What Gets in the Way Becomes the Way

Mastering Your Mindset: Transforming Obstacles into Opportunities

In this episode, the Erin dives into the power of mindset and the stories we tell ourselves, examining how these inner narratives shape our reality. Through personal anecdotes and insightful reflections, the episode highlights the importance of recognizing and reframing negative thought patterns into growth-oriented habits. 

Three critical questions are introduced to help listeners and leaders alike gain clarity and control over their lives: 
What do you really want? 
How do you want to feel?  
What are you trying to control? 

Listeners are encouraged to embrace discomfort, acknowledge their achievements, and harness the power of influence over control. 

This episode is a motivational guide to overcoming mindset traps, fostering self-awareness, and ultimately building a life and career that aligns with one's true potential.

00:00 Introduction: The Power of Your Thoughts
01:09 Recognizing and Reframing Negative Patterns
01:40 Three Game-Changing Questions for Leaders
02:35 Personal Journey and Podcasting Insights
04:29 Mindset Struggles and Overcoming Self-Doubt
05:29 The Impact of Thoughts on Emotions and Actions
06:25 Facing and Rewriting Your Origin Story
09:17 The Importance of Self-Validation
13:29 Leadership and Influence Over Control
15:37 Sacrifice and the Path to Success
18:09 Basketball Lessons: Mindset in Action
24:23 Embracing Discomfort and Growth
36:43 Conclusion: Owning Your Story and Future

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Transcript

Microphone (Yeti Stereo Microphone): 0:36

Have you ever felt like your own thoughts are working against you? Like you're stuck in this horrific thought loop of doubt, frustration, anger, resentment, or fear, and you can't seem to just let it go, break free, cut the loop? I know I have, that's for sure. What if I told you that the stories that you tell yourself, the ones you don't even realize are running in the background, are Really, what is shaping your reality? I hope that this episode helps you recognize That you probably have more influence over your life than anyone else. I know that's what I have realized in my life. And by shifting your mindset and reframing your thoughts and turning obstacles into opportunities, adversity into your advantage, you can radically shift your reality very quickly. It isn't just about thinking positively because It's a lot more than that. It's about recognizing the hidden patterns that hold you back and replacing them with powerful growth oriented habits or even reminders that you're not stuck. You can do anything you want to do. You just have to. To do it, right? We're gonna unpack three game changing questions that I feel like every person needs to ask themselves, but specifically every leader needs to ask themselves. And they are, What do you really want? How do you want to feel? And what are you trying to control? Is it even controllable? Stick with me, because by the end of this episode, I believe you're going to have a little bit more guidance on the tools to help you rewrite your own story. To embrace your true potential, and honestly, to start building the life you want. And the leadership that you want that I believe will help influence others inside of your community, your job, your family. Whatever it is that you are leading and let's get started. I'm really excited about this, mindset boundaries and energy are just. My, my focus in my life, they have been my focus on my life, really, since 2020, when it hit inside the community, but honestly, a real focus. Deep dive. I want to change my life kind of focus starting in 2023, actually, when I started this podcast, this podcast is a huge, example of doing something, even though you feel not qualified. Scared less than or ask yourself, who's going to listen to this anyways? Why are you doing this? So every time I put a podcast or start a podcast on, I ask myself. These questions and then I have to remind myself you're doing this for the one person that listens. That's who you're doing this for. and I promised myself at the very beginning that it wasn't about the number of people who listens. It's about the one person that you help when you tell your story. And that sounds so cheesy. Because we hear it a lot, but I want to tell you, if you actually believe it, it is the glimmer of hope to keep you going. Turns out, more than one person listened to it, and more than one person listens to all my episodes, and so therefore I keep going. Because if one person listens, I will create another episode. That's what I tell myself. Even on the darkest days, when an episode didn't get as much of a listen as a previous episode, 1 person listened to it, and that's all that matters. So we all have, I have big mindset traps inside my mind, big mindset traps. So I want to dive into, and I feel like I have been very honest on multiple different episodes about my struggle with mindset and how honestly, if there is 1 problem that I could say, it was. and is the biggest hurdle in my life. It's my mindset. It is the story that I tell myself over and over again. And no matter how much work I do to exercise the skill of changing the story, rewriting the story, ignoring the story, reminding