We're going to be talking about settling for fine.
The fine that we don't actually want the fine that is like not really fine.
It's actually terrible.
But we say we're fine because otherwise we're going to have some sort of a breakdown.
Yes.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
It's like that ticking time bomb.
That's what then as is kind of how I look at that one.
That's what I was thinking about.
So I was like, huh?
I was like, there's the like, okay, my hair is fine today.
And it could be better, but that's not necessarily the trap we're talking about.
You know, it's we're talking about the one that that leads people to explode.
Right.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Hopefully we catch it way before that.
Right?
Yeah.
My peanut butter and jelly sandwich can be fine.
My life cannot be fine.
Well said.
Okay.
So what's the what's the top secret?
Overcoming this life of fine, its choice.
All right.
Welcome in to Vision Pros Live with Jackson Calame.
I'm your show host.
We'll be doing interviews for visionary entrepreneurs and guest leaders who are building fantastic
visions out there.
In the vision pros live, I'm your host, Jackson Calame, founder and CEO of First Class Business.
I'm excited to have Lauren Lefkowitz on today.
We're going to be talking about the word fine and how it is a trap for our life and how to
escape that trap.
So before we go into that, I want to give shout outs to some sponsors that may be very
helpful for you.
They are to us.
One of them is one of them would have been had I come across it sooner.
So ColdClick is what we use for LinkedIn automation.
If you're in the business of of building appointments for yourself and you need to grow your network,
then automation is one of the best things you can be using.
It's also one of the worst things you can be using.
You have to know what you're doing with it.
And fine is a trap when it comes to that as well.
You can't just have messaging.
That's OK.
You can't manipulate people with messaging that makes people go like, oh, I don't know
if I want to be connected to this person.
That's not a good thing.
You want to be warm and inviting.
But you want a system like ColdClick that allows you to connect to 50 to 100 new people
per week because then you're able to attract the people who are more ready to start new
relationships.
Not everybody is interested in what you do.
Not everybody is in a position of need or want.
And this system allows us to make sure that we we abide by the rules of the algorithm
while also maximizing the amount of executives, coaches, business owners in our case that
we want to connect to in order to, for our case, host them on our show.
That's where we start.
We start with a very simple process of getting people into seeing do they know us, do they
like us, do they trust us, and we allow relationships to move forward naturally.
My big tip for the day when it comes to attracting people to work with you.
Number two, we've got simply fast websites.
Shane Michaels put this together.
You'll notice there it says websites starting at $179.
I spent thousands of dollars on my first few renditions of websites and spent countless
hours trying to build them out, make sure they were in place.
It would have been awesome to have a provider that I could have paid $179 to and gotten
the basics started and had some advice.
The people that I talked to to help me on my website back in the day, again, I had to
spend a minimum of a thousand with those individuals.
And yes, there was Wix and Squarespace and lots of free stuff too.
But when you're building a business, you also need to be considering strategy.
So I highlight this because I'm really proud of him and I'm always looking for new resources
to help people who are getting started out with an easier path than what I had to move
forward with.
Then there's the Water Project.
The Water Project is my favorite charity to talk about and to help.
I don't know if it's called a charity or cause, but what they're doing is just awesome,
in my opinion.
If I could spend my life working full-time on a project like this, and I probably can,
then I need to be preparing myself for how to move to that.
Well, this is one of the ways I can springboard towards that type of a life, and that's helping
people gain access to clean drinking water in Africa.
And if you notice, there's these communities that you can support and you can choose which
community you can support.
You can see in the example right there, there's 250 people who will get access to clean drinking
water by funding that project.
You get to see what their life was like beforehand.
You get to see what their life will be like afterwards.
You get to see the progress and momentum.
Once it's finished, you also get to see the update and effect that it has in that community.
And this is an opportunity to change lives for decades, change your education, change
your ability to be more reliable and work.
And as a family, to have more family time, there's so many benefits that come from giving
back to this cause.
And if you know of another cause that you'd like to see us support, do not hesitate to
drop it in the comments.
We'd love to see it.
I'd be happy to take a look, maybe even include it in the show as well.
So with all that said, I'm excited to bring Lauren on.
We're going to be talking about fine being a trap.
Let me pull up real quick what I've got here for her background, because there were some
things that stood out to me.
