Have you completed your daily thought downloads?

Read through your thought downloads and pick one thought that stands out. (Or, if you haven’t done a thought download, write down one thought you’ve thought today.)

We’re going to take one thought and do a deep dive, so choose one thought that really stands out for you.

Now ask yourself this…

How does this thought make me feel?

Check-in with your body, take a deep breath and close your eyes.

Several different feelings may come up for you.

Do a feeling download. Create a list of all the feelings you experience from this thought.

Go ahead, list them all.

I recommend referring to a feeling list (like this) to get very specific about the exact feeling. Be more specific than I “feel bad” – this is too general.

Take a closer look at your thought and feelings.

Thought > Feeling, Feeling, Feeling, Feeling 

Describe what happens next when you feel each feeling. For each emotion, describe what happens next, what do you do, what actions do you take when you feel this way?

Thought
Feeling > Action
Feeling > Action
Feeling > Action 

Notice that the feelings produce different actions, or sometimes we do nothing and take inaction when we feel specific emotions.

For extra credit, isolate the exact thought that’s producing every feeling.

Thought > Feeling > Action
Thought > Feeling > Action
Thought > Feeling > Action

We believe that one thought produces our feelings but specific thoughts produce specific feelings. We have parallel thoughts to our main thought that produce many different feelings.

Let’s give it a try.

We’ll use one thought you may think now or have thought in the past.

“My boss is toxic.”

You think “my boss is toxic” and you experience a multitude of feelings:

Anger, resentment, you feel undervalued, fear.

Your mind takes it further and builds a narrative around this thought to make the situation rich in detail.

What’s really going on is the effect of all the additional thoughts you’re having around your main thought “my boss is toxic.”

Here are additional thoughts you may have:

“My boss gets away with bad behavior.” (resentment)
“My boss doesn’t value me or my work.” (undervalued)
“My boss is unpredictable.” (fear)

All of your thoughts and feelings create an elaborate situation for you, your brain creates a story that supports the way you think and feel about your boss.

This is normal, this is how our brain is wired, it’s wired to make connections and build narratives.

And it’s also important to know that your behaviors and actions are fueled by your feelings. In this case, anger, resentment, undervalued, and fear.

Here are some possible actions and behaviors you might take based on how you feel.

You might :

• Go home and yell at your partner
• Binge on chocolate all night
• Start planning your escape from your job

Get curious about your feelings because it’s your feelings that drive your actions.

Why is this important?

Because until we understand how our thoughts produce our feelings and our feelings drive all of our actions, we remain unaware of exactly what’s going on for us in every situation we experience.

As we become more aware, we can learn how to intervene on our own behalf.

Until we build a better understanding of this, we’ll remain unhappy, frustrated and disempowered.

Stay tuned, there’s more I want to teach you!

What’s your result? We’ll talk about the outcomes produced by your thoughts and feelings.

Often we don’t pay attention to what’s happening for us and our end results. When we understand how our thoughts and feelings are actually producing our outcomes, we can create a more intentional life – and this is life-changing.

Do you know how you’re feeling?

What are you thinking?

Why do you do the things you do?

Many of us are simply unaware of what’s going on for us.

We move through our day not paying attention to what we’re thinking and feeling.

We tend to do the same things over and over.

We react in similar ways when things trigger us.

We act in ways that seem like a mystery to us.

We think it’s just the way we are or the way things are.

You probably never give it much thought.

You probably never think about what you’re thinking except that you notice you often feel anxious, frustrated, self-conscious, filled with doubt, angry, you feel stuck.

But why?

The why. That part is fuzzier.

Our brain tells us we’re angry because our boss is an as*hole, or we’re self-conscious and filled with doubt because our work isn’t as good as the designer who sits next to us.

We don’t even know why we’re anxious, we only know we feel it all the time.

We feel we’ve hit a roadblock, we’re at a crossroads in our career and we don’t know what to do.

So what’s going on here?

What I want to share with you is something so powerful and seemingly simple.

What’s going on is we’re having a whole series of thoughts.

And these different thoughts are creating our experiences.