myself of different accomplishments. It is still a battle I fight every single day. Cause the truth is, I know that my thoughts create my reality. They just do. My thoughts, the way I think about every situation, controls my emotions, controls my actions, and controls my outcomes. I know that my thoughts about a specific situation will control my emotions, and I know my emotions will control my actions and reactions. And then my actions control the outcome. I know that, and on a visceral, full body level, I understand when you look back at my life and different decisions that I made and reactions that were not good, it all started with a thought. And that thought, that deep rooted thought is, it's never going to be enough. I'm never going to be enough. And that there's a lot of shame wrapped in that sentence. I took a lot of time to find the root cause of that sentence. I know the root cause of that sentence. And honestly, I faced that sentence head on. And so therefore it no longer has control over me. It got in my way in every aspect of my life. And I decided to face it head on, and the many different scenarios that play into that. And I did, and it was scary, and it hurt, and it was amazing and wonderful, and now I know, in my life, that I chose to look at the wrong side of the story. Because there are two sides to every story. So if I wasn't enough and I wasn't chosen or it's never gonna be enough the opposite side of that story is I was chosen. But I never looked at it from that perspective, right? And so I have to choose myself over and over again. What do you want, Erin? How do you want to feel, Erin? What are you trying to control, Erin, right? No one has power over me anymore unless I give them power over me. And when I give them power over me, it's because I have given the power of my thoughts. Away. I know that now. That's the power of the mindset. I can do something wrong, and I do a lot, and I can make someone mad or I can make a bad decision and a bad outcome comes of that and I can learn from it and it no longer, pierces me to my soul my worth is not tied into that outcome, right? Bringing awareness to that sentence, to that feeling, to that origin story of that allows me to regain power over my life. In my people pleasing days, I needed people to validate me, unfortunately. I needed them to tell me that I was doing a good job, not in a desperate way, but in I just need it to be reminded. Now, a good leader would do that anyways. A good company that you work for would do that anyways. But we don't always have that in our life. But what we do have when we work inside of a community are a lot of family members and residents who tell you're doing a great job. And when you have that, it's constantly feeding me and giving me the energy that I need. But when I allow myself to need that kind of validation, I give away my own power to some degree. I don't realize that the, all the validation that I ever wanted was from me. I needed to be aware of my own amazingness. My own awesomeness, even in poor decisions, even in emotional reactions, even in not hitting the mark, I needed to know that I was going to learn from it and be okay and not be the one to destroy myself and then defend myself with other people because I have already done the negative self talk to myself over and over again. Because I'm just going to tell you, the power of the mind, when it does it, when you're negative to yourself or you're telling yourself negative stories and you're believing those stories and you're beating yourself up with all the things that you did wrong, when somebody comes to you like a boss or supervisor or a family member or a, whatever that person is for you and your industry. They're coming to you, but you've already beat yourself up to such a point to where you can't take it anymore, and you're scared, and what do you do? You start defending yourself. And when that defensive layer comes up, You're in self protection and you don't allow constructive criticism, constructive feedback, earned feedback or earned criticism to come near you and you become potentially unteachable. I have felt like there were several people that, I was never going to penetrate that wall to help them understand and bring awareness to what they were doing. And I am sure. There are a few people that thought the same way about me. I could tell you my parents did. As a kid, as a teenager. But, as an adult, in my forties, I learned that what protected me as a younger version of Erin, and in other different facets of my life, that protected me in a positive way, that helped me, There comes a point in your life where carrying that shield, that protective armor, becomes too much to carry. And that's what I felt like it was for me. 2022 happened, and I left a community that I loved. The relationship with the corporate office just died a very slow and torturous death. And When I look in to take accountability for that, there was a lot of defensiveness from my side, a lot of resentment that I had, this negative energy that was just stirring inside of me. And a lot of it came from me, the stories that I told myself. They could have been true, and I think a lot of them were true, but it didn't serve me. Instead of being content with the people that I loved and