You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 86.

Welcome to My Freedom Grove podcast. The all inclusive podcast that teaches mindset and business tools. We'll help you rise as your authentic self. Be unshakable with your emotional freedom and unstoppable in achieving any goal and living your purpose. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. If you want to put your mental health first in life, relationships and business, you've come to the right place.

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Hi, my strong friends! Happy October. We're about halfway through October now. Some of the leaves are turning out here on the coast. We have more pine trees than any of the leafy kind of trees. So I'm kind of missing seeing all of those fall colors. But last week, one of my clients posted a whole bunch of photos on her Facebook page that showed all of the beautiful fall colors where she lived. Oh, I was so grateful. I really miss getting to see all of those leafy leaves. The ocean's beautiful and everything, but it kind of looks the same every day.

 

I am getting ready to go to a conference out in Texas. So maybe they'll have some of those leafy kind of trees there so I can see some fall colors. But I thought about this as I was getting ready for this conference. I took some time to pause in my business, pause on doing some of the activities so that I could really plan out my trip.

 

It's a five-day-long trip actually gets about six days with all of the air travel and driving to the airport. The airport is many hours away from where I live. And then trying to figure out like Ubers and confirmation numbers and all of the different stuff. And I thought, you know, there's a certain level of courage involved in all of this.

 

So not only courage and taking a pause on doing some activities in my business, but also going to conferences overall takes courage. Going to a whole new state, most times, sometimes you're just going to a different city, but there's nobody there that you know, most of the cases, right? It's usually all brand new people.

 

Comfort or Discomfort Zone?

 

As coaches, we like to think about trying to help people get out of their comfort zones and go do stuff. I like to think about helping people to create new comfort zones.

 

See our lack of courage actually creates discomfort for us. If you think about this, there is something in your life that has discomfort. And in order for you to get out of that discomfort, it requires you to be courageous in doing something else. Either asking questions or doing something you've never done before or speaking up about something that's not working. That sometimes feels like the discomfort zone for people. And they're like, no, no, no. I'd rather be in my comfort zone than do that scary thing.

 

But really what it does is it keeps them in a huge amount of discomfort in this other part of their life. Or the sheer act of not speaking up of not asking the question of not doing the thing creates discomfort.

 

Now, stay with me here. Think about it.

 

How many times have you beat yourself up because you didn't do the courageous thing? How much discomfort did you create for yourself by staying in your comfort zone of not doing something? Your lack of courage is creating your discomfort. Courage actually creates comfort. It doesn't create discomfort.

 

Asking Questions - Do you look Stupid or Powerful?

 

It's really interesting to see how different people approach these acts of courage. Some people see it as something scary and some people see it as not scary at all. In fact, totally necessary.

 

Asking questions is one of those. And I'll just share a quick fun little example. I'm a question asker because I don't like to be in the unknown. I don't like the stress of not knowing what to do or not knowing how things work. So I ask a ton of questions.

 

Back in 2006, when my husband and I first met each other, it was at a new hire orientation for the company that we worked at. We were in a large room, over a hundred people were in the room. I was sitting somewhere up close, just so that I could see better and not have a whole bunch of people in my way of my view. I'm short. I always have to go off to the side to be able to see around people's heads because they're taller than I am. So it's just easier to sit in front.

 

I was asking a lot of questions because it's new hire orientation. I had never worked at this company before. There was so much to learn about like, you know, when do paychecks come? And what are the different policies on training and travel reimbursement? I was in a position that would require me to travel sometimes.

 

I didn't think anything of it, of me asking the questions. Well, okay. In full honesty, I was thinking, I hope I don't annoy other people with all of my questions, but I really needed to know all of these answers, so that I could go forth with confidence and with a lot more comfort. Well, it turns out that my husband was sitting in the back of the room and he kept seeing my hand go up.

 

He kept seeing me asking questions and he had this thought "she's so powerful."

