98: Mehvish Khan on Shifting Your View on Worth and Value

You're listening to the Time to Level Up Podcast. I'm your host, business life coach, Andrea Liebross. I help women in business commit to their own growth personally and professionally. Each week, I'll bring you strategies to help you think clearly, gain confidence, make your time productive, turn every obstacle into an opportunity, and finally overcome the overwhelm so that you can make money and manage life. Let's create a plan so you have a profitable business, successful career, and best of all, live with unapologetic ambition. Are you ready to drop the drama and figure out the how in order to reach your goals? You're in the right place. It's Time to Level Up. Let's do this.

Hello, my podcast listeners and welcome back to the Time to Level Up Podcast. I would love to say that my original thought for this podcast was something like how to move from surviving to thriving. It sounds super cliche, and it is, and it just didn't sit well with me. As I started to put some ideas down on paper for this particular episode, what I realized is that in order to move from surviving to thriving, you really have to “do the work” that’s worth doing.

I got a sign, so to speak, yesterday that this is exactly what I want to share with you today. I got off a consult call with a prospective client. What she shared in that call really solidified for me that what I help my clients do, I help them do the work that's worth doing. I'm going to share with you today what that work is, what makes it worth it, and how to do it when you know you have to do it. If you do it, what will happen to you?

This is worth work doing on a Saturday like I'm doing right now. I am recording this episode on a Saturday. I rarely record episodes on Saturdays. But I am home all alone this weekend. No kids, no husband, no dogs, just me in my house all alone and I am feeling very inspired to do the work and to record several podcast episodes today. That's where I'm at. Let's just dig right in.

Now I know that even though I don't get to see you, podcast listeners, and I don't really get to hear from you unless you reach out to me, you're hearing me and I am impressed by your desire to work on yourself, to grow yourself, to better yourself, to get better at loving yourself, at loving everyone, at loving what you do every day, loving each other, at loving your family, loving your business, at doing this work that's worth it because you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you weren't up for doing the work.

I think more than anything, what I'm impressed by is your willingness to be vulnerable while you do the work. In order to do the work that I'm teaching you here, you have to be willing to be vulnerable. You have to be willing to be wrong. I said that several times, you've got to be willing to be wrong. It's such a challenging thing to be willing to be wrong and to be vulnerable. It's really the ultimate form of humility.

Brené Brown does a lot of talking about this. I feel that desire from you in just the itty-bitty contact I get from you, whether it's in the form of a review or if it's in the form of someone saying to me, “Hey, I've listened to your podcast.” I want to know what you're listening to and what you're feeling and what resonates with you. I think I already know that you're willing to do the work. Always feel free to drop me a direct message on Instagram, on LinkedIn, Facebook, or send me an email to let me know what is resonating with you, I want to know.

Today we're going to talk about doing the work. This is the work that really creates a thriving you. My thought about surviving to thriving, I thought, “Okay, how to get over that bridge from surviving to thriving?” It's about doing that work. I sometimes say to you on the podcast or to my own clients something like, “Well, that's the work you have to do.” I'll be coaching someone, and they'll figure out what's really going on in their minds, what's really happening in their brain, where they're stuck, why they're stuck, what they need to do to progress from that place of stuck or from that place of just surviving the day.

I'll often say to them, “And this is the work worth doing, this is the work you need to do and it's worth it.” What that work is and why it's work worth doing, we're going to talk about. I do this work with my clients inside Committed to Growth, inside the Runway to Freedom mastermind, inside all the master classes I teach in the VIP Days, and on this podcast, we're always doing this work and there are stages to this work.

For example, the women in Committed to Growth are at a different stage than the women in Runway to Freedom masterminds, but they're all doing the work. As you listen to this episode as well, identify yourself like, “Is this the kind of work I need to do?” because it'll help you identify where you are on that continuum.

