Ep #19: How Are You Feeling Right Now?

Hi, this is Lindsay Dotzlaf and you are listening to Mastering Coaching Skills, episode 19.

To really compete in the coaching industry, you have to be great at coaching. That’s why every week, I will be answering your questions, sharing my stories, and offering tips and advice so you can be the best at what you do. Let’s get to work.

Hey coach, how’s it going today? So, today I have something kind of special for you. It’s a little more personal than usual. This is not what I was planning on talking about. I have something already recorded that’s amazing for next week.

But I had an experience over the last month, and really over the last week or two, that I really feel like is important to share with you. And it’s going to be a little more like a love note than what you’re used to getting from me.

I know you guys love it when I give you questions and lists and homework and all of the things. But today, we’re just going to check in a little bit. This is going to be short, so hang in here with me. Some of you will love this. Some of you are going to be like, “Wait, what’s happening? What is Lindsay doing? This is not what she usually does.”

But that’s okay. If that’s you, you probably need to hear this. So, stay here. I’ll make it quick. So, instead of giving you my normal, kind of straight forward logical, very thought-through lists, questions, exercises, I wanted to really share an experience that I’ve been having.

And I want to share it because I’m guessing that you are probably having some sort of the same experience in your life or business right now. And if not right now, you have had it in the past in some form, or – well, there’s really no or. You’ve definitely experienced this in some way in the past.

But even if you aren’t in it right now, I want you to just listen and kind of jot down a note to remember for later. Because this happens to all of us and it can show up in ways that affect our life and our business. And the sooner we catch it, the sooner we can move through it.

So, first I want to ask you a question. I’m going to give you just a second to think about it. Are you ready? How are you feeling right now? Maybe take a deep breath in and out. Maybe a couple deep breaths. Pause the podcast if you need to. Make sure you turn it back on.

But just take a second and check in. How are you feeling? What emotion comes up for you? How does your body feel? If you aren’t driving, maybe put a hand on your chest or on your heart and just check in. Just take a deep breath. Just check in with yourself. When was the last time you just asked yourself, “How am I feeling today?”

What came up in your brain when I asked you that? Did you have an immediate answer? Could you name the emotion? For those of you that are regulars here, you know this is not usually what I’m up to. But I just had such a huge revelation this week, really over the last few weeks, maybe the last month. And I just think it’s really important for us to check in, to just take a second, just like we would with our kids or our partner or our mom or whoever, our best friend.

How are you feeling today? I might need to have Sheri back on at some point to really dive deeper into this. She’s the expert here. She’s always talking about feelings. But I want to share a short, just a really quick story of what happened for me and then put it into context of how this might be showing up for you and even how it can affect your coaching business.

To share a little backstory, a couple weeks ago, my best friend asked me to go somewhere with her this month to celebrate a huge milestone in her life. And of course, I wanted to go. But I didn’t really think about it. I didn’t answer her. I just put it off for weeks. I just didn’t respond, which is so unlike me.

And a while later, maybe a week or two later, recently she messaged me and asked me if I knew if I could go. And then she said something that really caught me off guard. Not in a bad way, but it just made me think.

She told me how much it means to her and how important it is to her, and that it just wouldn’t be the same if I wasn’t there. Now, this podcast has nothing to do with this actual thing. This was just the thing that kind of cracked something in me.

So, if I’m really honest, what I did in that moment is I read the message, clicked right out of it, put my phone down, and went right back to what I was doing. I think I was cooking dinner maybe. I wasn’t doing anything exciting or something where I couldn’t think about what she sent. But I just was like, “Nah, ignore that. Nope, no time. I’ll think about it later.”

And although I was trying my best to ignore it, really a giant heaviness washed over my body and I could feel it in my chest, and there was just a lot of emotion that came up all at once.

And in that moment, for the first time in quite a while, I allowed myself to acknowledge that I really wanted to go. And then, after I did that, I started crying. And if you know me well, I don’t cry a lot.

I mean, there’s nothing wrong with crying. Sometimes crying is amazing. I’m not a quick go-to, like, just cry kind of person. I mean, I allow myself to cry. I love to experience all of the emotions, all the things. So, I’m not saying I never cry, because there are no medals for the person that never cries. That used to be me, pre-coaching.

