I'm Effie, a life coach who profoundly gives a fuck about
you feeling better for good. I teach people how to cut the
crap and live according to their own rules.
It's a crime we don't learn this stuff in school, but it's
simpler than you think to break the pattern and start living the
life you want. Listen on to find out how.
Queenie. Hello and welcome to Feeling
Better for Good. I'm so glad you're here.
I am super fucking excited. I am super excited about what's
popping off in life, what's going on, what's coming up in my
business. I have so much to share with
you, but I'm very excited about today's episode.
I'm going to be offering you a way of thinking that will have a
massive impact on your ability to set goals, to act on them
powerfully, and ultimately achieve them.
We're talking about optimism and pessimism.
We're gonna be exploring why and how our brains have this built
in negativity bias that we as a species are naturally
pessimistic, how and why that is.
We're gonna be looking at where and why we might actually want
to be pessimistic, how that can be helpful, and how to tame your
survival brain and expand your ability to make bold decisions
that can lead to great reward. And we're gonna do that using
unreasonable optimism balanced by strategic pessimism.
Before we do, though, before we dive in, I need your help.
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It means more than you know. And I can't wait to keep
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So stay tuned. Make sure you're following if
you're not already. OK, so I saw this clip from an
interview that Oprah did on 60 Minutes in 1986.
I saw this a couple of days ago, and this was one of the things
that inspired me to do this particular podcast.
So this was right before the national roll out of the Oprah
Winfrey Show, which was a huge gamble.
It was unprecedented in its time.
Like, it could have been a massive failure.
And if you know anything about Oprah, you know, she went all
in. Like, she put all of herself
into this project, and she had this unshakable vision.
So the interviewer says, OK, well, looks like you know it.
You're going national. And she says, yeah, it's going
to do well. It'll do well.
And he says, and if it doesn't and you just want to slap the
guy, you know, just want to be like, let my queen just rule her
land. And she does not skip a beat,
she says, and if it doesn't, I will still do well.
I will do well because I'm not defined by a show.
I think we're defined by the way we treat ourselves and the way
we treat other people. So would it be wonderful to be
acclaimed as this talk show host that made it?
Yeah, that would be wonderful. But if it doesn't happen, there
are other important things in my life.
And when she talks about the show and how wonderful it would
be and and her certainty of it doing well, you can just feel
the passion, like, oozing off of her, but without anything to
prove. So she just has such vision in
this clip and she has such humanity for herself.
Of course, we all know the rest of the story is that she became
this not just national, but international sensation, like
one of the most famous names in the entire world.
But this clip is just so gorgeous and such a fucking
example of what we're talking about today.
I want to give you also some personal context for how this
operates in my life, this unreasonable optimism and
strategic pessimism. So I've shared, I think I shared
last week on the podcast that I have started a radical dating
journey and I can't wait to share more about it with you.
But my goal in this, like my desire is to fall in love.
I wanna find a committed partnership with someone who
enriches my life, who brings more peace, pleasure and delight
into my life and vice versa. And I have this vision.
This is what I'm going for and that it is entirely possible for
me. My theory is that it will take
me a year and going on 51st dates, Why I think it will take
me a year, I don't know. It's arbitrary.
I'm like within a year, I feel pretty confident that I should
be able to fall in love in a sustainable way with this
person, with someone who really is a great match for me.
And this is not something like I've been in love before, but
I've never done this before where I've gone out so
intentionally and I've had a a really clear plan.
I actually work this plan in my private coaching containers with
one-on-one clients who are on their own dating journeys.
So I've had a lot of success with this plan outside of my own
personal life, but I just decided, you know what, it's
time for me to go. So I have a very strong plan,
very strong guidelines, and I've never just gone out there into
the dating pool, specifically online dating and had such clear
vision, standards and kind of code of conduct and allowed it
to play out. What I've actually done in the
past is just ended up with people that I met in the wild
who I was, you know, really drawn to for some or multiple
reasons, but we were not true matches.