So the work we're talking about is not the work that most people think about when they might use that phrase. This is work worth doing. When most people hear the word work, they think about some kind of action that they might need to take, something they might need to do, some way they might need to exert themselves, create something, write something, or lift something. Work equals action and there's usually an exertion factor to it. It's work in the world that most people in most cases take.

But when we're in the coaching world, that is not the type of work we're talking about. I will give you an example. Start off with this example of this consult call yesterday. I'm going to call this woman Julie. It's not her real name, but I'm going to call her Julie. She got on this call with me telling me that she was in a quandary as to whether or not she should leave her corporate job—and very well paying, she's established in her corporate role—to take classes and get certified as a physical therapy assistant.

She had already done some prereqs. She told me the reason she wanted to do this is because she wanted to do something that was more purposeful or fulfilling. But in the course of that conversation, she never once told me that she was excited about becoming a PTA. She actually even told me that once she got that certification, she probably wouldn't even get jobs she currently has. She loved her job. She actually gave her job currently right now like an eight or nine, but she was just looking for something that was more fulfilling.

What I told her is that I don't think she should go get her certification as a PTA. There's nothing here that tells me that's really what she wants to do. What she really needs to do is to do the work. She has got to figure out what she's really feeling and what she's wanting to feel. She's got to do the work on understanding who she is, what approach feels right to her, and she needs to explore what stage of life she's in now and where she wants to go.

Doing that kind of work might result in the action of pursuing the degree. It may just result in a change to the action she's currently taking like a tweak. It may result in something that we haven't even thought about. But the work that we're referring to here is not the work of getting another degree so she was going notice into that action mode. She was skipping the work worth doing.

The work that we refer to in coaching, the work that I encourage you to do and that I encouraged her to do happens first in your head and in your heart. It's not working on something that you're doing or actions. It's working on who you are being, what you are thinking and believing. It's working then on how you're feeling and it probably is more difficult work in most cases than the actual physical execution of work, or how we show up and create what happens on the outside of us. She was skipping this step of doing this thought work and going right to the action.

I said, “Hold up. We need to do this work first.” She heard me. She understood me. She's like, “You know what? You're totally right. I've been avoiding doing what really is the harder work. I thought this might be a quick fix.” So if you're new to me, and I already totally lost you, then two things you can do, you can get the Podcast Roadmap at andrealiebross.com/podcast-roadmap, and listen to the eight episodes on there that I have you listened to, and you can catch that link in the show notes.

You can also read a few of my blogs at andrealiebross.com/blog to get a better understanding of where I'm coming from. Again, link is in the show notes, but hopefully I haven't lost you yet. Hopefully this is making sense. Work worth doing means this is worth changing your beliefs around, it is worth tackling limiting beliefs. It is worth seeing what you're really thinking and feeling or wanting to think and feel and where you want to go. It is not just skipping ahead into the go.

It's like Monopoly when they say pass go, what do they say, pass go, skip, go, skip home? You know what I'm saying. You know what I'm talking about. Like you're skipping ahead. Nope, we can't skip ahead. We've got to do the work worth doing. This work is worth taking the time, the conscious energy required to redirect your brain every time it tries to offer you the story or a thought that isn't serving you and to go, “No, no, no, that's not the story I want to live out. That's not true.”

Remember, we're not thinking that story anymore. We're not focusing on that anymore. We're not believing that anymore. We're redirecting. As you do that, you rewire the neural pathways in your brain. This is truly science. This isn't like super woowoo. This is really neuroscience. This is literally how the brain works. We have to rewire the neural pathways, we have neuroplasticity.

A real-life example of neuroplasticity is you taking the same route to work, school, or a family member's house that you've taken forever. Then all of a sudden, the highway department decides to put a roundabout in the middle of the road, to close the road, to change the traffic pattern and you have to go a different route. You have to retrain your brain to go that way. Then our brain will prune the synapses that we aren't using anymore. It will take away the option of going down that old road.