 

I thought what? He thought I was the most powerful person in the room. I thought that was the most bizarre thing to interpret from someone asking questions.

 

But it's true. I've encountered lots of people who thought that I just had all sorts of confidence and that I was almost like a leader in the room. It's like, no, I just am asking questions so that I understand stuff because I don't like to be in the discomfort of not knowing. I think that's interesting that some people see that as confidence or even power.

 

But what happens to you if you don't ask questions? Like why would you not want to ask questions?

 

I was a teacher in corporate for lots of different courses, and this would come up quite a bit. There's people sitting there... I'm like, okay, any questions? And it would be crickets. It's like, what's going on. There's a lot of information here. I know that the presentation is pretty good, but it doesn't go over everything. So there has to be questions.

 

Later on, I would talk with people individually, and all of a sudden they'd start asking me questions. I was like, well, why didn't you ask this in the middle of class? This is a great question. And they said, well, I didn't want to look stupid.

 

Really? You think you're going to look stupid because you have a question?

 

Here I am thinking in the back of my mind, my husband thinking that I looked powerful because I asked questions. Here's this other person who would rather go back to their job, not knowing the critical information, not be able to do their job because they didn't have all of that. They'd probably make a lot of mistakes or they'd want to try to hide that they don't know the information. They'd rather take on that discomfort than the discomfort of asking a question, because they think that someone might think they look stupid. Really?

 

What are some of the other things that you miss out on if you don't ask questions? For me, it's opportunities.

 

Recently I had a friend request on Facebook by someone in a political office and I thought, wow, this is pretty cool that someone is making this friend request of me. And, you know, I'm sure it's probably because he's going to be running for office next year. And so it's really helpful for him to get a big support base and everything. But I had some questions.

 

I want to know if at the county or at the state level if there's any kind of funding for mental health support or for LGBT issues because these are things that I would really like to contribute to. A lot of my clients, also, they have businesses that can contribute to filling this need for the county or for the state.

 

So I decided I would ask this person the question! And I'd asked if he would be willing to meet with me over Zoom sometime. And you know what his answer was yes! And it was almost immediate, too.

 

And I thought, wow, the missed opportunity I would have had if I didn't ask the question. And this opportunity could be for people that actually need the services that either I provide or my clients provide. It's also a potential missed opportunity for all of us as business owners to have more clients come our way.

 

And then state when they have funding, if it doesn't get used up if they can't find providers that money goes unused and it makes it really difficult for them to get approval for more money for these different programs and initiatives.

 

I could have sat in my discomfort of, ooh, I don't want to ask a question because, you know, I don't know this person and some people might get hung up on the idea of status, right?

 

This is person that's pretty high up in the government. Here I am not in the government. Is there a status thing? Am I not allowed to talk to someone that is perceived higher than I am? But I know that he's just trying to be of service, just like I am. And really we're just two humans that want to help other people.

 

Back when I was in biotech, I'd have people just be in awe of me going up and speaking to all of the higher-ups within the company. Even the ones that were from the corporate office that were like way at the top of 17 sites within this whole biotech company. But here's the thing.

 

We're all just humans.

 

If we were in line at Disneyland, no one knows what the roles are. No one knows what job people have. We're all the same status. We're all just humans at that point.

 

I like to approach that in anything with asking questions. We're all just humans, there is no status level. All of us have jobs. We're all contributing in some way. Many of us just want to help other people so we can collaborate in ways.

 

Using my courage, I am trying to create comfort, right? Comfort for me, comfort for him, comfort for people that might need these services. Comfort for my clients, if I'm able to connect them up with people that need their services and some funds that can cover those services. So courage is creating comfort. Courage does not create discomfort, courage creates comfort.

 

Courage to Plan vs. Being Rushed with Mistakes

 

Let's go on to planning. So I mentioned at the beginning that I was doing a lot of planning for this conference that I'm going to. And it takes some courage to pause some of the activities that you do in your business so that you can plan.

