Ep#46 How to fix problems

Hi everyone, my name's Dex Randall, and this is the Burnout to Leadership podcast where I teach professional men to recover from burnout and get back to passion and reward at work. Hello, my friends, this is Dex. Glad you could join me for this week's episode on how to fix any problem. Using the primary self coaching tool, I teach my clients called the self coaching model. The self coaching model is the work of my instructor and coach, Brooke Castillo from the Life Coach School and you'll see the link to her ground breaking original work in the show notes. And by the way, she's used the model to stop overeating, over drinking and really overdoing anything simply by accepting and redirecting her own thoughts and feelings. She's also used the model to build a massively successful business with $100 million revenue goal. Oh, and by the way, I'm the master coach at the Life Coach School as well as an instructor both of their coaches and their clients. So okay, what is the model we're talking about here? The self coaching model or the model for short is a tool I teach my clients to better manage their experience of their life, their world and the people and events that pass through it. It's a tool that solves problems because everything we experience in life comes not from what happens in the world but the way we perceive and interpret what happens. We don't see what happens, we see what we think about what happens. Our entire existence is coloured by the lens of our thoughts. We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. We each have this internal catalogue of thoughts with which we understand the world. We have a set of conscious and unconscious beliefs about the way the world should be and the way people should behave and we interpret what happens against that, so that everything that happens is either in our opinion good or bad or neutral, we don't care about it. And of course, no two of us have the same interpretation of things that happen, no wonder we get into conflict. Now, we all believe our own thoughts and opinions with some passion, don't we? They seem like the only real truth to us, and when the world agrees with us, we are right, and when it doesn't, well we aren't wrong, the world is wrong. We're very invested in finding things right or wrong and even more invested in being right. But still other people have all grown up with a different map of the world depending on their upbringing, family, culture, education, religion and many other factors, and that's why you can't agree with all of the people all of the time. So when something happens, we all interpret it differently and we'll respond differently to it, which is you know that it can be not just painful, it can start wars. So let's use a specific example, let's say that a very old dog crippled with painful terminal cancer died today, one person will be paralysed with grief and another will be relieved. Same circumstance, different perception and reaction. And all of the dynamic I've just described by the way is based on cognitive behaviour therapy. The principle that how we think and feel colours our experience far more than what happens outside of us. Brooke Castillo synthesised these principles of CBT into the model as a way of analysing how we perceive and respond to the world, and we do that so that we can understand our own reactions and to a large extent, we can then control and modify those reactions. She calls it a way to analyse any problem, because mostly people come to her, and to me initially, with problems and difficulties they want to solve in their lives via coaching. People come to me in burnout, which is really a complex set of problems that in fact can all be solved using the model. So clients experiencing problems in life, use the model to find out what's going on when they aren't very happy and then to solve them. And by the way, I run a program called Burnout to Leadership for executives and professionals in burnout which is terrific because burnout is 100% recoverable using the precise step by step process that I teach centered around the model. But my clients actually come out of burnout completely within a matter of weeks, and then I go on to work with them on leadership, career or business development, performance promotion, earning potential and other fun projects. So although I'm talking about the model today firstly in terms of understanding and solving problems, that very same coaching model can be used to accelerate progress towards goals, to achieve new heights of performance. So it's perfect for creating leadership advancement and career progression. Really, I think that's the beauty of it. Since it's based on the neuroscience of how human brains work, whatever's happening for you now, in any situation, you can always improve on that with the model. So as you may hear, I'm rather a fan, and I'll probably let you in on some of the examples of that later. You can really make magical shit happen with the model. Just take it from me for a minute. But for anybody who hasn't heard of the self coaching model before or who doesn't know how it works, I'm gonna put the link to Brooke's podcast episode on it as a primer in the show notes so you can learn from her because it's her work and she's the master of it. However, I will give you a little quick overview of it now. So we have a problem in the world, whatever that problem is, we often think of it as something out there in the world went wrong and we didn't like it very much, we wish it hadn't happened that way. For example, let's go back to the dog that died of cancer. Any problem can be analysed by one of the five lines of the model. The model is just five lines we write on a bit of paper or a computer. And those five lines are line number one, the circumstance of the problem. What happened out in the world outside of our control that triggered us