We weren't lifestyle matches or we didn't have the same goals
and aspirations or, you know, it just hasn't worked out for me
that way. Falling into love with people
who crossed my path. So in my mind, like, you can't
do worse than that, right? I mean, OK, so I'm blessed,
right? Because I've been in love
several times. But you can't do worse than
falling in love with misaligned people.
So if it comes down to being in a relationship with someone
who's not right for me and being on my own, like I'm finally at a
place in my life where I'm like, no contest, hands down.
I'll take the second one any day.
I love my life as a single person.
I am not lacking for anything. I would love a partnership, but
if it doesn't happen, I will be OK.
Here's what's kept me from going for it before now, from really
committing to this process before now.
First was the belief that it was going to be really hard and it
was going to be painful. I was going to get my heart
broken and I wouldn't be able to handle myself and that I would
be repeating old patterns that I do not want to repeat.
In addition to thinking that I didn't have the energy for it, I
also told myself I didn't have the time.
Like I have a very busy life, when would I even go on dates?
And it would just be too big of an inconvenience.
And then I also thought it probably won't work anyway.
It'll be a waste of my time. And these thoughts felt so true.
And this is what I call involuntary or rational
pessimism. Like, it makes sense.
You know, all my objections are risks.
They are things to overcome. They are legitimate.
And so I kept telling myself these things.
And I still had the desire to find and have a partnership.
But when I was telling myself all of those things and when
those were the predominant thoughts, like I was totally
hobbled, you know, I wasn't able to move forward.
So I have a mentor that I talked to every single week.
And apparently I kept bringing up this dating thing and my
mentor asked me about it. He was like, what is this about?
And I was like, oh, nothing. It's not.
No, completely downplayed. And he said, well, you know, you
keep bringing it up, so let's talk about it.
And I said, well, OK. And I started talking about it
and I started telling him all of the reasons that it wouldn't
work, all of the things that I thought would make it not
possible for me. And then after all of that, he
asked me, yes, but but why would you want to?
What would be a good reason for doing it anyway?
And the only good reason, and the best reason I believe, for
doing anything is that I have the desire.
It's just I want to. And when you have a desire of
the heart and you hold yourself back from doing it, it's simply
because of unchecked or unquestioned thoughts, thoughts
that your brain is offering you on repeat that you have not
examined. So I started examining the
thoughts that were holding me back, and I decided, OK, I am
less attached to the thoughts than I am to the desire.
So I'm gonna honor the desire over the thoughts.
In my practice, I run into women who have goal PTSD all the time.
They have self defeating attitudes like I did, informed
by habituated pessimistic thoughts that feel really valid
and certainly are valid when measured by the survival brain.
Because the role of survival brain is to keep us small and
safe and familiar in our comfort zone.
Now if they do commit to the goal but then bail on themselves
before getting it or before seeing it through and quitting
is actually what creates goal PTSD.
The self betrayal is what creates goal PTSD, not the
actual goal. But if they do end up bailing,
here's why. They have a chokehold on their
results. They're very attached to the
results in an entitled way. They feel because they have the
strong desire and they're making the investment to go for it,
that it belongs to them. An entitlement is different than
ownership. Ownership is, I'm going to take
this on body and soul. I'm going to own this dream and
embody success on my path. I'm going to decide who I want
to be along the way and constantly work to uphold that
standard and then continuously invest in the belief that it's
coming, that it's working. I'm gonna figure it out.
I'm capable. I got this.
I was fucking born for this, right?
Like Oprah entitlement is I'm gonna do these things to get
this, and I am owed it. If I do these things, if I do it
all right, then the formula says that I get to have this.
I get to have my my pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
And if I don't get it, or if I don't get it in the time that
I'm expecting or the arbitrary timeline that somebody told me
this should be available to me in, then I have been robbed.
And it was all a lie and none of it was worth it.