Not only is she an executive leadership coach, but she also found herself going through the
process of escaping the fine.
And she's got her personal story written on her website.
I think that's awesome.
A lot of coaches I meet don't go into these details.
You don't really know where they came from.
And maybe they have a thought of, well, that's not appropriate to share.
Or maybe they use the excuse that their story doesn't really relate to you because it's
not about them.
It's about you.
But it's also really helpful to know what somebody's been through, what somebody's
going through, and to also work with somebody who understands that life's not about settling.
Life's about getting more out of it and making sure we maximize our time here.
So I'm not supposed to be coaching that, Lauren.
So I'll bring her on, and we'll talk about that in just a minute.
So Lauren, thank you so much for being on Vision Pros Live.
Thank you, Jackson.
I'm so happy to be here.
Awesome.
Lauren, let's define a little bit further for the audience.
So beyond the people who tend to use the word fine, if you're using the word fine, you should
be listening right now.
And who else should be listening?
And why do you feel they should listen to you?
Why should you listen to me?
Listen to me, everybody.
Fine is our automatic answer.
Fine is the thing that we say we are when we're not fine, but we feel like it's the
socially acceptable answer.
If you're having a terrible day and you run into an acquaintance and they say, hey, Jackson,
how are you doing?
You want to say fine because you don't want to say, oh my God, I tripped over my bed this
morning and then I ran out of milk and then my kid was horrendous and fine.
So we early on train ourselves to say we're fine, to act like we're fine, and that bleeds
into our lives and our careers.
And we get to this point in our career in our sometimes late 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s
and beyond where we have gotten the things that we went after.
The job, the title, the money, the team, the prestigious company we wanted.
And we think this is it.
Okay, I guess it's fine.
I'll do this till I retire.
Where we start our own businesses, we become entrepreneurs and we're bogged down with accounting
and the parts of the business that we don't want.
If we don't like marketing or if we don't like promoting ourselves, we feel stuck with
those things and we think, well, that's fine.
I'm an entrepreneur.
This is what I have to do.
And we go on and we go on and the more we're fine, the lower our threshold for excited
gets because we're like buried in fine.
And so the message and the listen to me part is it doesn't have to be that way.
No matter how long you've lived that way, no matter how much you've settled into, it's
now what you came to this earth for.
It's now what you have earned or what you deserve.
And I think anybody can create amazing if they're willing to put the focus on it.
Well said.
Yeah, we're going to dive into some controversy on this too, because I'm of the mindset, you
know, that for me it's okay to be sad and it's okay to be mad or upset and it's okay
to be amazing and great, but it's not okay to lie to myself.
Yeah.
You know, so that's anyway, go ahead.
I'll let you know.
That's a big one for me because not being fine and creating amazing is not toxic positivity.
I'm not in the camp of let's be grateful for what we have and everything's amazing and
isn't all of this wonderful as we skim over terrible things.
I think as humans, we have the right to experience the whole range of emotions.
And when we come into fine, it's almost a numb middle point where we don't get to experience
the terrible so that we can come out of it and we don't get to experience the amazing
because we're afraid it's going to go away.
And so we live in this middle ground of so-so and that's so unsatisfying.
So I am not of the camp of like, let's just make everything great and pretend that there's
nothing terrible out there.
Great positivity doesn't serve anybody, but neither settling.
Right.
Absolutely.
So for what's your vision for those who you serve, what do you want to see them accomplish?
You know, beyond the range of emotions you just talked about, let's dive in even deeper.
Yeah.
I want people to come out of working with me, recognizing that they have choices, that
they're making those choices consciously and deliberately, including choosing to be fine.
Not everything has to be one extreme or the other all the time.
If you're choosing that you don't want to put energy into something and that it just
needs to be fine, cool.
If you're not going to care about it and it just needs to sort of live somewhere, great.
I have a filing system at home that I don't care about at all.
It doesn't have to be any prettier than it is, it doesn't have to be any more functional
than it is.
I know where to find things.
It's fine.
But I care so much and so many of us do about my career.
I care about who and how I'm serving.
I care about who and how I am as a human.
And we dull ourselves down so much that we lose that.
So my vision for those I serve is that they discover who they are, which kind of sounds
silly because we're grownups.