Your feelings are created by the thoughts that you are believing.

You need to examine all the thoughts in your head to get a clear idea of what’s going on for you.

We think we know what we’re thinking but we really don’t, so we need to start writing all our thoughts down.

I suggest you do this by creating a thought download every day.

You may want to leave your thoughts in your head but it’s extremely important to write your thoughts down.

This is the only way to become more aware of what’s going on for you.

It’s like doing research on your brain to observe how it works. This is critical because your thoughts produce your feelings which drive your behaviors.

When you write down all your thoughts, you can start seeing all the thoughts you’re believing.

Get curious

Closely examine each and ask yourself – is it’s true?

Get really curious about what you’re thinking every day.

If you want to understand why you believe something or you do what you do, you must start by looking at your thoughts and getting curious about your thoughts.

We tend to believe our brain but it often thinks things that aren’t true.

Our brains are wired to create narratives around everything we think about and to find evidence for the things we’re already thinking.

Do you ever notice times when you create a story in your head and it doesn’t prove to be true? We sometimes call this jumping to conclusions. As humans, we do this a lot.

Remember it’s not true just because you think it.

When you write all your thoughts down you will become more aware of all the beliefs you’re carrying around.

You can start seeing more clearly why you’re feeling angry or why you feel so much self-doubt or are anxious.

What thoughts are you having about your career?

So start by writing down all your thoughts.

Do a thought download every day.

It’s about understanding yourself better by examining your brain. It’s an important first step.

Stay tuned. Next, I’ll share with you how to get a deeper understanding of what’s going on for you by taking a look at your feelings. Our feelings drive our actions so it’s super useful to understand how you feel.

Most of us do.

It makes sense. Our brains are wired to want to feel good and we use self-confidence as a gauge for what does and does not feel good.

We believe that having self-confidence will feel good.

We don’t like to feel discomfort or self-doubt.

But what is self-confidence really? Isn’t it just the absence of self-doubt? Self-doubt is simply the lack of confidence in oneself and one’s abilities.

We want more self-confidence when we feel nsecure and we judge whether we feel confident by the absence of self-doubt.

Some of us spend a lot of time and energy wanting to find more self-confidence.

Many of us feel like imposters in our work and want to feel better about ourselves and in our abilities. We try everything we can think of to avoid feeling the discomfort of self-doubt.

But self-doubt is like any other emotion, it is created by our thoughts.

And feeling like an imposter isn’t really an emotion, it’s a thought.

When we desire to have more self-confidence, we assume that something is wrong with us, that other people feel more confident then we do, or that other people or situations make us feel insecure.

But they don’t.

And the best news ever is this:

Nothing is wrong with you.

Confidence is created by your thoughts.

Do you want to learn how to feel more self-confident? I can show you how. Schedule a 15-minute mini-session with me to discuss how we can work together.

Your lack of self-confidence is about how you envision the future, whether you think you have the ability to succeed or fail in the future.

Lacking confidence is about how we anticipate we’ll feel if something doesnâ€t go as we planned.

When we try to avoid feeling discomfort, we have to limit and constrain ourselves. We have to avoid trying new things, we avoid anyone or anything we think might make us feel bad about ourselves.

The more you tell yourself “I lack self-confidence” the more you find in the world to avoid.

But you don’t have to feel this way

It’s your thoughts that create your feelings. And you need to recognize that your brain is often wrong. Sometimes your brain has thoughts about problems when there are none.

And sometimes it tells you to be afraid of something that will benefit you.

In order to have the life you want, you have to be willing to trust yourself and take risks.

You have to be willing to feel discomfort.

The secret to self-confidence is not feeling comfortable all the time.

Self-confidence comes from feeling discomfort and doing it anyway.

We think we need to have self-confidence in order to succeed at something but itâ€s the other way around.

We need to take action and be okay with experiencing any emotion (sometimes it will feel like a success, sometimes failure) in order to build more self-confidence.

Do you want to learn how to find more self-confidence?

I can help you with this.

