Mindset Shifts for Productivity

Mindset Shifts for Productivity

How do you develop Mindset shifts for Productivity?

When someone says rest, does your mind spin with confusion? After all, what does rest really mean?

It’s hard to get all the items on your to-do list checked off without running full speed ahead.

Going full blast, without taking time to rest, will land you one of two places. On the side of the proverbial road with a speeding ticket … or in an accident. Neither are productive places to be.

You can have it all! Yes you can! But, not all at the same time.

You can learn how to know when enough is enough, slow down to speed up, and rewire your mind for optimal productivity by tuning in to today’s podcast!

Enjoy!

Mindset Shifts for Productivity

TRANSCRIPTION

Mindset Shifts for Productivity

Welcome to the unstick, your mind podcast on Mimika TV, get ready to get unstuck align with your true purpose and unlock your God. Given potential. I was an entrepreneur when I was full. My, my dad had a business with my name on the plaque and I was clearly the boss. So, being somebody else’s employee wasn’t gonna work. So I always knew that one day I would be the boss and I have had several different business models from website design to, digital marketing agency as a professional photographer as well, and worked in TV production. And along the ways, kind of life happens. And as we grow, we have kids and family, we just, things happen. And we deal with things, but for me, the biggest highlights or the biggest, sort of if you had to look at my life as a movie would be some major hot drama, because I tell you all of us, I’m sure have got these stories to tell, but really what brings me here today after having been in business.

And really, I was really I’d say, addicted to approval. One of my biggest problems from a child was that I was always, achieving things and always trying to look for attention. A lot of us, I say, come with junk in our trunk, which often comes back from childhood. And as a child, we have a view of the world that sometimes doesn’t get corrected until we are adults. And what happens is eventually if we don’t pay attention to the signs, we eventually we will burn and crash. And that’s exactly what happened to me. So after running my business, my husband and I immigrated again, we moved from England to the USA in 2006. So two immigrations within five years and two kids and restarting our businesses was not ideal, but it was a perfect storm for what would’ve eventually result in breakdown and burnout.

And eventually the straw that broke the camel’s back was in late, 2015, early 2016. I had a trifecta effect of a business launch that didn’t go well. I had a child, teenage child in crisis mental health crisis, where we had to really intervene. And then I lost my mother-in-law to cancer. And this really shook my world. Like, after going through all that stress and just keep I’m one of those, like, I’ll just keep going till I drop. My husband says I have two gears, either full blast or full stop. And , I’ll admit, I’ve since given up my membership to control freaks anonymous, and things are so much better, but when you’re living in that community and you’re part of that member, you’re always pulling out your card and having these big, big energy SAPs.

What to know about: Mindset Shifts for Productivity

When you something doesn’t go right, and you just push yourself going and you just go and go and go until the walls, the wheels fall off the bus. And they did in a big way. And eventually what happened is I hit burnout where I physically couldn’t get out of bed, hit emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual breakdown. I had like a crisis of faith. My whole thing was my mother-in-law and I were very close and she was a strong woman of faith. And I was like, God, how could you let bad things happen to good people? And why is it that I feel like I’m in the middle of the worst storm ever business failure, mounting debt. And, as a parent being coming from that sort of performance high achieving, you wanna fix things. And eventually what happens in life, some things you can’t fix, they just get broke, but all we can do is rebuild when they are eventually down to ruins.

And sometimes that’s a good thing. Some people going, like, why would I wanna do that? Well, first of all, I would not advise you push until you hit burnout and breakdown, because it does take longer to rebuild, but there is a big fat, giant reset button. This is something we can do. The last two years, all of us have been through so much change. Most people don’t go through in a lifetime, but hashtag the rat race has been canceled. Yay. Aren’t so excited. We no longer have to play by this unspoken rule of what’s expected like high you levels, especially women. And those are a lot of the clients I deal with women who are, in high performing jobs or there’s big, big expectations. I mean, all of us in the last two years, especially us moms have had to deal with juggling homeschooling.

We’re still working, running a business, keeping the family together, cleaning like crazy. Like I was a total germophobe, like don’t touch the this, kind of like freaking out. And the stress levels were through the roof. And unfortunately what happens when we push ourselves beyond repair is that things do fall apart. And we have to look and say, okay, it’s time for a pause. We cannot keep going at that pace. This whole world’s view of hustle and grind just doesn’t work anymore. It’s just not possible. We are not machines. We are not made to push until we have nothing left because what the alternative is, broken down marriages, destroyed families, physical burnout. It’ doesn’t end well. So I’m really passionate. So after that whole process, I took like a year and a half. I closed my business down.