I believe this really happens at night when we sleep. But I don't know, I'm not a doctor and I'm not a scientist. All I know is that the neural pathways that you no longer use after a while, your brain says, “Well, we can just drop that one. It's not necessary. It's taking up space and you don't use it anymore.” As you get rid of patterns, thought patterns that aren't serving you and you instead focus on new ones, eventually you do become a new version of you.

Julie, you need to become a new version of you. Because this thought that going to PTA school is going to serve my desire to be more purposeful, I don't think that's actually serving you. We do this pruning all the time. Most of the time we do it unconsciously. We become slightly different versions of ourselves in various ways.

Doing work worth doing means that we're going to now do it consciously. We're going to consciously redirect the brain and create a new neural pathway that will give us a new, hopefully in the long run, automatic belief system, which will generate useful emotions, which will help us be who we want to be in the world, which will help Julie be the Julie she wants to be, which then leads us to useful actions that really serve us and ultimately give us exactly what we're looking for.

Are you following me? This is all the work worth doing. In Committed to Growth, most of this work worth doing that we do has to do with our personal lives. Inside Runway to Freedom, this is the work worth doing inside our business and making sure that our business aligns with our personal life. Because just because of the way we've done our business or operated in the past, if anyone inside Runway to Freedom mastermind has raised their hand and said, “Hey, look, I want to create some new neural pathways,” that might be even better and cut off some of those old prune, those synapses that we don't need to use anymore.

Now, there is work that's not worth doing. There's thought work that's not worth doing. I want to mention that just for a little bit. Because again, this is a common misconception when people first learn about thought work, or the work we do in coaching where I teach clients that thoughts create feelings, and they think that what I'm saying is that you should just think positive thoughts in order to have positive feelings all the time. That is not what I'm saying. Because there is work that's not worth doing.

Now, we could just try to think positive thoughts all the time and click our heels and put them positively but I don't think that's really what we want to do. Now, it's technically possible because we do have control over our brains, but I just think it would be really exhausting. Actually, I don't think it would really serve us. Even beyond that, even if we set aside the fact that it would be exhausting, challenging, and wouldn't serve us, there are just certain things that it makes sense that you would want to think negatively about and feel negatively about, you wouldn't want to do the work.

Here's an example. When I have a client that tells me that their child is struggling, a spouse is struggling, maybe a boss, employee, or contractor is abusive in some way, let's just say that's it, let's just say it's a person that's verbally abusive to you, not even physically, just verbally abusive, according to the coaching model that I use, I teach that your thoughts create your feelings, the circumstance doesn't create your feelings.

What do I mean by this? It's what that person says, those words coming out of that abuser, the words that come out of their mouth, the names that they might call you or the statements they make about you, that doesn't make you feel anything. Your thoughts about what he or she said about yourself in this situation, those thoughts are what make you feel bad. That's true. But it's not worth doing the work to change your thoughts in this particular situation. That is not work worth doing.

Maybe you disagree with me, but I don't think that you should allow people to talk to you in any way that you find to be derogatory, inappropriate, or offensive. I think that you should have a value system that says it's not okay. Talking to people that way, not okay. Think about it in a work situation. If you've got an employee that did something and your thought is, “This is unacceptable. I need to let them go,” I don't think it's work worth doing to try to figure out how to keep him. In fact, I think actually, that's a detriment to you. That's some of the work we do on Runway to Freedom mastermind. We're trying to figure out, “What's the work worth doing here when it comes to the people in our organization and what's not worth doing?”

Sometimes we hurt ourselves by trying to spin that type of situation in a positive way. When people talk to me in a way that feels abusive, it's not okay even though “it's not okay” is just a thought. We could change the thought to, “It's totally fine for him or her to talk to me in that way.” But that is going to be work, that's going to be challenging. You don't believe that it's not work worth doing. Do you know why? Because it's okay to have boundaries and remove yourself from situations when people are behaving in a way that doesn't align with your values.