How do we not know who we are?
But we don't.
We spend so much time doing that we forget to figure out who we're being and how we're
being.
And we can go through our whole lives just skipping through all the doing and forgetting
to look at ourselves.
So my clients become more self-aware.
They come into first knowing what they don't want anymore because those are the cobwebs
in our head.
Those are the things that distract us.
And often when I talk to a client for the first time, they tell me about all the things
they can't have.
I want a new job, but I know I'm going to have to take a pay cut.
I want to do this, but I don't have the experience.
I know I'm going to have to start over.
They are already coming in discounting themselves and telling me what they can't have.
So we have to clear that first.
Tell me what you think you can't have.
Tell me what you don't want.
Let's clear that out so that then we have a clean slate for what you actually like,
what you actually want and where that fits into a career.
Is that a corporate career?
Is that an entrepreneurial career?
Did you get into one and you actually wanted the other?
And how do we bridge that and get you from one place to the other?
How do we capture the value of what you have had if you're going to be a career changer
or an industry shifter?
How do we take that value and not put you back down at the bottom of the mountain you've
already climbed and show that value and demonstrate that?
And most of my clients walk away with, and I say most because everybody has different
priorities, but most of my clients walk away with more money, jobs they're happier with,
better boundaries and just more life in them.
Well said.
And like you said, each person defines their version of more, what they're looking for.
And there's quite a spectrum of what we can have in life when we start to open our eyes
to it.
If you're in the fine category right now, you may not see that even.
And that's why it's so important to look at it and say, okay, finds my current safety
net that I've used, but how fun is it to be in a safe house?
How fun is it to be in an isolated room with zero motion, good or bad?
It might protect you for a little while, but eventually it'll drive you crazy.
So let's shift gears a little bit.
What about your personal vision?
What do you see for yourself on the horizon?
It's funny.
I was just talking about this morning that I think my fine stuck place, which will lead
into my vision, my fine stuck place is the day to day, which is interesting because I
am a really detailed person.
So I wake up in the morning, I've got plans.
And at the end of the day, I critique myself for not having done all of the things that
I imagine the perfect version of me could have done.
The big picture me, the big vision me is on stages, is talking to Brene Brown and Simon
Sinek is hanging out with Adam Grant and Sean Aker and talking about the psychology of happiness
and the psychology of the workplace and working with individual clients and groups of clients
and having a book tour and just living so fully and spreading this message that we don't
have to settle for fine.
And I'm so excited to know that I have this grand vision because the old version of me
who worked 80 plus hours a week in a corporate HR job for 20 years did not have that vision,
didn't even have an idea of what that vision could be.
And I was saying to myself at that point in my life, oh, I'd love to coach full time,
but I can't because I need the steady salary.
I need the benefits.
I need this.
I need that.
And so I can't.
So I would talk myself out of it as soon as the thought came to my mind.
And so my vision for myself is to get into a world where on the day to day, I don't limit
my own vision so that I can create this grand practice of being out in the world and sharing
this message with people.
That's awesome.
Out of all, you think you're the hundredth episode, you're close to it if you're not
the one hundredth episode, but out of everybody's vision, you're the, I think the first person
to vision paint your world, that idea world with actual people talking about it.
Oh yeah.
People you'd want to be hanging out with.
That's amazing.
I appreciate you for bringing those people up.
And it's funny how the powers of manifestation work, right?
And being able to connect us to those realities when we look at them.
And that's part of what's required, but it's also part of the opportunity of shifting from
fine to fulfillment.
So we're going to come back to that in just a little bit.
But before we do that, let's look at your worst business experience ever or the worst
business experience that one of your clients has experienced.
Obviously not sharing names.
I won't press you too hard on that.
But what does that look like for you?
Yeah.
So I think I've already had my worst business experience ever.
And it happened in my first year of entrepreneurship.
I hope it's my worst business experience ever, because a lot of what I've done, while it's
scary and hard and I've had days where I thought I couldn't do it, most of what I've had has
been just incredible.
And I feel really lucky to be here.
But I had what I'll call a bad client experience, where I thought I had done my due diligence
in working with a new client who was a lovely person and was looking to do what I do and
accomplish escaping from fine and building the next level of her career.