I’m excited to share this with you. I’m reading the book Dream. Clarify and Create What You Want by Marcia Wieder. In her book, Marcia writes about our relationship to our past in a way that is new and really resonates with me.

“Your life was designed to protect a child.”

You were born as your essential self, your essence was clear to you as a young child. Then early in your life you developed strategies to protect yourself from being wounded.

“The internal protector took care of the wounded child.”

You developed an internal protector who helped to protect you from these wounds. This wounding shows up in all sorts of different ways. This is how you developed your coping strategies.

As a child, you developed a “walls up” coping mechanism in order to protect yourself. Brené Brown wrote about this in her latest book Dare to Lead, our childhood is about putting up walls, and then we spend our entire adulthood trying to tear down those same walls.

But here is the great insight that I hadn’t heard put this way:

“Your identity and worldview was turned into a story by a child.”

As a child we told ourselves stories (that were not necessarily true) in order to create our identity and to make sense of the world.

Our brain as a child is who determined how we assessed ourselves and everything in it.

And children tend to assume it is their fault, a child’s brain doesn’t know that other people are responsible for their own behavior.

How are you still allowing your identity and beliefs to be ruled by your child self?

For me, it’s the stories I told myself about not being good enough because I felt ignored and overlooked, not worthy to have needs and to have a voice. Even as I’m writing it, my child’s brain is telling me it was true.

But is it?

As an adult, I have the capacity to feel compassion for my parents and their human-ness. They did the best they could. But my child’s brain took responsibility for their shortcomings. I made it mean something about me.

I’m practicing new ways of thinking based on the understanding that my identity and beliefs have been determined by me when I was a child.

Now as an adult I have the choice to either play this out the rest of my life, or to construct a new story, a story told with my adult mind that has the maturity and intellect to tell it another way.

How can you tell a different story?

What has your child mind told you about the past? Is it really true? How does it affect you now as an adult?

Letting your past go by telling a new story is an important first step to taking responsibility for your life. And to create the best life you can for yourself.

Do you want help getting clear about your past so you can move on to your future? I can show you how.

Here’s what I’m hearing from many of you during the complimentary mini-sessions I offer:

“Thank you for providing mentoring to designers. This is greatly needed!”

“I have never come across any coaching services specifically for designers so I knew I needed to reach out to you.”

“I’ve worked with other coaches but they didn’t understand what I do or what it’s like to be a designer.”

“Thank you, I think what you’re offering is fantastic!”

I believe that coaching can transform your career and your life.

I believe that we all need help and can benefit from getting another perspective in order to make change and transform our lives.

So I wanted to give you an idea of what working with me can offer you:

Gain clarity
I help you discover what you want to do next. How can you reach your goals and dreams? How can you gain clarity that you’re on the right track? We’ll dig deep and get to the bottom of all of it so you can get clear once and for all.

Mind management
How do you live intentionally? I’ll help you uncover what’s preventing you from getting what you want. I teach you how your feelings drive all of your actions. I help you build awareness and manage your mind to get to the next level.

A “take action” plan
What exactly do you need to do and how? After we determine where you’re going, we can develop a plan for how you can take action to get there. We also take a look at the obstacles that may get in the way and determine strategies for overcoming any potential roadblocks.

Accountability
We take a closer look at why you’re not being as productive as you can be. We’ll practice accountability with the focus on learning how to be accountable to you and to honor the commitments you make to yourself.

Mentorship
Isn’t it great to have a mentor who can answer all your questions? Ask me anything about reaching the next level of your career and your best life. In addition to all the other work we do together, I can help you with your resume, portfolio, interviewing and the other “nuts and bolts” of moving towards your next endeavor.

Self coaching tools
I also teach you self coaching tools to help you continue to coach yourself when our work together is complete. This is a process that allows you to continue to move forward as you grow with your next endeavor.

Are you interested in learning more?

Is something missing?

Does it feel like you’re going through the motions? Is your energy low?

Is the only thing that sounds good watching Netflix all weekend.

It’s possible to feel better and to have what you want.

For a long time, I felt that something was missing from my life. I went through periods of time when I felt numb and I was just going through the motions.