You want to have values, you want to keep them, and I want you to have opinions about how you allow people, situations, or what you're willing to tolerate when it comes to how people treat you or talk to you. It's not worth doing thought work. It's just not necessary. You can remove yourself and there are plenty of kind people in the world that you can talk to.

Maybe you just remove yourself temporarily. Maybe you remove yourself permanently. I don't know. That's where we have to do coaching to figure that out. But I don't encourage people to sit around and think positive thoughts about somebody mistreating them. That's not work worth doing.

But when it comes to things like a job, a business, or even day-to-day tasks, maybe it's doing housework, loading the dishwasher, folding, laundry, exercising, taking care of your kids, attending a meeting that happens every week, those things are things that you don't want to do in your day. People tell me all the time, “I just don't want to do it and I don't feel motivated to do it. I can't get myself to do it.” What they want me to do is to give them a thought that will make them feel excited or motivated to do it. Actually, I would love to be able to give you a thought about that that would make you feel motivated. But the truth is, I can't always find those thoughts myself. I could, but that would be work that I don't think is worth doing.

Let's say I need to record a podcast, for example, and maybe I just don't feel like it. That happens sometimes. Maybe I'd rather go for a walk with my friend, Megan, like I did this morning, take a nap, or watch a new series on Netflix, or maybe I just feel like I don't want to do anything at all. I just don't feel like it. I could sit around and try to get my head into the space of wanting to do it and create some new thoughts. I do recommend you try that first. But if that's too challenging, and you just can't get there, if you just can't make that emptying the dishwasher exciting, if it requires a lot of energy to do that, then I just say that's not really work worth doing.

Because you know why? As human beings, we can do things even though we don't want to. We have that ability. You can just develop the skill of doing something because you said you would. Honoring it, honoring the commitments, honoring your calendar, honoring what you told yourself you would do in the past, not just being interested in doing it but staying committed because you respect yourself enough, that is work worth doing. It is work worth doing. It's worth me forcing myself or even if I don't want to do something, to do it, if it's something I've committed to.

But if it's too challenging, if you can't get there, if it requires a lot of energy to do that, then it's okay to say it's not really work worth doing and to just do the work of staying committed. Actually getting yourself motivated and excited on mundane tasks, I don't find that to be work worth doing. It's just not.

Inside coaching, we figure out what's worth it and what's not. Because there are a lot of things that we don't want to do but it's worth the work to stay committed to it. Let's talk about some of the work that's worth doing. It tends to fall into a few main buckets and we get the opportunity to do this work in various situations in our lives.

When my clients come to me with, “Oh, there's a problem here or a challenge here, or this is super hard,” I'm actually always a little bit excited for them because I know they're going to have the opportunity to do some work that's worth doing.

Do you know why it's worth doing? Do you know how you're going to know if it's worth doing? Because it's going to make every other part of your life easier. It will make your business easier. It will make your experiences easier, you'll experience the world differently. It will cause you to experience yourself differently. It will help you create anything you choose to create in your life differently. It's totally worth doing.

Let me give you a few examples. Number one, coming to terms with difficult people, learning to love people who don't even like you. Again, I am not talking about tolerating mistreatment, or tolerating people that you think you need to let go of in the workplace. I'm just talking about maybe they're just a little judgy. Maybe they don't behave in the way that you think they should behave. Maybe you have a judgment of them. Maybe you're jealous of them. Maybe you're threatened by them.

Or maybe you think they're jealous or threatened by you. I'm not talking about verbal abuse or anything like that. I'm just talking about the majority of difficult people in our lives, which either we have judgment of them or they have judgment of us, or in many cases, both. Learning to love and embrace people and just be compassionate with people and understand that sometimes people struggle, and when they struggle, when they behave a little funny or a little bit inappropriately, learning to love them is work worth doing.

