#318: Becoming Unshakeable

Becoming Unshakeable

Here's a transcription of this episode:

This podcast is about building resilience and your inner strength. It’s about becoming unshakeable.

Being unshakeable doesn’t mean you don’t have hard days. It doesn’t mean you don’t cry. It doesn’t mean you don’t feel disappointed.

Being unshakeable means you can face anything, and you know that you will handle it.

In this episode, you’ll learn what it takes to become the strongest person you know.

Thank you for being here. 

Before I get started, I want to say thank you for listening. I know you have a lot of choices out there when it comes to podcasts, so the fact that you’re here listening to Be a Better Lawyer means a lot to me. 

Thank you.

If you’ve been getting a lot of help from this podcast, I want to invite you to share this episode with a friend. You can do it on social media, a simple text saying, “Hey, I thought this podcast might interest you,” or my emailing the link to this podcast.

With your help, this podcast will help a lot more lawyers.

Okay, let’s talk about becoming unshakeable.

Today I’m sharing with you 4 lessons on becoming unshakeable. On becoming resilient in your life and your law practice.

Be sure you listen all the way to the end because #4 is the absolute most important lesson you need to hear.

What does it mean to be unshakeable?

To me, it’s a combination of inner strength and — maybe surprisingly — vulnerability.

Inner strength requires self-trust that you’re going to figure any problem out. That everything will be okay.

Vulnerability requires that you allow yourself to feel the emotions that come up whether disappointment or joy. It also requires that you allow yourself to ask for help when you need it.

Being unshakeable doesn’t mean you’re perfect. It doesn’t mean you aren’t going to have days when you question what you’re doing.

It means moving forward step-by-step, moment-by-moment continuing to move towards making your dream reality.

Resilience — and I’m using resilience and unshakeable interchangeably — is a muscle that needs to be built. 

Looking back, the first time I saw that I needed to learn resilience was when I decided to start my own business while working as a criminal prosecutor. I talked a little about that in the last episode.

It was a muscle I needed to build in order to do things I'd never done before, because it felt really hard. I was really scared about trying new things. It felt really hard restructuring my day, trying to figure out what I could do to accomplish my business goal while still getting my day-to-day work done.

At first, I bought into “time-hacking” and trying to cut corners. “What can I do there in terms of making more time? Maybe it requires more multitasking and doing X,YZ at the same time.”Those so-called hacks left me feeling rushed and hectic all the time, and I knew that’s not what I wanted.

As I came to find out, that was not helping me become more resilient. It was driving me insane because no matter how much I changed this thing or that thing, I still couldn’t get what I wanted done to build my business. And I felt like a chicken with my head cut off.

So lesson one about resilience: 

It required me breaking down my old structure of what I thought I knew and unlearning all the old habits. It required me to go against what I always believed to be true, which was, “The more you work, the more you’ll be rewarded” and “I can do it on my own.”

Building resilience meant living differently so that my time is used more wisely every single day. 

It’s about living intentionally.

Our brain will always want to do what it’s done in the past. The old habits have kept us alive, and it sees no reason to change anything. Even if logically we can see the benefit in it.

I took a long look at what I didn’t like about my life and I decided that I was going to make changes. 

That requires me to look at everything from how I spent my time, to how I felt, to whether or not I asked for help.

I started with how I felt in the morning and started tweaking the morning until I got it the way I wanted it, then I took on the next thing, and the next thing. I’m still doing that with my life.

I saw places where I was trying to tough it out and learned how to ask for help.

Breaking down the old structures, so you can live more intentionally exercises the resilience muscle.

The more you do it, the stronger it gets. And life gets better as you go.

The second lesson about becoming unshakeable:

Building inner strength requires you to trust yourself. And it takes practice.

I’ll continue with the time management example.

Prioritization is a problem a lot of lawyers talk to me about. Their brain takes them into 20 different places, and when it does that, it creates a lot of fear and overwhelm in their bodies. It’s impossible to prioritize from that place. 

This is where the practice of becoming unshakeable comes in.

You absolutely must trust that you are prioritizing the way you need to be prioritizing. Then you just take action.

This doesn’t mean you never make mistakes or that other matters won’t come up. It means you prioritize what needs to get done, and you trust that you’re making the right decision for yourself. 

Building trust requires that you have your own back. That you don’t talk down to yourself. That you are a cheerleader for yourself.

In order to do hard things, we need to see that we are capable and that we are winning at the changes we’re making. I had a call with a lawyer the other day, and they were talking through their week and what they’d accomplished, and the way they spoke to themselves was 100% different than when we first started working together. When we first started working together they were totally down on themselves on how they weren’t getting enough accomplished. That puts us in defeated energy. But now they are their biggest cheerleader. They don’t ignore that there’s things they want to accomplish, but now they acknowledge their accomplishments, which they didn’t before. This put them in a totally different energy where they could really take on anything.

When you have your own back, you can accomplish truly amazing things.

The third lesson about becoming unshakeable:

It requires you to know yourself on a deeper level.