I wanted to feel better but didn’t know how.

The importance of deciding

Rather than feeling unhappiness, you can decide you want something different.

Deciding is the first step.

It sounds so simple, right?

You can decide. You can decide that you want something more.

Believing 100%

Believing is the single most important part of getting what you want.

Do you believe in yourself?

Do you believe you can have anything you want?

What do you believe?

Actions in alignment

Belief is important and it works alongside taking action.

You must take actions that are in alignment with your beliefs.

When you believe you can have what you want, watching Netflix all weekend doesn’t seem as attractive to you, you don’t feel the need to numb yourself, right?

When you believe you can be a successful designer with her own body of work, you spend your weekends creating your own work.

Exactly how you will get there is less important than your belief that you can.

Self-confidence

Believing in yourself takes courage.

As Brené Brown teaches us: it takes courage to show up in the arena, we must be willing to be vulnerable.

Are you open to feeling your emotions? Are you willing to feel discomfort?

You may find yourself wanting to jump over “discomfort” to try to hang out in “happy” all of the time. But self-confidence requires us to feel the entire spectrum of feelings from joy to discomfort and everything in between.

Do you want to have more confidence in yourself? Do you want to reach your goals? Do you believe you can have what you really want?

“He makes me so mad.”
“My boss is difficult.”
“She doesn’t understand me, she doesn’t listen.”
“He’s such a narcissist.”

Maybe your boss is always telling you what to do and doesn’t know how to give constructive feedback.

He makes you so mad that you go home frustrated every night.

There’s the narcissist coworker who you can’t stand to be around.

Do you have a loved one who frustrates you?

Maybe she doesn’t understand you, and says judgmental things and doesn’t give you the support you need.

You feel like you’re surrounded by difficult people who make it hard on you, who zap your energy and affect your mood.

But it doesn’t have to be this way!

There’s another way to look at these situations that you probably haven’t considered.

You don’t have to feel this way about your work, your colleagues, and the other important people in your life.

What are your thoughts?

What are you thinking?

You may be thinking “I’m thinking my boss is a jerk.”

If only your boss would change, your problem would be solved.

But that requires a lot of hope and wishes.

It’s simply not possible to change people.

And, it’s not in your best interest (or very empowering) to think that the only way you can feel better is if someone else changes.

What’s a more empowering approach?

You can shift your perspective, and feel better, by experimenting with different thoughts about your experience.

You can choose to shift your thoughts for simply this reason — for your own benefit.

This may sound like you’re letting people off the hook for bad behavior, but when you think “my boss is a jerk” this produces feelings like resentment, anger, and frustration for no one else but you!

You’re giving your boss power over you and how you feel. You probably think s/he already has it, and you’ve just given your boss even more!

You’re the first to benefit from any shift in your thoughts.

But this takes practice.

We’ve been taught by society to think that our feelings are caused by other people. How many times have you thought “he hurt my feelings.”

But this just simply isn’t the case.

Take a closer look at the thoughts you have about the people in your life.

You can make minor shifts that produce great rewards, shifts that benefit you and will make an impact on your life.

I want to tell you more about it.

Does your life feel out of balance?

Do you feel exhausted and stressed?

Are you anxious?

Maybe you’re feeling so depleted that it’s affecting your health and sense of wellbeing?

I hear you! 

It didn’t always feel this way, right?

Do you remember when you felt energized by your work?

Remember when you were in school? When you could work twelve hours a day or more and feel completely full of life, energy, vigor, and passion?

Do you miss feeling this way?

Why don’t you feel this energy anymore?

Well here’s the difference:

What is fueling you?

Is it energizing you or is it depleting you?

Most people live in a perpetual state of giving up or in a state of busyness and burnout. This state of “I can’t do this” or “I’m so busy” is exhausting.

Some of our busyness is “busyness for the sake of busyness.”

I”‘m just exhausted” is something you may hear yourself saying a lot.

What is exhausting you?

It’s our brain that exhausts us because we get so tired of listening to all our self-doubt, so tired of listening to the questioning, the constant dreading, the constant worrying.