I literally needed to give myself time to heal physically, emotionally, mentally. I mean, I’d never experienced physical grief where you actually, your body feels like you feel like you’ve actually been through something like you’ve been in a war zone. I just had to, I even, my mom would phone me and I’d be like, okay, so I can’t talk to you I’d have to like email her or text her. I couldn’t even get the words out and I’d realize I just needed to take my foot off the gas, give myself time to breathe and rest and deal with one thing at a time. This whole multitasking thing is a myth. Our brains cannot focus on more than one thing at a time. I always love to say that women can have it all, but not at the same time.
We have to pick our battles and decide what is worth fighting for today. And it’s okay just to do one thing and do it well. But for us, speedy Gonzalez who like to zoom down the highway at a hundred miles an hour with a foot on the gas pedal, there’s only like one way that ends and not very well! Either a traffic ticket or you crash. So I’d love to take this opportunity just to, give people the encouragement if, if you are on the road and you can feel your engine burning, read the signs that slow down signs sometimes, we can avoid the worst case scenario by just taking the time out to think and to ask ourselves, is this where I wanna be going? Am I on the right highway?

Let’s talk: Mindset Shifts for Productivity

Is this taking me to the right place? And I think now is the best time. And then ever to take the moment to really think about that. So long story short, after that process, I had a digital marketing agency where I was doing a lot of, marketing for businesses and entrepreneurs, authors and speakers and helping them with their branding as a service based business. And I’d realize I just didn’t wanna do it anymore. I, I just couldn’t that whole pace was just not what I wanted. So I really that’s where I fell into coaching. I, I got coached, I got help. I realized I needed to change the way that I think about things. Otherwise I’m just regurgitating old news. And after that, I really discovered this transformative way of when you help people to be able to reset their mind, get all rid of old, the old junk in the trunk, get to a new way.
It’s a lifestyle way of thinking. It’s not a fair diet that we just do and go, and then leave and go back to our old ways. I realized for this to be effective, it has to stick. It has to become a lifestyle. So I really threw myself, into coaching and certification and studying. And right now I’m finishing my brain health coach certification with Amen university. And I’ve dived into everything like how the brain works, neuroscience, hormones. I’m like, I’m just geeking out on this stuff. I’m like, oh my gosh. It’s like, whoa. So, yeah. So that’s pretty much I, I lived it, I brain through it. And I’d realized how important having someone who can help you see the signs rebuild after breakdown, but also how to reformat and make better choices for our life using our mind. And also the faith element was very important.

Like I’ve been a strong woman of Christian faith since I was a kid and really realizing, who did God made me to be like, why am I trying to impress the Joneses? Like they don’t actually care. Like, is this really what makes my heart sing? Is this what I’m called to do? And that I’m equipped to do. So that’s really where I found I have a really great resonance with people and women who feel like they wanna get more in alignment with who God made them to be. Just, take the pretense, no more masks, no more hiding and trying to be something you’re not. And when that resets, I call it resetting to your factory setting. It is amazing how much more enjoyable and how much more fun life can be. All of us are raised in a certain environment, right?

And of course there’s nurture in nature. And I believe both play in a part, but paradigms are kind of the way we think about things. And our brain is developed and a lot of the value based thinking and things that we learned from our parents are usually entrenched in us by the age of seven. What is amazing to me is that I’ve made, I meet a lot of adults who still have what I call stuck thinking from maybe something they learned when they were five or seven. And here’s the thing. One the biggest change came from me when I started thinking about what I was thinking about at for the longest time. I never thought I had agency over my thoughts. I thought just thoughts just happen. And, oh, well, if I thought a bad thing and oh, I must be a terrible person.

Right? But I’d realized there’s actually choice. We have the option and the choice to choose, to renew our mind and to think new things. And just like you would go to the gym, like if you decided you wanna lose, 10 pounds and you wanna gain muscle. You can’t just have these huge, gigantic leaps and say, I’m gonna do this in a week. Right. You have to be realistic about how long something’s gonna take you. So if it took you a hot minute to get into a mess, it’s safe to say, it’s gonna take you more than a few hot minutes to get out. So if we think about if, how we were raised and our parents were, teaching us things around the dinner table or had certain, attitudes towards things, everything from beliefs to religion, to value system to habits, these are all things that are mirrored and modeled as kids.

But a lot of adults never question that they always think, well, that’s how the world is because you only know what, you don’t know what you don’t know. It’s like, if you ever as a kid had a sleepover at somebody else’s house and all of a sudden you see how they do breakfast or what they do for their bedtime routine at this family, they don’t shower at night. They shower in the morning, but my mom would have a hot, hot fit if I didn’t go, if I went to bed without showering. So it’s like, your brain goes, oh, there’s a different way of living. There’s a different way of, of, of thinking. So once I’d realized that there was important to define the difference between truth and lies, what you’ve discovered or what you learned in your life up until now is your truth, but might not necessarily be the truth or the full truth.