 

Planning sometimes might seem like it's just tedious and not productive because there's not necessarily a deliverable at the end. You don't have a product at the end of planning, you have a plan on how to create a product or a plan on how to execute on something, but you don't actually have the thing done.

 

I encountered this a lot when I was working in biotech because I would help people with their processes. We would be flushing out all of the details, all of the very minuscule details even of processes. And it wasn't always the most fun thing to do. I mean, okay, it's kind of fun to like flush out the details, but to take a whole day away from their regular jobs of churning out widgets. Of doing those deliverables, creating those deliverables. I had to take them away from that for a day or maybe two full days so that we could flush out all of these details.

 

Oftentimes there were teams that had a whole bunch of conflict going on because they had never flushed out the details. Nobody knew what everybody was supposed to do. It was always interesting to see as we were trying to put up all these sticky notes of what are all of the different process steps. You couldn't get these people to agree.

 

They couldn't agree what the steps were. Some people thought there were more steps. Some people thought there were less, the sequencing was always out of whack. It's like no wonder there was conflict within a team. Nobody knew what the actual process was.

 

So they didn't want to take a pause on doing this stuff, even though they're all doing it in different ways, to actually create the comfort of one routine process that everybody could do. Luckily, the powers that be at the business, they understand the importance of this, the value of it, because yeah, there might not be a payoff that day.

 

The payoff comes in the long run.

 

The payoff comes the next week or the week after that, or even a year down the road repeated payoff, actually. If you have a process that's not clearly defined, then you have a lot of waste in it. You have a lot of repeat work. You have a lot of errors. And if you have conflict, oh my gosh, conflict creates all of that extra discomfort too.

 

It takes courage to do that pause so that you can do all of that planning. That courage creates comfort, having planned and predictable business results and business processes creates comfort.

 

There's also planning involved when creating any type of a course or a workshop. There were so many times where I thought, okay, yeah, I've got this, just go into the room. I've got some basic supplies and we just go. Now part of that is some confidence from having done lots of workshops in the past, but it's not always the most effective. And especially the most effective use of time, because you want to respect your client's time.

 

You also want to respect your own time and if you've ever done this, and then later on, you're beating yourself up like, oh, I forgot to teach them this. Or I forgot to go over this other part of the concept. That's going to create discomfort.

 

Also, having people start to not feel comfortable with the process, like if they don't know what the agenda is and what's expected, they're having to put a lot of trust in you, which can create a little bit of discomfort for them. And then there's discomfort for the instructor, too, of oh my gosh, they may not know where we're going. They're lost, they're confused. And so then you're trying to make up for that right there in the moment instead of just focusing on the lesson that you're trying to teach.

 

Taking that pause so that you can really plan out what is this workshop or this course that you're going to create.

 

What's the outcome that you want for the folks? What, how are they going to be acting differently or the different behaviors or the new techniques they're going to be using or the new skills that they're going to be using? Figuring out the agenda and the exact timing. And how much time you're going to give for certain exercises or how many people you're going to ask for input.

 

Having that all flushed out ahead of time makes for a very structured course that provides a lot of comfort to the students and to yourself. Because you always know what it is that you're going to be doing. You always know that you're going to deliver the exact amount of information. They know what's coming, so they're comfortable with it too.

 

It's not the fear of the great unknown. It's nothing about having to just have blind trust in someone. They see it, they understand they can even plan for it.

 

And then there's the bill of materials. So I know that's kind of a big phrase, right? Or complicated phrase for people that haven't heard this before. So bill of materials is just saying, what are all of the things that you're going to need during this course? If it's something you're doing in person, it's knowing how many pins you're going to need, or how many pencils, how many packets of handouts are you going to need? If you have any kind of exercises, what things are you going to need?