And she kept forgetting to set up her appointments.
And we were on a contract.
And we had signed a contract for a period of time.
And I kept reaching out and saying, Hey, how can I help you get set up?
When do you want to I offer on demand service so my clients can contact me whenever they
need to.
Do you want to talk informally?
Do you want to, you know, just have a chat?
And she kept saying, thank you for reaching out.
Oh, thank you for reaching out.
And finally, sent me an email one day saying, Oh, let's just cancel.
And I had to hold her to the contract.
And she called me a lot of names and refuse to pay and turn or turn the whole thing around
on me.
We had a conversation where, you know, I really tried to support her and she wouldn't she
wouldn't allow it.
And she just no longer wanted to pay.
And I had to decide, did I want to stand for my contract in my business?
Or did I want to fold to this particular thing?
And I had other clients who for one reason or another couldn't continue and it was illness
or death in the family.
And I have bent because of those kinds of things.
But simply forgetting to commit to yourself in the way that the contract is set up so
that you will commit to yourself wasn't, you know, it didn't really meet the terms to
to cancel the contract.
And so I stood for it.
And she complained to the agency that certifies me that I was a monster.
And and they stood behind me.
I had a hearing and they stood behind me.
And so I feel good about having held to the contract in a way that felt authentic to me
and it felt valid to me.
I felt terrible as a human for having to hold these boundaries and having to hold these
contract terms.
But I also felt like I really took a stand for my business and a stand for my other clients
who have trouble with boundaries to be able to to say if I need to.
And I haven't really shared this story before now.
But to be able to say if I need to, like I have held to really difficult contract terms
and I I feel good about having done that.
So that's been my worst business experience.
And it also was an amazing lesson for me in how I work with clients on their contracts
and how I work with them on on upholding the agreement and in committing to themselves.
Absolutely.
Thanks for sharing.
You know, anybody who's listening and I that that's newer business, too.
I would I would warn caution that you'll probably have a lot more experiences like that over
a 10, 20 year career.
So those those things happen.
Not everybody always agrees on everything.
Imagine that.
Just go to the news and take a look.
So you got different perspectives.
But I love that you held your ground.
I also love that you you recognize and voice the reality that it's still it still made
you feel a certain type of terrible.
You know, it's it's never fun to be in that situation.
It's never fun to fail.
It's never fun to be painted a failure, you know, whether you failed or not.
It's never fun to, you know, when you have when your desire is to unlock somebody's greatest
reality.
Yes.
And then they turn around and see you as an enemy.
There's there's almost it's so hard to not feel the pain of, you know, what what didn't
what didn't come to fruition.
And not only that, but it's again, it's gone the exact opposite direction.
It's a very hard emotion to balance.
So I'm sure other people who are listening have been right there.
And that's neat that you you stuck to your discipline of your healthy boundaries and
at the entity as well, and also took the opportunity to to look at and support you.
Yeah, yeah.
So with that said, I guess that that does give one one more I've got like an ongoing
tally of certifications and non certifications.
I'm like a non certified guy and everything.
I don't have and it's kind of one of my unfair advantages.
But at the same time, there's there's pros and cons to that.
I've never thought about that.
Like, oh, wow, it's certification board.
Oh, cool.
They're there to validate you, you know, as well as as make sure that what you're doing
is in line with, you know, their their principles and and I don't know, conditions.
So that that's cool, because then you're not on your you're not on your own trying to figure
out and think through like, did did I do everything I could here?
I mean, is there anything I'm I'm overlooking?
You've kind of got the 360 evaluation built in when you want it when you need it or when
the client needs it.
So thanks for sharing.
Yeah, yeah.
I I'm a little bit of a certification junkie.
I like the street cred of it.
So when I was in HR, yeah, everybody should have value should should appreciate as much
as I don't care about the piece of paper on the wall.
So yeah, and I think it also depends on like what it is that you're doing.
Right.
So executive coaching is a real loosey goosey kind of profession in a lot of ways.
And anybody can call themselves a coach and anybody can believe that anybody is a coach.
And really, anybody can be a coach.
But the sort of pure coaching philosophy comes with street cred when you have a lot of people
who have some training in how to be a coach as opposed to having been good at something
and coached on it.