And this comes from the belief that it should be easier or
smoother than it is. And so that when it gets hard
and they stumble and failed, they think that something has
gone wrong. This is what I call failure
intolerance. When we make it wrong, that we
fail along the way. But what if it's just not wrong
at all? What if when we fail, that's
just part of the process? I like to think of space
missions. Did you know that those rockets
are 99% off course on their way to their destination?
Like they set their course and NASA with all of its
technological advancements cannot keep it on course more
than 1% of the time. But that's not a problem, right?
They still get there. It's just that they're having to
make micro adjustments and correct back to the course.
So imagine if the astronauts up in the space shuttle, they're
off course. And, you know, she freaks out
and she's like, oh, no, we're never gonna get there, right?
No, that doesn't happen because they understand that it's par
for the course to be off course. And they cannot rely on
autopilot. They have to always be making
those course corrections. They have to be vigilant to be
able to get where they're going. So let's talk about pessimism
and what we want to do with our built in pessimism that we all
have. Why would we be interested in
offloading some of this natural pessimism besides it being like
an ingenious tool for self torture?
So in longitudinal studies around the world, pessimism is
linked with higher mortality and besides greater longevity,
literally living longer. Optimism broadly predicts better
physical health, including cardiovascular outcomes and
immune function. So if we can learn to channel
our pessimism strategically and use our optimism responsibly, we
can create much improved outcomes for ourselves for the
rest of our life and literally elongate our life and the
enjoyment of it. So the common thinking is that
optimism is a personality trait, but it's not.
It's just a habit in the brain. Like all habits, it is
malleable, it is changeable. I don't care how entrenched it
is. So what's true is that you may
be constitutionally or conditionally more or less
optimistic, but regardless of your starting point and the
conditioning that you come with, you can upgrade your OS and
change the proportions and the context of your optimism and
pessimism. And you can do that on purpose,
with intention, with skill and repetition.
And that is the kind of change work that we do in my coaching
containers. The premise is that you get to
decide what kind of thoughts you invest in.
You may not get to decide what thought initially occurs to you
based on habit and existing belief systems, but you get to
choose whether or not to invest in that thought or divest from
that line of thinking. So I want you to imagine that
each school of thoughts that you have is a high yield savings
account. So you're making deposits every
day, you're growing your interest and that interest is
compounding into a belief system.
If you already have the belief system, but you're further
entrenching it, and this compound interest is growing
this belief system that either helps you or hinders you, that
either makes you more or less the person you want to be in the
life she wants to live. That is the function of belief,
not to be right, but to help you be who you want to be in the
world. I have a podcast on this.
It's called How to Believe in Yourself.
I will link it in the show notes.
So let's talk about humanity treating ourselves humanely and
the humility to understand that we do not control outcomes, that
that is actually not within our power.
We can absolutely influence them by the way that we show up, but
what we have most power over is who we are in the process of
moving toward that thing. So before I became the toxic
stress coach for women, I was an academic coach for many years.
I worked with students from high school up to doctorate,
postdoctorate level, and I had some areas of expertise like
science and writing. But mostly what I would help my
clients with was how to love learning, how to enjoy the
process of learning. 1st, to actually enjoy not knowing.
Because confusion is the first stage of learning.
And if it makes you upset to not know, it's gonna be really hard
to move forward. Or if you feel frustrated like
you should already know, then you're not gonna be open to be
able to learn the material that you need to.
So I would teach them how to be inspired, actually inspired and
compelled by not knowing how to generate curiosity inside of
them, which is a really vital skill.
So say you really love your course of study, but you don't
love the class that you're taking right now.
Or let's say you don't love the course of your study, but you
have to be able to pass it. Like if you're going to do it,
you might as well enjoy it, you know, what's the point
otherwise? So I'd teach them how to
generate true curiosity and then use that to question critically
and to problem solve through trial and error.
I taught them uncertainty tolerance, which is the biggest
asset as a student and I would argue as a human being.