 

I've done things with Legos and with squishy things. And can openers at one point. I actually, I was a student for a class with can openers to try to teach us a concept. It was pretty unique. It was very effective. But having that listed out ahead of time and even having your materials there and ready, that helps for everything to be comfortable later on.

 

The discomfort that you don't have to feel is the stress, the running around at the last minute trying to find everything. The being in front of a classroom and then realizing, oh my gosh, I don't have this. Or I don't have enough for everybody. So taking that courage to pause and actually take the time to plan everything out, document it, have even kits ready to go, if you need that, makes everything so much more comfortable for you and for the person and for your students.

 

Then you can just show up to your class. Everything's already there. You're just ready to go. It's almost like being the talent showing up to a show. Like if you can think of concerts and like singers and stuff, they have a whole team of people that get everything else ready and they just have to show up.

 

You can be that team for yourself. You can plan all of that out. You can have all of your stuff set up. So then you can just walk in and do everything smoothly.

 

Think about also your room setup. So if you work somewhere where someone else can set up the room, giving them on how to set up the room is really helpful. If you're doing this in an online format, setting up all of your technical stuff, if you're using Zoom or some other streaming platform, knowing how all of that tech works, planning it out ahead of time. Doing some dry runs, making sure that everybody can hear you and your lighting is good.

 

All of that is going to create comfort when it's go time. So you're not stressing out about all of those technical details right there in the moment. It takes courage to take that pause so that you can create comfort when it's actually time.

 

Comfort in Getting it Fixed vs. Suffering in Silence

 

How about speaking up? Have you ever had parts in your life or parts of your business where things just weren't working? Maybe it's a relationship. There's some kind of conflict going on or maybe one person doesn't even realize that there's conflict or they're creating an uncomfortable environment for you?

 

I know keeping yourself from speaking up might feel like a comfort zone because you're worried about somebody else's opinion of you or what their reaction might be. It's not a comfort zone though, because you're sitting there in this pool of discomfort of all of this stuff. That's not working. It's quite possible that the other people that are involved, the other person that's involved, isn't even aware that this discomfort exists for you.

 

When I teach people how to use the clarity steps, one of the most important pieces of that seven step process is an obstacle list.

 

An obstacle list, lets you have a place to speak up to say, what are the things that are not working? Might be a process obstacle. Could be a mindset obstacle.

 

Now, if you are a solopreneur, speaking up to yourself is important. You might not want to admit that things are an obstacle because then that might mean that you have to do something about it. And that might seem like discomfort, right? Because there might be learning that you have to do or experimenting that you have to do and you're thinking that's going to create discomfort.

 

No, doing those things and resolving those obstacles for yourself creates comfort. Speaking up, even for yourself is courage that will create comfort.

 

When you're in a team environment or a relationship speaking up is often hard, right? It's just, it's verbalizing what it is.

 

But what if you used an obstacle list?

 

I know it sounds a little strange, right? Especially if you're in a relationship, would you really have a piece of paper up somewhere that said here are all of the obstacles that we're facing?

 

Well, it might be something worth a try because when you do that, you give the other person the opportunity to also write what their obstacles are. It might seem uncomfortable that either of you have to read these obstacles, but your courage in doing this is going to be what creates the comfort for you in your relationship. Because if you can't actually resolve those obstacles or even know that they exist, you're going to stay in this big pool of discomfort.

 

If you're in a team environment, you might have a lot of thoughts holding you back on speaking up. What about all of these other people? What are they going to think about me by saying this obstacle?

 

This was one of my favorite things as a coach. I was the one that wasn't giving them a choice. It was like, all right, here's the process. Here's what's going on? What are the obstacles that are coming up? And a lot of times they would just try to quietly say it and say, oh, but it's no big deal.

 

I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. It is a big deal. And I'd write it down for them. Eventually. I just give them the pen and be like, nope, you go write it down. But to give people permission to actually speak up created comfort for everybody to actually speak up, right?

