Ep #24: The Five Whys
episode summary
Ever found yourself in a whirlwind of chaos, only to realize you're the one stirring the storm?
It can be hard to accept that we're the ones creating our own chaos (it's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me) but once we do, we can make different and better choices. I've got an easy but powerful tool to help you discover how you're getting in your own way, why you're doing it, and how to stop.
Join me as we get honest with ourselves!
Featured on the Show
Podcast Ep #23: Embracing Radical Responsibility
For the full show notes and transcript, head over here.
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CHAPTERS:
1:02 - Be On to Yourself
3:56 - What Not To Do Before a Flight
7:25 - The Five Whys
listen to the episode:
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Hey, I'm Michelle Gauthier and you're listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast. Hello friends, my name is Michelle and even though I'm a life coach with every tool at my disposal, I still get overwhelmed and stressed sometimes. I just had to start off with that admission. I really think the goal in creating a happier, more balanced, less stressful life is not to get to a magical end state where you're like whew, I did it, I'm balanced and I'm not stressed and I never will be again. I don't even think that's possible in this life. I see the goal as continually getting a little bit better each day and each year, and maybe even each decade, until we can be truly content and happy, because even when things go sideways as they do - life will hand us things that are out of our control - we know what to do to course correct and to try to get back to the type of life that we want to create for ourselves. The best way to do that is totally to be on to yourself. The faster you realize you're stressed and dig into why and how you got there, the less time you'll spend feeling stressed in the first place. If you are a person (and most people do this) who finds yourself saying, "things will feel better when", and then just insert any circumstance, anything that's outside of you, "things will feel better when.", I don't know. I was saying when school starts. A while back and school has started and now it's like when fall sports, and then it will feel better, et cetera. So, anytime you notice that you're outsourcing your life, your calmness, your non-stressed feeling to something outside of yourself, just be onto yourself and dig into what's really the cause of it, and that's what I'm going to talk to you about today. I'm going to tell you how you might be - probably are, if I'm honest - creating your own chaos in your life and how to stop it. As always, there are things that are in your control and out of your control, and I'm talking specifically about the things that are in your control and how you can stop making your life more stressful than it needs to be. I'm excited to be talking about this topic today because when I teach you, when I have to write a podcast and really think through it and teach you, I remind me as well, and I need this reminder right now as well. So, thank you, you're helping me. I'm getting ready to head to Mexico for a business retreat with nine other female business owners, and it's never easy to leave town, much less as a single mom. The amount of juggling and planning that has to go into taking a trip can almost make it not worthwhile. A trip is almost always, 99% of the time, worth it once you get there, but the buildup to going out of town and taking care of everything that you need to take care of can just really put a damper on it. It's hard to get excited for it, but if you guys can see where I'm going, oh my goodness, it looks amazing. We're going to Mexico. We're staying in this beautiful house. It's right on the ocean. There's a pool, there's tons of space, like I keep looking at the pictures. There's like a swing where you can sit by the ocean. On the schedule is, if you want to do it like an early riser, 6 am, sunrise, meditation, and then there's tapping and yoga and all these wonderful things that are just going to feed my soul, and the place looks absolutely amazing. So I'm so excited to go, but I want to be sure that I'm going from a calm place. Last time I took a trip, which was this summer -- Oh wait, before I go on, I have to tell you, because I feel like you'll appreciate this as overwhelmed working women the house that we're staying in has a chef who's going to prepare all the food for us. I mean, the chef isn't in the house all the time, but the chef is going to come to the house and make our food for us. How amazing is that alone?!? Okay, sorry, I had to add in that detail. I felt like that was important. What I was going to say, though, is the last trip I took was to Montana for vacation this summer, and I majorly stressed myself out doing that. Once I got there, the trip was awesome, but as I sat on the plane ready to take off, I felt super anxious and rushed, even though I had obviously made my flight. I was sitting on the flight, but I couldn't shake that feeling of like overwhelm and anxiety, so I'm going to tell you what coaching tools I used in that moment to calm myself down and remind myself of how to travel without being stressed, and why that situation is going to help me create a totally different experience for this trip. So, essentially, what you'll learn today is how you're creating your own chaos and how to stop, all based on lessons where I myself have messed them up. You're welcome. One of my clients always says, "I love to know you're only human too", and I cracked up because I am so human. I've just had a lot more time, spent a lot more time studying how to fix it and how to feel better and teaching other people. So I've just got more tools, but I do all the same stuff as everyone else does. Okay, so let's talk about this Montana situation that I was telling you about. So what happened is I was flying out in the morning. I left my house about an hour and 15 minutes before