served inside the community, I became. angry and resentful that a hundred percent wasn't good enough or a near perfect survey wasn't good enough or, a good and a lie wasn't good enough. I started telling myself all these things that I believed to be true and I started putting all these old wounds on people that did not hurt me. They didn't necessarily treat me the way that I wanted to be treated, but they didn't hurt me the way that I acted towards them, right? I now know, because hindsight's 20 20, and I look back and I look at all the work that I've done, that my thoughts about everything affected me more than anyone on the outside affected me. Anyone. And they had no idea. That I was struggling with self worth and value and needed things that they didn't have the capacity to do. And that wasn't their fault, right? It wasn't their fault. I was just drowning in my own very poor mindset and what I wish I would have known then, which is really what my mission is for senior living leaders, because we give so much. There's so much of us that we have to give away. It is we have to be on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 365 days a year. We have to solve problems constantly. We have to hire people. We have to find the right people. We have to give so much of ourselves that we lose some of us, lose the ability to understand or define what do we want? What do we need? How are we treating ourselves? And what are we trying to control that we cannot control? Because you don't have control. What you have is anxiety. The only thing that you can control is the way that you think about a situation, the way that you react about a situation, and the effort that you put in, and the education that you gain from outside sources, through experiences, and how you implement it. That's it. I cannot control other people. I cannot control, no matter how much I You expect people to be a certain way. You cannot control them, cannot enable them enough to change. You cannot want them enough to change. All you can do is control what you will accept and what you will no longer accept. you can put every intervention in place to keep someone safe, but you can't always control the uncontrollable or the inevitable, right? when I think about mindset shifts, I think about what do you want? What do you want out of this one life that you have, this one career, out of your community, out of the effort that you give? Because when you decide what you want, you get to make a plan, and you get to determine what you're willing to sacrifice to get it, because it takes sacrifice. Sacrifice is required to get anything. To never work again would sacrifice a consistent paycheck, right? Work all the time to reach the numbers and the goals and to exceed every expectation would sacrifice a lot of downtime to Run a marathon Would sacrifice a lot of time at home and you would be in a lot of pain as you were earning your as you were earning growing in your endurance. It takes sacrifice. Creating a podcast like this is a lot of sacrifice because you have to learn how to do it. You have to feel silly sitting here talking to yourself. You have to put yourself out there in a vulnerable way. You have to do the research about the topics that you want to talk about. You have to ask people if they want to be on it. You have to learn how to edit it. Then you have to post it. There's just a lot of sacrifice. Nothing is free. what do you want? What do you want? Not what somebody wants you to want, not what somebody's telling you to want. What do you want? This self awareness will take you a long way if you take the time and write it down. Do you want weekends with less interruptions? Do you want a good night's sleep? Do you want to lose 25 pounds? Do you want a better marriage? Do you want a better relationship with the corporate office? Whatever it is, You have the power. You have the power to change it. You just have to become aware of it first. Which is the first step, right? And the next question is, how do you want to feel? And I think to me, what I want was a big question. Yes. Because I, I had to decide, because I was I thought I wanted something and I didn't know how to get it. I didn't even know if I could do it, but I don't know if I really wanted that, right? So I really had to dig deep to figure out, what do I want? And then the next one, which I think is even bigger, is how do I want to feel? Because again, going after what you want is going to require sacrifice. And then when you're sacrificing and starting from the beginning, you're going to feel some very uncomfortable feelings. story. My daughter is playing basketball for the first time. She's nine years old, so she's in the third and fourth grade basketball. Team and this is my first like my son does dance without limits, but he's never played a sport My daughter is in gymnastics Although gymnastics is very much a sport. I am NOT emotionally tied to gymnastics I am on the other hand emotionally tied to basketball because I was a basketball player and I had an opportunity to be very good in basketball, but what stood in my way? You Was my mindset and I see it in my daughter, which is fascinating to me and it manifests itself. It shows itself in a way of. I'm not good at shooting. I'm good at defense, but