 

It was just that breaking of the ice. Sometimes courage as the coach to actually do it is necessary to provide the comfort for other people to have courage to do things, too. Once we can actually see things, then we can actually do something about it.

 

Courage to speak up is going to create comfort in the long run. It's going to get you out of the discomfort of the stuff that's going on that doesn't work, and it will create comfort for you. It's not getting you out of your comfort zone, right? As a coach, I'm not trying to get you out of your comfort zone. I'm actually trying to get you out of your discomfort zone and create comfort for yourself.

 

What Comfort Can You Create with Courage?

 

The final one that I want to bring up is the courage to do something, right? It's to produce something. It could be something written. It could be something verbal. It could be a tangible product. It could be a video. It could be any of these things. Courage to do that is going to create comfort for you.

 

Let's think about this. Where is the discomfort in this?

 

Right? Because I'm not getting you out of your comfort zone. I'm getting you out of your discomfort zone so that you can have comfort in your life. So oftentimes we're facing a lot of discomfort because we don't know how to do something. We haven't done it before.

 

We think, oh, I'm going to just stay in my comfort zone and not do it. No really. That's your discomfort zone. You're sitting there realizing that you don't know how to do these things. There's a lot of pieces to it or that you might not be good at it. Well, of course you're not going to be good at it. You've never done it before. No one's expecting you to be an expert at something you've never done before.

 

But when you stay there, just dwelling on all of these thoughts. You're creating a lot of discomfort for yourself.

 

If that thing that you need to do is something that is also going to create an income for you. Maybe it's going to fix something for you. Like if you're thinking about anything that's broken around your house, maybe you don't know how to fix it. So you just suffer with it. You suffer with that thing that's broken and you just keep thinking, oh, but I don't know how to fix it.

 

Well, that's not you staying in your comfort zone of, I don't know how to fix it. You're actually suffering with this thing. That's not broken. You might be trying to tell yourself that it's not that big of a deal, but not only do you have the thing that's broken, but you also have your thoughts popping up every time you look at that broken thing, thinking, oh, I don't know how to fix this.

 

Or I don't know anyone out in the world that can fix this or, oh, why does everything have to happen to me?

 

You're creating a whole bunch of discomfort for yourself. Now getting you to actually go and learn something, learn how to fix it. Try to do these things. This is going to eventually bring you the comfort. When you have the capability to do these things. When you have the knowledge to do these things, you're going to be unstoppable.

 

And next time when it breaks because you know, things are always going to break as much as we wish we could just fix everything and it would just stay unbroken. Doesn't always work that way. But next time it breaks. Guess what? You are going to have so much confidence. You're going to know exactly how to do that thing. And if it's a brand new thing that you're creating, if you're staying in that discomfort of, I don't know how to do this, I might have to pay someone to create this for me.

 

It's really just you getting used to doing it. And then all of a sudden you have that comfort and competence that you know how to do these things all the time.

 

I'm going to share a funny example on this one. So in order to do all of the different things in my business, I've had to learn how to automate a bunch of it. Some of that is on emails that get sent out. I have group coaching that happens in the Unshakable Women's group and the Unshakable Men's group. I also run the Men's Feelings Matter Support Group on Wednesday nights.

 

Before each of those meetings, an email gets sent out to all of the members that has a link for them to join those calls. Well, there are five of these calls a week. That's a lot of emails to go out. So I automate this.

 

I've created one standard template for each of those meetings. And then I schedule emails. I clone that email and send out that same email at those specific days and times every single week.

 

When I first started scheduling emails, oh my gosh, I had all of this discomfort that I was going to make a mistake that I was gonna have the wrong date, that I was gonna have the wrong time. There were times where I did send out emails before they were even ready. People got some really weird looking emails like a year ago.

 

And then I had to send out like a quick email of oh, please disregard that. There was so much discomfort because it wasn't a regular routine for me. Now, if I had held myself back and decided no I'm going to stay in my comfort zone, reality was I'd keep myself in a discomfort zone.