my flight took off and I lived 30 minutes from the airport and I had to park and take a shuttle. Yes, I know it's ridiculous. You're probably shaking your head at me right now. It was a terrible choice and I made it on the flight, probably only because I have TSA pre-check, and I carried on. But the weird part was and I said this to you guys at the beginning that I made it on the flight. I actually made it with plenty of time to spare. I think we sat on the ground for another 10 or 15 minutes. I was sitting there in my lovely first class seat and I still felt completely stressed and sweaty and overwhelmed. That's what happens when we get worked up. We think that as long as I get on the flight I'll be fine. But I did get on the flight and I wasn't fine. It's like once you get yourself worked up and into that fight-or-flight type feeling, it's really hard to come down from that and not let it ruin the good thing that's about to happen. I sat there just taking deep breaths. I turned on a meditation but I couldn't even concentrate on the meditation and I thought I just got to figure out what's going on here. I thought about when have I felt this way before? I felt this way all the time when I used to travel, but I used to get a high off of it. I loved it. I used to play this game. Now, keep in mind, I traveled all the time for work. I had a job for a while where I traveled like 40 weeks a year. I was traveling more weeks than I wasn't. I used to love to play this game where I could be the last person on the plane or get there as the latest possible moment, but still make the flight. The reason why I love to do that wasn't because I was chilling and living my best life somewhere else. It was so I could get more done. I could make one more phone call to a client, or I could send one more email, or I don't know. Now that I look back on it I don't know what the heck I was doing, but I did that all the time. That was just kind of part of my travel routine and I thought, as I was sitting there on that plane this summer, oh yeah, I know this feeling. I used to create this feeling for myself all the time, and now I'll do just about anything not to feel that way, but somehow I had fallen back into that old pattern. So here's what you can do. You can use this tool, this life coaching tool called the Five Whys, to ask yourself what is happening and why you have created this situation for yourself. Here's how to do it. First, ask yourself, and take radical responsibility, ask yourself, "what did I choose to do that caused this? I just talked about radical responsibility for the entire podcast last week, so if you need more information on that, go back to last week's episode. So what did I choose to do that caused this? So I chose several things that caused this. I didn't get up early enough. I spent a lot of time picking up the house and making everything perfect. I took extra time getting ready because my handsome man friend was picking me up on the other side. He was already in Montana, so I needed to look top notch cute. That's what I was telling myself. Why? Here's where we get to asking ourselves so why did I do that? Why did I feel like I needed to pick up my house and make everything perfect? So I could get enough done before I left. Whatever enough is, I don't know, but that's what came to my mind. Why did I do that? Why did I try to get enough done before I left so I could feel like I did enough and other people could see that my house is clean, even when I'm gone? It's always about the other people, isn't it? It's like people pleasing is a skill that we can learn not to do, but it runs deep and I notice. I surprise myself and notice in a situation like this, because I was having a dog sitter, who was a friend, come to the house and stay there, and I think I was thinking well, I want her to think that my house looks great while I'm gone. Why? Why do I care what she thinks? So that I could prove that I'm a woman who can handle a million things in a day, no sweat. I'm a single mom, I've got my own business, I can go out of town and my house still looks perfect. Why, why do I want to do that? Why do I want to show other people that I'm a woman who can handle a million things in a day, no sweat? And the reason why is because in my mind, that means that I'm enough. Now, when I read back over all those things and everything that I just told you, I don't actually intellectually believe that any of those are true. I know I'm enough without doing that. I know that I could leave my house how it was already, which was just fine. I know that I could have not picked up the house at all and everything would have been just fine. So intellectually, I know that this isn't true, but I'm sharing this with you because taking the time to ask those five whys and get to the bottom of why you're acting in a certain way helps show you the unconscious patterns that your brain has. So for me, being enough and other people seeing that I'm enough is a long old story, and that's where my brain likes to default. So it's really helpful that I can do that without judging myself, and that's always the case I say that all the time on this podcast that we're investigating our behavior with curiosity instead of judgment. So even though it kind of makes me laugh that I did this and I'm sort of shaking my head at myself, I'm not going to be mad about it. It's just what I did. It's fine. I can just look at it from a completely neutral perspective. So now that I've gotten to the bottom of all the whys - you just keep asking yourself why until you really get to the bottom of it; I think it only took me four whys to there, s ometimes it takes five - but once you get to the bottom of it, just ask yourself if it's true, and the answer is no, and if that's what you want to create in your life. So do I want to create a life where I feel frantic all the time in order to prove to other people that I'm enough? No, I do not. And also, who knows what other people are thinking? No one's thinking about my kitchen and what my