But now, in this moment, I started crying. And I’m pretty sure for the next week, I cried on and off every day. And it was the craziest experience. And what happened in that moment was something just broke and opened up inside of me and it felt, although I was crying, it also just felt like my whole body was having this huge collective kind of exhale because I allowed myself, in that moment, to think – not even speak my truth. Just think it.

And the details, again, don’t really matter here. But the part I want to share is what I learned after that happened. So, over the next couple days, what I really realized is since almost exactly one year ago, if you’re listening to this podcast in real time, almost exactly one year ago is when pretty much everything started to shut down with COVID.

And ever since then, it was gradual, it was kind of this gradual build. But what I realized is I think I’ve just been in this place of, like, I’m just waiting. Waiting for what? Everything.

I just started putting everything off until later, including feeling most of my emotions. Not that I haven’t been doing things or feeling any emotion. But when it comes to some big things in my life, I’ve just kind of been putting them off. I’ve been feeling just meh, sitting in kind of a feeling of, I would say, apathy for quite a while. Not super-negative, definitely not positive. Almost just a very neutral, what my coach Maggie, my friend Maggie calls just negative neutral. So, just to the negative side of neutral.

Because neutral can feel great. It can feel calm and just steady. And this isn’t really how I would describe how I’ve been feeling. It’s just a little to the negative side of that. And one thing that I always say is that emotions are contagious.

And what I mean by that is when you’re feeling one way about one part of your life, it starts to spread. If you don’t check it, it can start to spread to all other parts of your life. So, a good example of this that most of you have probably experienced at some point – I say this just because almost every coach that I have ever coached has come to me with this.

Let’s say you’re sick for a week or something bad happens in your life and you experience negative emotion. How many times has that happened and then somewhere in there, you go straight to, “And my business is failing? And my relationships are awful? And my…” whatever, fill in the blank. That’s what I mean by emotions are contagious.

It can start to spread even when it’s not true. So, maybe you’ve been sick for a week, you’ve been feeling awful. You’re not motivated. And your brain is like, “Oh, business is failing.” This happens to me still. I make a lot of money and my brain is like, “Oh, oh, yep, one hit wonder. You’re done.”

Our brains are so silly, right? But when I started to feel this way about a year ago, I started to feel it first around kind of travel and things that I had to cancel in my life or in my business. And my go-to response kind of became, “We’ll wait until later. I’ll think about that later.” Everything became later. Fun, later. Joy, later. Excitement, stop, definitely later. Anger, later. Disappointment, later. Any other strong emotion, later.

I wasn’t doing it consciously. I wasn’t – I mean, at first, I was. I was like, “This is annoying, canceling all the things.” I didn’t know it was going to last a year plus. I didn’t know that I would be a here a year later, still putting everything off until later.

Now, some of this isn’t a problem. Like I said, in the beginning, my brain started doing this just as a protection mechanism. It was just trying to keep me out of constant disappointment. Because in the beginning, when there was COVID – and this podcast is not about COVID, it’s just about this concept of just putting things off.

But in the beginning, I had to cancel all the things. I had to cancel retreats. I had to cancel the holidays, travel, the in-person event for my mastermind, birthdays, like everything just started getting cancelled. And I was disappointed over and over. And then, at some point, my brain was like, “Yeah, we’re not doing this anymore. So, now, everything will just be later, because if it’s later, we can’t be disappointed.”

So, I just put up a wall of protection around my emotions. And not just the negative ones. That’s where this is really a bummer. Not just the negative ones, but the positive ones as well. Because you know what happens if you let yourself feel excited or anticipation or joy, when you feel those emotions, they can increase your chances of feeling negative.

Because if you’re excited about something, now there’s a chance you’re going to be disappointed or let down. If you’re feeling joy, there’s a chance something’s going to come and knock you down and you’re going to feel the opposite of that.

I share this with you because I think it’s so important to know that it’s okay to feel awful sometimes. It’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to have negative emotion. It is just a part of life. Even when you are a coach.

It’s also okay to realize, “Oh my goodness, I’ve been really avoiding looking deeply at my thoughts for a while.” This is the part where you just get to allow the humanness. And really, this last year has been hard on everyone in some way, some more than others for sure.

I don’t care where you live, what your thoughts are about COVID, what your thoughts are about traveling or masks or vaccines, I don’t care any of those things. We all have different opinions. We all have different thoughts. It has still been hard on pretty much everyone. I don’t know anyone that’s like, “You know what, the last year has been the best year of my life. It’s been amazing.”

