't like me, they won't love me. I will And by the way, of course, some people are going to not like you, and some things you're going to be shit at, and some things you will fail at, and sometimes you will look silly, and sometimes you will get embarrassed,
as will I, as have I many times. But in order to at least create some kind of progress in this space of overthinking and turning down the volume on it, a little part of that is being mature enough and emotionally and psychologically resilient enough to say I could fail, I could look silly, I could fall down. It might not work, some people might not like it or me, it might not be a positive outcome, and that's okay, and not just say that, but be true in that
it's okay. I might fuck up, I might fail, and it's okay. And also tacking on to the end of that because I know when I do hard things when I do take a chance, when I do step out, when I do allow myself to be vulnerable and get uncomfortable, and perhaps put myself in a process or a situation where the outcome might not be what I want, and I could get all of those things embarrassed or or rejected or whatever it is. In the middle of that,
I learn about me. In the middle of that, I developed skill and knowledge and understanding and awareness and competence and resilience. And it's not until we step into our fears, or face our fears, or lean in a little bit that quite often the volume goes down on the overthinking. So overthinking is generally about fear. What is the fear? What am I afraid of? I was very afraid for a very long time of all of those things that I said, not being good enough, not being smart enough,
being embarrassed, being a failure, what people. I was very worried about what people thought of me, because I felt and nobody did this to me. This was just a byproduct of things. And I don't blame anyone, and I'm not mad at anyone, but one of the byproducts of my childhood and my teenage years was that I didn't feel enough, good enough, attractive enough, skinny enough, light enough, smart enough, creative enough, funny enough, socially acceptable enough. I
didn't feel all of those things. Now, the truth was that I probably was enough. But being enough and believing that you're enough are different things. So the challenge for us is not to find some magic switch to turn off the overthinking, but to rather understand ourselves and understand our overthinking. What is the source of this cognitive mayhem? Why is it so busy in my head? What am I really really scared of. I'm scared of failure. I'm
scared of rejection. I'm scared of having no money. I'm scared of being uncomfortable or embarrassment or uncertainty, your unfamiliarity. What if I took that chance? What if I just addressed all of this with courage? What if I went, well, yeah, all of those things could be happed, could happen, But nonetheless, I'm going to make a decision. I'm going to step forward. I'm going to step up, not down. I'm going to
take a chance. I'm going to lean in, and quite often, if not most of the time, what happens is that thing that we were terrified of proves to be false. It proves to be something that we didn't need to be that scared of. And when we do it, all of a sudden, we change our relationship with that thing that was terrifying, and now instead of it managing us, we start to manage it. The fear goes down our relationship with that thing. We do something uncomfortable, we do
something we were scared of. We do something that perhaps we didn't think we could do. We do it, or we do a version of it. We build confidence, skill, resilience, and now we're overthinking less. Do I ever think it disappears for most of us. No, I think it's part of the human condition. I mean, thinking a lot is not the same as overthinking thinking a lot and and being creative and solving problems and navigating and negotiating life from that kind of epicenter of us, which is our mind.
That's very normal. I'm talking in this conversation about the overthinking, that destructive overthinking that can derail our power, possibilities and potential. Let's take a quick break and we'll come back and wrap up. All right, we're back. So I don't know how good that was today. I'm overthinking how good that was. I don't think it was brilliant, but I'm opening the door. I could almost press the delete button on this episode, but I'm not going to. I'm not going to. I'm
not going to give in to that fear. It's funny that I have been overthinking this conversation about overthinking with you, about how I might share it articulated, because I don't have an answer, you know what I mean. I like in inverted commas. I don't have and I've thoughts and ideas. So in terms of opening the door and moving forward on this for you and starting to get the wheels turning on being less controlled by fear and being less
of a chronic overthinker, my questions for you are these. One, what fear is at the core of your overthinking? It might be many things, but I think there might be a consistent, reoccurring theme for many people. It's the fear of discomfort, whether that's physical, mental, emotional, social, or financial discomfort. But what fear is at the core of your overthinking? And also question two, I'm not even charging you for this second question. I'm chucking it in. Fuck it. It's
how I roll. Question two is what am I currently wasting energy on? What am I obsessing over? What am I overthinking? What am I focusing on? Because where your mind is, your emotion, where your emotions are, your body is, and where all of that is, you are. What am I currently wasting energy on that I need to let go of. I'm going to overthink this episode for the next day, so yeah,