And I think in life and in the world, we could avoid a lot of arguments and a lot of wars, frankly, if we were able to see from the other side, if we were be were able to tell, who am I? And really, what do I believe? And maybe what mom and dad taught me, isn’t serving me anymore. Maybe this isn’t, cuz dad had an issue where with rejection, when he was a kid, so he was always trying to get attention. And I thought that’s just the way we live. But once I’d realized there’s a route to everything, I, as a good God, I had to get to work and start uprooting roots that were not serving me. So I always like to think of it. Like your beliefs are kind of the trunk of a tree, the roots of what you were taught were a kid is deep below the soil.

And we don’t often see, we don’t often question, but as we grow in life, we grow branches, which become our experiences. And then we have the fruit, which is things that we start to see in behaviors. So when somebody’s angry, that’s a fruit of, of anger, right? We never really question why they’re angry. So if we start to go down the branch and we are like, why do I feel like when I get in the car, I get major road rage. And I automatically just, I flips the switch in me that all of a sudden, this is just how I act behind the wheel. And oftentimes we don’t think about where we learnt that behavior. We just accept that behavior or that thought process as truth. But for a lot of us, we never question that. So my whole viewpoint was, hang on a second.

Am I believing what I’m believing? Is this actually truth? Like, why did my parents think that way? Like I just thought that’s how we did things, right? Like running a business was you just work. You were a workaholic. And if you weren’t working, you weren’t being good. Personal. Like, I mean, I remember my dad as a child, when I was a child, he could never relax. And I just thought, well, if you relax and you sat on my couch, you were being lazy. So I always felt like I had to do, do, do something. And I’d realize as an adult, that wasn’t serving me. And when you realize that you start to question and say, this is the behavior I’m displaying. This is the fruit. Do I like the fruit? Does it taste good to me? If not, you don’t have to keep growing that fruit, but it takes a little, u, actually intentional work to start to really dig into those roots and to say, what?

I don’t want this tree noble. It ain’t, it’s not serving me. It’s not where I want to be. And the good news is you don’t have to be a, a victim of your circumstances. You get to choose. That’s one thing God does not interfere with this world is free. Will. I mean, I always think, okay, God, why don’t you just come down and smart. All these people that are just causing us issues. Like they went to solve a whole lot of problems and he’s like, sorry, honey, but there’s free. Will they have to choose it? So just like anything in life, everything’s a choice. And for all of us living in first world countries, like I was raised in South Africa. So I was very much aware of poverty and those who are living below the poverty line and a lot of those unfortunate situations where people don’t have a choice or they don’t think they have a choice, but believe me, I’ve made people who’ve come from the worst of the worst situations that the poorest of the poor who’ve had, the worst backgrounds, or maybe suffered terrible abuses as children made the choice.

Some sometime along their life that I’m not gonna take this anymore. I’m going to choose a different path. So the good news is no matter where you are in life, you’re never too old. You’re never too young. You haven’t missed the window. Today is always a good time to press the reset button and decide, what enough is enough. I’m gonna change my trajectory. I want my tomorrow to be better than today. Well, we definitely are all born with a choice. That is part of the human experience is our ability to choose. Now, the difference is a lot of people in the world just, in life in general, just feel like they don’t have control over their lives. And they feel like they’re a victim to their circumstances now, but here’s the good news you can, if you take a hundred percent responsibility for a hundred percent of your results, that’s when your life changes.

Because it’s, when we think about what we are thinking about, we start to challenge and differentiate the difference between a truth and a lie, like, like saying it feels right, but is this true? Like the way I was raised, or maybe this is what I learned, maybe this doesn’t suit me or this just feels wrong. Like our spirit knows before our brain and our mind even can formulate something. And oftentimes, the world is so much about your mind, your mind, your mind, like, it’s all self and whatever you do, you can, you can do it, which is great. But if we have broken beliefs, it’s kind of like a stuck record. That’s like goes around and round and round. For those of us who were from the seventies and eighties, remember those record players. I remember having one of those.

Is Your Mind Shifting for Productivity?

That’s how our mind is. Our mind loves pattern. It loves routine and the mind does not like change. So if you think about when things feel difficult and hard, it means you are pushing against your comfort zone, but that’s a great thing because nothing grows in a comfort zone. If you can stretch past that, feeling uncomfortable, just like going to the gym, when you first go and do a workout, I’m sure,the first few days it feels hard. You feel sore and achy and you feel stiff for days after, but as you keep momentum and you keep going, you start growing. And the growth is really with where the fun part is. And seeing that development and transformation, it kind of speeds up. So I have this a lot with my clients and I’ve had experience with many women in different arenas.