I'm not good at shooting. And I mean, listen, think of it, listen to your kids and see how early this starts. She is nine years old and she's telling herself this story and thank God she's telling me this story too. And I'm like, what do you mean you're not good at shooting? and she's just I just can't shoot. And I'm like, okay, why are you scared of shooting? Does it make you nervous? I mean, When you think about offense and defense, defense comes naturally. You just take the ball, you get aggressive, you're defending people, you're not having to do anything that's vulnerable. But when you take a shot, a basketball shot, that is vulnerable because you either make it or you don't. And if you don't make it, how do you feel afterwards? And if you shoot the ball seven times and you don't make it seven times, how do you feel afterwards? And then imagine being a nine year old girl who has never played basketball before and we're trying and we're shooting the ball and we're not making it. And in my experience, we'll talk about free throws. My, I was a really good defensive player, but I am naturally a defensive person, so defense comes very natural to me. Offense, I was decent at. Free throws, I was awful at. And I can tell you, I feel it even now as I'm sitting here talking about it. If it was in the middle of the game, and I was fouled, and the gym was packed, and I'm on the free throw line, I'm thinking about, are my socks, Up. What do I look like? Everybody's watching me. God, I hope I make this. This is going to be really embarrassing if I don't make it. These are things that are running through my mind. This is crazy. I need to be focusing on making the shot. I dribble three times. I make sure my fingers are on the black line. I bend my knees. I shoot the ball. And I'm thinking about everything else except for what I need to be. Because everybody's staring at me and I don't like that. Now, because I'm not that great at free throws, I get fouled at the end of the game. Because I have the least, free throw percentage. But what happens if the game is on the line? What happens to me when the game is on the line is I realize people are depending on me. And I'm going to make this shot, because I want to win this game. All of a sudden, the gym is empty, my socks don't matter, I dribble the ball three times, I put my fingers on the black line, and I shoot, and I make them. That is how powerful your mindset is. I want to feel like I helped people win the game, so everything else goes away and I am in the zone. And I look back at that now and I realize I just needed a mindset speech when it comes to free throws. And I look at my daughter who's sitting here telling me that she cannot shoot and I say, Okay, we're going to prove you right or we're going to prove you wrong. Let's go. And we just shoot. the ball. It doesn't matter if we make them, it doesn't matter if we lose them, but we need to find the rhythm. We need to find the pattern. We need to feel confident that we make a few shots. Fast forward to game number three, which was this past weekend. And, actually, game number two, she made her first shot. She scored it in the game. And then game number three, she scored another one. Now, I am a very proud mom. I'm also a very realistic mom. The score of the game was eight to six, which means that one team had four shots that went in, and the other team, our team, had three. But Olivia scored in both games, and the coach came up to me and said, Have you been working with Olivia on her shot? And I said, yeah, I have. And he's like, she's becoming one of our better shooters. And now we just have to get her to be more aggressive. And I'm like, it's what we tell ourselves, right? You have the opportunity to prove yourself right or to prove yourself wrong. Are you willing to do it? Are you willing to put in the effort? Are you willing to sacrifice time, attention, money to get what you need to do it? But even more, are you willing to feel like a failure? Like a beginner? Because watching my daughter be a beginner is hard and exciting and fun. And seeing her practice And get better shows me that I can do the same thing, but we don't want to feel silly and we don't want to feel like a beginner because God feeling like a beginner is such a struggle, but there's something about the coach telling you that you are helping your daughter become one of the best shooters on the team. Again, a team that scores six points, okay? But it's something about seeing the end result when you worked really hard to do it, despite of how you want to feel. If I want to feel like Mel Robbins on a podcast, or Ed Milet on a podcast, or a great speaker on the stage, guess what I have to do? I have to put the reps in. I have to do webinar after webinar, podcast after podcast, social media post after social media post, not to get likes, shares, hopefully to get business, but to get experience. That's what I have to do. I have to feel like a nine year old girl on a basketball team who can't make a shot. Until I can make a shot, right? Good leadership starts with knowing who you are, what you want, and what you are willing to sacrifice. Because success takes sacrifice. It just does. And that's really important to note. And if you're starting over, if you're starting something