So I kind of for me, I feel like I have the blend of having been a good mentor, advisor,
manager, doer.
And now I also have the certification that says like, we also think you're a good coach,
Lauren.
So for me, it works.
And I always advise people if they're looking for a coach specifically, to ask people what
their background is and how they define coaching, because a lot of coaches define coaching really
as advising.
I like that.
Yeah.
Ask them what their background is and ask them how they define coaching.
And you know, that leads to another very, very good therapeutic exercise is define what
coaching means to you, you know, as well, right?
What is it?
What is it that you're looking for in a coach?
Write those things down.
It'll help you with the process.
So it'll help you not settle for the coach that's fine to play with our theme.
So what's your best experience in business?
What does that look like so far?
Gosh, my best experience is there's so many, gosh, just choosing one.
Okay.
I'm going to choose a moment.
I put you right on the spot.
I know, I know it's okay.
I'm going to choose a moment.
I have a client right now who I've been working with for about a year who, who came to me
from such a horribly toxic environment.
And so the work, a lot of the work we've been doing has been rebuilding her confidence and
helping her remember who the F she is, right?
Because you lose that when your management is coming down on you for things that don't
make any sense.
And on our discovery call, strategy call, whatever you call the consultation call to
set up working together, we were talking about this and I could see that she was just waiting
for me to stop talking so she could tell me she wants to work with me.
And it is such a good feeling.
And I've had this experience a couple of times, hers in particular stands out more than anybody
else's because I could feel her on the edge of her zoom chair, just waiting to say like,
tell me how much it costs so I can work with you.
And my preference always is to tell you what you're getting so that you know then when
I give you the price for it, you know, then what's what comes with that, right?
If I tell you come to my restaurant, it'll cost you $75.
And then you come in and I just give you a side of french fries.
It's a lot less satisfying than a three course meal.
Right?
So if you don't know what you're getting, and you just put the money down.
So so I told her, you know, how it all worked, how we would work together.
And I could see her like, okay, okay, okay, you know, like on the inside, she wasn't making
those faces, but I could feel her energy.
And and those kinds of moments when somebody is so ready to do this and so ready to dive
into what has felt so scary is just like, even now it gives me chills to know that there
are people out there who are just waiting to discover how they want things to be and
go after it.
And they just don't know how and having somebody to be with you and help you with the how is
so powerful.
So it's that like eagerness and readiness that just is like, that's the high I'm going
after for the rest of my business.
Yes, I love that.
It is it's extremely helpful and satisfying to bring somebody in who's done their due
diligence within themselves and then within your work as well to know that the alignment
is correct.
And that yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that as the best experience we haven't I don't
think we've heard that one before either.
You can tie this to find if you want to.
You can also we're going to take the rest of the time to be talking about fine and how
it's trapped.
So you can feel free to squeeze something else in.
My next question for you is what powerful lesson can other visionaries learn from your
experience and let's do this in terms of if this is your last opportunity to share something
with us.
It's right.
What would that what would the lesson be?
The lesson is you are not stuck.
You have created this life for yourself or it has been created at you.
And you followed the path that was thrown at you.
At any point you get to pick something different.
And that is so powerful because we sit in our little boxes and we look at what our day
or week or month looks like and we feel like we are just packed into it and we just have
to do what comes our way.
And I can tell you as someone who has lived with chronic illness for 17 years, who worked
80 to 100 hours a week in an HR job and thought HR was the only future that I could possibly
have, who slipped and fell on my floor and broke both of my shoulders chasing a Roomba
vacuum and got taken out of my regular life.
It's funny.
It's like funny in the most disastrous way.
I have had the challenges, right?
There are we all have challenges, whether it's health or poverty or family issues or
whatever it is that comes at us that takes away from us or feels like it's going to take
away from us and makes us say out loud all the time, I'm fine.
It's going to be fine.
I can do this.
I'll get through this.
It'll be fine.
You can step out of fine at any time and choose something different.
You have to find support for it.
You have to find somebody outside of you who's constructive and that's important, who can
help you move forward towards those things.
The reason I say constructive is because we have a lot of commiserators around us.
We have a lot of people when you say, poor me, they say, yeah, poor you.
We have a lot of people around us.
When you say, I think I may do something that's a little bit risky, they say, no, no, be safe.