The better you get at loving other people regardless of who they are and how they choose to behave, what they believe, and all of that, the more amazing and expansive your world becomes. I'm telling you because this is true. Think about it, think about what would be more useful to be offended easily, or to be really almost never offended. What would serve you better? It doesn't mean that I want you to change your values. But it means that you might become a little more inclusive, and it might make your world a lot better. By learning to love people for who they are and not letting them ruffle your feathers, you can learn from all these people.

I get to know so many people in my business and just personally because I appreciate and love people who are different from me, have totally different values than I do, and live their lives totally differently than I do. My husband's a great example. He practices a different religion than I do. But I've learned so much from him.

Some of my closest friends couldn't be more opposite for me. It doesn't mean that I'm, again, abandoning my values. I keep my values. I choose who I want to be and how I want to talk, act, think, and live. But I respect these others in their agency to choose for themselves as well. I don't have a lot of judgment.

Now, there are topics that are harder for me to not be judging about. But for me being offended comes from not really seeing what someone else might be seeing. I'm pretty good at this. I'm pretty good at letting go and just accepting. I get to love them, embrace them, and learn. I think that has expanded my life and my world in really amazing ways. Work worth doing is coming to terms with difficult people. Jody Moore is a really great coach on that.

Here's number two. Learning to love and embrace yourself is work worth doing. This is why again, when my clients fail at something, I'm a little bit excited about because now I have the opportunity to do some work with them that's really worth doing and this is why I love helping entrepreneurs. This is why I push entrepreneurs and business owners inside the Runway to Freedom mastermind. This is why so many things that we choose to embark on in our lives like create a business are just opportunities for failure.

I think I just read another statistic, a different statistic, I mentioned one in the last episode, that half of businesses fail within five years. Someone told me yesterday that her favorite podcast episode is the one on learning to love failure, and I will link that one up in the show notes as well, go listen. But when we fail, then we have the opportunity to do some work that's worth doing, which is loving yourself no matter what.

Having your own back, noticing where you've fallen short, mistakes, weaknesses, and making them either opportunities to learn or win. Can I be there for me? Can I be there to support me in difficult times? That's work worth doing, learning how to be there for yourself and developing a healthy relationship with yourself, healthy relationship with your body, with money, food, with people.

How to know if you're learning to love and embrace yourself is work worth doing? I think an example of a place where you might recognize it's time to do this work is if you feel like you are burnt out. Burnout is a really serious health issue for women because between juggling a business and relationships and kind of being Julie McCoy Cruise Director for the family, both like their activities and emotions, it's really no wonder why women are stressed and drained.

Burnout can look like different things. It can look like being exhausted physically and mentally depleted. It might look like feeling apathetic about something that you were really excited about once. You might dread doing everyday tasks or feeling irritable or cynical. You might feel like you can't deal or cope because there's nothing left in your tank at the end of the day.

I was coaching another client yesterday who was building a house, not me, and she said to me, “I just can't get excited about this anymore.” That's kind of a sign of burnout in the building process. But even mild burnout can impact your life in devastating ways.

Many years ago, when I was running a different business, and it was what I thought, busier than ever, I also had my kids in that age where they are so, so needy and I had a giant list of personal things going on and I found myself getting really irritated over small things and struggling to sleep and resenting what was going on the circumstances even though I was sticking to my self-care routine, which I'm pretty good at. But I had to take a hard look at myself and realize that these were the symptoms of burnout. I see this in my clients sometimes.

I'm actually thinking of a specific client right now. In her job she has figured out probably in, how long have we been working together, maybe two months, she has figured out that really what's happening is that she's burned out in her job. It's been a discovery. It's been a wake-up call to pull back in some areas, to create stronger boundaries in business, to get back to what she knows works, which is making decisions for herself from a place of joy, pleasure.