So you say “I just need a break, it’s too stressful, it’s too hard, it’ too much.”

Living with discomfort

You may have a very low tolerance for any discomfort, any kind of discomfort means stop to your brain.

You may feel you need to go back and be somewhere predictable, somewhere less demanding, and less scary to your brain.

Do you notice that you are constantly working and so busy to the point of crazy, and you donâ€t produce your best work because your thinking is filled with worry and fear?

You work too many hours, you can’t pay attention when you’re talking to others. You only talk about work. You’re always rushing and stressed and overly concerned about everything that has anything to do with your work.

You miss lots of important things, including sleep because of work. You tend to overeat, overdrink, over-Instagram-ing to feel less stressed.

It’s not the actual amount of work that you have that produces your feelings, but rather the thoughts that provoke stress and ultimately, the burnout.

You’re using work as a way of buffering and not feeling.

You have the sense that if you could get acknowledged for your work or feel valued as a designer that the stress would be relieved, but this never happens because the stress is coming from your brain, not from your work.

What’s the answer?

If the answer is not taking a break and relaxing because you’re so exhausted, and if the answer isn’t completely burning yourself out and stressing and not accomplishing as much as you want to accomplish because youâ€re driven with fear and stress, what is the answer?

Burnout comes when you’re trying to outrun negative emotion when you’re trying to work hard enough to prevent that negative emotion. 

It comes from trying to trade this moment for a future better moment.

That never ever works.

You cannot outrun your negative emotion, and you cannot run into a future where there is better emotion.

The only thing that changes your emotion is changing the way that you think.

Do you feel burned out and want to get some help? I have the solution.

Are you as productive as you want to be?

(My guess is no!)

You don’t get around to doing the things most important to you, right?

Do you procrastinate?

Is your head filled with so many details you don’t know where to start?

You want to “do it right” but your perfectionism keeps you from starting.

Or maybe you think you get stuff done, sometimes. But you want be more consistent.

I’ve struggled with this too!

I tried every productivity app on the planet with the hope of getting more done.

I’ve spent hours with an app only to abandon it two weeks later. I’d get lost in the to-do list and overwhelmed with the plan.

Is this you too?

Throw away your to-do lists!

Here’s a simple process I use to get more done, without all the overwhelm:

1. Set constraints
2. Turn obstacles into strategies
3. Plan ahead of time
4. Calendarize results
5. Honor your commitments

Set constraints

Getting sh*t done is overwhelming because you try to think of ALL the stuff you need to do.

But here’s the truth, you only need to take the next steps.

Limit yourself to focusing on only the two important results you need first.

Constrain yourself. Here’s why â€” when your brain thinks about ten things it gets confused. Limit the project or goal to two immediate results and it becomes simple.

Also, constrain the time frame. What do you need to complete right now this month?

Pick two results to focus on and do only that.

For example, there’s the side project you’ve been thinking about for months (okay, years!)  What two results do you need first? Results must be steps critical to the success of the project, not what you’re most interested in doing.

If your goal is starting a business, this should be the most important result for your new business— getting clients.

Turn obstacles into strategies

A project or goal has obstacles. Write them all down now.

How will you overcome an obstacle?

Plan for your obstacles by developing strategies for each one.

When you turn obstacles into strategies, you determine ahead of time what will happen if you run into the obstacle, or you can plan to avoid the obstacle altogether.

The biggest obstacle for a project is finding time, calendarizing your time, and following your schedule.

What happens if you don’t follow your schedule?

One strategy is to have consequences for yourself if you don’t follow your schedule. To keep on track you can plan to work later in the day or on the weekend if you don’t keep to your schedule.

Plan ahead of time

Make decisions ahead of time so you can plan ahead of time.

Don’t let your brain make decisions in real-time, this is where you can get yourself into trouble.

This is why — your mind is typically caught in decision fatigue and deciding things over and over. When you make the decision ahead of time, you eliminate decision fatigue.

You decide ahead of time and plan for it. Then it’s only a matter of following your plan.