Now, I can definitely think of some examples of this last year that have been great. And I am not going to discount those. And if you’re like, “No, there are none…” I would encourage you to really question that and think, “What have I learned? What has gone right this year? What was this here to teach me?” Wherever you can find some goodness in it, I would encourage you to do that.

But I just want you to take a second today and check in. Check in with yourself. How are you feeling? What have you been putting off? Is there anything?

I don’t even mean necessarily just putting things off because of COVID. Just in general, even if you’re listening to this in the future and you’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was years ago. COVID is totally gone.” Cross my fingers and hope that’s a thing.

But just in general, where are you saying maybe later, or later, and just dismissing something without even thinking about it. What happens when you say that is you block any access to figuring it out. When it’s something that you want and you immediately go to just, like, “Ah, later…” your brain just moves on.

It’s like, throw that in the box over there. It’s like, we moved this year. One great thing that happened in my life this year. And we have a few boxes that are just like, “I don’t know where any of that stuff goes. I’ll just think about it later.” It’s kind of like that. Put it in a later box, then you can just move on and not think about it again. Until months from now and you’re like, “Oh yeah, this box.” That’s what we do sometimes.

The problem with it is that when you start doing that, it gets easier to do. If you think about, again, the example of moving, when I already have that box and it’s just sitting in a room somewhere open, it’s really easy for me to be like, “Oh yeah, let’s throw this in there too. We’ll just save that for later.” And then just not think about it.

The same is true in your life and in your business. Every time you’re like, “Yeah, later…” you’re just training your brain that that’s just the easier option. And again, when you do that, you just don’t have access to any of the figuring it out.

So, where is this happening for you right now? What is one thing, if you can think of one thing right now, what’s one thing you’ve been saying, “Maybe later…” about? Take a second today and really question this. How can you have this thing that you want now? How can you make it work? What are other alternatives? What are all of the options? What are the options you haven’t thought of yet? How can you brainstorm this and come up with some ideas?

Every time you say later, these are the things, these are all the amazing questions that you just don’t even see. And it’s true that you may not always be able to make every single thing work. But you are probably much more resourceful than you give yourself credit for.

Thin about that for a minute. If you just start questioning it, your brain is going to come up with some ideas that you don’t even know are in there. Maybe there’s a compromise. Maybe there’s a different way.

One thing I know for sure – here’s one example – I can’t tell you how many emails and messages I’ve received in the last month about my mastermind. I’ve talked about my mastermind on here, Coaching Masters. So many of you send me messages saying, “Oh, I can’t wait until next time,” with like 10 exclamation points.

If you’re that excited to have 10 exclamation points, why in the world would you wait until next time? It’s just something curious to think about. Of course, this is just one example. But if this is you, if you’re one of the people that has sent me that message, or if you’ve just been thinking about it, just take a second and question it. Why would you wait when you can do it now?

Maybe you have an amazing reason that you feel super-solid about. But maybe not. Maybe your brain is just like, “Yeah, later. That’s uncomfortable. I’ll figure it out later. Maybe later” Right?

But what if there is a way? Wouldn’t you want to know that now? What else are you putting off? Get really, really curious about this. I know I am. And ever since I had this realization and I have been getting super-curious about all the things, turns out I’ve been putting off so much.

I got a huge box delivered this morning of my amazing workbooks for my mastermind and I felt so excited. It felt like just a wave of emotion washing over me. I’ve not felt that excited in a long time.

I felt accomplished. I felt proud. And I just sat and allowed myself to feel all the things. Because I have not been doing that. I’ve been latering them. Is that a word? We’re just going to make it up. Latering. What are you latering? Setting on the shelf, putting in the box to do later? New word, tell everyone, latering.

That is all for today. Take a minute. Check in. have a couple deep breaths. And get so curious about how you’re feeling now. What are you putting off? What have you been avoiding? How can you make it happen today, right now, at least the figuring out part? No more latering. Alright, I love you. You’ve got this. And I will see you back here next week.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Mastering Coaching Skills. If you want to learn more about my work, come visit me at lindsaydotzlafcoaching.com. That’s Lindsay with an A, D-O-T-Z-L-A-F.com. See you next week.