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How To Eliminate the Pressure So That You Can Enhance Your Career Anytime You Want

Listen to the full podcast episode to learn the science-backed practice that not only changed my life but also the lives of countless people over the last two decades. This is something you can’t ignore if you want to achieve that great goal you identified for this year and write your new future.

When I’m asked about careers, it usually falls into one of three categories – how to enhance one’s career, achieve a specific goal, or transition into a new one.

Regardless of the reason, there are three biases that repeatedly show up in these conversations. These biases are the very things that create the pressure cookers that prevent individuals from making the decisions and taking the actions to make the changes they want, whether that’s more satisfaction, revenue, impact, or a combination of all three.

In order to dial down the pressure you may also be experiencing in your career, you first need to understand these biases and the importance of acknowledging and overcoming them to catapult yourself forward.

The first of the three biases is the LINEAR BIAS. The linear bias is the belief that our life and work should always be moving forward and upward.

While society tells us that we should always be progressing, life just doesn’t work this way. Sometimes it pauses; sometimes it oscillates; sometimes it moves two steps forward and one step back.

In the book Life is in the Transitions by Bruce Fellier, he identifies over 116 disruptors, including lay-offs, illness, births, moves, and divorce. He points out that this expectation around life being linear puts a great deal of anxiety on us. That pressure to always be ascending causes us to be in a constant state of self-judgment. This self-made pressure leads to underperformance and undermines our careers.

If something happens, it’s supposed to happen. You can fight it or not fight it, but it’s still real.

That judgment and resistance to accepting what’s happening is part of the additional pressure we unwittingly allow into our world. This results in the inability to break through to new levels or enhance our careers at the rate we want.

When you release the idea that you need to be constantly progressing, you’ll find you can relax, trust yourself, and have your eyes open to the golden opportunities in front of you.

The second bias is the SCARCITY BIAS. The scarcity bias states that there is not enough of what you need.

You may feel there isn’t enough opportunity, time, or money to be successful. You may think the industry is too saturated and there’s not enough need in the marketplace for your talent.

You and I both know your talent is needed. Has anyone ever been grateful for the service you offered? I’m betting they have. People need what you have to give. Don’t let this bias that there’s not enough, hold you back from leading your desired career.

The third bias is the HARD WORK BIAS. The hard work bias is that success is a result of hard work. We know this isn’t true. If it was true, everyone who worked hard would be successful.

This unconscious idea that achieving your goal needs to be difficult is precisely why so many people’s days are ruled by low-grade stress, and it gets in the way of building your career to the level you want.

We don’t get what we want in life; we get our habits.

I was talking to an attorney, James, this week. As a partner at his firm, he’s responsible for bringing in new business. Three years ago he landed the firm’s largest account. Since then he hasn’t brought in any new business. Because of this, he says his confidence is shattered; he wonders what is wrong with him and why he can’t follow through on his good ideas.

Through our conversation, I saw that he held all three of these biases. They were affecting how he managed his days and the results of his career.

Biases shape our habits, so it’s important to be aware of them when looking to build a rewarding career.

Do you insist that you should be farther than you are today? Do you seek opportunities or tell yourself there isn’t enough time, opportunity, or support to succeed at your greatest desires? Do you make things harder than they need to be?

If any of these apply to you, the best way to have a massive shift in your career is to recognize these biases and understand that when we’re coming from these low-grade emotions, we’re actually resisting the very thing we say that we want.

Here’s the practice that will allow you to eliminate the pressure and enhance your career anytime you want.

Get honest about your biases. Step outside of yourself and become the observer. How do you resist allowing yourself to expand? Do you spend everything you make? Are you addicted to the adrenaline of being too busy?
Think of a client that you’ve already helped or a time when you succeeded in doing what it is that you want to do more of now. Write it down. Recount the experience and how great it was for the client you served. Then, consider what might have happened if you weren’t there. When life feels like you’re in a pressure cooker, return to this moment to remember your ‘why.’
For one week, bring this same set of feelings to as many as you can. Focus not on what it will do for you or your career. Instead, focus on what you are able to bring to others. Then give it away for one week without attachment to the outcome. Without any meaning other than you are doing your most important work. That you are moving in your ‘right’ direction.

We all have moments of pressure and stress. You can turn this around by dropping your old stories and your past and looking at how to give more of yourself. When you do this, your work opportunities will increase, your business connections will improve, you’ll feel better about yourself and your relationships, sleep better, and the stress and pressure that has become a habit over the past few years will dissipate.

In this episode, I share:

The three major biases that are causing resistance and stopping you from up-leveling your career
How these biases form our habits and affect how we move through life
The practice that will allow you to make a quantum shift and experience a breakthrough in your career

Resources and related episodes:

Tune in to the previous episode, The Most Influential Practice to Write Your New Future
Listen to episode 69: The Six Habits of the Fulfilled Bold Leader
Check out the book Life is in the Transitions by Bruce Feiler
If you’d like to be notified of when new podcast episodes are released, you can do so here: Playing Full Out
Learn more about the Inside Out Method
Connect with Rita on LinkedIn

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts for more tips, tools, and inspiration to lead the optimal vision of your life, love, and leadership. Remember, a half version of you is not enough. The world needs the fullest version of you at play.

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About Rita Hyland

With over 20 years of experience as an executive and leadership coach, Rita helps leaders — emerging and established — excel in corporate and entrepreneurial environments.

Rita believes if leaders were more clear about how transformation really works and more intentional about creating what they want, their impact, success, and influence in the world would be unstoppable.

Through her coaching programs, private coaching, and masterminds, Rita shows leaders how to win consistently and create the impact and legacy they desire.