Right.
Those people are great for comfort.
They are not great for growth.
You have to find someone growth oriented to help you with that.
Well said.
I love that you point that out too because there's obviously the people who are not constructive
and I think most people listening into this are already avoiding those individuals, hopefully.
You don't want somebody who's negative and who makes you feel bad and says, man, you
really sucked at that.
But on the flip side, you're right.
If we just get people around us who are going to shield us and protect us and keep us safe,
they don't want to see us strain.
They don't want to see us work hard.
They're going to also hurt us because they're not allowing us to exercise, which is what
leads to strength.
Thank you for sharing that.
Let's dive into fine and the trap that it is on a deeper level.
So Lauren, take this away.
If somebody were to, I'll put the host mic in your hand.
What question should I be asking you to unlock our fine mindset and get us unstuck?
Yeah.
I think you should be asking me why we keep going back to fine.
That's the question, right?
Why do we keep coming back to it and landing in fine?
And the answer is comfort and familiarity.
And they're two different things and we don't treat them as two different things.
Comfort is what we enjoy because we know it and it feels good.
That's comfort.
So comfort foods like potatoes and cheese.
I love potatoes and cheese.
I can eat potatoes and cheese only for the rest of my life.
I don't know how comfortable my body would be with that, but I find those delicious and
comforting, right?
Comfort is what we feel when we are warmed by what we know.
Familiarity, on the other hand, is what we do only because it's what we know.
So if you think of the word comfort, and I always like this metaphor, when we're cold,
we wrap a comforter around us, right?
It is intended, this blanket is intended to make us feel comfortable.
And some of us have comforters from our childhoods or from 15 years ago that are tattered and
worn and they don't keep us that warm anymore.
And there's that little hole at the bottom that you keep getting your toe stuck in.
So it's no longer comfortable.
It is only familiar.
And at some point, it's time to decide that you don't want that comfort, that familiarity
that you used to have.
You want something new.
You want to stretch.
You want to find new areas of comfort.
You want to find new potato and cheese money.
And you want to be able to be in a world where you feel really good about what you're doing
in your life, in your career, in your relationships, in your relationship with yourself.
And it is hard to decide to do that.
And then once you've decided to do it, it's like an addiction, a positive addiction, but
it is like an addiction, like, Oh, I figured this out.
Now I want to unpack this and now I want to unpack this.
And for me, that's led me to different coaches, different therapists, different really hard
times, different really amazing times.
And I just want to keep at it because I will no longer settle for fine.
And once you get a taste of what not fine is and choosing not fine anymore and choosing
something better for yourself, you just want more of it.
Yes.
And I love that.
You become stronger at being able to go towards that as well.
You know, it's just like anything else in life, any other choices you have to work out
or to not, you know, once you build the atomic habit, you know, you're, you're going to
have nowhere to go once you've transitioned and you just can't see life the same anymore
once you've made those, those hard steps.
But for me, I was, I was overweight and I'm overweight again, a little bit.
But when I was not working out for a very long time, my blanket of comfort was the fact
that I was never hungry.
And Jim Gaffigan, the comedian, it talked about, he's like, I haven't been hungry.
It's been like 20 years.
I mean, when he likes to make fat jokes about himself and all that.
And so I resonated with that and I was like, cool.
I'm with Jim on this.
There became a very interesting day where I said, wait a second, maybe that's part of
portion control is my need to allow my body to feel hungry, not starving, but just to
allow myself to want food for a couple hours at a time, knowing that I'm not, I'm not hurting
myself.
I'm just experiencing something new and I'm ignoring this constant desire to be full.
And it, you know, by, by paying attention to that for several months, I ended up getting
down to my, my best health since I was 18 years old.
And it, it was really like, I, I, it was so subtle that change that I was very lucky to
catch that by myself.
Yeah.
Most of the time I need a coach, you know, somebody in my life to help me realize those
realities, whether it's business, career, et cetera.
Why leave that up to chance, you know?
So with, with fine and fine being a trap, again, what let's, let's dive in a little
bit deeper.
You talked about the comfort and the familiarity.
So we have to be willing to let go of comfort we have and throw that blanket away.
We have to be willing to get out of what's familiar as well.