Certainty is so overrated. One of my favorite quotes, I
don't think it's from Socrates himself, but it's very Socratic,
is that knowledge comes from knowing.
Ignorance comes from thinking you know for sure.
So we have to love the process of finding out what we're made
of. The brain wants a guarantee.
The brain feels safe in certainty.
It wants to be right is a prediction machine.
That's literally how we evolved. It would often rather be right
then grow or be successful. So if you've ever had the
experience of going for a goal and getting frustrated and
losing momentum and quitting, what I wanna offer you is that
your brain may actually have been satisfied when you quit.
And it's a little sadistic. Like, see, I told you it's not
working. It's never gonna work because
again, it wants to be right. It's gonna say I called it.
And the problem with that besides, you know, it being
shitty and such an obstacle to moving forward on anything,
especially if you keep believing survival brain every single time
you have a desire of the heart and it tells you that's a risky
1 is righteous satisfaction. That little hit of righteous
satisfaction is extremely short lived because then you have to
live in the reality where you trust yourself less.
You have less agency and belief and chutzpah and courage and a
dulled instrument for moving toward what you want.
That is the cycle that we need to break out of, and we do it
first by investing in unreasonable optimism.
The first thing is that we don't allow our levels of optimism or
pessimism to be guided by what we've accomplished before.
It is a terrible yardstick for what you're really capable of.
Like terrible. I mean, think about it.
How will you ever find out what you're capable of if you don't
push the limits of who you know yourself to be?
So when it comes to goals and moving powerfully toward big
desires of the heart. Acting based on prior experience
is the enemy of growth and the enemy of learning and the enemy
of ultimate success and achievement.
So we want to pick goals and thoughts to support them that
are completely uncalled for according to our survival brain.
Like my 51st dates in a year scheme, that means I am going to
choose to spend my precious time with 50 new people this year in
order to get me to my goal. I have never dated on the scale,
never anywhere near it, right? I've maybe got on an app and
like gone out on two or three dates.
They were kind of disappointing or maybe fell into a
relationship with one of them. Like a disappointing first date
that became a misguided relationship.
But I have never dated at this scale with this kind of
investment. So my survival brains like,
wait, we're doing what? Oh, fuck no, no.
And what I want to offer you is that's a good thing.
If your survival brain has a response like that, that's what
we want. We want that part of our brain
to be offended by the audacity of the desire.
Like who do you think you are? And your brain will offer you
that thought. Like who do you think you are?
And you can just answer it with like, well, I think I'm amazing.
And I choose to believe I'm someone who's capable of more
than what I have gotten in the past and who I've been in the
past because I like myself better when I believe that.
And when I carry myself through my days operating in the world
as if I'm amazing, I have something remarkable to offer,
something as yet unrealized, but that I'm committed to the
process of breaking out of me. That's the person I want sitting
next to me in the car. That's the person I want holding
my hand, advising me, supporting me, making decisions with me.
That's her. That's the person I want to have
breakfast, lunch, and dinner with.
That's who I want to partner with.
So I have to be her. I have to be committed to being
her. I pick unreasonable thoughts.
My dreams are urgent. I was born for this.
I can handle it. And survival brain, of course,
is going to say, no, you can't, you've never done it before.
I say that's true. I haven't.
There's plenty to learn and I'm committed to learning it.
You can actually just agree with any objection your survival
brain offers you. You do not have to fight.
I mean, you can stand up to it. You do not have to fight, right?
Survival brain says it's going to eat your life up.
You say, yeah, there will be more demands on my time.
I'm going to have to learn to balance it all.
It's too expensive. Survivor brain's going to say,
and you say, yeah, that's right, it is expensive.
This is a high value thing to invest in.
We're talking about time, energy and money.
And if I disagree with the price, I do not have to pay it.
But how could it be worth it even though it's expensive?