When you begin practicing the freedom of planning ahead of time, rather than resisting with thoughts like “I need to be spontaneous,” you’ll get more done.

Calendarize results

Okay, so you have two results to focus on. You’ve acknowledged your obstacles and have strategies for overcoming each one.

Now you can define the tasks you need to complete to produce the two results, and calendarize these tasks.

Be sure to focus on the results.

Your time has to produce a result that will move you forward with your project or goal.

Include the strategies for overcoming the obstacles on your calendar. For example, if you don’t follow your schedule, calendarize the other times you can work on your project instead of having free time.

Honor your commitments

Here’s the most critical part.

You must honor your commitments to yourself.

This is where we get very squishy with ourselves.

Consider everything you’ve added to your calendar as an appointment with yourself. If you had an appointment to meet someone for coffee you wouldn’t stand them up.

Be firm. Don’t stand yourself up!

Coach yourself

Coach yourself along the way using the self coaching model.

Why aren’t you honoring your commitments? What are your thinking? How does that thought make you feel?

Understanding yourself better is an important part of the process.

I discovered that I tend to feel rebellious and often think the thought “I like to do what I feel like doing.”

I found myself resisting my schedule because I wanted to believe I could do whatever I wanted and still reach my goal. So be aware (and beware!) of what you’re believing.

The role of discomfort

Feeling discomfort is part of the process to getting more done. It’s true.

But there’s also a lot of discomfort in NOT getting things done!  So why not choose the discomfort that produces the better outcome and the bigger reward?

Do you need help getting more done? I can teach you how to be more productive.

Do you show empathy for yourself?

As designers, we talk a lot about empathy.

A designer’s ability to empathize

In order to produce meaningful and successful outcomes, we need to know as much as we can about the user/customer/client.

What would your user/customer think, feel, do? We spend a lot of time understanding who they are and how they will behave.

As designers, our creative practice includes our ability to empathize with others.

What are the user’s needs? What do they want?

Our work extends beyond this to include:

“What does our team need to produce a successful outcome?”
“What does our boss or manager need?”

Our work feels personal to us despite its focus on satisfying the needs of others.

Your challenge as a designer

As a designer you often hear feedback and opinions of your work from others. And often, it’s from people who are not designers or who may not share your perspective.

Many times your work feels “judged” by clients, and even your own boss or manager who don’t seem to understand your perspective or your work.

How often have you felt criticized, undervalued, and under appreciated?

Many times you take criticism of your work personally. You internalize it to mean something about you and your value as a designer. You can’t separate yourself from your creative work.

You think “criticism of my work feels like a criticism of me.”

This is completely understandable, right?

Of course, this is the way your brain works. Our brain connects the two â€” “my work equals me,” in ways that feel amazing when your work is praised, but not so good when your work is criticized.

You may struggle with this repeatedly to a point where you lose some of the joy of being a creative.

Building awareness

Step back for a moment and become more aware of what’s going on for you.

Feel compassion for yourself. It may hurt to feel your work is not quite right for whatever reason.

But it’s okay. Nothing is wrong here.

Of course that’s where your mind goes. You can recognize it, you can empathize with yourself as you do for your user/customer.

But what situation is your mind creating for you? A pretty crappy one, right?

With compassion comes awareness. When you empathize with yourself you start to understand why you’re feeling this way.

Dig in. Experience your feelings without judging yourself. (And without judging other people.)

By showing compassion and empathy for yourself and allowing yourself to feel sensitive, without making it mean anything about you, you can make space for new thoughts about it.

Subtle shifts that allow you to not only feel compassion and empathy for yourself but also for your client, colleague, boss, and manager. You can see other ways of thinking when you make this space.

Add these thoughts to your creative practice:

“I will have compassion for myself as a creative. I will practice empathy for myself and will understand how I think and feel better than anyone else.”

“I understand how I think and I give myself permission to feel and practice new ways of thinking and being.”

“I will practice having empathy for the people who work with me and be cognizant of my role in making their words mean something about me personally.”

Do you want help and guidance to know what you’re thinking and feeling, and why? Do you want to understand yourself better?