What are some of the things that we tell ourselves, Lauren, or your clients tell you as their,
I don't want to call them excuses.
They are.
Um, but the reasons that, that they stay in the, the fine zone, what are some of the most
common ways we manifest that?
Yeah.
Um, it's funny that you said excuses and then reasons.
I always talk about, uh, you know, when, when I'm asking people why they don't think that
they can have things.
It's always like, because reasons, you know, it's reasons it's, we all have them.
We all think our own reasons are special and we are all unique in how we come to our reasons.
It's, you know, whether it's childhood influences or a bad boss or a, you know, a damaging partner
or like one bad day at work that just has stuck with us for all of these years, we have
those and they shape us.
And also say those reasons out loud, say those excuses out loud, whatever you want to call
them, because those are what limit us.
Right?
So I talked earlier about if we want to go into another job or another career, we always
think we have to take a step down.
This is especially true with women and it's not all men or all women or all anything, but
it, in a general sense, women experience this more frequently that men are willing to apply
for a job they have no business applying to because they have confidence.
Women think they have to have a hundred percent of the qualifications to go in and apply for
that job.
And they're willing to take a pay cut if they can get the opportunity.
So we always start talking about what we can't have.
And I think we all do it when we're going into entrepreneurship, everybody who becomes
an entrepreneur.
I've never met an entrepreneur who said this first year I'm going to match my corporate
salary.
Never met one.
Did you?
I did not.
I said, no, I did not, but I said I was going to.
Good for you.
Bravo.
Yeah.
I, that's overconfident.
I was arrogant.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
Um, and, and we, so we set limits for ourselves about what we're allowed to have, how much
money, how much joy, how much love, how much fun, how much balance we set all of these
limits and we almost like bargain with our inner self.
If I'm allowed to get a job at this good company, then I'll be willing to give up these other
things.
Right?
It's almost like we dive right into that stage of grief where we're, we're doing like the
anticipatory grieving of what we're going to lose by going after what we actually want
because we cannot believe that we can have everything we want.
So part of having a coach, part of having people surrounding you who believe in you
is being able to have people tell you again, not in like a toxically positive way, but
be able to tell you, Hey, I hear you discounting yourself again.
Hey, you just said something really cool.
Then you talked yourself out of it.
You just said, I'd love to be on 27 podcasts this year.
And then you said, but.
So stop every time you say, but stop every time you say I can't because, and then ask
yourself how you can.
Right?
And part of the settling for fine and limiting ourselves is because our brains and our hearts
like can't comprehend that things can be this good.
And I don't want to paint you a picture of my life is perfect.
This year's therapy work went into like deep trauma work and it has been incredibly hard.
And it's been going to be incredibly rewarding, which I know, but I'm in the icky part of
trauma therapy right now.
I'm also celebrating loving my business, loving my life, having the opportunity last week
to decide I need a couple of days away.
I can move this and move this and have Wednesday, Thursday and Friday off.
I'm going to do it.
Right?
So I can never have imagined that stuff on my own.
I could never have built that stuff on my own.
And we tend to not only tell ourselves what we can't have, but also not share the things
we want with other people because we're afraid they'll seem dumb or outrageous or too big.
And I think if you have a dream of doing something, just stop saying, but get yourself the support
you need in order to get that in whatever way you can get that support and start small.
I didn't wake up one day and say, I'm going to be a business owner, quit my corporate
job and live my life exactly the way I want to.
I woke up one day and said, I want to not check my phone for 15 minutes in the morning
when I wake up.
That was my first step because all the steps I built before were these like big, giant,
unachievable from where I was steps.
So as I took each step forward, I became less fine and more excited about what could be.
And I still talk myself out of things.
I had an appointment with my coach this morning and I told her what I couldn't have.
And she said, why?
And I was like, OK, help me get it.
But we have to stop limiting ourselves.
We have to allow ourselves to dream and we have to be audacious.
The fact that you were willing to say, I'm going to become an entrepreneur and I'm going
to match my salary, whether you did it or not, isn't the point.
The point is you believed in yourself enough to get the support you needed to build the
business that you were dreaming of building and to keep at it so that you had bigger and
bigger goals as you kept going.
I have been extremely blessed and to have a mindset far from fine for most of my life
and life was never even close to fine.