to feel that there was a problem. So it's a neutral fact, it's devoid of our opinion or feelings about it. It's the simple fact of what happened. So in my example, the dog died. Line number two of the model is the thought we had when that thing happened. Line number three is the way we felt when we had that thought. Line number four is the action we took or the way we showed up or behaved when we felt that way, and number five is the result of us taking that action. So I'm gonna write the five lines out for this example of the dog from the point of view of Fred, the dog's owner. So line one of the model, the circumstance would be that a dog with cancer died today and the pub test of a good circumstance is if a bunch of lawyers were there observing, would they all have agreed that this was factually what happened? If so, it is a provable neutral objective fact which is what we want it to be because it's something that's happened outside of our control and we want to minimise that, 'cause the alternative is if you don't do that, you're gonna use something like the dog died a slow and painful death today. But slow and painful are subjective, we can't prove it and not everyone would agree on it. It's really projecting our emotion or opinion onto the situation, so it's no longer a bare neutral fact of what actually happens objectively. It's become an emotional or emotive statement. So okay, we'd say here that the circumstance is that a dog with cancer died today. And the thought line two of the model, the thought Fred had about it was he shouldn't have died like that. And line three of the model, Fred's feeling was then distraught and line four of the model when he felt distraught, the action he took is that he left the vet's and sat in the car. He was shocked and numb with grief, thinking about all the ways the vet hadn't worked hard enough to save his dog. So line five of the model, the result for Fred was that he amplified and prolonged his own suffering and also generated anger towards the vet. Now of course, when we have a problem in the world, there can be a natural measure of emotional pain that we feel about it. In this case, Fred might have felt that grief was how he wanted to feel at the loss of his dog, it was appropriate for him he would think, but he might not have chosen distraught and the additional anger might not have been welcome either. So the reason the model is useful is because it shows us how we're contributing to our own pain to a result we basically don't want, because any thought we have will generate our feeling, the feeling we have drives the action we take or admit to take, and the action creates the result we get. So basically it follows that the thought we have creates our result for us. This is pretty good. The wonderful news about this is that we can change our thoughts and thus produce a result that's more favourable to us that we would prefer. But when you're doing this, if you attempt to do this yourself, if you know the model or if you've just heard a little bit about the model, and you try it yourself, be very, very careful to be gentle and compassionate on yourself in this experience. Partly because of this, our initial thoughts, our knee jerk response to what happens in the world is usually subconscious, it's usually below our level of consciousness. So whatever thought we have in that moment, we can't blame ourselves for having it because we couldn't control it in that moment. Any thought is just a bunch of words passing through our mind, any of them are fine. I'm just having a human experience by perceiving something and having a thought about it, no blame, no judgement. Likewise, we don't blame our feelings, there's no good or bad here, any feeling is just a human emotion, and any human is capable of every emotion. But once we've written down a model in the way that I've described and perhaps we've seen clearly that we've made our own suffering worse, we can then consciously choose a new thought that will create a more useful feeling, useful in the sense that it becomes... That the feeling becomes a catalyst for taking more productive action towards creating a result we prefer. So again, there's no judgment but there is the possibility of creating a different result for ourselves. And so in this way, you can create a better life day by day, model by model by choosing to think new thoughts. And this really is just the beginning of the story of coaching, the tip of the iceberg about how you can learn to do this, it's just a little teaser really to introduce it. Because I teach my clients step by step, week by week how to create a life they love from the ashes of burnout, and I really hope you found today's episode useful. Know that you do have agency over your life even when you don't think you do, and I can teach you, I can teach you how to do that. And if you're interested, listen for the coaching link at the end. I'm going to invite you to tune in to the next episode where I'm going to dig a little bit deeper into solving stubborn problems in using the model, when our minds are a little bit reluctant to change, so hold tight here and listen to that one too. Thank you for listening today. I appreciate your time and attention. And if you are one of those marvellous people leaving me five star ratings on the podcast, I'm very grateful, you're most kind. If you are in burnout, you must come and talk to me about how to recover quickly and sustainably and get back to your best performance, leadership but most of all, enjoyment inside work and out. Listen on for the link at the end of how to book a chat with me. My one on one coaching program's gonna have you there basically in a jiff. If you're in burnout and ready to recover, come and join my Burnout to Leadership program. You can book in to talk with me at burnout.dexrandall.com. Just tell me what's bugging you and let's make a plan to fix it.