Central to Rita’s work is the understanding that you will never outperform your current programming, no matter how strong your willpower.

When you learn to use Rita’s proprietary Neuroleadership Growth Code, a technology that uses the best of neuroscience and transformational psychology to hit the brain’s buttons for change, YOU become both the solution and the strategy.

Her mission is to end talented, hard-working, and self-aware leaders spending another day stuck in self-doubt or confusion and not contributing their brilliant work and talent the world so desperately needs.

The Most Influential Practice To Write Your New Future

Listen to the full podcast episode to learn the science-backed practice that not only changed my life, but also the lives of countless people over the last two decades. This is something you can’t ignore if you want to achieve that great goal you identified for this year and write your new future.

There are a handful of days in my life that stand out in my memory because of their mind-blowing impact on me. One, in particular, was the day I was given a life-changing practice that taught me how to overcome what was keeping me from making the necessary changes in my life so that I could enjoy more happiness and success. I doubted it when I first received it, but then I saw its effects on my life and the lives of people just like you over the last two decades.

Today, we’re continuing our 3-part series where you will get just what you need to do your most satisfying work and create meaningful change and the life you really want.

In Part 1, Get Your Great Goal Down, we talked about overcoming the #1 mistake high achievers make when setting goals and how to overcome it.

In Part 2, The #1 Ability You Need to Elevate Your Life in 2023, we covered what self-aware, high-performers understand and do to raise their performance and satisfaction at work and in life.

In Part 3, I’m teaching you something you absolutely cannot ignore if you want to do the best work of your career — the simple, science-backed practice used by some of the greatest change-makers in history to create things that have never before existed. It doesn’t take hours to do, but without a doubt, because it works with the brain in the way the brain works, it will create and allow for the change that you desire.

If you think about the great leaders in history – Gandhi, Thomas Edison, Martin Luther King, Jr. – they all shared one common thing: they each believed so strongly in a future that was so real in their minds that they began to live as if it was already happening, regardless of their circumstances.

Those who have achieved great things in life once became so possessed with a future vision that, although it could not yet be seen in their current reality, they behaved as if that vision was already happening. When they did that, their environment bent to their behavior.

The key to writing your new future and creating the life of happiness that you desire is to become unconditionally committed to your vision regardless of your current circumstances.

While coaching a CEO the other day, I challenged her to put this practice into action. Whereas her company had always been the manufacturer of an automotive line, in her vision, she created products for an entirely new industry: medical. But, her current reality didn’t reflect evidence that that was even possible. Regardless, she became completely immersed in the reality of her vision getting her to the future reality in advance. I know that the same has happened to you, you probably haven’t recognized it yet.

How often have you stopped working on a goal or an objective because your environment didn’t show evidence that you need to stay the course?

Perhaps you were waiting for your work environment to reflect leadership that publicly endorses your special project. Perhaps you are waiting for employees to like coming to work before you make any changes in your leadership style.

Oftentimes, we are waiting for some type of evidence in our environments before we actually begin to believe in this new vision and take action. But, it’s in these moments when we let our environment control us instead of communicating with our brains to take action that will then change our environment. We think the environment should lead with change and then we will follow suit, but that’s absolutely backward. This is the #1 reason why so many of us in this overstretched and the unfocused world won’t get the change we want this year.

Greatness, however you define it, requires you to hold onto your dream, your vision, or your goal regardless of the circumstances in front of you.

So, how do you do this when the reality is staring you in the face and your brain has given you 100 pounds of evidence that it’s not going to work out? You mentally rehearse it.

Those great leaders often reminded themselves of the reality they were envisioning and to do this, they had to have mental rehearsals. Having a mental rehearsal means stepping into the state of being of your future vision. This state of coming from your thoughts, your feelings, and your behaviors. Stepping into this state of being means understanding how you would think, how you would feel, and how you would behave in this ideal future and then –and here’s the key – leading your present life in that way.

Does this sound at all complicated? Well, here’s the truth for you: we are all mentally rehearsing something.

We’re mentally rehearsing whatever is ruminating in our minds all day long:

I never have enough time
I’m in trouble
This isn’t going to work
These people are all the same
It’s never going to change

What brain science demonstrates is that what we mentally rehearse, we create. Oftentimes, we are mentally rehearsing an unwanted past or a dreaded future. That alone is why we may continue to repeat the limited reality we have come to know and dream to change.

The good news is that we can change our brains, and in order to live a life of happiness and success, we have to change our brains. We have to create a new way of being for ourselves and we can do this just by thinking differently.

If we repeatedly think about something to the exclusion of everything else, we will encounter a moment when the thought becomes the experience.

When this occurs, neurons fire together and start rewiring your brain. Your rewired programming then creates the results you want. Let’s face it. Your existing hardware is not going to take you to that new reality. If it could, it already would have happened.

The best way to begin your mental rehearsal practice and write your new future is with these two questions:

What would it be like to live in that reality?
What if I was the person living in that reality?

Once you begin to immerse yourself in these answers, you will feel it. Then behave like that in the present time. In time, you will see that your environment bends to you and your success.

Your Call To Action for this week is to practice mental rehearsal daily.

It doesn’t need to take long, perhaps just 2-4 minutes, and it’s best done in the morning or right before bed. This is when your brain is most receptive to suggested thoughts. You can either write something down and read it to yourself each day or envision it in the silent moment. During this process, understand that emotion is the ultimate conductor to fire those neurons and to really get your brain to change.

I’d love to hear from you when you’ve done this practice. Commit yourself to mentally rehearsing like the leader who simply saw their idea as so, before it ever came to be. Become obsessed.

Share what you find with me below or over on Instagram at @ritahyland.