This is work worth doing. A shout out to Jill if you're listening. This is work worth doing. It requires you to learn, love, and appreciate yourself. I think she would say she's doing that. If you're headed towards burnout, you're already there, you are a great candidate to do this work to maybe invest in coaching like she did and do the work.

Pleasure is the antidote to burnout. Remember, one of my favorite sayings is how can we make this simple, doable, and fun. I want you to replenish you so you can operate from that place of pleasure, joy, or fun because if you've got goals and dreams like she does, like Jill, I want you burning strong, not burning out. That is work worth doing.

Here's the third type of work that's worth doing. Remember, we had work dealing with difficult people, work loving yourself and recognizing if you're feeling burnt out. The third type of work worth doing is getting out of being stuck in your day-to-day or maybe with your busy badge on and not being future-focused.

What do I mean by this? Well, sometimes I notice in my clients that they have a big goal they would love to accomplish. This could be a financial goal, a business goal, relationship goal, or health goal. If you've got a goal to achieve and find yourself stuck or trapped in your day-to-day with your busy badge on, the work worth doing is the work to create freedom, space, margin, or time in your world so that you can go after it.

Sometimes they say how you manage your time is evidence of how you manage your mind. How do you create this time, freedom, space, or margin? It means doing something or a series of things that are out of the ordinary, that are disrupting your neural usual routine, that are signaling to your brain that it needs some rewiring or some new neural pathways, we’ve gotta cut off those dead synapses. Because this big goal that you're going after requires your attention.

When you choose to actively seek freedom from your day-to-day so that you can attend to what you want to attend to, you unlock part of your brain that helps you achieve that goal without sacrificing your pleasure, productivity, or sanity. You get creative, you get curious, and you figure it out. That is work worth doing, figuring out how to disrupt your routine and the status quo so that you can be more future-focused and move towards something versus away.

Here's the fourth thing. I've got five so I'm almost there. This is the fourth thing that I think is worth worth doing. It's learning how to show up for yourself. Are you stuck in a frustrating pattern of ghosting, I'll call it, on your goals and self commitments? This would look like you have no problem showing up for your clients and colleagues, often going above and beyond expectations, you have no problem actually even showing up for your family and doing the most and over delivering and serving as household CEO, person to handle all emotional and physical workload in the house.

People in your world often consider you the reliable one or the one that's really good at it. The person who always shows up with a full heart and the person who gets it done and yet when you give and give and give when it comes to others, deep down, you are not applying that same level of commitment to your own goals, dreams, or desires. You're ghosting on yourself. You even trust yourself to follow through on commitments to others, maybe even pride yourself, but following through on your own goals, no way.

Suddenly you become kind of one of those flaky people. When it comes to what you want, you don't like labels, commitments, or following through. You don't want to put anything on your own personal calendar for you. Someone said to me yesterday, and we were talking about rewards, she's like, “I'm so bad at rewarding myself. I just feel like I shouldn't be spending time on it.”

If you ghost on yourself repeatedly, the message that you're sending is that other people's goals, wishes, and wants are more important than your own. Ghosting on ourselves is a dangerous habit that steals our lives and leaves us full of regrets. It's not an easy pattern to break. But this is work worth doing.

I can find myself slipping back into this place myself, forgetting my own needs and putting my goals on the back burner, but it really takes awareness and inner work to break the habit. The work worth doing is learning how to treat your commitments to yourself seriously, because when you stop ghosting on your own goals, that is when incredible things start to happen.

Not ghosting on yourself means taking trips, wearing what you want to wear, having holidays and special occasions that you want to have, setting boundaries and sticking to them, following your passion projects, doing whatever you find peace, joy, freedom, and delight in. Now I know ultimately what it's like to fall into that pattern of serving everyone else but yourself. But I refuse to disrespect myself and my desires. I have done the work. This is work worth doing.

If you are ghosting on your business goals, you need to be in that Runway to Freedom mastermind where we will learn how to not ghost on our business. If you feel like you're ghosting on your self care, you need to be in Committed to Growth where we learn how to not ghost on ourselves and how to reach the health, wellness, relationships that we want to have.