Resilience might be interpreted as willpower, so let me dispel that here. 

Resilience is not about killing yourself to push through things no matter how sick you are or how exhausted you are. And that really is a detriment to our wellbeing. 

Resilience requires you to recognize how your mind and your body function together. 

A lot of what I talk about here on the podcast is mindset, because it helps us reconnect with who we truly are and what we want in a way we were never taught to do. 

When we reconnect with those two things, we create a life we actually love.

So, for instance, it it’s Sunday and you're dreading going to work on Monday, and you feel paralyzed and feel a tightness in your throat. You feel maybe a rocks in your stomach and you feel on edge. Notice that. Don’t ignore it.

Those feelings are the signal that there is an emotion that hasn't been processed.

Why is that important?

The dread is coming from thoughts that you're having in your brain, and they're unconscious. They're subconscious until you start shining a light on them. And in the Coaching Open House that you might have listened to the other week, there was a a segment all about the subconscious

The subconscious rules us until we become aware of how our mind works. 

I want you to picture an iceberg, like the top of part of an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg, so to speak. So when you feel dread and you feel paralyzed, and you feel all those sensations in your body, I just described, that is what we see. That is, that's what we see on the outside. And so we feel paralyzed and maybe we procrastinate on things and we are grumpy the next day. And maybe we're snapping at people because, you know, we're, we've got things to do right? And people are interrupting us. We gotta get stuff done and we're in such a hurry, and we're rushing around and we're stubbing our toe. That’s because we're in such a hurry, we can't pay attention and we can't be present. That's the top part of the iceberg. That’s the subconscious driving the car. The subconscious driving you. 

Resilience requires you to drive the car. And you can’t do that if your subconscious is constantly steering.

What is underneath that iceberg is a much larger segment of the iceberg, because that is where our subconscious has stored all of the beliefs that we have accumulated over our lifetime. And they have the power over us UNLESS we 

1. A) create awareness.
2. B) begin to process the emotions that come with that awareness.

And 

1. C) begin to make changes to be the person we want to be.

It is not an easy task. 

Most of us are totally asleep. I was for a long time. And my subconscious was making all my decisions for me. I didn’t even know.

I was talking to a client last week, and he was telling me how he was shocked that all of the problems he saw in his life really did stem from what his brain told him to be true. And each week he’d see a new place where his brain was preventing him from doing what he wanted to do in his practice or prevented him from setting boundary.

We simply can’t see it until we start shining a light on where the subconscious is driving the car.

The fourth lesson about being unshakeable — and the most important one:

To believe in your deepest recesses that you are worthy of what you want.

Your value is not determined by how hard you work or by how many billable hours you make.

Your value is inherent. Your value supersedes anything you can imagine. When you were placed on this planet, you were innately valuable. You didn’t have to do anything to earn being worthy. 

You simply are worthy.

Worthy to breathe the air on this planet. Worthy to eat delicious foods that are here. Worthy to have all the water you need to drink.

I want you to think about a little kid screaming at the top of his lungs to get what he wants at the grocery store. What does he have to do to be valuable? Absolutely nothing. He is still loved by his parents no matter how loud he yells. 

Work is something you do. It’s not something that defines your worth.

Your position at the office is something that determines your pay, it doesn’t determine your worthiness.

You are enough.

And because you alone are enough — without the work, without the title, without the job — you can have anything you want. You can have any life you want.

In fact, the fact that you’re listening to this podcast means you’re likely in a better position than most people to have any life you want because you’re actively seeking the life you want. You’re seeking inspiration and instruction. Not everyone is.

As you move into the rest of your day, I want you to see just how resilient — just how unshakeable — you already are.

Here’s a recap of the lessons with a twist…

FIRST:

Where are you already breaking down old structures? Where might you want to take down some old structures and begin rethinking how you do things?

SECOND:

Where do you already trust yourself to make good decisions for yourself? Are there places you don’t quite trust yourself yet? What do you think needs to shift for you to begin trusting yourself more? Do you need to celebrate your wins more or be more understanding instead of demanding of yourself?

THIRD:

Where do you already know yourself? Do you already see where there are places where you let fear and overwhelm guide you instead of your inner strength? Noticing means you’re half way to change. Celebrate that.

FOURTH:

Where in your life do you know for certain that you are worthy of what you have in your life? They could be things or relationships or something else. How is it true that you can be worthy of those things/relationships by simply being you?

You may want to listen back to this episode again to catch it all. There was a lot in this one. If you want to read the transcript to grab the questions I asked, you can read it in the show notes at https://dinacataldo.com/318

If you want to take this work deeper — and I highly suggest you do because it’s life-changing — book a Strategy Session with me. You don’t have to know what to say. You don’t have to have a plan. That’s my job. I’ll ask you questions, and we’ll take it from there. If we both think we’d be a good fit to work together, then I’ll tell you more about coaching and how we can work together. You can book a Strategy Session with me at dinacataldo.com/strategysession

Take care, my friend, and have a beautiful week.