Think about the last time that you found yourself thinking or telling a narrative that “I’m confused, I don’t get it, I’m overwhelmed, I don’t know where to start”…
I bet you came to that conclusion very quickly, without actually taking the time to think about to approach the situation with the knowledge and skills you already have.
I want to talk to you, and challenge you to ask yourself if you are defaulting to a place of confusion or if you are genuinely confused next time you find yourself in a situation that makes you uncomfortable.
We all know that for change and growth to happen, we’ve got to step outside of our comfort zone!
Full Transcript
I want to talk to you about the themes of confusion and overwhelm, which I hear come up a ton in Facebook groups that I am a part of that relate to business in calls or conversations with potential prospects, all sorts of forum, where this concept of I’m feeling really overwhelmed. I’m feeling really confused about this thing. I don’t know how to do that. I’m stuck. This language shows up a lot. So let me know if that’s something that you find yourself saying, maybe something that you find yourself saying a little bit more often than you would like, or that you find yourself feeling a little bit more often than you would like. So I find that there is something, you know, one of the evolutions that I think has happened over the last several years, I think there’s some amazing things that have happened towards an evolution in the direction of vulnerability and authenticity and talking about things that are challenging and that maybe aren’t working.
Hey, good morning, J. Michael. Good to see you, man. So I love that. I think that’s so important and so powerful, and I want to commend that, but I also see a trend inside of that, that I think that is maybe at the margin, given more license in kind of normalize this pattern, talking about I’m confused, I’m overwhelmed. I am these feelings. And I just want to talk about like, if that’s where you are, uh, I don’t want to tamp that down, but I also, I want to have us maybe just examine, what is going on there a little bit and maybe give you a chance to have a tool in a way to start examining what is going on there. So since the beginning of the pandemic, what, uh, we, we have contact mapping, you know, we have this amazing studio in our offices with a super cool green screen and a 4k camera and all this stuff.
And we have some connections to some really powerful, personal development seminar companies. And so we have been producing, uh, alongside them. We’ve been doing the technical side of producing some amazing personal and development seminars and content, uh, with them over the last 12, 18 months. And I have so enjoyed that because I really believe in their mission. And I’m not allowed to talk about who they are, uh, publicly, but they’re an incredible organization, but what I’ve loved even more is that I’ve gotten not only to get to sort of by osmosis, take their sort of flagship, uh, personal development seminar over and over again. But even more, I have gotten a behind the scenes look at, you know, how does it, how does an instructor who has seen thousands and thousands of people go through a process of deep transformation? How do they process, what is showing up in front of them? Someone is, you know, going through whatever they’re going through. And one of the things that comes up a lot in that world is again, confusion. And what I, I love is they, they use this language of looking at somebody and saying that person is not confused. They are going to confusion. So are you confused or are you going to confusion? And the distinction there is that going to confusion or going to overwhelm
If I’m overwhelmed or if I’m confused,
Then it’s not my fault that I’m not taking action. I’m just confused. And if I wasn’t confused, of course, I would be doing the things that I know I need to do in order to create a breakthrough for myself. Of course, I would be doing the things that I know I need to do to grow my business by keeping connected with a lot of people in developing authentic, powerful relationships. But I just can’t figure out how to do this thing in the app. And my app’s broken. It’s not working. And all of these things come up and I, it’s not, I believe that it is not a function of the person who is saying that to me, or the way if you’re saying that you genuinely feel confused or overwhelmed in that moment. But what I want to challenge you to do is to get curious about what’s going on there and to really dig into why did confusion or overwhelm show up in that moment?
And is it possible that maybe without me even realizing, or maybe with me noticing it just on some, you know, maybe I’m 10% aware of this instill 90% unaware, but is what’s really going on that I got close to something that made me feel uncomfortable in my brain said, oh, we’re going to throw the wrench in the works. We are going to stop this thing. And we’re going to take you to the place of confusion or overwhelm because that’s going to shut down the factory and we don’t have to go there. Just get curious about that. And, you know, if that makes you mad, I guess, sorry,
Not sorry, but like, if it makes you mad, I want you to maybe get curious about that too, because, I just, I wonder what is going on there. And if that is something that might also be a defense mechanism and that isn’t to say that we don’t get confused, that isn’t to be little how anybody feels, but I think sometimes the way we feel and what we believe about what is going on there versus what is actually going on, there might be two different things in the more we can get curious about that and become more aware of that. The more, the more capable we are of having some agency and some power over finding some ways to move forward, because I, I believe, and I certainly have experienced this leading context mapping that when somebody tells me that they’re confused by the app, uh, S every once in a while it goes, yeah, you’re right. That actually is kind of confusing, but
Most of the time, it really wasn’t
That confusing. Like we, we have spent so much effort in time and money and development resources trying to make it so that it’s almost impossible for you to feel confused by contact mapping. And so most of the time, I really believe it’s not that it’s confusing. And it’s more that there’s a pattern of some level of, well, if I’m not confused, then that means that it’s time for me to call these people. And that sounds scary. And so being confused is a safer space for me to live. And so I want to challenge you to just take a look at that and where, where confusion and overwhelm are consistently showing up in your life. And to just ask yourself this question of, is there, is it possible that part of what is going on here is not that it is inherently objectively confusing? You’re overwhelming.
Is it possible that at least part of what’s going on here is that there’s something on the other side of that that is scary to me and that I’m avoiding, and once you’re aware of, then you get to choose, right. It might be it’s too scary, but at least now I know that what I’m doing is not that I’m confused or overwhelmed, it’s that I don’t really want to do that, or I’m not ready to do that yet. And now I can go about deciding if I want to get ready to do it, or if that’s just not for me, but that’s a completely, completely different conversation. And so I hope that distinction makes sense. I hope that added value for you. I hope that I shared it in a way that you can hear, that’s not belittling you. That’s not, you know, I feel you, I do this sometimes. So I know exactly what this feels like, but I want to get better and I’m committed to getting better. And I think that curiosity and that willingness to just entertain does it, could it be something else going on here is really an important piece.