kitchen looks like when I'm out of town. So then you give yourself two options, because you always have the choice. Do I want to do this again when I go on this trip to Mexico? Do I want to do that again where I don't get up early enough and I don't plan enough ahead of time, or I don't take some things off my list, where I get on the plane and I feel completely frantic? Do I want to do that? Because I could; I could choose that just like I chose it last time or do I want to change something next time? So yes, I definitely do want to change something next time. So what I'm planning to do for this trip is to first of all, start off with I'm enough. I've already done enough. I don't have to do anything else in order to prove something to this person, whoever I'm imagining, which is really just me, I think, my own subconscious and I'm going to go ahead and get to the airport in plenty of time probably two hours early, since it's an international flight and I'm going to get a coffee. I'm going to sit at my gate and read a book and calmly get on the plane and just know that whatever I've done at that point, I can't do any more or less, and it is just enough as is. So let's think about how this can relate to your life. If you want to try this same process, just think about a time when you've recently felt stressed and overwhelmed and ask yourself those questions. So the first question is what did I do to create this? It's easy to try to outsource that to somebody else, but what did you do to create this? Just be honest with yourself, without judgment, and then ask yourself why. And when you get that answer, ask yourself why again, and why again, and why again, until you get to the very bottom of it. And once you're at the bottom of it, consider if it's true and give yourself the option: okay, that's how I created this and that's why, and do I want to do that again or do I want to change it up next time? It doesn't have to be dramatic. You don't have to beat yourself up. You just have to say, okay, I made that choice last time. Do I want to make that choice again? I recently, too, just caught myself about to make myself feel overwhelmed. I've been working on this group program that I told you guys about on a couple of the past podcasts, called The Good Life. It is a huge undertaking. Essentially, what I'm doing is I'm taking everything that I have learned and done with my clients over the past five years that I've been a coach and I'm putting them all into this 12-week course. I'm creating modules and videos that go with those, and then there will be live coaching about the topic as well. So that just takes the skill of being super organized, choosing the order in which to teach them, and then it takes a long time to get something out of my head on a piece of paper, because I'm making a corresponding worksheet which is actually turning into a book. I think it's going to be like a hundred pages that will go with all of the videos. So it is a really big undertaking, and I caught that I really wanted to overwork, I wanted to work on the weekends and I wanted to work at night, because I love this project and I'm so excited and I can't wait to get it out to the world. But what I realized is okay, I'm already seeing clients, I'm full for clients, I am doing this podcast, I write weekly articles, I have a lot of things that I already do every week and creating this into my spare time - work time, but spare work time - is a big undertaking. And so, as I started to notice that I was coming to my office at night, I realized, okay, this is going to feel good right now and it's going to feel like fun because I'm so excited about doing this, but I know what's going to happen, I'm going to get overwhelmed and I'm going to burn out, and I'm going to miss time with my kids and all the things that I don't want to do. So I just got out the project plan, estimated how long it would take me if I only worked during the work hours that I set for myself, and adjusted accordingly, and I'm so glad I did, because I don't want to rush it, I don't want to skimp on it, I don't want to feel overwhelmed. There's all these ways that I know I don't want to feel. I want to feel like it's complete, clear, and that I'm clear and complete and not overwhelmed when I finish it. So doing something like this where, even though going on a trip to Montana isn't related to the group program, it's related in the fact that I noticed that I was starting to feel that same way and then I didn't even have to do the full investigation, I could tell right away what was going on. "Oh, I'm thinking about what other people will think and how quickly I want to be able to get this out, etc. And instead I just chose to keep going with the kind of life that I've created for myself. So the group program is coming. I'm working really hard on it and right now, if you're interested in it - which I hope you are, it's so good. I got to say it's so good, I cannot wait to have my first group of women - sign up. On my website, if you go to my homepage, michellegauthier. com, at the very top there's a button that says subscribe to my emails. If you subscribe to my emails, you will know immediately when it comes out, so you can sign up. I'm only taking a certain number of women in the first group, probably in all the groups, because I want it to be a small, intimate experience where we're able to work together. Okay, that is it for today, friends. Thank you so much for listening, as always. If you have not already, if you would give a rating to the podcast and write a review. That would be wonderful. That helps a lot and I hope you have a great week and when you start feeling overwhelmed, just pause, ask yourself what you've done to create it and ask yourself why; five times, as many times as necessary. Okay, talk to you next week. Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Women podcast. If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at MichelleGauthier.com. See you next week.
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