new, it's not the most fun. And you want to avoid it. But don't lean into it because what gets in the way Becomes the way. Promise. I promise you. I promise you. I promise you. What gets in the way Becomes the way. So lean into the discomfort as long as you can learn from it and apply it. And own the fact that it's brand new. I think one of the biggest reasons why I had influence inside of my community is that I actually did what was important to me and I talked about how it was uncomfortable and I did the hard work. If the room wasn't clean, I cleaned it and people saw it. If there was a server that wasn't there, I was in there. And it influences people. I was never the best at anything. Always had to work hard. And when you work hard, you influence people. And when you can prove yourself right or wrong, you influence yourself. And you, not anyone else, but you are the biggest influence in your life. Your mindset. What do you want? How do you want to feel? And what are you trying to control? Let me tell you. I want my daughter to play basketball from here on out every year and it will be so exciting. I want her to start. I want her to do all these things. I don't know if she wants that and I am okay if she doesn't. And I tell her that over and over again. When I was in the community, when I first became an executive director, I thought everyone thought like me. I thought everyone was motivated like me. I thought all these things that were absolutely untrue. You do realize how hard it is to learn that no one in your community thinks like you. Maybe some people do, but not everyone does. And you have to understand how to motivate them. I learned through having an autistic son that you don't get to control your children. No matter how you try, I was a very judgmental new parent. I was someone who thought that my kids were going to do exactly what they said, but that's not the case. I do not have control like I thought I would. You don't either. Control is an illusion. And when you realize that, The world opens up. You have to let it go. What you can do is control how you educate people. What you can do is to control how you want to show up and feel. What you can do is for you to say, I know what I want and that's going to influence me. You've got to replace control with influence. Because influence is the modern day leadership tool that everyone needs. It's not control. It's not. Control is impossible. You don't have control, you have anxiety. When you try to control everything, you get so lost in what you have to do that you never, ever get done what needs to get done to move the needle forward to success. If you can figure out the levers of influence inside your community, inside your life, then you can figure out how to create the success. You need the buy in of your team. You need to educate your team. You need to identify who is on your team that needs to be on there and that doesn't need to be on there. And you need to be able to identify what you need as a leader to grow in influence and in skill for yourself. There's a lot of humility that has to come when we have to let go of control. And turn our energy into influence and growth. There's a lot of humility and transparency and vulnerability. And I believe there's a lot of humility in influence. Because people want to follow people that they like and relate to. And not necessarily who is just the boss. Thanks. I have given my fair share of trying to tell people what to do, and yes, there are parts of our jobs that we get to do that, but that doesn't mean that they do it. There's more power and empowerment than overpowering people. So your mindset of feeling like you have to control everything in order to be successful is wrong. Of not wanting to be vulnerable, transparent, and eating a piece of humble pie when you're not able to answer the questions appropriately from your supervisor, your regional director or whatever, it's what gets in the way. But if you can answer a question with, we didn't do X, Y, Z, but we did do A, B, C, and here's what we learned and we're going to implement next. That's impressive. And it all started with you knowing what you want, how you want it to feel, and realizing that you can't control the outcome. Now, I am a person who loves to control outcomes, and I have to say I was pretty good at it. But the reason why I was good at it is because I asked a bunch of questions. I didn't control the outcome, I influenced the outcome and there's two, that's two totally different things. I realized I was trying to control the outcome and you can't control people. People influence outcomes, they don't control them. those three questions, what do you want, how do I want to feel, and what are you trying to control, will influence your own mindset and will turn your story, if it's negative, into a friend of yours. And when you are having these negative mindset moments, asking yourself three questions will help you rewrite the story. Because most people have a very negative first impression. version of the story that we tell ourselves. That doesn't mean it's true. And you got to stop listening to yourself and start telling yourself the truth. What do I want? How do I want to feel? What am I willing to sacrifice? And what am I trying to control that I need