 

The discomfort of not knowing how to do it. The discomfort of fear. The discomfort of extra work for myself.

 

So yesterday I actually went through and I scheduled all of these emails. So five emails a week for the next three months. And I now have a system set up so that I know that I'm not going to make any mistake. I have checkboxes. I can keep everything all nice and tidy. And I was able to do all of that in way less than an hour. And with no fear.

 

I was completely comfortable because it was just a standard routine at that point. And now that part of my business runs on autopilot. I'm able to do a lot more stuff in my business because I chose to learn how to do some of the automation. So my courage in learning something new, created the comfort for me. It got me out of my discomfort zone and into the comfort zone.

 

If you really want to feel comfortable. If you really want to be in a comfort zone, you have to use courage. Ask questions so that you can learn all the answers. You'll always know what to do. You'll feel comfort in your confidence. Pause some of the activities in your business from time to time so that you can take the time to plan. Having a planned predictable, smooth experience creates comfort for you at go time.

 

Speak up about the things that aren't working in your life or in your business or in your relationships. Having that courage enables those things to get fixed. And for you to finally have comfort, do the thing that you need to do that new thing that you need to learn that new experience to go try out. Even if you suck at it at first, you're still going to learn so much.

 

You're going to know a bunch of this stuff that worked and you'll know some of the stuff that didn't work. You didn't know any of that before you started. So you're going to start to have comfort because you're going to know all of the stuff. Whether it worked or whether it didn't work. Having knowledge creates comfort.

 

Doing courageous things might even be for somebody else's benefit your act of courage of sticking your hand up and asking a question in a room full of people can create comfort for everybody else around by having that knowledge. Maybe you have a little bit more courage than other people.

 

One last piece I want to share before we wrap up for today is what is that thing that's really holding us back? What is that fear that we have that makes us think we're getting out of a comfort zone?

 

We're doing that thing that is uncomfortable. That one little tiny thing that's uncomfortable. That's getting us away from the big thing that's discomforting. It's usually because we have a fear of what other people are going to think. We have come up with a guess in our brain about the thought that they're going to have in their brain when we do the thing that we're going to do. What if you were wrong about what they're thinking? Let that one sit with you for a while.

 

What if 95% of the time you're wrong about what the other person is thinking? I mean, honestly, we can't crack open their brains and like read a book in their brain. We really don't know what other people are thinking. What if we had convinced ourself that someone else looked at us and thought she made a fool out of herself or, oh, she's such an idiot.

 

What if we were wrong about that? And instead they were thinking, oh my gosh, I'm so inspired by her. Or as my husband said, she's so powerful. She's the most powerful person in the room. Or what if it's someone who's sitting way in the back who hasn't had a whole lot of courage in their life. And they're thinking I'm so grateful that she was brave so that I didn't have to be. Your courage creates comfort.

 

What are you going to do with all of that courage in you? What comfort do you want to go create for yourself or for other people? I can't wait to find out. If you'd like a little bit of support on your way of using your courage to create comfort in all aspects of your life and in your business. Reach out to me.

 

I've kind of got a knack for helping people find their courage. And for doing these things, I invite you to go over to my website MyFreedomGrove.com. Go to the contact me page, set up some time for us to talk. I would love to hear about what's going on in your life. And what type of comfort you want to create in your life, and in your business, through using your courage.

 

My strong friends. I hope you have a great week. I'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

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Thank you for listening to My Freedom Grove Podcast. I can't wait to work with you directly. I'll help you to be your authentic self, to have amazing relationships, and to live your purpose. I invite you to check out Unshakable Men and Unshakable Women. The unshakable programs will give you all of the tools, coaching, and the community to help you rise in life, relationships, and business. To learn more, go to my MyFreedomGrove.com/workwithme. I can't wait to see you there.