Number five, last one, the work worth doing, work worth doing is creating your own luck, or as Dan Sullivan might say, getting out of the gap and finding the gain. If we were in the gap, we are comparing whatever our current reality is to the ideal, we're always going to be in the lack, scarcity. We're always going to feel we've fallen short, life has shortchanged us, or something's gone wrong. That's a gap. A lot of times we just say, “I'm not lucky. I have no good luck.” I’ve kind of always been fascinated by luck. There’s a podcast, again, on creating your own luck. Go listen, we’ll link it in the show notes.

I love talking to people who have experienced lucky streaks. Whether it appears to be a lucky streak, whether it's financial luck, romantic luck, or career luck, if you look for the patterns from these lucky people, what you'll find is that they really create their own luck. If we're in a gain mode, we're comparing whatever's going on in reality to where we used to be and we're noticing the progress, we’re not noticing shortcomings, we're looking for opportunity, we're creating gain, we always feel grateful, abundant, delighted, and excited.

People who do the work that's worth doing to create luck and bring to life what they crave, they gain, they create conditions for success. They're assertive, they're audacious. They don't wait around for others to make things happen or give them permission.

Creating your own luck can look different depending on your goals and it could look like asking for opportunities, like pitching yourself to a podcast or taking over control of what you want, like publishing a book instead of waiting around. If it's a money goal you're after, if you decide you want to make $1,000 and you make $800 and you're disappointed that you fell short of your goal, then you're in the gap. But if you choose to be delighted because you just made $800 and that's a lot of dollars and almost $1,000, then you have $800 more than you had at the beginning of the month or whenever you set the goal, then you're living in the gain.

Living in the gain is the way to create more of anything you want in life and being delighted about your $800 is really the way to get to the $1,000 the next month. Not being hard on yourself for falling short or being disappointed that you didn't hit your goal, this is work worth doing.

In business with entrepreneurs, I can always tell when someone's going to be successful or not by what headspace they're in, by the way they talk about what they've done so far. If they talk to me about all their shortcomings, and how they failed or how something didn't work, then they're in the gap. If they talk to me about what's working, what they're excited about and delighted by the little parts that do seem to be working, even if it's teeny, they're in the gain This is work worth doing.

Getting rid of low quality thoughts and learning to turn setbacks into set ups for opportunity, for miracles, learning to live in the gain, learning to be grateful, learning to stay in abundance, that is work worth doing. There are several podcasts on abundance. Go back and listen to those because again, these things I'm describing to you have a ripple effect in your life.

When someone says to me, “I don't even know where to start. I want to apply what you're teaching or what you're coaching. I want to apply it to my own life. I really feel like this is exactly what I need. It sounds so good, but I don't know where to start.” I tell them every time, “You do know where to start, you start by doing the work that's worth doing by seeing the gain, not the gap.”

It doesn't matter where you begin because these things that are worth working on will have a ripple effect. It's not that you have to have tons of things wrong. You don't have to have tons of issues or problems. It's just that you have to have your one brain applied to every area of your life.

For example, if you're living in the gap, it's going to show up in money. It's going to show up in your health. It's going to show up in the way you view other people, it's going to show up in the way you think about your time, it's going to show up in the way you think about yourself in so many areas. If you feel unlucky or wonder why everyone else seems to have all the luck, I encourage you to do this work.

The good news is we just use one area to get our head out of that negative space and into the area of abundance and it's going to have a ripple effect. I'm telling you this is true. I've watched this over and over with my clients. There's even a little part on my website in the copy that talks about this. We just have to start in one place. We don't have to tackle everything all at once. We just have to do work worth doing in one area and there is a ripple effect.