to influence rather than control? So a framework that I like to use is acknowledge and recognize the negative thoughts and emotions. Stop trying to stuff them down. Acknowledge them. They're there. We all have them to some degree. Acknowledge them and then reflect. Examine them on whether those thoughts are true or helpful. Okay, and then reframe them, shift the perspective to focus on growth and learning. It's not about the outcome. Your worth is not tied to the outcome. Your worth is in the process, look at me, right? I'm 78 episodes in, or look at her. She shot two, she made two baskets in two games, right? It's not about they only scored six points, right? It's the fact that she made two points. And she's proving to herself every day that she could shoot and score in a game. And that's a huge thing. And so what are you doing for you? Are you taking down the notes of everything that you haven't done and focusing on those? Or are you taking down the notes of what you actually have done? And being proud of that and letting that boost your forward momentum. That is a big deal. ask yourself this. And this is something that I ask myself. Who do you want to be a year from now, five years from now? I would say approximately a year and a half ago, I wanted to be a podcast host that had 100 episodes and who had, active listeners. I'm on my way. This is, I think, my 79th episode. But in order to get here, where honestly the most people have downloaded just a solo episode from me, I am getting consistent downloads of numbers that I have not seen before. It took 78 episodes to get there. And I would never have gotten here if I didn't start with episode number one. Or had episodes that only had 19 listeners. And been really happy when I had 50 listeners. So We all start somewhere and the goal is not the number of listeners. The goal is how I grow through the process, how I show up being the best version of myself, how I structure podcasts better, or how I get on the stage and connect with people speaking, or how I help coach people in, to the best versions of themselves. And I can say to them, you're thinking poorly right now. Let's look at the other side of that story because remember there are two sides to every story and you have a choice as to which one you want to believe. Okay. My story, two sides. I wasn't chosen, but in all actuality I was, but I never told the story to anybody about how I felt. And so I just had myself to listen to. And when I faced that story head on, I realized I was chosen my entire life. I just looked at the wrong side of the story. There's two sides to every story. So, who do you want to be? What do you want? How do you want to feel? Because you can change the way you feel, too, by the way that you think about it. Because that's The self reflection piece, right? Our values, what we want, it drives our behaviors. And if we feel stuck and we're not getting what we want, we act out negatively. We react negatively, but the power to unstuck yourself is within you. You just have to change your thought process, change your actions and be willing to be uncomfortable while you change. And it's worth it. It's worth it. I promise. It's worth it. When you know yourself, you can better serve your teams, your communities, your families, and create the environment. Where you thrive along with everyone else. look at your core values from a personal standpoint. Look at your core values from a company standpoint. And how do you, as a person, personify those to your team? How do your behaviors, your actions, your reactions, the proactive way that you live your life, how do they look for someone to see them? Do you know? And can you show them and tell them, right? Ask yourself those questions. Remember, more than anything, what gets in the way becomes the way. Every challenge is an opportunity to grow and become the person that you're meant to be. I believe that my adversity is my advantage, and that when I own my story, that I will create my future. And every day, I try to take one step forward in that direction. Every day, I fight the negative thoughts in my mind. And every day, I prove myself right or wrong. And that's all we can do. You have the power. Let people be angry. Let people reject you. Let people go that are holding you back and Start creating the story that serves you. We all have worked in communities that need better staffing, that need more staffing, that need more education. It starts with you. We can listen to everything or we can do something about it. When you own your community story, you'll find the people who want to be a part of that story. You're not for everybody. You're for specific people. Who are they? When you know, you will attract them. When you know who you want to be, you will become that. And when you know where you want to go, you can start taking steps. In that direction. Thank you for being here and listening to me today. we're going to start talking about energy and boundaries next because your mindset, your boundaries, your energy help you become the leader and the person you want to be. If this has helped you forward it to somebody, leave me a review, a comment, leave me a message on LinkedIn. I love getting those. Thank you so much. And as always, aspire for more for you. Silence.