How could it be worth actually way more than what I'm
investing? And then what's the cost of not
doing it? And how could this be the best
investment I ever make? And then finally, and this one
is the heavy hitter, your brain is going to offer you thoughts
like, what if you're wrong? What if it doesn't work?
So say you're in a marriage and you've been having problems for
a long time and you're questioning whether you want to
stay or not. I mean, there's good stuff,
there's bad stuff. There's no real huge beacon
telling you it's time to leave. There's just discontent and
frustration. And it's been going on for quite
some time. But you love him and you don't
know where to go from here, what could make things better?
But deep down you feel that if you could find a way to make it
work, you would want to. Now, I don't ever claim to know
what's right for anyone else. That's not my job.
But what I often offer as a thought and a course of action
when women come to me in this position or a similar position,
is that if the desire is still there, it may be time to go all
in. So I know things have got to
change and I'm gonna double down on my part.
I'm gonna do everything I can without betraying myself to save
this marriage. That could look like hiring
outside help, committing to extreme self-care within the
marriage, maybe setting some hard boundaries, changing the
way you think about your marriage and your partner so
that you can be the person that you want to be within it.
And then after doing that, it still doesn't work because of
factors outside my control. I can leave with my head held
high knowing I gave it my all. I can be proud of how I
conducted myself and who I became in the process of
standing for something I love. And no matter what, I get to
take her with me. I get to take that sufficiency
that I created in that relationship with me, regardless
of whether the relationship continues.
This could be actually the best case scenario.
And I have seen and shepherded miraculous turnarounds in
partnerships where one partner takes radical responsibility for
their part, and then that gives implicit permission to the other
partner to do the same. And the ecosystem of the
relationship starts to flourish in a way that doesn't make sense
because you've invested in the possibility of something more,
and you've invested in your part.
So when your brain offers you that objection, what if it
doesn't work? We answer it with equanimity.
It might not work. Like Oprah, I'm investing
heavily in the possibility. And if it doesn't work, I will
be OK. Because I am not defined by a
relationship. I'm not defined by a job.
I am not defined by my career or what's in my bank account or the
results that I get in life. I am bigger than that.
Unreasonable optimism does not mean we lie to ourselves about
the nature of reality. We may go hard for a thing we
deeply desire and not get it, or it takes us a lot longer and a
lot more effort than we think it'll take to get it.
In fact, that's likely. But to that I say, so fucking
what? Being prepared for failure isn't
a problem, but we're not so prepared that we create a path
for failure. We do accept the inevitability
of us having fails along the way to our success and it not going
the way that we expected to go or the way we think it should
go. That's called dying before going
into battle. It's very healthy and it's a
very important preset to have when fighting for something you
love. And this is strategic pessimism,
knowing the risks, accepting them and choosing to go anyway.
In my dating journey, I'm like, I fully anticipate getting my
heart broken in this. And it's, that's already
happened on a smaller scale more than once.
You know, I haven't been in any committed relationships, but
just in the first six weeks of this adventure, I have 100% had
disappointment and heartache. And I'm not afraid of it.
I'm going in anyway because I know and believe so strongly
that the upside is worth it. The risk is worth the reward,
and I'm going to prove it. So for more on this topic, I
want to direct you to episode 42.
It's called How to Stop Doom Scrolling in Your Head, and it
gives you a really great practice.
I think it starts at around the 10 minute mark, but it gives you
a phenomenal practice for being able to balance both optimism
and pessimism in the most useful ways when you do feel worried or
anxious or confused or overwhelmed.
So I'll leave you with that and I will link that in the show
notes. Thank you so much for being
here. I adored it every minute.
I adore you. If you got something powerful
today, please do go and leave a review right now if you haven't
already. Thank you in advance and I will
see you next time. Have a wonderful week.
Until then, if you're ready to do the work to move forward on
what you want and actually get it, I can help you.
I'm offering my podcast listeners a free consultation
with me to talk about what coaching can do for you this
year. Just visit effielavor.com to get
started.