Now, the work though doesn't end, my friends. It's like brushing your teeth. You're never really done with it. It happens all the time. You have to keep doing it. But you're going to be doing different work. It's going to get easier. It's like you're going to change different flavors if you're changing different flavors of toothpaste.

Now, for example, if you're doing work on this feeling of scarcity right now, you're not going to have to do that same kind of work a few months from now. You might have to do it sometimes, but that's not what your focus is going to be. You're going to switch to a different focus and do the work worth doing in a different area.

More good news, you get to decide whether or not it's work worth doing. You get to decide what you want to tackle. But one of the things I like to do is back way up from a situation and to get out of the weeds and ask myself, “Okay, if I were thinking about this in a different way, would that make sense? Would it be useful?” I get to decide whether or not I want to do the work on it. This can be hard to see on your own so I would recommend that you either work with a coach for a while, or you listen to every Time to Level Up Podcast. But listening, I'm going to tell you too, is way different than doing the actual work with a coach or guide.

Doing the work and seeing other people do the work is different than just listening. Because once you do the work for a while or you see others do the work, it becomes easier for you to do it. Example, I was coaching a woman the other day who said that her daughter was struggling in her new marriage, and she knew that she was and when I pointed it out that really that was a thought, not a fact, she said, “Oh, yeah, you're right, Andrea, I can see that. It's just a thought. It’s a thought that my daughter's struggling in her marriage.”

Struggle is really just a thought. That became super easy for her to see. It probably wouldn't have been easy for her to see on day one, on the first day she decided to do this kind of work. It's okay to do your own assessment, but be careful about doing your own assessment if you hadn't had a lot of exposure to coaching. You might want to get that exposure. You might want to get help from somebody, me or someone else. I would be honored to be your coach.

Another example. Another woman I was coaching on why she was having a hard time gaining momentum in her business, she was a perfect Runway to Freedom mastermind candidate. When I pointed out to her that having momentum in her business is just a thought, it's really not a fact, she actually could start to see that she had gained momentum in her business. She's got a lot of traction. There again, there's an example of things becoming easier. But it's continuous work.

Both of these clients have been doing this work for a while and it has become much easier for them to change their thinking, see the gain, create their own luck, get out of their day-to-day, or stop ghosting them on themselves. It's become a lot easier. It's gotten easier to decide, “No, I'm not doing that work. Sorry. It's not worth it to me. I don't care enough about changing that result,” or “Yes, I'm doing that work. It's so worth it to me. It's super important to me.” It's really just a personal decision. But you actually even need help in deciding what's worth it.

There you go. That's what I think we mean when we say work worth doing. I hope that you will think about that and you'll consider doing the work. It is mind blowing and life-changing work. If you are interested, if this sounds like work you want to do, then let's chat and we'll figure out where to plug you in best into coaching. All it requires is just a conversation. Head over to andrealiebross.com/consult and set up a time to chat. I would love to help you do this work that is worth doing.

All right, my friends. Runway to Freedom mastermind, if you're listening to this in real time, the doors are closing soon, the last day of the month. The doors are also closing in Committed to Growth on the last Thursday of the month if you want to join us in the following month. Committed to Growth doors always close on the last Thursday of the month. Runway to Freedom is right now, a once-a-year door opening registration. If you want to be part of this in 2023, you need to get in on it now. Go set up a consult andrealiebross.com/consult and we'll chat. Have a great week. See you soon.

Thanks for listening to the Time to Level Up Podcast with me, your host, Andrea Liebross. If you know someone who could benefit from listening to this episode, I encourage you to take a screenshot and share it with them. Okay. Now, what about you? You've listened to the podcast, and if you now know that you're ready to upgrade your life, upgrade your business, upgrade you, then stop being only a listener and start being a liver living that upgraded life. Head over to my website and schedule a call. Right there on that call, we'll start changing the way you think and act so that you can have the freedom to achieve the impossible in life and business, and have the resources to do it. You deserve an upgrade. Let's do it.