And particularly like, I actually worked with a clinical psychologist who had gone through a very hard, difficult divorce and her confidence was shot. And the thing is it’s like, even though she’s clinically educated to know the psychology of things, sometimes we need more than just knowing the psychology or the neuroscience. We, we need more of a heart based approach, which is who am I? And why am I on earth? Why has God made me this way? And how can I better find myself when I feel like I’m getting lost in the noise that lost in the sea of expectation or oftentimes expectations we put on ourselves. We think that it’s the outside world, but when we can realize and take that a hundred percent responsibility for our lives, then we get agency. Then we get control and we realize what?
This is up to me. If I don’t like this job, I can resign and go find another one. If I don’t like this situation and where is this road is taking me? I don’t have to just be a victim and be pulled along. And that’s the difference is for those who stay stuck forever. And those who actually make a change is you have to come to a point where you realize it’s entirely up to you. So once you’ve reformat that and realized what you want out of life and work through the process, and that’s what I’ll do well, I like to call myself a personal trainer for your mind. A Personal, trainer’s gonna make you work. You’re gonna sweat. And you probably will cry a few times, but it’s totally worth it when you build the muscle and the lifestyle, the mind muscle of how to approach life so that you doesn’t matter what circumstances you have, because life is 50 50.

You’re gonna get the good with the bad, just like the earth is, two different poles. You need the positive and the negative for things to work. And oftentimes the world is like, oh, you’ve always gotta be happy. You’ve always gotta be happy. And if you’re unhappy, oh, something must be wrong. Or, either pop a pill or take food, or eat food to make yourself feel better. And it’s not a criticism of that. It’s just, we’ve never questioned it. Like, why do I, why is that my go to resource? Instead of thinking about what I’m thinking about, what is making me unhappy instead of staying in denial and inevitably just keeping myself stuck. So part of what I do with my clients is really get them. First of all, step one is awareness. You can’t help what you can’t fix what you don’t know, and you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.

I have a lot of clients who say to me, oh, well, my husband and my child. And I’m like, listen, honey, we can’t fix them, but we can fix you. And oftentimes when we fix you, it trickles into the rest of your relationships. People see the change. So I always say, I’m a firm believer that, husband might be the head of the home, but the woman’s the heart. And if the heart is broken, everyone in the family feels it. If mom’s having a bad day and she’s, losing her tonsils over something, yelling at the kids, it’s gonna create a whole different atmosphere for everybody in the house. So when mom feels confident, when mom feels calm, when she feels like she has it together, and oftentimes we learn to function, even, we don’t feel like we have it together.

Cuz here has the good news ladies. You can have it all, but not at the same time, which is why we have the joys of delegating or magic word saying no, it’s fabulous. No I will not bake cup cupcakes for the dance team. That’s not what I do, but I will buy some at the store. If you want me to you just, you just know what you can and can’t do. You start to become more confident. And as I say, the process, I always take my clients through and I always say, we need to slow you down to speed you up. You cannot drive around the racetrack with a broken down tire, with a head gasket, about to blow or wave for you out of gas. We need to take you aside, put you in the garage, fix the junk, get rid of the junk in the trunk, fix the carburetor and get you some tires and get something new to put you back on the road.

So you can function. You can go faster and you can get there where you wanna go without the crash and burn. So it really is taking the pause. And I know this was hard, especially for us go getters high achievers. When someone says rest I’m like, say, what do you mean? So doesn’t mean I should sit on the couch and just maybe like check email, like rest is can be very uncomfortable because our brains think we have to constantly be in that. Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go. Which is actually your brain’s fight or flight mechanism. And let’s be honest when you are busy and you’re getting stuff done, working on adrenaline, it does feel good in the moment. Right? But it comes at a cost. Our bodies cannot maintain that pace. It’s like, I think of, putting your finger in the plug, electrocuted like, yeah, this feels fabulous.
But until you take your finger out the plug and then there’s a hot mess at the end. So that’s my encouragement today is to everybody is just to think about what you thinking about and to realize you have more choice than you think. And when you make that choice and you decide either enough is enough or something’s gotta change and you are committed, not just interested. There’s a difference between interested and commitment because when you’re committed, you will do whatever it takes. Sunshine, rain, like if you are determined to get somewhere, you are ready, are prepared to put up with whatever comes your way, because that the result is worth the effort.

 

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