That's part of the reason life had lots of darkness to it.
And so it was very obvious I needed to make big changes in order to overcome the odds.
And so there's that side of it.
But to dive into some of those realities, the universe or God, whatever you want to
call it, or the person, has this uncanny ability to cater to our exact situations.
We never have more in front of us than we can take on.
Pretty close.
We're pretty close to that reality.
Now, I don't want to minimize our friends, family members who have committed suicide
and have taken darker paths.
But for those of us who are listening to this, have the capacity to listen and to have a
healthy dose of hope in our lives, we are always going to be swimming upstream in life.
And that's kind of the design of life itself.
What that means is we have to be swimming faster than the current.
However, sometimes that current is going slower against us than at other times, where it's
okay to take those smaller baby steps forward in life.
And so it's not me saying, hey, look at my current.
It's bigger than yours.
This isn't a comparison.
You just have to know where you're at and be willing to look at it.
But if you don't realize that the current is going against you and you're swimming slower
than that current, that's where good becomes the enemy of great.
That's where fine becomes, again, what pushes you off that waterfall where you're thinking
like, oh my gosh, I was rowing my boat.
How did this happen to me?
And it's like, well, were you settling?
Were you not working hard enough to move beyond that?
We're all at different limitations.
We're all at different realities with that.
But I think that's one of the key important things to hit on.
You also, you have a cup on your website.
And I don't recommend doing the opposite cup, by the way, but it says choose happiness or
choose happy.
And I love that.
And I would add, choose sadness.
We're not going to put a cup on a website for that.
We can buy my cup that says choose sadness.
But when it comes to grief, when it comes to having lost a relative or you went through
a divorce or you got fired from a job, whether it was earned or not, whether it was something
that you cause or not, learning to accept those emotions and dive into them in healthy
fashion, again, with the help from somebody who's going to be constructive with you.
Those are those that is the essence of life, whether it's good or bad.
Yeah, we're not made to just float.
If we're going to take I love a metaphor and I can take a metaphor, I can build a screen
play off of a metaphor.
But if you're just going to float, you're going to be fine.
You're going to look at stuff that's up there and you're going to see that there's possibility
for joy, for grief, for experiencing full ranges of emotions.
You're going to look behind you and you're going to see what's already happened and have
experienced it.
And then you're going to just sit still.
And that's boring.
It's a trap.
And unsatisfying.
It is a trap.
So if you're rowing and you're in the boat for the first time, I told you, I'm going
to take this far.
You're in the boat for the first time and they've given you the biggest, heaviest oars
there are.
You will not be able to row forward.
You will row forward.
Your arms will get tired and you're going to come back.
And I had a call with a client yesterday who needs to have a conversation with her boss
that feels like a big conversation and a big change.
And we played this game that I play, which is what's before that?
What's before this big change happens?
Well, my boss agrees.
What's before that?
I tell her what she needs to agree to.
What's before that?
I need to write down what I want to say to her.
What's before that?
I need to actually observe what's happening so that I can write it down.
Right.
So the little oars is observing and writing it down.
The big oars are starting from right now and going right to your boss and telling your
boss what needs to change, gaining agreement and having everything be amazing.
You're not ready for those oars.
You're ready to observe.
Small oars, small wings.
Dude, Lauren, I was so ready for those oars, I would hit them over the head with that oar.
That's not the way to approach either.
So this is really helpful.
I got some notes from myself.
Thank you for showing up on Vision Pros Live and throwing down.
Where can people connect with you, Lauren?
Where would be the best place?
I am the most active right now on LinkedIn, TikTok and Instagram.
And you can download a Fine as a Trap checklist inventory from fineasatrap.com.
If you forget everything else about me, including how to spell my last name, which is difficult,
go to fineasatrap.com and that's where you can find ways to get in touch with me and
download the tool.
Awesome.
You heard it.
Grab the checklist.
We look forward to seeing you guys in the next episode.
If you have any other questions, you just want to drop a comment.
Feel free to do that.
We'll for sure get back to them and of course get you connected to Lauren.
Lauren, my pleasure to host you today.
This was a lot of fun.
It was a lot of fun.
You guys all have a fantastic day.
We'll see you on the next show.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned into Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show and thank you for giving.